[“The Symposium” is the fourth chapter of a novel-in-process that deals with the
loss of innocence and is set in a deserted Brazilian beach area during the early seventies.]

The angel said to me, “All that you have

written is sure and will come true: the Lord

God who inspires the prophets has sent his

angel to reveal to his servants ‘what is soon

to take place.’”

The pipe was deeply and intricately carved with native Afro-Brazilian imagery. If posed on a table you would see that--from its Yemanjá's head cauldron, all along the stem to the very ball-like mouth-piece--the long smoking-device presented over its half-a-yard length a carved depiction of The Glory of Yemanjá. Yemanjá was the Queen of the Sea. An assortment of extraordinary shells, mollusks and other(sea)worldly crustacean-like mythical creatures entangled their arms and claws to form a singularly bursting--and rare--version of Yemanjá's Medusa-like hair. Neptune had carved it

Meteoro was self-consciously burning and mashing balls of hashish, and mixing them with lumps of marijuana sem semente. The mix would soon be fed into The Glory of Yemanjá.

We had built an intense fire on which some fish were being broiled. Ricardo was already carefully placing some golden shrimp shish-kebab sticks on the makeshift grill, while Nelson mashed limes into a perfectionist's caipirinha-cocktail pulp: while kneading the pulp, he slowly added minimalist amounts of sugar to it. When the consistency and the amount of pulp reached the ideal point, Nelson would evenly distribute it among everybody's glasses, after having blended it with generous doses of the strongest moonshine cachaça liquor he had been able to find during his afternoon surveying-foray around Buzios' fishermen shacks. The sun had already set; it had sunk behind the sky-sea divide. It was after nine PM and the caipirinhas were the cocktails to precede our first banquet.

I was in charge of sautéing the mussels, which I was doing using a blackened copper frying pan that I had borrowed from Aricene, a fisherman's wife who had let us take rain water from the enormous barrel that stood next to her cabin. She liked Meteoro, and very often Meteoro visited her to exchange recipes and other niceties.

Aricene's stories, I would come to understand, were painted with the oddest truths of Buzios, and she would become a valuable source to understand the strange energy that seemed to enchant the silvery sands. Furthermore, her stories would provide a strong backbone to the account of the Mythical Foundation of Buzios that I gave you when I started this story that does not ever seem to get going: it had been Aricene who, by mixing stories of the locals and of distant and famous visitors to Buzios, had allowed me to comprehend that the fishermen were still blessed with the possibility of correcting the darkness and silence of the moonless nights with tales and legends. Actual facts, old beliefs, and rare discoveries were nightly brought indiscriminately to the small groups that sat in circles mending fishnets, drinking cachaça, and chewing mussels. These fantastic ingredients, slowly added to the stories with each account, flashed and enriched the trivial facts, making the story-telling a much deeper form of entertainment than the soap-operas that resonated among the apartment walls in the (after all, and inconceivably) not-so-distant nights of Rio de Janeiro. Aricene, for example, explained to us the singularity of the makers of the cachaça that Nelson was mixing to prepare the caipirinhas.

After long research, and using a personal polling method, Nelson had concluded that the best, strongest possible cachaça in Buzios (according to Aricene, “in the whole world”) was made in a mountain hut around João Fernandes' beach by old mute twin brothers. Their product was known by all Buzios' fishermen as a cachaça dos mudos, The Cachaça of the Mutes. According to Aricene, the mutes had been working on perfecting their product for what now seemed like too many years.

The twin brothers had tried many different alembics through which to distill the sugar cane alcohol. The alembic-pipes had been built using different lengths, curves, and materials at different times. Each vintage was the product of a new experiment, always looking for a better cachaça. They had obtained rare alloys from copper, iron, brass, and tin scrap. The twins, with an alchemistic zeal, had often sailed to Cabo Frio to scrap metals among the old ship-cemeteries. These were scrap lots where the remains of old vessels were dismantled to be sold as metal to scrappers not so singular as the mutes of the cachaça. Most of the metal for sale came from ships that had been wrecked or sunk during dangerous, stormy nights among the treacherous rocks directly North of Cabo Frio.

