This is an excerpt from a longer travel essay entitled "The Other Side of the Journey" that recounts an unpleasant experience in Montevideo where I had travelled to a presentation at a conference.
From the cast-iron chains of memory, I resurrect link by link the city that provided the backdrop and witnessed with impartiality the saga of my undoing which unfolded so unexpectedly on a sullen afternoon, a city which has precipitated such disastrous consequences that I initially mistook as a sign of crossed stars in my destiny that may never give up their sordid embrace. The taxi driver drove at breakneck speed through the outskirts of the sprawling metropolis in the attenuating darkness of pre-dawn until we reached the denser, more nondescript inner city, uninhabited at this hour by the lonely and unawakened, full of closed doorways, abandoned cars and street lights that shone dully in the gloom. In the lingering darkness, nothing yet spoke of the coming brightness of the new day. The city streets gave the appearance of an abandoned town, dark and shuttered, lights dimmed along the narrow cluttered streets as a confirmation of eerie premonitions at my arrival.
Around every corner, I expected to be dropped off at a darkened street corner to a three star hotel whose door was locked and whose shutters were drawn into the gloom of early morning when the unawakened linger a while in their own nightmares and dreams. The air coming through the open car window actually tastes of dead leaves and recent rain. The night, stripped of any kind of intimacy that you might find at the height of the evening, is gritty with restlessness and anxiety. The unlighted streets cast an ungodly glow in the light of a near full moon passing its zenith and reaching for the horizon as though it has had enough of the night; I know I certainly have.
As I sat in the back of the taxi roaming through the jumbled streets of the inner city in the inky darkness, I felt like an itinerant traveler that has awakened upon some dream landscape in a twilight city of ghosts. There is a spirit to the night that is characterized by the hour, when the soul has its strongest connection to passageways that give access to a sense of eternity. The religious traditions are well aware of the spirit of the night and its ghostly presence. Christian tradition divides night and day into a 24-hour cycle of daily worship, punctuated every three hours with formal prayer. Nocturnes, or the Midnight Office, commemorate Christ’s late night prayer of supplication in the Garden of Gethsemane. Matins, the last of the four night offices, signals the passing of night, seeping through a terrestrial crack into the realm of eternity until the new day is born out of the death of the night. According to Quranic traditions, the repetition of “the best of names” and the recitation of the Holy Quran during the latest hours of the night just prior to dawn are witnessed by the angelic envoys of Allah.
In the pre-dawn darkness, it is the hour when there is a night beyond the night, a presence beyond presence that speaks of ancient mystery and the sanctity of the night; when the city appears to be a lifeless copy of another state of existence, gloomy, wild, and vague, as though sculpted in the shades and shadows of dark marble. The dying hour of the night is when darkness is at its greatest intensity, as patch-dark as coal and as ominous as the tolling of bells, the hour when sudden illumination pierces through the fabric of darkness like a flaming sword. It is the moment of pre-awakening, when the world holds its breath and life begins to stir once again from the depths of night in its perennial cycle of death and renewal.
* * *
I am exhausted as the taxi rounds a bend and stops in front of a halo of light surrounding the door of the small boutique hotel that seemed to beckon the weary traveler in out of the dark, wondering how the isolated building could contain so much color and light in such a dismal setting as the cold stone of the night and the sullen silence of the cab driver. Inside and in stark contrast to the outer city I have just been driven through, understated elegance characterizes the ambiance of this place where I will be staying for the next couple of days, as though a fairy godmother has just struck a magic wand on my behalf. The truth is, unlike many a weary traveler who is tired of being away from home, I love hotels, no matter their size, shape or general ambiance. Give me a hotel room in a strange city and I can make myself at home. I like the sense of unassuming privilege that a reasonable hotel provides, whether it be three, four, or the proverbial five star hotel. Nowadays, a classy 3-star boutique may offer fine attention to detail and personable attention from the hotel staff, in addition to stylish decoration and amenable services. I half expected to be told to wait until a room becomes available and that the hotel has no obligation to provide a room before the announced check-in time, a truism most hotels vigilantly post in their public relations brochures. The small, bespectacled receptionist with a generous smile, his bright eyes distinguishing the sleepy hour of day with their focused light, assured me that the room was ready, in impeccable English no less with his endearing, lisping Spanish accent, a nice way of expelling my fears of abandonment to a lengthy wait in the lobby for another guest to leave. With my plastic room key and one suitcase, I then took the elevator alone up to the room like a night phantom seeking further darkness.
