They looked back and found that this adventure was a shortcut to happiness. At a time made of dust from shining stars, although its light comes from a time without time that illuminates memories: Nélida Piñon is seen at the age of four or five on the almost anonymous beach of Copacabana “collecting bugs to make rice”… Elena Poniatowska he feels on his face the wind that came through the car window when he was 10 and verified the immensity of a Mexico that left his native France "like a handkerchief" ... Colm Tóibín smiles when he listens to the beat of life that London discovered him when He left Ireland for the first time at the age of 19 ... Paco Roca relives the steps of Tintin when at the age of twenty he made the dream of going to Egypt come true ...
They and up to a total of 13 writers serve as guides to destinations around the world with their evocations as a way to travel in a period when many will not be able to do so due to the coronavirus pandemic. A journey through their voices through different places and times with small great trips that marked them personally and creatively. They tell us about what they saw, heard, thought, felt ... Tickets for a literary vacation.
Copacabana, dreams and inspiration
Nélida Piñon
“Before Copacabana had the charm and brilliance of today, I lived there. I was about four or five years old, between the 1930s and 1940s, when my parents moved there. It was a huge crescent-shaped sandbank. One would stand at one extreme end of the beach to see the other end and see that a sort of pearl necklace was formed. My father, who was a great swimmer, took me to the beach, where I was looking for bugs that came from the sea to make rice. It was a fantastic adventure. Sometimes I looked and looked at the sea ..., as I thought Europe started there, I would say to my mother: 'Let's go to Europe, let's go to Europe!' She replied: 'The time has not come to go to Europe. But we promise to take you, we have to wait. ' I insisted because I believed that the border with Europe was Copacabana.
So, it was not the dazzling and sinful place of today, but it already had extraordinary beauty. In those years, small officials and millionaires began to live there. Buildings began to emerge until they became what they are today. Then we left. My Galician grandfather said to my father: 'But Daniel, why didn't you buy land there!' He replied: 'You cannot guess the future'. But with its beauty and attractiveness, Copacabana inspired many things of mine, it developed my imagination ”.
Nélida Piñon (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1934) obtained the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2005 and is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His most recent book is his autobiographical mosaic La epica del corazón (Alfaguara). She is the daughter of Galician parents and grandparents migrated to Brazil.
The vastness of a corn field
Elena Poniatowska
“At the age of 10, in the middle of World War II, I left Paris with my sister and my parents. We arrived in Bilbao and embarked for Mexico. There I realized that it was such a large country that France was a handkerchief next to it. That new country was my mother's country. We lived in Mexico City, a short city with many houses and low buildings of burnt blood because the houses were red and the sun reduced their color. The first thing I remember is that from the city we were on a road. My mom drove, although they told her not to travel alone with her daughters. She did not listen. She was very daring; during the war she did it with ambulances in the middle of the night, even with the headlights turned off so that the Germans would not see her.
That day we were on the road to Acapulco when it was not famous. Now it is a horrible city, due to tourism and idiocy. On that trip I saw an immense country, an immense field of corn, something that I had never seen because, although in France I had crossed the lavender fields by bicycle to go to school, it was just a quilt of colored squares of crops. That day on the road that took us to the sea I had a feeling that I had never had before: I felt the vastness. A dark blue highway, without a soul and a skinny dog that did not understand how it got there. The smell of the sea anticipated the arrival. There was only one hotel, El Papagayo, that did not commit the rudeness of being in the sand on the beach, but had to cross the street to go to the sea ”.
Elena Poniatowska (Paris, 1932) received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 2013. She is a journalist and author of works such as La noche de Tlatelolco and La piel del cielo . His most recent novel is The Polish Lover (Seix Barral). She is the daughter of the Polish prince Jean E. Poniatowski and the Mexican María de los Dolores Amor Escandón.
