This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE. Copyright (c) 2006 by Paulo Coelho. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub (c) Edition JUNE 2006 ISBN: 9780061835438
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About the book
Paulo Coelho on the Inspiration Behind Veronika Decides to Die
"'So you're going to give me electric shock treatment,' I said to Dr. Benjamim Gaspar Gomes."
I entered a tiled cubicle. There was a bed covered with a rubber sheet and beside the bed some sort of apparatus with a handle.
"So you're going to give me electric shock treatment," I said to Dr. Benjamim Gaspar Gomes.
"Don't worry. It's far more traumatic watching someone being treated than actually having the treatment yourself. It doesn't hurt at all."
I lay down and the male nurse put a kind of tube in my mouth so that my tongue wouldn't roll back. Then on either temple he placed two electrodes, rather like the earpieces of a telephone.
I was looking up at the
peeling paint on the ceiling when I heard the handle being turned. The next moment a curtain seemed to fall over my eyes; my vision quickly narrowed to a single point, and then everything went dark.
The doctor was right; it didn't hurt at all.
THE SCENE I HAVE JUST DESCRIBED is not taken from my latest book. It comes from the diary I wrote during my second stay in a mental hospital. That was in 1966, the beginning of the blackest period of Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1989). As if by some natural reflex of the social mechanism, that external repression was gradually becoming internalized (not unlike what is happening in the United States today, where a man doesn't even dare look at a woman without having a lawyer by his side). So much so that good middle-class families found it simply unacceptable that their children or grandchildren should want to be "artists." In Brazil at that time, the word "artist" was synonymous with homosexual, communist, drug addict, and layabout.
When I was eighteen I believed that my world and that of my parents could coexist peacefully. I did my best to get good marks at the Jesuit school where I was studying. I worked every afternoon, but at night I wanted to live out my dream of being an artist. Not knowing quite where to begin, I became involved in an amateur theater group. Although I had no desire to act professionally, at least I was among people with whom I felt some affinity.
Unfortunately, my parents did not share my belief in the peaceful coexistence of two such diametrically opposed worlds. One night I came home drunk, and the following morning I was woken by two burly male nurses.
"You're coming with us," one of them said.
My mother was crying and my father was doing his best to hide any feelings he might have had.
"It's for your own good," he said. "We're just going to have some tests done."
And thus began my journey through various psychiatric hospitals. I was admitted, I was given all kinds of different treatments, and I ran away at the first opportunity, traveling around for as long as I could bear it then going back to my parents' house. We enjoyed a kind of honeymoon period, but after a while I again started to get into what my family called "bad company," and the nurses reappeared.
There are some battles in life that have only two possible outcomes: they either destroy us or they make us strong. The psychiatric hospital was one such battle.
Talking to another patient one night, I said: "You know, I think nearly everyone at some point in his life has dreamed of being president of the republic. But neither you nor I can ever aspire to that because of our medical records."
"Then we've got nothing to lose," said the other man. "We can just do whatever we want to do."
It seemed to me he was right. The situation I found myself in was so strange, so extreme, that it brought with it something unprecedented: total freedom. All my family's efforts to make me the same as everyone else had exactly the opposite result; I was now completely different from all the other young men my age.
That same night I considered my future. One option was to become a writer; the other, which seemed more viable, was to go properly mad. I would be supported by the state and would never have to work or take on any responsibility. I would of course have to spend a great deal of time in mental institutions, but I knew from my own experience that patients there do not behave like the mad people you see in Hollywood films. Apart from a few pathological cases of catatonia or schizophrenia, all the patients were perfectly capable of talking about life and had their own highly original ideas on the subject. Every now and then they would suffer panic attacks or bouts of depression or aggression, but these did not last.
The greatest risk I ran in the hospital was not of losing all hope of ever becoming president of the republic, or of feeling marginalized and unfairly treated by my family--because in my heart I knew that having me admitted to the hospital was a desperate act of love and overprotectiveness on their part. The greatest risk I ran was of coming to think of that situation as normal.
When I came out of the hospital for the third time--after the usual cycle of escaping from the hospital/traveling around/going back home/enjoying a honeymoon period with my family/getting into bad company again/being readmitted into the hospital--I was nearly twenty and had become accustomed to that rhythm of events. This time, however, something had changed.
Although I again got into "bad company," my parents were growing reluctant to have me readmitted to a mental hospital. Unbeknown to me they were by then convinced that I was a hopeless case, and preferred to keep me with them and support me for the rest of my life.
My behavior went from bad to worse. I became more aggressive, but still there was no mention of the hospital. I experienced a period of great joy as I tried to exercise my so-called freedom in order to finally live the "artist's life." I left the new job my parents had found for me, stopped studying, and dedicated myself exclusively to the theater and to frequenting bars favored by intellectuals. For one long year I did exactly as I pleased. But then the theater group was broken up by the political police, the bars became infiltrated by spies, my stories were rejected by every publisher to which I sent them, and none of the girls I knew wanted to go out with me because I was a young man without a future, with no real career, and who had never even been to college.