Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption

by Paulo Coelho

  Gradually the universe returned to its proper place and Veronika stood up. Eduard had not moved in all that time, but there seemed to be something different about him: There was a tenderness in his eyes, a very human tenderness.

  It was so good that I can see love in everything, even in the eyes of a schizophrenic.

  She was beginning to put her clothes back on when she felt a third presence in the room.

  Mari was there. Veronika didn't know when she had come in or what she had heard or seen, but even so she felt no shame or fear. She merely looked at her distantly, as one does at someone who has come too close.

  "I did as you suggested," she said. "And I went a long, long way."

  Mari said nothing; she had just been reliving certain vital moments of her past life, and she was feeling slightly uneasy. Perhaps it was time to return to the world, to face up to things out there, to say that everyone could be a member of a great Fraternity, even if they had never been in a mental hospital.

  Like this young girl, for example, whose only reason for being in Villete was because she had made an attempt on her own life. She had never known panic, depression, mystical visions, psychoses--the limits to which the mind can take us. Although she had known many men, she had never experienced the most hidden part of her own desires, and the result was that half of her life had been unknown to her. If only everyone could know and live with their inner craziness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier.

  "Why did I never do that before?"

  "He wants you to play more music," said Mari, looking at Eduard. "I think he deserves it."

  "I will, but answer my question first: Why did I never do that before? If I'm free, if I can think whatever I choose to think, why have I always avoided imagining forbidden situations?"

  "Forbidden? Listen, I was a lawyer, and I know the law. I was also a Catholic, and I used to know whole sections of the Bible by heart. What do you mean by 'forbidden'?"

  Mari went over to her and helped her on with her sweater.

  "Look me in the eye, and never forget what I'm about to tell you. There are only two prohibitions, one according to man's law, the other according to God's. Never force a sexual relationship on anyone, because that is considered to be rape. And never have sexual relations with children, because that is the worst of all sins. Apart from that, you're free. There's always someone who wants exactly what you want."

  Mari didn't have the patience to teach important things to someone who was about to die. With a smile, she said good night and left the room.

  Eduard didn't move; he was waiting for the music. Veronika needed to reward him for the immense pleasure he had given her, merely by staying with her and witnessing her insanity without horror or repulsion. She sat down at the piano and started to play again.

  Her soul was light, and not even the fear of death tormented her now. She had experienced what she had always kept hidden from herself. She had experienced the pleasures of virgin and prostitute, of slave and queen, albeit more slave than queen.

  That night, as if by a miracle, all the songs she had known returned to her memory, and she played in order to give Eduard as much pleasure as she herself had experienced.

  When he turned on the light, Dr. Igor was surprised to see the young woman sitting in the waiting room outside his office.

  IT'S STILL very early. And I'm completely booked all day."

  "I know it's early," she said. "And the day hasn't yet begun. I just need to talk for a while, only a short while. I need your help."

  She had dark shadows under her eyes and her hair was dull, the typical symptoms of someone who has spent the whole night awake.

  Dr. Igor decided to show her into his room.

  He asked her to sit down while he turned on the light and opened the curtains. It would be dawn in less than an hour, and then he would be able to save on electricity; the shareholders were very tough on expenses, however insignificant.

  He glanced rapidly through his diary: Zedka had had her last insulin shock and had reacted positively, that is, she had managed to survive that inhuman treatment. It's just as well, in this particular case, that Dr. Igor had demanded that the hospital council sign a declaration taking full responsibility for the consequences.

  He started reading some reports. Two or three patients had behaved aggressively during the night. Among them, according to the nurses' report, was Eduard. He had gone back to his ward at about four in the morning and had refused to take his sleeping tablets. Dr. Igor would have to act. However liberal Villete might be inside, it was necessary to preserve its image as a harsh, conservative institution.

  "I've got something very important to ask you," said Veronika.

  But Dr. Igor ignored her. Picking up his stethoscope, he began to listen to her heart and lungs. He tested her reflexes and examined the back of her retina with a small flashlight. He saw that there were now almost no signs of Vitriol poisoning.

  He immediately went to the phone and asked the nurse to bring in some medication with a complicated name.

  "It seems you didn't have your injection last night," he said.

  "But I'm feeling much better."

  "I just have to look at your face: dark shadows under the eyes, tiredness, the lack of immediate reflexes. If you want to make the most of the little time left to you, please do as I say."

  "That's exactly why I'm here. I want to make the most of that little time, but in my own way. How much time have I actually got?"

  Dr. Igor peered at her over the top of his glasses.

  "You can tell me," she said. "I'm not afraid or indifferent or anything. I want to live, but I know that's not enough, and I'm resigned to my fate."

  "What is it you want, then?"

  The nurse came in with the injection. Dr. Igor nodded and the nurse gently rolled up the sleeve of Veronika's sweater.

  "How much time have I got left?" said Veronika again, while the nurse gave her the injection.

  "Twenty-four hours, perhaps less."

  She looked down and bit her lip but managed to maintain her composure.

