Forgiveness of Angkor Wat
Everything is forgiven for the temples of Angkor Wat because one goes to the sublime without question, without highlighting and, like in family dinners where the tureen has drawings of birds, one leaves without making much noise and starving. Angkor always leaves you hungry.
Because Angkor is a sin of existence, a whim that must have remained covered by the forest so that in my dreams I could have allowed myself the luxury of imagining that I was the one who rediscovered them.
I don't give a damn if it's true or not that he stumbled into the temples while hunting butterflies
Because I would like to be Henri Mouhot, and I don't give a damn if it's true or not that he stumbled into the temples while chasing butterflies back in the 19th century. I don't even care if it was the first, the third or those privileged who found them covered with roots and leaves the one in the tail squad. Because it seems that it was a Portuguese cappuccino, Antonio da Madalena, who at the end of the 16th century was the first Westerner to contemplate such beauty.
But to the Portuguese, discoverers of many things, history has stubbornly cornered them under the summary crime of not having been them, small but bold, those who wrote the history books. That corresponds to the demolition of the English and French, makers of a yesterday from which they always come out with glory, in many cases deserved and in others stolen from others.
But back to Angkor, to my desire and enthusiasm of having arrived two centuries ago, and to the immense force of a space that is forgiven, effortless, their enormous sins. I will not put many words to the largest religious space on the planet, he does not need it. The obvious is not explained. Angkor is a wonder that began eleven centuries ago and that cannot belong to anything that is earthly or logical..
A wonder that began eleven centuries ago and that cannot belong to anything earthly
And then one forgets the thousands of tourists around you, the buses full of Japanese and the endless lines of numbered tuk tuks that take Koreans in pairs to get lost in that labyrinth of the imagination made of rock and trees.
And then, when one leaves that religious immensity and returns to Siem Reap, the city that punishes him, you entertain yourself recounting with your fingers the things that when contemplating them seemed impossible. And then the noise from the street, Already at night, shows that the masses do not deserve heaven and that is why, they say in these temples, it is so complicated to reach him and they placed him so high.
Because one undaunted attends the concert of a group dressed as rockers, with studs, crest and leather jackets, who plays Celine Dion in a bar. And in the street, below, there are thousands of people under a neon-colored sky in which music and sales offers alter everything without leaving any room for survival.
A group dressed as rockers, with studs, crest and leather jackets, who plays the "irreverent" Celine Dion in a bar
but the same, It doesn't matter if the queues return to the temples the next morning, that the business is so obvious or that the birds do not respect the designs of the wind and flee from the wetlands as the crocodiles did before. Everything is forgiven in a place that belongs to that mythical club on the planet where the spaces that one cannot die without stopping seeing are honorary members. They are many, but they are not so many.
And if you want, I'll tell you those stories of travelers later, of the young boy who took us in the tuk tuk, of our trip from Bangkok to Cambodia by bus, from the three euro massage scam or from the wonderful small and cheap hotel where we stayed through a friend of a friend who works in tourism with honesty and experience and whose name is Alex Póo, of Tuareg Travel?
But that, I think, you should find out for yourself because the only thing I wanted to tell you today is to go to Angkor, that they do not forget not to betray themselves and let themselves go from this life without having seen such a wonderful place full of venial sins. What a bastard Antonio da Madalena, how much would I have given to be him!
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I do not plan to die without seeing them… By Petra, and Machu Picchu, nor the pyramids of Egypt…..
But from Angkor I have a very cool painting that a friend brought me wrapped in bamboo…
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