Breathe
By Consuelo Sáizar de la Fuente
What motivates one to visit a place on the other side of the world?
The incipient learning of world geography that one acquires in elementary school
while memorizing the capitals of the countries that - since then - one longs to visit?
The texts that accompany adolescence? The horrors one observes on
television; the conversations provoked by novels read; the encounters with
writers one admires; the images of films seen; the indignation at the destruction of a library?
I am 62 years old and I don't know Sarajevo, I thought, as I boarded an old passenger bus in Mostar, remembering Monsiváis and the famous last line of his
precocious autobiography, "I am 28 years old and I don't know Europe".
