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THE INDIAN TALE
“Well, let me eulogize you, entangle you, euphemize
you, roll you and rock you. Not that a Grateful Dead is better than a hole in
the sky to be used as your home cloaca. No, things are quite easier. After all,
where we are? We are surrounded by two kind of men, one make gold from
everything they touch, and the other turn into shit everything they get. No
kidding’, my friend. Now, there are many kinds of gold, but there is only one
kind of shit. Yeah, honest. You may say that am wrong, a baby caca got nothing
to do with an old woman caca”.
“I give you ten points for your sound remark”.
“Now tell me what, which of both you will eat first,
the baby’s caca or the old woman’s caca? But you will take any kind of gold,
don’t you?”
“I got to take away from you those ten points, sorry”.
“However, watch the first man, it makes gold, he don’t
bother about power. Take a look on the second kind; he wants gold, he doesn’t
know how to make it and he devote his devotion to power, and with power he buys
gold. But as he only knows to make shit at the end of the day shit is what he
left behind for the next president to come up. Right?”
“OK, can you close your book of Philosophy and let me
think?”
We were in El Cairo. The easiest and natural road to
India was Alexandria, ferry to Athens, road to Istanbul, and hit Asia till
India. That’s what everybody was doing. But not Horst. Horst always had
something very of his own on mind.
“Nop”, said he, “we will
cross Egypt from North to South, we will follow the Nile River till we fall on
the Blue Nile, then we turn left, we get on the ferry from Port Sudan to
Medina, and we will hit Arabia from South to North, and finally we will arrive
to Israel. You’re coming?”, and he laughed.
Giving it a second thought Horst’s plan was stupid,
dangerous and nearly suicidal. He was a German anyway, his fathers wouldn’t
weigh the pros and contras or a world war, why would he shake like a little
girl because a few thousand of kilometers under the killing sun of the Arabian
desert? The more you give it a thought the more was clear that we both were
stupid and crazy. We were about to cross the Arabian Peninsula, the most
inhospitable desert in the planet, on a Renault 4L, no water tank with us?
“Yeah”, Horst’s replied me.
“All right”, said I.
Somehow we had to buy the Visados in Alexandria City. I never saw the meaning in it, but people were very much
into the story of making nations jails with iron doors, it was easy to come in,
but nearly impossible to come out. There were no many people around the world
driving their cars from country to country. Hippies had broken that system, at
least for themselves, and were the first people in History to wander throughout
the nations for the fun to visit their fellow neighbors. In the Past people had
to make war on their neighbors to do just that, take a look on the Mountains
and the seas of the world. My philosophy did not bother Horst’s brain. He got
the money, it was easier to pay the jailers to let you in.
“With philosophy you will not buy us a Visado, will you? So shut up and let’s go”
Alexandria was a small city full of History and
legend. Alexander’s legend, however, was gone. The place was nice anyway. We
filled our papers, and was told to come back few days after for the passports.
Sunshine is my favorite element. I was born in the
sunshine. Fort Horst it was a new experience, to wake up every single day in
the kingdom of the sunshine. The place where he came from is in a hole between
ugly hills in love with the rain and the snow. I felt pity for him.
We wandered around the town tasting the fruits of the
country and drinking tea and coca-cola. It was
already December.
“You really wanna be in
Christmas in Arabia, man?”
“By that time we will be in Jerusalem. Relax”
However, plans are made to be fucked up. No man had
ever reached his dream. All that about “dream dream dream and you will make it” it is simply a lot of shit, old
woman caca. If you buy that shit you are fucked up. Look at the world. Where do
you see the dream? The world is a fucking nightmare, man. We just follow
ghosts. Kind of sarcastic, isn’t? People got it all wrong talking about the
hippy movement. Europeans hippies were all educated guys, with university
masters and lot of money in their pockets, they were just throwing their
careers to the cloaca. I was the last generation of the Hippies for that
matter, the last of the Hippies, and I wasn’t a drug addict, not at all.
Hippies never drank alcohol, or used heroine, nor cocaine. Marihuana,
marihuana, and only marihuana. Even when not very much educated Hippies were
adventurers, earthlings moved by an intense love of knowledge of the planet
where they were born. This was the root of the Hippy movement. In the days
before you needed lots of money to move around the world. The Hippies found
that to move around the world you just need to begin walking. What else?
