by Paulo Coelho
“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.
In this way, they extended for a few more years their sense of usefulness on this earth, until sooner or later all the children left—the house became empty, and the only things that mattered at all were Sunday lunches, the whole family together again, always pretending everything was perfect, always pretending there were no petty jealousies or competition between them, while they all hurled invisible daggers through the air: because I make more than you do, my wife is an architect, we just bought a house like you’d never believe, that sort of thing.
Two years earlier she’d figured out that it didn’t make sense to go on living this absolute freedom. She began to think about death, flirted with the idea of entering a convent, she even went to the place where the Discalced Carmelites lived entirely cut off from the world. She told them she had been baptized, discovered Christ, and wanted to be his bride for the rest of her life. The mother superior asked her to think it over for a month before making her final decision—and during this month she had time to imagine herself in a cell, forced to pray from dawn to dusk, repeating the same words over and over until they lost meaning, and she discovered she was unable to lead a life whose routine might well drive her insane. The mother superior had been right—she never went back; no matter how bad the routine of absolute freedom was, she could always discover new and interesting things to do.
A sailor from Bombay, in addition to being an excellent lover (something she rarely encountered), led her to discover Eastern mysticism. It was then that she began to consider that her ultimate destiny in life was to travel far away, live in a cave in the Himalayas, keep the faith that the gods would come speak to her one day or another, free herself from everything that surrounded her at that moment and that she found boring, so boring.
Without getting into detail, she asked Wilma what she thought of Amsterdam.
“Boring. So boring.”
Exactly. Not only Amsterdam but all of Holland, where everyone was born under the protection of the state, no one ever had to worry about becoming a helpless old fogey thanks to all sorts of senior homes and lifetime pensions, health care that was free or practically so, and where recently all the kings had actually been queens—the Queen Mother Wilhelmina; the current queen, Juliana; and the heir to the throne, Beatrix. While women in the United States were burning their bras and demanding equality, Karla—who never used a bra despite the fact her breasts weren’t exactly small—was living in a place where such equality had been gained long before, without any noise, without all sorts of attention seeking, by simply following the ancestral logic that power belongs to women—it’s they who govern their husbands and children, their presidents and kings, who for their part seek to give the impression that they’re exceptional generals, heads of state, businessmen.
Men. They thought they ruled the world but couldn’t so much as take a step without, that very same night, seeking the opinions of their partners, lovers, girlfriends, mothers.
Karla needed to take a radical step, discover a country within herself or without that she’d never explored before and find a way past the tedium that she could feel draining her strength with each passing day.
She hoped the tarot reader had been right. If the person she’d been promised didn’t show up the next day, she would go to Nepal anyway, alone, running the risk of becoming a “white slave” and ending up sold to some fat sultan in a country where harems were the order of the day—though she had her doubts that anyone would have the courage to do this with her. She would defend herself better than any man, shielding herself from threatening looks, weapon in hand.
She said goodbye to Wilma, they agreed to meet at Paradiso the next day, and she set off for the hostel where she’d spent those monotonous days in Amsterdam, the city of dreams for so many who had crossed the world just to get there. She walked through the narrow streets without sidewalks, her ears alert to hearing something that might be a sort of sign. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, but signs are always like that, surprising and disguised as routine events. The sensation of the drizzle falling on her face brought her back to reality—not the reality around her but the fact that she was alive, walking down dark alleys in total safety, crossing paths with drug traffickers from Suriname who acted in the shadows—it’s true, they posed a real danger to their customers, because they offered the devil’s drugs, cocaine and heroin.
She passed through a square—it seemed as if, unlike Rotterdam, the city had a square on every corner. The rain became heavier, and she gave thanks for being able to smile despite all that she had thought about in the coffee shop.
As she walked she uttered silent prayers, words that were neither Lutheran nor Catholic, grateful for the life she had complained about only hours earlier. In her devotion she basked in the sky and earth, the trees and animals, the mere sight of which resolved all the contradictions in her soul and enveloped everything in a deep peace—not the sort of peace that comes from the absence of challenges but the sort that was preparing her for an adventure that she was resolved to see through, regardless of whether she found a travel companion. She was confident that the angels watched over her, singing melodies that, though undetected by her ears, reverberated throughout her and cleansed her mind of impure thoughts, put her in touch with her soul and taught her to love herself though she had never known Love.
