It is a question with a thousand faces. On the road, in gutters, in their fields, about transistor, in the shade of a tree, in a crowded bus, in a tractor trailer, among the stalls of a market. The look of the other surprises you at every step, sometimes fleeting, other infinite. Zarandea, restless, softens, forces you to think, as. It happens that, when we are so far from home, the other is us.
Whenever I get to a new place I try to meet three standards almost sacrosanct: travel by public transport, Enter a bar to have a beer and walk through a market. It is a quick way to take the pulse to the place. If displacements are, I prefer the road to the plane or the train. I have given myself authentic car balls by infamous clues-trampa, disregarding the plane, With the only desire to see life go to ground level. Hours and road hours. Kilometers and kilometers of sensations, of villages hanging out of nowhere, of little ones who greet with enthusiasm before getting lost in the hopper, of peasants carrying their tools, of elders waiting for death with the parsimony of an iguana. Life, in the end.
I have crossed many looks with people that I will not see again. Spend every day in the subway, But without the sorrow of routine is something else. Some have frozen my mood, Others have drawn a smile in my heart, A few have left a bitterness in my already heavy luggage of miseries. Children's are always unforgettable. Sometimes, I wanted to stop a few minutes, And sometimes I have done it, To help rest those fleeting impressions and see if they were sincere or a misleading flash. But when you are the other, others treat you as such. What right do you have to wait for you not to see you as another stupid white man rotten with dollars? And that has nothing to do with wearing a deharted or impeccable appearance, With traveling in SUV or in a matatu, With loading with a backpack or picture suitcase of Louis Vuitton. You will always be, In his eyes, A dollar with legs. And it is understandable.
I think about this while Shigatse's Zangolteo, Tibet's second largest city, And I am surprising a woman draining in the snacks in the town of Drongtse. I don't guess a blush apex in his gaze when he feels observed by the stranger, But I do have the feeling of being invading your intimacy, an intimacy that, if, is on the street, Where nobody looks at her to bend down to piss.
The tourist, certainly, It is a very strange specimen that, Among other oddities, Take advantage of your vacation to get up early.
I look at the tazed faces of the peasants who are going to work to the field with their tractors and carts, Some with children in tow. There is no one who to leave them with (It is surprising that in a society so distant from ours in mentality and well -being, the same inconveniences are reproduced). Surely, They will ask what we have lost here and why we get up so much if we don't have to plow the tillage fields. The tourist, certainly, It is a very strange specimen that, Among other oddities, Take advantage of your vacation to get up early.
For better or worse, The other's look sometimes cheats. A few years ago, Traveling through the territory of the Gumuz (Historically Land of Slave Razzias), north of the blue Nile, in Ethiopia, We had reluctantly risen to our pick-up to a torva-looking man and kalashnikov on his shoulder. He had a long walk to his town and Juan, The combonian missionary who was driving the van, I didn't know how to say no, So we had the rear about to burst of passengers. When we get to your destination, The guy insisted vehemently that we accompanied his hut to invite us to coffee, A hospitality ceremony in ancient Abyssinia. We insist that I was getting dark and that we still had a good stretch ahead. For a moment I thought he was going to take us home encañonados, But in the end he gave up. His gaze was now clean, transparent, as if it belonged to a different man. Kalashnikov a la espalda, He was aimed at his sad town for not being able to correspond to our kindness.
THE CROSS OF THIS EXPERIENCE, In other looks. I counted it at VAP. A swarm of zarrapastrosy little girls who shrink the mood. Some photos at the foot of a beautiful glacier on the way to the Tibetan Altiplano. They surround us, They add spontaneously to the snapshot with their plates sheep in arms. They receive less coins than they think deserve. The kindness of his mute eyes in sadness, first, and in indignation and contempt later. A girl throws us a stone while we flee. Other's eyes, and say.
