‘Every story is us’
-Rumi
The old man looks at me from across the empty bar, and I see his face transform into a big question mark.
I ask the bartender to make me a ‘café lungo’. The old man signals for the same.
What did I look for, he asks me in his broken English.
What do you look for, Bella, when you are in your travelling?
Stories. I say to him. A way of knowing, repeatedly, that the world and its ways are varied. That we’re all the same, even in our vagaries.
We fall into a silence.
Capisce? I ask
Si. He whispers.
He tells me he is a fisherman, and has lived all his life in the little Italian village. But he found the world through stories. That is how he travels.
Libri.
Through books.
You want Storia. I give one. He says.
Outside, I see the fog take over the lagoon and the fisherman begins to tell me a story.
There was once a Sufi traveller whose feet never touched the ground. He glided from place to place, wondering about the ways of the world, gathering couplets and sonnets.
And everywhere he went they knew of him. There he comes the Sufi traveller, they said. Look how he glides, they said.
But behind all his wandering and gathering was a search.
But what was it that he lost?
What was it that he sought?
He was at a loss for answers, so he lived through the questions, and continued to glide.
Through the dunes of the Sahara, through the courtyards of the Taj, he searched, and he found nothing.
But in the gardens of Myanmar he stood before a revelation.
It stood before him.
A mirror, reflecting cherry blossoms and orchids, and him!
He saw himself in his reflection for the first time. And in the crack between his realities his feet touched the ground at last.
It was then that the Sufi traveller stopped gliding from place to place for he had finally seen home.
The fisherman finishes his café lungo.
The silence in the café grows loud, and in its noise I feel a tremor.
I gather my book and my scarf, leave some change on the bar for both our cafès and bow before the fisherman- a nod to his storytelling.
Outside, the lagoon is dark as a secret sin, and I continue on.
Gliding.