Abdul the world was shrunk in his thin hands. Everything was so small that there was not enough look in his eyes. And then invented it. Invented a world to pencil and paper in which I dreamed of freedom. That is what he always repeated with his resigned gesture, “I want to be free, that nobody intervenes in my life, that nobody decides for me ".
And then this young Egyptian of 25 years began to dream of maps and impossible. “It's very expensive, very expensive to leave the country ", He repeated while having a tea looking at the Mediterranean in Damietta, an Egyptian city that drags the Nile until death. Abdul wants to travel, See the world that exists beyond its footprints and cannot. And try, and dreams and in the meantime it paints the world he wants to know.
I would like to go paint Paris. I would like to get out of here
And in their world there are beautiful women who teach their backs and face. There are no, They are just shadows with light that he invents in his solitude. That loneliness in which he can afford to be honest with his desire after a canvas in which life appears more real than in all his strict world of foreign rules. "I would like to go paint Paris", He confessed with tone as firm as. "I would like to get out of here".
And all that happened while his first youth was spending between papers from a port where his father also worked. And he works there for the son of his father's boss, a good guy, that now is your boss. Because in your world those are the rules: "Things are done by routine", He told us outraged. And Routina means that he is obliged to be his father because the order of this universe requires that the lines be straight to avoid endangering the fate of things with unexpected curves.
The mother despairs of so much anarchy that her son practices in her soul
And for this his mother, A strict teacher who handles her child's future as explained by spelling rules, Women who Abdul must fall in love with. And he goes to those dinners with the families of one another with the rebellion of whom he has decided to dream. And then he looks at his mother with a counterpart and explains that this young woman is not his and the mother despairs of so much anarchy that her son practices in her soul.
And when he told us that was also his childhood friend, Ali, also from 25 years, that he had lived eleven years in Saudi Arabia with his family and that he has so many scars in the memory that he said he would never come out of his land. “Egypt is the best place in the world and could be the richest country on earth, It has everything ", The immense Ali that tripled his dreamy friend said in size. "Now we are doing things well, You have to give time to the new government to change things. We are not Afghanistan ", said. And Abdul denied his head and Ali told him with a laugh, What are two good friends, "Go to South Africa". And Abdul was lit his eyes with the possibility of fleeing his shadow.
Abdul was lit his eyes with the possibility of fleeing his shadow
And for Ali everything was good. And he was already promised with his crush. And his hormones dreamed of the night that he could stay alone with her, For what you have to marry before. And his mother -in -law put the rules and set the criteria to allow her daughter's wedding. And I asked a lot, And I wanted a better house, and that will be installed in your land, And ... and he, who has never been able to spend a single day alone with the woman who will spend the rest of her life, I said: “The day we get married will be mine and will stop being of his mother. She is the most beautiful woman in the world ". And accelerated his car to the limit, that this was the only passion that until now is allowed to palpate Ali.
But none of that is Abdul's life. And then he flees and paints again, In the intimacy of their hours, To forget so much regulation with which to knead your feelings. And with one of those paintings he appeared one night at our Damietta hotel, Casablanca, that it was a lifeless cave in which we felt prisoners, For regallarsla to Vítor. My Portuguese friend had seen the paint before and asked to buy it. And the young Egyptian did everything with such generosity that he came with five canvases and offered us all one. And Vítor chose one in which a beautiful girl holds her face with shy gesture. And Abdul wrapped canvas, He delivered him and asked to change a single thing: "I give you this canvas with a unique condition, if you see somewhere you tell this woman that I'm looking for. You have to promise me you'll do ".
And after those days jailed in Damietta until they returned our car., The guy invents women to love, who wants to live free, travel.
PD. Abdul, Ali and Mohamed are three young people who work in the port agency that our car should take out of the port of Damiettta. There are three formidable types, The only friends we find so far on this earth, that in their youth they have a rebellion before so much absurd rule and both strict past. The rest, Better not to mention the ports of the port and their officials, nor from the treatment of a hotel where they were trying to collect every smile, nor of so many people that the only thing they have intended is our money without offering anything in return. Meet people like those boys and listen to their stories is why we travel. We are already on the route again.
