Between borders

24 may

There’s a beautiful poem from Anibal Nazoa called “Point and Dash”. It was given music and then sung by Soledad Bravo. When we are outdoors, it tells, we see valleys and rivers, we see meadows and mountains and even seas and birds. We do not see no dashes nor points. Those things -it says- we see in maps, signs drawn to mark borders invented and inexistent. It says.

And yet, when you bike along the border in betwen two countries (as me and my beloved have been doing for the last week), even two countries as close as Belgium and The Netherlands are, you do get to doubt Anibal Nazoa, and all your cosmopolitan instincts. Along this border we have biked through towns that are separed by few hundred meters and those imaginary lines of points and dashes, that are totally different. The stubborn individuality of Belgium houses, even when being in a row of five in a town of perhaps ten houses is as striking as the ordered elan of Dutch towns, even when they mix old farms and newly build countryside houses. There is no way to confuse a Dutch town and a Belgium one. They look different, they even smell different. And don’t get me started in the ways of talking of the people that have been living across each other for centuries and still have rythms and words so lovely different.

And yet. And yet the other thing that you learn -or remember- biking along this line of dots and dashes is the cruelty that we are capable of exact into ourselves. Once upon a time (as horror tales also start) between Belgium and The Netherlands existed the doodendraad (freely translated as “wire of the dead”), 300 kmts of electrified barbed wire that tried to prevent people crossing between occupied Belgium and neutral Netherlands. Even if it was more than hundred years ago, today it is remembered with partial reconstructions and boards that tell the tale of people that did not quite understood what high voltage was capable off, burned to death when trying to escape the very understandable reality of death in the fronts of that First World War, in the fields of Flanders. It wasn’t enough that we were killing each other by the millions in absurd and meaningless and cruel deaths, but we also prevented the escape of the ones that wanted no part in it.

One of the days of our travelling, staying at different places at different families, our host was a retired Belgium worker who expend a great deal of his life working for the army in Germany, in our times of reunified and peaceful Europe. He was a tank technician, he told, and with some mixture of pride and regret he also told that “his” tanks are today fighting in Ukraine. There was a silence after he told it, in our shared breakfast, so perhaps to break the impasse he also told us few annecdotes of his father, who had been a smuggler. We laughed together at his tale of brand new heaters that he managed to pass under the eyes of attentive douaniers, disguised as old ones, to have the same douaniers a few days later knocking at his door wanting to buy some of the heaters… but the new ones, they said. I could see, perhaps only in my imagination, in the tinkle in his eyes, the tinkle of the eyes of the smuggler reflecting the tinkle of the eyes of the douaniers. We could imagine then a world in which the borders does exist, but both the ones that guard them and the ones that break them know each other and deal with each other, smiling.

Without walls, or barbed wires.