Chronotrope

by Joe Aultman-Moore (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown Spain

I go mile-crazy. Hitchhiking. A kind of fever only cooled by movement. The motorway is a blood vessel. Hours in anonymous towns in Switzerland and France bypassed by the blood supply. Extremities squeezed off begin to die; there’s a telltale smell in those places, a dry-rot. Several objects make their way into my backpack: a Stetson hat in the bushes of an interchange in Geneva. Blown off a thin-headed man driving a convertible, no doubt. No one picks me up; I sleep on the ground of the same interchange. From Bern, Switzerland I hitchhike with a man, Bruno, who speaks seven languages. He drives an expensive black Lexus in an expensive black suit and expensive black watch. He tells me he grew up poor in Lisbon, Portugal. Bruno takes calls as he drives, talks to his boss in German, a client in French, then me in English, his brother in Portuguese, then English again. When I point this out, he shrugs, “I speak Spanish, Italian, and some Russian as well, “ he says, “I collect them, somehow, like watches or cars.” Bruno drops me at a McDonald’s, hands me twenty francs and says, “Good luck.” When I reflexively say, “You too,” he shrugs again, “I don’t need luck. Hey—” I turn back around. “You probably need this more than me.” He rummages in the glove box and tosses me a shiny blue object. It’s a Swiss Army knife. A chronotrope—something where time and memory intersect. To let go of destination, or rather to accept each moment as a destination in itself— this is one of the oldest lessons of wandering. Wander enough and one feels as if the world were a great carpet pulled underfoot; as if it were the world that moved, not the traveller. Bruce Chatwin writes in The Songlines, “A Sufi manual, the Kash-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.” Steinbeck in Travels With Charley: “We find after years of struggle the we not take a trip; a trip takes us.” Then there are nights beside the motorway, gas stations, in scruffy patches of trees and the faces going by, even in my dreams, faces thinking of elsewhere and the hiss and roll of corpuscles in the arteries; I surrender and go, float into the night on the backs of cars with a trail of cardboard signs like breadcrumbs, city names written on them and a trail of cigarette-smoke from the truck driver from Dubai, roaring through the Cote D’Azur (ten-speed gears, screaming at cars) and a homesick young man from Lyon meeting his father at the airport in Barcelona; I float into that city on his homesickness and end up on the beaches of the Mediterranean, gawking at the topless women but by the third day it seems normal and I fall asleep on the beach and get a terrible sunburn that prevents me from wearing my pack for several more days so I get drunk at a nightclub and wander the empty night-streets of Barcelona lost until I ask two hookers for directions, stumble back to the hostel, puke all over the toilet and wake with sheets of skin peeling off my back. In the Spanish town of Irun, on the French border, I start walking. Walk and walk across the entire country on the ancient roads of the Camino de Santiago (another story for another time). In Santiago I wake in a dirty hostel and remember Kerouac in On the Road: “I was far from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and the footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen seconds.” I emerge at the other end, alone again. The feeling that the next thing is going to be big, that things have been building up somehow, that I’ve run out of land to hitchhike.