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She stopped in a coffee shop, where there were several varieties of marijuana and hashish for sale. But the only thing she did was drink a coffee and trade a few words with another young woman, also Dutch, who seemed out of place and was also there having a coffee. Wilma was her name. They decided they would go to the Paradiso but they soon changed their minds, perhaps because the place was no longer a novelty for anyone, just as the drugs sold there weren’t either. A great thing for tourists but boring for those who had always had them within reach.
One day—one day in a far-off future—governments around the world would conclude that the best way to put an end to all they considered a “problem” was to legalize it. A great deal of hashish’s mystique was its being illegal and, as a result, highly sought after.
“But that’s in nobody’s interest,” Wilma said when Karla shared her thoughts. “They earn billions of dollars by cracking down. They consider themselves above the rest. Crusaders for society and the family. An excellent political platform—putting an end to drugs. What other idea would they replace it with? Sure, an end to poverty, but no one believes in that anymore.”
Their conversation came to an end and they sat staring at their coffee cups. Karla thought back to the movie, to The Lord of the Rings, to her life. She had never really had any interesting experiences. She had been born into a pious family, had studied at a Lutheran high school, knew the Bible by heart, had lost her virginity as an adolescent with a Dutch boy who was also a virgin at the time, had traveled some through Europe, had found a job when she turned twenty (by this time she was twenty-three). The days seemed to stretch on, to repeat themselves, she became Catholic merely to rebel against her family, decided to leave her parents’ house and live alone, had a series of boyfriends who came into and out of her life and her body for periods varying from two days to two months. She thought that the blame for all of that belonged to Rotterdam and its cranes, its gray streets, and its harbor, where stories were constantly coming in that were much more interesting than those she typically heard from her friends.
She got along better with foreigners. The only time her routine of absolute freedom was interrupted was when she decided to fall hopelessly in love with a Frenchman ten years her senior. She convinced herself that she could make that all-consuming love mutual—though she knew quite well that the Frenchman was only interested in sex, a discipline she excelled in and was always striving to improve. After a short while she left the Frenchman in Paris, having come to the conclusion that she hadn’t truly discovered the purpose of love in her life. This was a condition of her own making—all the people she knew had at one moment or another begun to talk about the importance of marriage, children, cooking, having someone to watch television with, take to the theater, travel the world with, bring back little surprises each time they came back home, get pregnant, raise the children, pretend they never saw each of their husband’s or wife’s petty betrayals, say that their children were their only purpose in life, worry about what to have for dinner, what they would grow up to be like, how things were going at school, at work, in life.
In this way, they extended for a few more years their sense of usefulness on this earth, until sooner or later all the children left—the house became empty, and the only things that mattered at all were Sunday lunches, the whole family together again, always pretending everything was perfect, always pretending there were no petty jealousies or competition between them, while they all hurled invisible daggers through the air: because I make more than you do, my wife is an architect, we just bought a house like you’d never believe, that sort of thing.
Two years earlier she’d figured out that it didn’t make sense to go on living this absolute freedom. She began to think about death, flirted with the idea of entering a convent, she even went to the place where the Discalced Carmelites lived entirely cut off from the world. She told them she had been baptized, discovered Christ, and wanted to be his bride for the rest of her life. The mother superior asked her to think it over for a month before making her final decision—and during this month she had time to imagine herself in a cell, forced to pray from dawn to dusk, repeating the same words over and over until they lost meaning, and she discovered she was unable to lead a life whose routine might well drive her insane. The mother superior had been right—she never went back; no matter how bad the routine of absolute freedom was, she could always discover new and interesting things to do.
A sailor from Bombay, in addition to being an excellent lover (something she rarely encountered), led her to discover Eastern mysticism. It was then that she began to consider that her ultimate destiny in life was to travel far away, live in a cave in the Himalayas, keep the faith that the gods would come speak to her one day or another, free herself from everything that surrounded her at that moment and that she found boring, so boring.
Without getting into detail, she asked Wilma what she thought of Amsterdam.
“Boring. So boring.”
Exactly. Not only Amsterdam but all of Holland, where everyone was born under the protection of the state, no one ever had to worry about becoming a helpless old fogey thanks to all sorts of senior homes and lifetime pensions, health care that was free or practically so, and where recently all the kings had actually been queens—the Queen Mother Wilhelmina; the current queen, Juliana; and the heir to the throne, Beatrix. While women in the United States were burning their bras and demanding equality, Karla—who never used a bra despite the fact her breasts weren’t exactly small—was living in a place where such equality had been gained long before, without any noise, without all sorts of attention seeking, by simply following the ancestral logic that power belongs to women—it’s they who govern their husbands and children, their presidents and kings, who for their part seek to give the impression that they’re exceptional generals, heads of state, businessmen.
