Summer must finally be over. Although he has no desire to travel. To leave, said Paul Morand, is to win a case against tradition. Therefore, when faced with the compulsion to return to routine, it is not bad to resort to the consolation and appeal of a travelogue. And in addition, if it’s not written by a daring professional traveler, but by a woman who could be our neighbor, co-worker, or hopefully friend.
My imaginary reader, the book I recommend to you is called Beautiful Cities and Me (Libros del Baal). It was written by Pilar Lennon (Valencia, 1952), a high school teacher who has been traveling the planet for forty years. From a young girl’s first getaways to Paris and Florence, just seventeen years old, to her trips to Djenné and Timbuktu; from the Yemeni deserts to southern Ushuaia; from Samarkand to Salvador de Bahia; from Cuzco to Khartoum; From Ubud in Bali to Mombasa… Thus, seventy or so cities where he wrote a short story of impressionist lines, where descriptive brushstrokes and personal experiences, landscape and peasantry converge in the best tradition of the travel genre.
The author had the wisdom of not listing the trips chronologically, something that would somehow give him an interpretable biographical tone, which is simply not the case. Instead, he chose alphabetical order, which is an elegant way to systematize the random. Below each city’s name, the country appears, along with the month and year of escape. A reference that allows the reader to contextualize some stories that seem to have been written on his return or later reconstructed from some travel notes. A narrative option that reveals a perceptual observer, a sense of humor and curiosity, adventurous tenacity, empathy and a desire to live and dance, or a text that gives agility, lightness and freshness to an almost identical text. the other.
Of all the cities she traveled to, Pilar Lennon says it was the mud cities of the Sahel and the deserts of Yemen that impressed her the most. About She and the Ghat in the Libyan desert, she writes: “Time lives in the city of sand.” A wonderful sentence that will delight Borges and is already worth the whole book. I don’t know if Pilar Lennon would have wanted to make a road movie of her life, let alone what kind of music she would have put in the movie, but I know she wrote a good book for those endless late summer afternoons.