It’s really cold outside. Mist covers the buildings and a fine rain is falling. A perfect day for staying in my hotel room reading Juan Pablo Villalobos’ new novel. But I promised to write a chronicle a day and if I don’t go to meet Eduardo, the Inquisition expert, I won’t have any material. I’m not really an inventor of stories. Without experience, I can’t write. So, if I don’t want to write a whole text about the innovative activity of reading a book in a hotel room, I have to face the drizzle and the cold, the worst enemies of people who grew up in the tropics.
Without an umbrella or a hood, I set off in search of the train station. Google tells me it’s nine minutes away, but it takes me sixteen. If I didn’t get lost, I’d be a different person. I check which platform I should head for and, once I’m on the train, I feel at home again. If I could, I’d spend my whole life on a train, in silence, observing the world going past outside and the passengers who get on and off. Between The Hague and Amsterdam the land is flat; the horizon, stretched taut.
A train journey is far better than a session on a psychiatrist’s couch. I revisit my childhood, imagine better days, remember my dead, tell them things I don’t tell anyone else. Logical time becomes the time between two cities, which goes by unexpectedly quickly.
I had my phone on silent, and it’s only when I get to Amsterdam that I see a message from Eduardo: he’s fifteen minutes late. I take the opportunity to have a coffee and buy a copy of Le Monde. Fifteen minutes later, another message: Maybe you can find a restaurant and wait for me there? I start to get nervous; in my tropical mind, Europeans are never late. But I’m still hopeful. Eduardo is going to appear and tell me everything he knows about Salom Salem, detail by detail. I’m going to return home with a nearly-formed novel tucked under my arm.
It’s raining in Amsterdam as well, and for that reason I go into the first place I find, The Doors, a typical tourist trap. On my iPhone I listen to Villagers, who won me over with their show yesterday. The album is aptly named Awayland. That’s where I live, in that remote land, away from home.
I send Eduardo a text to give him directions and then order a lemon and ginger tea, quickly followed by a piece of apple tart. When I look at my mobile again, almost an hour has slipped by. No message from Eduardo in the forty-five minutes that I’ve been in the bar. I decide to call, but his phone is off, or he hasn’t got a signal. What if he ran out of battery?
The problem with waiting is that it’s an endless spiral. We only stop waiting when the other person arrives. If that person doesn’t arrive, we never stop. There’s always a doubt; if I leave now, he might appear. I decide to wait another fifteen minutes. Then fifteen more, fifteen more, fifteen more. At five o’clock there’s no option but to accept the evidence and get a train back to The Hague. I can’t risk missing this evening’s reading.
On the way back, the ‘psychoanalysis session’ turns into an imaginary fight where I call Eduardo all the names I can think of. I went to great lengths for the sake of a story, which turned out not to exist. The bastard left me without a chronicle. I went searching for the best story and ended up with nothing.
Little by little I come to terms with the wasted day, convincing myself that the past is a land that ought to remain distant. It’s enough to catch a glimpse of it from time to time and then carry on. When I’m ready, Taco, the translator, knocks on my door: he was wandering around The Hague when he happened upon Spinoza’s grave. You can’t leave without seeing it, he says, looking at once enthusiastic and deathly pale, as if he’d seen Spinoza himself, not just his tomb.