by Paulo Coelho
The travelers washed their clothes. The two annoying little girls pretended not to see the group of more than twenty nude people standing right next to them, and soon they seemed to have hit upon some captivating subject of conversation. Paulo washed and squeezed out his shirt and underwear, thought about washing his pants and using the spare ones he always carried with him, but he thought it better to leave this for the next group bath—jeans were useful in any situation, but they took a long time to dry.
He noted what seemed to be a small chapel on top of one of the mountains and the scores in the vegetation carved by the intermittent rivers that must have run through there each spring when the snow melted. At that moment, they were streaks of sand.
The rest was absolute chaos, the chaos of black rocks mixed with other rocks, without any order, any attention to appearance—which made them especially beautiful. They weren’t trying to do anything, not even to fall into order or arrangement so as to better resist nature’s constant assault. They could have been there for millions of years or a mere two weeks. Signs near the entrance asked drivers to be wary of rockslides, which meant the mountains were still in the process of formation, they were living, the rocks sought each other out the way human beings do.
This chaos was beautiful, it was the font of life, it was how he imagined the universe beyond that place—and also within himself. It was a beauty that wasn’t the fruit of comparisons, of prayers, or desires—simply a way of living a long life in the form of rocks, of pine trees that threatened to plummet from the mountains but which must have been there for years because they knew they were welcome there, pleasing in the eyes of the rocks, and each adored the other’s company.
“Further up there’s some sort of church or a chapel,” someone said.
Yes, everyone had noticed it but they all thought it had been a personal discovery and now they knew it wasn’t, and they silently asked themselves if someone lived there or if it had been abandoned years earlier, why it was painted white in a place where the rocks were black, how someone had managed to climb up there to build it in the first place. But anyway, there was the chapel, the only thing that differed from the surrounding primal chaos.
And there they all stood, gazing at the pines and the rocks, trying to determine the exact location where the surrounding mountains peaked, putting their clean clothes back on, and realizing, once again, that a bath was capable of curing many sorrows that refuse to budge from our minds.
The bus horn blew, it was time to resume their journey—something they’d forgotten about completely amid the beauty of that place.
By the look of it, Karla could be a bit obsessive with certain subjects.
“But how did you learn all this about parallel realities? It’s one thing to have an epiphany, a revelation in some cave, but returning over these thousands of miles is something else entirely. It’s not as if there’s a single spot where spiritual experiences are possible—God is all around us.”
“Yes, God is all around us. I always keep him close when I walk through the fields of Dooradoyle—the place where my family has lived for centuries—or when I go to watch the sea in Limerick.”
They were sitting at a restaurant on the side of the road, near the border with Yugoslavia—where one of the great loves of Paulo’s life had been born and raised. Until that moment no one—not even Paulo—had encountered any trouble with visas. However, because Yugoslavia was a Communist country, he now felt uneasy, though the driver had told everyone not to worry—unlike Bulgaria, Yugoslavia was outside the Iron Curtain. Mirthe was next to Paulo, Karla next to Rayan, and everyone maintained an air of “everything’s all right,” even knowing that a change of couples might well be approaching. Mirthe had already said she didn’t intend to stay long in Nepal. Karla had claimed she was going there with the possibility of never returning.
Rayan continued.
“When I lived in Dooradoyle, a city the two of you should visit someday, though it rains quite a bit, I thought that I was destined to spend the rest of my days there, with my parents, who hadn’t even been to Dublin to see the capital of their country. Or I’d be like my grandparents, who lived in the country, had never seen the sea, and thought Limerick was ‘too big a city.’ For years I did everything they asked: school, work at a minimarket, school, rugby—because the city had its own team that played hard though it never managed to qualify for the national league—go to Catholic church, because it was part of my country’s culture and identity, unlike those who live in Northern Ireland.
“I was used to all this, and would set off on weekends to see the ocean. Even though I was a minor, I drank beer because I knew the pub owner, and I began getting used to the idea that this was my fate. After all, what’s wrong with living a calm and easy life, looking at all those houses that’d probably been built by the same architect, going out now and then with a girl, going to the stables just outside the village and discovering sex—good or not, it was sex, there were orgasms, though I was afraid to go all the way and end up punished by my parents or by God.
“In adventure books everyone follows their dreams, they go to incredible lands, pass through some adverse circumstances, but they always come back victorious to tell their battle stories at the market, at the theater, in films—in short, in all the places where there’s someone to listen. We read these books and we think: my fate will be similar, I’ll conquer the world in the end, I’ll become rich, return to my country as a hero and everyone will envy me, respect me for what I’ve done. The women will smile as I walk by, the men will doff their hats and ask me to tell them for the thousandth time what happened in this or that situation, how I was able to take advantage of the only opportunity I had in my entire life and transform it into millions and millions of dollars. But these things only happen in adventure books.”
