Like the Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections (7 page)

I
n New York, I meet up for afternoon tea with a rather unusual artist. She works in a bank in Wall Street, but one day she had a dream, in which she was told to visit twelve different places in the world and, in each one of those places, to create a painting or a sculpture in Nature itself.

So far, she has managed to make four such works. She shows me photos of one of them – a carving of an Indian inside a cave in California. While she waits for further signs to be revealed to her in dreams, she continues working at the bank, and that way earns enough money to travel and to carry out her task.

I ask her why she does it.

‘In order to maintain the equilibrium of the world,’ she replies. ‘It may sound like nonsense, but there is a tenuous web around us all, which we can make stronger or weaker depending on how we behave. We can save or destroy many things with a simple gesture that might, at times, seem utterly pointless. My dreams may be nonsense too, but I don’t want to run the risk of not following them. For me, human relationships are like a vast, fragile spider’s web. What I’m trying to do with my work is to restore part of that web.’

‘T
he reason the king is so powerful is because he’s made a pact with the Devil,’ a very devout woman in the street told the boy, and he was intrigued.

Some time later, when he was travelling to another town, the boy heard a man beside him remark:

‘All this land belongs to the same man. I’d say the Devil had a hand in that.’

Late one summer afternoon, a beautiful woman walked past the boy.

‘That woman is in the service of Satan!’ cried a preacher angrily.

From then on, the boy decided to seek the Devil out, and when he found him, he said:

‘They say you can make people powerful, rich, and beautiful.’

‘Not really,’ replied the Devil. ‘You’ve just been listening to the views of those who are trying to promote me.’

I
receive through the post three litres of a product intended to provide a substitute for milk. A Norwegian company wants to know if I’m interested in investing in the production of this new kind of food because, in the opinion of the expert David Rietz: ‘ALL [his capitals] cow’s milk contains 59 active hormones, a great deal of fat, cholesterol, dioxins, bacteria and viruses.’

I think of the calcium that, when I was a child, my mother said was so good for my bones; but the expert is ahead of me: ‘Calcium? Where do cows get calcium for their big bones? Yes, from plants!’ Naturally, this new product is plant-based, and milk is condemned on the basis of innumerable studies carried out by various institutes dotted around the world.

And protein? David Rietz is implacable: ‘Milk can be thought of as “liquid meat” [I never have, but he must know what he’s talking about] because of its high protein content. But it is the protein which may actually leach calcium from the body. Countries that consume high protein diets also have the highest rates of osteoporosis.’

That same afternoon, my wife e-mails me an article she has found on the internet:

People who are now aged between 40 and 60 years old used to drive around in cars with no seatbelts, no head support and no airbag. Children sat in the back, making a tremendous racket and having a great time.

Baby cribs were painted with brightly coloured paints, all highly suspect, since they might have contained lead or some other dangerous substance.

I, for example, am of the generation that used to make their own ‘go-karts’ (I don’t know quite how to explain this to today’s generation – let’s just say they were made with ball bearings fixed inside two iron hoops) and we would race down the hills in Botafogo, using our feet as brakes, falling off, hurting ourselves, but very proud of our high-speed adventures.

The article continues:

There were no mobile phones, and so our parents had no way of knowing where we were – how was that possible? As children, we were never right, we were occasionally punished, but we never had any psychological problems about feeling rejected or unloved. At school, there were good pupils and there were bad pupils: the good pupils moved up to the next year, the bad ones flunked. Psychotherapists were not called in to study the case – the bad pupils simply had to repeat the year.

And even so, we managed to survive with a few grazed knees and a few traumas. We not only survived, we look back nostalgically to the days when milk was not a
poison, when a child was expected to resolve any problems without outside help, getting into fights if necessary, and spending much of the day without any electronic toys, and, instead, inventing games with friends.

But let’s go back to my initial topic. I decided to try the miraculous new product that could replace murderous milk.

I got no further than the first mouthful.