In colonial times, the pirate ships would leave their hiding posts within the dozens of enclosed bays of Cabo Frio. They would sail to the open sea, and from there they would return and intercept Portuguese and Spanish cargo galeões and caravelas. The pirates would press the Portuguese and the Spanish toward that rocky maze through which no unseasoned pilot could sail fast enough—no unseasoned pilot could sail at all—without risking sending his vessel to those very cemeteries.

If you go to Buzios today, you can still have a caipirinha at Le Pirate, a bar that stands by João Fernandes' beach. In the early seventies, Le Pirate was just a drinking spot in a state of dilapidation, but Aricene maintained that those ruins had formerly been the house of the pirate Paul Le Bourgeois. She said he had built it around the late fifteen hundreds (maybe even the early sixteen hundreds), after he had abandoned a pirate-ship, choosing instead to stay in Buzios. Aricene swore (“pelo Pai Oxúm”) that the old man who tended the dilapidated bar was a direct descendant of the pirate. To Paul Le Bourgeois, the golden sunsets of João Fernandes' had had a stronger appeal than the Spanish and Portuguese gold doubloons

But, going back to the mutes of the cachaça.

It seems that one night, after having conceived an alembic with a providential alloy, after having boiled the sugar cane concoction using as fuel a rare, spongy wood that strong eddies had brought to wash ashore João Fernandes' sands, the mutes obtained a particularly crystal-clear cachaça. They sat outside their shack with a bottle, one of the translucent bottles with no label that were characteristic of The Cachaça of the Mutes. It was a full moon night; the moon shone, and they had no other light than the moonshine that flooded their wooden table. They poured the new vintage in their two glasses, and noticed that—in the glass—the new cachaça gleamed with a mother-of-pearl quality. From their glasses, they both poured one third of the drink on the soil para o santo, for “the saint,” and emptied the rest into their bodies. The cachaça sparkled, flashed, and burned its way through their throats, tasting and aftertasting as if it were the perfect blend of Olympic nectar and ambrosia.

The brothers kept drinking the iridescent liquor, while they silently stared at the cliffs and at the sands and at the ocean. Either because of the moonshine, or because of the new cachaça, the landscape had turned monochromatically, magically, metallic silver gray. Every once in a while they either saw or felt as if mother-of-pearl lightning briefly electrified the whole scene. When they finally emptied their bottle they fell in a dream-plagued sleep. The twins did not wake up until the moon was quite old and waning. And they could never speak again.

According to Aricene, that is how the mutes of the cachaça became mute.

The mutes kept that alembic as the standard for their small industry. They understood that that was o alambique filosofal (the philosophical alembic, for lack of a better translation). The spongy wood, that magic fuel, the second indispensable ingredient of the formula, has not washed ashore again yet. Unnecessary to say that, after he heard Aricene's story on the magic wood, Nelson visited the mutes to further inquire about the spongy fuel.

I do not know what went on among them, mainly considering that the mutes of the cachaça are mute. They never developed a sign language and Nelson is somebody who sometimes not even we can easily understand. All I can say is that on many a full-moon night, Nelson strolls along the sands of João Fernandes, his heart half full of mystical optimism. Nowadays, whoever establishes a moonshine cachaça business in the area, still packages his product in translucent, labeless bottles hoping the prospective client will mistake his liquor for The Cachaça of the Mutes.

The night in Buzios, the night of our first banquet in Little Horseshoe to be more precise, seemed to me a continuation of that regular and apparent storytelling that I saw was the remarkable feature that kept the local fishermen and their families linked as a tight community. They shared a folklore which was, to them, more concrete than the flamboyant reality awarded them by nature in its exuberant display. They sailed, fished, and turned back to the lush hills, but their minds were fed with stories and thoughts that transcended not only the temporal but also the non temporal history of the place. Through the stories told by elders like Aricene, Buzios existed as an entity whose magnitude exceeded its mere existence as a tropical fishermen's hamlet.