“All right, what you are waiting for? We meet in
Jerusalem, I go with my car and you with your legs, let’s see who make it
first”
Skepticism was Horst’s motto. Well, he had been
working in a Bank for the last years. Even though he thought of himself not a
hippy, he was; he was doing what a Hippy does, break the system for himself and
live life as an adventure.
Another one who was driving in our direction was a guy
from Sudan coming straight from Berlin. I met him in the ferry from Athens to
Alexandria. Horst was playing poker in the saloon of the ferry, I was on the
deck staring at the heavens, he came up for a chat. He needed a lending hand.
He was running out of money and had to make it to Jartoum,
Sudan’s capital city. We were going to Israel. He walked off. Now we met in
Sudan’s Consulate. I told him my story that day back in the Ferry from Athens.
This time he knew who to talk to. He spoke fluent German. He got Horst into his
story. A while after Horst came up to me.
“What do you think?” he was asking me.
“Do you mean if I had the money what should I do? I
don’t have the money Horst, that’s is a classic dilemma from very old on the
table of the fools, what if Adam would had never fallen? He who got the power
is the only one who can take the decision demanded. You want to load the blame
on me if something go wrong? It’s your money, it’s your decision. Whatever
happens I got nothing to do with it. The guy looks fine to me. But so Satan to
Eve for that matter”.
“All right, then, I take the challenge”, said Horst.
I knew that he was going to say so anyway. He had the
soul of a Hippy. Kind, brave and brother to the human race. And then we were
three. First we had to get out of the harbor the car of our new friend.
Apparently what he was doing it was very simple. He was driving a Mercedes from
Germany to Sudan, to sell it. He would make a great profit. And would pay back
the debt contracted with Horst. Horst understood the deal, he thought it
profitable too, and yeah, we filled the tanks and began to drive along the Niles’
shore and through the desert. We got the ferry boat in Wadi Alfa and kept going South. The Sudanese guy fixed us a room in his parent’s
house. Very kind people, and as it was Christmas we passed the two first two
weeks hangin’ around the city. When the third week
came the guy faded away, like smoke in the heart of a cloud. We began to worry.
One week later he came up with a terrible story. He couldn’t pay back any
money. But it could offer a buyer for Horst’s car. In between the words, he
threw a threat. And he disappeared again. We were still in his parent’s house,
and these were so ashamed that they would not look in our eyes anymore. Horst
thought of committing a barbarity. I had to cool him down.
“He has to come back to get the answer to his last offer.
If he try to rob us again, I’m with you, we kill the bastard, throw his body to
the Nile, and drive away. By now, stay calm. I don’t know how much is his debt
with you, but you got to lose sometimes, a human life got no price, my friend.
Let’s give him a chance”
And he came back. Yes, he had a buyer for Horst’s car
and the offer was honest, really good money. He would take none of it. Horst
laughed, of course. Then he got some marihuana of the country and filled a
pipe. Horst had never smoke marihuana, me neither. But the deal was good and
the anger got to go. Like the brave man he was Horst hit the pipe. I said no.
Both were laughing like good friends, impressive to see them laughing like good
friends, and they kept pressing me to hit it. At the end of an eternity I gave
in. They were eyes wide open in front of me, “come on, come on, you don’t gonna die”. I hit it couple of times. They finished the
round and went away. I tried to followed them, but I could not move. My head
was flying in circles around the roof. I had to lay down and breath heavily. I
felt like vomiting but it wasn’t that. If I had an enemy and he entered at that
moment in the room it was his lucky day, he could have killed me as easy as you
break a chicken’s neck. I saw my guitar, and took it in my arms looking for
salvation. And then, that magic sound. The first note was a kiss in the soul.
The second, a kiss in the brain. The third, a kiss in the heart. I was saved. I
played and played and played hour after hour. When Horst came back hours after
I was still playing.
“So? You had a deal?”
He had a deal. Very good deal. And a new plan. We had
to forget about Arabia. We would fly to Athens, train to Istanbul, Magic Bus to
Afghanistan. From Afghanistan we would make it by bus to India.
