About a month ago or perhaps sometime more, I imagined the story of a working man who arrives home from a hard-work day in the factory and get himself ready to catch a train and find his love, meet his lover. I did it thinking of a true working man or about 50 -let's call him H.- who I met in the antibiotics factory in Aranjuez; and I did it not because he is in distant love with a lover, not quite that; simply because someone else -let's call him, J.- explained to me why H. was always in working dress, unshaven -but tidy-: "it is because he comes to the factory to work; when he finishes, he goes home, get a shower and shaves his face. My father, rip, used to do the same". On the other hand, the image of a man traveling to meet the person he loves is an old leit-motiv, immensely beautiful, though. I was particularly thinking of Benito P. Galdos' character Gabriel de Araceli, from Cadiz who, right before the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, works for a newspaper printer in Madrid. His love, Isabel, Isabelita, lives precisely in Ontigona, outside Aranjuez, about 30 miles South Madrid. Gabriel finishes work on Saturday evening, gets himself ready and travels by cart, pulled by animals, perhaps oxes, all through the night, to spend the Sunday with Isabel, and come back at night to start again the whole week... Immensely tender and sweet, don't you think?
That is what happened to me yesterday... So now you know why I did not showed up. The day was not that, that hard, not at all, but I rushed home, got a shower watching the tip-tapping evening rain through the window and catch the bus, the tube and later the train after the rain, in an immensely beautiful sunset. I was probably the only man happy in the train, packed with employees, business men and engaged girls on their way home to Totemham Hale, Cheshunt or farther into the Northeast to Anglia... . Upon arriving to my destination I walked the town in a progressively colder dusk to hold a piece of Eternity; each second of that walk was one extra beat of life for the heart.
(...)
Very early in the morning, the day was a gorgeous awakening and the trip back quite pleasant. Oh, "the World is full of magic", says the Water Genie to Haroun Khalifa in Rushdie's story -my friend V. explained to me how apples, bananas and tomatoes silently pilfer the surrounding substances and keep maturing after they have been picked-, and you can sniff that magic in the 5-minute walk between Liverpool Station and Moorgate: never, ever, such an inexpressive tidal of human faces have made a man merrier.
Yesterday, I was in the best place on Earth and got there by a magic path. I just think everyman's planet should be composed of places like that... And only that.
Don't you think it would be very, very nice?
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