We had finished our dinner. We had washed down our seafood with Nelson's perfectionist-caipirinha, whose main ingredient, as you know, was The Cachaça of the Mutes. Relaxed and sleepy, maybe drunkenly, we were still sipping it, chattering, still unaware that dinner prologued a long series of revelations, when Meteoro brought Neptune's The Glory of Yemanjá pipe so that we could smoke the rich blend of Moroccan hashish and sem semente marihuana. We were around the fire, reclining on the sand. Some of us were propped up on the rocks that had been distributed around the fire to be used as seats or leaning devices for our banquet.

Meteoro gave the pipe to Neptune for the latter to light, but Nelson, noticing the pipe's rich work, asked if he could take a closer look at the carving before it was used; he did not want to stop and observe it on his turn to smoke, because, he told Neptune, he knew that if he started to look at the carved imagery while smoking, he would lose himself in such a detailed inspection that no continuation of the communal smoking ritual would be possible.

“Olha, cara…” said Neptune, “Look, man… That is exactly one of the reasons for which I carved my pipe.” A long silence followed in which we digested our surprise. Neptune had not said more than one or two words since the moment when he had received us with his “pode chegar, ô gente” when we landed. This was our fourth night in Buzios, and it was the first time we had heard so much from Neptune. Since we were not yet acquainted with Neptune's commitment to save any unnecessary words, we had started to suspect that, if Neptune had not undergone a similar phenomenon as the makers of the cachaça, he had already walked half of the way. What is even more: we did not know that before very long, we would become strongly involved by the richness and magic of the silent man's tales.

Neptune's voice was deep, slow, and well modulated, and even though he spoke mainly in the giria slang of the Brazilian freaks, his words felt charged with more meaning than their natural load. His speech was both unexpected and surprising. “I carved my pipe,” he went on, “to say a couple of things about this place that I don't want to have to use words to convey. I did it long ago, when I was still alone in Little Horseshoes, long before Meteoro decided to join me. The pipe, Yemanjá, is not going anywhere. It is right here, cara, and it is going to stay here by the sea, her place. It is going to circle tonight among us, and still many a night to come when we will be many more around the fire. It will still be here when we start to understand why it is that we are here.

“So, cara, vai enfrente, just smoke it when it gets to you. And if you want to see where Yemanjá takes you while you are at it, do not ever worry, cara. If that happens, we'll be doing something else than just waiting for you to pass the pipe along. De uma boa sacada no cachinbo e isso vai lhe adiantar mais de um barato.

My friend, I just hate having to give you this last one in English. It is impossible to pass on to you all the different meanings in all the different readings that this last of Neptune's slangy sentences allowed. I would have to write several possible translations and explain each one in its possible context. So, I am sorry you have never been one of us. I am sorry you have not ever pulled with your lips and lungs from Neptune's Glory of Yemanjá's mouthpiece. And I am most of all sorry you were never under Little Horseshoe's starry night listening to Neptune telling you that, if you took a good look at his pipe while smoking from it, a good deal of important metaphysical incognita would start to disentangle.

Using a thin dry stick he took from the fire, at last Neptune, taking his time, lit the pipe. While lighting up, he took three long drags and kept the smoke in his lungs for a while. His eyes became humid and glassy. He slowly exhaled in many short jets of gray smoke. Then, Neptune gave the pipe to Meteoro, who took it to Zelma, who was sitting next to me. Then Neptune addressed Nelson, and by extension us, again:

“Cara, this is our first bom papo (good chat) here, so let me do something in memory of the moment when I learned that I was to come to this place,” Neptune continued. “Let me do something that I saw, was invited to share, long ago and far away. I do not know if I'm going to tell you details tonight. I don't know if I will finally ever get to tell you the where, when, why or the how. But, now let's just do this as a ritual of acquaintance, and see where it takes us to.”

