The Zahir

by Paulo Coelho

  “Can you explain why you all use body piercing?”

  “Why do other people wear jewels or high heels or low-cut dresses even in winter?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “We use body piercing because we’re the new barbarians sacking Rome. We don’t wear uniforms and so we need something to identify us as one of the invading tribes.”

  She made it sound as if they were part of a important historical movement, but for the people going home, they were just a group of unemployed young people with nowhere to sleep, cluttering up the streets of Paris, bothering the tourists who were so good for the local economy, and driving to despair the mothers and fathers who had brought them into the world and now had no control over them.

  I had been like that once, when the hippie movement was at its height—the huge rock concerts, the big hair, the garish clothes, the Viking symbol, the peace sign. As Mikhail said, the whole hippie thing had turned into just another consumer product and had vanished, destroying its icons.

  A man came down the street. The boy in leather and safety pins went over to him with his hand outstretched. He asked for money. However, instead of hurrying on or muttering something like “I haven’t any change,” the man stopped and looked at us and said very loudly:

  “I wake up every morning with a debt of approximately 100,000 euros, because of my house, because of the economic situation in Europe, because of my wife’s expensive tastes. In other words, I’m worse off than you are and with far more on my mind! How about you giving me a bit of change to help me decrease my debt just a little?”

  Lucrecia—whom Mikhail claimed was his girlfriend—produced a fifty-euro note and gave it to the man.

  “Buy yourself some caviar. You need a bit of joy in your miserable life.”

  The man thanked her and walked off, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be given fifty euros by a beggar. The Italian girl had had a fifty-euro note in her bag and here we were begging in the street!

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” said the boy in leather.

  “Where?” asked Mikhail.

  “We could see if we can find the others. North or south?”

  Anastásia chose west. After all, she was, according to Mikhail, developing her gift.

  We passed by the Tour Saint-Jacques where, centuries before, pilgrims heading for Santiago de Compostela used to gather. We passed Notre-Dame, where there were a few more “new barbarians.” The vodka had run out and so I went to buy two more bottles, even though I wasn’t sure that everyone in the group was over eighteen. No one thanked me; they seemed to think it was perfectly normal.

  I started to feel a little drunk and began eyeing one of the girls who had just joined us. Everyone talked very loudly, kicked a few litter bins—strange metal objects with a plastic bag dangling from them—and said absolutely nothing of any interest.

  We crossed the Seine and were suddenly brought to a halt by one of those orange-and-white tapes that are used to mark off an area under construction. It prevented people from walking along the pavement, forcing them to step off the curb into the road and then rejoin the pavement five meters further on.

  “It’s still here,” said one of the new arrivals.

  “What’s still here?” I asked.

  “Who’s he?”

  “A friend of ours,” replied Lucrecia. “In fact, you’ve probably read one of his books.”

  The newcomer recognized me, but showed neither surprise nor reverence; on the contrary, he asked if I could give him some money, a request I instantly refused.

  “If you want to know why the tape is there, you’ll have to give me a euro. Everything in life has its price, as you know better than anyone. And information is one of the most expensive products in the world.”

  No one in the group came to my aid, so I had to pay him a euro for his answer.

  “The tape is here because we put it there. As you can see, there are no repairs going on at all, just a stupid orange-and-white tape blocking the stupid pavement. But no one asks what it’s doing there; they step off the pavement, walk along the road at the risk of being knocked down, and get back on farther up. By the way, I read somewhere that you’d had an accident. Is that true?”

  “Yes, I did, and all because I stepped off the pavement.”

  “Don’t worry, when people step off the pavement here, they’re always extra careful. It was one of the reasons we put the tape up, to make people more aware of what was going on around them.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said the girl I was attracted to. “It’s just a joke, so that we can laugh at the people who obey without even thinking about what they’re obeying. There’s no reason, it’s not important, and no one will get knocked down.”

  More people joined the group. Now there were eleven of us and two Alsatian dogs. We were no longer begging, because no one dared go near this band of savages who seemed to enjoy the fear they aroused. The drink had run out again and they all looked at me and asked me to buy another bottle, as if I had a duty to keep them drunk. I realized that this was my passport to the pilgrimage, so I set off in search of a shop.

  The girl I was interested in—and who was young enough to be my daughter—seemed to notice me looking at her and started talking to me. I knew it was simply a way of provoking me, but I joined in. She didn’t tell me anything about her personal life, she just asked me how many cats and how many lampposts there were on the back of a ten-dollar bill.

  “Cats and lampposts?”

  “You don’t know, do you? You don’t give any real value to money at all. Well, for your information, there are four cats and eleven lampposts.”

  Four cats and eleven lampposts. I promised myself that I would check this out the next time I saw a ten-dollar bill.

  “Do any of you take drugs?”

