Hippie

11

The train stopped, and the dreaded sign written in several languages came into view: BORDER CONTROL.

Some officers boarded and began to walk the aisles. Paulo was calmer now, the exorcism was over, but he couldn’t get a verse from the Bible, more precisely from the Book of Job, out of his head: “What I feared has come upon me.”

He needed to remain in control—anyone is capable of sniffing out fear.

Whatever. If, as the Argentinean said, the worst thing that could happen would be their getting turned away, there was no problem. There were other borders they could cross. And if somehow they didn’t manage, there was always the other center of the world—Piccadilly Circus.

Paulo was overcome with a deep sense of calm after reliving the terror he’d experienced a year and a half earlier. As though everything truly had to be faced without fear, as a mere fact of life—we don’t choose the things that happen to us, but we can choose how we react to them.

He realized that up until that moment the cancer of injustice, of despair, and of powerlessness had begun spreading throughout his entire astral body, but now he was free.

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.