After saying so, Neptune left us and went into the parachutent.

He came back with a book. It was Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. He asked Nelson to choose a page. Nelson leafed through the strange book from which several pages were missing and which had curious cutouts on others. He chose a nice entire page with many written lines, and passed the book back to Neptune. Without looking at it, Neptune handed the open Tao Te Ching to Tetê, and asked her to choose some paragraph from that page, preferably by its shape, “try to avoid reading it,” he said. “And cut it out.” Tetê took the whole page with all that was written on it, ripped it out, and gave it to Neptune. Neptune cleared his throat, and read:

Which is more precious, fame or health?

Which is more valuable, health or wealth?

Which is more harmful, winning or losing?

The more excessive your love,

The larger your hoard,

Knowing what is enough is freedom.

Knowing when to stop is safety.

Practice these, and you'll endure.

What an odd place language puts me in! Please! Please! Understand that Neptune's words are always basically untranslatable! Neptune had again spoken in his hermetic, untranslatable giria. Likewise, my trying to tell you what he said next will further increase the distance between what Neptune might have really said and what you are reading now. By now, you already know quite well that I am putting down here not only what I think he meant, but also what I think I heard. Anyway, this is the only way I have to tell you what went on that night. There is an error-factor to take into consideration (and I will not remind you of this again) due to the distance between facts, time, memory, ideas, and language. So here we go: what Neptune said next, in English would go more or less like this:

“This is our piece of wisdom. Everlasting non-cumulative knowledge given to us by the chance forces of the universe tonight, here. Let's smoke this knowledge as a way of incorporating it into our baggage. We will read it still two more times, making a total of three. And think of this number, I beg you.

“Afterwards, we will smoke it, thus incorporating it to our brains through the chemistry of our blood, and we will not need to see it again. It will stay with us for ever and ever. We can obey these words or ignore them, follow this advice or contradict it.

“The guiding of our actions by these rules, and the ordering of our lives accordingly, is one of the choices our free will has the opportunity to make. By making this decision we will, in part, design our future. We can ignore this wisdom, but from now on we can never lose it. Now we are this much wiser.”

For some reason, Neptune had chosen, at least for this night, Nelson and Tetê as his acolytes. He passed the piece of wisdom back to Tetê for her to read it again. Tetê's sensual voice gave a different meaning to these ideas. Afterwards it was Nelson's turn. His raspy, forceful voice made Lao Tzu's suggestions an advice so strong that, to the weak, it would have been a unrenounceable command. That was Neptune's second lesson. There wasn't any unique truth. Even if expressed in equal words, each truth was in part constituted by him/her who expressed it.

When Neptune had the Tao piece of paper back in his hand, he dexterously used it to roll a big fat joint made with Meteoro's hashish-and-grass mix. He lit it, inhaled deeply and passed it along to Nelson. All of us smoked it. As we smoked, we became increasingly aware that we were at that very moment physically and concretely incorporating part of the Tao Te Ching into our moral code, or whatever you want to call that inner mechanism that makes you do the things you do or prevents you from doing otherwise.

---

 

We were sooo stoned. I was to the left of Neptune, separated from him by quiet Meteoro. Zelma's head lay on my lap. Immobile. The Tao page had been smoked; the Glory of Yemanjá rested on Nelson's lap. We were in silence. Nelson was beside Neptune, on the right. Nelson's eyes followed the mysteries of that suggestive marine Deity that Neptune's hand had so patiently described.

Tetê had left the circle and lay on the sand, belly up, a few yards away. Arms and legs stretched and spread open, she must have felt she was an antenna capturing the energy of that sky, of that beach, of that moment. She was a flesh-made cross, a muscle-and-sinew artifact thrown on the sand inhaling life, exhaling all the heat of human existence. First she stared at the Three Marys embroidered in the Immense Black. Close by she saw the Holy Dagger, and further down Taurus. She then aimed to and followed the cloudy path of the Milky Way. And sailed away.

