The New Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor by Salim Bachi

Author:Salim Bachi [Salim Bachi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782270072
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2012-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

ITRAVELLED TO SYRACUSE. I liked the town, which made me feel strangely lethargic. I felt that I could breathe more freely walking through the narrow lanes, over the Piazza del Duomo, strolling along the boardwalk, a balcony suspended over the ocean, the dream of sailors or merchants setting out on expeditions for a thousand years. But, like a wife or an abandoned whore, I stayed on the quay, gazing into the dream-filled depths. I imagined Archimedes erecting his mirrors to burn the Roman ships, a popular legend that had been masquerading as truth since time immemorial. It was a wonder that men seemed to prefer tall stories to tangible proof, even if it was dry as straw. They preferred the mystery of the heavens to the mathematical order of the world.

I also remembered the Arabs who invited themselves to Syracuse in the ninth century, when they were still sailing on strange, fragile crafts that could cross oceans, as Sinbad, the one from the legend, liked to relate.

I tried to forget my loneliness, the strange, nagging impression that I was continually reliving the same things, as if my story belonged to everyone. I travelled, but everyone travelled. I went from one woman to the next in search of Vitalia, but everyone spent their life like this, moving from one embrace to another, from one face to another, mistaking the image of love for true love and ending up with nothing. People grew old, their memories faded, they finished their lives alone and went to the grave and eternal oblivion. Life is nothing. An illusion. Like the ever-moving waves pulsing in the light.

I would have liked to be wrong, to believe in an afterlife, something to make up for all the sorrow we experience in life. The worst part was thinking that everything we’d lived through had been in vain and would disappear with the death of that vessel of marvels or sorrows, the demise of the person of flesh and feathers: body, dreams, mind and desires which had once been in the light and were now conspicuous by their absence. The Sailor’s true wealth resided in his good fortune in being able to reinvent himself through his women and his voyages; and if there was no rhyme or reason to that, if it were just free verse, just poetry doomed to be scattered to the wind like an ephemeral word, then who cared? The important thing was not to be weighed down by baggage—you had to travel light, taking only the bare minimum for moral comfort.

I walked to the Piazza del Duomo and sat down at a table in a café facing the cathedral, which had been built around a Greek temple. I was ordering a lemonade, when suddenly a tall, very dark man appeared: Robinson hadn’t changed, he might have put on a little weight, but I wasn’t sure. He almost looked taller than usual. He was dressed in the latest fashion.

“My dear Robinson, you look so affluent… a three-piece

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