Turquoise rivers in the desert
Guillermo Arriaga
"When I was around 12 or 13 years old, I went for the first time to a hunting place near Piedras Negras, in Coahuila, on the border with the United States. First we traveled by train from Mexico City to Santi; it was 12 hours. Then eight more hours by bus. It seemed very far away. We arrived at the San Martín ranch of my cousin Pepe Sánchez; it is called San Martín because they are called Sánchez Martínez. It is a 5,000-hectare ranch of which I was captivated. We returned a few times, until in 1981 my cousin Pepe rented it to some Americans and we could not go back there.
Years later, my friend Sergio Avilés, originally from the State of Coahuila, invited me to a town called Zaragoza and we started hunting in the area. It turns out that the place where he was going to hunt is only about two kilometers from the ranch where he was going to hunt in 1971. It was a thrill to return to that same area where he went every summer. There are some spectacular turquoise rivers. One cannot imagine those colored rivers in the middle of the desert. Sunsets are beastly. Perhaps the best people I have ever met in the world live there. Oak and walnut stains appear here and there. It is there where, perhaps, I have the best memories that have accompanied me from the age of 12 up to now with 62. It is 50 years of being linked to that land ”.
Guillermo Arriaga (Mexico City, 1958) is a writer, as well as a producer, screenwriter and film director. As screenwriter, Amores Perros , 21 grams, Babel and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada stand out . His most recent book is Salvar el fuego (Alfaguara Prize for a novel in 2020).
Cubanía two in one
David Rieff
“I have no vacation experience because I am, let's say, a professional traveler, not to say a professional foreigner. There are two places that evoke a mood in me, since they are linked to good memories: Havana and Miami, Cubanism. I grew up in New York in a world in which there were many exiles, first from the Batista regime and then from the Castro brothers. As a child he had a magical image of Cuba. Ten years later I had my little radical leftist era, now I hate politics. In the 1990s I was invited to visit the island. That's how I met her from the point of view of the exiles who returned and people who lived in Miami.
Havana is an extraordinary city not only with great monuments and places erected by the Spanish, it also has modernist houses of great architectural interest. Then there is Miami with all the Cubans who created a special space. Two magical places of revolution and exile that began to merge in my imagination. Now I cannot think of Havana without thinking of Cuban Miami. For quite a few years I didn't know which was which. Two cities incarnation of Cubanism with its accents and the power of its seduction. Cubanism as something binary ”.
David Rieff (Boston, United States, 1952) is a journalist, political analyst, and cultural critic; It has covered major conflicts in recent decades. His most recent book is Against Memory (Debate). He is the son of the writer and intellectual Susan Sontag.
Shadowless light nights in Reykjavik
Ida Vitale
“In a summer in the mid-1990s I did the only weird thing in my life: a trip to Iceland. When you have a dream it will not always be going to Iceland. It happened by chance and I went with my husband. The first thing I remember is the journey from the airport to Reykjavik, quite far away, which allowed me to see the countryside. A flat land populated by yuyiyos, those little plants that are born everywhere, and I saw clovers everywhere, a very green field. In winter the snow covers everything, nourishes the earth, and what it leaves is not bad.
On the way there were two large houses where we stopped. They had a kind of garden, plantations and animals. I, very curious, approached a house with many chickens; it is seen that I opened a door and the whole chicken house escaped. I had to dedicate myself to returning the birds to the corral; Then, I noticed that they were very obedient, I do not know if it is a peculiarity of the Icelandic chickens, but they attended to return to the corral without much fuss. I already knew that Iceland was a very civilized country.
The nights had a very starry sky, although less than that of Montevideo. What surprised me was the friendliness and education of the people. I was surprised by nature, space. And, of course, the midnight sun, its clarity. It is not that the sun is seen shining, it is a different clarity because the light comes from a hidden sun, from a sun that I remember seeing as it submerged in the sea while its light continued. It is a light without shadows ”.
Ida Vitale (Montevideo, 1923) won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 2018. She is a poet, narrator, translator and essayist. All his poetic work is in Poetry Gathered (Tusquets). Between 1973 and 1985 she lived in exile in Mexico because of the dictatorship of Uruguay. She lived in Austin (Texas, USA) between 1989 and 2016.
