It’s that time of year when airports are packed, tickets are more expensive and terminals are filled with family members preparing for hugs. Spaces filled with emotions, reunions and also stories that come from the people who accompany us during part of the trip. Sometimes they will tell you them themselves and, other times, in a display of imagination in the absence of mobile data, you will create them yourself. Or at least, it happens to me.
From a tuktuk I have seen another full of children carrying colorful bracelets – perhaps heading to a wedding? A passenger who records the clouds throughout the flight -? -. Stewards trying to have a brief Spanish lesson while pushing the stroller, two twins with a red mole between their eyes or a heated argument between a couple on the flight back from vacation at the end of August. Young women in their twenties hugging a teddy bear while you wonder all the way to Mexico City if it is a gift from a Spanish boyfriend or a therapeutic tool against altitude sickness. However, one of the stories that caught my attention began with a folded banana leaf sticking out of the pocket of Isabel, a Colombian woman whom I met during a Bogotá – Miami flight.
“Between ferries and trains / people give you, / unintentionally, / a story” (transit)
Isabel had white hair, bulging eyes and that certain air of Úrsula Iguarán although, unlike the protagonist of One Hundred Years of Solitude, she had decided to take the final flight instead of being at the mercy of hurricanes and ants. She was traveling to the United States to live with her daughter, who had settled in Florida years before after getting a job as an editor for a local newspaper, and her two grandchildren.
He told me that he had never left his country before and was afraid of the skyscrapers and the additives in hamburgers. Of feeling displaced in a world that perhaps was spinning too fast for her. Luckily, she had a great facility for masking her worries and talking about other different things such as the exact point of the sabanera potatoes in the ajiaco, the nights spent among coffee plantations counting stars, or the cumbia songs that she used to dance to when she was single woman. While she was talking, I couldn’t stop looking at that banana leaf. Could it be a sacred amulet? Maybe a temporary umbrella in case you can’t find one at duty free?
When the plane was about to land, Isabel’s wrinkled hand folded her green ally again to put it in her jacket pocket. “I’m sure my daughter has never made tamales for my grandchildren,” she said, in a tone of tender modesty. Only then did I understand that tamales were just another excuse. That that banana leaf was Isabel’s last chance to connect three generations.
I lost sight of her after retrieving my suitcase from the treadmill. But I kept her story in my memory and even today, every Christmas, I imagine her eating tamales with her grandchildren before going to South Beach to eat ice cream. Perhaps by traveling we become more imaginative, more receptive. We only need the banana leaf or the teddy bear that gives us that first of many thousands of stories that, right now, cross the skies around the world.
Happy reunions.