Hippie

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 soul: 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.

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.

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.

* * *