London, that window to the world
Colm Tóibín
“The British Government paid for my first departure from Dublin and visit to London. One day in February 1974, when I was 19 years old, I went to the university office that advises on your future after finishing my studies. The man in attendance told me that if I wanted to be a civil servant there was a system where you could go to London and be a British civil servant. And he added that he could get to know the city and the offices and the government system, all paid for by them. I was Irish and did not want to be a civil servant ... I had never left my country, nor Northern Ireland.
A few weeks later he was traveling on a boat from Dublin to Liverpool, then on a first-class train to London. I arrived at a three-star hotel. For a week I went every day to a department of the English Administration. At three in the afternoon he was free and they gave us money. I went to museums and especially bookstores, which were wonderful. She walked the streets without knowing anyone, something unthinkable in Dublin. You knew the bars, the night with its fun offer. I was struck by the city. Ireland was a white country, only Irish lived, but London ... London had Indian, Pakistani and different countries restaurants. I was 19 years old, I was quite innocent, and what interested me was buying books and going to museums ... No, more than books and museums, London was the atmosphere on the streets. Everyone was there. "
Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, Ireland, 1955) is a writer, essayist, literary critic, and has been acting professor at universities such as Princeton, Stanford, Texas, and New York. He is the author of books like The Master. Portrait of the adult novelist and Brooklyn . Her most recent novel is Nora Webster (Lumen).
In a Malaga town
Paul Preston
“My first memory of Spain is that of an August on Madrid's Gran Vía and the smells, the fact that there were still artisans working in front of their stores. Madrid amazed me. It was the year 1969, even closer to the Civil War than to the democracy that was to come. I traveled that summer after studying at Oxford and at the beginning of a master's degree at the University of Reading on the Spanish Civil War. The idea was to spend the summer and learn Spanish with friends and my girlfriend. My English friends had warned me against Spanish food and it turned out that I loved it! I liked those omelets from the first bite. That summer I got fat. There were things that horrified me, like seeing Civil War maimed in the streets and seeing signs of war.
That week in Madrid it was terribly hot, so we took a train and went to a town in Malaga. The trip was nightly and very slow. It was not until the morning that we discovered that southern landscape that has always caught my attention since its contrasts: dry areas painted by other greens, small forests or crops, such as olive groves, that go up and down the hollows, as well as the villages of white houses that shine under a blue sky. While my friends went for drinks and to the beach, I focused on learning Spanish. What I remember most is the kindness and understanding of people with someone who was babbling words. One day a neighbor from the town asked me what I was going to do the next day. 'Go to Granada', I replied. He looked at me in surprise and said, 'There's nothing there, just old things.' I was amused. ”
Paul Preston (Liverpool, United Kingdom, 1946). He is a historian and one of the greatest experts in the history of Spain in the 20th century. Its most recent title is A People Betrayed. Spain from 1874 to the present day. Corruption, political incompetence and social division (Debate).
Madrid-Prague, two cities united by a poem
Clara Janés
“The trip that tempts us the most is always the one that takes us to an unknown place. This was my first visit to Prague to meet the poet Vladimír Holan. The country was under Soviet rule, so Holan, a rebel, was locked up and did not want to see anyone. I had not written poetry for six years, but after reading A Night with Hamlet I returned to it with enthusiasm. So much so that I looked for Holan's translator, Josef Forbelsky, and sent him what I had written, Love. He sent it to him, and I received in response a dedicated book: 'To Clara Janés, with love'. I was in Barcelona and with the help of a Czech friend I wrote to him saying that I would very much like to meet him. She replied that she could go see her whenever she wanted and two days later I took a plane. It was June 13, 1975. In those years Prague was a mysterious, dark, and also very beautiful city with its beautifully landscaped houses. It didn't have the Walt Disney coloring of today. The day I went to see Holan I brought wine, roses and poems. He hid behind the roses, listened to the wine and only when he said goodbye took the poems in his hands. He trembled and his face changed color. He took my hands, kissed them, and asked me to come back. I studied Czech to be able to speak to him and after two years I returned, and so every year until he died. Turns out he had guessed me before he met me. His poem Una noche con Ofelia, written long before I had news of myself, tells of a woman from Barcelona who traveled to her land to meet a poet. I related the story in Ofelia's voice.
