The Zahir

by Paulo Coelho

  “I apologize for not being as direct as the two previous speakers, but I nevertheless have something to say. I went to a train station today and learned that the distance between railway tracks is always 143.5 centimeters, or 4 feet 8½ inches. Why this absurd measurement? I asked my girlfriend to find out and this is what she discovered. When they built the first train carriages, they used the same tools as they had for building horse-drawn carriages. And why that distance between the wheels on carriages? Because that was the width of the old roads along which the carriages had to travel. And who decided that roads should be that width? Well, suddenly, we are plunged back into the distant past. It was the Romans, the first great road builders, who decided to make their roads that width. And why? Because their war chariots were pulled by two horses, and when placed side by side, the horses they used at the time took up 143.5 centimeters.

  “So the distance between the tracks I saw today, used by our state-of-the-art high-speed trains, was determined by the Romans. When people went to the United States and started building railways there, it didn’t occur to them to change the width and so it stayed as it was. This even affected the building of space shuttles. American engineers thought the fuel tanks should be wider, but the tanks were built in Utah and had to be transported by train to the Space Center in Florida, and the tunnels couldn’t take anything wider. And so they had to accept the measurement that the Romans had decided was the ideal. But what has all this to do with marriage?”

  I paused. Some people were not in the slightest bit interested in railway tracks and had started talking among themselves. Others were listening attentively, among them Marie and Mikhail.

  “It has everything to do with marriage and with the two stories we have just heard. At some point in history, someone turned up and said: When two people get married, they must stay frozen like that for the rest of their lives. You will move along side by side like two tracks, keeping always that same distance apart. Even if sometimes one of you needs to be a little farther away or a little closer, that is against the rules. The rules say: Be sensible, think of the future, think of your children. You can’t change, you must be like two railway tracks that remain the same distance apart all the way from their point of departure to their destination. The rules don’t allow for love to change, or to grow at the start and diminish halfway through—it’s too dangerous. And so, after the enthusiasm of the first few years, they maintain the same distance, the same solidity, the same functional nature. Your purpose is to allow the train bearing the survival of the species to head off into the future: your children will only be happy if you stay just as you were—143.5 centimeters apart. If you’re not happy with something that never changes, think of them, think of the children you brought into the world.

  “Think of your neighbors. Show them that you’re happy, eat roast beef on Sundays, watch television, help the community. Think of society. Dress in such a way that everyone knows you’re in perfect harmony. Never glance to the side, someone might be watching you, and that could bring temptation; it could mean divorce, crisis, depression.

  “Smile in all the photos. Put the photos in the living room, so that everyone can see them. Cut the grass, practice a sport—oh, yes, you must practice a sport in order to stay frozen in time. When sport isn’t enough, have plastic surgery. But never forget, these rules were established long ago and must be respected. Who established these rules? That doesn’t matter. Don’t question them, because they will always apply, even if you don’t agree with them.”

  I sat down. There was a mixture of enthusiastic applause and indifference, and I wondered if I had gone too far. Marie was looking at me with a mixture of admiration and surprise.

  The woman on stage sounded the cymbal.

  I told Marie to stay where she was, while I went outside to smoke a cigarette:

  “They’ll perform a dance now in the name of love, in the name of the Lady.”

  “You can smoke in here, can’t you?”

  “Yes, but I need to be alone.”

  It may have been early spring, but it was still very cold; nevertheless, I was in need of some fresh air. Why had I told that story? My marriage to Esther had never been the way I described: two railway tracks, always beside each other, always forming two correct, straight lines, We had had our ups and downs; one or other of us had occasionally threatened to leave for good; and yet we continued on together.

  Until two years ago.

  Or until the moment when she began to want to know why she was unhappy.

  No one should ever ask themselves that: Why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy.

  I now found myself in precisely that situation: I had a lively, interesting girlfriend, my work was going well, and there was every chance that, in the fullness of time, things would sort themselves out. I should resign myself to the situation. I should accept what life was offering me, not follow Esther’s example, not look at anyone else, but remember Marie’s words, and build a new life with her.

