XANGRI-LÁ

“He said what he said, and I saw myself. She said what she said, and I saw myself.”
Grace watched Marcel placed his right hand over his face and smiled half nervously. He told her that vacation with his family had been tough. For the first time he clearly heard what they had been repeating for more than 30 years. Marcel heard the lament behind the irony, the anguish among the stories, and the pattern encrusted in every syllable.

The beach was cold and the sand was not white. The pebbles reminded him of how much time he’d have to work with himself alone, before attempting to bring his loved ones with him.
Everything Marcel wanted to do was to surf in Atlântida Beach, but he felt bad telling his family he wished to be left alone on this trip. He thought he could find a way to please his parents by sharing the day with each one of them, but two days after his arrival he was already planning to wake up at 5am to surf. Bricio, his childhood friend, had driven 130 kilometers from Porto Alegre with three other surfer friends a week before. They were staying at Pousada NaniMoana on Avenida Paraguassu and living their ultimate dream: surfing during the day and dancing at Jimbaran at night. Marcel was not fond of dancing, and promised himself he would read all the books he brought, so he invented an excuse to stay home and relax.

On one of those nights after a day of embracing the waves, Marcel had a dream. It was a recurring dream he used to have when he was ten years old. In it, his body was small as a tennis ball and everything around him was enormous. The feeling of being so tiny made him feel awkward. That morning he stayed in bed until late and didn’t hide his worried face. His mother gave him a little book by Jung that she used to keep by her bedside table. The first sentence that caught his eye was: "A dream that is not understood remains a mere occurrence; understood, it becomes a living experience." Marcel placed paper and pen beside his bed and fell asleep at 10pm.
The first thing he remembered was great amounts of water running along a curbside and a little boat made of paper stumbling down the current. He felt his body was rocking side to side inside that little boat, and the curb walls were the size of the Parthenon. Marcel wrote everything down without opening his eyes and fell asleep again at about 3am.

When the sun came through the window at 5:30am, Marcel was already sitting and reading Jung’s book. “ (…) The unconscious is older than consciousness…the unconscious is what is originally given, from which consciousness rises anew again and again.” (…) Children have less conscious superstructure than adults and thus more direct exposure to oneiric blasts from the collective unconscious.”
He asked himself why he was still having that same dream. “Am I a 30-year old child?” He laughed. His mother heard him laughing, and knocked on his bedroom door calling him for breakfast.

When Marcel came to the table his mother was drinking chimarrão with milk by the backdoor. His father was on the window complaining he had a headache. “Maybe it was those marisqueiras you had last night, dad” said Marcel smiling.
Marcel’s auntie brought some bread to the table, sat by his side, and touched his hand. She smiled at him and said: “I heard you moaning last night.”
“Really? Did I say anything you could understand?” asked Marcel.
“Yeah, you kept saying ‘ahead, ahead.’”
“Jeez, this is getting weird,” said a puzzled Marcel.
“You know, I used to hear my dad, your grandpa, talk during the night. The morning after each time was always full of revelations to him. I had never mentioned I heard him talk during his sleep. He was a proud and stubborn man, and would probably think I was making fun of him. I remember one morning after a very talkative night. A Portuguese vendor came to our door and said someone had called his shop asking for him. He followed the vendor and came back 30 minutes later. His face was livid and he was speechless. I waited for him to finish his mate, and softly asked him if he was ok. He said his dad had passed away of a heart attack during the night.”
“I remembered you told me that story when I was a teenager,” said Marcel.
“Yes, but I’ve never told you what else happened during the night.”
Marcel felt the fresh rush of his blood running though his veins.
“At about 2:30am, when he woke up that night, I heard his footsteps on the wood floor and met him on the corridor walking towards the living room.”
“I heard a noise,” he said.
“I followed him quietly towards the dinning table, and saw when he picked up the tall white candle and placed it back to where it originally was. He turned around right away and went back to sleep. The next day he found out his dad had passed away when that candle fell.”
“Wow.”
“I wonder if daddy used to be so stern in the morning because he had premonitions like that all the time. I learned to wait a few hours before saying or asking something. When he turned 65 he started walking along the river as soon as he would get up. He would come back home for breakfast another man, his face relaxed, and a smile on his face.
When he passed away he left me a present. I found a big envelope with a quote written on it: "’O oposto do amor não é o ódio, mas a indiferença’ (The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference). Please, forgive me, my dear daughter.” Inside I found a book called Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley translated by Erico Veríssimo. On the first page dad had quoted Huxley: “The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos.”
“Now I know why I had slept until late today. Can I borrow that book, auntie?”


* “The phrase ‘Shangri-La’ most probably comes from the Tibetan "Shang - a district of Tsang, north of Tashilhunpo pronounced ‘ri’, ‘Mountain’ = ‘Shang Mountain’ Mountain Pass, which suggests that the area is accessed to, or is named by, ‘Shang Mountain Pass.’"

Story of May coming up soon! ; )