  "I want to ask two favors. First, that you give me some medication, an injection or whatever, so that I can stay awake and enjoy every moment that remains of my life. I'm very tired, but I don't want to sleep. I've got a lot to do, things that I always postponed for some future date, in the days when I thought life would last forever. Things I'd lost interest in, when I started to believe that life wasn't worth living."

  "And what's the second favor?"

  "I want to leave here so that I can die outside. I need to visit Ljubljana castle. It's always been there, and I've never even had the curiosity to go and see it at close range. I need to talk to the woman who sells chestnuts in winter and flowers in the spring. We passed each other so often, and I never once asked her how she was. And I want to go out without a jacket and walk in the snow, I want to find out what extreme cold feels like, I, who was always so well wrapped up, so afraid of catching a cold.

  "In short, Dr. Igor, I want to feel the rain on my face, to smile at any man I feel attracted to, to accept all the coffees men might buy for me. I want to kiss my mother, tell her I love her, weep in her lap, unashamed of showing my feelings, because they were always there even though I hid them.

  "I might go into a church and look at those images that never meant anything to me and see if they say something to me now. If an interesting man invites me out to a club, I'll accept, and I'll dance all night until I drop. Then I'll go to bed with him, but not the way I used to go to bed with other men, trying to stay in control, pretending things I didn't feel. I want to give myself to one man, to the city, to life and, finally, to death."

  When Veronika had finished speaking, there was a heavy silence. Doctor and patient looked each other in the eye, absorbed, perhaps distracted by all the many possibilities that a mere twenty-four hours could offer.

  "I'm going to give you some stimulants, but I do
n't recommend you take them," Dr. Igor said at last. "They'll keep you awake, but they'll also take away the peace you need in order to experience everything you want to experience."

  Veronika was starting to feel ill; whenever she was given that injection, something bad always happened inside her body.

  "You're looking very pale. Perhaps you'd better go to bed, and we'll talk again tomorrow."

  Once more she felt like crying, but she remained in control.

  "There won't be a tomorrow, as you well know. I'm tired, Dr. Igor, very tired. That's why I asked for the tablets. I spent all night awake, half desperate, half resigned. I could succumb to another hysterical attack of fear, as happened yesterday, but what's the point? If I've still got twenty-four hours of life left, and there are so many experiences waiting for me, I decided it would be better to put aside despair.

  "Please, Dr. Igor, let me live a little of the time remaining to me, because we both know that tomorrow will be too late."

  "Go and sleep," said the doctor, "and come back here at midday. Then we'll speak again."

  Veronika saw there was no way out.

  "I'll go and sleep and then I'll come back, but could I just talk to you for a few more minutes?"

  "It'll have to be a few. I'm very busy today."

  "I'll come straight to the point. Last night, for the first time, I masturbated in a completely uninhibited way. I thought all the things I'd never dared to think, I took pleasure in things that before frightened or repelled me."

  Dr. Igor assumed his most professional air. He didn't know where this conversation might lead, and he didn't want any problems with his superiors.

  "I discovered that I'm a pervert, doctor. I want to know if that played some part in my attempted suicide. There are so many things I didn't know about myself."

  I just have to give her an answer, he thought. There's no need to call in the nurse to witness the conversation, to avoid any future lawsuits for sexual abuse.

  "We all want different things," he replied. "And our partners do too. What's wrong with that?"

  "You tell me."

  "There's everything wrong with it. Because when everyone dreams, but only a few realize their dreams, that makes cowards of us all."

  "Even if those few are right?"

  "The person who's right is just the person who's strongest. In this case, paradoxically, it's the cowards who are the brave ones, and they manage to impose their ideas on everyone else."

  Dr. Igor didn't want to go any further.

  "Now, please, go and rest a little; I have other patients to see. If you do as I say, I'll see what can be done about your second request."

  Veronika left the room. The doctor's next patient was Zedka, who was due to be discharged, but Dr. Igor asked her to wait a little; he needed to take a few notes on the conversation he had just had.

  In his dissertation about Vitriol, he would have to include a long chapter on sex. After all, so many neuroses and psychoses had their origins in sex. He believed that fantasies were electrical impulses from the brain, which, if not realized, released their energy into other areas.

  During his medical studies, Dr. Igor had read an interesting treatise on sexual deviance, sadism, masochism, homosexuality, coprophagy, coprolalia, voyeurism--the list was endless.

  At first, he considered these things examples of deviant behavior in a few maladjusted people incapable of having a healthy relationship with their partners. As he advanced in his profession as psychiatrist, however, and talked to his patients, he realized that everyone has an unusual story to tell. His patients would sit down in the comfortable armchair in his office, stare hard at the floor, and begin a long dissertation on what they called "illnesses" (as if he were not the doctor) or perversions (as if he were not the psychiatrist charged with deciding what was and wasn't perverse).

  And one by one, these normal people would describe fantasies that were all to be found in that famous treatise on erotic minorities: a book, in fact, that defended the right of everyone to have the orgasm they chose, as long as it did not violate the rights of their partner.