I asked my wife and my maid to try it, without telling them what it was. They both said they had never tasted anything so disgusting in their life.

I’m worried about tomorrow’s children, with their computer games, their parents with mobile phones, psychotherapists helping them through every failure, and – above all – being forced to drink this ‘magic potion’, which will keep them free of cholesterol, osteoporosis, and safe from those 59 active hormones and from toxins.

They will be very healthy and well balanced; and when they grow up, they will discover milk (by then, it may well be illegal). Perhaps some scientist in 2050 will take it upon himself to rescue something that people have been drinking since the beginning of time? Or will milk only be available from drug traffickers?

I
possibly should have died at 22:30 on 22 August 2004, less than forty-eight hours after my birthday. In order for the scene of my near-death to be set, a series of factors came into play:

(a) In interviews to promote his latest film, the actor Will Smith kept mentioning my book
The Alchemist.

(b) His latest film was based on a book I had read years ago and very much enjoyed:
I, Robot.
I decided to go and see it, in homage to Smith and Asimov.

(c) The film opened in a small town in the south-west of France in the first week of August. However, for a series of entirely trivial reasons, I had to postpone going to the cinema until that Sunday.

I ate supper early and drank half a bottle of wine with my wife. We invited our maid to come with us (she resisted at first, but finally accepted); we got there in plenty of time, bought some popcorn, saw the film, and enjoyed it.

I got into the car to make the ten-minute drive back to the old converted mill that is my home. I put a CD of Brazilian music on and decided to drive fairly slowly so that, during those ten minutes, I could listen to at least three songs.

On the road, passing through small, sleepy villages, I see – appearing out of nowhere – a pair of headlights in the driver’s side mirror. Before us lies a crossroads, clearly marked by posts.

I try to brake, because I know that the other car won’t be able to overtake – the posts at the crossroads make that impossible. All this takes a fraction of a second. I remember thinking, ‘The guy must be mad!’, but I don’t have time to say anything. The driver of the other car (the image engraved on my memory is that of a Mercedes, but I can’t be sure), sees the posts, accelerates, pulls over in front of me, and when he tries to correct his position, ends up slewed across the road.

From then on, everything seems to happen in slowmotion. His car turns over on its side once, twice, three times. It hits the hard shoulder and continues rolling over and over, forward this time, with the front and back bumpers hitting the ground.

My headlights illuminate the whole thing, but I can’t brake suddenly – I’m driving right alongside this car performing somersaults. It’s like a scene from the film I’ve just seen; but that was fiction, and this is real life!

The car returns to the road and finally stops, lying on its left side. I can see the driver’s shirt. I stop beside him with just one thought in my head: I must get out and help him. At that moment, I feel my wife’s nails digging into my arm: she is begging me, please, to drive on and park further off; the other car might explode, catch fire.

I drive on for another hundred metres and park. The CD continues playing the Brazilian music as if nothing had
happened. Everything seems so surreal, so distant. My wife and Isabel, the maid, run towards the scene of the accident. Another car, coming in the opposite direction, stops. A woman jumps out, looking very upset. Her headlights, too, have lit up that Dantesque scene. She asks if I’ve got a mobile phone. I do. Then why don’t I phone for an ambulance!

What is the emergency number? She looks at me – everyone knows that! 51 51 51! My mobile phone is switched off – at the cinema, they always remind patrons to do that. I key in the access code and we phone the emergency number – 51 51 51. I know exactly where it all happened: between the villages of Laloubère and Horgues.

My wife and the maid return: the boy in the car has a few scratches, but apparently nothing very grave. Nothing very grave, after what I saw, after turning over six times! He staggers slightly when he gets out of the car; other motorists stop; the firemen are on the scene within five minutes; everything is all right.

Everything is all right. But he had been a fraction of a second away from hitting our car and hurling us into the ditch; things, then, would have been very bad for all of us. Very bad indeed.