  “Some, but mainly it’s just alcohol. Not much at all, in fact, it’s not our style. Drugs are more for people of your generation, aren’t they? My mother, for example, drugs herself on cooking for the family, compulsively tidying the house, and suffering over me. When something goes wrong with my dad’s business, she suffers. Can you believe that? She suffers over me, my father, my brothers and sisters, everything. I was wasting so much energy pretending to be happy all the time, I thought it was best just to leave home.”

  Another personal history.

  “Like your wife,” said a young man with fair hair and an eyebrow ring. “She left home too, didn’t she? Was that because she had to pretend to be happy all the time?”

  So she had been here too. Had she given some of these young people a piece of that bloodstained shirt?

  “She suffered too,” laughed Lucrecia. “But as far as we know, she’s not suffering anymore. That’s what I call courage!”

  “What was my wife doing here?”

  “She came with the Mongolian guy, the one with all the strange ideas about love that we’re only just beginning to understand. And she used to ask questions and tell us her story. One day, she stopped doing both. She said she was tired of complaining. We suggested that she give up everything and come with us, because we were planning a trip to North Africa. She thanked us, but said she had other plans and would be heading off in the opposite direction.”

  “Didn’t you read his latest book?” asked Anastásia.

  “No, I didn’t fancy it. People told me it was too romantic. Now when are we going to get some more booze?”

  People made way for us as if we were samurai riding into a village, bandits arriving in a frontier town, barbarians entering Rome. The tribe didn’t make any aggressive gestures, the aggression was all in the clothes, the body piercing, the loud conversations, the sheer oddness. We finally found a minimart: to my great discomfort and alarm, they all went in and started rummaging around on the shelves.

  I didn’t know any of them, apart from Mikhail, and even then I didn’t know if what he had told me about himself was true. What if they stole something? What if one of them was
armed? As the oldest member of the group, was I responsible for their actions?

  The man at the cash register kept glancing up at the security mirror suspended from the ceiling in the tiny shop. The group, knowing that he was worried, spread out, gesturing to each other, and the tension grew. To cut things short, I picked up three bottles of vodka and walked quickly over to the cash register.

  A woman buying cigarettes said that, in her day, Paris had been full of bohemians and artists, not threatening bands of homeless people. She suggested that the cashier call the police.

  “I’ve got a feeling something bad is going to happen any minute now,” she muttered.

  The cashier was terrified by this invasion of his little world, the fruit of years of work and many loans, where perhaps his son worked in the morning, his wife in the afternoon, and he at night. He nodded to the woman, and I realized that he had already called the police.

  I hate getting involved in things that are none of my business, but I also hate being a coward. Every time it happens, I lose all self-respect for a week.

  “Don’t worry…” I began.

  It was too late.

  Two policemen came in and the owner beckoned them over, but the young people disguised as extraterrestrials paid no attention—it was all part of standing up to representatives of the established order. It must have happened to them many times before. They knew they hadn’t committed any crime (apart from crimes against fashion, but that could all change with next season’s haute couture). They must have been afraid, but they didn’t show it and continued talking loudly.

  “I saw a comedian the other day. He said that stupid people should have the word ‘stupid’ written on their identity card,” said Anastásia to no one in particular. “That way, we’d know who we were talking to.”

  “Yeah, stupid people are a real danger to society,” said the girl with the angelic face and vampire clothing, who, shortly before, had been talking to me about the number of lampposts and cats to be found on the back of a ten-dollar bill. “They should be tested once a year and have a license for walking the streets, like drivers do to drive.”

  The policemen, who couldn’t have been very much older than the tribe, said nothing.

  “Do you know what I’d like to do,” it was Mikhail’s voice, but I couldn’t see him because he was concealed behind a shelf. “I’d like to change the labels on everything in this shop. People would be completely lost. They wouldn’t know whether things should be eaten hot or cold, boiled or fried. If they don’t read the instructions, they don’t know how to prepare a meal. They’ve lost all their culinary instincts.”

  Everyone who had spoken up until then had done so in perfect Parisian French. Only Mikhail had a foreign accent.

  “May I see your passport,” said one of the policemen.

  “He’s with me.”

  The words emerged naturally, even though I knew what it could mean—another scandal. The policeman looked at me.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, but since you’re obviously with this lot, I hope you’ve got some kind of document to prove who you are, and a good reason for being surrounded by people half your age and buying vodka.”

  I could refuse to show my papers. I wasn’t legally obliged to have them with me. But I was thinking about Mikhail. One of the policemen was standing next to him now. Did he really have permission to stay in France? What did I know about him apart from the stories he had told me about his visions and his epilepsy? What if the tension of the moment provoked an attack?

  I stuck my hand in my pocket and took out my driver’s license.

  “So you’re…”

  “I am.”

  “I thought it was you. I’ve read one of your books. But that doesn’t put you above the law.”