Men. They thought they ruled the world but couldn’t so much as take a step without, that very same night, seeking the opinions of their partners, lovers, girlfriends, mothers.
Karla needed to take a radical step, discover a country within herself or without that she’d never explored before and find a way past the tedium that she could feel draining her strength with each passing day.
She hoped the tarot reader had been right. If the person she’d been promised didn’t show up the next day, she would go to Nepal anyway, alone, running the risk of becoming a “white slave” and ending up sold to some fat sultan in a country where harems were the order of the day—though she had her doubts that anyone would have the courage to do this with her. She would defend herself better than any man, shielding herself from threatening looks, weapon in hand.
She said goodbye to Wilma, they agreed to meet at Paradiso the next day, and she set off for the hostel where she’d spent those monotonous days in Amsterdam, the city of dreams for so many who had crossed the world just to get there. She walked through the narrow streets without sidewalks, her ears alert to hearing something that might be a sort of sign. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, but signs are always like that, surprising and disguised as routine events. The sensation of the drizzle falling on her face brought her back to reality—not the reality around her but the fact that she was alive, walking down dark alleys in total safety, crossing paths with drug traffickers from Suriname who acted in the shadows—it’s true, they posed a real danger to their customers, because they offered the devil’s drugs, cocaine and heroin.
She passed through a square—it seemed as if, unlike Rotterdam, the city had a square on every corner. The rain became heavier, and she gave thanks for being able to smile despite all that she had thought about in the coffee shop.
As she walked she uttered silent prayers, words that were neither Lutheran nor Catholic, grateful for the life she had complained about only hours earlier. In her devotion she basked in the sky and earth, the trees and animals, the mere sight of which resolved all the contradictions in her soul and enveloped everything in a deep peace—not the sort of peace that comes from the absence of challenges but the sort that was preparing her for an adventure that she was resolved to see through, regardless of whether she found a travel companion. She was confident that the angels watched over her, singing melodies that, though undetected by her ears, reverberated throughout her and cleansed her mind of impure thoughts, put her in touch with her soul and taught her to love herself though she had never known Love.
I will not feel guilty for what I was thinking before, perhaps it was the film, perhaps the book, but, even if it was only me and my inability to see the beauty that exists inside myself, I ask your forgiveness. I love you and I’m grateful that you always accompany me, that you bless me with
your company and free me from the temptations of pleasure and the fear of pain.
Rather unusually, she began to feel guilty for being who she was, living in the country with the highest concentration of museums in the world, crossing at that moment one of the city’s 1,281 bridges, gazing at the homes with only three windows on the side (to have more than this was considered ostentatious and an attempt to humiliate the neighbors). She was proud of the laws that governed her people, of their history as seafaring explorers, even if everyone overlooked them for the Spanish and the Portuguese.
They’d made only one bad deal: selling the island of Manhattan to the Americans. But who’s perfect?
The night watchman opened the hostel door. She entered as quietly as she could, closed her eyes, and before falling asleep, she thought about the only thing missing in her country.
Mountains.
That was it: she would go to the mountains, far from those endless flatlands conquered from the sea by men who knew what they wanted and who had succeeded in taming a landscape that refused to submit.
* * *
—
She decided to wake up earlier than was typical—she was already dressed and ready to go at eleven in the morning, whereas she usually wasn’t ready until one in the afternoon. According to the tarot reader, today was the day she would find the person she was looking for, and the clairvoyant could not be wrong; both of them had fallen into a mysterious trance, beyond their control, like most trances, by the way. Layla had said something that hadn’t come from her own tongue but from a higher power who’d filled the entire atmosphere of her “office.”
There were still very few people in Dam Square—things really began to pick up after noon. But she noticed—finally!—a new face. Hair just like everyone else there, a jacket without many patches (the most prominent was a flag inscribed with BRASIL on top), a bright, knitted shoulder bag, made in South America, which at the time was a hit among the young people who crisscrossed the globe—as were ponchos and beanies that covered the ears. He was smoking a cigarette—a regular one, she knew, since she walked near where he was sitting and couldn’t detect any particular smell other than tobacco.
He was terribly busy doing nothing, looking around, at the building at the other end of the square and the hippies scattered about. He must have wanted someone to talk to, but his eyes betrayed shyness—extreme shyness, to be more specific.
