Hippie

by Paulo Coelho

  “I kept waiting for the feeling to pass, but it never did. When we started talking to Rayan and Mirthe, I felt jealous for the first time. I’d been envious, angry, insecure before, but jealous? Jealous wasn’t part of my universe. I thought you all should have been paying more attention to me, this independent, beautiful, intelligent, strong-willed woman. I decided it wasn’t exactly jealousy of Mirthe that I felt but envy at the fact that I wasn’t the center of attention at that moment.”

  Karla took his hand.

  “And then this morning, as I sat watching the river and remembered the night we danced together around the bonfire, I discovered it wasn’t some temporary infatuation I felt—no, nothing like that, it was love. Even after our intimate moment last night, when you showed just how bad a lover you could be, I was still in love with you. When I sat on the bank of the strait, I was still in love with you. I know that I love you and I know that you love me. And that we could spend the rest of our lives together, on the road, in Nepal, in Rio, on a desert island. I love you and I need you in my life.

  “Don’t ask me why I’m telling you this now—I’ve never said this to anyone, and you know I’m telling you the truth. I love you and I’m not looking to explain my feelings.”

  She turned to face him, waiting for Paulo to kiss her. There was something strange in his kiss, and he said maybe it was better they return to Europe, to the hotel—it had been a full day, full of emotions and absolute fascination.

  Karla felt afraid.

  Paulo was even more afraid; the truth was he was having a beautiful adventure with her—there were moments of passion, moments he never wanted her to leave his side, but all that was over.

  No, he didn’t love her.

  In the morning, people met for breakfast to trade experiences and recommendations. Karla tended to sit alone—when asked about Paulo, she said that he wanted to take advantage of every second to understand more about the so-called dancing dervishes, and so he would meet someone every morning who could teach him more.

  “ ‘The monuments, the mosques, the cisterns, the marvels of Istanbul can wait,’ he told me. ‘They’ll always be there. But I’m learning about something that could disappear from one moment to the next.’ ”

  The others understood perfectly. After all, as far as they could tell, the relationship between the two went no further than having split a room.

  * * *

  —

  The night they returned from Asia, just after dinner, they made amazing love that left her soaked in sweat, satisfied, and ready to do anything for this man. But he was talking less and less.

  She didn’t dare ask him the obvious question—Do you love me?—she was simply sure of it. Now she wanted to set her own needs aside and let him go meet this Frenchman he’d been talking about and learn as much as he could about Sufism; after all, it was a unique opportunity. The young man who looked like Rasputin invited her along to the Topkapi Palace Museum, but she declined. Rayan and Mirthe asked her to go with them to the bazaar—they’d been so caught up with everything else that they’d forgotten the most important thing: How did people live there? What did they eat? What did they buy? She said yes, and they agreed to meet the following day.

  The driver told her it was either that day or never—the fighting in Jordan was under control, and they ought to leave the next day. He asked Karla to tell Paulo, as though she were his girlfriend, his lover, his wife.

  She responded, “Of course,” whereas at other moments she would have said something like what Cain said of Abel: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  Upon hearing the driver’s word, people began to voice their displeasure. But how? Weren’t they going to stay an entire week in Istanbul? It was only the third day, and the first day didn’t even count—they’d been too tired to do anything.

  “No. We were going—and we’re still going—to Nepal. We stopped here because we had no other option. And now we have to leave quickly because the conflict could rear its head again, according to the newspapers and the company I work for. Besides, there are people in Kathmandu waiting to make the return trip.”

  The driver had the last word. Whoever wasn’t ready to leave at eleven the following morning would have to wait for the next bus—fifteen days later.

  Karla decided to go to the bazaar with Rayan and Mirthe. Jacques and Marie joined them. They noted something different in her, a lightness, a glow, though no one dared say a thing. This girl, who’d always been sure of herself and her decisions, must have fallen for the skinny Brazilian with his goatee.

  Meanwhile, she thought to herself: Hmmm, the others must have noticed that I’m feeling different. They don’t know the reason, but they’ve noticed.

  What a wonderful thing it was, being able to love. She understood now why it was so important to so many people—actually, for everyone. She remembered, with a certain sorrow in her heart, how much suffering she must have sown—but there was nothing to be done, that’s love.

  It’s what makes us understand our mission on Earth, our purpose in life. Whoever lives with this in mind will be followed by a shadow of goodness and protection, will find peace in difficult moments, will give everything without demanding anything in return, only the presence of the lover, the holder of light, the vessel of fertility, the torch that shines the way.

  That’s how things ought to be—and the world would always be kinder to those who love; evil would be transformed into good, lies into truth, violence into peace.

  Love defeats those who would oppress it with its sensitivity, quenches the thirst of those in search of the living water of affection, keeps an open door so that the light and blessed rain can enter.

  It makes the time pass more slowly or quickly, but time never passes as before—at the same monotonous, unbearably monotonous pace.

  The changes within her were slow because true change requires time. But something was changing.

