I met a sage in Bosnia once.
Majda wouldn’t stop talking about her. Gala was one of the smartest people she knew. Gala became an international model in Panama. Gala just curated an art gallery in Italy. As my Airbnb host, Majda dispensed a fair share of wisdom herself in a gorgeous cigarette voice she attributed to the war. “I started smoking when we fled to Sardinia.” The wall across from her front gate was still pockmarked with bullet holes. Her voice lowered in awe whenever Gala came up.
Every morning over coffee the suspense built with each latest update on Gala’s whereabouts. Heating a copper pot slowly on open flame till just before the velvet crema rose past the rim, Majda sketched in the details of her daughter’s brilliant career. I asked where she got the name Gala. She said it came from the wife of her favorite painter Salvador Dalí. Finally one day she announced, “Gala is here.”
Sure enough there in the courtyard, her feet on the table, sat a young woman reading a book. My voice lowered in awe as I asked Gala what possessed her to split her time between three countries. She said that after a difficult youth she attended the School of Peace in a castle in Tuscany and it opened the world for her. Their method of housing “rivals” together, an Israeli and a Palestinian for example, made her come to understand her Serbian roommate firsthand rather than through the mist of propaganda and witness that people are more complicated than we can imagine. Alongside university studies, they practiced peacemaking techniques and upon graduation were meant to swoop back home in every direction sowing peace like swallows, rondine in Italian, the school’s namesake. That, to some extent, is what carried her back and forth over the sea.
Years later, Gala’s words pierced me with insight. “Seph, you give so much to people. It’s good, but be careful. People like that give what they feel they’re missing. And usually, they’re trying to fill a void.” To be seen and seen through so thoroughly left me reeling.
I wonder what wisdom I have yet to stumble on, whose words I have neglected to seek, and where. And if they might finally fill the void.
