Watcher

Tehran, 22-23 December 2019

I enjoy walking in any city, I like to get lost in any city, to walk without a precise objective, I follow odors, noises, silences, shadows, sunlight, a pattern in the pavement, in the walls, a random color that repeats itself.

In Tehran I did the same: I silently walked. I observed.

I am being guided by S. who gives me directions on how to navigate the city and uncovers the beauties and pleasures of a place that feels deeply crushed, grey, that smells like gas, where distances are infinite even on small neighborhoods.

It is already night, I am still with S. walking around, suddenly we stop behind a window.

On the other side there is a bread maker, he seems absent minded, he is connected to his own bread universe, he is not aware he is being watched.

He dresses in what seems to be pijamas, he works the dough, he puts it on the oven. He repeats this gestures in a grateful loop. His work is hypnotic.

Behind us there is only the cold night, closed shops, anonymous curbs of anonymous streets.

Another night will soon end in Tehran: like a smoked cigarette in a furtive alley.

I say goodbye to S. I go back to my hostel. Today my heart and memory goes to this man making bread, to the enlighten walks and talks with S. that taught me the rhythms and rudiments of the city, and allowed me to sneaked peak into its treasures.

The next morning.

My watch was stolen in the hostel. There was nothing that could be done. I had an emotional attachment to the watch, my phone screen is slowly breaking down, the watch was my only connection to time, the only thing that I believed would last a life long. I spend more money that it was worth it to keep it working. I was affectionate to it.

My plan that morning was to go to the bazaar.

Without a compass I begin my stroll into the greyness of this city covered by the perfume of gas, covered by a thick layer of smog and coldness. Every alley is a dose of bewilderment: I notice how women are a phantasmagoric presence, many dressed in black: like shadows they disappear into the buildings.

I am becoming a victim of a aggressive succession of the frequency illusions.

After the women, I am surrounded by motorcycles, then by errant solitary men walking back and forward with a clear path in mind while I feel in a labyrinth, then is the turns of street mechanics, then of an uncollected mountains of trash. Even if I try to walk on a straight line I feel I'm on a spiral.

The Bazar is still far from where I am, I have no idea where I am, I have with me an approximative hand written map with reference points.

I only know that I have not eaten, nor drank. I spot a nuts seller and buy some pistachio for later.

I am in the mood of somebody deprived of love, of memories, of the sense of time.

Everyone appears to stand alone in the heart of this Tehranian walk.

As I get closer to the bazaar I notice estranged elderly, men, and children pulling and push wobbly carts full of goods or full of nothing, they go every direction, all at the same speed, bouncing from one side of the road to the other.

I follow them inside.

There are the poorest of children who have nothing else but the crumbles of whatever jobs an adult throws at them.

I follow the rounded clattering sound of women hidden and trapped in their black chadors, knocking their low heels on the great bazaar’s asphalt.

I stumble in front of the spices sellers, some of them sneeze, some other are drinking tea.

All is extravagant, abundant, odorful, colorful.

I stumbled in an infinite alley of textile shops. I remember a childhood fantasy in which I covered the offensive ugliness of imaginary buildings with black fabric, now I would have loved to do it at some Tehranian ones.

There is no shortage of textiles for such a task.

On the corners of the bazaar elderly men and women, who already do not belong to our present, are stuck in the misery of their sufferings hoping to buy another day on planet earth by selling whatever.

The Bazaar is inebriating, is never ending basin filled with faces coming from the extremities of the world: Turkmenians, Tagikians, Kazakian, Pashtum, Baluchi, Arabs, Bedouins, Armenians, Kurds, Turks, and other peoples, all actors of their own unaware poetics.

The more I roam the more I can't find my way out. I don’t understand if the light is real or artificial anymore. The sensation is that it only sets the rhythm in the story of men that are prisoners of these walls.

I spot a group of jewelers encrusted at the end of a backstreet right next to bored merchants that sell cheap toys hanged to the ceiling, hanged to the walls.

There is a constant flow of cart pushers, I decided to follow one but he takes me on a long loop. I pick another one to follow, his route brings me to a Mosque in a courtyard, filled with natural light, with green spots, with a fountain. I take a rest, I want out. I am somehow afraid to ask for directions, I have walked unnoticed, unbothered, I enjoyed this feeling.

I pick a direction: luck blesses me with the exit.

Expelled from the guts of this well I am relief. I sit down on a bench facing where I came out. A kid polishing shoes has caught my attention, he notices me and approaches me with an open palm, asking for money. I have only the pistachios I have not eaten, I offered some, he hesitates, I insist.

He grab a few, he chew them whole, with the peel on, like Lazarillo de Tormes.

He says goodbye, I am speechless, I walk away.

Further down the road some youngster are starting a fist fight while a big crowd surrounds them, as I leave them behind I see limping sellers, blind sellers, more and more kids without anything but themselves either sleeping or working or begging, new and more faces that do not smile, interior silences covered by insistent car horn noises.

I don't care about my watch anymore.