NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – NEPALESE CAPSULES: EPISODE I

Hello Silence, My Old Friend

“Many years ago I had a friend called Jim and I have not come across a saddest North American ever since. I have seen many hopeless. But as sad as Jim, not a single one.” (Jim, “The Insufferable Gaucho”, Roberto Bolaño.)

The Oracle, aka Peanuts, gives me a farewell book, Wade Davis’ Into the Silence, for my upcoming trip to Nepal, where he lived on and off between 1973 and 1978. It is the account of the late attempt to surmount Everest led by George Mallory, in 1924. I give Peanuts a copy of Bolaño’s The Insufferable Gaucho, in return. In its second short story, Jim, the saddest North American walks the streets of Mexico City mesmerized by a flame eater and oblivious to everything except his obsessive hunt for the most frugal, virtuous rhyme. Jim walks and occasionally stops, and the beggar kids ask him what is the meaning of poetry. Jim looks at the clouds, then vomits, and then says. “Lexical, eloquence, the search for truth. Epiphany.”

Durbbie

“Harper, in Kathmandu, go to Durbar Square and visit the temple of the Lost. I used to live just above it. There were no tourists back then, just the odd mountaineer,” Peanuts says. He was one of the fewest expats in the 70s, and found his way to sell magic carpets filled with hash. “Back then, you could get an unbelievable range of the brown stuff in every street market. It was lined up in heaps and you could buy as much as you wanted. Eventually, at the airport, you had to pay a five per cent tax for each gram you took away, can you believe it?”

When auld timers tell you about the good old days, they have a massive offline point.

KTM

Landing in KTM is the quietest affair ever: no one seems agitated or in a rush, all tourists are already moving like ballerinas underwater. The custom agents are also mindful and apparently floating in Kumari’s (the Goddess of the land) smile, and I found my obnoxious backpack gently resting on a corner, already removed from the panic-attack-inducing conveyor-belt where most of my belongings have historically vanished in an timeless spiral of lost-and not found, lost-and-not found, lost-and-not found.

Harper God

Outside international arrivals, smiley Roman finds me and I’m not lost anymore. “Where are you going? I give you a lift,” he says. He is sporting an embroidered waistcoat and a Dhaka topi, the Nepalese traditional hat.

Next thing, I’m his co-pilot. He considers me and says: “Everything is easy here: no stress, relax.” It could sound like a condescending Aikido belt, but unlike them, his voice feels like a gust of wind tickling your temples.

He could be my grandson, and I could be his lost and found child. Then he says that in Nepal “all guests are Gods,” and asks what’s my name.

“Harper God,” I inevitably answer.

His smile broadens like a horizontal Annapurna.

From Silence to Eternity

In Into the Silence, Wade Davis recalls that during his late expedition to Mount Everest, Mallory and part of his strictly British team ascended mostly through the Tibetan side of the highest peak in the world. Above 16.500 feet, amongst blue icecaps, phosphorescent flowers, and Buddhist-tamed fauna, they encountered a small community of followers of Machig Labdrön (1055-1149), the Tibetan tantric master of Chöd, the most radical Buddhist approach to absolute detachment. Her accomplished disciples took the foundational teachings to the T, and were living in caves, deprived of everything except the sparse grains of barley that villagers fed them with —typically to nourish the worms living in their guts.

The English were astonished with their unconceivable long nails, hair and stench, but overall they admired their endurance through the harshest of weathers devoid of blankets, winter clothes or food, which according to Labdrön, aka the “Singular Mother Torch from Lab,” was the key to attain Nirvana. Their devotion was rewarded with otherworldly rainbows in the skies whenever each of them departed this life.

The Temple of the Lost

I wake up to my Nepalese existence. I can make out the rainbow glimpse of the top of the world breathing through the dusty air, and set off for the Temple of the Lost. Upon leaving, I meet Alfred, a late thirties Western-Eastern looking guy juggling a small ball with his feet at the courtyard of our lodgement. He claims to be Mexican, although he can barely speak Spanish. “I’m from California,” he meaningfully adds. “I was born in Barcelona, the Sweden of Spain.” He looks at me mystified, and off I go.

Peanuts had mentioned that while he was living there, the Temple was at the end of a quiet junction, across the derelict backyard where he sold his carpets. “There were a few of us, we found a chemical component to dye the rugs, and the locals wanted to buy our recipe, but we never accepted any of their offers, just to piss them off,” he recalls laughing his ass off.

Faded Tiles

I can’t make out the temple anywhere, let alone the junction. As it turns out, it is a tourist-infested nest of endless intersections, where pilots, pedestrians, street sellers, travel adventure agencies, ATM’s and exchange posts thrive like flying ants. After scrutinising every corner of the alleged crossroad the only remnant of the temple of the Lost is a ramshackle tiled wall where I see the faded image of a Goddess. A passer by sees me staring at it as if lightning struck, and says what I want to hear: “This is Machig Labdrön. The Temple was brought down to ashes during the 2015 Earthquake.”

