Zurich
I woke up. I felt a great emptiness. What now? What should I do today? I had no schedule for the day, no appointments. Only freedom and the far horizon! Should I brush my teeth and take a shower? Drink an espresso and read my favourite newspaper? These were appointments too. Or should I perhaps eat breakfast this morning, given that I never ate breakfast otherwise?
I was wide awake, more awake than I would have liked. I hadn't imagined that the first forty seconds of my forty-day journey would be like this. Forty days without appointments and destinations in a world of appointments and destinations. I was supposed to enjoy the journey, not to brood. I felt as if I were a new-born child who doesn't know what it's meant to be doing here on earth, why it's here, where it ought to go.
No appointments. I was paralysed. What had happened to my habits? I didn't at all feel like getting up, brushing my teeth, shaving and taking a shower, drinking coffee and reading the newspapers. I felt like staying in bed and reading my friend Franco's book The Stone Flood, which had now been lying a whole year on my bedside table.
Franco! Why not call Franco and his wife Ursula? The two of them had also once been forty, and might serve as midwives for my journey. And they only lived around the corner. I called them, and they offered me an impromptu invitation to lunch. So I was saved for a few hours, and inside this incubator I would be able to prepare myself for my journey into the wide, wide world.
Franco and Ursula gave me a warm welcome, and cooked me a wonderful Italian lunch. Ursula told me that some weeks ago, after her mother's death, she had brought back from the cellar of her house some old bottles of wine, a few of them very old indeed. Ursula's father had been teetotal, which was why not only he but the bottles had reached a ripe old age. Franco had been searching desperately a bottle from the year of my birth. With no luck. But he had found a very nice line on one of the bottles: "Le meilleur chemin pour aller au paradis c'est l'escalier de la cave."
