Maqroll El Gaviero Judio

A tale of a wandering Jew. Dedicated to Maqroll the Gaviero, an imagination of Alvaro Mutis.
Though his life was devoid of danger, unless you call fifteen foot waves in the open seas off the coast of Funafuti smooth sailing, his desire to accept only his longings as his home made him dangerous to women who were always dreaming of becoming someone else’s wives. Once he casually asked an Ecuadorian who had relentlessly pursued him what her plans were for the morning, the suppressed fury of rejection in this Andean from a port full of black sands was to destroy his social standing all along the rugged pacific coast. He dined with the diligent bourgeoisie who carefully nurture the deliberate, mean spirited hypocrisies of their convictions. In reply to a question of a customs agent in the island of Hispaniola , he could not codify for them his imprecise profession and was suspected of running drugs while the actual purpose of his visit to the island was ignored. Abandoned by a mother who specialized in making others loose their power of speech, thus made a vagrant at birth at a distant corner of the Portuguese empire, he had traveled by trains along so many rivers as an adolescent. The forces of water pushed him into a period of wanderings among the small islands that dot the pacific ocean. He quoted about the frivolity of life, the morning after reading his favourite Norwegian author, the village was gulped in a wave that caused the island nation he was visiting to declare itself homeless. Attraction to the seas continued, now to different islands where steep mountains touched gently the fervent oceans. He toyed with the idea of becoming decent in one of them but by then he had become addicted to business class travel. Serrated mountains, irregular lands, angry seas, late model aircrafts, long discussions on most obscure topics became his passion. He tried in vain to master the dialect of St. Cristobal where ear shattering din is confused for happiness. After contracting illness along desolate road near Andhra Pradesh he was thrown out by some vague, somnambulistic protodravidian official who could not pronounce his Hebrew name, into the comfort of the lounge of the Airlines of the island of Singapore at an airport so modern that he thought he had settled down for good, samosas and curry puffs with freshly squeezed orange juice will be served everyday for the rest of his life by illiterate Indonesian maids brought over with false promises. During the moments of fever, a sense of siege overtook his body and he shared the pain, paralysis and potentially dangerous impotence of the island of his little girl. On receiving a note from the Malabar coast that home of an aging Jew was about to be passed on to him, he imagined himself ensconced there, waited on by thin Malabari Moslems who questioned their faith, with his traveling companion, the Prince of Palms and the little girl who loved him so much that she continually adoringly attached herself to other lovers in faraway lands she dreamt of visiting with him. Making vagrancy a profession young people all over the world could aspire to, he plans to convert the 700 year old synagogue, when it is not in use, of course, into a Museum of Vagrant Peoples where others may find refuge from the restriction imposed upon them by their fear of being alive