Пауло Коэльо - Hippie

“You’ve had this dream for a long time?”

“No. It began as an ad clipped from one of the alternative newspapers. Ever since, it’s all I can think about.”

Wilma was going to ask her if she’d smoked too much hashish that day, but just then Paulo showed up.

“Let’s dance?” he asked.

She took his hand and they walked down together to the church’s nave. Wilma wasn’t sure where to go, but that wouldn’t be a problem for long; as soon as someone noticed she was alone, they would come and start a conversation—everyone spoke to everyone there.

When they walked out into the silent drizzle, their ears were still buzzing from the music. They yelled so they could hear one another.

“Are you going to be around tomorrow?”

“I’ll be in the same spot you found me the first time. Then I need to go buy the bus ticket to Nepal.”

Again with this Nepal stuff? A bus ticket?

“You can come along, if you’d like,” she said as though she were doing him a huge favor. “But I’d like to take you on a little outing just outside Amsterdam. Have you ever seen a windmill?”

She laughed at her own question—that was how the rest of the world thought of her country: clogs, windmills, cows, prostitutes in the windows.

“We can meet in the same spot we always do,” Paulo responded, a bit anxious and a bit pleased with himself because she—that model of beauty, her hair neatly combed and full of flowers, a long skirt, a vest covered in mirrors, patchouli perfume, a wonder from head to toe—wanted to see him again. “I’ll be there around one o’clock. I have to get a bit of sleep. But weren’t we going to one of those houses of the rising sun?”

“I told you I’d show you where to find one. I didn’t say I’d go with you.”

They walked about five hundred feet until they reached an alley where there was a door without any number or music coming from it.

“There’s one over there. I’d like to give you two suggestions.” She had thought about using the word “advice,” but that would have been the worst choice in the world.

“Don’t leave there with anything—there must be some policemen we can’t see in one of these windows, keeping an eye on everyone who visits the location. And they tend to search anyone who leaves. And whoever leaves with anything goes straight to the slammer.”

Paulo nodded, he understood, and asked what her second suggestion was.

“Don’t try anything either.”

Having said this, she kissed him on the lips—an innocent kiss that promised much but surrendered little. Then she turned around and set off toward her hostel. Paulo stood there alone, asking himself whether he ought to enter. Perhaps it was better to go back to his hostel and start gluing the metallic stars he’d bought that afternoon to his jacket.

However, his curiosity won out, and he walked toward the door.

The hallway was narrow, poorly lit, the ceiling low. At the end of it, a man with a shaved head who clearly had experience as a policeman in some country sized him up—the famous “body language test,” used to gauge a person’s intentions, degree of anxiety, financial standing, and profession. He asked Paulo if he had money to spend. Yes, but he wasn’t about to do as he had done at customs and try to show him how much. The man hesitated for a moment then let him pass—he couldn’t have been a tourist, tourists weren’t interested in that sort of thing.

There were people lying on mattresses spread across the floor, others leaning against the red painted walls. What was he doing there? Satisfying some morbid curiosity?

No one was talking or listening to music. Even his morbid curiosity was limited to what he could see, and that was the same glimmer—or lack of glimmer—in everyone’s eyes. He tried to talk to one kid his age, his skin emaciated and spots on his face and shirtless body, as though he’d been bitten by some insect and scratched himself until the bites became red and swollen.

Another man came in—he looked ten years older than most of the kids outside, but he must still have been approaching Paulo’s age. He was—at least for the moment—the only one sober. A short time later he would be in another universe, and Paulo walked up to him to see if he could come away with something, even if it were a simple phrase for the book he intended to write in the future—his dream was to become a writer, and he had paid a high price for this: stints in psychiatric hospitals, prison and torture, the prohibition from the mother of his teenage girlfriend that she get anywhere near him, the scorn of his classmates when they saw he had begun to dress differently.

And—his revenge—the jealousy they all felt when he got his first girlfriend—beautiful and rich—and began to travel the world.

But why was he thinking only about himself in such a decrepit environment? Because he needed to talk to someone there. He sat next to the oldish young man. He watched him pull out a spoon with its handle bent and a syringe that looked like it had been used many times.

“I wanted to…”

The oldish young man got up to go sit in another corner, but Paulo took the equivalent of three or four dollars from his pocket and set them on the floor next to the spoon. He was met with a look of surprise.

“Are you police?”

“No, I’m not police, I’m not even Dutch. I would just like to…”

“You a journalist?”

“No. I’m a writer. That’s why I’m here.”

“What books did you write?”

“None yet. First I need to do some research.”

The other man looked at the money on the floor and then again at Paulo, doubting that a person so young could be writing something—unless it was for the newspapers that were part of the “Invisible Post.” He reached for the money, but Paulo stopped him.

“Just five minutes. Not more than five minutes.”

The oldish young man agreed—no one had ever paid a cent for his time ever since he threw away a promising career as an executive at a multinational bank, ever since he tried the “kiss of the needle” for the first time.

The kiss of the needle?

“That’s right. We prick ourselves a few times before injecting the heroin because what everyone else calls pain is our prelude to finding something all of you will never understand.”

They were whispering so as not to draw the attention of others, but Paulo knew that even if an atomic bomb dropped on the place none of the people there would go to the trouble of fleeing.

“You can’t use my name.”

The other man had begun to open up, and five minutes passed quickly. Paulo could sense the devil’s presence in that house.

“And then what? What’s it feel like?”

“And then I can’t describe it—you only know by trying it. Or believing what Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground said about it.”

Paulo had listened to Lou Reed before. That wasn’t gonna cut it.

“Please, try to describe it. Our five minutes are going fast.”

The man before him took a deep breath. He kept one eye on Paulo and the other on his syringe. He should respond quickly and get rid of the impertinent “writer” before he got kicked out of the house, taking the money with him.

“I’m guessing you have some experience with drugs. I’m familiar with the effects of hashish and marijuana: peace and euphoria, self-confidence, an urge to eat and make love. I don’t care about any of these, they’re things from a kind of life we’ve been taught to live. You smoke hash and think: ‘The world is a beautiful place, I’m finally paying attention,’ but depending on the dose, you end up on a trip that takes you straight to hell. You take LSD and think: Good god, how didn’t I notice that before, the earth breathes and its colors are constantly changing? Is that what you want to know?”