  No, I can’t think like that. If I behave in the way people expect me to behave, I will become their slave. It requires enormous self-control not to succumb, because our natural tendency is to want to please, even if the person to be pleased is us. If I do that, I will lose not only Esther, but Marie, my work, my future, as well as any respect I have for myself and for what I have said and written.

  When I went back in, I found that people were starting to leave. Mikhail appeared, having already changed out of his stage clothes.

  “Listen, what happened at the pizzeria…”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk by the Seine.”

  Marie got the message and said that she needed an early night. I asked her to give us a lift in her taxi as far as the bridge just opposite the Eiffel Tower; that way, I could walk home afterward. I thought of asking where Mikhail lived, but felt that the question might be construed as an attempt to verify, with my own eyes, that Esther really wasn’t living with him.

  On the way, Marie kept asking him what the meeting was about, and he always gave the same answer: it’s a way of recovering love. He said that he had liked my story about the railway tracks.

  “That’s how love got lost,” he said. “When we started laying down rules for when love should or shouldn’t appear.”

  “When was that?” Marie asked.

  “I don’t know, but I know it’s possible to retrieve that Energy. I know, because when I dance, or when I hear the voice, love speaks to me.”

  Marie didn’t know what he meant by “hearing the voice,” but, by then, we had reached the bridge. Mikhail and I got out and started walking in the cold Paris night.

  “I know you were frightened by what you saw. The biggest danger when someone has a fit is that their tongue will roll back and they’ll suffocate. The owner of the restaurant knew what to do, so it’s obviously happened there before. It’s not that unusual. But your diagnosis is wrong. I’m not an epileptic. It happens whenever I get in touch with the Energy.”

  Of course he was an epileptic, but there was no point in contradicting him. I was trying to act normally. I needed to keep the situation under control. I was surprised how easily he had agreed to this second meeting.

  “I need you. I need you to write something about the importance of love,” said Mikhail.

  “Everyone knows that love is important. That’s what most books are about.”

  “All right, let me put my request another way. I need you to write something about the new Renaissance.”

  “What’s the new Renaissance?”

  “It’s similar to the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when geniuses like Erasmus, Leonardo, and Michelangelo rejected the limitations
of the present and the oppressive conventions of their own time and turned instead to the past. We’re beginning to see a return to a magical language, to alchemy and the idea of the Mother Goddess, to people reclaiming the freedom to do what they believe in and not what the church or the government demand of them. As in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence, we are discovering that the past contains the answers to the future.

  “Your story about the railway tracks, for example: In how many other areas of our lives are we obeying rules we don’t understand? People read what you write—couldn’t you introduce the subject somewhere?”

  “I never make deals over what I write,” I replied, remembering once more that I needed to keep my self-respect. “If it’s an interesting subject, if it’s in my soul, if the boat called The Word carries me to that particular island, I might write about it. But none of this has anything to do with my search for Esther.”

  “I know, and I’m not trying to impose any conditions, I’m just suggesting something that seems important to me.”

  “Did she tell you about the Favor Bank?”

  “She did. But this isn’t a matter for the Favor Bank. It’s to do with a mission that I can’t fulfill on my own.”

  “What you do in the Armenian restaurant, is that your mission?”

  “That’s just a tiny part of it. We do the same thing on Fridays with a group of beggars. And on Wednesdays we work with a group of new nomads.”

  New nomads? It was best not to interrupt; the Mikhail who was talking to me now had none of the arrogance he had shown in the pizzeria, none of the charisma he had revealed on stage or the vulnerability he had revealed on that evening at the book signing. He was a normal person, a colleague with whom we always end up, late at night, talking over the world’s problems.

  “I can only write about things that really touch my soul,” I insist.

  “Would you like to come with us to talk to the beggars?”

  I remembered Esther’s remark about the phony sadness in the eyes of those who should be the most wretched people in the world.

  “Let me think about it first.”

