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.He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world.Not merely travel, but live.Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South America to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific.He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local.It had taken Felipe less than a week of living with me in Knoxville, for instance, to locate his favorite breakfast café, his favorite bartender, and his favorite place for lunch.(“Darling!” he’d said one day, terribly excited after a solo foray into downtown Knoxville.“Did you know that they have the most wonderful and inexpensive fish restaurant here called John Long Slivers?”) He would’ve happily stayed in Knoxville indefinitely if I’d wanted us to.He had no trouble with the idea of living in that hotel room for many years to come—as long as we could just stay in one place.All of which reminds me of a story that Felipe told me once about his childhood.When he was a small boy in Brazil, he used to get scared sometimes in the middle of the night by some nightmare or imagined monster, and each time he would scamper across the room and climb into the bed of his wonderful sister Lily—who was ten years older, and therefore embodied all human wisdom and security.He would tap on Lily’s shoulder and whisper, “Me da um cantinho”—“Give me a little corner.” Sleepily, never protesting, she would move over and open up a warm spot on the bed for him.It wasn’t much to ask for; just one little warm corner.For all the years that I have known this man, I have never heard him ask for much more than that.I’m not like that, though.Whereas Felipe can find a corner anywhere in the world and settle down for good, I can’t.I’m much more restless than he is.My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be.I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters.So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem.The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet.I’d realized this only a few weeks earlier, back in northern Laos, when Felipe had woken up one lovely morning in Luang Prabang and said, “Darling, let’s stay here.”“Sure,” I’d said.“We can stay here for a few more days if you want.”“No, I mean let’s move here.Let’s forget about me immigrating to America.It’s too much trouble! This is a wonderful town.I like the feeling of it.It reminds me of Brazil thirty years ago.It wouldn’t take much money or effort for us to run a little hotel or a shop here, rent an apartment, settle in.”In reaction, I had only blanched.He was serious.He would just do that.He would just up and move to northern Laos indefinitely and build a new life there.But I can’t.What Felipe was proposing was travel at a level I could not reach—travel that wasn’t even really travel anymore, but rather a willingness to be ingested indefinitely by an unfamiliar place.I wasn’t up for it.My traveling, as I understood then for the first time, was far more dilettantish than I had ever realized.As much as I love snacking on the world, when it comes time to settle down—to really settle down—I wanted to live at home, in my own country, in my own language, near my own family, and in the company of people who think and believe the same things that I think and believe.This basically limits me to a small region of Planet Earth consisting of southern New York State, the more rural sections of central New Jersey, northwestern Connecticut, and bits of eastern Pennsylvania.Quite the scanty habitat for a bird who claims to be migratory.Felipe, on the other hand—my flying fish—has no such domestic limitations.A small bucket of water anywhere in the world will do him just fine.Realizing all this also helped me put Felipe’s recent irritability in better perspective.He was going through all this trouble—all the uncertainty and humiliation of the American immigration process—purely on my behalf, enduring a completely invasive legal proceeding when he’d just as soon be setting up a newer and much easier life in a freshly rented little apartment in Luang Prabang.Moreover, in the meantime, he was tolerating all this jittery traveling from place to place—a process he does not remotely enjoy—because he sensed that I wanted it.Why was I putting him through this? Why would I not let the man rest, anywhere ?So I changed the plan.“Why don’t we just go somewhere for a few months and stay there until you get called back to Australia for your immigration interview,” I suggested.“Let’s just go to Bangkok.”“No,” he said.“Not Bangkok.We’ll lose our minds living in Bangkok.”“No,” I said.“We won’t settle in Bangkok; we’ll just head in that direction because it’s a hub.Let’s go to Bangkok for a week or so, stay in a nice hotel, rest up, and see if we can find a cheap plane ticket from there to Bali.Once we get back to Bali, let’s see if we can rent a little house.Then we’ll just stay there in Bali and wait until this whole thing blows over.”I could see by the look on Felipe’s face that the idea was working for him.“You would do that?” he asked.Suddenly I had another inspiration.“Wait—let’s see if we can get your old Bali house back! Maybe we can rent it from the new owner.And then we’ll just stay there, in Bali, till we get your visa back to America [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]