Veronika decides to die   ::   Coelho Paulo

The result was utter confusion, and the press was constantly publishing tales of ill treatment and abuse, although they had never been given permission to visit Villete and see what was actually happening. The government was investigating the complaints but could get no proof; the shareholders threatened to spread the word that foreign investment was difficult in Slovenia, and so the institution managed to remain afloat; indeed, it went from strength to strength.

“My aunt killed herself a few months ago,” the female voice continued.

“For almost eight years she was too afraid even to leave her room, eating, getting fat, smoking, taking tranquilizers and sleeping most of the time. She had two daughters and a husband who loved her.”

Veronika tried but failed to move her head in the direction of the voice.

“I only saw her fight back once, when her husband took a lover. Then she kicked up a fuss, lost a few pounds, smashed some glasses and—for weeks on end—kept the rest of the whole neighborhood awake with her shouting. Absurd though it may seem, I think that was the happiest time of her life. She was fighting for something; she felt alive and capable of responding to the challenges facing her.”

What’s all that got to do with me? thought Veronika, unable to say anything. I’m not your aunt and I haven’t got a husband.

“In the end, her husband got rid of his lover,” said the woman, “and gradually, my aunt returned to her former passivity. One day she phoned to say that she wanted to change her life: She’d given up smoking. That same week, after increasing the number of tranquilizers she was taking because she’d stopped smoking, she told everyone that she wanted to kill herself.

“No one believed her. Then, one morning she left a message on my machine, saying good-bye, and she gassed herself. I listened to that message several times: I had never heard her sound so calm, so resigned to her fate. She said she was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn’t go on.”

Veronika felt sorry for the woman telling the story, for she seemed to be doing so in an attempt to understand her aunt’s death. In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those people who decide to die?

No one can judge. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering or the total absence of meaning in their lives. Veronika wanted to explain that, but instead she choked on the tube in her mouth, and the woman hurried to her aid.

She saw the woman bending over her bound body, which was full of tubes and protected against her will. She openly expressed desire to destroy it. She moved her head from side to side, pleading with her eyes for them to remove the tubes and let her die in peace.

“You’re upset,” said the woman. “I don’t know if you’re sorry about what you did or if you still want to die; that doesn’t interest me. What interests me is doing my job. If the patient gets agitated, the regulations say I must give them a sedative.”

Veronika stopped struggling, but the nurse was already injecting something into her arm. Soon afterward, she was back in a strange dreamless world, where the only thing she could remember was the face of the woman she had just seen: green eyes, brown hair, and a very distant air, the air of someone doing things because she has to do them, never questioning why the rules say this or that.

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.” Resides, 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 patients 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 chat 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.