Last day in Saint Petersburg

Photo by: Gerardo Meléndez

I have always thought that as we walk through any place, a part of us stays there. Every street, monument, and museum that we have visited in our life, keeps a touch of our essence forever, in the same way that our memory helps us preserve all its features in our minds.

Whether or not this is a universal truth is irrelevant. I believe it and thus it is true for me. I very much enjoyed this thought as I roamed around the streets of Saint Petersburg, thinking that a young version of my grandfather, the General, remained encapsulated within the aura of its buildings.

The previous days in the Venice of the North had been quite agitated. In an attempt to absorb hundreds of years of rich history, and an equal amount of gallons of potato alcohol, in only a few days my friends and I visited countless historical sights, galleries, important streets, museums, and nightclubs. A couple nights earlier I had met a girl who would later become an important part of my life, and soon I would be returning to Stockholm, in order to continue my studies in Economics.

As my time in Russia came to an end, and as the buildings in every street spoke to me, I found myself thinking about the General and his past. It then struck me as necessary to bring him an adequate souvenir from a place that had been important in his career. Thinking about his anecdote regarding the Georgian army and his brush with a spy from the Kremlin, I quickly arrived to the conclusion that no gift would be better than a nice bottle of Russian vodka, and so my search began.

You would think that getting a bottle of vodka in Russia couldn’t become much of a story. Well, think again. There I stood in a medium-sized local, surrounded by countless matrioshkas of repetitive designs, figures within figures of themselves, reminding me of fractal structures that seem to reveal a hidden meaning after every iteration. Colored eggs, communist flags, music boxes, army hats and uniforms... the list went on, and then I finally found a wall devoted to different vodka brands.

I approached the person working in the area, a man not much older than myself, to ask for his guidance.

-‘¡Hola!’ he said, recognizing my accent, ‘how can I help you?’ he inquired in perfect Spanish.

-‘This is a surprise, your Spanish is quite good’ I said, genuinely startled.

-‘Thank you’ he said, ‘I am fluent in seven languages, including your own’. He somehow began to remind me of C3PO, but I digress.

-‘I was wondering if you could recommend me a nice bottle of Russian vodka. It’s for my grandfather, he…’

-‘Say no more!’ he interrupted me, and he took out a bottle of a Polish transparent drink. He made a large shot glass appear out of I don’t know where, and filled it with the vodka imitation. ‘Drink, all of it!’

Now, for context sake, let me tell you that this was a Sunday morning, around 10:00. That day in particular I hadn’t had breakfast because I had overslept, and of course, as people in the store realized what was happening, they began to gather around us.

I drank the whole thing, and felt the burning liquid as it made its way down my esophagus. I could still feel it consuming my inside as it settled in my stomach.

-‘Muy bien’ he said, ‘Very good, now choose one of our Russian vodkas, anyone you’d like to try’. I began to apologize, but he wouldn’t let me go, ‘come on amigo, I’m letting you taste it before you buy it’.

There were dozens of bottles, many of them with ingenious or funny shapes, others looked rather sophisticated and had very detailed patterns embedded in them, I thought those were the most expensive ones. I went for a standard-looking bottle right in the middle of the display.

The polyglot man took it off the wall without hesitation, and poured me a shot all the way to the rim of the glass. ‘I want you to drink it all, move it around your mouth, and then let some air in as the vodka flows down your throat, it will help you savor it’.

Again I emptied the shot glass, following his instructions. This time there was barely any burning feeling, and the taste was quite enjoyable, almost sweet. ‘I’ll buy this one!’ I said after I swallowed the last bit of it, sure that I wouldn’t be able to find a better brand.

-‘Oh, my friend, do not rush! Please, try another one before you decide’ he said with a smile.

Was he trying to make me drunk? Again I tried to excuse myself, but the other costumers encouraged me to accept the man’s nice gesture. I went for a more refined bottle, hoping this would make him happy and let me buy it after I tried it. He repeated the ritual, and I did as well. Surprisingly, this vodka was even better than the previous one, less burning and sweeter.

