Me and the Didactical Dwarf were having lots of fun reading subtitles with a stereotypical Indian accent in front of an Indian gift store near a Hare Krishna restaurant. It was some traditional Hindu story in the form of a soap opera. As I intoned my Apu-like gibberish Vitor had me notice a sanyasin of sorts standing nearby. "This must be a bit offensive", I said just as we entered a domain of deep embarrassment and obliquity, which included nonsensical comments about how happy that side of the street looked with that multicolored bench — and the other side NOT ("the church sure is beautiful, but is not happy") — and weird dance-like moves along the sidewalk. As we perceived we were still making bozos out of ourselves, we had to ran away and get the Communist Hippie, who by that time was still eating away a vegetarian hamburger at Lord Krishna's place.

Sure this would be a good enough story to tell in details, but something happened a few minutes later that, in perspective, made the whole fiasco a small footnote for the day.

Please understand that I will also refrain from minute descriptions of several irrelevancies, including a discussion about the Gaucho ethos and less-than-400-years-old-so-called-traditions, and a dog named Harry which only understood English and cried with chords of harmonics and had a cute brown nose. Furthermore I won't tell of the girls we noticed, and the acquaintances we met and sort of ignored, of computer prices and discussion of cost-benefit of specific hardware parts. Yes, I won't tell you about my private opinions about each meaningless phenomenon I had the karma to meet with today, and I will completely forget any great discovery about the nature of games, humor and existence that I also may have had, even though they are my favorite subjects; for I will focus on the story of a man with a Big Nose.

That's right. As we rested after our meals sitting bellow Santos Dummond statue in front of the Arc de Triomphe wannabe in Redemption Park, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, South America, Third World, this very earth, we happen to meet a World War II veteran – and he happened to have a wide, all-around huge, lavishly decorated with craters and a wart to top it all, state-of-the-art nose.

He was a stout old fellow, with a hat decorated with the red snake smoking (mark of the FEB (Brazilian Expedictionary Force), for Brazil making expeditions to help other countries was as believable as a snake blowing a pipe), a very worn-out belt and truly shaggy, blue, watery eighty-seven years old small eyes.

Maybe he needed company, old age means solitude for most¹, and maybe he found our small group of three young adults inviting some conversation, for he asked, without any proper or informal introduction, if we knew what was the biggest area of constructed land in Rio Grande do Sul.

Of course we didn't, but we thought of shopping-malls. He said, maybe an anachronism, that it was the Military School right in front of us. He discussed it a bit with Vitor and Adriano, but I kept silent since I thought he was just a boring old man getting in the way of me and my thoughts. Boy was I wrong!

Soon we discovered he had fought WWII, actually having arrived in Italy in 1944. On a defensive tone he said he didn't go there to kill Germans, but to fight Nazism – and that Germans were actually good hard-working intelligent people, etc. And then he had some war stories for us. How could we imagine having that on such a bright, mundane, post-modern, Saturday afternoon?

He told us of the time he and 10 others had to stop a caravan with grenades. One of the trucks had ammunitions and provisions, and the other 60 young German soldiers. They had an agreement between the 11 of not blowing out the truck carrying the soldiers. "And if somebody squealed on you?" I asked, "Oh, that would lead us to the Court-Martial. We would be punished for sure... but how to face the killing of sixty 16 year old boys at the end of war?" That is something an American would rarely be proud of, I thought to myself, but it is such a great merit to respect life during a war. Vitor later told me he had shed a few tears during this bit.

Then he told us of the day he had to bring with him, forcefully if required, a member of the Hitler Youth who was renitent to come. He first asked for help, but his superior said he didn't had anyone to spare. So he went, disarmed, not speaking German, to force a maybe disarmed man in a destroyed house to come with him. He got some gasoline and threw on the guy's back, and there he went, threatened by a lighter. "This is the sort of on-the-run skill we needed in war". And in the whole samsara, mate.

On another occasion he had to blip off (yeah, that was sort of the hardboiled slang I could find to translate the Portuguese he used) a German fellow who he found out lying with an Italian chick as he opened the door of a cabin. "He heard the trinket on the door – if his gun was loaded I was gone. Oh, how that woman ran." Then I started praying, for me it is so uncommon to talk with somebody that has killed a man. I believe I had never faced such a confession from anybody yet — I'm just a baby.

I got curious if he had scored some Sophialorenesque chicks while in Italy, but was careful to ask first if he was married when he went to war. "Oh, that's a sad story".

"There was this pretty 16 years old whom I thought I could help. Since she only had her mother in her life and both were very poor, if we got married and I died in war, she would at least have some money. Though by the rules of the army I couldn't get married at that time – at that time the Brazilian army going to war was a sure thing, yet we didn't know who and when — we did get married, in secret.

"The day after the marriage my superior called me. I don't know how, but he knew I had gotten married. I thought I was going to jail, but he actually gave me a license of eight days, which was our honeymoon. Just after those eight days they put me into a ship, and from then on I didn't receive any news from her.

"When I returned, a couple of years later, I found out she had gotten pregnant and died in labor. She and her mother had tried to contact me, but the mail was censored for sure. My daughter survives till this day. "

Well, then it wouldn't be ok to ask about some Italian ho? Particularly not with an Indian accent?! Ok, I got it. Maybe my Asperger's not so bad lately.

...

Unsatisfactory endings arise from expectations. Our need for closure manufactures a well rounded resolution that is what maybe Freud called "death wish". Our dreams never have a proper ending, they always finish when something else is being construed — even if there is, in fact, a climax. This non-expectative unresolvedness is none else than the deathless state itself. We are forever unsettled by mental fabrications that have build-ups and conclusions, but there's a pool wherein all this small waves surface. This is our sole refuge, the Lama's mind.

I have stayed up late to write this, as I had a little difficulty with Corporal Freitas closure for our conversation. He just went away, back into the dharmakaya, although maybe like one of the eleven war-criminal-bodhisattvas he accidentally met 50 years later, we may find each other as sad animals on a zoo somewhere someday, or something like that. After such a eventfull day, while I came again to the end of Wild Strawberries, and wondered why this particular Bergman had this cozyness feel about it even while it didn't really settle anything², I decided to put some words about the deathless state. Yes, it seems we always die mid-something, as we wake from dreams. That is, unless we cut-through closure and leap at once in the pool — (day)dreaming whatever, never wrong.