From Medan to Berastagi, July 3, 2019
The city squeezes itself into the vise of the road, it brings its engines it brings its masses. It meshes and knocks like a long machine. It takes us into its wheels and conveys us, it breaks us and grinds us.
The big metal trucks head sunk in their shoulders. The trucks with fluorescent gas cylinders. The plastic cars forcing the pace. The yellow and dented Mitsubishi minibuses, filled to the brim with bodies roped like sardines: heads at the windows seeking their air, shopping bags crushing them, drivers arm outside a cigarette in the fingers. The taller buses that are rams and fiestas: old Mercedes-Benzes in garish colours, fuchsia mudguards, set of lanterns on the head, two horned trumpets at the ears: their horns are panic musics, barn-owl shrieks.
The compressors clack in the tambal ban1. The pineapples dream upside down. The tanker trucks drink from rusty arms. On our white scooter that knows nothing of metal, I seek my way through the gearing. I try to survive the fiestas that detonate, the tonnes that rough us up, the wheels that eat the road and everything on it.
In the middle of the traffic an old Vespa, its hornet silhouette. It stalls. And while the man tries to restart it by kick, hemmed in on all sides by the traffic, harassed by howling horns, threatened by the wheels of the trucks, he does not abandon the cigarette that hangs from his moustache.
The machine spits me out at Berastagi. At the hotel where I stay, the guy at the reception tells me, speaking of the minibuses on the Medan road, as if it were the metal itself, the engines, the wheels and the iron that were this madness he points at:
– They are crazy, they are crazy…