I will not feel guilty for what I was thinking before, perhaps it was the film, perhaps the book, but, even if it was only me and my inability to see the beauty that exists inside myself, I ask your forgiveness. I love you and I’m grateful that you always accompany me, that you bless me with
your company and free me from the temptations of pleasure and the fear of pain.
Rather unusually, she began to feel guilty for being who she was, living in the country with the highest concentration of museums in the world, crossing at that moment one of the city’s 1,281 bridges, gazing at the homes with only three windows on the side (to have more than this was considered ostentatious and an attempt to humiliate the neighbors). She was proud of the laws that governed her people, of their history as seafaring explorers, even if everyone overlooked them for the Spanish and the Portuguese.
They’d made only one bad deal: selling the island of Manhattan to the Americans. But who’s perfect?
The night watchman opened the hostel door. She entered as quietly as she could, closed her eyes, and before falling asleep, she thought about the only thing missing in her country.
Mountains.
That was it: she would go to the mountains, far from those endless flatlands conquered from the sea by men who knew what they wanted and who had succeeded in taming a landscape that refused to submit.
* * *
—
She decided to wake up earlier than was typical—she was already dressed and ready to go at eleven in the morning, whereas she usually wasn’t ready until one in the afternoon. According to the tarot reader, today was the day she would find the person she was looking for, and the clairvoyant could not be wrong; both of them had fallen into a mysterious trance, beyond their control, like most trances, by the way. Layla had said something that hadn’t come from her own tongue but from a higher power who’d filled the entire atmosphere of her “office.”
There were still very few people in Dam Square—things really began to pick up after noon. But she noticed—finally!—a new face. Hair just like everyone else there, a jacket without many patches (the most prominent was a flag inscribed with BRASIL on top), a bright, knitted shoulder bag, made in South America, which at the time was a hit among the young people who crisscrossed the globe—as were ponchos and beanies that covered the ears. He was smoking a cigarette—a regular one, she knew, since she walked near where he was sitting and couldn’t detect any particular smell other than tobacco.
He was terribly busy doing nothing, looking around, at the building at the other end of the square and the hippies scattered about. He must have wanted someone to talk to, but his eyes betrayed shyness—extreme shyness, to be more specific.
She sat at a safe distance, so as to allow her to keep an eye on him and not let him out of her sight before proposing he join her on a trip to Nepal. If he’d already been to Brazil and South America, as his bag suggested, why wouldn’t he be interested in going further yet? He must have been about her age, as inexperienced, and it wasn’t likely to be difficult to convince him. It didn’t matter whether he was ugly or good-looking, fat or thin, tall or short. The only thing that interested her at all was having company on her personal adventure.
Paulo, too, had noted the pretty hippie girl who had passed by, and had it not been for his crippling shyness, perhaps he would have dared to flash her a smile. But he lacked the courage—she seemed far away; perhaps she was waiting on someone or wanting only to contemplate the morning free from the sun but not without the threat of rain.
He went back to focusing on the building in front of him, a true architectural marvel, which Europe on 5 Dollars a Day described as a royal palace, constructed upon 13,659 piles (also, the guide noted, the entire city was constructed on piles, though no one ever noticed). No guards stood at the door, and tourists went in and out—hordes of them, endless lines, the type of place he would never visit while he was there.
We can always sense when someone is watching us. Paulo could sense that the pretty hippie was now sitting just outside his field of vision, that she hadn’t taken her eyes off him. He turned his head, and she was indeed there but began to read as soon as their eyes met.
What to do? For almost a half hour, he sat thinking whether he ought to get up and go sit at her side—which was what would have been expected in Amsterdam, where people met others without need for excuses and explanations, merely the desire to talk and exchange stories. At the end of this half hour, after repeating a thousand times that he had nothing to lose, that it wouldn’t be the first or the last rejection he’d face, he stood up and walked in her direction. Her eyes did not move from her book.
* * *
—
Karla saw him approaching—something unusual in a place where everyone respected others’ individual space. He sat down beside her and said the dumbest thing one could say:
“Excuse me.”
