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Karla filled up their glasses again and toasted with Paulo.
“My journey ended here,” he repeated, perhaps thinking she hadn’t understood what he’d just told her. “I don’t have anything to do in Nepal.”
He steadied himself for the tears, the fury, the despair, the emotional manipulation, everything to be said by the woman who had told him “I love you” the night before.
But she just smiled.
* * *
—
“I never thought I’d be capable of loving someone the way I love you,” Karla responded after they’d emptied their glasses and she’d filled them one more time. “My heart was locked up, and it had nothing to do with psychologists, a lack of chemical substances, that sort of thing. It’s something I’ll never be able to explain, but suddenly, I don’t know exactly the moment, my heart opened. And I’m going to love you for the rest of my life. When I’m in Nepal, I’ll be loving you. When I return to Amsterdam, I’ll be loving you. When I finally fall for someone else, I’ll continue loving you, even if in a different way from today.
“God—I don’t know if He exists but I know I hope He’s here with us now, listening to my words—I ask to never again allow me to be satisfied with only my own company. That I never feel afraid of needing someone or of suffering, because there is no suffering worse than the dark, gray room where pain cannot reach.
“And that this love so many people speak of, so many share, so many suffer on account of, that this love lead me to that which was unknown and is now becoming clearer. That, as a poet once said, He takes me to a world where there exists no sun, no moon, no stars, no earth, not even the taste of wine in my mouth, merely the Other, he whom I will find because you opened the way.
“That I might walk without need of my feet, see without needing to look, fly without asking for wings.”
* * *
—
Paulo was surprised and content at the same time. Both of them were coming to an unknown place, with its terrors and its wonders. There, in Istanbul—a place where they might have visited the many attractions that had been suggested to them—they’d chosen to journey into their own souls and there was nothing better or more comforting than this.
He got up, walked around the table, and kissed her, knowing it was against the local custom, that the owners might be offended—despite this, he kissed her with love and not lust, with pleasure and not guilt, because he knew that it would be their last kiss.
* * *
—
He didn’t want to ruin the magic of the moment, but he needed to ask all the same.
“Were you expecting that? Were you prepared for that?”
Karla didn’t respond, merely smiled, and he would never know her response—and that was true love, a question for which there is no answer.
He made a point of walking her to the bus. He’d already advised the driver that he was staying behind, to learn what he needed to learn. For a brief moment, he thought to repeat the famous line from Casablanca, “We’ll always have Paris.” But he knew it was a silly idea, and he needed to hurry back to the green room and the teacher without a name.
The people on the bus pretended not to see anything. No one said goodbye to him because no one—besides the driver—knew this was the last stop on his journey.
Karla hugged him without a word but could feel his love as though it were something physical, a light growing more intense, as though the morning sun were rising and shining first across the mountains, then the cities, then the plains, then the sea.
The door closed and the bus took off. More than one person could be heard exclaiming, “Hey, you left the Brazilian guy behind!” But the bus had already pulled away.
One day he would meet Karla again and ask about the rest of her journey.
Epilogue
In February 2005, when he was already a world-famous writer, Paulo went to Amsterdam to give an important talk. On the morning of the talk, he was interviewed on one of Holland’s principal TV shows at his old hostel—since converted into a hotel for nonsmokers, expensive and with a small but well-regarded high-end restaurant.
He never again heard from Karla. The guide Europe on 5 Dollars a Day had become Europe on 30 Dollars a Day. Paradiso had closed (it would reopen a few years later, retaining its identity as a concert venue); Dam Square was deserted, it was merely a square with that mysterious obelisk in the middle, whose purpose he’d never known—and which he would prefer never to know.
He felt the temptation to walk through the streets where they’d walked to reach the restaurant where they’d eaten for free, but there was always someone with him—the person who had organized the talk. He thought it better to return to his hotel and prepare what he was to say that evening.
He had a vague hope that Karla, knowing he was in the city, would show up to meet him. He imagined she hadn’t spent much time in Nepal, just as he’d abandoned the idea of becoming a Sufi, though he’d lasted nearly a year and learned things he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
During the conference, he told part of the story found in this book. At a certain point, he couldn’t help it and asked:
