I’m grounded. I’m slowly recovering from surgery to repair a detached retina, and I’m writing today from my most comfortable chair, which assures me of a 45° inclination of my torso, as indicated by my brilliant ophthalmologist.
Close friends suggest that such punishment is self-sabotage: without respecting the limits of a body that is already approaching 60, my organism then found a way to force me to stop. An argument, by the way, with which I tend to agree.
The fact is that I am practically isolated in my residence in São Paulo, unable to even leave São Paulo. The procedure made my eye ultrasensitive to variations in atmospheric pressure and, therefore, I cannot travel, for example, to Campos do Jordão. Or to Santos. For almost a month!
Recovery is well underway, albeit slow. Two weeks after the surgery, the nagging discomfort of the first few days after surgery turned into acceptance.
For a traveling spirit like mine (and yours), it has been a tortuous learning experience. And I had to look to literature for inspiration to escape.
In the book “Reparation”, by the great Ian McEwan, I read one of the most fascinating chapters in contemporary literature. Trapped in her dark room with a shattering migraine, the family’s matriarch, Emily, manages to let her mind wander around the house, taking care of every detail of the family routine without having to open her eyes.
I cite this passage because, more than once in my rest, I find myself in a similar situation: I leave memory and desire to be transported to fulfilled and dreamed destinations, far beyond my room, my house.
Today, then, I started my walk barefoot along the sands of Caraíva, Bahia. The pleasant heat of those no-strings-attached streets was getting more and more unbearable until I realized I was in one of the saunas at a place called the Russian Bath House in New York, where one of their huge receptionists, dressed only in a loose towel, was patting my back. with eucalyptus branches.
I fled to Istanbul’s Çemberlitas, where the Turkish bath is punctuated by a not always gentle foam massage. I leave there for the labyrinthine tent market in Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakesh.
I’m hungry and soon I’m sitting in a smoked-only restaurant in the basement of a cramped entrance in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood. I haven’t even satiated my hunger yet, and I’m now in a caravansarai in the historic center of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, drinking my fourth or fifth round of vodka shots, in the hope that drunk I can face the fat soup he so kindly offers.
Dessert is in Tiradentes, Minas Gerais, where, under a leafy tree, I enjoy the best tangerine cake in the world. I digest through the Atacama Desert, Chile, with the air so dry it makes my nose bleed.
The discomfort only grows and I’m lying on the floor of my London hotel on the eve of interviewing Paul McCartney, my body paralyzed with anxiety cramps. But, who arrives for the meeting is Keith Richards, and we are already in a suite looking at the Tuileries in the French capital.
I’m going to have dinner, still in Paris, at Roseval, closed since 2014, on a small corner of the 20éme. And from there to the waters of the Tirta Empul temple in Bali.
Then to the sea view in Baía Formosa, Rio Grande do Norte. Afterwards, for sunset in Etosha Park, Namibia. Then to the endless wait for an aurora borealis in Alta, Norway. To then return to my 45° reclining chair, waiting for a new itinerary.