The Indian (or Arab) man, who took turns at the wheel with the primary driver, came and sat next to them. Rayan continued his story.
“I went and served in the army, like the bulk of the boys in my city. Paulo, how old are you?”
“Twenty-three. But I didn’t serve, I received a deferment because my father managed to get something we call third rank, in other words, reservist for the reservists, and now I can spend this time traveling. I think it’s been two hundred years since Brazil fought a war.”
“I served,” said the Indian man. “Ever since we got our independence, my country has been at war—an undeclared war—with its neighbor. It’s all the fault of the English.”
“The English are always to blame,” Rayan seconded. “They still occupy the northern part of my country, and just last year, right around the time I had returned from a paradise called Nepal, things got worse. Now Ireland is at the brink of war after confrontations between Catholics and Protestants. They’re sending troops in.”
“Carry on with your other story,” Karla interrupted. “How did you end up going to Nepal?”
“Bad influences,” Mirthe interjected, laughing. Rayan also laughed.
“You’re absolutely right. My generation grew up and my school friends began to move to America, where the Irish community is enormous and everyone has an uncle, a friend, some family.”
“You’re not going to tell me this is also the fault of the English.”
“This is also the fault of the English,” Mirthe said; it was her turn to enter the conversation. “They tried to starve our people to death twice. The second time, in the nineteenth century, they planted a fungus in our potato fields—our main source of sustenance—and the population began to wane. They estimate an eighth of the population died of hunger—hunger!—and two million had to leave the country in search of food. Thank God America received us with open arms yet another time.”
That girl, who looked like a diva from some other planet, began to hold court on the subject of the two great famines, something Paulo had never heard of. Thousands
dead, no one to support the people, a fight for independence, or things like that.
“I earned my degree in history,” she said. Karla tried to guide the conversation back to what mattered—Nepal and parallel realities—but Mirthe didn’t stop until she was finished teaching everyone how much Ireland had suffered, how many hundreds of thousands of people had starved to death, how the country’s great revolutionaries went before the firing squad after two attempted uprisings, how finally an American (yes, an American!) forged a peace treaty for a war that had seemed it would never end.
“But this will never happen—never happen—again. Our resistance is much stronger now. We have the IRA and we’re going to take the war to their land, with bombs, killings, whatever’s possible. Sooner or later, as soon as they find a good excuse, they’re going to have to march their dirty boots straight off of our island.” And, turning to the Indian man: “Like they did in your country.”
The Indian man—whose name was Rahul—had begun to tell what had happened in his country, but this time Karla adopted a stronger, more decisive tone.
“Shall we let Rayan finish his story?”
“Mirthe is right: it was ‘bad influences’ that led me to Nepal the first time. When I was serving in the army, I was in the habit of going to a pub in Limerick, near the barracks. They had everything there, darts, pool, arm wrestling, everyone trying to prove to the others how manly they were, how they were ready for any challenge. One of the regulars was an Asian guy who never spoke; all he ever did was drink two or three glasses of our national treasure—a dark beer called Guinness—and leave before the bar owner would ring the bell advising it was nearing eleven at night and the bar was about to close.”
“It’s all the fault of the English.”
In fact, the tradition of closing at eleven had been set by Great Britain at the start of the war, as a means of keeping drunk pilots from setting off to attack Germany, or soldiers lacking discipline from waking up late, ruining morale.
“One fine day, tired of listening to the same stories of how everyone was getting ready to go to America as soon as they could, I asked permission to sit at the table of this Asian man. We sat there for maybe a half hour—I figured he might not speak English and I didn’t want to make him self-conscious. But before leaving that day, he said something that stuck in my head: ‘You may be here, but your soul is in another place—my country. Go in search of your soul.’
“I agreed and raised my glass to salute him, but avoided getting into details. My rigid Catholic upbringing kept me from imagining any scenario beyond body and soul united, awaiting their meeting with Christ after death. They are obsessed with this idea of the soul in the East, I told myself.”
“Yes, we are,” said Rahul.
Rayan realized he’d offended the man and decided to poke fun at himself.
“We’re worse still, we think the body of Christ can be found in a piece of bread. Don’t take me the wrong way.”
The other man waved his hand, as if to say, “It’s no big deal,” and Rayan was finally able to finish his story—but only a part, because soon they would all be interrupted by some bad energy.
“So anyway, I was already resigned to return to my village, take care of our business—more specifically, my father’s dairy farm—while the rest of my friends crossed the Atlantic to see the Statue of Liberty as it welcomed them, but I couldn’t get that man’s comment out of my head that night. The truth was I was trying to convince myself everything was all right, that I was going to find a girl one day and get married, have kids, far from this world of smoking and swearing where I lived, even though I’d never made it further than the cities of Limerick and Dooradoyle. I’d never been curious enough even to stop and have a walk through one of the small towns—villages, actually—between these two cities.