-‘I would really like to buy this one’ I said, almost worried, but in a very good mood.

-‘You liked it more, didn’t you? It’s a good bottle, and I would recommend it. But before you buy it, I would like you to try one more, just to be sure, pick again!’ he said enthusiastically.

This story is already too long, so I will avoid the details, and just tell you that within the next ten minutes, I tried at least six more kinds of vodka. I am quite sure that by the end I could even speak a bit of Russian, or so it sounded like. I can’t recall much of what happened right after the tasting session, but I do know that I left the store with a bag full of extra souvenirs and a bottle of what I assume was the last vodka I tried. I also seem to recall giving my (parents’) phone number to one of the girls who worked in the store, and having an episode of incontrollable laughter back in the matrioshka section.

To this day, the General hasn’t opened his bottle. ‘We should save it for a special occasion’ he said right after I gave it to him, when I came back home from my semester abroad. Maybe I’ll tell him this story one of these days; we’ll open the bottle together, and see for ourselves if my purchase was a good one, or a mere consequence of those nine shots of vodka in my system.

Uneven Steps

"If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space.

If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time."

J.L. Borges

Photo by: Alina Jakubova

Never in my life had I seen something that resembled infinity as closely as the incessant twists and turns of the Great Wall, slowly but relentlessly teasing its way to the horizon. As my eyes tried to follow each sequence of steps, from tower to tower, I felt completely insignificant, not only in a spatial, but also in a temporal way.

It had been a quite interesting week in Beijing. I had met a rather large crowd of bright young people from several parts of the world, and little by little a more structured inner group of friends had emerged. A Curaçaoan, a few Americans and Icelanders, Saudi Arabians, Russians, a Haitian, an Indian and a Brit, Canadians, a South African, and even a fellow Mexican… they were the people with whom I shared a unique experience, as we discovered the complexities of the Chinese culture, while we explored three of its major cities.

The visit to the Great Wall was something I had been expecting since I planned to attend the Conference. There is something that has always mystified me about millenary structures, pieces of the past that remain in the present to give testimony of our origins. Glorious, monstrous, perhaps disproportionate evidence that our kind has been here for longer than our generations can recount. Although their sight is almost always unexpected, and sometimes disruptive, it is never anachronical.

Alina, a Russian girl, roamed by my side through most of the stretch that we were able to walk. She had long dark hair and cinnamon skin. Her eyes were blue, with lighter circles around her pupils, and at times her gaze was so intense it was almost unbearable. Her scent was Burberry, a preference she might have acquired after living in London for several years. It rendered me weak. I fell in love, of course.

As we got introduced and talked about our lives, I couldn’t help but notice that every step we had to take was different from the previous one. The length and height of each new block seemed to have been randomly assigned, which made the task of walking more difficult than one could have imagined. It was as if each step was the life of a different man, one in front of the other, leading somewhere too far for any of them to see. I then began to wonder about the amount of time and workers needed to complete each section of the Wall. I thought of the many lives consumed by the task of building something they would never be able to fully appreciate or understand.

Alina interrupted my digressions: ‘Race me to the top!’ she shouted, and began running before I could utter a single word. I ran after her, then next to her, and finally in front of her, until I made it to the cusp. By the time I stopped, I was breathless, and had to lie on the ground. When I opened my eyes, the new vantage point allowed me to contemplate the apparent unboundedness of the Great Wall.

It was then that I realized that whatever I intended to know about this culture, or any other, was trivial. I understood that our very existence was no more than a glitch in the history of humankind, a sigh, reverberating almost imperceptibly through the ages. Each one of us was no more than one uneven step in the Great Wall, a mere connection between two eternal paths.

It occurred to me that trying to grasp the vastness of anything larger than ourselves would be a task so immense that the length of no mortal life would be enough to achieve it. Thus, any undertaking of the same nature was condemned to fail. Yet, if we were there for a reason, it had to be more than to confirm this very notion.

