Like the Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections (4 page)

A
meeting in the house of a São Paulo-born painter based in New York. We are talking about angels, and about alchemy. At one point, I try to explain to the other guests the alchemical idea that each of us contains the whole universe and that we are, therefore, responsible for its wellbeing. I struggle to find the right words, but cannot come up with a good image that will explain my point of view.

The painter, who has been listening in silence, asks everyone to look out of the window of his studio.

‘What can you see?’ he asks.

‘A street in Greenwich Village,’ someone replies.

The painter sticks a piece of paper over the window so that the street can no longer be seen; then, with a penknife, he cuts a small square in the paper.

‘And if someone were to look through there, what would he see?’

‘The same street,’ comes the reply.

The painter cuts several squares in the paper.

‘Just as each of these holes contains within it the whole view of the same street, so each of us contains in our soul the same universe,’ he says.

And all of us applaud the lovely image he has found.

O
n the day of my birthday, the universe gave me a present which I would like to share with my readers.

In the middle of a forest near the small town of Azereix, in south-west France, there is a tree-covered hill. With the temperature nudging 40°C, in a summer when nearly five thousand people have died in hospital because of the heat, we look at the fields of maize almost ruined by the drought, and we don’t much feel like walking. Nevertheless, I say to my wife:

‘Once, after I dropped you off at the airport, I decided to explore this forest. I found a really pretty walk. Would you like me to show you?’

Christina sees something white in the middle of the trees and asks what it is.

‘It’s a hermitage,’ I say, and tell her that the path passes right by it, but that on the one occasion I was there, the hermitage was closed. Accustomed as we are to the mountains and the fields, we know that God is everywhere and that there is no need for us to go into a man-made building in order to find him. Often, during our long walks, we pray in silence, listening to the voice of nature, and understanding that the invisible world always manifests itself
in the visible world. After a half-hour climb, the hermitage appears before us in the middle of the wood, and the usual questions arise. Who built it? Why? To which saint is it dedicated?

And as we approach, we hear music and singing, a single voice that seems to fill the air about us with joy. ‘The other time I was here, there weren’t any loudspeakers,’ I think, finding it strange that someone should be playing music to attract visitors on such a little-used track.

But this time, the door of the hermitage is open. We go in, and it is like entering a different world: the chapel lit by the morning light; an image of the Immaculate Conception on the altar; three rows of pews; and, in one corner, in a kind of ecstasy, a young woman of about twenty, playing her guitar and singing, with her eyes fixed on the image before her.

I light three candles, as I usually do when I enter a church for the first time (one for me, one for my friends and readers, and one for my work). I look back. The young woman has noticed our presence, but she simply smiles and continues playing.

A sense of paradise seems to descend from the heavens. As if she understood what was going on in my heart, the young woman combines music with silence, now and again pausing to say a prayer.

And I am aware that I am experiencing an unforgettable moment in my life, the kind of awareness we often only have once the magic moment has passed. I am entirely in the moment, with no past, no future, merely experiencing the morning, the music, the sweetness, the unexpected
prayer. I enter a state of worship and ecstasy, and gratitude for being alive. After many tears, and what seems to me an eternity, the young woman stops playing. My wife and I get up and thank her. I say that I would like to send her a present for having filled my soul with peace that morning. She says that she goes there every morning and that this is her way of praying. I insist that I would like to give her a present. She hesitates, but finally gives me the address of a convent.

The following day, I send her one of my books and, shortly afterwards, receive a reply, in which she says that she left the hermitage that day with her soul flooded with joy, because the couple who came in had shared her worship and shared, too, in the miracle of life.

In the simplicity of that small chapel, in the young woman’s voice, in the morning light that filled everything, I understood once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things.

I
’m looking at a lovely natural pool near the village of Babinda in Australia. A young Aborigine comes over to me.

‘Be careful you don’t slip,’ he says.

The small pool is surrounded by rocks, apparently quite safe to walk on.

‘This place is called the Devil’s Pool,’ the boy goes on. ‘Many years ago, Oolona, a beautiful Aborigine girl who was married to a warrior from Babinda, fell in love with another man. They fled into these mountains, but the husband found them. The lover escaped, but Oolona was murdered here in these waters. Ever since then, Oolona thinks that every man who comes near is her lost love, and she kills him with her watery embrace.’