Wearing only her plaster cast, Viviane was crotch-deep in the water: as deep as the cast allowed her to go. Close by, Ricardo was entangled in a dialog with the sea. He would wait for a wave to break and immediately trigger a Bach fugue that lasted to the very second when the next wave started to break. The wave would go and then Ricardo would attack with another fugue. From where I was, by the fire, I heard Ricardo's flute very faintly. Our particular breed of Muzak.

The moon shone high.

“See, cara?” That was Neptune. He started his monologue as if following a conversation interrupted a few seconds before. “It happened in Amsterdam. In the Red-Light District. The coffee shop is still there. You could walk in there right now, buy and smoke your pot. There is a sign in the front: It says Coffee Shop - PARADISE - The Best. It is a painted-over mirror. Coffee Shop and The Best are painted in yellow; PARADISE, in bright red. There are three big palm-trees on that sign, cara. I did not notice it when I walked in but, on my way out, I stood across the narrow street taking a good look at that sign. I'll tell you why.”

Neptune had now squatted by the fire; readily, Meteoro took the coffee pot and poured him some.

“I had sailed to the Horn of Holland on the Koningin Beatrix and, from there, I took the night-train to Amsterdam. Once in Amsterdam, I had rented a cot in a cheap fleabag called Kabul, on the Warmoesstrass, left of the Centraal Station,” continued Neptune. “I went to Paradise just to smoke some grass and read, take it easy. There were a few tables in the front. In the back, there was a quaint space with Oriental rugs and embroidered cushions next to the smoke-bar. I bought a cup of coffee and sat there. A few people lay on those big pillows listening to the music, quietly chatting. The Music! Brazilian that I am, I immediately noticed that Gato Barbieri obsessively spat the highest notes of a very fast version of the song Bahia into his saxophone. In England, before boarding the ship I bought a book, quite boring cara; but I liked how this guy lashed out at the rich and powerful. It helped me to go through the train's quiet hours. So, leaning on the cushions of Paradise, I fixed my pipe, lit it and, under the faint light of the room, I went to my book again.

“I guess the environment was helpful: I was getting high very quickly. Gato Barbieri's chords, this English book ranting against enclosure, against the all-eating sheep, the murmur of the smokers surrounding me; I felt at peace. I had noticed that the man on my right had sailor-tattooed arms. He smoked a hookah, one of the several store-rental Arab brass water pipes, full of what smelled like very sweet hashish, probably much darker and stronger than the one favored by the locals. Distracted from the reading by the fragrance of his hashish, I looked at his tattooed arms again. He took this as a cue and addressed me in German--or Dutch--heavily accented English:

“‘What is that book about, man?’

“‘It's called Utopia. Have you read it?’ I asked him.

“‘No, man,’ he answered, ‘I haven't. I'm not doing a lot of reading lately. I used to; now I only remember. Utopia, eh?…. Like impossible… or like… perfect situation, right?’ He smoked a little.

“‘Yeah,… something like that.’ I thought he wanted to talk. Maybe I wasn't going to read quite yet.

“‘Who wrote that, man?’ he wanted to know.

“‘Thomas More.’

“‘And… who is that, man?’

“‘Don't know much, cara, an English saint. Got burned at the stake, I think… executed in some way.’

“‘Oh!… a holy book!’ His eyes lit.

“‘Don't know if holy, cara,’ I responded.

“The mention of More's sainthood had suddenly awakened something in him. ‘Yeah, Holy!Ê Where are you from man?’ he inquired.

“‘I'm Brazilian, like that music playing, cara,’ I proudly lectured.

“‘Don't sound Brazilian, man, more like good jazz,’ he protested, but went on: “but I take your word… Do you believe in Omens, man?’ He pronounced this word in some special fashion.

