Upon the Face of Earth | by Javier Kafie

Gustavo had always been an enigmatic and unpredictable character, a constant headache for his wealthy parents. Doña Isabel, his mother, never managed to get over the trauma caused by one particular call he made years ago. By the time he’d just turned eighteen, as his mother scolded the troop of gardeners who were sculpting the trees of her mansion at the exclusive Escalon quarter, one of the maids brought her the cordless phone.

 “I’m coming back on foot”, said Gustavo on the receiver.

“Are you crazy!”, replied doña Isabel grasping a garden chair, fighting the sudden vertigo of probability. “Stop with all that nonsense and get on the plane. Your father and I will pick you up tomorrow at the airport.”

“No mom, you don’t understand. I have to do this. Don’t worry about me, I know how to take care of myself. I’ll see you in a few months.” Then he hung up.

That night doña Isabel received her husband, General Mauricio Águila, with plenty of tears and lamentations. The whole day she’d been imagining all the vicissitudes that her son would certainly go through. As soon as her husband entered the house, she demanded, between whimpers and broken phrases, that he should go and pick up his son immediately, my God he was just a boy, and it was his fault to let him go alone to that international meeting of the Catholic Youth.   

 The General listened to her impassive from the moment he crossed the main door. She followed him to his office, where he undid his uniform tie and sat on his reading chair next to the old studio lamp to take off his shoes and put on the slip-ons. He stood up, poured himself a whisky and walked back to his chair without uttering a word.

“Mauricio, are you going to let him do this?”

“What happens is that he’s as mad as my father, God bless his soul”, he said with a martial voice, “it’s all right. Maybe that way he’ll become a man”

Gustavo’s friends received the news with elation. The guys he used to surf with murmured a ghostly “respect” to each other and then went on catching waves.

Diego remembered clearly the moment he saw Gustavo crossing the Honduran border. It was a windy December day and he and his friends had driven all the way to the Amatillo border check to pick him up. He smiled to himself recalling those times, got up from the cold metal bench, and wandered around the old, Czech train station of the border city of Cheb. He was getting truly impatient for the six o’clock train.

All his friends had driven to pick him up in a convoy of at least ten cars adorned with banners with silly legends like “you’ve got the biggest balls” or “I want to be the mother of your children”. Gustavo came ragged and with a dirty beard, skinny, taciturn and with a ghostly tone on his pupils. Everyone hugged him affectionately while he warned them that he wasn’t going to get into a car, he was going to walk all the way to his home.

A voice in Czech announced that the six a.m. train to Nürnberg would be one hour late. “Shit” thought Diego to himself, worrying about his appointment at the British Embassy at 2 p.m. No fucking chance he’d make it. He sat again on the cold bench. He stood up. He wandered around once again through the old train station and stood in front of the shop window of a Czech souvenir and thrift shop. They had on display a collection of classic porn movies from Eastern Europe. He read the business hours and cursed his bad luck. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., which meant that he’d missed the privilege of watching the Rumanian porn-version of Dracula.

He sat again on the cold bench while a little man with thick glasses and the look of a mole was opening the little ticket window. There were two women waiting for him no longer impatiently for they would no longer need to hurry to buy the tickets for the six o’clock train.

Diego opened his bag and took out the book that he’d been reading during the trip, Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy. It was beginning to dawn. He opened it on the sixth chapter of the third book, The Rise of Science, and started reading. But a few seconds later his eyes got fixed on the letter he’d received one week ago from doña Isabel, which he’d been using as a bookmark. He closed the book at once trying to contain an avalanche of memories.