  The fact that he had read one of my books threw me completely. Here was this shaven-headed young man in a uniform, albeit a very different one from that worn by the tribes in order to tell each other apart. Perhaps he too had once dreamed of having the freedom to be different, of subtly challenging authority, although never disrespectfully enough to end up in jail. He probably had a father who had never offered him any alternative, a family who needed his financial support, or perhaps he was just afraid of going beyond his own familiar world.

  I said gently:

  “No, I’m not above the law. In fact, no one here has broken the law. Unless the gentleman at the cash register or the lady buying cigarettes would like to make some specific complaint.”

  When I turned around, the woman who had mentioned the artists and bohemians of her day, that prophet of imminent doom, the embodiment of truth and good manners, had disappeared. She would doubtless tell her neighbors the next day that, thanks to her, an attempted robbery had been averted.

  “I’ve no complaints,” said the man behind the register. “I got worried because they were talking so loudly, but it looks like they weren’t actually doing any harm.”

  “Is the vodka for you, sir?”

  I nodded. They knew that everyone there was drunk, but they didn’t want to make a big deal out of a harmless situation.

  “A world without stupid people would be complete chaos!” said the boy wearing leather and metal studs. “Instead of all the unemployed people we have today, there would be too many jobs and no one to do the work!”

  “Shut up!”

  My voice sounded authoritative, decisive.

  “Just stop talking, all of you!”

  To my surprise, silence fell. My heart was beating furiously, but I continued talking to the policemen as if I were the calmest person in the world.

  “If they were really dangerous, they wouldn’t be talking like that.”

  The policeman turned to the cashier:

  “If you need us, we’ll be around.”

  And before going out, he said to his colleague, so that his voice echoed around the whole shop, “I love stupid people. If it wasn’t for them, we might be having to tackle some real criminals.”

  “You’re right,” said the other policeman. “Stupid people are a nice safe distraction.”

  They gave their usual salute and left.

  The only thing that occurred to me to do when we left the shop was to smash the bottles of vodka. I saved one of them, though, and it was passed rapidly from mouth to mouth. By the way they were drinking, I could see they were frightened, as frightened as I was. The only difference was that they had gone on the offensive when threatened.

  “I don’t feel good,” said Mikhail to one of them. “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by “Let’s go”: each to his own home or town or bridge? No one asked me if I wanted to go with them, so I simply followed after. Mikhail’s remark “I don’t feel good” unsettled me; that meant we wouldn’t have another chance that night to talk about the trip to Central Asia. Should I just leave? Or should I stick it out and see what “Let’s go” meant? I discovered that I was enjoying myself and that I’d like to try seducing the girl in the vampire outfit.

  Onward, then.

  I could always leave at the first sign of danger.

  As we headed off—where, I didn’t know—I was thinking about this whole experience. A tribe. A symbolic return to a time when men traveled in protective groups and required very little to survive. A tribe in the midst of another hostile tribe called society, crossing society’s lands and using aggression as a defense against rejection. A group of people who had joined together to form an ideal society, about which I knew nothing beyond the body piercing and the clothes that they wore. What were their values? What did they think about life? How did they earn their money? Did they have dreams or was it enough just to wander the world? All this was much more interesting than the supper I had to go to the following evening, where I knew exactly what would happen. I was convinced that it must be the effect of the vodka, but I was feeling free, my personal history was growing ever more remote, there was only the present moment, instinct; the Zahir had disappeared…
.

  The Zahir?

  Yes, it had disappeared, but now I realized that the Zahir was more than a man obsessed with an object, with a vein in the marble of one of the twelve hundred columns in the mosque in Córdoba, as Borges puts it, or, as in my own painful case for the last two years, with a woman in Central Asia. The Zahir was a fixation on everything that had been passed from generation to generation; it left no question unanswered; it took up all the space; it never allowed us even to consider the possibility that things could change.

  The all-powerful Zahir seemed to be born with every human being and to gain full strength in childhood, imposing rules that would thereafter always be respected:

  People who are different are dangerous; they belong to another tribe; they want our lands and our women.

  We must marry, have children, reproduce the species.

  Love is only a small thing, enough for one person, and any suggestion that the heart might be larger than this is considered perverse.

  When we marry, we are authorized to take possession of the other person, body and soul.

  We must do jobs we detest because we are part of an organized society, and if everyone did what they wanted to do, the world would come to a standstill.

  We must buy jewelry; it identifies us with our tribe, just as body piercing identifies those of a different tribe.

  We must be amusing at all times and sneer at those who express their real feelings; it’s dangerous for a tribe to allow its members to show their feelings.

  We must at all costs avoid saying no because people prefer those who always say yes, and this allows us to survive in hostile territory.

  What other people think is more important than what we feel.

  Never make a fuss—it might attract the attention of an enemy tribe.

  If you behave differently, you will be expelled from the tribe because you could infect others and destroy something that was extremely difficult to organize in the first place.

  We must always consider the look of our new cave, and if we don’t have a clear idea of our own, then we must call in a decorator who will do his best to show others what good taste we have.