When I get home, I look up at the stars. Sometimes we encounter things on our path, but because our time has not yet come, they brush past us, without touching us, even though they were close enough for us to see them. I thank God for the awareness to understand, as a friend of mine says, that everything that had to happen happened, but nothing did.

D
uring the World Economic Forum at Davos, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Shimon Peres, told the following story.

A Rabbi gathered together his students and asked them:

‘How do we know the exact moment when night ends and day begins?’

‘When it’s light enough to tell a sheep from a dog,’ said one boy.

Another student said: ‘No, when it’s light enough to tell an olive tree from a fig tree.’

‘No, that’s not a good definition either.’

‘Well, what’s the right answer?’ asked the boys.

And the Rabbi said:

‘When a stranger approaches, and we think he is our brother, and all conflicts disappear, that is the moment when night ends and day begins.’

I
t’s raining hard today, and the temperature is about 3°C. I decide to go for a walk – I don’t feel that I work properly if I don’t walk every day – but it’s very windy too, and so, after about ten minutes, I drive back home. I pick up the newspaper from my mailbox, but it contains nothing of importance, only the things that journalists have decided we should know, feel involved in, and have an opinion about.

I go over to my computer to check my e-mails.

Nothing new, just a few unimportant decisions to be made which take me no time at all to resolve.

I try doing some archery, but the wind makes it impossible. I’ve written my latest biennial book, which, this time, is entitled
The Zahir
and which won’t be published for several weeks. I’ve written the columns I publish on the internet. I’ve updated my web page. I’ve had my stomach checked out and, fortunately, no abnormality was found (I had been very frightened about having a tube put down my throat, but it turned out to be nothing very terrible). I’ve been to the dentist. The plane tickets I’d been waiting for have finally arrived by express mail. I have things to do tomorrow and things which I finished yesterday, but today…

Today I have absolutely nothing that requires my attention.

I feel uneasy. Shouldn’t I be doing something? Well, if I wanted to invent work, that wouldn’t take much effort. We all have projects to develop, light bulbs to change, leaves to sweep, books to put away, computer files to organize. But how about just facing up to the void?

I put on a hat, thermal clothes, and a waterproof jacket and go out into the garden. That way, I should be able to withstand the cold for the next four or five hours. I sit down on the wet grass and start making a mental list of what is going through my head:

(a) I’m useless. Everyone else at that moment is busy, working hard.

Answer: I work hard too, sometimes twelve hours a day. Today I just happen to have nothing to do.

(b) I have no friends. Here I am, one of the most famous writers in the world, and I’m all alone; even the phone doesn’t ring.

Answer: Of course I have friends, but they respect my need for solitude when I’m at the old mill in St Martin in France.

(c) I need to go and buy some glue.

Yes, I’ve just remembered that yesterday I ran out of glue. Why not jump in the car and go to the nearest town? And I stop at that thought. Why is it so difficult to stay as I am now, doing nothing?

A series of thoughts cross my mind: friends who worry about things that haven’t yet happened; acquaintances who manage to fill every minute of their lives with tasks
that seem to me absurd; senseless conversations; long telephone calls in which nothing of any importance is ever said; bosses who invent work in order to justify their jobs; officials who feel afraid because they have been given nothing important to do that day, which might mean that they are no longer useful; mothers who torment themselves because their children have gone out for the evening; students who torment themselves over their studies, over tests and exams.

I have a long, hard struggle with myself not to get up and go to the stationery shop to buy that glue. I experience terrible feelings of anxiety, but I am determined to stay here doing nothing, at least for a few hours. Gradually, the anxiety gives way to contemplation, and I start to listen to my soul. It has been longing to speak to me, but I’m always too busy.

The wind is still blowing very hard, and I know that it’s cold and rainy, and that tomorrow I might perhaps need to buy some glue. I’m not doing anything, and yet I’m also doing the most important thing a man can do: I’m listening to what I needed to hear from myself.