By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept: A Novel of Forgiveness

by Paulo Coelho

  TWENTY KILOMETERS from here there's a grotto," he was telling me. "On the eleventh of February, 1858, a young girl was baling hay near the grotto with two other children. She was a fragile, asthmatic girl who lived in miserable poverty. On that winter's day, she was afraid of crossing a small stream, because if she got wet she might fall ill. And her parents needed the little money she made as a shepherd.

  "A woman dressed in white, with two golden roses on her feet, appeared. The woman treated the child as if she were a princess, asked if she might return to that place a certain number of times, and then vanished. The two other girls, who were entranced by what had happened, quickly spread the story.

  "This brought on a long ordeal for the girl. She was imprisoned, and the authorities demanded that she deny the whole story. Others offered her money to get her to ask the apparition for special favors. Within days, her family began to be insulted in the plaza by people who thought that the girl had invented the story in order to get attention.

  "The girl, whose name was Bernadette, had no understanding of what she had seen. She referred to the lady who had appeared as 'That,' and her parents, concerned as they were, went to the village priest for assistance. The priest suggested that when the apparition next appeared, Bernadette should ask the woman's name.

  "Bernadette did as she was asked, but received only a smile in response. 'That' appeared before her a total of eighteen times and, for the most part, said nothing. During one of her appearances, though, she asked the girl to kiss the ground. Without understanding why, Bernadette did as she was asked. During another visitation, she asked the girl to dig a hole in the floor of the grotto. Bernadette obeyed, and there immediately appeared a hole filled with filthy water, because swine were kept there.

  "'Drink the water,' the woman said.

  "The water was so dirty that although Bernadette cupped it in her hands, she threw it away three times, afraid to bring it to her mouth. Finally she did, despite her repugnance. In the place where she had dug, more water began to come forth. A man who was blind in one eye applied several drops of the water to his face and recovered his vision. A woman, desperate because her newborn child appeared to be dying, dipped the child in the spring--on a day when the temperature had fallen below zero. And the child was cured.

  "Little by little, the word spread, and thousands of people began to come to the place. The girl repeatedly asked the woman her name, but the woman merely smiled.

  "Until one day, 'That' turned to Bernadette, and said, 'I am the Immaculate Conception.'

  "Satisfied at last, the girl ran to tell the parish priest.

  "'That cannot be,' he said. 'No one can be the tree and the fruit at the same time, my child. Go there, and throw holy water on her.'

  "As far as the priest was concerned, only God could have existed from the very beginning--and God, as far as anyone could tell, was a man."

  He paused for a long time.

  "Bernadette threw holy water on 'That,' and the apparition smiled tenderly, nothing more.

  "On the sixteenth of July, the woman appeared for the last time. Shortly after, Bernadette entered a convent, not knowing that she had changed forever the destiny of that small village near the grotto. The spring continued to flow, and miracles followed, one after the other.

  "The story spread, first throughout France and later the world. The city grew and was transformed. Businesses sprang up everywhere. Hotels opened. Bernadette died and was buried in a place far from there, never knowing what had occurred.

  "Some people who wanted to put the church in a bad light--and who knew that the Vatican was now acknowledging apparitions--began to invent false miracles that were later unmasked. The church reacted strongly: from a certain date on, it would accept as miracles only those phenomena that passed a rigorous series of examinations performed by medical and scientific commissions.

  "But the water still flows, and the cures continue."

  I heard something nearby; it frightened me, but he didn't seem to notice. The fog now had a life and a story of its own. I was thinking about everything he had told me, and I wondered how he knew all of this.

  I thought about the feminine face of God. The man at my side had a soul filled with conflict. A short time ago, he had written to me that he wanted to enter a Catholic seminary, yet now he was thinking that God has a feminine face.

  He was silent. I still felt as if I were in the womb of the Earth Mother, beyond time and place.

  "There were two important things that Bernadette didn't know," he finally said. "The first was that prior to the arrival of the Christian religion in these parts, these mountains were inhabited by Celts--and the Goddess was their principal object of devotion. Generations and generations had understood the feminine face of God and shared in Her love and Her glory."

  "And the second thing?"

  "The second was that a short time before Bernadette experienced her visions, the authorities at the Vatican had met in secret. Virtually no one knew what had occurred at those meetings--and there's no question but that the priest in the small village didn't have the slightest idea. The highest council of the Catholic Church was deciding whether they should ratify the dogma regarding the Immaculate Conception.

  "The dogma wound up being ratified, through the papal bull known as Ineffabilis Deus. But the general public never knew exactly what this meant."

  "And what do you have to do with all this?" I asked.

  "I am Her disciple. I have learned through Her." He seemed to be saying that She was the source of all his knowledge.

  "You have seen Her?"

  "Yes."