He remembered the day that Gustavo and him surfed for the first time the warm waters of the Central American Pacific near the Puerto de la Libertad; that happened about four years before Gustavo had walked all the way from Argentina to El Salvador –except for the territory between Columbia and Panama, which according to Gustavo, it lacked streets or other land roads and could only be crossed by boat. He also remembered the radiant morning that he and Gustavo paddled out to the huge waves of the 1996’s swell. Gustavo was crazy enough to ride one of the biggest waves and its gigantic and diaphanous lip of water had broken on his board. Diego’s heartbeats had frozen on the spot when he saw Gustavo falling in that turbulent mass of foam and salty water, with almost zero chances to survive. After the group of waves had passed on, Diego had looked for Gustavo everywhere. He had realized that Gustavo’s leash had broken because his board had torn into pieces on the rocks on the shore. Seconds later, he had been consoled to see a dark and smiling shape swimming towards him. It was Gustavo, thrilled by the biggest wave he would ever surf.    

But he and Gustavo surfed for different reasons. He did it for his love of the sea, for devotion to water, for the precious feeling of sliding softly upon it. Gustavo did it, it seemed, trying to prove himself something; a kind of psychological challenge, one could say. Like the time he climbed the huge rock of La Puerta del Diablo without any rope or other equipment. Or the time he left his home and immigrated wordlessly to the United States disappearing for his parents and for the rest of his acquaintances in El Salvador for a very long time.  

Some years later Diego got a phlegmatic postcard from Fresno, California. This happened some weeks before he had begun, against his parent’s will, his studies in Madrid. In it Gustavo told him in three short sentences that he was living among Mexican immigrants, that he was working with them in the grape fields and that he was happy. Diego hurried to contact Gustavo’s parents, fearing that the latter had forgotten, consciously or not, to tell them his whereabouts. And then this in his hand, doña Isabel’s letter from some days ago...

The train was full, which disgusted Diego. He got squashed onto a seat next to an old man with an alcohol stank reading a magazine on classic cars. He felt the pull of the locomotive and said goodbye to the Czech Republic, sure that he’d come back soon enough, because no matter where life or destiny would take him, Prague would always remain one of his favourite cities, an artificial nest to which he would, sooner or later, have to return.

And that in spite of the spell of bad luck of the last few days: Money that got stolen from the room at the hotel, and then the Museum of the Sternberg Palace was closed due to renovations, depriving him of all those beautiful pictures by El Greco, Holbein and others, but above all frustrating his long-time desire to see Dürer’s impressive “Feast of the Rose Garlands”. Besides he’d lost his Sunday-afternoon connection and therefore had to take a night train with change in Cheb, which would make it virtually impossible to be on time for his appointment in Berlin. And now this, another delay.

He had slept very little in the last 24 hours and was in a levitating, sedative mental state. Nevertheless, he put an awkward friendly face while the border officers inspected his documents on the German-Czech border. Actually, now he was a holder of diplomatic papers, but could not help feeling nervous, as he always did when his papers were being checked –a habit hard to change after one has lived illegally in a foreign continent. Short afterwards the old man with an alcohol stank stood up, took his magazine and his little Bescherovka bottle and got off in the first Bavarian station. Diego leaned his dazzled head against the window-pane and noticed a smooth and moving rain that started to fall. Where had all those years gone? How is it possible for a human being to leap above the fences of time to land suddenly in other periods, being unconscious of the changes happening around? It seemed like yesterday when he and Gustavo and the rest of their classmates went to “La Pana”, a clandestine bar on the forests of San Salvador’s volcano, to celebrate the end of high school. They were at last done with all that crap: now the world and true freedom! So they parked their parents’ expensive cars on an empty dirt road and walked along the path amid the forest that would take them to the legendary watering whole where, according to the legend, it remained a neutral zone even in times of war since military and guerrilla alike sat there together to drown their demons.

Gustavo, Diego and all their friends took a table with a view of San Salvador and lighted the first joint. Later, Diego stood up, sat with another group a couple of tables away, and five minutes later he came back with a hundred Colones worth of first quality Salvadorian weed.  Someone offered him a Cuban cigar, and he cut it open with a razor blade to fill it in with ganja –a fashion of back then when cigars were cheap on the black market and easy to obtain by rich kids. That afternoon they sat and forgot about themselves and drank liters and liters of Regia and listened to Todos tus Muertos and ate paterna seeds and smoked more.      

