“There is only love”

“There is only love” is the expression Ulla leaves with Lin in Goa, joining her belief in love to a concrete instruction: find Karla. Its force lies both in what Ulla tells him about Karla and in what Lin does next, carrying her words from a moonlit ferry into the search that takes him toward Mapusa.

Ulla’s Counsel

Ulla speaks while Lin holds her. She has just reflected that Karla needs love and said that Modena truly loves her. Then, gripping Lin’s arms and looking directly at him, she tells him to start at Mapusa and look for Karla on a beach. Ulla has learned from Karla’s letter that she will remain in Goa for a little while and can see the ocean from her front door. The expression is therefore not only a general declaration: Ulla gives Lin a destination and a reason to keep searching.

Words That Remain

After Ulla urges Lin to find Karla, she repeats that there is only love. The words stay with him as he leaves by ferry; he remembers Ulla’s tears as bright in the moonlight and her phrase as passing like prayer-bead wishes through the music and laughter around him. The image connects a fleeting conversation to the journey ahead: her counsel persists after the ferry carries him away.

From Expression to Action

At dawn, when the ferry reaches Panjim, Lin is the first to board a bus to Mapusa. He travels the fifteen kilometres through leafy groves and passes mansions shaped by centuries of Portuguese colonial rule. Arriving on a Friday, the town’s market day, he bargains for an Enfield Bullet motorcycle, pays a bond and a week’s rent in advance, and rides out through the market toward the beaches. Ulla’s words thus become part of the immediate chain of action by which Lin follows her directions and searches for Karla. The expression’s significance in this passage rests on that movement from reassurance to pursuit: love is presented as a reason to go looking, even when the person sought has not yet been found.