‘WOW, that’s KERRRAZY good!’ The last time I went to a medium,”
he adds soberly, “he had to shield his eyes when I came in the
room.”
I didn’t; maybe my eyes have adjusted to his aura.
“So I started reading ancient books: The Book of the Dead, the I
Ching, the Gitas; the teachments of Jesus. The REAL ones, not the
ones the church sets out for us. Like when Jesus say, ‘Drink my
blood, eat my meat,’ it’s mean that God is in all of us. AND WE ARE
IN GOD. And evil is just the absence of God. That’s all it is.”
“Augustine says the same,” I begin, but next to the Tibetan Book of
the Dead, Augustine’s a Johnny-come-lately. Paulo shrugs and
resumes: “Think about it: our souls have an amazing opportunity
here to learn. We go from universe to universe, but here on earth we
can take a GIANT LEAP forward. So I’m learning to love my enemy.
Because I want to love EVERYBODY. Think about it.”
I’m thinking: You don’t need Tibetans to learn to love everybody.
Ask Hillel. Ask Jesus. For that matter, ask Zamenhof.
“When I knew that I was sent here to put my energy into the
ground to feed these children, then I ACT. I come to Ursula and
Giuseppe and they say, ‘Here’s ten hectares, see what you can do.’
So I left a great house in Goiana—and a girlfriend who was a model!
—to come here and plant. I put my energy into the plants and
sometimes they stay quiet, shhhhh, a month, a year, two years, and
then—WHOOMP!—POW!—they come up KERRAZY big.” It’s like
talking to a comic book hero, Plantman.
“And I don’t get paid; no, I pay Ramón out of my own pocket. If I
leave, I leave everything. But who would?” He seems to have in
mind his life with Carla and Nestor, with the ten boys for whom he
provides a father’s lore—how to swim, how to fish, how to make a
bow and arrow from bamboo. A father’s love.
But no, he’s talking about another dimension entirely. “It’s just
full of souls here, FULL OF SOULS. Even Kubitschek felt it, homing
in on this place from his helicopter.” In the late 1950s, President
Juscelino Kubitschek made good on his motto, “Fifty years of
progress in five,” by founding the new capital, Brasília. Rumor has it
that Kubitschek’s helipad, during his forays into Goiás, was on the
grounds of Bona Espero. “Think about it,” says Paulo.
He leans in and locks my gaze; the moral of the story is at hand.
“We are all living in someone’s dream.”
* * *
Late in the afternoon, when the heat of the day has passed, Paulo
and I kneel on opposite sides of a platform full of palm seedlings,
transplanting the successes and weeding out the failures. He’s been
talking about his various careers—interior design, cooking,
patrolling for avalanche victims with a GPS (“beep, beep,
beepeepeepeep”), and I ask how he started farming. The question
seems to amuse him. “I knew nothing about farming; I just figured it
out, like: why isn’t this working?” his rubbery face assumes a
befuddled expression. “AHH, I’ll try this. And this?” He taps his bald
pate twice. “AHH, I’ll try that.”
He begins to rattle off stats: the vegetable field is seventy by
eighty meters. He’s installed over three kilometers of irrigation
pipes. On four hectares, he’s planted five hundred-odd fruit trees;
around the rest of the property, more than two hundred non-fruit
trees. The water tank, filled by water pumped up from the lake,
holds ten thousand liters. Last year the garden yielded one ton of
tomatoes. Lately, he’s grown a dense pasture of mombasa grass,
with four distinct quadrants.
He walks me through a large shed he’s just built for raising
seedlings and storing tractors. It’s the kind of shed Nero might have
built for his seedlings and tractors; aureate, capacious. He’s painted
it classic Brazilian colors—sky-blue and ochre—and put in a
bathroom “so the gardeners don’t have to pee in the fields.” Of late,
from the bend in the highway, it’s the most prominent building you
see. Paulo calls it a “laboratory.” Ursula calls it “Paulo’s palazzo.”
Bona Espero runs on two different calendars: Ursula’s and
Paulo’s. The Ursuline calendar refers to epochal events of the past
forty years: “the-time-of-the flood”; “the-time-of-the-fire”; “the-time-
the-board-of-the-UEA-came-to-Bona-Espero.” The Pauline calendar
refers to the future: “when-we’ll-be-raising-horses”; “when-we’ll-be-
using-wind-power”; “when-we’ll-be-farming-fish.” Paulo points to a
jagged gash in the chicken wire. “You see that? That’s where the
cascavel—how do you say, rattlesnake?—poked out his head, but we
were READY for him.” He picks up what looks like a blind person’s
white stick; at one end is a red plastic loop which, when he tugs the
other end, tightens like a noose. “I got him, Ramón cut the wire, and
then I took the snake out to the fields.” No animals were harmed in
the making of this utopia.
Suddenly, abruptly, Plantman’s face darkens, his brow furrowed.
“It’s just a matter of time before people wake up. You’ve seen what’s
happening: tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes. When the energy
comes, the first thing it does is to shift the plates. BAM. And you see
what’s going on in the economy, don’t you? Watch CNN: This
morning the Dow fell 3 percent, and that’s just this morning. A
matter of time before EVERYONE FINALLY SEES … and they’ll all
start coming. Here. To Goiás.”
He squares his shoulders and faces me. “It’s all depend on your
faith. You have to be prepared for the energy. Do you have FAITH?
Are you PREPARED? Are you ready to leave behind the world of
lies?”
I’m not likely to receive the energy, but am I ready to leave
behind the world of lies? “I’ve just left my marriage of thirty years,”
I say. “If I’m not ready now, I’ll never be.”
This evening, after walking two miles down the red dirt road, I
wave my little clamshell phone high overhead, fishing for texts.
Suddenly my phone buzzes, and buzzes again and again. It seems so
uncanny, finding messages in the ether. Maybe Paulo’s right: We are
al living in someone else’s dream.
8. Sebastian’s Mantras
It’s not easy making a living as an Esperanto rocker, in Buenos Aires
or anywhere. To pick up some income, Sebastian’s been working in
an amusement park as a Hannibal Lecter impersonator. Hard to
think of anyone caging up that boyish, chiseled face, like wasting
ozone. When the owner shut down the park in Buenos Aires,
Sebastian decamped to the Canary Islands for a few months, where
he wrote a novel and some short stories.
“Were they good?” I ask. “Did you like them?”
“Like them? I love them, I think I am a genius. But the publishers
did not agree.”
The upper-middle-class son of a doctor and a homemaker,
Sebastian was educated in a bilingual English-Spanish school in
Buenos Aires: it was cosmopolitan, well-appointed, “lots of Jewish
kids.” He speaks Esperanto whip fast, with the raw, gutted rs of