“Good Lord, even Pandora would had sold her soul for
this box. You are some kind of Columbus, my friend”.
Of course the Sudanese guy was full of surprises too.
He never said the buyer would pay in Sudanese Money, worth nothing in the
International Market. The deal was closed, there was nothing to complaint about
it, it was to us to change that sack of money into dollars in the black market.
And how were we going to take out of the country that much toilet paper, man?
Horst was nearly at the edge of giving up. I could see his soul. I had one
idea. We would fill my guitar with it. No man in this world was to think that
the belly of a naked hippy guitar was full of money. If they got me…
“Don’t even think about it, Horst”
All right, we did it. My guitar passed the airport
control. We were in the terrace of the airport waiting for our plane when the
idiot whom we used to invite to a tee in the city came up straight to us. We
thought he didn’t speak good English and we made the plan for hiding the money
before him. He knew everything, he wanted a lot of that money or he will go to
the airport police with the story. Finally Horst sank. All was lost. I kept
cool.
“Can I talk to you”, said I to the idiot. And the
idiot followed me to the ledge of the terrace. I did not give him a second to
doubt of his victory. I got him straight there, made him a Judo key, show him
the ground far below. Horst came running like a mad ready to fuck the guy to
hell. We had him suspended in the air for a while. He began to cry, the idiot.
“Enough, Horst”. The poor bitch ran away like from the devil. Few minutes after
we were flying a Lufthansa iron bird and heading back to Athens. Our African
Adventure was closed. Horst got a double room if Athens Melia Hotel to cheer himself up. And from the magnificent view we laughed remembering
the good days gone.
Couple of days later we hit the train to Istanbul. S
We got a train to Hamas, Syria; we changed there the Sudanese Money in Dollars,
and got back to Istanbul.
We stayed In Istanbul one week hanging around until
the Magic Bus was to drive us to Herat, Afghanistan. The Magic Bus got filled
with Hippies like us, all smoking marihuana, freely, and all chatting no end
and playing like kids who never knew no evil. Guitars and violins were the
stars during the long road from Istanbul to the Hindu Kush. Once the real trip
began, exclamations after exclamation signed every turn of the Bus along the
edge of the West Himalayas. That was why it was called the Magic Bus. No man
but a magician could drive that path from the flat Iranian desert to the top of
the highest range in the planet and to the other side, the Afghanistan plateau.
It was Magic. It was the Magic Bus.
And magic was Herat. As in all the cities at that side
of the Hindu Kush there was a Green Hotel. We stayed for a week there. Horst
used to hang around the town. I was exploring my guitar. One day he came back
with a German guy. I don’t remember his name but I didn’t like his nose. Horst
explained to me his new friend’s story. In few words, he ran out of money and
he was going to lend him a hand.
“Where to?”
“Goa”
“I don’t like the guy. He doesn’t look me straight in
the eye”
He was as junkie. I had never met a junkie before for
that matter. How would I know? He simply give me the chill. You know? Stupid to
tell, I was right. Of course for Horst to have someone to speak his own mother
language was great. And like me he was not experienced with junkies. So, how
would he know? But as we entered in India, Horst began to change. We used to
hit marihuana. I mean that was something. But I knew Horst was going a step
further. In Amritsar he began to take LSD. In Delhi he was just nearly every
day in LSD. I began to worry. It was in Delhi that I first met a junkie. It
took me not much to comprehend that Horst’s friend was a junkie. I got mad. I
went to him, straight. He was around thirty, six feet tall, and bad blood. But
I was a twenty years old lion on fire. I took out his mask before Horst. He was
a piece of a shit, and I told him so, straight in the face.
“And if you move while am talking to you am gonna rip you off right here. This is your plan, divide and
conquer. Get alone Horst and sack his money. Speak, motherfucker”.