  WE RETURNED to the plaza and walked toward the church. I saw the well in the lamplight, with the bottle of wine and two glasses on its wall. A couple of sweethearts must have been here, I think. Silent, allowing their hearts to speak to each other. And after their hearts had said all they had to say, they began to share the great mysteries.

  I felt that I was facing something quite serious and that I needed to learn everything I could from my experiences. For a few moments, I thought about my studies, about Zaragoza, and about the man I was hoping to find in my life--but all that seemed far away, clouded by the mists over Saint-Savin.

  "Why did you tell me the story of Bernadette?" I asked.

  "I don't know why exactly," he answered, without looking at me directly. "Maybe because we're not too far from Lourdes. Maybe because the day after tomorrow is the day of the Immaculate Conception. Or maybe it was because I wanted to show you that my world is not so solitary and mad as it may appear. There are others who are part of that world, and they believe in what they say."

  "I never said that your world is mad. Maybe it's mine that's crazy. I mean, here I am, spending the most crucial time of my life concentrating on textbooks and courses that won't help me at all to escape from the place I already know too well."

  I sensed that he was relieved that I understood him. I expected him to say something more about the Goddess, but instead he turned to me and said, "Let's get some sleep. We've had a lot to drink."

  Tuesday, December 7, 1993

  HE WENT straight to sleep, but I was awake for a long time, thinking about the fog, the wine, and our conversation. I read the manuscript he gave me, and what was in it thrilled me: God--if God really existed--was both Father and Mother.

  Later, I turned out the light and lay there thinking. When we were quiet with each other, I was able to see how close I felt to him.

  Neither of us had said anything. Love doesn't need to be discussed; it has its own voice and speaks for itself. That night, by the well, the silence had allowed our hearts to approach each other and get to know each other better. My heart had listened closely to what his had said, and now it was content.

  Before I fell asleep, I decided I would do what he called the "exercise of the Other."

  I am here in this room, I thought, far from everything familiar to me, talking about things that have never interested me and sleeping
in a city where I've never set foot before. I can pretend--at least for a few minutes--that I am different.

  I began to imagine how I would like to be living right at that moment. I wanted to be happy, curious, joyful--living every moment intensely, drinking the water of life thirstily. Believing again in my dreams. Able to fight for what I wanted.

  Loving a man who loved me.

  Yes, that was the woman I wanted to be--the woman who was suddenly presenting herself and becoming me.

  I felt that my soul was bathed in the light of a god--or of a goddess--in whom I had lost faith. And I felt that at that moment, the Other left my body and was standing in the corner of that small room.

  I observed the woman I had been up until then: weak but trying to give the impression of strength. Fearful of everything but telling herself it wasn't fear--it was the wisdom of someone who knew what reality was. Putting up shutters in front of windows to keep the joy of the sun from entering--just so the sun's rays wouldn't fade my old furniture.

  I looked at the Other, there in the corner of the room--fragile, exhausted, disillusioned. Controlling and enslaving what should really be free: her emotions. Trying to judge her future loves by the rules of her past suffering.

  But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if that means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.

  The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us.

  And to save us.

  When the Other left me, my heart once again began to speak to me. It told me that the breach in the dike had allowed the waters to pour through, that the wind was blowing in all directions at once, and that it was happy because I was once again willing to listen to what it had to say.

  My heart told me that I was in love. And I fell asleep with a smile on my lips.

  WHEN I AWOKE, the window was open and he was gazing at the mountains in the distance. I watched him without saying anything, ready to close my eyes if he turned toward me.

  As if he knew, he turned and looked at me.

  "Good morning," he said.

  "Good morning. Close the window--it's so cold."

  The Other had appeared with no warning. It was still trying to change the direction of the wind, to detect shortcomings, to say, No, that's impossible. But it knew it was too late.

  "I have to get dressed," I said.

  "I'll wait for you downstairs."

  I got up, banished the Other from my thoughts, opened the window again, and let the sun in. Its light bathed everything--the mountains with their snow-covered peaks, the ground blanketed in dry leaves, and the river, which I could hear but not see.

  The sun shone on me, warming my nude body. I was no longer cold--I was consumed by a heat, the heat of a spark becoming a flame, the flame becoming a bonfire, the bonfire becoming an inferno. I knew.

  I wanted this.

  I also knew that from this moment on I was going to experience heaven and hell, joy and pain, dreams and hopelessness; that I would no longer be capable of containing the winds that blew from the hidden corners of my soul. I knew that from this moment on love would be my guide--and that it had waited to lead me ever since childhood, when I had felt love for the first time. The truth is, I had never forgotten love, even when it had deemed me unworthy of fighting for it. But love had been difficult, and I had been reluctant to cross its frontiers.

  I recalled the plaza in Soria and the moment when I had asked him to find the medal I had lost. I had known what he was going to tell me, and I hadn't wanted to hear it, because he was the type who would someday go off in search of wealth, adventure, and dreams. I needed a love that was possible.