  * * *

  —

  Before they went out, Marie came up to Karla.

  “You said something to the Irish couple about some LSD you brought, didn’t you?”

  She did. It was impossible to detect, because she’d soaked one of the pages of The Lord of the Rings in an LSD solution. She’d set it out to dry back in the Netherlands, and now it was merely a passage in one of the chapters of Tolkien’s book.

  “I’d really like—really like—to try some today. I’m fascinated by this city, I need to see it with new eyes. Could it help me do that?”

  Yes, it could. But for someone who’d never taken it, it could be heaven or it could be hell.

  “My plan is simple. We go to the bazaar, then I get ‘lost’ there and take it far away from everybody so as not to bother anyone.”

  She had no idea what she was talking about. Experience your first trip alone, without bothering anyone?

  At first, Karla deeply regretted having told anyone she’d brought a “page” of acid. She could have told the girl she’d heard wrong, she could have said she was referring to the characters in the book, but she hadn’t mentioned any book at all. She could have said she didn’t want the karma from introducing someone, especially Marie, to any sort of drug. Even more so at a moment in which her life had changed forever, because once you love someone, don’t you begin to love everyone?

  She looked at the girl, a little younger than she was, who had the curiosity of those true warriors, the Amazons, ready to face the unknown, the dangerous, the different—not unlike what she was herself facing. She was scared, but it was good; it was good and terrifying at the same time to discover you were alive, to know that in the end something called death awaits, and still be capable of living each moment without worrying about this.

  “Let’s go to my room. But first I want you to promise me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “You must never leav
e my side. There are several kinds of LSD, and this is the most potent—you could have an amazing experience or an awful one.”

  Marie laughed. The Dutch girl had no idea who Marie was, the things she’d already experienced in life.

  “Promise me,” Karla insisted.

  “I promise.”

  The rest of their group was ready to leave, and “girl problems” were the perfect excuse for that moment. They would be back in ten minutes.

  Karla opened the door and felt proud to show off her room; Marie saw the clothes hung out to dry, the window open to let in fresh air, and a bed with two pillows that looked as if a hurricane had blown through—which was in fact what had happened, taking several things with it and leaving others behind.

  She walked over to her backpack, grabbed the book, opened it to page 155, and, with tiny scissors she always carried with her, cut a quarter of a square inch of paper.

  Next, she handed it to Marie and asked her to chew it.

  “That’s all?”

  “To tell the truth, I’d thought about giving you only half. But then I thought it might not have any effect, so I’m giving you the amount I used to take.”

  That wasn’t the truth. She was giving the girl a half dose and, depending on Marie’s behavior and tolerance for the drug, she’d make sure she had the real experience—she was simply waiting a bit.

  “Remember what I’m telling you: it’s what I used to take, it’s been more than a year since I’ve put LSD in my mouth and I’m not sure I’ll ever do it again. There are other, better ways to achieve the same effect, though I don’t have the patience to try them out.”

  “Such as?” Marie had put the paper in her mouth, it was too late now to change her mind.

  “Meditation. Yoga. Overwhelming passion. That sort of thing. Anything that makes us think about the world as though we’re seeing it for the first time.”

  “How long until I feel the effects?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on the person.”

  Karla closed the book again and put it back in her bag. They went downstairs, and everyone walked together to the Grand Bazaar.

  Back at the hotel, Mirthe had grabbed a brochure about the bazaar, founded in 1455 by a sultan who’d managed to wrest Constantinople from the hands of the pope. In an era when the Ottoman Empire ruled the world, the bazaar was the place people brought their wares, and it grew and grew to such an extent that the ceiling structures had to be expanded several times.

  Even after having read this, the group was far from ready for what they would find—thousands of people walking through packed corridors, fountains, restaurants, prayer spots, coffee, rugs—everything, absolutely everything you could find in France’s best department store: finely wrought gold jewelry, clothes in all styles and colors, shoes, rugs of all kinds, working artisans indifferent to those around them.

  One of the merchants wanted to know if they were interested in antiques—the fact that they were tourists was written on their foreheads; it was clear from the way they looked around them.

  “How many stores are there?” Jacques asked the merchant.

  “Three thousand. Two mosques. Several fountains, an enormous number of places where you can have the best Turkish food. But I have some religious statuary you won’t find anywhere else.”

  Jacques thanked him, said he’d be back soon—the merchant knew it was a lie and briefly redoubled his efforts but soon saw it was useless and wished them all a good day.

  “Did you know Mark Twain was here?” asked Mirthe, who at this point was covered in sweat and somewhat frightened by what she was seeing. What if there was a fire, how would they get out? Where was the door, the tiny little door they’d used to come in? How would they keep the group together when everyone wanted to see something different?

  “And what did Mark Twain have to say?”