Later on, I ask the owner of the small hotel about the Devil’s Pool.

‘It might just be superstition,’ he says, ‘but the fact is that eleven tourists have died there in the last ten years, and they were all men.’

I
read in an on-line newspaper on the internet that, on 10 June 2004, in Tokyo, a man was found dead in his pyjamas.

So far, so good. I think that most people who die in their pyjamas (a) either died in their sleep, which is a blessing, or (b) were with their family or in a hospital bed, meaning that death did not arrive suddenly, and they all had time to get used to ‘the Unwanted Guest’, as the Brazilian poet, Manuel Bandeira, called it.

The news item went on to say that, when he died, the man was in his bedroom. That cancels out the hospital hypothesis, leaving the possibility that he died in his sleep, without suffering, without even realizing that he wouldn’t live to see the morning light again.

However, there remains one other possibility: that he was attacked and killed.

Anyone who knows Tokyo also knows that, although it is a vast city, it is also one of the safest places in the world. I remember once stopping with my Japanese publishers for a meal before driving on into the interior of Japan. All our cases were on the back seat of the car. I immediately said how dangerous this was; someone was bound to
pass, see our luggage, and make off with our clothes and documents and everything else. My publisher smiled and told me not to worry; he had never known such a thing to happen in his entire life (and, indeed, nothing did happen to our luggage, although I spent the whole of supper feeling tense).

But let’s go back to our dead man in pyjamas. There was no sign of struggle or violence. An official from the Metropolitan Police, in an interview with the newspaper, stated that the man had almost certainly died of a sudden heart attack. So we can also reject the murder hypothesis.

The corpse was found by the employees of a construction company on the second floor of a building in a housing development that was about to be demolished. Everything would lead us to think that our dead man in the pyjamas, having failed to find somewhere to live in one of the most densely populated and most expensive places in the world, had simply decided to live in a building where he wouldn’t have to pay any rent.

Then comes the tragic part of the story. Our dead man was nothing more than a skeleton wearing pyjamas. Beside him, was an open newspaper dated 20 February 1984. On a table nearby, the calendar marked the same day.

He had been there for twenty years.

And no one had noticed his absence.

The man was identified as an ex-employee of the company who had built the housing development, where he had moved at the beginning of the 1980s, immediately after getting divorced. He was just over fifty on the day he was reading the newspaper and suddenly departed this life.

His ex-wife had never tried to get in touch with him. The journalists went to the company where he had worked and discovered that the company had gone bankrupt immediately after the project was finished, because they had failed to sell any of the apartments, which would explain why they did not find it strange when the man stopped turning up for work. The journalists tracked down his friends, who attributed his disappearance to the fact that he had borrowed money from them and hadn’t been able to pay them back.

The news item ended by saying that the man’s mortal remains were returned to his ex-wife. When I finished reading the article, I kept thinking about that final sentence: the ex-wife was still alive; and yet, for twenty years, she had never once tried to contact him. What can have been going on inside her mind? That he didn’t love her any more, and that he had decided to cut her out of his life for good? That he had met another woman and disappeared? That this is simply what life is like once the divorce proceedings are over, and that there is no point in continuing a relationship once it has been legally terminated? I imagine what she must have felt when she learned the fate of the man with whom she had shared a large part of her life.

And then I thought about the dead man in pyjamas, about his complete and utter isolation, to the point that, for twenty long years, no one in the whole world had noticed that he had simply vanished without trace. I can only conclude that worse than hunger or thirst, worse than being unemployed, unhappy in love or defeated and
in despair, far worse than any or all of those things, is feeling that no one, absolutely no one, cares about us.

Let us say a silent prayer for that man, and thank him for making us think about how important friends are.

J
uan always used to attend the Sunday service at his church, but he began to feel that the priest was always saying the same thing, and so stopped going.

Two months later, one cold winter night, the priest came to visit him.

