All my life I’ve waited for this moment.
If you are patient, your wishes will come true sooner or later, ever if sometimes, as in my case, you have to wait a lifetime.
How often in our lives do we run breathlessly to reach something: your bus, your turn in the queue, your first date with a pretty girl… We rush to be on time at work, at school or at an appointment for an interview for a job we get thanks to our own merits or to knowing the right people. We run against time, even if we already know that it’s an unequal race. And when at last we arrive anguished at our goal, most times exhausted, we discover that what we were looking for isn’t so pleasurable after all and we can’t even explain to ourselves why the devil we ran so hard.
I think about the happy moments of my life, which have been many, I know now. But then I didn’t realize what great luck I had to experience certain emotions, to let the time go by talking to friends, to gaze at the sunset in the arms of my beloved or to walk barefoot on soft, golden-sanded beaches. But always, even in moments of solitude, I’ve held on to a fixed idea, almost an obsession: to take an interplanetary journey. When I was young, gazing at the night sky for hours used to fill me with pleasure. That was when the first journeys of that sort began; I was sixteen and I knew I ought to work hard and save who knows how much to try and make my dream come true. Already in my mind’s eye I envisioned an interplanetary missile blowing out tongues of flame in the take-off and could almost see its powerful leap towards space as it carved out a wake in the sky.
I’ve always held on to this idea of the journey, which is fairly common now that many people are used to travelling to far-away places, but for me it was different: it was my Journey! I was obsessed by the idea to the point of insanity. And here I am today - at long last my goal is at hand. I don’t even care very much that the distance between the continents has gradually shrunk, thanks to the incredible speed of new means of transport; nor do I care about the special offers to go anywhere and everywhere, or about hearing travellers talk about the different yet similar customs of all the places they’ve visited. Even my mother was able to meet up with her relatives in Latin America regularly in the last years of her life, and she adored the Great Underground that crossed the ocean and could take her to the land of her ancestors in just a few minutes. But it was not for me. As the years passed, in fact, the easier it became to move from one country to another, the less desire I felt not only to leave the small town where I lived, but almost to leave my neighbourhood. What had happened to me? Maybe my proud, sensitive spirit could no longer bear the human infamy of my race? Genius and the devil at times inhabit the same guise, I often told myself without conviction, and in the end it has been my great luck to arrive safe and sound at old age without committing any terrible crimes. I have loved and been loved, passionately; I have tried to speak only what was necessary, omitting the superfluous, always telling what I knew to those who wanted to know, and I have always tried to be honest and faithful to myself and to others in harmony with my way of feeling and thinking.
Now I am like a pre-Columbian god, pure, dignified and exacting. And like a god I want to rise up into the sky and fly away now, with infinity as my destination. Like a god I want to be different from common mortals and accept them for what they are. Too long have I observed broken-heartedly the blind destruction of mankind: fathers who sell their children, women used as merchandise, fanatics who in a few seconds destroy sublime centuries-old creations. What has mankind done to deserve such an ill-omened existence? But despite it all, I have never turned my back to life. I feel I’ve gone beyond good and evil, and in this chaos I am happy in any case, and am grateful to life for that.
And now, in the darkening lucidity that reaches my senses like a glitter, I can at long last see my mirage taking shape: my Journey! The memory of my dear ones, the swish of the tide that I’ve always kept trapped in a shell, the happiness of seeing a new day every day – these things will accompany me.
I am ready to fly up into that unknown world which so many have reached before me.
I’ll shut my eyes.
No, of course, I cannot. Someone will shut them for me.
translated by Brenda Porster