We will never get to Ceylon

Ceylon.

6 ° 54′0 ″ N, 79 ° 54′59 ″

I remember that island, Ceylon, which is now only the name of a tea. Ceylon, which looked like an appendage under the shadow of that other country that fell in the shape of a triangle over the Indian Ocean. I saw it for the first time on a yellowish map. On it, there were still the marks of crosses made in pencil, crosses that indicated places that faded with time. I do not know if the places, but the names that designated them. It was the map that he always hung on the wall of a tiny room without light, of a storage room, where my grandfather kept, throughout his life, what he called “junk”. It was a map of the world, but of another world. Because our names, these of now, to which we cling to name and point, are different.But I learned geography by letting myself be carried away by the evocation of the names of those mythical lands and one day I began to dream of going there, to that island. Not to Sri Lanka, but to Ceylon.

The true journey contains in its promise something of impossibility because one never finishes arriving at the places, nor leaving, because nobody ever told what it means to arrive or leave. Everything important in life contains that kind of chiaroscuro, so how to find out what happens to names that are lame, outdated. Perhaps all of them live in that garbage dump that Cortázar spoke of, a garbage dump where explanations are piled up. Perhaps the names without an owner, expired, without a place on the map, have suffered a similar fate and are there, asleep, waiting for someone to name them again, to illuminate them.

Maps are representation and desire, and in addition to hanging on the walls of rooms without light, they also begin here, where I am now, on the floor of a hospital in an empty Barcelona. At the entrance they told us "follow the green line" that, on the ground, goes through winding corridors, this green line on the granite floor that leads us to box 19 where a sign announces: "aspiration punctures". I wait outside, in a plastic chair, and I take out my book but at the same time I follow the green line with my eyes, as if it could take me to another place, and I dream of escaping. Because one would want to escape from certain signs and landscapes. But it is true that the journey does not always start on a plane, on a train. Actually, it begins, and we all know that, when we think about traveling. In the desire to travel.

Ceylon is not Sri Lanka. One might wonder if someone who has traveled to Sri Lanka has been to Ceylon, I lean towards no. It was Ceylon during the Portuguese and British occupations, and in 1972, after 24 years of independence, it changed its name to Sri Lanka. Lanka was the ancient name of the Asian island. One summer I got there, the summer when I turned thirty. I remember the coast, the train that took us through the tea plantations, a monkey that attacked us, that Ayurvedic oil that lasted three days in my hair. I wanted to go to Ceylon, but I found another island, I think I was guided by that map of my childhood in the room without light. I found, in fact, in the fort of Galle, an old fortification on the south-west coast of the country, a supposedly vintage postcard that read

and in it, in the foreground, some dancers in traditional costumes appeared.

I had finally arrived in Ceylon, I said to myself triumphantly, so I bought a custom poster reproduction to hang at home.

However, back at the hotel, I decided that I was never going to do it.

The

are the opposite of the trip.

Annihilating the vestiges of the past has a price and, of course, there is also a price to try to resurrect it with a two-dollar sheet.

there are maps that are breathers thanks to which names that have ceased to exist survive

On preserving the past, on the relationship between language and things,

speaks

a set of stories by the writer Kanishk Tharoor that was never published in Spain. In the story that bears the same title as the book, a team of ethnographers locates an old woman in a remote town, who turns out to be the last speaker of a language on the brink of extinction. While recording her speech, hoping to capture enough to reconstitute and preserve it for posterity, she begins to sing a song in which she talks about a woman who instead of getting married wishes to become a "swimmer among the stars", that is , in an astronaut, who dances among the "invisible lightning moths", the satellites. Ethnographers point out, amazed at the beauty of a language that dies, that no longer serves and only evokes. And just as there are languages ​​that are clinically dead,that are kept alive thanks to a respirator, there are also maps that act as such, that are respirators thanks to the surviving names that have ceased to exist and that are useful because they serve for this so necessary: ​​close your eyes and go away from the corridors of a hospital.

And so, traveling is also, now, closing the book and following back this green line on the granite that takes us out to the world after aspiration punctures. Heat wave in Barcelona, ​​and we both walk through this sleepy city and walking towards Roger de Llúria street and I know that she, a worthy daughter of her father, that is, my grandfather, forever owner of a yellowish map, continues to think in names that no longer mean anything. The street map of the city changed years ago but there are people, like us, who continue to go to Lauria Street, which was its previous name and that almost no one remembers anymore. Resisting using new names is an attitude, a way like another to stop time, to say: let the world keep turning that I get off here to always wish to go to Ceylon, not to Sri Lanka.

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