‘He’s probably come to try and persuade me to go back,’ Juan thought to himself. He felt that he couldn’t give the real reason for his absence – the priest’s repetitive sermons. He needed to find an excuse and, while he was thinking, he placed two chairs beside the fire and started talking about the weather.

The priest said nothing. After trying in vain for some time to start a conversation, Juan gave up. The two men sat on in silence for nearly half an hour, staring into the fire.

At that point, the priest got up and, with one of the logs that had not yet burned, he pushed one piece of coal away from the flames.

Since there was not enough heat for the coal to continue burning, it began to cool. Juan quickly drew it back into the centre of the fire.

‘Good night,’ said the priest, getting up to leave.

‘Good night, and thank you very much,’ replied Juan. ‘However brightly a piece of coal may be burning, it will soon burn out if you remove it from the flames. However intelligent a man may be, he will soon lose his warmth and his flame if he distances himself from his fellow man. I’ll see you at church next Sunday.’

M
anuel needs to be busy. If he is not, he thinks that his life has no meaning, that he’s wasting his time, that society no longer needs him, that no one loves or wants him.

So, as soon as he wakes up, he has a series of tasks to perform: to watch the news on television (something might have happened in the night); to read the newspaper (something might have happened during the day yesterday); to tell his wife not to let the children be late for school; to take the car or catch a taxi or a bus or the metro, all the time thinking hard, staring into space, looking at his watch or, if possible, making a few calls on his mobile phone, and ensuring that everyone can see what an important man he is, useful to the world.

Manuel arrives at work and sits down to deal with the paperwork that awaits him. If he’s an employee, he does his best to make sure that his boss has seen that he’s arrived on time. If he’s a boss, he sets everyone to work immediately. If there are no important tasks to be done, Manuel will invent them, create them, come up with a new plan, develop new lines of action.

Manuel goes to lunch, but never alone. If he is a boss, he
sits down with his friends and discusses new strategies, speaks ill of his competitors, always has a card up his sleeve, complains (with some pride) of overwork. If Manuel is an employee, he, too, sits down with his friends, complains about his boss, complains about the amount of overtime he’s doing, states with some anxiety (and with some pride) that various things in the company depend entirely on him.

Manuel – boss or employee – works all afternoon. From time to time, he looks at his watch. It’s nearly time to go home, but he still has to sort out a detail here, sign a document there. He’s an honest man and wants to justify his salary, other people’s expectations, the dreams of his parents, who struggled so hard to give him a good education.

Finally, he goes home. He has a bath, puts on some more comfortable clothes, and has supper with his family. He asks after his children’s homework and what his wife has been doing. Sometimes, he talks about his work, although only to serve as an example, because he tries not to bring his work problems home with him. They finish supper, and his children – who have no time for examples, homework, or other such things – immediately leave the table and go and sit down in front of the computer. Manuel, in turn, goes and sits down in front of that piece of apparatus from his childhood called the television. He again watches the news (something might have happened during the afternoon).

He always goes to bed with some technical book on his bedside table – whether he’s a boss or an employee, he knows that competition is intense, and that anyone who
fails to keep up to date runs the risk of losing his job and facing that worst of all curses: having nothing to do.

He talks a little to his wife; he is, after all, a nice, hard-working, loving man who takes care of his family, and is prepared to defend it whatever the circumstances. He falls asleep at once, and he sleeps knowing that he will be very busy tomorrow, and that he needs to rebuild his energies.

That night, Manuel has a dream. An angel asks him: ‘Why are you doing this?’ He replies that it’s because he’s a responsible man.

The angel goes on: ‘Would you be capable of taking at least fifteen minutes of your day to stop and look at the world, and at yourself, and simply do nothing?’ Manuel says that he would love to do that, but he doesn’t have time. ‘You’re lying to me,’ says the angel. ‘Everyone has time to do that. It’s just that they don’t have the courage. Work is a blessing when it helps us to think about what we’re doing; but it becomes a curse when its sole use is to stop us thinking about the meaning of our life.’

Manuel wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Courage? How can a man who sacrifices himself for his family not have the courage to stop for fifteen minutes a day?

It’s best to go back to sleep. It was just a dream; these questions will get him nowhere; and tomorrow he’s going to be very, very busy.