Hippie

by Paulo Coelho

  Karla was seated in Dam Square, asking herself when the guy who ought to accompany her on this magical adventure (in her mind, of course) would show up. She’d left a job behind in Rotterdam, just an hour’s train ride away, but since she needed to save every last cent, she’d hitched a ride and the trip had taken almost a day. She had found out about the bus trip to Nepal in one of a dozen alternative newspapers published with the sweat, love, and effort of people who felt they had something to say to the world and subsequently sold for a nominal price.

  After nearly a week of waiting, she was growing anxious. She’d approached a dozen young men from different countries who wanted nothing but to stay put, in that town square filled with nothing remarkable but a phallic monument, which at a minimum should have inspired virility and courage. But no; not a single one of them was inclined to travel to such unknown lands.

  It wasn’t a question of distance: most of them came from the United States, Latin America, Australia, and other countries that required hefty prices for airline tickets, and they had faced many border checkpoints where they might have been barred and forced to return to their countries of origin before ever seeing one of the two world capitals. When they arrived there, they’d sit around the nondescript square, smoking marijuana and getting happy because there they could do so in plain view of the police, and they were soon literally kidnapped by the city’s numerous sects and cults. They forgot, at least for a while, what they had heard their entire lives: My boy, you have to go to college, get rid of this hair, don’t bring shame to your parents, people (what people?) will say we didn’t raise you right, whatever it is you’re listening to, it isn’t music, it’s time you got a job, or Look at your brother (or sister), he’s younger than you are and still manages to pay for his own fun without asking us for money.

  Far from their families’ never-ending laments, they were now free people, Europe was a safe place (as long as they didn’t get any ideas and cross the famous Iron Curtain to “invade” some Communist country), and they felt satisfied because our travels teach us everything we need to know for the rest of our lives, as long as there’s no need to explain this to our parents.

  “Dad, I know you want me to earn a diploma, but I can do that at any point in my life, what I need now are experiences.”

  There weren’t any fathers who could make sense of this logic, and so the only thing left for their children to do was save some money, sell their things, and sneak out of the house while the rest of the family was sleeping.

  Sure, Karla was surrounded by those who were free and determined to have experiences that most people lacked the courage to pursue. So why not go to Kathmandu by bus? Because it’s not Europe, they replied. We don’t have any idea what things are like over there. If something happens here, we can still go to the consulate and ask to be sent back to our countries (Karla hadn’t heard of a single case where this had happened, but legend had it this was possible, and after much repetition legend becomes truth).

  By the fifth day spent waiting for the man she’d choose as her “companion,” she was growing desperate—she was spending money on a hostel when she could easily be sleeping on the Magic Bus (this was the official name of the bus that cost a hundred dollars and covered thousands of miles). She decided to go see a clairvoyant she’d been in the habit of visiting before going to Dam Square. The clairvoyant’s place, as always, was empty—in September 1970, everyone either had paranormal capabilities or was in the process of developing them. But Karla was a practical woman, and though she meditated daily and was convinced she’d begun to open her third eye (an invisible spot in the middle of the forehead), up until then the men in her life had been all wrong for her, even when her intuition had assured her they were all right.

  And so, she decided to appeal to the psychic, especially because her endless wait (nearly a week had already passed, an eternity!) was making her think she ought to travel on with a female companion. Though two women, on their own, crossing many countries could mean suicide; they would, at a minimum, be greeted with ugly looks and, in the worst case, if her grandmother were to be believed, they would end up being sold as “white slaves” (the term, for her, had an erotic sound but she didn’t care to put her own flesh on the line to test it out).

  The clairvoyant, whose name was Layla, was a little older than Karla. She wore clothes of white and the angelic smile of someone in contact with a Higher Being and welcomed Karla with a bow (Finally, someone to help me pay the day’s rent, she must have thought to herself). She asked Karla to sit, which she did, and then the woman praised her for having chosen the energy center in the room. Karla pretended to herself that she’d truly managed to open her third eye, but her subconscious warned her that Layla must have said the same thing to everyone—or more precisely, to the few who entered that place.

  At any rate, all this was irrelevant. Incense was burned (“This one is from Nepal,” the clairvoyant told her, but Karla knew it had been manufactured nearby—incense was one of the hippies’ major industries, along with necklaces, batik shirts, and patches with the peace sign or flowers or the phrase “Flower Power” to be sewn onto clothing). Layla grabbed a deck of cards and began to shuffle them, asked Karla to cut the deck, placed three cards on the table, and launched into the most conventional of interpretations. Karla interrupted her.

  “I didn’t come here for this. I only want to know if I’m going to find someone to go with me to the same place that you told me”—she placed great emphasis on the words the same place that you told me, because she didn’t want to attract bad karma; if she’d said only I want to go to the same place, perhaps she would have ended up in some suburb of Amsterdam where the incense was actually made—“the same place you told me the incense came from.”

