I Become a Madman

I was staying in Quito, Ecuador, which is a very interesting high altitude town. I was living in a cheap hotel on a downtown corner one block off the main street. The hotel was pretty dilapidated like most of Quito, but had been some rich person's mansion maybe eighty years ago. Like other rich people with delusions of grandeur, the first owner of this big old domicile had built a four-story fake castle tower on the corner of the house facing the street intersection and my room was at the top. I was living out a childhood fantasy of being a magician living in a round tower room, but this place was really pretty poor.

Quito is not exactly a touristic paradise and even the legitimate hotels are empty most of the time.

I had been the only guest at this inn for a month and was surprised when I came in from a stroll one afternoon to see a man in the “lobby” registering with the nice, fat old lady who owned the place.

I had been on the road long enough to be a little careful so I looked this new guest over with what you might call critical interest, if not outright suspicion.

He was young, dark, small and thin. His clothes were a patchwork of elegant and shabby and he was carrying a big cardboard suitcase. By the way he carried it, I knew the suitcase was empty.

“This guy's a thief.” I thought.

He avoided eye contact with me like he already knew who I was, an American maybe with money, and shambled off to his upstairs room following the “bellboy”, the worthless nephew of the owner.

When he was gone, I asked the lady who her new guest was. She said he was a tourist from Spain.

That clinched it. I had been traveling a long time and I had never met anyone from Spain on the road. The Spanish seem to have lost their enthusiasm for adventurous exploration since the conquest. Modern Spaniards stay home. I thought the guy was a thief and I was, obviously, his prospective victim.

I went up to my tower room and gave it a security check. The single door was flimsy, with a useless lock on the inside and a hasp with padlock on the outside for when you went out, but the windows would open and if I heard the thief breaking in, I could probably exit through a window and onto the roof of the lower part of the house. A watchman was usually drowsing below on the street corner all night and I thought I could make enough noise from the rooftop to wake him. (“Socorro! Socorro!”)

I didn't sleep too well, but in the morning sunshine I thought I was probably being paranoid about the skinny young stranger—maybe he was some kind of freak traveling salesman.

I had an early breakfast date at a coffee shop a couple of blocks away before the girl went to clerk at a bank, so I put the padlock on my door and went out.

This girl spoke a little English and I spoke a little Spanish and we were friends. She had loaned me a paperback book by the Lebanese mystic, Kahlil Gibran: How I Became a Madman. The book was in Spanish but I had read it before in English so I could more or less understand it.

Gibran's story is a surrealistic fable: The narrator wakes up one day to find that during the night thieves have stolen the mask that he wears every day—in fact, they have stolen all the masks he has worn for his last seven lifetimes! He is outraged, frightened and angry. He runs out of his house screaming that thieves have stolen his masks and his neighbors come out and stare. Then he realizes that he has never been out of his house before without his mask and he is afraid of what his neighbors, will think. The neighbors, who are all wearing their customary masks, are appalled. But then, standing outside without a mask for the first time in his life, he feels the sunshine on his naked face and it is wonderfully pleasant. His masked neighbors are afraid of him at first, since he is the only person they have ever seen without a mask, but then they scornfully avoid him. They say he has become a madman. But the “madman” loves to feel the sun and wind on his exposed face and, slowly and painfully, he learns to live without a mask. At the story's end, he blesses the thieves for stealing his masks since they have given him the joy and freedom of living honestly, without a mask—and, though his neighbors ever after call him “the madman”–– he is content.

When I returned to my room after the coffee date, the padlock had been cut away and my room had been ransacked. My clothes, my notes, my drawing tools were all gone. And since I had only expected to be away from the room for a short time, I had left all my other ID's and credentials there too: my passport was gone, my university diplomas, my navy discharge papers, my bank records, my checks and letters of recommendation—that skinny “Spaniard” had stolen all my masks—but he had not taken the book.

So, maskless in Quito and trying to bless my bandit, I began to learn to live free.

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