Travels with Herodotus Read Online Free Page A

the world, making it unattainable. It was an unpleasant and humiliating sensation. It might explain why, in a first encounter with someone or something foreign, there are those who will feel fear and uncertainty, bristle with mistrust. What will this meeting bring? How will it end? Better not to risk it and to remain in the cocoon of the familiar! Better not to stick one’s neck out of one’s own backyard!
    On first impulse, I might have fled India and returned home, if not for my having bought a return ticket on the passenger ship
Batory
, which in those days sailed between Gdańsk and Bombay.The Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had just nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting England and France to respond with armed intervention; as war broke out, the canal was blocked, and the
Batory
was stuck somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea. Cut off from home, I was condemned to India.
    Cast into deep water, I didn’t want to drown. I realized that only language could save me. I started to think about how Herodotus, wandering the world, had dealt with foreign languages. Hammer writes that Herodotus knew only Greek, but because Greeks at the time were scattered over the entire planet, had their colonies, ports, and factories everywhere, the author of
The Histories
could avail himself of help offered by the countrymen he encountered, who served as his translators and guides. Moreover, Greek was the lingua franca of those days, and many people in Europe, Asia, and Africa spoke the language, which was later replaced by Latin, and then French and English.
    I began cramming words, night and day. I placed a cold towel on my temples, feeling my head was bursting. I was never without the Hemingway, but now I skipped the descriptive passages I couldn’t understand and read the dialogues, which were easier:
    “How many are you?” Robert Jordan asked.
    “We are seven and there are two women.”
    “Two?”
    “Yes.”
    I understood all of that! And this, too:
    “Augustín is a very good man,” Anselmo said….
    “You know him well?”
    “Yes. For a long time.”
    I walked around the city, copying down signboards, the names of goods in stores, words overheard at bus stops. In movie theaters I scribbled blindly, in darkness, the words on the screen, and noted the slogans on banners carried by demonstrators in the streets. I approached India not through images, sounds, and smells, but through words; furthermore, words not of the indigenous Hindi, but of a foreign, imposed tongue, which by then had so fully taken root here that it was for me an indispensable key to this country, almost identical with it. I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, this universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it. I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I was able to name: for example, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know. I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture.
    During all those days after my arrival in Delhi I was tormented by the thought that I was not working as a reporter, that I was not gathering material for the stories that I would later have to write. I hadn’t come as a tourist, after all. I was an envoy, engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate. But I found myself empty-handed, and feeling incapable of doing anything, at a loss even to know where to begin. I knew nothing about India, after all, and hadn’t asked for it.
Crossing the border
—that was it. Nothing more. But now, since the Suez war made returning impossible, I could only move forward. I decided to travel.
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