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8-6-2012
THE RESURRECTION SONG
When there is no answer for a question the
best thing is to shut the mouth. Horst thought I was fooling around with his
logic.
“Man, how can I tell you? This is a Muslim
country. There is no pub here where you can pop in and get drunk for fun. You wanna get killed? You want me to pick you up from the
gutter? Come on, forget it. We are few hours away from Eilat.
There you can drink the full red Sea if that calm your thirst”.
“Shut up, Raul. I’m thirsty, It’s my fault
that you don’t drink? Relax. You don’t like moros, do you?”, said Horst
looking at me with that sarcastic look of a German 20 years old running away
from military duties. He had in mind to reach Australia, buy a boat and
navigate the seas. To me that he had done some tricky number in the Bank where
he had been working for the last couple of years.
“Listen slowly to me; those guys, when
they see us, they see two sacks of dollars on two legs. They will put a gun in
your mouth, and you will buy back your life with everything you have. It’s
life, man. Let’s drive and forget about drinking”.
Right there, music, lots of noise. A
wedding. Horst didn’t bother to think about, he stopped to watch the party.
People looked at us as they were being visited by aliens. Horst had blond crazy
hair, kind of Dylan type; I had Mediterranean long brown hair, real hippy kind.
I was 19 years old. The people in the frontyard were
dancing and smiling. Our irruption did not scandalized them, but make them very
curious. They made us signs meaning to pop in and share their joy. Horst went
straight to talk with the guys. Few minutes later he came back with two men. He
was going with them to fetch a bottle of Jack Daniel.
“Have you lost your mind?”, I had to say
it. To no purpose.
“Wait for me in the car. I’ll be back
soon”.
We just came from Cairo. We spent a whole
week sleeping by the Pyramids, at the feet of the Sphinx. That was something to
live. Our meeting with the Sphinx was a kind of revelation. We had seen the
Sphinx in the pictures; she look big in the picture, but not that much. Well,
let me tell you, it is a simple question of perspective. The Sphinx is so big
that to put the entire Complex in the picture the eye got to retire and shoot
the photo from a very far distance. Ergo, the Complex look not big. See for example
the famous New York Liberty’s Statue; it’s so small that you can magnify its
look playing with the perspective. Most people imagine the Liberty Statue as a
colossal production of the same French people who built the Eiffel Tower.
Wrong. Once you come from New Jersey City with the Ferry and you get closer and
closer to the Statue of the Liberty more and more, you laugh. She is so small
that you could make love to her. Yeah man. The case of the Sphinx is all the
contrary. She is so big that when you see her the first time you understand why
there has been always people to say that she is the creation of people from
another world. You run to her like a lunatic falling in love at first sight
with a goddess waiting for you from the dawn of times; and the closer you get
to her the smaller you feel, smaller and smaller, until you simply disappear at
her feet.
It was November. The Egyptian Autumn was
magnificent. It was the year 75. There was no need to get a room. We were
strong and wild. Not for a five stars room would had we slept away from the
Sphinx. The starry sky from the heights of the Pyramids was something to
experience. The Nile at one side, the desert all around, Cairo in front of us.
In the daytime horses and camels filled the Complex, lot of students from all
over Egypt came to visit the Pyramids; we had even the time to receive kisses
of impossible romance from beauties of the Nefertiti’s kind, their eyes shining
with the fascination of the divine Sphinx. No wonder that Horst was feeling
paradisiac when we arrived to Port Said. I was Ok. There were plenty things to
see still.
I made my way to the car, a Renault 4L,
trying to erase from my mind the risk Horst was taking. Why do people drink?
Can a bottle of whisky add anything to the magic of life? We were in Port Said
on our way to Jerusalem through the Sinai Peninsula. There was no road map to
guide us from Port Said to Eilat. Just a dusty road.
What was he doing? One hour, two hours,
three hours. I began to worry.
Four hours and still no news. The worst
things crossed my mind. They had showed him a gun, he had played the hero and
got shot. Still so I tried to cheer me up.
When the people drink they get funny; they
forget time, children and wife, why not a friend? Probably he was drinking with
the guys and dancing in the wedding party.
“Slow down, man” said to myself.
At the early fifth hour I heard a voice
roaring and cursing. He was Horst. By its guttural curses I could say he saw
the gun and had to buy his life.
He carried the empty JD bottle through the
streets. It was the time right to tell “I told you”, but it was not the right
time. I said nothing. It was his play. From my experience with the few friends
I had and I saw drinking their souls to hell I knew the best thing to do when
they reach the bottom it is to let them alone.
But Horst had his stomach filled with
anger; the struggle between the alcohol and his fury kept him on his feet.
“Drive” he said suddenly.
“You are drunk but you are not crazy,
Horst. I have never driven a car. You come alive from a certain death and you
want me to kill us both? Wait until you feel better”.
My fellow students used to call me the Metaphysician.
I loved to get an argument and twisted it in the face of my professor of Philosophy.
I was good to turn into white the black. Even so, my dialectics had no power on
my friends when they were drank.
I knew Horst had reached that point when
alcohol turns people out of their mind. Ina normal situation room Horst had
crash right there, on the ground. Anger kept him up. He got in the car, sat
heavily, and said it again and again : “Drive”.
“All right, all right. Tell me what to do
to make it run, I will do my best”.
“Follow the road” he said.
If there was any, good. The night was
dark. No Moon. The road disappeared and became a kind of Russian mountain. It
was so crazy and scary that it came my turn to be angry.
The more I got angry fighting against the
ups and downs of the dusty county road, if that was a county road at all, the
less Horst could stop laughing. He had never seen a guy driving so bad. Neither
I for that matter!
I got enough, I stop the car and walk me
out. “Your turn”.
Believe it or not, he forgot the gun in
his mouth and came back from the grave. However, we were feeling like those
Hebrews going in circles for forty years.
“We better sleep and wait for the dawn”, I
suggested.
That was out of Horst’s mood. He wanted to
get out of Egypt, now! He got the wheel, but to no purpose, we kept driving in
circles. In one of those, four men armed with machine guns came out of the
dunes and jumped in the middle of the road. Was it a road that? They blinded is
with their lights, and ordered us to stop.
The paranoia got hold on Horst. He thought
them friends of the bastards who showed him the gun, and they had been
following us to finish the job. Two bullets, plenty dessert to bury the
corpses. “Saiza, saiza, saiza”. He began to curse in German, a quite
nasty sound getting on my nerves.
“Stop the cursing, man. They are soldiers.
We have enter in a War Zone. Nothing is gonna happen
to us”.
Horst kept babbling incoherent curses. The
soldiers thought funny his desperation and me trying to calm him down. They
registered the car, found two guitars, two road sacks, two sleeping backs, and
laughed. They saw the whole affair. Two crazy young tourists lost in the Sinai
desert. Two soldiers sat in the backseats and, with their machine guns in
Horst's neck, told us to drive. They spoke no English, every time the car had
to turn here and there they pointed the direction in Horst’s neck with the gun
machine. I saw Horst getting crazier and crazier, sinking deeper and deeper
into his paranoia. As I could see the soldiers laughing at the reaction of
Horst it needed not an Einstein to understand the whole thing. As a matter of
fact there was no answer, because there was no question. Morning came and went;
we were still alive and kicking. They led us out of the Sinai Labyrinth, on the
Egyptian side of the Suez Canal, they got out of the car and waved us bye-bye.
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