  Layla smiled, though her vibe had changed entirely—inside, she was burning with rage at having been interrupted at such a solemn moment.

  “Yes, of course you will.” It’s the duty of every clairvoyant and tarot reader to tell her or his clients what they want to hear.

  “When?”

  “By end of the day tomorrow.”

  They were both taken by surprise.

  For the first time, Karla felt the other woman was telling her the truth: her tone was positive, emphatic, as though her voice were coming from another dimension. Layla, for her part, was overcome with fear—it wasn’t often things happened that way, and when they did she was afraid of being punished for entering that world which seemed both false and true without the proper reverence, though she justified her actions every night in her prayers, claiming that everything she was doing there on Earth was to help others to approach the things they wanted with greater positivity.

  * * *

  —

  Karla immediately stood up from her energy center, paid for her half session, and left before the guy she was waiting for could arrive. “By end of the day tomorrow” was vague, it could well have meant that very same day. But whatever the case, she now knew she was waiting for someone.

  She returned to her spot in Dam Square, opened the book she had been reading, known then to only a few (which lent its author cult status): The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien, a tale of mythic lands like those she intended to visit. She pretended not to hear the young men who every now and then came to bother her with some stupid question in a feeble attempt to begin a still feebler conversation.

  Paulo and the man from Argentina had already discussed just about everything it was possible to discuss and now looked out on the flat terrain, but their minds were elsewhere—they both carried with them memories, names, curiosity, and above all a deep fear of what might happen when they reached the Dutch border, likely no further than twenty minutes away.

  Paulo started to tuck his long hair inside his coat.

  “You think you’re going to fool the guards like that?” the Argentinean asked him. “There’s nothing they hav
en’t seen, absolutely nothing.”

  Paulo gave up. He asked his companion whether he wasn’t worried.

  “Of course I am. Especially because I already have two Dutch stamps on my passport, so they start to think I’m coming a bit too often. And this can mean only one thing.”

  Drug trafficking. But as far as Paulo knew, drugs were legal there.

  “Of course not. They crack down hard on opioids. Same thing for cocaine. Of course, there’s no way for them to control LSD, all you have to do is dip the page of some book or a piece of cloth in the mixture and then cut it up and sell all the pieces. But everything they can detect can land you in prison.”

  Paulo thought it better to stop their conversation there. He was dying to know whether his fellow traveler was carrying something, but simply knowing would make him an accomplice. He had been in prison once before, although he had been totally innocent—in a country with the same decal on the doors of every airport: BRAZIL: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.

  When we try to dismiss negative thoughts, it only attracts more diabolic energy, and for Paulo, the simple act of remembering what had happened in 1968 not only set his heart racing but had him reliving in excruciating detail that night at a restaurant in Ponta Grossa, in Paraná—a state in Brazil known for issuing passports to blond and blue-eyed men and women.

  He was returning from his first lengthy trip along the latest hippie trail that was all the rage. With him was his girlfriend—eleven years his senior, born and raised under the Communist regime in Yugoslavia, the child of an aristocratic family that had lost everything but had given her an education that allowed her to learn four languages, flee to Brazil, and marry a millionaire. She would later divorce him when she found out he already considered her “old” at the age of thirty-three and had begun seeing a girl of seventeen. She then hired a top-notch lawyer who sued for enough damages that she would never have to work another day in her life.

  Paulo and his girlfriend had set off together for Machu Picchu on the Death Train, a mode of transportation much different from the train car that he found himself in at that moment.

  “Why do they call it the Death Train?” his girlfriend had asked the man responsible for checking tickets. “It’s not as if we’re traveling along any steep cliffs.”

  Paulo didn’t have the least interest in the response, but he got one all the same.

  “In the old days, these cars were used to transport lepers, the ill, and the bodies of the victims of a yellow fever epidemic that struck the region of Santa Cruz.”

  “I assume they’ve done an excellent job sanitizing the cars.”

  “We’ve had no casualties since, except for a miner or two forced to pull the pin and end it all.”

  The “miners” he referred to weren’t those born in the mineral-rich region of Minas Gerais in Paulo’s native Brazil but those who worked day and night in the tin mines of Bolivia. Well, it was a civilized world they were living in; he hoped no one would decide to pull any pins that day. To the relief of both, the majority of the travelers were women with their bowler hats and colorful dress.

  * * *

  —

  They arrived in La Paz, the country’s capital, 12,000 feet above sea level, but, having made the ascent by train, they barely felt the effects of the thin air. Even so, when they stepped off the train, they saw a young man wearing clothes that identified his tribe sitting on the ground, a bit disoriented. They asked him what was wrong (“I can’t breathe”). A man who was passing by advised that he try chewing coca leaves, which could be easily found at any of the nearby street markets. This was a tribal custom that helped those who lived there to face the high altitudes. The young man soon felt better and asked them to leave him where they had found him—he was to go to Machu Picchu that very day.

