I met the writer Mauricio Lavista in the Condesa neighborhood when he lived in a luxurious apartment bequeathed to him by his family in front of Mexico Park. However, his last years were not at all pleasant, because I visited him again years later when, by family order, he lived in a kind of garage in a large house in Coyoacán with a cot and some books. However, he remained affable and talkative.
I was surprised to learn of a legend that began to circulate among the bohemian group that visited the Condesa, which mentioned that he had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. I cannot say if it was true, but in any case, the Mauricio I was talking to never seemed like a candidate for hospitalization. More research would be needed on this great mystery surrounding the last years of his life.
A relative of Paulina and Mario Lavista, few people know that Mauricio was one of the first Mexicans to complete the journey along the famous Silk Road (a network of ancient trade routes) that so obsessed Marco Polo, an adventure that took him more than six years of travel, during which the Mexican author almost lost his life in incidents in the armed regions and due to diseases such as hepatitis, but which allowed him to complete half a dozen logbooks and learn about the reality of the Middle East with its political conflicts and spiritual searches.
When someone asked Mauricio why he decided to embark on a journey through the most remote regions of Asia in 1993, he replied that it was because of the same wandering desire that lives within every man as a need to measure the dimensions of the world.
I remember that he told me that from that itinerary that he divided into two stages and that covered cities and regions of several countries such as New Delhi, Nepal, Nagarkot, Rajasthan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Beijing, Kashgar, Cairo, Alexandria, Tangier, Morocco and Lisbon, he wrote the book entitled Rihlain which he describes his odyssey through places such as the Sivarupi Mountains, the regions inhabited by saddhus Brahmins, the Kathmandu Valley, the Himalayan mountain range, the Thar Desert, the cold steppes of Lahul and Spiti, as well as the port of Hoi An, among many other places.
In that lonely garage where he lived his last days, he told me that the seed to undertake this journey began in his childhood with the stories that his father read to him about various regions of Asia, especially India; however, one of the triggers that at the beginning of the nineties pushed him to follow the same route as Marco Polo was the discovery of a poem by Tristan Klingsor, one of whose phrases says: “Asia, Asia, Asia, wonderful old country of nursemaid tales where fantasy sleeps like an empress in a forest full of mystery”.
He confessed to me that he understood other travelers who claimed that when crossing the regions of the enigmatic continent, regardless of nationality, religion or ideology, they shared the feeling of making a reunion with enigmatic universal roots that are pierced in the temples, valleys, cities, deserts, without forgetting the traditions and character of the people who lived in those distant lands.
In his mysteriously lost logs (hopefully his relatives will preserve them), Mauricio Lavista adopted in most of the passages a literary style that sought to be a faithful portrait of the experience in each region, as well as a metaphor of the effect that Asian cultures have on Western nature. I remember a passage that he gave me to read that said:
Is there a tiger hiding in the thicket? I follow the river ford. I enter a forest. I sunbathe on a rocky promontory. I walk to the shore; I take off my shirt. I dip my head into the cool air; it is my first baptism in India into an aquatic divinity. Silhouettes of temples in the distance. I now understand the climate and the atmosphere of the place. It is the furthest place I have ever traveled. If my organism were accustomed to the detachment from material benefits, to the forgetfulness of vested interests, would it perhaps know the feeling of nirvana? Am I too Western and therefore ambitious? Besides, I think, I am at a high point in my existence.. Orchha. November.
Mauricio believed that knowledge of other cultures helps writers redefine their established ideas about the world and approach a more universal idea of human nature. For this reason, he said that detail is a fundamental ingredient of every logbook because it often becomes an important record of a certain time and place, because after all, he said, a large part of history and the first contacts between cultures have been made and witnessed by solitary travelers.
Let’s hope that those logs that made up the book Rihla be published one day to pay tribute to a forgotten writer like Mauricio Lavista, who will undoubtedly be remembered by many members of the cultural circle of La Condesa and La Roma as the first Mexican to complete Marco Polo’s Silk Road. Something that, by the way, he said, brought him closer to his origins, his country and his place in the world.
A prayer for this author and I leave you a kiss.