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.