I began to believe that our reason to exist could only be to know ourselves, and that in the continuous and infinite sequences of existence and cognition we might, if we were lucky enough, find a way to converge to a single point of truth, to which we would be able to hold on until the end of times.

Alina arrived seconds later, and decided to take a photograph to immortalize our race. We walked down the steps together, into the bus that would take us back to our hotel, and danced to the sound of no music. My journey had begun.

Epiphany

He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points

Photo by Gerardo Meléndez

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As weeks went by, I learned to appreciate the Swedish winter. The snow and the cold went from being exciting and new, to customary items of my day-to-day life, and then evolved again into two mysterious friends.

The reasons why I had decided to exile myself into a far away country had turned back to me after a few months of aperiodic ostracism. Had I resolved my questions? Had I found a solution for everything I left behind at the place that I used to call ‘home’? The answer was no, of course. Yet these matters didn’t seem as harsh as I lay down on the cold snow, away from the people, the noise, and the light, somewhat closer to death than to all those things.

You see, my sleeping patterns changed widely after I moved to the dark North. My body lost all sense of a normal day cycle, and in that particular week I was unable to wake up before 15:00, not even a couple of hours before the sun went down again. Thus, my daily walks in the woods and around the frozen lake quickly transformed into nightly strides through passages that showed me different faces every time.

For some reason this new setting made me feel adventurous. At all times I would stay out of the paths and enter unexplored areas of the woods. When I found that a boulder, a fallen tree, or the frozen lake obstructed my way, I climbed, dug, and risked falling into the icy water without much hesitation. Little by little I uncovered the secrets of that lonely place, and it became a part of me.

This also meant that I frequently got lost. Although this was usually not a problem, since I could just look for the lights around the roads, or try to walk towards the water to get some sense of orientation, this one time my adventure had taken too long. At midnight all artificial illumination ceased, and I was left in complete darkness, wondering around my forest, thinking about the meaning of life, and all the other questions that haunted my thoughts.

Many hours had gone by since I had started roaming around, at some point my legs betrayed me, and I decided to sit down. I closed my eyes, and listened to the music of the nature, took in the cold air, which didn’t feel cold anymore, and felt my body going numb. By the time I opened my eyes again, I found myself lying on the snow, completely still, unable and reluctant to move a single muscle.

The cloudy night had acquired strange tonality. The snow seemed to be reflected on it, and gave me the illusion of being trapped inside an infinite room full of mirrors. Not a patch of the sky was discernible; it was all snow around me, on top of me, and under me. I felt as if I were completely absent. The numbness of my limbs, the cold inside my chest, and the pain within my heart all disappeared. And then it happened.

A single star became visible above. One small dot, breaking through the impossible mirror of snow; countless particles of hydrogen burning millions of years ago, their story travelling at the speed of light, echoing through the corners of the Universe, until it found me. For an instant I could understand everything; it all became as clear as the most crystalline water, and I could see all at once. “I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity”, I had found an Aleph.

Russia, 2009 (or Passport Control, and the day that changed my life)

Little did I know...

Photo by Gerardo Meléndez

Passport Control on the Russian side of the border with Finland is probably one of the most distressful experiences I have ever gone through. Not because of the four or five times our bus was stopped to check for illegal substances, or even because of the long line we had to endure while the Russian officers were having lunch. No, it was because of that woman’s stare.

Each one of us had to stand in front of her when our turn arrived. She was around forty years old, had black hair, and stone cold green eyes that could pierce all the way to the back of anyone’s mind. She would look at the victim’s passport intently, and then direct her sight straight into his eyes. She wouldn’t even care about his general appearance, it was like a war, she’d try to break him down and make him confess: “Ok, here are the drugs!” or “Fine, I’m an illegal immigrant”. I swear, I almost confessed, and I wasn’t even guilty.

I tried smiling as she gazed at me, but her face only seemed to harden after my attempt. The war went on for what seemed to be hours, until she finally decided that I could go into her country. She stamped my passport, I took it, and walked away as fast as I could.

