Paulo Coelho - Veronika decides to die

She went to work, read through several pending lawsuits, and tried to occupy herself with various other tasks, for the experience of the previous day had left a residue of fear, and she wanted to prove to herself that it would never happen again.

She discussed the film on El Salvador with one of her colleagues and mentioned in passing that she was fed up with doing the same thing every day: “Perhaps it’s time I retired.”

“You’re one of the best lawyers we’ve got,” said the colleague. “Besides, law is one of the few professions where age is in your favor. Why not take a long vacation instead? I’m sure you’d come back to work with renewed energy.”

“I want to do something completely different with my life. I want to have an adventure, help other people, do something I’ve never done before.”

The conversation ended there. She went down to the square, had lunch in a more expensive restaurant than the one she normally went to, and returned to the office early. That moment marked the beginning of her withdrawal.

The rest of the employees had still not come back, and Mari took the opportunity to look over the work still on her desk. She opened the drawer to take out the pencil she always kept in the same place, and she couldn’t find it. For a fraction of a second, it occurred to her that her failure to put the pencil back in its proper place was an indication that she was perhaps behaving oddly.

That was enough to make her heart start pounding again, and the terror of the previous night returned in full force.

Mari was frozen to the spot. The sun was coming in through the shutters, lending a brighter, more aggressive tone to everything around her, but she again had the feeling that she was about to die at any minute. It was all so strange; what was she doing in that office?

I don’t believe in you, God, but please, help me.

Again she broke out in a cold sweat and realized that she was unable to control her fear. If someone came in at that moment, they would notice her frightened eyes, and she would be lost.

Cold air.

The cold air had made her feel better the previous night, but how could she get as far as the street? Once more she was noticing each detail of what was happening to her—her breathing rate (there were moments when she felt that if she did not make a special effort to inhale and exhale, her body would be incapable of doing so itself), the movement of her head (the images succeeded one another as if there were television cameras whirring inside it), her heart beating faster and faster, her body bathed in a cold, sticky sweat.

And then the terror, an awful, inexplicable fear of doing anything, of taking a single step, of leaving the chair she was sitting in.

It will pass.

It had passed last time, but now she was at work; what could she do? She looked at the clock, and it seemed to her an absurd mechanism, two needles turning on the same axis, indicating a measurement of time that no one had ever explained. Why twelve and not ten, like all our other measurements?

I mustn’t think about these things, they make me crazy.

Crazy. Perhaps that was the right word to describe what was wrong with her. Summoning all her willpower, she got to her feet and made her way to the toilets. Fortunately the office was still empty, and, in a minute that seemed to last an eternity, she managed to reach them. She splashed her face with water, and the feeling of strangeness diminished, although the fear remained.

It will pass, she said to herself. Yesterday it did.

She remembered that, the day before, the whole thing had lasted about thirty minutes. She locked herself in one of the toilets, sat on the toilet seat, and put her head between her knees. That position, however, seemed only to amplify the sound of her heart beating, and Mari immediately sat up again.

It will pass.

She stayed there, thinking that she no longer knew who she was; that she was hopelessly lost. She heard the sound of people coming in and out of the toilets, faucets being turned on and off, pointless conversations about banal subjects. More than once someone tried to open the door of the cubicle where she was sitting, but she said something in a murmur, and no one insisted. The noise of toilets flushing was like some horrendous force of nature, capable of demolishing an entire building and sweeping everyone down into hell.

But, as she had foreseen, the fear passed, and her heartbeat returned to normal. It was just as well that her secretary was incompetent enough not even to notice her absence, otherwise the whole office would have been in the toilets asking if she was all right.

When she knew that she had regained control of herself, Mari opened the cubicle door, again splashed her face with water for a long time, and went back to the office.

“You haven’t got any makeup on,” said a trainee. “Do you want to borrow some of mine?”

Mari didn’t even bother to reply. She went into the office, picked up her handbag and her personal belongings, and told her secretary that she would be spending the rest of the day at home.

“But you’ve got loads of appointments,” protested her secretary.

“You don’t give orders, you receive them. Do exactly as I say, and cancel the appointments.”

The secretary stared at this woman with whom she had been working for nearly three years, and who had never once been rude to her before. Something must be seriously wrong with her, perhaps someone had told her that her husband was at home with his lover, and she wanted to catch them in flagrante .

She’s a good lawyer, she knows what she’s doing , said the girl to herself. Doubtless tomorrow she would come and apologize to her.

There was no tomorrow. That night Mari had a long conversation with her husband and described all the symptoms she had experienced. Together they reached the conclusion that the palpitations, the cold sweats, the feelings of displacement, impotence, lack of control, could all be summed up in one word: fear. Together husband and wife pondered what was happening. He thought it might be a brain tumor, but he didn’t say anything. She thought she was having premonitions of some terrible event, but she didn’t say anything either. They tried to find some common ground for discussion, like logical, reasonable, mature people.

“Perhaps you’d better have some tests done.”

Mari agreed, on one condition, that no one, not even their children, should know anything about it.

The next day she applied for and was given thirty days’ unpaid leave from the office. Her husband thought of taking her to Austria, where there were many eminent specialists in disorders of the brain, but she refused to leave the house; the attacks were becoming more frequent and lasted longer.

With Mari dosed up on tranquilizers, the two of them managed, with great difficulty, to get as far as a hospital in Ljubljana, where Mari underwent a vast range of tests. Nothing unusual was found, not even an aneurism—a source of consolation to Mari for the rest of her life.

But the panic attacks continued. While her husband did the shopping and the cooking, Mari obsessively cleaned the house every day, just to keep her mind fixed on other things. She started reading all the psychiatry books she could find, only immediately to put them down again because she seemed to recognize her own malaise in each of the illnesses they described.

The worst of it was that, although the attacks were no longer a novelty, she still felt the same intense fear and sense of alienation from reality, the same loss of self-control. In addition, she started to feel guilty about her husband, obliged to do his own job as well as all the housework, cleaning apart.