  * * *

  —

  The receptionist at the hotel they’d chosen called Paulo’s girlfriend to the side, said a few words, and then completed their registration. They went up to their room and immediately fell asleep, but not before Paulo asked what the receptionist had said.

  “No sex for the first two days.”

  It was easy to understand why. He was in no condition to do anything.

  They spent two days in the Bolivian capital without sex, without suffering any collateral effects of the soroche, as the lack of oxygen was called. Both he and his girlfriend attributed this to the therapeutic effects of the coca leaves, which in reality had nothing to do with it; soroche occurs only in those who depart from sea level and quickly climb to great heights—in other words, by plane—without allowing their bodies the time to adjust. The couple had spent seven long days on the Death Train. Much more ideal for adjusting to their environs and much safer than air travel—in the airport at Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Paulo had seen a monument honoring the “heroic pilots who laid down their lives in the line of duty.”

  In La Paz, they came across their first hippies—who, as a global tribe conscious of the responsibility and solidarity they owed one another, always wore the famous symbol of the inverted Viking rune. In Bolivia, a country where everyone sported colorful ponchos, jackets, shirts, and suits, it was practically impossible to know who was who without the help of the rune sewn onto jackets or pant legs.

  These first hippies they came across were two Germans and a Canadian woman. Paulo’s girlfriend, who spoke German, was soon invited for a walk through the city, while he and the Canadian woman looked at each other, unsure exactly what to say. When, half an hour later, the three others returned from their walk, they all decided they ought to depart immediately rather than spend their money there: they would continue on to the highest freshwater lake in the world, navigate its waters by boat, get off at the other end—which would already put them in Peruvian territory—and head straight for Machu Picchu.

  Everything would have gone according to plan if, when they arrived at the shores of Titicaca (the highest navigable freshwater lake in the world), the group hadn’t found themselves before an ancient monument known as the Gate of the Sun. Gathered around the monument were still more hippies, holding hands in a ritual that they were afraid to interrupt but, at the same time, would also have liked to be a part of.

  A young woman caught sight of them, silently beckoned them with a nod, and all five of them were able to sit with the others.

  It wasn’t necessary to explain why they were there; the gate spoke for itself. There was a crack straight down the middle of the upper part of the stone, possibly caused by a lightning strike, but the rest was a true wonder of low reliefs, a guardian of stories from a time already forgotten and yet still present, wishing to be remembered and discovered anew. It was sculpted from a single stone, and across the upper part were angels, the gods, lost symbols of a culture that, according to the locals, would show the way to recover the world in the event it was destroyed by human greed. Paulo, who could see through the opening in the gate onto Lake Titicaca in the distance, began to cry, as though he were in contact with those who had built that structure—people who had abandoned the area in a hurry, before they’d even had a chance to finish their work, fearful that something or someone would appear, demanding that they stop. The young woman who had called them to the circle smiled, she too with tears in her eyes. The rest stood with eyes closed, speaking to the ancestors, seeking to discover what had brought them all there, respecting this great mystery.

  Those who wish to learn magic ought to begin by looking around them. All that God wished to reveal to man He placed right in front of him, the so-called Tradition of the Sun.

  The Tradition of the Sun belongs to all—it wasn’t made for the erudite or the pure but for everyday people. Energy is to be found in the tiniest things man encounters in his path; the world is the true classroom, the Love Supreme knows you are alive and will teach you all you need to know.

  Everyone was silent, paying close attention to som
ething they could not quite understand but which they knew to be true. One of the young women there sang a song in a language Paulo could not understand. A young man—perhaps the oldest among them—stood up, opened his arms, and said a prayer:

  May God give you…

  For every storm, a rainbow,

  For every tear, a smile,

  For every care, a promise,

  And a blessing in each trial.

  For every problem life sends,

  A faithful friend to share,

  For every sigh, a sweet song,

  And an answer for each prayer.

  At this exact moment, a horn sounded from a boat, which was in fact a ship built in England, disassembled, and transported to a city in Chile, then carried piece by piece on the backs of mules to an altitude of 12,000 feet, where the lake was to be found.

  Everyone climbed on board, off toward the ancient lost city of the Incas.

  The days they spent there were unforgettable—rarely did someone actually manage to reach that place, only those who were God’s children, the free of spirit ready to face the unknown without fear.

  They slept in abandoned houses without roofs, gazing at the stars; they made love; they ate the food they’d brought. Each day they bathed completely nude in the river that ran below the mountain, and discussed the possibility that the gods had actually been astronauts and landed on Earth in that region of the world. They had all read the same book by a Swiss author who often interpreted the Incan drawings as trying to depict celestial travelers; just as they’d read Lobsang Rampa, the Tibetan monk who spoke of opening one’s third eye—until one day an Englishman told everyone sitting there on the central square in Machu Picchu that the so-called monk was named Cyril Henry Hoskin and was a plumber from the English countryside whose identity had recently been discovered and whose credentials had already been refuted by the Dalai Lama.