That first summer I spent a few days in Prague. I remember the Slavia café, a meeting place for writers and intellectuals, where, precisely, Holan translated Góngora. I was amazed by the old Jewish cemetery and the churches with their organs and music. Prague was a very seductive city. "
Clara Janés (Barcelona, 1940). She is a poet, translator and member of the Royal Spanish Academy. His most recent work is Kamasutra to sleep an expert (Siruela). She is the daughter of the publisher Josep Janés i Olivé.
Mount Athos' responses
Paolo Giordano
“On a medieval trip to Athos I went in search of myself. It is the strangest trip I have ever taken, to that mountain located on a Greek peninsula in the Mediterranean. It was like being in a fiction. A place of pure faith for a person with a very difficult relationship with religion like me, who has been everything in my life: a little atheist, a believer, someone who did not know whether to believe. A journey to understand things about me. They were four days, the maximum they authorize in this site forbidden for women and full of monasteries. I didn't have a map of the place. I was alone with my small suitcase. There, what you do is move from one monastery to another and ask for hospitality at night without any assurance that they will let you sleep or give you food. It was the first time that I left without security of anything and only with questions. I hardly spoke to any monks who received me in the monasteries. Four days of very intense solitude. The monasteries are impressive, ancient and wonderful, located in places that are often difficult to access, on mountains or on the sea, and each one is different from the other. It was like traveling to the Middle Ages. It was 2015 and I was 33 years old. ”
Paolo Giordano (Turin, Italy, 1982). With her debut in the novel, The Solitude of Prime Numbers , she won the Strega Prize and the Campiello Award for Best First Film in Italy in 2008. It was a global success. His most recent novel is Conquistar el cielo (Salamandra).
Riding the Nile
Paco Roca
“On my first trip I followed in the footsteps of Tintin. Since I was little I have always loved it, especially the comic The Pharaoh's Cigars, which must be the one I have read the most in childhood. I discovered adventure with this character, and with that album curiosity and interest in Egypt. When I started working as an advertising illustrator, with the first money I had that same summer in the mid-1990s, I went to visit that country. An incredible experience! I already knew romantic painters and writers who were talking about the place, and suddenly you were in the middle of the land of a lost and decaying civilization. I took the classic trip down the Nile. I saw myself almost as a 19th century explorer. I made a dream come true and that served me in many professional facets when it came to counting environments and transcribing in my drawings that feeling of lost glory.
I boarded Luxor, next to Karnak, one of the most spectacular places I have ever been to. It was a cheap boat. The money was not enough for great luxuries, but the experience was unique. I experienced the first sunset in a special way with that red of the desert sand while sailing. My mind was going to all those adventure novels, to those prints by David Roberts. The journey ended at Abu Simbel, the perfect closing with that temple and those Ramses sculptures. Happiness, many times, is being able to fulfill those childhood dreams. As a child, reading Tintin, I had imagined being there; They were the happiest days of my whole life. "
Paco Roca (Valencia, Spain, 1969) is a cartoonist and advertising illustrator. In 2008 he obtained the National Comic Award for Wrinkles . His works include The Cartoonist's Winter, The Furrows of Chance or The Treasure of the Black Swan, which Alejandro Amenábar is adapting to the series format. In autumn he will publish Return to Eden (Astiberri).
The everlasting globetrotter
Cees Nooteboom
“My nomadism started when I was 17 in the summer of 1950. I took the bicycle and told my mother that I was leaving: I went to Belgium. That was my first trip abroad and, in a way, I have never stopped. What is difficult for others is normal for me. The trip comes from curiosity, from seeing how others live. In Bolivia or Argentina I have met young people who travel by bus and take a year of their life to discover the world. Another thing is tourism. But these young people do it as I have. You have to let go. Arrive in a city, go to the bus terminal, take anyone and get carried away. So there will be adventures, ugly things, beautiful things, interesting people, boring people. You never know. Thus the world widens. And if you can learn the language before traveling, much better. So the world will be big and different.
