In a tiny corner of the busy old quarter of Hanoi, some gentlemen feast in a lively local restaurant drinking Bia Hoi.
The weather is humid, my shirt is stuck to sweaty skin.
All around the noisy scooters head in every direction without knowing what braking is. All in a hurry, towards their next destination.
A mother with a baby in her arms crosses the road with determination and confidence, she’s walking straight without even looking to see if cars or motorbikes arrive, they are swallowed up by the traffic and reappear on the other side of the street. Unscathed, as always happens here.
The whole city is a colorful and unruly complex system of intertwining lives. Each building has a commercial activity on the ground floor that sells all kinds of merchandise. The whole of Hanoi is an immense market with no space left to the unprofitable emptiness, the streets and sidewalks are overflowing with salable items and two-wheeled and two-legged traffic.
The merchants are seated in front of their source of income on low colored plastic stools, they wait for customers, they talk to each other, they laugh, they eat, they sleep among the goods, they repair some item that has seen better days, they fix the layout of some new items just arrived, they weigh, cook, measure, take a selfie, a deep-eyed lady observes the constant coming and going of lives that never touch each other.
Next to her, on the bustling sidewalk, a cat is sitting on her hind legs, its quiet and serene eyes aiming at the road, as if enchanted.
I often wonder what cats stare, what thoughts go through their minds.
Someone says that we humans have a soul and animals don’t … how could such an idea ever be established? People like that have probably never spent time observing a cat studying the world.
Who knows what this soul is that everyone is talking about … just another concept that is repeated because someone has passed it on to us. We, humans, live on these things, stuck in a conditioned and conformed mind. We live on artificially induced images, we do not live on pure and free life as cats probably do.
It starts raining. People look for shelter and stop … the fast scooters stop … the street vendors, with their cone-shaped straw hats, carrying the goods to sell on the overcrowded bicycles stop … for a moment the city is as motionless, no more noise.
Then in a hurry, everyone put on colored raincoats and in a short time everything starts up again and turns on again. The Vietnamese capital returns full of vitality, in the rain.
The cat remained there, contemplating.