Our first excursion around Saint Petersburg was something special. The guides made an emphasis that the city was also known as “The Venice of the North”, and after a nice bus ride around town they took us on a boat tour through some of the channels that run inside the metropolis. We had Russian Champaign (which I affectionately started calling ‘Champanska’) as we enjoyed the view of the sunset. The golden sparkles of light bounced on the water, and the Soviet architecture displayed its shadows as the day died.

Back in the hotel I debated between going out and staying in my room. I didn’t have any sleep on the boat from Stockholm to Helsinki, and the bus from there to Saint Petersburg hadn’t been any better. The other students insisted in having dinner outside, but I just felt like resting. My life would be completely different today if I hadn’t decided to go out on the last minute.

I went down to the lobby with Roberto, one of my Mexican friends; we walked to the main door as we discussed our options for dinner. We were about to leave the hotel when I heard someone calling us.

-‘Hey! You’re speaking Spanish!’

I turned around and found her standing a few meters away from us. She had the nicest big blue eyes I had ever seen, long blonde hair, and a warm smile. Little did I know that I would go half around the world a year later, just to see her again.

Russia, 1978

“The first glass of vodka goes down like a post, the second like a falcon and the third like a little bird.” – Russian Saying

Photo by Gerardo Meléndez

He pointed at the largest of three glasses in front of him, indicating a waitress to fill it to the top with pure vodka. At once, the other women took away the two smaller glasses from each of the guests, and proceeded to pour the burning liquid into the remaining one, in an exact imitation of what the Commander had just ordered for himself.

The guests went silent, stood up, and fixed their attention on the man whose job was no less than leading the whole of the Soviet Union’s artillery. He was an extremely powerful individual, with a physique that revealed both his years of military training and his ethnic Georgian origins. There was no one in the region who could ever dare to question his authority; no one, except perhaps for the Colonel sitting next to him.

The General spoke in a confident tone. He directed his words to the fourteen people sharing the table with him, in particular to the three visitors from the Mexican Army who were being treated as his guests of honor. A Georgian interpreter translated every sentence from Russian to perfect Spanish as the speech developed, explaining that the Commander was flattered by their visit, and expected to build stronger ties between both military bodies.

Once he was finished, the Commander raised his glass and again pointed at it, but this time he slid his finger from top to bottom, in a slow and almost dramatic way. The interpreter told the Mexicans that this was the traditional way of ending a toast, and that all guests were expected to empty their glasses as it had been suggested by the General.

The Russians drank easily and gladly, and continued to eat and chat as usual through dinner. Some of the Mexicans, on the other hand, were neither used nor prepared for this kind of drinking, and began to feel somewhat lightheaded after complying with the protocol. It was going to be a long night.

My grandfather sat down after drinking his shot and gazed at the Colonel, who had been sent from the Kremlin with the mission of reporting everything he saw and heard during the Mexicans visit. He was a spy within his own people, reporting to the higher ranks in Moscow, and everyone, even the Commander, respected him to a degree that bordered fear.

A quintessential Russian soldier, the Colonel was tall and blonde, extremely serious, quiet, and not very friendly. When he showed the Mexicans the artillery facilities, he was especially proud of the artificial puddles installed in every dorm entrance, obliging the barefoot soldiers to step into the freezing cold water whenever they entered or left their room: ‘it builds their character’, was all that he added. He, of course, wasn’t very popular.

The Colonel caught my grandfather’s eye, just as he was wondering how to give the Georgians the information he intended to deliver without it being intercepted. They studied each other for a few seconds, oblivious to the events that were developing at the table. Their psychological war was only interrupted by a sudden silence that was too deep to be ignored.

One of the Mexican officers had stood up, glass in hand, inhibitions lost after some drinks. He started speaking about his impressions of the USSR and the interpreter quickly began translating. In spite of the large amount of alcohol he had ingested, his speech was actually good, and the Georgians quickly began smiling and applauding as he kept on praising their country. By the end of the intervention he took the only glass in front of him and pointed at it, imitating the Commander’s actions at the beginning of dinner. Everyone went crazy; they cheered as he slid his finger from top to bottom, and drank until their own glasses were empty.