She sat there looking at him, waiting for him to finish—which he did not. Five awkward minutes later she decided to take the initiative.
“Excuse me what, exactly?”
“Nothing.”
But, to her joy and relief, he didn’t say any of the usual stupid things like “I hope I’m not bothering you,” or “What’s that building there?” or “You’re so beautiful” (foreigners loved to use that one), or “What country are you from?” “Where did you buy these clothes?” that sort of thing.
She decided to help him a bit since she was much more interested in the young man than he could imagine.
“Why the coat of arms with ‘Brasil’ on your sleeve?”
“In case I come across Brazilians—that’s where I come from. I don’t know anyone in the city, and this way they can help me find interesting people.”
So this young man, who looked to be intelligent and had dark eyes that shone with an intense energy and a weariness that was even more intense had crossed the Atlantic to meet other Brazilians abroad?
That seemed the very epitome of stupid, but she decided to cut him some slack. She could jump straight to the subject of Nepal and continue the conversation or abandon it once and for all, move to another spot in the square, say she had to meet someone, or even leave without so much as an explanation.
But she decided not to move, and the fact that she stayed sitting there next to Paulo—that was his name—while he considered his options would end up changing her life completely.
That’s what love affairs are like—though the last thing she was thinking about at that moment was this secret word and the dangers it brought with it. There they were together, the clairvoyant had been right, the interior and exterior worlds were quickly merging. He could have been feeling the same thing, but he was too shy, it seemed—or perhaps he was only thinking about finding someone to smoke hashish with or, what was worse, saw her as a companion to take to Vondelpark to make love and then go their separate ways as if nothing very important had happened beyond an orgasm.
How to determine what someone is or isn’t in a matter of minutes? Of course, we know when a person repulses us, and we quickly distance ourselves, but this certainly wasn’t the case. He was crazy skinny, and he seemed to wash his hair. He must have showered that morning, she could still smell the soap on his body.
The second he sat down beside her and uttered that stupid phrase “Excuse me,” Karla had felt a deep sense of well-being, as though she were no longer alone. She was with him, and he with her, and they both knew this—even though nothing more had been said and neither of them was sure what was happening. Their unconfessed sentiments had yet to be revealed, but they would not remain unknown for long, Paulo and Karla were merely waiting for the right moment to make their feelings clear. That was the instant when many relationships that could have resulted in great love stories were lost—or because when two souls meet on the face of the earth, they already know where their journeys will lead them and this terrifies them, or because we are so focused on our own things that we don’t even allow two souls the time to get to know each other. We set off in search of “something better” and lose the opportunity of a lifetime.
Karla was allowing her soul to bare itself. At times, we are fooled by t
heir words because our souls aren’t exactly very faithful and end up accepting situations that in reality don’t have anything to do with anything; they try to please the mind and ignore the thing into which Karla was plunging deeper and deeper: Understanding. The outer self, that which you believe yourself to be, is nothing more than a limiting place, a stranger to the true self. This is why people have such a hard time listening to what their souls are telling them; they try to control the soul so that it does exactly as they have already decided—their wants, their hopes, their futures, the desire to say to friends, “I finally found the love of my life,” the dread of ending up alone in an old folks’ home.
She could no longer pretend. She didn’t know what she was feeling and sought to leave things as they were, without any detailed justifications or explanations. She was aware that she ought to finally lift the veil concealing her heart, but she didn’t know how and wasn’t about to find out so soon. It would be ideal to keep him at a safe distance until she could see what happened between the two in the coming hours, days, or years—no, she wasn’t thinking of years, because her destination was a cave in Kathmandu, alone, in touch with the universe.
Paulo’s soul had not yet bared itself, and he had no way of knowing if the girl before him would disappear from one moment to the next. He didn’t know what else to say, she too got quiet, and they both had accepted that silence and kept their gazes straight ahead, without actually noting anything. Around them, people were on their way to lunch counters and restaurants, packed trolleys rolled on by, but both Paulo and Karla looked lost, their emotions in some other dimension.
“Would you like to get lunch?”
Taking that as an invitation, Paulo was pleasantly surprised. He couldn’t understand why such a beautiful girl was asking him to lunch—his first few hours in Amsterdam were off to a good start.