“You sure you don’t want to see India?”
Paulo could see that Karla and Lars were flirting. So what? She wasn’t his girlfriend, she wasn’t anything more than a recent acquaintance, kind but keeping her distance.
“How much to Kathmandu?”
“Seventy American dollars.”
Seventy dollars to go to the other end of the world? What kind of bus was this? Paulo couldn’t believe his ears.
Karla took the money from her belt and handed it to the “travel agent.” This Lars filled out a receipt like those you get in restaurants, without any information beyond a person’s name, passport number, and final destination. He then filled a section of the receipt with stamps that in reality meant nothing but lent an air of respectability to the whole operation. He handed it to Karla along with a map of the route.
“There are no refunds in the event of closed borders, natural disasters, armed conflicts along the way, that sort of thing.”
She understood perfectly.
“When’s the next Magic Bus?” Paulo asked, emerging from his silence and his brooding.
Lars’s tone became slightly hostile. “It depends. We’re not a regular bus line, as you might have guessed.” He’d taken Paulo for an idiot.
“That I know, but you didn’t answer my question.”
“In theory, if everything’s in order with Cortez’s bus, he ought to get here in two weeks, rest for a bit, and then take off before the end of the month. But I can’t promise anything—Cortez, like our other drivers…”
The way he said “our,” it was almost as if he were referring to a large enterprise, something he’d denied being a short time before.
“…gets tired of taking the same route all the time. They own the vehicles they drive, and Cortez could decide to go to Marrakech, for example. Or Kabul. He always talks about such things.”
Karla said goodbye, but not before flashing a killer look at the Swede before her.
“If I weren’t so busy, I’d offer to drive you myself,” Lars said in response to Karla’s wordless message. “That way we could get to know each other better.”
As far as he was concerned, the girl’s male companion didn’t exist.
“There’ll be a chance yet. When I make it back, we can grab a coffee and see how things develop.”
It was at that moment that Lars, leaving behind the arrogant tone of someone who owned the world, said something no one was expecting.
“Those who go to the very end never come back—at least not for a good two or three years. That’s what the drivers tell me.”
Kidnappings? Muggings?
“No, none of that. The nickname for Kathmandu is ‘Shangri-la,’ the valley of paradise. Once you get used to the altitude, you’re going to find everything you need there. And it’s unlikely you’ll ever want to come live in a city again.”
As he handed her the ticket, he also handed her another map marked with all the stops.
“Tomorrow at eleven o’clock. Everyone here. Whoever doesn’t make it doesn’t get on.”
“But isn’t that too early?”
“You’ll have plenty of time to sleep on the bus.”
Karla, who was a stubborn and headstrong person, had decided the day before, when they’d met at Dam Square and walked around, that Paulo had to go with her. Though they’d spent little more than twenty-four hours together, she enjoyed his company. And she was comforted by the fact that she would never fall in love with him, because she was already feeling a bit strange about the Brazilian, and this needed to pass soon. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing better than to spend time with a person before their charm dissipated, in less than a week.
If things continued their current course and she left behind in Amsterdam the man she still considered her ideal, her trip would be completely ruined by the constant
memory of him. And, if the image of this ideal man continued to grow in her mind, she would turn around halfway through her trip, they would end up marrying—something that was absolutely not in her plans for this incarnation—or he would set off for some distant, exotic land full of Indians and snakes slithering down the streets of its big cities (though she thought this second part could well be legend, like many other things people said about his country).
For her, Paulo was merely the right person at the right time. She had no plans to transform her trip to Nepal into a nightmare—constantly fending off other men’s proposals. She was going because doing so seemed to her the craziest thing she could do, something far beyond her limits—she who had practically been raised without any limits at all.