Even the Colonel was caught in the euphoria, and didn’t notice when a single paper note was handed by my grandfather to the interpreter, and then from the interpreter to the Commander. The rest of the night went on as smoothly as a night with Mexicans, Russians, and vodka can go.

The book

'What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not.'

-St. Augustine, Confessions

Although the place where I stayed was situated relatively close to the Jules Joffrin métro, I refused to take the Paris subway unless it was imperative. Not only can one learn more from most countries by walking their streets than from visiting their museums or reading about their history, but it is much easier to find oneself involved in interesting situations if one develops the habit of walking through paths that lead to unknown places.

This last thought crossed my mind as I entered the antique bookstore, compelled by the thought of closely examining the main piece on display: a 1686 French translation of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, a book that I had become obsessed with after a philosophy course in my freshman year at University.

Photo by Gerardo Meléndez

The air in the room was dense, full of the scents of dust, wood, and books. Wherever I turned I could see yellowed pages with varied calligraphies, ancient volumes stacked in shelves that seemed to be about to explode, writings in every language imaginable. The orange sunset, glowing through the windows, gave the room a warm and calm appearance.

A bell attached to the door frame announced my entry. No one came right away, so I ventured deeper inside the store. Soon I stepped into a studio, where a completely absorbed old man studied a manuscript under special lighting and with the aid of a monocle. A black cat lay lazily at his feet, fixed its bright eyes on me for a second, and then decided to go back to its standard task of sleeping. The man hadn’t noticed my presence, until someone spoke behind me.

‘Bonjour monsieur’, said a soft female voice. I turned around to find an extremely beautiful woman in her early twenties. She had delicate features and a fragile constitution, blonde hair, gray eyes, and a look that made me think that, like me, she was old inside; this was matched by her seriousness and the formality with which she addressed me. ‘Puis-je vous aider?’ she added after my silence –‘Can I help you?’

I was, of course, speechless. I opened my mouth and tried to utter a more or less understandable sentence in French, but nothing came out. She looked at me inquisitively, ‘Monsieur?’ she repeated. I tried again, and fortunately this time I was able to mutter some words: ‘Augustin, Les Confessions’. Her expression transformed slowly, and a smile appeared on her face after a few seconds. I smiled back, hoping I had made myself clear. She looked at the old man, who limited himself to nodding before fixing his attention on the document again. ‘Suivez-moi’ she said -‘Follow me’.

She took me to a small room away from the old man’s studio, and asked me to wait. A minute later she was back with the piece, holding it close to her body as if it were a treasure of her belonging. She placed the volume in front of me and then gazed into my eyes, I felt as if she were searching for something inside my soul. Then she spoke in English, with a heavy French accent: ‘Do you think about it too? Do you wonder about time?’

I gazed back at her, and it was my turn to try to find something in her depths. Perhaps she had stayed up all night many times, angry, anxious, trying to find an answer for the question. Maybe she had considered the idea of every second existing for eternity: still drops of time not flowing, but staying, and our lives being the illusion of their movement. Possibly, she had explored the thought of every act repeating itself an infinite amount of times, which is the same as saying that it never happened. Or the notion that anything that could happen at any moment will eventually occur or has occurred, in the next time, the previous time, or the other times, if there are such things.

-‘Oui’ I said, trying to get over my perplexity, ‘it is all I can think about sometimes’.

She looked down and opened the book, carefully turning its pages until she reached the fourteenth chapter. ‘Voilà’, she said, almost in a whisper. And there it was, the question that would always haunt us:

Qu’est-ce donc que le temps?

Behind the veil

Photo by Gerardo Meléndez

Her penetrating green eyes were locked on mine for a couple of seconds, and then she looked down while rushing past me, getting lost within the busy crowd of the Médina’s market. Her body was covered from head to toes by a distinguishing white robe, her face sheltered by a veil, leaving only her eyes exposed; this wasn’t strange attire for a woman in the middle of an Islamic country, yet there was something about her that didn’t quite fit in. I’ll never know how I could possibly tell that by only looking at her eyes, but I kept thinking about it for the whole day as I explored the surroundings.