  I realized that I had known nothing of love before. When I saw him at the conference and accepted his invitation, I'd thought that I, as a mature woman, would be able to control the heart of the girl who had been looking for so long for her prince. Then he had spoken about the child in all of us--and I'd heard again the voice of the child I had been, of the princess who was fearful of loving and losing.

  For four days, I had tried to ignore my heart's voice, but it had grown louder and louder, and the Other had become desperate. In the furthest corner of my soul, my true self still existed, and I still believed in my dreams. Before the Other could say a word, I had accepted the ride with him. I had accepted the invitation to travel with him and to take the risks involved.

  And because of that--because of that small part of me that had survived--love had finally found me, after it had looked for me everywhere. Love had found me, despite the barricade that the Other had built across a quiet street in Zaragoza, a barricade of preconceived ideas, stubborn opinions, and textbooks.

  I opened the window and my heart. The sun flooded the room, and love inundated my soul.

  WE WANDERED FOR HOURS, through the snow and along the roads. We breakfasted in a village whose name I never found out but in whose central plaza a dramatic fountain sculpture displayed a serpent and a dove combined into a single fabulous creature.

  He smiled when he saw it. "It's a sign--masculine and feminine joined in a single figure."

  "I'd never thought before about what you told me yesterday," I said. "But it makes sense."

  "'And God created man and woman,'" he quoted from Genesis, "because that was his image and simulacrum: man and woman."

  I noted a new gleam in his eye. He was happy and laughed at every silly thing. He fell into easy conversation with the few people we met along the way--workers dressed in gray on their way to the fields, adventurers in colorful gear, preparing to climb a mountain peak. I said little--my French is awful--but my soul rejoiced at seeing him this way.

  His joy made everyone who spoke with him smile. Perhaps his heart had spoken to him, and now he knew that I loved him--even though I was still behaving like just an old friend.

  "You seem happier," I said at one point.

  "Because I've always dreamed of being here with you, walking through these mountains and harvesting the 'golden fruits of the sun.'"

  The golden fruits of the sun--a verse written ages ago, repeated by him now, at just the right moment.

  "There's another reason you're happy," I said, as we left the small village with the strange statue.

  "What's that?"

  "You know that I'm happy. You're responsible for my being here today, climbing the mountains of truth, far from my mountains of notebooks and texts. You're making me happy. And happiness is something that multiplies when it is divided."

  "Did you do the exercise of the Other?"

  "Yes. How did you know?"

  "Because you've changed too. And because we always learn that exercise at the right time."

  The Other pursued me all through the morning. Every minute, though, its voice grew fainter, and its image seemed to dissolve. It reminded me of those vampire films where the monster crumbles into dust.

  We passed another column with an image of the Virgin on the cross.

  "What are you thinking about?" he asked me.

  "About vampires. Those creatures of the night, locked inside themselves, desperately seeking company. Incapable of loving."

  "That's why legend has it that only a stake through the heart can kill them; when that happens, the heart bursts, freeing the energy of love and destroying the evil."

  "I never thought of that before. But it makes sense."

  I had succeeded in burying the stake. My heart, freed of all its curses, was aware of everything. The Other no longer had a place to call its own.

  A thousand times I wanted to take his hand, and a thousand times I stopped myself. I was still confused--I wanted to
tell him I loved him, but I didn't know how to begin.

  We talked about the mountains and the rivers. We were lost in a forest for almost an hour, but eventually we found the path again. We ate sandwiches and drank melted snow. When the sun began to set, we decided to return to Saint-Savin.

  THE SOUND of our footsteps echoed from the stone walls. At the entrance to the church, I instinctively dipped my hand in the font of holy water and made the sign of the cross. I recalled that water was the symbol of the Goddess.

  "Let's go in," he suggested.

  We walked through the dark, empty building. Saint Savin, a hermit who had lived at the start of the first millennium, was buried below the main altar. The walls of the place were crumbling and had clearly been reconstructed several times.

  Some places are like that: they can suffer through wars, persecutions, and indifference, but they still remain sacred. Finally someone comes along, senses that something is missing, and rebuilds them.

  I noticed an image of the crucified Christ that gave me a funny feeling--I had the impression that his head was moving, following me.

  "Let's stop here."

  We were before an altar of Our Lady.

  "Look at the image."

  Mary, with her son in her lap. The infant Jesus pointing to the heavens.

  "Look more carefully," he said.

  I studied the details of the wooden carving: the gilt paint, the pedestal, the perfection with which the artist had traced the folds of the robe. But it was when I focused on the finger of the child Jesus that I understood what he meant.

  Although Mary held him in her arms, it was Jesus who was supporting her. The child's arm, raised to the sky, appeared to be lifting the Virgin toward heaven, back to the place of Her Groom's abode.

  "The artist who created this more than six hundred years ago knew what he wanted to convey," he commented.

  Footsteps sounded on the wooden floor. A woman entered and lit a candle in front of the main altar.