Flights

BOARDING

He takes off his shoes, places his backpack at his feet, and waits now for them to start boarding the plane. He has a few days’ worth of facial hair, is almost bald, aged somewhere between forty and fifty. He looks like a guy who discovered not so long ago that he’s not really so different from everybody else – thus attaining, in other words, his own enlightenment. Traces of that shock are still visible on his face: the eyes that only look down, around where his shoes are, likely to prevent his gaze from getting tripped up by the sight of other people. No facial expressions or gestures, which he no longer requires. After a while he gets out a notebook, a nice one, hand-sewn, probably from one of those shops that charges a fortune for cheap third-world products; it says ‘Traveller’s Log Book’ in English on the recycled-paper cover. It’s a third full. He opens it up on his lap, and his black roller ball pen embarks upon a first sentence.

So I also get out my notebook and start to write about this man writing down. Chances are he’s now writing: ‘Woman writing something down. She’s taken off her shoes and placed her backpack at her feet…’

Don’t be shy, I think to the rest, all waiting for our gate to open – take your notebooks out too, and write. For in fact there are lots of us who write things down. We don’t let on we’re looking at each other; we don’t take our eyes off our shoes. We will simply write each other down, which is the safest form of communication and of transit; we will reciprocally transform each other into letters and initials, immortalize each other, plastinate each other, submerge each other in formaldehyde phrases and pages.

When we get home we’ll put our written-in notebooks with all the rest – there’s a box for them behind the wardrobe, or the bottom desk drawer, or the shelf on the nightstand. Here we have chronicled our other journeys already, our preparations, our happy returns. Raptures over sunset on a beach littered with plastic bottles; that evening in that hotel where the heat was on too high. A foreign street where a sick dog begged for food, and we didn’t have a thing; the kids who crowded around in the village where the bus stopped to cool off its radiators. There’s a recipe for peanut soup that tasted like dirty sock broth; there’s the fire-eater with the scorched lips. Here is where we kept careful track of our expenses and attempted in vain to sketch the likeness of the motif that for once captured our attention for one split second on the metro. The strange dream dreamed on the plane and the beauty of the Buddhist nun in her grey robes, standing ahead of us for a little while in line. Everything is in here, even the sailor who tap-danced on the empty pier that once sent ship after ship on its way.

Who will read it?

The gate’s about to open. The flight attendants are already closing in on the desk, and passengers plunged until now in lethargy arise and call their hand luggage to order. They search for boarding passes, set aside the papers they haven’t finished reading with no visible regret. In their heads they perform mute examinations of conscience: do they have everything, passport, ticket, and papers, have they exchanged money. And where is it they’re going. And what for. And will they find what they are looking for, have they chosen the direction they need.

The flight attendants, beautiful as angels, check to make sure we’re fit to travel, and then, with a benevolent motion of the hand, permit us to plunge on into the soft, carpet-lined curves of the tunnel that will lead us aboard our plane and onto a chilly aerial road to new worlds. That smile of theirs holds – or so it strikes us – a kind of promise that perhaps we will be born anew now, this time in the right time and the right place.