it – and, it must be said, he rarely did – he considered the real madman to have been the doctor who had agreed to admit him for the flimsiest of reasons (as in any family, the tendency is always to place the blame on others, and to state adamantly that the parents didn’t know what they were doing when they took that drastic decision).Paulo laughed when he learned of the strange letter to the newspapers that Veronika had left behind, complaining that an important French magazine didn’t even know where Slovenia was.
‘No one would kill themselves over something like that.’ ‘That’s why the letter had no effect,’ said his friend Veronika, embarrassed. ‘Yesterday, when I checked in at the hotel, the receptionist thought Slovenia was a town in Germany.’
He knew the feeling, for many foreigners believed the Argentine city of Buenos Aires to be the capital of Brazil.
But apart from having foreigners blithely compliment him on the beauty of his country’s capital city (which was to be found in the neighbouring country of Argentina), Paulo Coelho shared with Veronika the fact just mentioned, but which is worth restating: he too had been admitted into a mental hospital, and, as his first wife had once remarked, ‘should never have been let out’.
But he was let out. And when he left the sanatorium for the last time, determined never to go back, he had made two promises: (a) that he would one day write about the subject and (b) that he would wait until both his parents were dead before touching publicly on the issue, because he didn’t want to hurt them, since both had spent many years of their lives blaming themselves for what they had done.
His mother had died in 1993, but his father, who had turned eighty-four in 1997, was still alive and in full possession of his mental faculties and his health, despite having emphysema of the lungs (even though he’d never smoked) and despite living entirely off frozen food because he couldn’t get a housekeeper who could put up with his eccentricities.
So, when Paulo Coelho heard Veronika’s story, he discovered a way of talking about the issue without breaking his promises. Even though he had never considered suicide, he had an intimate knowledge of the world of the mental hospital – the treatments, the relationships between doctors and patients, the comforts and anxieties of living in a place like that.
So let us allow Paulo Coelho and his friend Veronika to leave this book for good and let us get on with the story.
Veronika didn’t know how long she had slept. She remembered waking up at one point – still with the life-giving tubes in her mouth and nose – and hearing a voice say:
‘Do you want me to masturbate you?’
But now, looking round the room with her eyes wide open, she didn’t know if that had been real or an hallucination. Apart from that one memory, she could remember nothing, absolutely nothing.
The tubes had been taken out, but she still had needles stuck all over her body, wires connected to the area around her heart and her head, and her arms were still strapped down. She was naked, covered only by a sheet, and she felt cold, but she was determined not to complain. The small area surrounded by green curtains was filled by the bed she was lying on, the machinery of the Intensive Care Unit and a white chair on which a nurse was sitting reading a book.
This time, the woman had dark eyes and brown hair. Even so, Veronika was not sure if it was the same person she had talked to hours – or was it days? – ago.
‘Can you unstrap my arms?’
The nurse looked up, said a brusque ‘No’, and went back to her book.
I’m alive, thought Veronika. Everything’s going to start all over again. I’ll have to stay in here for a while, until they realise that I’m perfectly normal. Then they’ll let me out, and I’ll see the streets of Ljubljana again, its main square, the bridges, the people going to and from work.
Since people always tend to help others – just so that they can feel they are better than they really are – they’ll give me my job back at the library. In time, I’ll start frequenting the same bars and nightclubs, I’ll talk to my friends about the injustices and problems of the world, I’ll go to the cinema, take walks around the lake.
Since I only took sleeping pills, I’m not disfigured in any way: I’m still young, pretty, intelligent, I won’t have any difficulty in getting boyfriends, I never did. I’ll make love with them in their houses, or in the woods, I’ll feel a certain degree of pleasure, but the moment I reach orgasm, the feeling of emptiness will return. We won’t have much to talk about, and both he and I will know it. The time will come to make our excuses – ‘It’s late’, or ‘I have to get up early tomorrow’ – and we’ll part as quickly as possible, avoiding looking each other in the eye.
I’ll go back to my rented room in the convent. I’ll try and read a book, turn on the TV to see the same old programmes, set the alarm clock to wake up at exactly the same time I woke up the day before and mechanically repeat my tasks at the library. I’ll eat a sandwich in the park opposite the theatre, sitting on the same bench, along with other people who also choose the same benches on which to sit and have their lunch, people who all have the same vacant look, but pretend to be pondering extremely important matters.
Then I’ll go back to work, I’ll listen to the gossip about who’s going out with whom, who’s suffering from what, how such and such a person was in tears about her husband, and I’ll be left with the feeling that I’m privileged: I’m pretty, I have a job, I can have any boyfriend I choose. So I’ll go back to the bars at the end of the day, and the whole thing will start again.
My mother, who must be out of her mind with worry over my suicide attempt, will recover from the shock and will keep asking me what I’m going to do with my life, why I’m not the same as everyone else, things really aren’t as complicated as I think they are. ‘Look at me, for example, I’ve been married to your father for years, and I’ve tried to give you the best possible upbringing and set you the best possible example.’
One day, I’ll get tired of hearing her constantly repeating the same things, and to please her I’ll marry a man whom I oblige myself to love. He and I will end up finding a way of dreaming of a future together: a house in the country, children, our children’s future. We’ll make love often in the first year, less in the second, and after the third year, people perhaps think about sex only once a fortnight and transform that thought into action only once a month. Even worse, we’ll barely talk. I’ll force myself to accept the situation, and I’ll wonder what’s wrong with me, because he no longer takes any interest in me, ignores me, and does nothing but talk about his friends, as if they were his real world.
When the marriage is just about to fall apart, I’ll get pregnant. We’ll have a child, feel closer to each other for a while, and then the situation will go back to what it was before.
I’ll begin to put on weight like the aunt that nurse was talking about yesterday – or was it days ago, I don’t really know. And I’ll start to go on diets, systematically defeated each day, each week, by the weight that keeps creeping up regardless of the controls I put on it. At that point, I’ll take those magic pills that stop you feeling depressed, then I’ll have a few more children, conceived during nights of love that pass all too quickly. I’ll tell everyone that the children are my reason for living, when in reality my life is their reason for living.
People will always consider us a happy couple, and no one will know how much solitude, bitterness