Exhausted, I neglected to unpack even and quickly tucked my aging bones under the crisp sheets and soft blankets that the air-conditioned room provided, drifting off immediately to a dreamless, jet-lagged sleep in the vast and welcoming anonymity of the hotel room, without a care for the world beyond its comforting walls. Not wishing to sleep all day and thus impede a good night’s sleep that evening, I set the alarm for a reasonable hour just after mid-day allowing time for lunch and an afternoon stroll to get the lay of the land, as is my usual habit upon arrival in a new city. I was scheduled to give a presentation at an educational management conference the next morning at 9:00 and wanted to locate the venue so that I wouldn’t have to search for it at the last minute without sufficient knowledge to get there on time. In fact, I soon discovered that it was little more than two blocks away from the hotel on the same street. I walked down there after lunch. The convention center, housed in a place with a charming Spanish title, Alliance Culturalle de los Estados Unidos, was closed, and I soon drifted down a small incline on the way to the Ramblas along the sparkling Montevideo Bay and into a small mini-mart to stock up on water and selected treats for a late night snack before bed. Along the way, I noticed several other three star boutique hotels, with their well-appointed invitation to enter; although there were very few people along the tree-lined street to notice. This is the side of the journey like all others, pleasant, enticing, and venturesome, that shows its shy face to the casual visitor piece by piece, with its implicit promise to lead the innocent tourist into the unknown with nothing untoward or unusual, and with no reason for apprehension or alarm.
There is another side to the journey, however, that lingers in the background like a thief in the night, ready to steal one’s sense of tranquility and peace of mind without a thought to disturbing consequences. The other side of the journey is the one that should never have happened, the one that should have remained tucked away in the enchanted realm of possibility, never to show its ugly face or disturb our serenity or the passing of days. It begins in good faith and unfolds with all the timelessness and lack of reality that one experiences in a fretful dream. You are there riding the tiger’s tail, but you cannot get off. In a reversal of true reality that dreams foster upon us against our will, the tiger has got you by the tail; you cannot escape its wicked embrace.
I was plodding back up the hill to my hotel still half asleep, my mind lost in a subconscious world of random thoughts, when my personal space was suddenly violated from behind with a laying of hands on my waist and a jolting shove forward. I heard nothing, neither the rustling of clothing nor the fleeting whisper of approaching footsteps. A truant hand dug itself into the right side pocket of my pants drawing its contents out with a violent wrenching, followed by another shove that sent me to my knees, on all fours like a dog. Stunned by what had happened, I got up and looked around to see two teenage thugs (skin heads with t-shirts and jeans falling off their scrawny behinds), already some distance away, running down the hill. There were not many people around the shaded, tree-lined street. I noticed an elderly parking attendant standing not five steps away who shrugged his shoulders and looked away, not wanting to get involved. I noted with relief that my money (such that it was, about $40 in local currency) and credit cards in a small wallet were still tucked into my left pocket. Now what was in my other pocket; what was it in that pocket that they must have taken? At first, I couldn't remember, my mind was a blank, but then it dawned on me. They had grabbed my passport. It was gone, along with my identity, my nationality, my legitimacy, my ability to travel or return home. Technically speaking, I was a dead man.
When it comes to trouble, we really have no one in attendance to serve our emotional needs. That’s when we realize just how alone we really are and are left with the stuff from which we are made. Where is the mercy amid the indignity of theft and violence? Once you have been attacked, the world in its rightful place has been taken from you. Even the sense of home has been breached as a concept that can be found deep within oneself. It is for this reason that the stricken deer goes apart from the herd and the aging lion grimly withdraws himself into his den. Melancholy songbirds pretending to be nightingales fill the morning hours with their birdsong, but quietly disappear when it comes time to die. Except in love or through attachments in friendship or intimacy with children who give freely of their love, we really have no true tenderness available to us from outside, especially when we need it. I looked down the narrow, tree-lined street in a strange city in a foreign country and saw nothing to pull me back from the slippery edge of oblivion.
