Flights

UNUS MUNDUS

I have a poet friend who, unfortunately, was never able to live off her poetry. Is there anyone who lives off poetry? So she started working at this travel agency, and since she spoke excellent English, she ended up becoming a tour guide for American groups. She was great at it, and she kept getting recommended for even the most exacting guests. She would pick them up in Madrid, fly with them to Malaga, and then they’d sail to Tunis. Normally it was a small group, around ten people.

She enjoyed these assignments, and she had on average two per month. She liked to relax then in the finest hotels, which she would take the opportunity to sleep in. She had to take them around the various landmarks, and so she read a lot in those days in preparation. On the sly she also wrote. When some especially interesting idea came to mind – a phrase, an association – she knew she had to write it down right away, because if not, it would be gone forever. Memory falters with age, gets spottier. So she’d get up and go to the bathroom and write it down, sitting on the toilet. Sometimes she would write on her hands, just letters, mnemotechnics.

She was not a specialist in Arab countries and their cultures – she had studied literature and linguistics – but she consoled herself with the fact that her tourists weren’t either.

‘Let’s not kid ourselves,’ she’d say. ‘It’s just one world.’

You didn’t need to be a specialist; you just had to have an imagination. Sometimes when there would be some interruption in their travel, when they’d have to sit for hours in strange shadow, in the middle of nowhere, because a cable in their Jeep just snapped, she would have to entertain her clients somehow. That was when she started telling stories. They expected her to. She took some from Borges and embellished them a little, dramatized them. Others came from the Thousand and One Nights, although even then she always added a little something of her own. She said you had to find stories that hadn’t been made into films yet, and it turned out in fact there were quite a few of them. To everything she lent some Arab colour, holding forth on details of dress, cuisine, camel varietals. They must not have listened to her too attentively because on the occasions when she would mix up some historical fact, no one ever pointed it out to her, until in the end she simply stopped bothering about the facts.