  “He said it was impossible to describe what he saw, but that it had been a much more powerful, more important experience than his visit to the city. He spoke of the colors, the immense variety of visual tones, the rugs, people conversing, the apparent chaos that nonetheless seemed to follow an order he was unable to explain. ‘If I want to buy shoes,’ he wrote, ‘I don’t need to go from store to store along the street, comparing prices and models, but simply find the aisle of shoemakers, lined up one after another, without there being any sort of competition or annoyance between them; it all depends on who is the better salesman.”

  Mirthe didn’t care to mention that the bazaar had already been through four fires and an earthquake—it wasn’t known how many had died because the hotel brochure said only this and glossed over any talk of body counts.

  Karla noticed that Marie’s eyes were glued to the ceiling, its curved beams and its arches, and she’d begun to smile as if she could say nothing beyond “incredible, absolutely incredible.”

  They walked at about a mile per hour. When one person stopped, the rest did, too. Karla needed some privacy.

  “At this rate, we won’t even make it to the corner of the next aisle. Why don’t we split up and meet back at the hotel? Unfortunately—I repeat, unfortunately—we’ll be leaving this place tomorrow, so we have to make the most of this last day.”

  The idea was greeted with enthusiasm, and Jacques turned to his daughter to take her with him, but Karla stopped him.

  “I can’t stay here on my own. Let the two of us discover this universe of wonders together.”

  Jacques noticed that his daughter didn’t so much as glance at him, she merely repeated “incredible!” as she stared at the ceiling. Had someone offered her hashish when they entered the bazaar? Had she accepted? She was old enough to take care of herself—he left her with Karla, that girl who was always ahead of her time and always trying to show how much smarter and more sophisticated she was than all the rest, though she’d toned it down a bit—only a bit—during the last two days in Istanbul.

  He went his way and disappeared amid the multitude. Karla grabbed Marie by the arm.

  “Let’s get out of here right now.”

  “But everything is so beautiful. Look at the colors: absolutely incredible!”

  Karla wasn’t asking, she was giving orders, and began to gently tug Marie toward the exit.

  The exit?

  Where was the exit? “Incredible!” Marie was growing increasingly intoxicated with what she saw, and completely inert, while Karla asked several people the best way out and received several different answers. She started to get nervous; that itself was as disorienting as an LSD trip, and she wasn’t sure where the combination of the two would leave Marie.

  Her more aggressive, more dominating manner returned; she walked first in one direction then another, but she could not find the door through which they’d entered. It didn’t matter if they returned the way they’d come, but each second now was precious—the air had grown heavy, people were full of sweat, no one paid attention to anything except what they were buying, selling, or bargaining over.

  Finally, an idea came to her. Instead of looking for the exit, she ought to walk in a straight line, in a single direction, and sooner or later she’d find the wall that separated the largest temple to consumerism she’d ever seen from the outside world. She charted a straight path, begging God (God?) that it also be the shortest. As they walked in the direction they’d chosen, she was interrupted a thousand times by people trying to sell their wares. She pushed past them without so much as an “excuse me” and without considering they could well push back.

  Along the way she came upon a young boy, his mustache just coming in, who must have been entering the bazaar. He seemed to be looking for something. She decided to use all her charm, her seduction, her persuasiveness, and asked him to take her to the exit because her sister was suffering an attack of delirium.

  The boy looked at her sister and saw that, in fact, she
wasn’t really there but off in some distant place. He tried making conversation, telling her that an uncle of his who worked nearby could help, but Karla begged him, saying she knew the symptoms, that all her sister needed now was a bit of fresh air, nothing more.

  Rather against his will, and regretting that he was about to lose sight forever of these two interesting girls, he took them to one of the exits—less than sixty feet from where they’d been standing.

  * * *

  —

  At the moment she stepped outside the bazaar, Marie came to the solemn decision to abandon her revolutionary dreams. She would never again say she was a Communist fighting to free oppressed workers from their bosses.

  Yes, she’d started dressing like a hippie because now and then it was good to be in style. Yes, she’d understood her father had become a bit worried about this and had begun to furiously research what all of it might mean. Yes, they were going to Nepal, but not to meditate in caves or visit temples; their goal was to meet up with the Maoists who were preparing a large-scale rebellion against what they judged to be an outdated and tyrannical monarchy under the rule of a king indifferent to his people’s suffering.

  She’d been able to make contact through a self-exiled Maoist at her university who’d traveled to France to call attention to the few dozen guerrilla soldiers being massacred there.

  None of that was important anymore. She walked with her Dutch companion along an absolutely unremarkable street and everything seemed to have a greater meaning that went beyond the peeling walls and people walking with heads lowered, barely glancing up.

  “Do you think people are noticing something?”

  “No, nothing, beyond the bright smile across your face. It’s not a drug that was made to call others’ attention.”

  Marie, meanwhile, had noticed something: her companion was nervous. She didn’t sense this from the tone of Karla’s voice—she didn’t need to hear her say anything, but could attribute it to the “vibration” coming from her. She’d always hated the word “vibration,” she didn’t believe in such things—but at that moment she could see they were real.