Armed with a map in Arabic and a bottle of water, I walked across the city trying to decipher its secrets. I visited Bahia Palace, where the sequences of arches and the details in every brick made me think of infinity. I then moved to Badii Palace, where gold and onyx were once traded for sugar, though today only ruins of columns and mud walls remain. I circled the perimeter of the fortified city, and found a garden with plants from every country of the world; there I rested under the shade of a fellow Mexican tree and then decided to go back to the riad where I was staying.

Morocco can get quite hot in the middle of July. Perhaps this explains why over a hundred orange juice stands have been able to proliferate one next to the other in the city square, offering exactly the same product for a modest amount of dirhams. Stand-owners call tourists in different languages (not unlike every other store owner in the city), trying to guess their nationalities and offering relief for the heat: ‘A glass of juice for 5 dirhams amigo!’ -Sometimes, once the glass is empty, the owner offers to refill it a bit and gives the tourist a wink, ‘just remember to come back to stand number 39’, he’ll say while pointing up to the only mark that differentiates his business from all the others. The wide eyed tourist will drink his juice in the middle of the show involving snake charmers, monkey traders, fakirs, and fortune tellers that is Marrakesh.

That day had been a particularly hot one. The shade of the Mexican tree had helped me recover, and a glass of orange juice from stand number 79 (my favorite) had kept me alive on the way to the riad, but once I arrived there, all I really wanted was a fresh shower and a change of clothes. I walked through reception and greeted Shazam, one of the employees, then ran up to the large room I shared with other young travelers, and reached for the bathroom’s doorknob, but as I did someone opened the door from inside.

She was about as tall as I was and around my age; her brown hair -still wet from the shower- was kept up, leaving her neck and shoulders visible. Her skin was fair and smooth, especially around her face, and her eyes were piercing green, framed by long dark eye-lashes. I hesitated for a second, fixing my attention around her eyes. She smiled almost imperceptibly, and then I noticed that she was only wearing a towel.

I turned around and closed my eyes, trying to apologize, not quite knowing what to say. She laughed as she walked to her bed, giving no importance to my babbling, and sat down in a relaxed position. I was clearly much more embarrassed than she was.

After a moment of silence, she finally spoke: ‘I saw you in the market today, do you remember me?’ -It was her after all…

-‘I think I do… but you were all covered’

-‘Yes, but I know you saw me walk by, and I noticed you too. You looked… different’. This remark took me by surprise, partly because very often locals thought I was also an Arab, asking me things in their language and getting surprised once I replied in English; why would I be any different? On the other hand, I had also found her unusual when I first saw her. ‘What is your name?’, she went on.

-‘My name is Gerardo; I’m from Mexico, how about you?’

-‘My name is Sophie, I’m from Belgium and I came to visit some relatives. Why are you here?’

The answer I gave to her question got us talking for a long time. I took my shower and when I came out Sophie was wearing jeans and a top. She had covered her hair with a light purple scarf, but her face was still visible. ‘I dress like this when I’m in Belgium, the scarf is optional’ she told me as we zipped through our glass of whiskey marocaine (sweet hot mint tea), watching the sun come down from the rooftop of the riad.

Photo by Gerardo Meléndez

We spoke as if we had known each other for a long time, talking about nothing really important, yet concealing no secrets. A few hours after dark we went back to the room and climbed into our respective beds without issuing a word. It had been an exhausting day, and I fell asleep even before my head touched the pillow.

I woke up early the next morning with the call for prayer and managed to see Sophie wearing her white robes and adjusting her veil as she left the room. Before stepping outside she turned and stared at me for a second, we both nodded, and knew that was a good enough good bye.

I took my backpack and walked down to the reception, where a small group of adventurers had already gathered, waiting for the van that would take us to Sahara.