“What do you have in mind?” Asked Diego.

“Does it matter?” answered Gustavo, standing up and walking towards the bar to get another bottle of Regia. Some weeks later he began his Latin American tour on foot.

But, a month after Gustavo came back, serious changes were noticed in his behaviour. Diego believed he could remember exactly the moment it happened. He called him one morning at 5 a.m. to tell him “hey, cerote, there’s a swell coming in today. I´ll pick you up in ten minutes?”. I’ve given up surfing, answered Gustavo, and Diego thought he was crazy.

“I’ve given up surfing...” Now he was the traitor. The one who never took the pains to continue with a practice that had been so central for him in his youth. The thing that defined him for many a year. But in the old Europe there were always more than enough excuses: I’m too busy right now… I don’t have any money… now that my parents have turned their back on me I have more important things to think about, etc. And amid a critical epoch in his life he found himself addicted to thought, not movement, and his internal voice found no restraint. Afterwards, when the wind began to blow his direction, he consoled himself thinking that this is another kind of sea where books are waves and stories, music and art are coral reef, picturesque shipwrecks and languid sunsets. It wasn’t treason, but metamorphosis. And yet, he couldn’t believe himself wholly.

The megaphone announced the arrival to Nürnberg and he hurried to the next ticket counter. “Dear Diego” wrote Gustavo’s mother. Next connection would leave in half an hour. “So long without hearing from you...” he searched unsuccessfully for the number of the Ambassador’s secretary in his agenda... “here things are pretty much the same. Mauricio spends a lot of time in Ahuachapán, overseeing the properties…” he’d have to find an internet café and look for the British Embassy phone  number. But it was still too early early to call. He’d  have to write an email... “Sometimes I feel lonely; especially when I think about my son…” He wrote an email full with apologies. Perhaps his most important meeting in life and he was painfully late. He’d be willing to show his train ticket, although he knew those gestures were unnecessary with the British... “I haven’t seen him for more than five years, my dear Gustavito. Since he left home…” He bought a Bratwurst with mustard and two beers for the way, who gave a shit that it wasn’t even eight o clock in the morning, he needed just a bit of sleep… “I never managed to understand him. I think God punished me with such a rebellious son for all the troubles I gave to my parents…” He sat on a cement bench on the platform, bit the sausage and took out his pocket knife to open the beer bottle… “I’m sorry if I’m bothering you with all this, but I always thought that you were a good boy. I always believed that you gave good advice to my little Gustavo …” He opened his bag, feeling already a bit sleepy, and took out the book to read a couple of pages before the arrival of the train. There it was. The envelope with its blue-and-white striped edge, its post stamps of the Volcán de Izalco and the Salvadorian flag. He opened the envelope once again and found two pages. One with doña Isabel’s grandmotherly calligraphy. The other a Xerox copy... “I’m sending you attached a copy of the letter I received from Gustavo half a month ago. I don’t know what to do, Diego…” He tried to imagine into what pains did doña Isabel went through to make the copy, for her and technology were as compatible as water and oil: “I think we’ve lost my son forever”.     

Poor doña Isabel, thought Diego as he boarded the train. Poor mother who could not understand her son. Gustavo had always been a sort of timeless person, exempt from the norms that rule common sense. That’s why his decision appeared to Diego, after the first shock of the news, like something already expected, like an imminent move on a chess game. He’d been expecting it for months now, perhaps years. It began when Gustavo stopped sending him postcards that would only say “I’m fine” and began to confess his admiration of eastern philosophies, his vegetarianism, his need to disassociate himself from what he called a “senseless moving world”. At the end, Gustavo would just send a type of aphorisms with oriental tones. His last letter registered only one poem:

“Death cannot be lived;

And thus is stillness its virtue.

However, what has not been born

Is never spoken of.

However, the concealed exists.”

