Paulo Coelho heard about Veronika's story three months later, when he was having supper in an Algerian restaurant in Paris with a Slovenian friend, also called Veronika, who happened to be the daughter of the doctor in charge at Villete.
LATER, WHEN he decided to write a book about the subject, he considered changing his friend's name in order not to confuse the reader. He thought of calling her Blaska or Edwina or Marietzja, or some other Slovenian name, but he ended up keeping the real names. When he referred to his friend Veronika, he would call her his friend Veronika. When he referred to the other Veronika, there would be no need to describe her at all, because she would be the central character in the book, and people would get irritated if they were always having to read "Veronika the lunatic," or "Veronika the one who tried to commit suicide." Besides, both he and his friend Veronika would only take up a very brief part of the book, this one.
His friend Veronika was horrified at what her father had done, especially bearing in mind that he was the director of an institution seeking respectability and was himself working on a thesis that would be judged by the conventional academic community.
"Do you know where the word 'asylum' comes from?" she was saying. "It dates back to the Middle Ages, from a person's right to seek refuge in churches and other holy places. The right to asylum is something any civilized person can understand. So how could my father, the director of an asylum, treat someone like that?"
Paulo Coelho wanted to know all the details of what had happened, because he had a genuine reason for finding out about Veronika's story.
The reason was the following: He himself had been committed to an asylum or, rather, mental hospital, as they were better known. And this had happened not once but three times, in 1965, 1966, and 1967. The place where he had been interned was the Dr. Eiras Sanatorium in Rio de Janeiro.
Precisely why he had been committed to the hospital was something that, even today, he found odd. Perhaps his parents were confused by his unusual behavior. Half shy, half extrovert, he had the desire to be an "artist," something that everyone in the family considered a perfect recipe for ending up a social outcast and dying in poverty.
When Paulo Coelho thought about it--and, it must be said, he rarely did--he considered the real madman to have been the doctor who had agreed to commit 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 made 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 neighboring country of Argentina), Paulo Coelho shared with Veronika the fact just mentioned but which is worth restating: He too had been committed to 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 (even though he'd never smoked) and despite living entirely off frozen food because he couldn't get a housekeeper who would put up with his eccentrici
ties.
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--preserving 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 a 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 areas 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 realize 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 movies, 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 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 to read a book, turn on the TV to see the same old programs, 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 theater, 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.