“At that time, I thought it was enough, safer and cheaper, to travel through books and films—no one on the planet had laid eyes on fields as beautiful as those that surrounded me. Still, I returned the next day to the pub, sat at the solitary man’s table, and even knowing it’s risky to ask questions that have a high probability of getting an answer, I asked him what he’d meant. Where was this country of his?”
Nepal.
“Anyone who’s made it to high school has heard of a place called Nepal, but he’s probably already learned and forgotten the name of its capital, the only thing he can remember is that it’s far away. Maybe in South America, in Australia, in Africa, in Asia, but one thing’s for certain, it’s not in Europe, or else he would have met someone from there, seen a film, or read a book about it.
“I asked him what he’d meant the day before. He wanted to know what he’d told me—he couldn’t remember. After I reminded him, he sat there staring at his glass of Guinness for several moments without saying anything, then finally he broke his silence: ‘If I said that, perhaps you really ought to go to Nepal.’ ‘And how do you suppose I get there?’ ‘The same way I came here: by bus.’
“Then he left. The next day, when I asked to sit at his table so he could tell me more about this story of my soul awaiting me so far away, he told me he preferred to drink alone, as he did, after all, every night.
“Now, if it were a place I could reach by bus and I managed to find some company for the trip, who knows, maybe I would end up visiting that country after all.
“That’s when I met Mirthe, in Limerick, sitting in the same spot I often visited to stare at the sea. I thought she wouldn’t have any interest in some kid from the country whose destiny wasn’t Trinity College in Dublin—where she was finishing her studies—but the O’Connell Dairy, in Dooradoyle. But we had an immediate connection, and during one of our conversations I told her about the unusual character from Nepal and what he’d said to me. Soon I would be going home for good and all that—Mirthe, the pub, my friends in the barracks, everything—would merely be a phase from my youth. I was caught by Mirthe’s tenderness, her intelligence, and—why not just say it?—her beauty. If she thought I was deserving of her company, it would make me more secure, more confident in myself in the future.
“One long weekend, just before the end of my military service, she took me to Dublin. I saw the place where the author of Dracula had lived and Trinity College, where she studied, which was bigger than anything I could have dreamed. In one of the pubs near the university, we sat drinking until the owner rang the closing bell. I sat looking at the walls covered in photos of the writers who had made history in our land—James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw. At the end of our conversation, she handed me a piece of paper telling me how to get to Kathmandu. There was a bus leaving every fifteen days from the Totteridge and Whetstone subway station.
“I thought she’d grown tired of me, wanted me far, far away, and I grabbed the piece of paper without the slightest intention of going to London.”
* * *
—
In the midst of telling his story, Rayan pretended not to hear a group of motorcycles pull up and then rev their engines in neutral. From the travelers’ vantage point inside the restaurant, they couldn’t tell how many bikers there were, but the sound was threatening and out of place. The manager of the restaurant mentioned they were closing soon, but no one at any of the other tables had budged and Rayan continued speaking.
“Then Mirthe surprised me with what she said: ‘Setting aside travel time, which I won’t mention so as not to discourage you, I want you to come back from there after exactly two weeks. I’ll be here waiting for you—but if you aren’t here by the day I think you ought to arrive, you’ll never see me again.”
Mirthe laughed. That wasn’t exactly what she’d said—it was closer to “Go in search of your soul, because I’ve already found mine.” What she hadn’t said that day, and wasn’t about to now, was “You are my soul. I’ll pray every night that yo
u return safely, that we meet again, and that you never want to leave my side, because you deserve me and I deserve you.”
“Was she really going to wait for me? Me, the future owner of O’Connell Dairy Milk? What would she care for a kid with so little culture and so little experience? Why was it so important for me to follow the advice of some strange man I met in a pub?
“But Mirthe knew what she was doing. Because the moment I stepped onto that bus, after having read everything I could find about Nepal and then lying to my parents that the army had extended my service time for misconduct and was sending me to one of its most remote bases, in the Himalayas, I came back another person. I left as a hayseed, I came back as a man. Mirthe came to meet me, we slept in her house, and ever since we’ve never been apart.”
“That’s the problem,” she said, and everyone at the table knew she was being sincere. “Of course I don’t want some idiot at my side, but I also wasn’t expecting someone who would say to me, ‘Now it’s your turn to go back with me.’ ”
She laughed.
“And what’s worse, I accepted!”
Paulo was already feeling awkward about sitting next to Mirthe, their legs touching and, now and then, her hand rubbing his. The look in Karla’s eyes was no longer the same—this wasn’t the man she was looking for.
“Now what, do we talk about parallel realities?”
But the restaurant had filled with five people dressed in black, heads shaved, chains around their waists, tattoos in the form of swords and ninja stars, who had walked over to the table and surrounded the group without a word.
“Here’s your bill,” said the restaurant manager.
“But we haven’t even finished eating,” Rayan protested. “And we didn’t ask for the bill.”