“‘Why do you ask that, cara?… I guess I do.’

“‘Too many signs, man. Coincidences.’ He drew intensely from the hookah.

Neptune stopped talking for a while. As if trying to elicit the details of a well kept memory, he now lit Yemanjá again. Dragging from the pipe, he took his time.

His story had drawn everybody back to the fire. Tetê knelt behind Nelson and had her arms around him. Back from the water, Viviane had wrapped herself in a poncho, and sat on Ricardo's lap. I hadn't moved, neither had Zelma. We all smoked some more. Neptune spoke again:

“‘Signs, man… coincidences’ the sailor said. He pointed to a prominent tattoo on his right forearm. ‘I noticed you were looking at my tattoo.’ He stretched his arm before my eyes for me to take a closer look: It was a colorful rendering that reminded me of the technique of air-brush artists. It was a geometrical profile: a semi-spherical island with three palm-trees on its high, round summit. The island protruded from a light blue ocean and everything shone under a sunny sky. The waterline marked a clear division. The underwater part of the island — which, in reality would have been invisible — was also tattooed, under the translucent ocean: In a blurrier rendering (it was an underwater image) this completed the full sphere. This second, underwater engraving was a sunken half-hemisphere. Hence, the whole island--with its on-the-surface and its underwater parts--in fact constituted a planet; the Earth. The above-the-water island was the North Hemisphere; the water line coincided with the Equator; the sunken part was Earth's Southern Hemisphere. Underwater, South America was quite visibly delineated, and the part that corresponded to Brazil was tattooed in blood-red. It was an incongruous tattoo: the green island topped by three palm-trees under a sunny sky; the translucent-blue ocean; and the underwater, sunken, drowned half-world.

“‘I had this tattooed in Recife; that's in Brazil, man,’ the sailor now lectured with his finger still placed on the strange tattoo. ‘I call this thing Juliana's Island…. still don't know if I really like carrying it, man. It's a little too weird. Juliana Pernanbucana, The Albino Mermaid of Recife did it. Does that name ring a bell, man?’

Because I had sailed on Navy ships for more than a couple of years and tattoos were the main adornment among the sailors, I immediately recognized the name the sailor had dropped to Neptune in that bar of Amsterdam's Red Light District.

Juliana Pernambucana, The Albino Mermaid of Recife was at the same time one of the most reclusive tattoo artists in the world and one of the most renowned. I could never forget the picture of her that I once saw in a tattoo magazine. Platinum-white hair, almost-white pink skin, Juliana Pernanbucana was from Recife, the capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. During daytime albinos in Brazil were condemned to stay indoors or carefully cover their skin, wear the darkest sunglasses. Some people insisted that Juliana Pernambucana was related to both Sivuca and Hermeto Paschoal, world-famous fusion musicians from Brazil's North; both also albino.

Juliana Pernambucana was not only a tattoo artist but was herself a tattoo canvas. Albino skinned, she had clothed as much of her own body as possible by the art of her own hands: Tattoos. Then she had directed another tattoo artist to do the unreachable parts. The result was of visible Japanese inspiration. Most of the work consisted of a net of fish scales. She had taken the motif to paroxysm: The entirety of her body was covered with obsessive pentagonal scales that were dark blue colored, nearing pitch black in the darkest parts, fading to a softly-smoked gray in the lightest. The scales' size and tone varied according to the logic of her body. She had loosely followed the ideal of a fish. To allow the engraving of the proper scaling, she had shaved her head. Afterwards, she had allowed her platinum hair to grow back. Whenever she braided it, which she really seldom did, you could decipher the dexterous craftsmanship on the white scalp. The work included her face, and her ears had been transformed by needle-and-ink into fish gills.

