I met with several through the years in the most diverse circumstances. João Au-Au, for instance, is a type who belongs in my childhood and adolescence. He was a tall and thin fellow who lived in a corner in the neighborhood where I was born. He had a pushcart, of the type used in construction sites, and a retinue of street dogs who followed him everywhere. Some of them tied to the pushcart, others loose. It was a strange sight to see him walking the streets with that band of dogs around him. Another time, when I was eighteen, on the night before I went to the US for the first time, I went out for a walk. At a street corner, a beggar started talking to me and I told him I was going to travel and where. He began speaking in English, very good, by the way, and that was not all, he spoke in French and in Italian too. Strange advice in several different languages, everything at the same time.
At the end of an afternoon, in the park by the Charles River in Boston, many years later, ducks in the water, sail boats leisurely in the distance, people jogging and squirrels hiding behind the trees, a man stopped in front of me, pointed to the ducks and said solemnly: America is dead. They don’t know it yet, but America is dead. And went his way. Maybe it really is.
Saffron Gagné, a woman escaping her own life and waving at me from the other side of a street in Chicago. We had traveled together for two months on the roads between Denver and that street, and until today I don’t know exactly who she was.
A tribe of nomads. Solvitur ambulando. Things are solved by walking. Or, as Rimbaud said in a letter from Africa: what am I doing here?
