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| December
1st, 2003: FACES, by Emanuela |
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When we came back from Central Asia
a friend, living on the other side of my world, wrote me: "Spare
me pictures, texts and video, I wouldn't take a look at them.
You can call it bad manners or the way you like, but I wouldn't
consider them anyway. It's the way I feel about it ever since
I'm a child: you can tell me about your travels, but don't show
me pictures and don't make me read anything. Why? I don't know
- better - it's probably a matter of diffidence against travel
writers, whether they are made up or not. I can be show some
indulgence to photographers, especially if they concentrate
on faces".
My answer:
Your consideration has one only and obvious conclusion: if you're
getting out of areas where tourist buses arrive and you start
to step into side alleys or get into panoramas where, according
to the climate, only mud or dust prevails, you can't help taking
pictures of faces and details with your 300 lens, but also of
a number of wide-angles with your 24 because, unlike Western
panoramas, you have no borders, here.
And when you get back home, you realize that you got so many
faces, really so many, and many clothes, many colours, many
hairdos, different footwear, many attitudes, many markets, many
children, many old people, many wrinkles, much sun on those
faces; but also that there are so many more in your head, all
those you didn't take pictures of, smiling at you, helping you,
talking to you, looking at you, spitting in front of you, refusing
to speak to you, turning their head in front of you, checking
your passport, letting you pass, ripping your ticket, releasing
your visa, bringing you spicy tea salty tea pepper tea yak butter
tea, cutting a watermelon for you and sharing it with you, cooking
your kebab, understanding your mei yuo mogu and telling
you not to eat that dish because of mushrooms inside, transporting
you through the mountains on cars with no suspensions, continuing
their activities on the side of the street while your bus was
moving dust around them, chasing each other in mud and straw
alleys, giving you onion bread right out of the oven, uncovering
shining white teeth underneath their Saladin black moustache,
recognizing you at a crossroads because the earlier day you'd
given them something they're already wearing, sharing with you
the emotion of being at five thousand meter altitude at an eight-thousand
meter basecamp where there's only a stone with something written
in Chinese on it and only yak and two shepherds in sight.
Faces contorting in a laugh when you try to speak their Turkish
language, never whining faces, silent children, children with
all Mongolia they can step on as a playground, goat muzzle rubbing
like a cat against the skirt of an old woman with ice-blue,
almond-shaped eyes, muzzles of dogs barking like mad, chasing
you for kilometers at thirty kilometers per hour while your
Land Rover hardly proceeds on a torrent bed at four thousand
meters, scared yak muzzle looking at you, proud and dominating
camel muzzle, lazy dromedary muzzle, muzzles of monkeys looking
at an Indian road traffic, muzzles of cats royally lying on
mouldy roofs of old Nepali towns, muzzle of a water buffalo
emerging from mud, muzzle of a half-sleeping cow in the middle
of a road, among coloured rumbling snorting trucks, faces of
people on the back of a blue Chinese truck in front of you,
faces of Chinese wearing a grey suit shovelling at the side
of the road, faces of curled-up Chinese people eating under
the shadow of a plastic tent, faces of half-sleeping Uyghurs
moving through the oasis on their donkey or camel carts, never-changing
profile of Aagii always smoking the same cigarette while scanning
the horizon in search of a special point, black sunglasses of
Aagii looking for the sun, guttural sound of Aagii launching
in chase of running gazelles, irregular sound of our UAZ, which
has its own face too, bouncing on the high planes, coughing
sound of its left gas pump when we switch from the write pump,
face of Aagii once again spitting out 76-octane gas sucked from
the engine, face of Toroo exhausted on the dune behind me, face
of a reptile still on a stone that looks the same but different
from all other stones, my face in front of the news of the second
attack to a Christian target in Pakistan two days before our
planned departure for the Pakistani border, my feverish face
at 39 ½ degrees of temperature while the outside temperature
is 43°C and the fan is turning, Carlo's face when we decide
to catch a plane thus interrupting our overland trip, my face
in front of China which, seen for the second time, looks beautiful
and familiar, Chinese faces crowding around the luggage in a
desert airport in the middle of the desert, my face while I'm
sucking condensed milk right out of its tube, face of Tsering
sucking his soup, face of Pasang making a ball of tsampa with
his hands and then eating it avidly, the face of the mountaineer
I've married in front of Qomolongma, the face of a singing monk,
of a monk playing the gong, of a Buddhist mask, of all Buddha
Lama and Boddhisatva statues, golden face of President Nyiazov
looking at me from his golden profile on TV, on paper money
which is worth half a dollar and nobody wants, on the thousand
golden statues of his person spread among the fountains draining
Aral Sea, on the twelve-meter statue on an eighty-meter concrete
pedestal that no nine-Richter earthquake can tear down, face
of the smiling and benedicting Saint Three Mao-Deng-Jiang, face
of the big Mao in a concrete coat in the large Chinese square
of Kashgar, the face of a Mao who's taller than the Uyghur representative
on the statue of the first village coming out of five hundred
kilometres of Taklamakan sand, the hat-covered faces of thirty
Tajik moving their looks from the TV to us when we take a sit
in Tashkurgan inn for dinner, the face of a twenty-year old
shepherd of Karakul lake who lives underneath Muztagh Ata while
he explains me, sit on his horse, about camel yak goat breeding,
face of a woman inviting us during a thunderstorm in her Kyrgyz
yurt, the aspect of Kyrgyz yurt, different from the aspect of
Mongolian ger, the face of double-arch rainbow in the middle
of Siberia, in the middle of Pamir, in the middle of Kyrgyzstan,
the light, an incredible light everywhere but over China and
India, that light lighting up all these faces in a clean, cutting,
clear way, strengthening colours, abstracting every outline
from the surrounding scenery, the light which gives us a wonderful
goodbye to Istanbul, and all those faces of women inside their
chador held with their teeth in Mashhad, faces of Khatami and
faces of veiled students in Tehran, Iranian faces crossing Kurdistan
and changing when we pass lake Van and an out-of-logic border,
face of Romanian on a TurkishBulgarianCroatianYugoslavRomanian
train, face of a Bulgarian train station, face of the Romanian
McDonald's in a station, faces waiting for us at our station.
I was just making it up, of course, it's what I'm good at.
Kisses
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