One night some two years ago, in a filthy tavern by Rio de Janeiro's Praça Mauá, a robust tattooed captain of an old lagosteira, a lobster fishing boat, after not a few shots of Steinheager, confided to me that even Juliana Pernambucana's vaginal external labia were intricately engraved. Juliana Pernambucana's body work presented still one more particularity. From her calves down, the needlework subtly and imperceptibly switched from the harmonic scaling to become a compact, continuously tightening grid whose final effect was a trompe l' oeil fish caudal fin. Her hands had been submitted to the same treatment and resembled a fish's lateral fins.

Juliana Pernambucana was as much a mermaid as humanly possible.

Juliana Pernambucana was both a conceptual and an intuitive tattoo creator. She would hang out with you, talk to you, listen to you, do whatever with you — as she did with the lagosteira captain of the filthy tavern by Rio's Praça Mauá. At one point she would be ready to work on you. She would feverishly work on your skin devising the logo she had slowly allowed to form within her mind while she did the hanging out. It was a ritual whose basis was the subject's trust. In other words: she would tattoo on you whatever she wanted. Whatever she had to, she would say.

“‘She talked about a tragic geodesic yin and yang, see?’ Neptune told us the sailor in Amsterdam told him. ‘She talked about polarities, man. She said I needed this tattoo here. Said it was my duty to have it; I'm a sailor. See? I see the world; the world sees me… Sees the Geodesic Tragedy, man.’

Neptune said the sailor had not understood the tattoo; but Juliana Pernanbucana had told him that some day, at the proper moment, it would all gain the proper meaning. The tattoo was a sign for somebody in the future.

“‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘the tattoo has been on my arm waiting to do what it is doing right now… Have you noticed the sign of this place, outside?’ he wanted to know.

“‘Yeah, cara, it says Paradise.’

“‘Yeah, yeah, but…. did you carefully look at it? Palm-trees, man! Three palm-trees! As many as on my arm! That's why I walked in here. The Trinity, man! Sacred Number! I have been thinking of the three palm-trees on my arm every single day since I got them. Holy! Not one or two, but three palm-trees, see?’ Suddenly, he had become really excited. ‘Maybe I was waiting for you, Brazilian man.’

“‘And you see,’ he went on, ‘Paradise, man! Utopia, man! Brazilian music, man! Don't you see it! Omens, man! Strange coincidences!’

Neptune was telling this part of the tale really vividly, as if performing some sort of psychodrama. His voice had gained the sailor's pitch and speed. It reminded me of the Vietnam photographer played by Dennis Hopper in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. But, let Neptune go on:

“We got lost in our thoughts. Now we were sharing his water pipe. We smoked in silence for a while. Then, the sailor asked me: ‘Listen, have you heard of Transcendental Mnemotechnics, brother?’

“I hadn't.

“‘It's a way for you to remember something important forever,’ he went on. 'And, come now: how about Chance Wisdom, or Cosmic Designs? Have you heard of any of those?’ Of course not. 'By Jove,' he jumped; that's why I had to come smoke here! Now I see it! So you could find me, man; so I could find you!’

“By that time, he had won me over. I felt that chance had nothing to do with my being next to this man.

“‘Cosmic Messages, man,’ after a long drag of smoke he ranted on. ‘What were you reading there, man?… what for?’ he almost demanded.

“‘Some stuff about a better place, I guess. it's old stuff, pal,’ I think I told him.

“‘A better place? What place?’ He kept smoking.

“Like in an elementary-school drill, we went quickly through the whole thing again; he guided me: ‘Yeah,’ I repeated to myself, us: ‘a better place, something impossible, an ideal, the utopia.’

“‘Like a Paradise, for example,’ almost sarcastically he said. ‘Let's forget about the impossible.’ He leaned heavily on that last word. ‘You are looking for the better place, your place. That's what you are doing. Like Carlos Castañeda's Don Juan's porch.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.

“‘Look, cara, I guess we are all looking for our own place,' I tried to resist.

