Perhaps other forms of medication existed, but Dr. Igor had decided to center his thesis around the one he had had the opportunity to experiment with scientifically, thanks to a young woman who had, quite unwittingly, become part of his fate. She had been in a terrible state when she arrived, suffering from a severe overdose, nearly in a coma. She had hovered between life and death for nearly a week, just the amount of time he needed to come up with a brilliant idea for his experiment.
Everything depended on one thing: the girl's capacity to survive.
And she had, with no serious consequences, no irreversible health problems; if she looked after herself, she could live as long as or longer than him.
But Dr. Igor was the only one who knew this, just as he knew that failed suicides tend to repeat the attempt sooner or later. Why not use her as a guinea pig, to see if he could eliminate the Vitriol from her organism?
And so Dr. Igor had conceived his plan.
Using a drug known as Fenotal, he had managed to simulate the effects of heart attacks. For a week she had received injections of the drug, and she must have been very frightened, because she had time to think about death and to review her own life. In that way, according to Dr. Igor's thesis (the final chapter of his work would be entitled "An Awareness of Death Encourages Us to Live More Intensely') the girl had gone on to eliminate Vitriol completely from her organism, and would quite possibly never repeat her attempt at suicide.
He was supposed to see her today and tell her that, thanks to the injections, he had achieved a total reversal of her heart condition. Veronika's escape saved him the unpleasant experience of lying to her yet again.
What Dr. Igor had not counted on was the infectious nature of his cure for Vitriol poisoning. A lot of people in Villete had been frightened by their awareness of that slow, irreparable death. They must all have been thinking about what they were missing, forced to reevaluate their own lives.
Mari had come to him asking to be discharged. Other patients were asking for their cases to be reviewed. The position of the ambassador's son was more worrisome, though, because he had simply disappeared, probably helping Veronika to escape.
Perhaps they're still together, he thought.
At any rate the ambassador's son knew where Villete was, if he wanted to come back. Dr. Igor was too excited by the results to pay much attention to minor details.
For a few moments he was assailed by another doubt: Sooner or later Veronika would realize that she wasn't going to die of a heart attack. She would probably go to a specialist who would tell her that her heart was perfectly normal. She would decide that the doctor who had
taken care of her in Villete was a complete incompetent; but then, all those who dare to research into forbidden subjects require both a certain amount of courage and a good dose of incomprehension.
But what about the many days that she would have to live with the fear of imminent death?
Dr. Igor pondered the arguments long and hard and decided that it didn't really matter. She would consider each day a miracle--which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences.
He noticed that the sun's rays were growing stronger; at that hour the inmates would be having breakfast. Soon his waiting room would be full, the usual problems would arise, and it was best to start taking notes at once for his thesis.
Meticulously he began to write up his experiment with Veronika; he would leave the reports on the building's lack of security until later.
St. Bernadette's Day, 1998
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About the author
Meet Paulo Coelho
About the book
Paulo Coelho on the Inspiration Behind Veronika Decides to Die
About the author
Meet Paulo Coelho
PAULO COELHO was born in Rio de Janeiro in August 1947, the son of Pedro Queima Coelho de Souza, an engineer, and his wife Lygia, a homemaker. Early on Coelho dreamed of an artistic career, something frowned upon in his middle-class household. In the austere surroundings of a strict Jesuit school Coelho discovered his true vocation: to be a writer. Coelho's parents, however, had different plans for him. When their attempts to suppress his devotion to literature failed, they took it as a sign of mental illness. When Coelho was seventeen, his father twice had him committed to a mental institution where he endured sessions of electroconvulsive "therapy." His parents brought him to the institution once more after he became involved with a theater group and started to work as a journalist.
Coelho was always a nonconformist and a seeker of the new. In the excitement of 1968, the guerrilla and hippy movements took hold in a Brazil ruled by a repressive military regime. Coelho embraced progressive politics and joined the peace and love generation. He sought spiritual experiences by traveling all over Latin America in the footsteps of Carlos Castaneda. He worked in theater and dabbled in journalism, launching an alternative magazine called 2001. He began to collaborate as a lyricist with music producer Raul Seixas, transforming the Brazilian rock scene. In 1973 Coelho and Seixas joined the Alternative Society, an organization that defended the individual's right to free expression, and began publishing a series of comic strips calling for more freedom. Members of the organization were detained and imprisoned. Two days later Coelho was kidnapped and tortured by a paramilitary group.
This experience affected him profoundly. At the age of twenty-six Coelho decided that he had had enough of living on the edge and wanted to be "normal." He worked as an executive in the music industry. He tried his hand at writing, but didn't start seriously until after he had an encounter with a stranger. The man first came to him in a vision; two months later Coelho met him at a cafe in Amsterdam. The stranger suggested that Coelho should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic. He also encouraged Coelho to walk the Road to Santiago, the medieval pilgrim's route.
In 1987, a year after completing that pilgrimage, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage. The book describes his experiences and his discovery that the extraordinary occurs in the lives of ordinary people. A year later Coelho wrote a very different book, The Alchemist. The first edition sold only nine hundred copies and the publishing house decided not to reprint it.
Coelho would not surrender his dream. He found another publishing house, a bigger one. He wrote Brida (a work still unpublished in English); the book received a lot of attention in the press, and both The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage appeared on bestseller lists.