Arrive in Tel Aviv without a bathing suit or towel. It was still the capital of Israel, and I understood the security measures at the airport.
Luckily, there was waiting for me a cultured, refined and wise young woman, like all the Jews that I found nor way.
She facilitated the airport crossing without maudlin, and I discovered in her eyes an affable undertone. She and the immigration officials welcomed me without saying a word.
Shortly after we arrived at a hotel with a name for me, “Cinema”. Antique projectors, reconstructed cameras, historical stills and modern televisions were displayed in its lobby, playing one after another the tapes of Charles Chaplin.
My room was very peculiar. A giant screen served as the door, and the postmodern reclining armchairs gleamed with discreet lighting. Everything referred to an environment similar to the dark room. From the telephone to the shower, they mimicked elements of audiovisual technology.
But I return to the translator of that team of Argentines, Chileans, Uruguayans, Peruvians, Costa Ricans and whoever writes this as the only Dominican-Cuban.
It was a strange congress. They didn’t lock us in a conference room to talk about the same old stuff. We toured Israel and its borders, and our experiences were shared by Latino immigrants living there. We exchange points of view with them, and we always agree as good friends who may think differently, but dream the same thing.
We receive, by direct source, shots of cinema, dance, music, theater and letters. They were meetings not suitable for tourists. After a short break, the productive debate returned, the unforgettable experience, the need to work on what we love. At the end of each day, a good shower awaited us at the Hotel Cinema and the promptness of another night out through the city.
Our translator crossed the Via Dolorosa in front of a troop of astonished journalists, after praying at the Western Wall. There, each one asked for a less resentful world. The pandemic was still hidden in the belly of a reptile, and there was nothing to fear. The thousands of travelers went from one place to another like a flock of sheep led by an invisible good shepherd.
The translator asked me reasons for avoiding the open tomb of Christ and I explained my fullness for the miracles. She did not understand the profane sacrilege, but she did not care because she also owed me the headache that I did not have before the Lord’s tomb.
“I’m exhausted from walking,” I managed to say and she, without taking her eyes off me, gave me her indifference.
Near the Dead Sea, I asked her to get on a camel and she knew how to please me. He looked happy to see me perched on that animal unable to walk carrying a strange journalist as a burden.
While I was training it uselessly, my colleagues changed their costumes for bathing suits and smeared mud on their skin before entering the water, as was the custom there.
“I want to swim,” I told him. –I did not bring a bathrobe or a towel. What should I do?
He suggested an unexpected exit.
-Bath in panties. But first you must fill yourself with mud. I will take pictures of you.
I did what he asked, not realizing that my panties showed part of my testicles, as they came into the world.
I swam through those waters without fish and with the bottom of saltpeter; waters that every day were getting smaller due to the absence of life. Across the sea, the mountains of the West Bank gleamed with reporterial temptation. But that story would not be told by that group of Latinos stripped of prejudices in the face of Jewish spiritual greatness.
Back at the hotel, the unforgettable happened. The bus was forced to stop; the sound of police sirens was heard. About a hundred meters away, security controls detected a powerful bomb in a shopping center.
Our astonishment did not stop until minutes after the incident, when the authorities ordered to continue the course.
-We use for cases like these some small robots that disconnect the pumps. Faced with an alert like the one we are experiencing, the police deploy trackers, and mechanical teams take care of the rest. That is why bombs no longer explode as they used to in Tel Aviv –the translator explained to us.
I would like to go back to Israel. Not because of idolatry, but because it is no longer the transfigured country that they paint.
He would return with a bathing suit and towel to swim as far as possible and open his eyes in those waters of a sea that will never die. If I can’t do it, my children and my grandchildren will see to that promise. It is worth praying at the Wailing Wall and walking the Via Dolorosa without the rush of a newspaper writer who was only looking for the non-existent behind those sacred stones. I was not brainwashed in Israel. But I did wash my underwear in the still waters of the Dead Sea.
– .
