I was twenty.
not let anyone tell you age is
beautiful life.
-Paul Nizan, Aden Arabia
, 1966
say that at twenty years has, from the biological point of view, perfect physical condition: the optimal age for military service or for an Olympic career. From then on everything in life is declining. So those who die in wars are boys as young as those who fell in the sands of Iwo Jima. So the Olympic competitions between athletes are given more or less twenty years. That's why boxers, football players, basketball players, have their big moment at twenty. Is the peak age.
I have met three times twenty years and although I get what I did at that age. Where was I in 1961 and the subsequent months? "It seemed so terrible that age as Paul Nizan, the young philosopher, Sartre's friend? I think not. Maybe because in many cases those years have a greater capacity for illusion.
"It threatens to ruin a young man: love, ideas, loss of family, entering the adult world. He is hard to learn his place in the world. "
In May 1962 I was not yet twenty-one and I was in New York waiting for a boat that would take us to Le Havre, the Aurelia. I had gone by land in a Greyhound bus from Laredo to Philadelphia because he had to meet a group of young Quakers in a town called Pendelhill, Pennsylvania, where he would teach us about the camp that every summer the Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee (which in 1947 won the Nobel Peace Prize for his services during the second war in Europe) organized in Switzerland and southern Italy. I happened to camp in a Swiss village called Bergün, more or less by the region where the Thomas Mann novel locates his enchanted mountain (I know that in English is known as The Magic Mountain, but I like to remember as it was translated into Italian: La montagna Incantate), a week, and then in a remote village in southern Italy: Crucifix, in Calabria, which had no over 300 souls and in which mafia and had kept the law of omerta.
we had no evil in the Aurelia. Our group was about twenty, and gringos gringos, and a Mexican. We did eleven days in the Aurelia, originally built by the Germans in 1917, now sailing with Italian flag and the trip was very interesting because I was changing the schedule. The food was very good and eat with wine. The wine became dizzy in a very pretty. We rocked. After lunch we went to all the girls to the stern to sing and to digest, but as you moved the boat stirred digestion. It was the pleasure of drinking mild. And he was a joke or FAJE well suited to time, as was natural and logical andARTE gringas kissing, sometimes we apretábamos by brokers and other times we got into the bunk, ie the cabins.
cachondería was a constant day and night, at all times, although Smooches not pass away. We arrived at Le Havre and then we went direct train to the Gare du Nord in Paris. A dream come true: I grew up always knowing obsessed with Paris as soon as possible in my life. But I was very scared: he had then the wave of the OAS, the Secret Army (L'Organisation de l'Armée Secrete) which is opposed to De Gaulle and the liberation of Algeria. It was in 1962. They planted bombs strafing and spraying the cafes in certain neighborhoods, you will cast a machine gun or grenade
But Paris was my goal. There could be a writer if I did not know Paris. So at age twenty, I was in Europe at a very young because I put the craziness of a writer if I was not going to Paris could not be a writer. I walked with the mark of the lost generation of the twenties, like Hemingway, who made his Paris, and Scott Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. If not were you in Paris writing in cafes as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre then what kind writer wanted to be?
Later, well into the summer, I spent six weeks in a camp building a school for children in the Calabrian town, Crucifix. There I met a Milan, with whom I traveled south to north after the peninsula, Sicily to Florence for eighteen days. We arrived at the youth hostels and slept in bedrooms and beds, some for men, others for women. But last night in Florence, decided, or rather she decided, we went to a hotel. We found a guest house that we got as seven in the evening and we no longer till the next morning. There I had my very privileged and fortunate erotic initiation and understand that indeed, at that age, you know the hardships of love. Comes a kind of sweet physical exhaustion after making love many times, something that the Romans coined a memorable sentence: post coitum omne animal triste. At dawn, we did not know exactly what part of town we were, we opened the wooden window overlooking the street and we realized we were in front of the baptistry of Dante and Giotto's campanile front, ie, below Florence Cathedral. That was the scene.
0 comments:
Post a Comment