Men I didn’t want to sleep with. Chapter 3.
Alvaro
I once met an extraordinary man called Luis, who made me promise I’d write a book about all the other incredible men I’ve also met. You can read Luis’ story here.
This is the story of Alvaro, the castaway hunter.
In 2016, I read in the newspaper that a real-life Tarzan had been found in the Vietnamese jungle. When he was just 4 years old, his father had taken him there to escape the war. Living away from society for 41 years, they weren’t even aware that the Vietnam war was over. The article was complemented by a video in which a handsome blonde man asked the “Vietnamese Tarzan” profound questions about what it was like to live outside of society, how they survived, and how he saw society from the outside.
Having fallen in love with the story and the questions asked, I conducted some research of my own. I found out that the video had been made by a Hong Kong company called Docastaway, which enables people to go alone on castaway holidays to secret desert islands around the world. I then sent an email to Docastaway complimenting the video, and the beautiful blonde man in it. After a few days, the blonde man replied, and I discovered he was the founder and CEO of the company, as well as a very famous Spanish explorer. His name was Alvaro Cerezo.
For years, we wrote to each other and discovered we were both mad as hell: while I worked with eagles and hitchhiked around the world, he travelled through jungles and deserted places and had managed to find numerous other castaways, whose interviews he sent me.
After some time, our epistolary relationship was marked by Evelyn’s First Disappearance, when I suddenly deleted all my social media profiles without leaving a trace. After about a year, Alvaro contacted me by email asking where I had disappeared to. I responded that I was working as a reindeer herder in Greenland, to which he replied that it was impossible that we hadn’t yet met in person and sent me a plane ticket to visit him in his castaway home in Spain.
From that visit, our friendship began. I found out that Alvaro lives at night and sleeps during the day because that’s the way his body works. He doesn’t even think about living in the circadian rhythms dictated by others. He explores jungles on full moon nights, and he only reads books about castaways because that’s the only thing that interests him. As soon as a castaway is found elsewhere in the world, he goes there and becomes a constant presence in the castaway’s life until he knows all their secrets.
Alvaro does not like to speak in public and makes no effort that goes against his nature. He simply never gives interviews to anyone and does not concede to any conditions. Despite this, the internet is full of videos and articles about him, written by people who have only communicated with him by email or made by third parties (like me, haha). Alvaro does not answer and never sees people, except for a very lucky few, because he loves to be alone.
Alvaro is in perfect shape and does not adhere to society’s sick pattern of sitting at the table three times a day and stuffing himself with food. He just eats nuts or fruit (or wild animals if he is exploring) when he’s hungry, which is very rare. He once sent me a video of a hissing snake in the woods, and then a picture of the snake’s spine on the plate, with the comment “only the bones left”. After meeting him, I also adopted his habit of only eating when hungry, and it is impossible not to be thin.
Alvaro has a wonderful business but has no idea how much he earns, and he lives very simply, surrounded by nature. He only sees romantic relationships as bringing problems and is therefore happily single without feeling any external pressure to give in to conventional familiar patterns. He is one of the most authentic and happy men I know, with the sweetly enthusiastic and innocent perspective of a child.
To me, Alvaro is an interviewer of aliens, he is Gulliver on his travels, and he is Hobbes discovering Man in the state of nature.
Do you want to be happy? Look around you and appreciate everything you have. Only do things that make you happy as a unique and irreplicable person, without being constrained by common needs. Do not obey the schedules, needs and requirements of others. Can’t complete a mission? Abandon it, who will remember it in a few years? Are relationships bad for you? Be alone. Want to do more than something that’s only valuable to you? Go ahead. You are free. Life is simple. Life is beautiful.
