The end of the World Cup is near. I'm already looking at the suitcase out of the corner of my eye and making increasingly eloquent gestures for it to open up before me, but since it's an inanimate object it doesn't and I find myself incapable of capturing its true self. Will he want to come back? I wonder. Soon I will open it in the middle with the zipper, I will stuff it like a chicken at Christmas and I will put inside it dirty clothes, clean clothes, ugly gifts and many other things. Hotel towels I have decided not to because thieves are very frowned upon here, although writing anecdotes from prison would greatly raise the level of my writing. Memories I won't introduce them either because I hate cheesy metaphors. Besides, I'm not going to entrust something so intimate to a suitcase that doesn't even answer me when I speak to it.
Anticipating the farewell is relevant because what you are reading is going to be my last article in the Qatari Life section, a space that has served to unleash the adventures and dreams of an insomniac in a strange country. I am going to say goodbye in my line, that is, with daily scenes from Doha, more than anything to give meaning to the statement.
The other day I got into a taxi driven by a Nepali man. I didn't ask him about his personal life because I'm cutting myself off (social awareness is fading as my return to the West approaches), but it wasn't necessary. He immediately ignored me and started a FaceTime while driving, I assumed with his son. Curiosity soon overcame the fear of dying in an accident (have you tried driving and simultaneous FaceTime?) because the kid was a teenager and it turns out that I have two magnificent specimens.
I didn't understand anything because Nepali is one of the languages I'm the worst at, but I did recognize universal gestures in that teenager that could perfectly belong to mine. Read rearranging their hair over and over again and making faces to fill a catalog looking at themselves while they talk to their father and pausing, sometimes unnerving, before answering each question.
Suddenly I thought that soon I will return home and meet my family again, when a month ago I solemnly said goodbye to them because 30 days is quite a long time. I also remembered that previous stress that assails us in the days that precede any long trip, when you think that the day to leave will never come. And not only does it come but it even ends and you come back.
The Nepali hangs up and charges me the race. I enter the hotel at dawn, they open the lobby door for me (the establishment does not have a category for this but having a guy who opens and closes them makes them think they do), I see my things scattered around the room, the accreditation, the Unused sun cream, Mailer's book on the nightstand... And I get serious: on Monday I will land in Barcelona and my life and professional experience in Qatar will now become a part of my existence. If you put many pieces together, which are sticking one after the other, it means that time advances inexorably. I've already become transcendental.
I look at my suitcase out of the corner of my eye and, suddenly, he finally decides to talk to me, as if recriminating me for existentialism at that hour. "What are you looking at, fool, go there", he tells me. My suitcase has become Argentine.
He goes with Messi, like me.