“‘Yeah, man, I know, but only some get an answer…. Where is the place in that book?’

“‘Don't know, man, doesn't say.‘

“‘Yeah, it says. Ask the Cosmos, bro'. Look: pick a page by chance. Don't read it; give me that book, if you will.’

We were all listening attentively to Neptune; at last he was telling us the how, who, where. And more than that.

“I opened the book somewhere and, while I handed it to him,” Neptune went on saying, “I noticed I shook a little.”

Neptune told us that he had kept that book carefully ever since. It had become a religious object, a relic: It had been decreed a Holy Book by the Mysterious Sailor of Amsterdam. He kept it in his small chest within the parachutent.

Neptune fell silent again, so Meteoro immediately went to the parachutent. For a few minutes, we all listened to the sound of small nocturnal waves placidly dying on the sand. Meteoro came back with The Book. Neptune took and displayed an old paperback for all of us to see: the copy of Utopia. We leaned closer. Illuminated by the flames and the moon light, the book quivered in Neptune's hands: a white cover with a post-Medieval engraving of an island. The word Utopia was printed in red letters, like the Paradise sign in the Amsterdam coffee shop.

He handed it to Tetê, and told her “Look for page thirteen.”

Tetê leafed through the book and said “It is missing.”

"Right," said Neptune. "We smoked it. That was the first time I did that. The sailor taught me that. But, as you know, before we smoked, we read it. Three times. On that page you learn that Hythlodaeus, this guy who spent time in Utopia — who found Utopia, let's say — was once himself a sailor. He was with Amerigo Vespucci. He sailed on all his four travels, cara. But, on the last one, he asked to be let go. Hythlodaeus left the ship in the New World, cara. In that continent that after Vespucci would be called America. More precisely, he asked to be let off on the Sunken Hemisphere of the Mysterious Sailor's tattoo. In South America, cara. We read the part thrice, so we learned it by heart; it said:

“…on the final voyage he did not return with him. He importuned and even wrested from Amerigo permission to be one of the twenty-four who at the farthest point of the last voyage were left behind in the fort.”

Neptune's voice was now graver, blurred by the smoke and the hour.

“Think of the strange coincidences. The sailor said that strange coincidences are never coincidences, but signs, like the one hanging above the entrance of the coffee shop, with its three palms. Think of the page chosen by chance. It was number thirteen; a charged number. Depending on whom, either a good or a bad auspice.

"That paragraph, right after the word fort, directed you to a footnote. It located the precise place in the New World where Hythlodaeus and the other twenty three men abandoned ship,” Neptune was about to conclude his tale. “Footnote twenty-three. The sailor and I went to the bottom of page thirteen and read:

“23. Cape Frio in Southeast Brazil.

"You all know Praia do Forte, in Cabo Frio, right? Beach of the Fort, in Cape Frio. Not too far from us, right? Well, that was Hythlodaeus' first foothold in his search for Utopia. If you ever find a copy of this book before page thirteen has been smoked as Cosmic Wisdom, you can see that all I told you checks out right, cara. The publisher is Yale University, the year 1964. Is it a coincidence that I bought a British book in England, but the book was published and printed in the New World?

"So, the sailor rolled a big joint with that page and my grass, and we smoked the whole thing together. Loucos de pedra, madly stoned, we stood silent for a while, and then, the sailor sent me on my way: ‘Have a good trip, man. Good Fortune,’ he said. He walked out of that coffee shop. I've never seen him again.”

Yemanjá had come full circle. Neptune took a last drag and placed the pipe on his lap. He said: “I left the coffee shop much later. I stood outside for a while looking at those red letters, PARADISE, and at the three palms. The Best. There was something I had to do. I had to sail across the Atlantic. It would be my homecoming. There was some unknown waiting for me which I would meet sometime after I had I set my foothold in Cabo Frio. It was my calling.”

Neptune focused his eyes on the distant, invisible horizon and grew silent for the rest of the night.