  Women who had studied in convent schools dreamed of being sexually humiliated; men in suits and ties, high-ranking civil servants, told him of the fortunes they spent on Rumanian prostitutes just so that they could lick their feet. Boys in love with boys, girls in love with their fellow schoolgirls. Husbands who wanted to watch their wives having sex with strangers, women who masturbated every time they found some hint that their men had committed adultery. Mothers who had to suppress an impulse to give themselves to the first delivery man who rang the doorbell, fathers who recounted secret adventures with the bizarre transvestites who managed to slip through the strict border controls.

  And orgies. It seemed that everyone, at least once in their life, wanted to take part in an orgy.

  Dr. Igor put down his pen for a moment and thought about himself: What about him? Yes, he would like it too. An orgy, as he imagined it, must be something completely anarchic and joyful, in which the feeling of possession no longer existed, just pleasure and confusion.

  Was that one of the main reasons why there were so many people poisoned by bitterness? Marriages restricted to an enforced monogamy, within which, according to studies that Dr. Igor kept safely in his medical library, sexual desire disappeared in the third or fourth year of living together. After that, the wife felt rejected and the man felt trapped, and Vitriol, or bitterness, began to eat away at everything.

  People talked more openly to a psychiatrist than they did to a priest because a doctor couldn't threaten them with Hell. During his long career as a psychiatrist, Dr. Igor had heard almost everything they had to tell him.

  To tell him, for they rarely did anything. Even after many years in the profession, he still asked himself why they were so afraid of being different.

  When he tried to find out the reason, the most common responses were: "My husband would think I was behaving like a prostitute," or, when it was a man: "My wife deserves my respect."

  The conversation usually stopped there. There was no point saying that everyone has a different sexual profile, as individual as their fingerprints; no one wanted to believe that. It was very dangerous being uninhibited in bed; there was always the fear that the other person might still be a slave to their preconceived ideas.

  I'm not going to change the world, Dr. Igor thought resignedly, asking the nurse to send in the ex-depressive, Zedka, but at least I can say what I think in my thesis.

  Eduard saw Veronika leaving Dr. Igor's consulting room and making her way to the ward. He felt like telling her his secrets, opening his heart to her, with the same honesty and freedom with which, the previous night, she had opened her body to him.

  It had been one of the severest tests he had been through since he was admitted to Villete as a schizophrenic. But he had managed to resist, and he was pleased, although his desire to return to the world was beginning to unsettle him.

  "Everyone knows this young girl isn't going to last until the end of the week. There'd be no point."

  Or perhaps, precisely because of that, it would be good to share his story with her. For three years he had spoken only to Mari, and even then he wasn't sure she had entirely understood him; as a mother, she was bound to think his parents were right, that they had just wanted the best for him, that his visions of paradise were the foolish dreams of an adolescent completely out of touch with the real world.

  Visions of paradise. That was exactly what had led him down into hell, into endless arguments with his family, into such a powerful feeling of guilt that he had felt incapable of doing anything and had finally sought refuge in another world. If it hadn't been for Mari, he would still be living in that separate reality.

  Then Mari had appeared; she had taken care of him and made him feel loved again. Thanks to her, Eduard was still capable of knowing what was going on around him.

  A few days ago a young woman the same age as him had sat down at the pia
no to play the Moonlight Sonata. Eduard had once more felt troubled by his visions of paradise and he couldn't have said if it was the fault of the music or the young woman or the moon or the long time he had spent in Villete.

  He followed her as far as the women's ward, to find his way barred by a nurse.

  "You can't come in here, Eduard. Go into the garden, it's nearly dawn, and it's going to be a lovely day."

  Veronika looked back.

  "I'm going to sleep for a bit," she said gently. "We'll talk when I wake up."

  Veronika didn't know why, but that young man had become part of her world, or the little that remained of it. She was certain that Eduard was capable of understanding her music, of admiring her talent; even if he couldn't utter a word, his eyes said everything, as they did at that moment, at the door of the ward, speaking of things she didn't want to hear about.

  Tenderness. Love.

  Living with mental patients is fast making me insane. Schizophrenics don't feel things like that, not for other human beings.

  Veronika felt like turning back and giving him a kiss, but she didn't; the nurse would see and tell Dr. Igor, and the doctor would certainly not allow a woman who kissed schizophrenics to leave Villete.

  Eduard looked at the nurse. His attraction for the young girl was stronger than he had thought, but he had to control himself. He would go and ask Mari's advice, she was the only person with whom he shared his secrets. She would doubtless tell him what he wanted to hear, that in such a case, love was both dangerous and pointless. Mari would ask Eduard to stop being so foolish and to go back to being a normal schizophrenic (and then she would giggle gleefully at her own nonsensical words).

  He joined the other inmates in the refectory, ate what he was given, and went outside for the obligatory walk in the garden. While "taking the sun" (on that day the temperature was below zero), he tried to approach Mari, but she looked as if she wanted to be left alone. She didn't need to say anything, Eduard knew enough about solitude to respect other people's needs.

  A new inmate came over to Eduard. He obviously didn't know anyone yet.

  "God punished humanity," he said. "He punished it with the plague. However, I saw him in my dreams and he asked me to come and save Slovenia."