Javier Reverte’s Journey Without Return

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From Istanbul to Isfahan. In his latest adventure, the long-awaited writer crossed the border between Europe and Asia via the Bosphorus for a journey of nearly 4,000 kilometers

Perhaps what gives meaning to the journey is the return, like that of Ulysses to Ithaca. But Javier Reverte (Madrid, 1944 – 2020) considered not returning from his last adventure and staying in Isfahán, far from his Ithaca in Valsaín, in the mountains of Segov. This is what the long-awaited writer suggests in ‘La Frontera Invisible’ (Plaza & Janés), the last and posthumous book of the incorrigible traveller. For his latest adventure, he traveled east from Istanbul to cross Turkey and Iran and landed in Dubai after crossing the Strait of Hormuz. “I travel the world to feel free,” said Reverte, who, like Pla, knew that “describing is much harder than expressing an opinion. That’s why most people think.

“I wanted to go to the Middle East, a region whose name resonates with immensity, ancient empires, shocking wars, lost armies, buried cities, dead religions, ancient silenced languages; also to pogroms and genocides, bloodthirsty sultans, fierce warriors and warlike kings, as well as sensuality, adventure and poetry besides that,” Reverte clarifies his interest in the area he traveled, knowing that life was slipping away.

Plagued by the liver cancer that had stolen it from him, he left instructions to David Trías, his publisher for twenty years, in the order of publication of his last three titles: the novel ‘Man in the water’, about a former prisoner who is in a net anarchist, appeared in March 2021; ‘Dear Comrades’, his memoirs, in October of the same year, and ‘The Invisible Frontier’, his last travel notebook, are now reaching the reader.

He started it with his backpack full of drugs and classics about the East. The doctors will prescribe what is necessary for a journey of nearly four thousand kilometers, moved by the mixture of curiosity and whim that led him to plot his routes, as he tells in the prologue. “Why not go to Isfahan?” he wondered at a photo of the mosque’s beautiful dome in the monumental square of the Iranian city that the Persians call “The Middle of the World.”

He travels and tells of Alexander the Great, the Great Tamerlane, the Sultan Bayezid (‘The Thunder’), or Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey. A controversial figure whose Reverte highlights the good and the bad. “He freed the women from the seraglio, took their veils from them and took them to parliament,” he recalls. He opened universities, closed madrasas, disrupted Islamic law, created a civil code and made the country literate, but he was “extremely authoritarian” and “admired by Hitler and Spanish fascists, like Ramiro Ledesma.”

Tehran disappointed Reverete. Overwhelmed by the chaos, he got lost in the maze of a bustling megacity ‘with an Islamic heart and a secular head’. But everything turned into balsamic Isfahan. “Contrary to the traveler’s mind, I think there are places you should never leave, such as Isfahan Square,” he writes, recreating himself in an enclave that “disrupts your senses.”

Trías recalls that the “worker” Reverte was “very conscientious” when documenting himself before going on a trip. “His lyrics are full of references from those who visited the places that interested him in the past.” In this case, prominent predecessors such as Pierre Loti, Chateaubriand, Ruy González de Clavijo, Blasco Ibáñez or Julio Camba, whose books Reverte carried in his backpack with a “mobile pharmacy of pills, syrups, creams and injections”. He will roll them up in the streets of Istanbul, Ankara or Tehran, in the old train carriages ‘which were still a form of happiness for Reverte’. It was not in vain that he suffered the 56-hour bumpy Trans-Asian Express that connects Ankara with Tehran and covered the 446 kilometers by bus to Isfahan. He visited Shiraz, the city of roses, wine and verse, and Persepolis to link stories of Tamerlanes transfixed “and enjoy” the moments of pleasure that come from arriving in a place where you don’t know anyone, where you ignore the geography and where you don’t understand the language.

Finally, tired and alone, while waiting for the ferry to Dubai in Bandar-e-Lengeh, he compares the misery of the terrain with his situation. “My feeling was not pleasant or sad. It was like seeing the end of the road, the last part of my life.”

Source: La Verdad

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