Any man, thirty years old with two bollocks would had
jumped on me and make me to eat those words back. But he was no man, just a
snake crawling around his prey, a fucking junkie, a piece of a shit. I knew I
was hurting Horst German’s pride. But man, shit is everywhere. Good and bad
people is everywhere. Patriotism is the disease of the born idiot. That piece
of a shit was introducing Horst in LSD, then Heroine, which was absolutely
cheap in India. Finally he would steal his money and left him in the shit. The
bastard saw his plan so exposed that he didn’t find the words to deny me or to
face me. Horst saw his soul through my eyes, and he knew I was right. But I had
cut in pieces his heart too. Our brotherhood was broken. Months after, as I was
coming back to Europe, I heard say that he was sacked by a son of a bitch. It
did not take me hard thoughts to give a name to that bastard. Horst never made
it to Australia. All through my life I wondered if he fell under the Horse of
Death, or if he kept himself a man.
I landed in Anjuna Beach in
the Hippy Market day. How great! I embraced the sea and later on I gathered
around the people playing drums. I got my guitar out and more people came up,
among them a Violinist from Paris. I took him so high that he got nuts. He could
not believe it, he met the guitarist he had been looking for so long right in
the same day when he was to going back to France.
“You are coming back with me”, said he with his French
accent, so dear to me.
“Excusez moi”
“I pay you the plane. I will produce the LP. We got to
go now”.
He was serious. He was probably 25 or 27 years old.
All the guys were older than me.
“Cool down, man. I have just arrived. Give me your address,
I’ll be back in a couple of months”
He was flipping out. I mean, if he had a gun he would
had put me in the challenge, following him to Paris or die right there.
“Listen, -said I-, hang some days with me, we make
friends and we talk about that Band later”.
I managed to control his passion for my guitar. He
gave me his address, his telephone number, and finally he took his plane back.
He took me to Vagator, where
we could play on our own, with few people around, and we could harmonize our
sounds. He really was something. He walked away making me swear hundred times
that I would call him once in Paris, that I would not go nowhere else but to
Paris. The guys in Vagator stared at the Violinist
and the Guitarist with a funny smile in their eyes.
Vagator, at that time, was paradise. Some palm tree huts had
been built by the slope of the hill, and a big western tent was on the sand
like a medieval castle, some Germans on their way to Australia too, by that
time cooking their paradisiac meal, rice with milk, papaya, mango, kiwi,
pineapple morceaux with, and… little pieces of Indian
Hashish. I had never had that kind of meal. And I was hungry. I sat by the
shade of a coconut tree and began playing my guitar. They were all in their
thirties. For all I had seen, anyway, I was the little brother around. And they
had all some money too. To do what I did, begin the trip from Europe to India
without money it was crazy. When the meal was done, they could not stand
watching me alone there.
“Come on, get close, don’t tears us apart with you
weeping guitar”.
I was a wonderful guitar player, but they wanted to
see some money if they were to feed me during the months to come. Luckily I had
the idea to write to my old man from Delhi, to tell him that I had made it and
I was going to need some money, he could send it to Panjim,
Goa’s Capital City. So you see?
“I got some money” said I to their surprise.
“Do you? OK, Give us all of it”
I did so. I had no place to keep it and probably one
day someone would take it while I was swimming.
They find me so cute that never again ask me anything.
Anyway I had nothing else. And they knew it. One of them was pretty much in
drugs. Peter was the chief, he was in his forty, an art martial professor
looking at me as to his little brother. Michael was a classic orchestra man, a
musician from the old school staring at me with the eyes of one wondering how
that nuts, me, could play like that. I won his heart anyway, and as time passed
by and the fame of the Vagator’s guitar man swept the Anjuna Beach Colony Michael loved to push me to the
ring. The guys came singing their Hendrix’s songs and so on and so forth. Man,
I was playing nearly I don’t know how many hours per day, on my own. It was
good to led the people to play for me. Some, it is true, and musicians are
sometime real nuts, came to impress the company with their Honky Tonk Woman ballads. It was in that moment that Michael
said, “Come on, guitar man, shine on us”. The poor fellows after hearing me
they could not touch their guitar anymore. I was not in that story. But Michael
was, and he knew the guys who came with their guitars were too. Me, the guy I
really loved to play for, was a real holy hindoo man.