I remember the two times I have gone to Japan on a pilgrimage through 33 temples of the 68 there are. It took me two months. It is almost six kilometers between one temple and another. More than traveling, it is the need to know what moves me ”.
Cees Nooteboom (The Hague, The Netherlands, 1933) received the 2020 Formentor Prize for Literature. Writer, essayist, translator and poet, his works include In the mountains of the Netherlands, Tombs, Berlin News, Red Rain and Nomadic Hotel . In autumn he will publish The Lion, the City and the Water (Siruela).
A trip to the stars
Gioconda Belli
"My journey was cosmic. I love celestial phenomena. I am registered on a NASA site that announces different phenomena. In 2001 they announced a spectacular shower of stars, the Leonids, in the middle of November, the tail of a comet called Tempel-Tuttle that in its turn towards the Sun would become incandescent. They said that there would be no such phenomenon in 100 years and that it would leave 1,000 to 3,000 shooting stars per hour. I lived in Los Angeles and the light of the city is contraindicated to observe the phenomenon. I spoke to a friend who lived two hours. At five in the afternoon he called me and told me that the sky was cloudy. I could not believe it. I thought there must be a place in California where the sky was clear. I ran to the computer and saw that Palm Beach was that place. We traveled with my husband for two or three hours. He checked the map and saw that near there were the mountains of San Jacinto. After advancing through the depths of the night and with the lights of civilization that were barely visible, we found a camping area. It was midnight when we parked, got out, and lay leaning against the door of the car, having never seen a sky with so many stars. They lit up a moonless night that allowed us to see our shadows. Lights of all kinds falling, leaving trails of color, from red to yellow like phosphorescent traces as drawn by a mischievous child from the constellation Leo. A feast of lighted streamers, a cosmic miracle. It will not be 100 years to see them again, but 33 when, in 2034, there is another similar star shower. Those who can do not miss it, go to a mountain or far from the city and they will make a memorable trip to the stars ”.
Gioconda Belli (Managua, 1948). She is a member of the Nicaraguan Academy of Language. She is a poet and narrator, and was an activist for the Sandinista National Liberation Front. His most recent novel is The Fevers of Memory (Seix Barral).
Africa of yesterday, Africa of today
Dacia maraini
Traveling to Africa was like traveling through time. Hold on to some of the last remnants of ancient history that still exist in the world. There I could see with my eyes the last wild animals that we have slaughtered and that are disappearing. It meant perceiving the smell of a wind that knows no asphalt or gasoline. It meant knowing cruel and candid people who continued to live on his arms and on his land.
We know what the Europeans have done in the name of civilization: they looted the raw materials without giving anything in return; they appropriated the most robust arms, made them slaves and exported them to distant lands; wild animals were slaughtered. All in the name of civilization and a new monotheistic religion.
For me, visiting Africa, especially in the company of people as dear as Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini, was a way of knowing and understanding the history, customs, and thoughts of those who behind them do not have tales of victors, but long tragedies of servitude.
Today Africa has other enemies that do not come from the outside, but from the inside: intransigent and violent religious extremists who, in the name of a god with a severe and vengeful face, subdue, humiliate and murder everyone who does not think like them, and before anyone else to their own brothers and compatriots.
I remember robust women, great walkers, free although considered as donkeys, who managed and directed all the small African markets. Returning now to the countries of the interior, I have found these markets in the hands of foreigners and women covered in black from head to toe, without detaching themselves from the walls. This is the evil of Africa these days, caught as it is in a terrible civil war between those who take seriously the words written in the fifth century and those who want to historicize, understand, study, emancipate themselves in the name of new freedoms and new knowledge. At stake is the future of a colossal continent from which we all come and from which we are children, but whose survival is at risk today due to hunger and hatred.
Dacia Maraini (Fiesole, Italy, 1936) is a poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. His latest book in Spain is Isolina. The dismembered woman and in September will publish Trio. Two friends, a man and the Messina plague (Altamarea Ediciones).
Translation by Giuseppe Grosso
