Paulo confirmed he did—he had learned that this was the main condition for travel to any foreign country and had bought an outrageously expensive round-trip ticket arriving first in Rome, even though the return date was a year out. He reached for the belt that stayed hidden around his waist, ready to provide proof for what he’d said, but the guard told him it wasn’t necessary, he wanted to know how much money he had.
“Around sixteen hundred dollars. A little more, perhaps, but I’m not sure how much I spent on the train.”
He’d stepped off the plane in Europe with seventeen hundred dollars, his earnings as a college entrance exam instructor at the theater school he had himself attended. The Rome ticket had been the cheapest he could find; when he arrived there he’d discovered via the “Invisible Post” that there the hippies often gathered in the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the Spanish Steps. He’d found a place to sleep in a park, lived off sandwiches and ice cream, and could have stayed in Rome—where he’d met a Spanish woman from Galicia who immediately became a friend and shortly thereafter his girlfriend. He had finally bought the bestseller of his generation, which he had no doubt was about to make all the difference in his life: Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. During the days he’d spent on the Piazza di Spagna, he’d noticed that it wasn’t only the hippies who used the book—which listed the cheapest hotels and restaurants, plus important tourist attractions in each city—but more conventional travelers, too, known as “squares.”
He would have no trouble getting around when he arrived in Amsterdam. He had decided to continue on toward his first destination (the second was Piccadilly Circus, as he never tired of remembering) when the Spanish woman told him she was going to Athens, in Greece.
Once again he reached for his money, but he quickly received his stamped passport back. The agent asked whether he was carrying any fruits or vegetables—he was carrying two apples, and the guard asked him to throw them in a trash bin just outside the station as soon as he left.
“And how do I get to Amsterdam from here?”
He was informed he would need to take a local train, which passed by every half hour—the ticket he’d bought in Rome was good to his final destination.
The agent directed him to the exit, and Paulo once again found himself out in the fresh air, waiting on the next train, surprised and pleased that they had taken him at his word when it came to his ticket and the money he was carrying.
Truly, he was in another world.
12
Karla didn’t waste an entire afternoon sitting around in Dam Square, particularly because it had begun to rain and the psychic had assured her that the person she was waiting for would arrive the following day. She’d decided to go to the movies to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, which everyone had told her was a masterpiece, despite the fact she didn’t have much interest in science fiction films.
Alas, it truly was a masterpiece. The film had helped her kill some time while she waited, and the ending showed her something she thought she knew—but in reality it wasn’t a question of what she thought or didn’t think, it was an absolute and indisputable fact: time is circular and always returns to the same spot. We are born from a seed, we grow, we age, we die, we return to the earth and again become the seed that, sooner or later, becomes reincarnate in another person. Though her family was Lutheran, she had flirted for a time with Catholicism, and during the Mass she had begun to attend regularly, she would recite all the professions of faith. This was the line she liked the most: “I believe […] in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.”
The resurrection of the body—she had tried once to speak to a priest about that passage, asking him about reincarnation, but the clergyman told her it wasn’t about that at all. She asked him what it was about. His response—as stupid as they come—was that she didn’t yet have the maturity to understand. At that moment she began to slowly drift away from Catholicism because she’d noticed that the priest had no idea what the passage was about either.
“Amen,” she repeated that day as she made her way back to her hotel. She kept her ears open for anything, in case God decided to speak to her. After distancing herself from the Church, she decided to seek out—via Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, African religions, the various forms of yoga—some sort of response to her questions about the meaning of life. A poet had said many centuries before: “Your light fills the entire Universe / The lamp of love burns and rescues Understanding.”
Because love had always been such a complicated thing throughout her life, so complicated that she constantly avoided thinking about it, she arrived at the conclusion that this Understanding was within herself—that was, after all, what the founders of each of these religions had preached. And now that everything she saw reminded her of the Lord, she sought to make each of her actions a gesture of thanks for her life.
That was enough. The worst killing is that which kills the joy we get from life.
She stopped in a coffee shop, where there were several varieties of marijuana and hashish for sale. But the only thing she did was drink a coffee and trade a few words with another young woman, also Dutch, who seemed out of place and was also there having a coffee. Wilma was her name. They decided they would go to the Paradiso but they soon changed their minds, perhaps because the place was no longer a novelty for anyone, just as the drugs sold there weren’t either. A great thing for tourists but boring for those who had always had them within reach.
One day—one day in a far-off future—governments around the world would conclude that the best way to put an end to all they considered a “problem” was to legalize it. A great deal of hashish’s mystique was its being illegal and, as a result, highly sought after.
“But that’s in nobody’s interest,” Wilma said when Karla shared her thoughts. “They earn billions of dollars by cracking down. They consider themselves above the rest. Crusaders for society and the family. An excellent political platform—putting an end to drugs. What other idea would they replace it with? Sure, an end to poverty, but no one believes in that anymore.”
Their conversation came to an end and they sat staring at their coffee cups. Karla thought back to the movie, to The Lord of the Rings, to her life. She had never really had any interesting experiences. She had been born into a pious family, had studied at a Lutheran high school, knew the Bible by heart, had lost her virginity as an adolescent with a Dutch boy who was also a virgin at the time, had traveled some through Europe, had found a job when she turned twenty (by this time she was twenty-three). The days seemed to stretch on, to repeat themselves, she became Catholic merely to rebel against her family, decided to leave her parents’ house and live alone, had a series of boyfriends who came into and out of her life and her body for periods varying from two days to two months. She thought that the blame for all of that belonged to Rotterdam and its cranes, its gray streets, and its harbor, where stories were constantly coming in that were much more interesting than those she typically heard from her friends.
She got along better with foreigners. The only time her routine of absolute freedom was interrupted was when she decided to fall hopelessly in love with a Frenchman ten years her senior. She convinced herself that she could make that all-consuming love mutual—though she knew quite well that the Frenchman was only interested in sex, a discipline she excelled in and was always striving to improve. After a short while she left the Frenchman in Paris, having come to the conclusion that she hadn’t truly discovered the purpose of love in her life. This was a condition of her own making—all the people she knew had at one moment or another begun to talk about the importance of marriage, children, cooking, having someone to watch television with, take to the theater, travel the world with, bring back little surprises each time they came back home, get pregnant, raise the children, pretend they never saw each of their husband’s or wife’s petty betrayals, say that their children were their only purpose in life, worry about what to have for dinner, what they would grow up to be like, how things were going at school, at work, in life.