Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho Read Free Book Online Page A

find it hard to rent out the room again. We may live at the end of the twentieth century, but people still believe in ghosts.
    Obviously she could have thrown herself off one of the few tall buildings in Ljubljana, but what about the further suffering caused to her parents by a fall from such a height? Apart from the shock of learning that their daughter had died, they would also have to identify a disfigured corpse; no, that was a worse solution than bleeding to death, because it would leave indelible marks on two people who only wanted the best for her.
    ‘They would get used to their daughter’s death eventually. But it must be impossible to forget a shattered skull.’
    Shooting, jumping off a high building, hanging, none of these options suited her feminine nature. Women, when they kill themselves, choose far more romantic methods—like slashing their wrists or taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Abandoned princesses and Hollywood actresses have provided numerous examples of this.
    Veronika knew that life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act. And so it proved. In response to her complaints that she could no longer sleep at night, two friends of hers managed to get hold of two packs each of a powerful drug, used by musicians at a local nightclub. Veronika left the four packs on her bedside table for a week, courting approaching death and saying goodbye—entirely unsentimentally—to what people called Life.
    Now she was there, glad she had gone all the way, and bored because she didn’t know what to do with the little time that remained to her.
    She thought again about the absurd question she had just read. How could an article about computers begin with such an idiotic opening line: ‘Where is Slovenia?’
    Having nothing more interesting to do, she decided to read the whole article and she learned that the said computer game had been made in Slovenia—that strange country that no one seemed quite able to place, except the people who lived there—because it was a cheap source of labour. A few months before,
    when the product was launched, the French manufacturer had given a party for journalists from all over the world in a castle in Vled.
    Veronika remembered reading something about the party, which had been quite an event in the city, not just because the castle had been redecorated in order to match as closely as possible the medieval atmosphere of the CD-Rom, but because of the controversy in the local press: journalists from Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain had been invited, but not a single Slovene.
    Homme’s correspondent—who was visiting Slovenia for the first time, doubtless with all expenses paid, and determined to spend his visit chatting up other journalists, making supposedly interesting comments and enjoying the free food and drink at the castle—had decided to begin his article with a joke which must have appealed to the sophisticated intellectuals of his country. He had probably told his fellow journalists on the magazine various untrue stories about local customs too, and said how badly Slovene women dress.
    That washis problem. Veronika was dying, and she had other concerns, such as wondering if there was life after death, or when her body would be found. Nevertheless—or perhaps precisely because of the important decision she had taken—the article bothered her.
    She looked out of the convent window that gave on to the small square in Ljubljana. ‘If they don’t know where Slovenia is, then Ljubljana must be a myth,’ she thought. Like Atlantis or Lemuria, or the other lost continents that fill men’s imaginations. No one, anywhere in the world, would begin an article asking where Mount Everest was, even if they had never been there. Yet, in the middle of Europe, a journalist on an important magazine felt no shame at asking such a question, because he knew that most of his readers would not know where Slovenia was, still less its capital, Ljubljana.
    It