Hippie

7

The train’s pace began to slow, a likely sign they were approaching the Dutch border.

“Is everything all right with you, dude?” the Argentinean asked.

Paulo nodded, searching for something to talk about, to exorcise his negative thoughts. It had been over a year since the incident at Vila Velha, and most of the time he managed to control the demons inside his head. But whenever the word POLICE entered his line of sight, even if it were just a customs official, his terror returned. Only this time when the terror returned so did the entire story, which he’d already told a few friends, though always maintaining a certain distance, as though observing himself from afar. However, this time—and for the very first time—he was repeating the story to himself alone.

“If they bar us at the border, no problem. We can go to Belgium and cross somewhere else,” the Argentinean suggested.

Paulo wasn’t in much of a mood to talk to this character—his paranoia had returned. What if the man really was trafficking hard drugs? What if they decided Paulo was an accomplice and threw him in prison until he could prove his innocence?

The train came to a stop. It wasn’t customs but a tiny station in the middle of nowhere where two people got on and five got off. The Argentinean, seeing that Paulo wasn’t in much of a talking mood, decided to leave him alone with his thoughts, but he was worried—Paulo’s expression had changed entirely. He asked one last time:

“So, everything really is all right with you, right?”

“I’m performing an exorcism.”

The Argentinean got the message and said nothing more.

Paulo knew that there, in Europe, the things he’d been through did not happen. Or, rather, they had happened but in the past. He always asked himself how those walking to the gas chambers in the concentration camps or lined up for death at a mass grave, watching the firing squad execute the front line, never had the slightest reaction, never tried to run, never attacked their executioners.

The answer was simple: their panic was so great that they were no longer present. The brain blocks out everything, there’s neither terror nor fear, just a strange submission to what’s about to occur. Emotions vanish to make way for a sort of limbo, where everything happens in a zone that scientists have been unable to explain to this day. Doctors have a label for this, “temporary stress-induced schizophrenia,” and have never bothered looking into the exact consequences of the flat affect, as they call it.

And, perhaps to expel the ghosts of his past once and for all, Paulo relived the entire ordeal through to the very end.