He came one day and sat by the fire. Those holy men love to smoke hash. We gave
him so much as he could get, which was a lot. I got my guitar out, as always,
and began to play to the Moon. The holy man broke singing in his holy language
holy songs for his holy gods. I kept playing for him until suddenly he shut up,
got up and went off. Next day he came too. And so every day for some weeks. He
was a very curious fellow. He had a face like dry leather, and an undefinable
look, but when he gave a smile he shone like a child. It was just a few
seconds. But what tremendous few seconds were those.
Of course we had visitors of all kinds. Sometimes we
had guys in LSD suddenly weeping their souls out because the beauty of the
place. They could not hold on so much happiness, and we had tremendous time
watching the guy let his tears flowing one after one. It was comic. Some people
went and others came. Then I saw her. Anne, an English girl of my age,
beautiful as Venus.
“And you are?”
“The guitar man”
“I see”
“I see you too. Halleluiah, at least a real girl”
“You don’t like your friend?”
“Yeah, but they have little willies like me. I can’t
do nothing with them”
“And what make you think that you can make something
with me?”
“I will buy you a kiss for a million dollar”
“If you had it”
“I can sing you a million song”
“No thanks, then we would have no time to make
anything”
Oh God, she was delicious. Not because I hadn’t had a
woman for the last eight or seven months. I had my first right during the first
Full Moon Party, a French bitch, for that matter. We kicked all night long in
the water. Man, I got my testicles hurt by the sand. But what, you can’t drink
wine and not getting drank, right? Anne was loving, the other was fucking.
There is a difference in it, as to fall in love and to love. You love your
child but you don’t fall in love with your daughter. You may love your dog, but
you don’t fall in love with your dog. I fall in love now and then, so what?
Summer love, winter love, springtime love is the best. Anne was that, my
springtime love. She was the incarnation of the Spring. When summer came and the
love was terminated, I spared a tear on her memory. A kiss of hers was worth a
place in my memory.
Summer came. Monsoon was coming and everybody was
packing and leaving. My friends said that they could take me to Iran. They were
going back to Teheran, they would sell their Bus there and keep their trip to
Australia. There was no problem, inasmuch as I never knew anything about their
plan or asked from them anything.
I could swear that the idea came from Peter’s heart.
When the others left me in Delhi he nearly cry. The thing is that the French
bitch presented herself in Vagator looking for me. I
mean, who can drink twice the same water? I told her to fuck off. She felt so
much offended that she decide to take her revenge. She thought that fucking the
entire colony it would break my heart. She became the whore of the guys. Every
night she would fuck with one. She brought also with her lices.
Shit man, the tent was infected and we all got it. Nasty bitch. But the guys
had a whore for free. Good Lord didn’t they know, old as they were, that
nothing is for free in this world? Anyway as she could not hurt me like a
whore, she could hurt me turning the guys against me. Peter held his promise as
far as Delhi. And there we all said good bye.
The trip from Goa to Delhi along the west coast was a
wonder, marvel after marvel never to forget, elephants on the road, peacocks in
the farms, coconuts tree valleys, hills inhabited by vampires big as eagles,
rivers and hills, and the sunset and the moonlight and the dawn. Nothing in the
world like it, it make you forget that you are crossing the land of hell, where
people had less value than a monkey, than cows are fed while children are left
to die, that misery is a part of life as much as power corruption.
Goa was a paradise in the west coast of a that land.
On the other side of Goa’s frontiers a religion born out of hell reigned
supreme in a land where Nature was magnificent. I had seen in Amritsar and in
Delhi and in Bombay horrors beyond imagination, a smile beyond the descriptive
power of a pen, souls sold to hell by the rupee, humans convinced to be
reincarnations of gods and demons, the terror of a soul born to be slave of a
system demoniac in which few are pure and the most are impure. I had seen
entire families by the street side begging a piece of bread and cows being fed
with caviar and champagne right in front of them. No man or woman would turn
their eyes to the child dying in their midst. No young man or young woman would
let his heart be torn apart by the infinite suffering of an impure soul. India
is a land where the beauty paradisiac of the country is counterbalanced by the
enormous hell living in the heart and soul of the nation. You are poor because
you were bad in a life before, ergo, fuck you! This is the abridged résumé of
India’s religion. That’s why the hippies went to Goa and never left the place
except to fly back. The experience was worth the year expended on the road.
Still I had to make it back.
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