Suman New Man

His name is Suman and he looks very much like someone I can’t remember. He is wearing shiny sandals, a waistcoat and a hat, and his blue eyes and features seem to match the glimmer of the spears of all the temples around us. He asks if I want to know more. I say, “always.” He smiles, holds my hand, and walks me through a hole-in-the wall that defies physics and perception. All of a sudden we are inside a carpet shop that could have been designed by Charlie Kaufmann and Ali Baba.

I feel like I’m in Marrakech in 1998, except for the lack of snakes and mint tea. He says that there were a bunch of Mediterranean’s lads living here back then. They were young, wild and very smart, and they came up with a system for dying carpets in a shiny purple hue that nobody around had ever seen before. I freeze. He screeches to a halt, grabs my hand, and asks my name. “Harper God,” I say.

Trenches and Heavens

Wade Davis chronicles how before attempting to surmount Everest, most of the mountaineers found themselves drafted as soldiers during the First World War. The unspeakable horror of the butchery was so disturbing that some of the greatest writers of the time decided not to mention it ever again.

T.E. Lawrence and Robert Graves famously agreed not to discuss the experiences of the former in Arabia, which would become the foundation of the latter’s mind-blowing biography “Lawrence and The Arabs.” Graves himself could not handle being back in Great Britain after serving at The Great War, and he left home to never come back. Before doing so, he became the best man at George Mallory’s wedding, a man he was infatuated with, like most of the members of the Bloomsbury group and any other passer by lucky to see his handsome face.

Flames and Blizzard

Mallory married Ruth instead, and the letters that they both exchanged during the Everest expedition is one of the most moving compasses of the many breathtaking layers and scopes of the book.

Mallory was a member of the British Alpine Club, and probably the most fearless and fit of them all. After the war, he just wanted to crown the ultimate heaven; the white, dark and blue summit he had restlessly longed for all his life. Most members of the expedition had dodged the shelling and the flamethrowers of the most horrifying armed conflict to date while witnessing the evisceration of some of the brightest minds of their generation —for only to find eternity under a massive blizzard on the peak of the Earth.

Jim

Bolaño’s memorable antihero, Jim, walks the streets of Mexico city hypnotised by one particular sinister fire-eater, whom must have reminded him of the horrors of the Vietnam War, where he had been stationed, the deepest crease of his sadness, and the ultimate reason for wandering aimlessly the streets of his neighbour country, the closest to a home he ever managed to return to.

Once in Hell, you are always in Hell. Once in Heaven, you might or might not remain in a greater flameproof eternity.

Peanuts were brought down to tears while reading Into the Silence. “You wouldn’t believe the horror, how brave those guys were. I was young and fit while I lived in Nepal, and I still remember the amount of corpses I encountered on the tracks along the many demented hikes I took barefoot and sleepless. I was close to drowning under a waterfall during one nasty monsoon, I could have been one of them, and yet, here I am. Life is a miracle.”

Ruins

Suman recalls that the Earthquake of 2015 destroyed a great deal of the old town. As we approach Durbar Square, the rubble, braced buildings and bendy lampposts are still visible everywhere, dozens of massive hairy dogs meandering or sleeping on heaps of crumbled stone or along tubular, dusty pipes waiting to be installed again. We walk up Freak Street, where Peanuts and his mates used to trade carpets for Afghan hash and honey. “It was full of chancers, very clever merchants and an army of barefoot, long bearded wanderers that had found Nirvana at the tip of a burning cylinder. Today the street is full of bubble tea shops, Halal restaurants, and hundreds of guesthouses and hotels, where many families and groups of friends dressed in shiny silk robes walk leisurely while tiptoeing the cracks and the potholes that open the ground every second step.

Suman smiles, points his finger ahead, and his blue eyes mirror the flight of the many pigeons gathered at the roof of the dark wood temples that line up the arresting skyline of the World Heritage Sites of Durbar Square.

Next thing he says, “life is a cruel miracle,” and only then I realise that he looks like a suntanned Paul Newman. I can’t help but say it. He can’t help but reply: “I’m not the hustler: you are. You are ready to fly. Go.”

I gather my bearings and walk back to the guesthouse just in time to avoid the sudden deluge.

The Saddest American

At the backyard of the guest house there is a garden with massive apricot trees, a few tables, and a 70s looking bar. Before I make my way upstairs, I see Alfred sitting at the counter by himself. He waves at me and asks if I want to join him and his friend for a drink. “I don’t drink anymore.”

He offers me sparkling water.

“Don’t choke and start spitting bubbles though: it seems to be what every other local does to me whenever I walk the streets around here.”

“Fire,” I ask.

“What?”

“Do they spit fire at you?”

“No. Just racist spit.”

I say that I thought all the guests were Gods here. He sadly smiles; there is no innocence in his eyes, just fear and a deep melancholy. I say nothing, and I look around wondering if his friend might be locked in the toilet. His drink is sitting untouched on the bar counter.

Next thing, Alfred asks me what I do. I say I’m here on a writing assignment and he says that he also writes, like every second tourist I meet.

“As a matter of fact, many people have said to me that I’m good at it. I actually wrote something today. Do you want to read?”

I say “always” and he extends me his notepad.

The first line says:

“My best friend died 7 months and 7 days ago today.”