So, dear readers ... Where were we?
Ah yes: that I was born on January
16th, 1981 and 26 years later, on Thursday September 13th, 2007, a
guy on a motorcycle, who didn't want to follow a stop sign around 1
p.m., at the intersection between Uruca street and Pavas main avenue,
located in the west part of the city of San Jose (or, as we would
give the address in Costa Rica, “at the corner located 100 meters
east from the Pollo Cervecero Bar and Grill) changed my life. I never
got the chance to know him. I don't even know his name. Moreover, I
was not even there when all this happened: at that moment I was
sitting in my office, just on the other side of the capital, working
and trying to digest a lasagna that I had eaten for lunch .
This was an example of what is known as
a butterfly effect. And sometimes it happens that it's not even you
the one who puts its wings to move.
Anyway, since then I have had 13 jobs,
including jobs as random as answering phones in call centers, drive a
truck, do gardening in a nudist camp, ask for money on the street,
take care of 60 orphaned children in a boarding school, demolish
houses, clean hostels and as a journalist, of course, which in theory
is my profession. I have also lived in six houses, hostels or
apartments in four different countries on three continents, and have
traveled to 37 countries. As you can see, then,back on that day, what
that guy hit with his motorcycle was my stability. Since then, my
life is a mess.
A couple of years later, on a rainy
afternoon in the city of San Jose, watching some Man Ray's movies and
smoking a hookah with a friend in his apartment's living room, I
found a book about Dada. This artistic movement, originated in the
early twentieth century in Switzerland, proposed the random, the
unstructured and the casual as an art form. For example, a poem could
be cut out words from newspapers, put them in a bag, and then shake
them out like crazy only to paste them afterwards in a random order.
The movement's name, of course, also had to be random. Its founders,
who used to meet at the legendary Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, opened
a French dictionary and the first word that jumped off the pages gave
name to the movement: Dada. A horse that swings for playful and
childish fun. A rocking horse.
At that moment, I had an epiphany: my
life was precisely that. A plastic bag full with unexpected events.
No fixed targets, no long periods terms, no stability. A collage of
unrelated facts together. And while all this happens, I am riding on
a rocking horse, without getting anywhere really, just for fun, just
for enjoy the time.
Tristan Tzara's grave, founder of Dadaism. Paris.
With this in mind, in 2011 I launched
my first blog, On the rocking horse (Sobre el caballito de
madera, sorry, available only in
Spanish) with the goal of keeping my friends updated about my
adventures in Europe. At the end, since I was unable to keep a travel
diary, the blog morphed through a lot of thoughts, photos, stories,
opinion articles and it fluctuated according to my mood and how tired
I was to write. Well, with the mess that my life is, I could not
expect anything else.
Nearly a year later, when I returned to
Costa Rica, I sat with all the notes I had in my laptop and I wrote a
novel, which I sent to a travel literature award in Valencia, Spain.
One afternoon, while I was at work and
I was about to go happily to the bathroom after eating a cassava pie,
just as I was walking away from my desk, toothbrush in hand, my cell
phone rang and I received the news that On the rocking horse,
the novel, was awarded with the International Award for Travel
Literature of the City of Benicassim 2012. After I dropped the
toothbrush and I fell down to the floor afterwards, and after the
whole building heard me screaming of joy, and after huging anyone who
dared to come into my office, and after jumping across the halls, I
realized I could be a writer.
The award allowed me to take my mom to
Europe, one of my biggest dreams, and according to me, as well it
would allow me to begin my journey to Asia, in order to write the
story's second part: On the bamboo horse (thanks Shirley
Malespín, for suggesting the name).
However, two things happened that I did
not consider. The first is that one thing is traveling alone and
another one traveling with a mother. Given the circumstances, I had
to raise my quality standards for backpacking, such as eating three
times per day something more than bread from the supermarket;
sleeping in hotel rooms and not doing couchsurfing, camping, or
simply crashing at a train station; taking planes, trains or buses
fully prepaid and without sneaking into the wagons without a ticket,
or hitchhiking depending only on my thumb to reach my destination. In
other words, I spent a lot of money, but I will NEVER regret it: it
is priceless to see your mother admired with the Eiffel Tower, to see
her crying of happiness at Saint Peter's Square, or to sit with her and
smoke a join at a coffee shop in Amsterdam.
With my mom in Paris. At least one dream deserves to come true.
The second thing that went wrong was
that I got a job in Portugal, in a hostel, which at the end it didn't
turn out to be what I expected. You know, the famous economic crisis…
So we arrive to this moment, when I am
in Europe with just a few bucks left and no job. Under these
circumstances the most reasonable thing would be to go back to my
country with the tail between my legs and start from the scratch,
activity in which I have a really extensive experience. But I refuse
to do that. I already crossed the ocean and I am going to Asia. If
making your dreams come true was easy, everyone would do it and we
would live in heaven.
I had thought about not writing any
other blog for a while until I would be ready to start with On the
bamboo horse, in order to focus on other writing projects that I
have going. My idea is to finish them as soon as possible and then
settle down in front of a publisher in Spain, in strict hunger strike
until someone deigns to read my drafts.
However, very soon I realized that I
choked myself with many unwritten words. I needed to share what I was
living. There is a lot to laugh about, a lot to cry about, a lot to
write about.
Besides, I also began to think that if
I really want to be a writer, I should start acting like one. I
should start to believe in myself and in what I write. And this is my
work actually, not only cleaning floors, babysitting or opening the
door to german backpackers in a hostel at two o'clock in the morning.
So here I am. This blog tells the story
of how I try to be a writer on this side of the world, where I am
alone. I've never been so lonely in my whole life. This is, then, the
window through which I cry.
What results from all this remains to
be seen. And if it's good, I guess at some point I will end up
looking for that guy who simply ignore a stop sign on Thursday
September 13th, 2007, around 1 p.m., at the junction between Uruca
street and the main avenue in Pavas (or, as we would give the address
in Costa Rica, at the corner 100 meters east from the Pollo Cervecero
Bar and Grill) to thank him for changing my life, although initially
I wanted to kill him, literally.
You never know: life can take so many
turns …
Do you like the way I write? Do you
think that being a writer is a respected profession, just like any
other? So please, please share this text in your social networks or,
if you feel like doing positive karma points today, click on the
buttons on the right side and subscribe yourself, or give me whatever
you think is fair for my work. Just imagine that you invited me a
coffee.Thank you for reading! :)