My life, my identity, my purpose, all once an integral part of my waking cosmos, has suddenly disappeared, rushing away into the distance with the locomotion of young feet. It feels like stars falling into darkness that leaves no more room for light. I am suddenly disconnected from all that I am known to be. I feel nailed to the ground, like Sisera the great Biblical commander of the Canaanite army, who was killed by a tent-peg lodged in his brain, the theft and its consequences like a fixed idea of the mind nailed in place to do permanent damage. My heart felt like cold stone and an airy wind swept through my mind stirring the memory of dead leaves in its wake. At first, I simply stood there, as though frozen to the spot, thinking what could I do to retrieve the passport; but I soon realized there was really nothing to do, at least in terms of running after the assailant, my winged feet had turned to cloven hooves, moving soundlessly on the dusty pavement with all the tentativeness of a stricken deer. You could have threaded my state of mind, frail and finely tuned, through the eye of a needle.
I look down the road in a state of shock, already my identity has gone up in a puff of smoke, and I am still not fully aware of what has happened until it dawns on me that my life is running away inside the gripping (and filthy) hands of a punk teenager on a joy-ride, looking for a free hand-out, a quick fix to his misery, gaining nothing by affecting the destruction of my personal world, the only world I know with any familiarity, the world I wear like a comfortable pair of shoes that take me where I need to go and remain faithful in the bargain. I look around me one final time in search of sympathy, appearing to listen as though someone has called my name in recognition of my plight, but then searching with my eyes for something to settle on that will tell me not to worry, all my senses alert to the mercy of an outstretched hand. I see nothing but trees blowing in the wind, leaves falling in memory of autumn, a dumpster at the end of the street being ravaged by a street person. The traffic moves leisurely up and down the hill with an indifference that was astounding. I FEEL small, angry, and alone, as though fallen into a discomforting isolation from all that is familiar, taking comfort from the fact that my physical body was still in one piece, unharmed. A tourist leaves the protective confines of another 3-star hotel with a glowing, neon sign illuminating her pleasant face as she descends the stairs to the street without glancing my way. She’s off in her own world, having nothing to do with mine, except that I notice here with longing and regret.
There was nothing to be done but turn around and walk back into my life once again after this sudden hiatus, by returning to the hotel, to set in motion the steps and procedures that would get me back on tract and make me a real person again. Back in the hotel, I am not the same person who left the lobby only 30 minutes before. I have become a man with no name. No one knows or cares what I should do, what will happen, where I will end up. My life of legitimacy is suddenly over with the brush of a hand, a sudden rush of wind around the trunk of my person, an invasion by an unknown attacker in which I am thrown to the ground after alien hands have invaded my pocket.
An intriguing central mystery lies at the heart of why such things happen. Two hoods rob an old man of his identity in the form of the passport, creating inner turmoil and deep insecurity, initiating a process of procedural bureaucracy that creates havoc to one’s routine and goes on for weeks in a labyrinth of bureaucratic contradictions that encircle a central vortex of hopelessness with seemingly no solution. I tried to settle myself down until my mind took on the calmness of an injured bird, as if some instinct told me that there was no point in struggling. Is all of this the result of a whimsical impulse of a jaded youth in search of an easy fix, to grab, rip, tear, and run, only to find that he was in possession of a worthless document. I did roam around the area for a while a little later with a fading hope that the perpetrator may have tossed the useless document into the gutter. I even suspiciously eyed a homeless person exploiting the treasures of the dumpster and tucking them into a grocery cart; but there was no passport to be found amid the scattered leaves to haul me out of the well of despair and I returned to the hotel empty-handed.
It is a terrible thing when something like this happens to a person. I am so glad you were not hurt badly. In this day and age it seems that violence rules and people are killed or injured over a few dollars. Excellent write
Another finely written story with vivid details about a terrible plight. In essence, it created a separate journey for you to gain back your identity in the form of a passport. No matter where we find ourselves, we need to prove who we are with paper or plastic.
An account of adventures in Scandinavia that involved flying dragons, Russian and German submarines, old WW2 era battlefields, Finnish foxes (female kind), Finnish-Mexican cuisine and much more. Written for the most part with a light touch, it ends o
Personal journals are full of potential, waiting for you to add the color! Pages for you to fill in the blanks with tidbits and trivia about New Hampshire
