Paulo awoke with Karla’s arm across his chest—she was still in a deep sleep—and lay there thinking about how to adjust his position without waking her.
They’d arrived at the hotel relatively early, the entire group had eaten dinner at the same restaurant—the driver was right, Turkey was dirt cheap—and when they went up to their rooms he found a double bed in his. Without saying anything, he and Karla took a shower, washed their clothes, hung them in the bathroom to dry, and—exhausted—collapsed on the bed. By the look of it, the two of them were thinking only about sleeping in a decent bed for the first time in days, but their naked bodies, touching for the first time, had different plans. Before they knew it, they were kissing.
Paulo had trouble getting an erection, and Karla didn’t help; she made it clear that she was interested only if he was. It was the first time they’d gone beyond kissing and handholding; just because he had a beautiful woman at his side, was he required to pleasure her? Would she feel less beautiful, less desired if he didn’t?
And Karla thought: let him suffer a bit, thinking I’ll be upset if he decides to sleep instead. If I see things aren’t progressing as I’d like, I’ll do what I have to do, but let’s wait and see.
An erection finally came, and then penetration, and Paulo reached orgasm quicker than either of them thought possible, no matter how much he’d tried to hold back. After all, it had been a long time since he’d had a woman at his side.
Karla, who hadn’t reached any sort of orgasm, and Paulo knew it, gave him an affectionate tap on the head, like a mother to her child, turned to the other side of the bed, and realized right at that moment just how exhausted she was. She slept without thinking about any of the things that usually helped her to fall asleep. Paulo did the same.
* * *
—
Now that he was awake, he thought back to the previous night and decided to step out before he was forced to have a conversation about it. He carefully removed her arm, put on an extra pair of pants that was in his backpack, threw on some shoes and his jacket, and just as he was about to open the door, he heard:
“Where are you going? Aren’t you at least going to say good morning?”
“Good morning.” Istanbul must be a pretty interesting place and I’m sure you’re going to like it.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
Because I think sleeping is a way of talking to God through our dreams. That’s what I learned when I began to study the occult.
“Because you could have been having a beautiful dream or maybe because you must be exhausted. I don’t know.”
Words. More words. Words only served to complicate matters.
“Do you remember last night?”
We made love. Without thinking about it much, for no other reason than we were both naked in the same bed.
“I remember. And I wanted to say sorry. I know it wasn’t what you were expecting.”
“I wasn’t expecting anything. Are you going to meet Rayan?”
He knew she was really asking, “Are you going to meet Rayan and Mirthe?”
“No.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“I know what I’m looking for. I just don’t know where it is—I need to ask at reception, I hope they can tell me.”
He hoped her questioning would end there, that she wouldn’t force him to tell her what he was looking for: somewhere he could find the dancing dervishes. But she did ask him.
“I’m going to a religious ceremony. Something to do with dancing.”
“You’re going to spend your first day in such a different city, such a special country, doing exactly what you already did in Amsterdam? Weren’t the Hare Krishna enough? Or the night around the bonfire?”
It had been enough. And, with a mixture of annoyance and a desire to provoke her, he told her about the dancing Turkish dervishes that he’d seen in Brazil. The men wearing tiny red caps on their heads, immaculately white skirts, begin by slowly turning around themselves—as though they were Earth or some other planet. That movement, after a certain time, ends up driving the dervishes into a sort of trance. They’re part of a special order, at turns recognized and abominated by Islam, the order’s principal source of inspiration. The dervishes belonged to an order called Sufism, founded by a thirteenth-century poet who was born in Persia and died in Turkey.
Sufism recognizes a single truth: nothing is divisible, the visible and the invisible are one, each of us is merely an illusion in flesh and bone. That was why he had little interest in the bus conversation about parallel realities. We are everyone and everything at the same time—time that, by the way, does not exist. We forget this because we are bombarded daily with information from the newspaper, the radio, the TV. If we accept the Unity of Existence, we have need of nothing else. We will understand the meaning of life for a brief moment, but this brief moment will grant us the strength to make it until what they call death, which in reality is our passage into circular time.
“Understand?”
“Perfectly. For my part, I’m going to the bazaar—I imagine Istanbul must have a bazaar—where there are people working day and night to show the few tourists who make it here the purest expression of their souls: art. Of course, I don’t plan on buying anything—and it’s not a question of frugality, but lack of space in my backpack—but I’ll make an effort, a real effort, to see if people understand me, understand my admiration and respect for what they’re doing. Because for me, despite the whole philosophical speech you’ve just given me, the only language that matters is called Beauty.”