Paulo Coelho - Veronika decides to die

“Do you think I could talk to my daughter?” asked the woman, who was not interested in the Japanese, the Indians, or the Canadians.

“Yes, yes, in a moment,” said Dr. Igor, slightly annoyed by the interruption. “But first, I want you to understand one thing: apart from certain grave pathological cases, people only go insane when they try to escape from routine. Do you understand?”

“I do,” she replied. “And if you think that I won’t be capable of looking after her, you can rest assured, I’ve never tried to change my life.”

“Good.” Dr. Igor seemed relieved. “Can you imagine a world in which, for example, we were not obliged to repeat the same thing every day of our lives? If, for example, we all decided to eat only when we were hungry, what would housewives and restaurants do?”

It would be more normal to eat only when we were hungry , thought the woman, but she said nothing, afraid that he might not let her speak to Veronika.

“Well, it would cause tremendous confusion,” she said at last. “I’m a housewife myself, and I know what I’m talking about.”

“So we have breakfast, lunch, and supper. We have to wake up at a certain hour every day and rest once a week. Christmas exists so that we can give each other presents, Easter so that we can spend a few days at the lake. How would you like it if your husband were gripped by a sudden, passionate impulse and decided he wanted to make love in the living room?”

The woman thought: What is the man talking about? I came here to see my daughter.

“I would find it very sad,” she said, carefully, hoping she was giving the right answer.

“Excellent,” roared Dr. Igor. “The bedroom is the correct place for making love. To make love anywhere else would set a bad example and promote the spread of anarchy.”

“Can I see my daughter?” said the woman.

Dr. Igor gave up. This peasant would never understand what he was talking about; she wasn’t interested in discussing insanity from a philosophical point of view, even though she knew her daughter had made a serious suicide attempt and had been in a coma.

He rang the bell and his secretary appeared.

“Call the young woman who tried to commit suicide,” he said. “The one who wrote the letter to the newspapers, saying that she was killing herself in order to put Slovenia on the map.”

“I don’t want to see her. I’ve cut all my links with the outside world.”

It had been hard to say that in the lounge, with everyone else there. But the nurse hadn’t been exactly discreet either, and had announced in a loud voice that her mother was waiting to see her, as if it were a matter of general interest.

She didn’t want to see her mother; it would only upset both of them. It was best that her mother should think of her as dead. Veronika had always hated good-byes.

The man disappeared whence he had come, and she went back to looking at the mountains. After a week the sun had finally returned, something she had known would happen the previous night, because the moon had told her while she was playing the piano.

No, that’s crazy, I’m losing my grip. Planets don’t talk, or only to self-styled astrologers. If the moon spoke to anyone, it was to that schizophrenic.

The very moment she thought this, she noticed a sharp pain in her chest, and her arm went numb. Veronika felt her head spinning. A heart attack!

She entered a kind of euphoric state, as if death had freed her from the fear of dying. So it was all over. She might still experience some pain, but what were five minutes of agony in exchange for an eternity of peace? The only possible response was to close her eyes: In films the thing she most hated to see were dead people with staring eyes.

But the heart attack was different from what she had imagined; her breathing became laboured, and Veronika was horrified to realize that she was about to experience the worst of her fears: suffocation. She was going to die as if she were being buried alive or had suddenly been plunged into the depths of the sea.

She stumbled, fell, felt a sharp blow on her face, continued making heroic efforts to breathe, but the air wouldn’t go in. Worst of all, death did not come. She was entirely conscious of what was going on around her, she could still see colors and shapes, although she had difficulty hearing what others were saying; the cries and exclamations seemed distant, as if coming from another world. Apart from this, everything else was real; the air wouldn’t enter her lungs, it would simply not obey the commands of her lungs and her muscles, and still she did not lose consciousness.

She felt someone touch her and turn her over, but now she had lost control of her eye movements, and her eyes were flickering wildly, sending hundreds of different images to her brain, combining the feeling of suffocation with a sense of complete visual confusion.

After a while the images became distant too, and just when the agony reached its peak, the air finally rushed into her lungs, making a tremendous noise that left everyone in the room paralyzed with fear.

Veronika began to vomit copiously. Once the near-tragedy had passed, some of the crazy people there began to laugh, and she felt humiliated, lost, paralyzed.

A nurse came running in and gave her an injection in the arm. “It’s all right, calm down, it’s over now.”

“I didn’t die!” she started shouting, crawling toward the other patients, smearing the floor and the furniture with her vomit. “I’m still in this damn hospital, forced to live with you people, living a thousand deaths every day, every night, and not one of you feels an ounce of pity for me.”

She turned on the nurse, grabbed the syringe from his hand, and threw it out into the garden.

“And what do you want? Why don’t you just inject me with poison, since I’m already condemned to die? How can you be so heartless?”

Unable to control herself any longer, she sat down on the floor again and started crying uncontrollably, shouting, sobbing loudly, while some of the patients laughed and made remarks about her filthy clothes.

“Give her a sedative,” said a doctor, hurrying in. “Get this situation under control.”

The nurse, however, was frozen to the spot. The doctor went out again and returned with two more male nurses and another syringe. The men grabbed the hysterical girl struggling in the middle of the room, while the doctor injected the last drop of sedative into a vein in her vomit-smeared arm.

She was in Dr. Igor’s consulting room, lying on an immaculate white bed with clean sheets on it.

He was listening to her heart. She was pretending that she was still asleep, but something inside her must have changed, judging by the doctor’s muttered words:

“Don’t you worry. In your state of health, you could live to be a hundred.”

Veronika opened her eyes. Someone had taken her clothes off. Who? Dr. Igor? Did that mean he had seen her naked? Her brain wasn’t working properly.

“What did you say?”

“I said not to worry.”

“No, you said I could live to be a hundred.”

The doctor went over to his desk.

“You said I could live to be a hundred,” Veronika repeated.

“Nothing is certain in medicine,” said Dr. Igor, trying to cover up. “Everything’s possible.”

“How’s my heart?”

“The same.”

She didn’t need to hear any more. When faced with a serious case, doctors always say: “You’ll live to be a hundred,” or “There’s nothing seriously wrong with you,” or “You have the heart and blood pressure of a young girl,” or even “We need to redo the tests.” They’re probably afraid the patient will go berserk in the consulting room.