Selected Cronicas

THE GRATUITOUS ACT

What has often saved me has been to improvise some gratuitous act. If any reasons exist for such an act, they are unknown. And if there are any consequences, they are unforeseen.

A gratuitous act is the opposite of our struggle for life. It is the opposite of our frantic pursuit of money, work, love, pleasure, taxis, buses, our daily existence in short. And there is a price to be paid for all of this.

One afternoon, not so long ago, I was typing away under a blue sky flecked with tiny clouds, white as white could be, when suddenly I felt something inside me.

A sudden weariness of this perpetual struggle.

And I realized I was thirsty. A thirst for freedom had stirred inside me. I was simply weary of living in an apartment. I was weary of extracting ideas from myself. I was weary of listening to my typewriter. And then this strange, deep thirst had appeared. I suddenly felt an urgent need to make a bid for freedom. An act which needs no justification. An act capable of showing, quite independently of me, what I was really like inside. And this called for an act which would have to be paid for. I do not mean paid for in money, but paid for in broader terms, at the high price it costs to live.

Then my own thirst guided me. It was two o’clock on a summer’s afternoon. I interrupted my work, quickly changed, went downstairs and hailed a taxi. I told the taxi-driver: Drop me off at the Botanical Gardens. ‘Where is that?’ he asked. ‘You don’t understand’, I explained, ‘It’s not a street or district. I mean the Botanical Gardens.’ This was enough to make him peer at me for a second.

I left the taxi windows open as it gathered speed and sat back to enjoy my freedom as a sharp gust of wind blew my hair about and grazed my grateful cheeks, my eyes half-closed with happiness.

Why had I chosen the Botanical Gardens? Just to look. To see things. To feel them. Just to live.

I leapt out of the taxi and went through the wide gates. Into the welcoming shade. I stood there motionless. Green life in those gardens was so abundant. I could see no meanness there: everything gave itself completely to the wind, to the atmosphere, to life, everything reached for the sky. And what is more: also surrendered its mystery.

Mystery surrounded me. I looked at the delicate shrubs which had just been planted. I gazed at a tree with its dark, gnarled trunk which was so wide my arms would never be able to embrace it. How could sap flow inside this solid wood, through those heavy roots, hard as claws? Sap, this almost intangible substance which is also life. For there is sap in everything just as there is blood in our veins.

I shall not describe what I saw there. Everyone must discover it for themselves. All I will say is that there were swaying, secret shadows. In passing, I shall touch briefly on the freedom of the birds. And on my freedom. But that is all. The rest was a moist green rising inside me through unknown roots. I walked and walked. Sometimes I would pause. I had left the main gates far behind me, and they were already out of sight as I explored a labyrinth of tree-lined avenues. I felt pleasantly apprehensive — the tiniest tremor in my soul — the nervous thrill of perhaps being lost and of never, but nevermore, being able to find the exit.

There was a fountain where water played incessantly. The water spouted from the mouth of a head carved in stone. I drank some water and got completely drenched. This did not worry me. Such nonchalance seemed in keeping with the abundance in those Gardens.

Here and there the ground was covered with tiny pods from the pepper-trees, those pods one found scattered on the pavements as children and instinctively trampled with the greatest satisfaction. As I trampled them again after all these years, the same sense of satisfaction came back to me: mysterious yet such a comfort.

I began to feel pleasantly tired. It was time to go home. The sun was no longer warm.

I shall return one day when there is heavy rain, just to see that dripping garden submerged.