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boarded a bus. He did not know how to pay the fare and as the
situation was getting embarrassing, a girl, without saying a word, gave
him a ticket. At first he did not know what it was. He read on the
ticket 250 and pondered for a while: "is it the number of the station or
the number of the bus?" When he understood that 250 meant 250 yen,
the girl had already left the bus and he was in sight of the railroad
station. As soon as the bus stopped, Ibrâhim took a round ticket and
fetched the girl to thank her and repay her kindness. But she was out
of sight. So he went to Tokyo, Osaka, and one day he had to come
back to the same town. Suddenly, in the bus he met the girl, this girl he
recognized with her smile, a perfect smile “which is rather rare in
Japan,” he explains. Gesticulating, he succeeded in inviting her to the
restaurant: “At seven o’clock, Saturday, EKKI.” She understood and
the next Saturday they spent two hours together, bursting out laughing
but incapable of understanding each other. They laughed because they
were happy or they laughed because they did not understand each
other. Who knows? This would always be a puzzling question to
Ibrâhim. As he continues to narrate the story, he declares:
“I said to myself: You know several languages and there you
are in a country incapable of communicating. Where are those
languages that you have learned? In this challenge of the non-
comprehension, I think something was established. It is like sometimes
we are obliged to go through a stage, a schedule to what we never
escape, the stage on which we tolerate and we know that the other is
different from us. When we go through this stage where we accept
others as unique, we do not need anymore languages, we need
nothing, except spaces between the feelings, through the eyes. It is at
this precise moment that I became aware of the world of the sight, the
world of contrasts.
Therefore I was going through a cultural awareness. From the
moment we let ourselves go to our emotions and to our contrasts,
mistakes do not make sense anymore, mistakes are lost from our
sight. Mistakes are no longer amplified, developed by the mystery of
the communication, of the non-communication, of this non-utterance
of the feelings. The emotion remains as it is, it changes only when we
try to put it into words, when we give it a formulation. The happiness
comes from this plot, the intrigue that consists in not pondering over if
the person has understood or not. You let yourself go; the happiness
comes from the ability to let oneself go...”
It is this very attitude that enabled him to meet people of all ages and
nationalities. For example this granny with the gray hair, with the
brown kimono set off by a laced blue scarf who taught him how to
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massage feet in the Japanese fashion. Or this young hostess to whom
he once asked the road and who accompanied him all day long.
Ibrâhim remembers her beckoning, an horizontal wave of the hand
from left to right, left to right. He remembers how she later wrote to
him:
2000-2001 www.arttoday.com
“You man were a lot of fun and interesting. It’s really close to
magic to crash someone like you out there -- someone who’s very
interesting to talk to and doesn’t see just the long legs and searches
for opportunity how to hit on you.”
I read the message and I understand why Akemi, the woman of the
bus, began to learn English in order to be able to communicate her
admiration and her sympathy for Ibrâhim. She was about to be
married in November of the same year they met and always she
wrote the same letter, ten times, twenty times to Ibrâhim: “I can see
you sometimes in my dreams,” and as postscript: “With much love.”
She was trying, with the little English she knew, to revive several
hours spent with a complete stranger and with the mystery of the
language. It is so much easier to revive a dream rather than to face
reality, and the traveler always takes the part of a magic person in it, a
person who has much to share, much more than the ordinary man. I
think that Ibrâhim has always been conscious of this. He never lured
himself. He says something that I do not hear. I would find it later on
one of my tapes. He says:
“To communicate in a language you do not master is something
special. You express a feeling, a word when you feel it, without
prejudices, and it is then that you begin to feel alive. You think you
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