“No physical contact,” the “good torturer” said.
She ignored him, and for a second, Paulo thought they would both be taken inside again and beaten for disobeying. He tried removing his hand, but she tightened her grip and held it there.
The “good torturer” simply closed the door and ordered the car forward. Paulo asked her whether she was all right, and she responded by railing against everything that had happened. Someone gave a chuckle in the front seat, and Paulo asked her to please quiet down, they could discuss it all later, or another day, or wherever it was they were being taken—perhaps a real prison.
“No one makes you sign a document saying our things have been returned to us if they have no intention of letting us out,” she told him. The figure in the front seat laughed again—actually, there were two people laughing. The driver was not alone.
“I’ve always heard that women are more courageous and more intelligent than men,” one of them said. “We’ve noticed this here among the prisoners.”
This time, it was the passenger who asked his companion to quiet down. The car sped on for a while longer, stopped, and the man on the driver’s side asked them to remove their hoods.
It was one of the men who had nabbed the couple at the hotel, he was of Asian descent—this time, he was smiling. He climbed out with them, went to the trunk, grabbed their backpacks, and handed them over instead of throwing them on the ground.
“You can go now. Take a left at the next light, walk about twenty minutes, and you’ll be at the bus station.”
He got back in the car and slowly pulled away, as though he didn’t have a care about everything that had just taken place. That was the way things were now in Brazil, he was in control, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Paulo glanced over at his girlfriend, who glanced back. They embraced and held their kiss for some time and then continued on to the bus station. It was dangerous to stay there, he thought. His girlfriend didn’t seem to have changed a bit, as though all those days—weeks, months, years?—had merely been a short pause in the trip of their dreams, as though the positive memories were what remained and could not be overshadowed by what had happened. He picked up the pace, avoiding any suggestion that everything was her fault, that they never should have stopped to see the sculptures molded by the wind, that if they had kept moving, none of those things would have happened—though it wasn’t anybody’s fault, not his girlfriend’s, not Paulo’s, not that of anyone they knew.
He was being ridiculous and weak. Suddenly he felt a terrible headache, so intense he almost couldn’t walk any further, flee back to the city where he’d grown up, or return to the Gate of the Sun and ask the ancient and forgotten inhabitants there what had happened. He propped himself up against a wall and let the backpack slide to the ground.
“You know what that is?” his girlfriend asked—and then quickly gave the answer. “I know the answer because I’ve already been through the same thing when my country was being bombed. The whole time, it was like my brain slowed down, the blood didn’t flow to my arteries the way it did before. It’ll pass in two or three hours, but we’ll buy some aspirin at the bus station.”
She grabbed his backpack, lifted him with her shoulder, and dragged him forward—slowly, at first, then gradually gaining speed.
Oh, woman, what a woman. A shame that when he suggested they set off together for the two centers of the world—Piccadilly Circus and Dam Square—she told him she was tired of traveling and, to be honest, she no longer loved him. They ought to go their separate ways.
11
The train stopped, and the dreaded sign written in several languages came into view: BORDER CONTROL.
Some officers boarded and began to walk the aisles. Paulo was calmer now, the exorcism was over, but he couldn’t get a verse from the Bible, more precisely from the Book of Job, out of his head: “What I feared has come upon me.”
He needed to remain in control—anyone is capable of sniffing out fear.
Whatever. If, as the Argentinean said, the worst thing that could happen would be their getting turned away, there was no problem. There were other borders they could cross. And if somehow they didn’t manage, there was always the other center of the world—Piccadilly Circus.
Paulo was overcome with a deep sense of calm after reliving the terror he’d experienced a year and a half earlier. As though everything truly had to be faced without fear, as a mere fact of life—we don’t choose the things that happen to us, but we can choose how we react to them.
He realized that up until that moment the cancer of injustice, of despair, and of powerlessness had begun spreading throughout his entire astral body, but now he was free.
He was beginning anew.
The border agents entered the cabin where Paulo and the Argentinean sat with four other people they didn’t know. As expected, the guards ordered the two of them to step off the train. Outside, there was a chill in the air, though night had only just begun to fall.
But nature follows a cycle that’s repeated in the human souclass="underline" a plant gives birth to the flower so that the bees might come and create the fruit. The fruit produces seeds, which transform once again into plants, which again bloom with flowers, which attract the bees, which fertilize the plant and cause it to produce yet more fruit, and so on and so forth until the end of eternity. Greetings, autumn, time to leave behind all that is old, the terrors of the past, and make way for the new.
Some of the young men and women were led inside the customs station. No one said a thing, and Paulo made sure to stay as far away as possible from the Argentinean—who took note and did not seek to burden him with his presence or his conversation. Perhaps he understood at that moment that he was being judged, that the young man from Brazil must have had his suspicions, but he’d seen Paulo’s face as it was covered by a dark shadow, and now it was full of light once again—perhaps “full of light” was an exaggeration, but at the very least the intense sadness of only moments before had disappeared.
They began calling each person individually to a room—and no one knew what was said inside because they exited through another door. Paulo was the third to be summoned.
Seated behind a desk was a uniformed guard who asked for Paulo’s passport and leafed through a large file full of names.
“One of my dreams is to go…” Paulo began, but he was immediately warned not to interrupt the official as he worked.
His heartbeat quickened, and Paulo was battling against himself, to believe that autumn had arrived, dead leaves had begun to fall, a new man had been born from the individual who until then had been in absolute tatters.
Bad vibrations only attract more bad vibrations, so he tried to calm himself down, particularly after he noticed the guard was wearing an earring in one ear, something unthinkable in any of the other countries he’d visited. He sought to distract himself with the room full of documents, a photo of the queen, and a poster of a windmill. The figure before him quickly set the list aside and didn’t even bother asking what Paulo was going to do in Holland—the guard only wanted to know if he had enough money for the trip back to his country.