Diego never understood why Gustavo kept on sending him those enigmatic letters. Was it because of their endemic friendship since childhood? Was it a mocking answer, a saying “that is worth nothing” to his long letters narrating his struggles being an illegal sudaca, a Latin American immigrant in Europe, or his experiences in different countries, the publication of his first short-stories, his first successes as a cultural attaché in the diplomatic world and his fears of turning thirty or forty without being able to go back to his home country to surf the Pacific waves? He couldn’t understand how someone whose spiritual training consisted in detachment of everything loved would continue to remember him, letting him know that he was still alive. Now, probably he’d never hear about him anymore. Gustavo had decided conclusively his path, and it would take him apart from all that his eyes had seen so far.   

Diego felt a slight urge to vomit and fought it breathing deep and slowly. He closed the book and felt comfortable in his nausea, relieved inside an almost empty train at a vertiginous speed with the vineyards of Upper Franconia running through his window. He closed his eyes and thought again about Gustavo, about his decision to leave everything behind in search of the Nirvana. Doña Isabel never managed to accept him, she was always trying to understand him. And in spite of the mellow and selfish sadness that Diego felt because he’d probably never see him again, would never have another drink at la Pana, or would never return triumphant and old, wrinkled and white-haired to the waves of Puerto de la Libertad, he had to feel happy for Gustavo, who had begun his path to the Complete –or was it the Nothing? he never cared much for Eastern thought.     

Indeed, he was different. But this doesn’t mean that the question hadn’t perturbed his sleep before. It doesn’t mean that he’d never thought, as he had earlier that morning, that time recurrently falls into deep holes and that one day, suddenly, with or without warning one dies, leaves its form in this physical world and becomes dust. And there’s an intrinsic voice in every human being that cries out live! Live as much as you can! Breed upon the face of the earth, sow and harvest the fields, scrutinize the heavens! Let your essence last forever and never once again!   

Diego always knew that such voice rose the curtain to sex, that which launches us upon the search of affection: the connate impetus to continue. But for him this didn’t seem enough. And one winter day, while reading Homer in his empty and unheated Parisian apartment, he couldn’t bring himself to imagine what hands had written the text, what lips had recited it. Homer wasn’t a man but an instrument of all that which is ensconced and then revealed to humanity. Homer would live forever in echoes, in repetitions, in flames that die and turn to ashes and then revive. And thus Diego decided to follow that path, to become an instrument. It didn’t matter if nobody would remember him in two generations. It didn’t matter that humanity would someday vanish, that the sun, in some distant millennium, would extinguish and that the galaxy would follow its path without being annoyed by the death of a minuscule star. The important thing was the experience, life itself. It was the only thing he could grasp, and transmit it with words.

But perhaps Gustavo’s decision was easier. Maybe religions and their total truths are the easy way. And not to face day to day with naked fists our inconsiderate questions and their half-way answers. In any case, he had already chosen his way, as did Gustavo.     

He arrived at Zoologischer Garten station in Berlin at 2:30 p.m. He had in his right hand his hand luggage, in his left shoulder a small backpack and in the same hand Russell’s book. He rushed to the exit doors trying to locate the sight of a cab, and while he walked over the threshold of the station’s main entrance he felt something falling from his grasp. It was the Xeroxed copy of Gustavo’s letter, which fell upon the stone floor:

“I have decided to go to the East, to a Buddhist monastery called Rongbuk.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.

Gustavo.”

Diego stopped for a second and it occurred to him, comically, how the migratory proceedings would be like to stay forever in Tibet, isolated from the world in an edifice at the foot of Mount Everest. But then he remembered that he was dealing with Gustavo, and that for a person like him those details were truly irrelevant. He decided to leave the copy there laying on the floor, and to remember his friend as he was in that afternoon they spent at la Pana, back then when all was touch and empiricism. He exited to a late-Summer tepid day and took a taxi to his hotel. He still had to shower and shave before leaving for the British Embassy.