  We were approaching the Louvre, but he paused to lean on the parapet, and we both stood there contemplating the passing boats, which dazzled us with their spotlights.

  “Look at them,” I said, because I needed to talk about something, afraid that he might get bored and go home. “They only see what the spotlights show them. When they go home, they’ll say they know Paris. Tomorrow, they’ll go and see the Mona Lisa and claim they’ve visited the Louvre. But they don’t know Paris and have never really been to the Louvre. All they did was go on a boat and look at a painting, one painting, instead of looking at a whole city and trying to find out what’s happening in it, visiting the bars, going down streets that don’t appear in any of the tourist guides, and getting lost in order to find themselves again. It’s the difference between watching a porn movie and making love.”

  “I admire your self-control. There you are talking about the boats on the Seine, all the while waiting for the right moment to ask the question that brought you to me. Feel free to talk openly about anything you like.”

  There was no hint of aggression in his voice, and so I decided to come straight to the point.

  “Where is Esther?”

  “Physically, she’s a long way away, in Central Asia. Spiritually, she’s very close, accompanying me day and night with her smile and the memory of her enthusiastic words. She was the one who brought me here, a poor twenty-one-year-old with no future, an aberration in the eyes of the people in my village, or else a madman or some sort of shaman who had made a pact with the devil, and, in the eyes of the people in the city, a mere peasant looking for work.

  “I’ll tell you my story another day, but the long and the short of it is that I knew English and started working as her interpreter. We were near the border of a country where the Americans were building a lot of military bases, preparing for the war in Afghanistan, and it was impossible to get a visa. I helped her cross the mountains illegally. During the week we spent together, she made me realize that I was not alone, that she understood me.

  “I asked her what she was doing so far from home. After a few evasive answers, she finally told me what she must have told you: that she was looking for the place where love had hidden itself away. I told her about my mission to make the energy of love circulate freely in the world again. Basically, we were both looking for the same thing.

  “Esther went to the French embassy and arranged a visa for me, as an interpreter of the Kazakh language, even though no one in my country speaks anything but Russian. I came to live here. We always met up when she returned from her missions abroad; we made two more trips together to Kazakhstan. She was fascinated by the Tengri culture, and by a nomad she had met and whom she believed held the key to everything.”

  I would have liked to know what Tengri was, but the question could wait. Mikhail continued talking, and in his eyes I saw the same longing to be with Esther that I myself was feeling.

  “We started working here in Paris. It was her idea to get people together once a week. She said, ‘The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.’”

  I remember Esther saying that all the really important things in our lives had arisen out of long conversations we’d had sitting at a table in some bar or walking along a street or in a park.

  “It was my idea that these meetings should be on a Thursday because that’s how it is in the tradition in which I was brought up. But it was her idea to make occasional forays into the Paris streets at night. She said that beggars were the only ones who never pretend to be happy; on the contrary, they pretend to be sad.

  “She gave me your books to read. I sensed that you too—possibly unconsciously—imagined the same world as we did. I realized that I wasn’t alone, even if I was the only one to hear the voice. Gradually, as more and more people started coming to the meetings, I began to believe that I really could fulfill my mission and help the energy of love to return, even if that meant going back into the past, back to the moment when that Energy left or went into hiding.”

  “Why did Esther leave me?”

  Was that all I was interested in? The question irritated Mikhail slightly.

  “Out of love. Today, you used the example of the railway tracks. Well, she isn’t just another track running along beside you. She doesn’t follow rules, nor, I imagine, do you. I miss her too, you know.”

  “So…”

  “So if you want to find her, I can tell you where she is. I’ve already felt the same impulse, but the voice tells me that now is not the moment, that no one should interrupt her encounter with the energy of love. I respect the voice, the voice protects us, protects me, you, Esther.”

  “When will the moment be right?”

  “Perhaps tomorrow, in a year’s time, or never, and, if that were the case, then we would have to respect that decision. The voice is the Energy, and that is why she only brings people together when they are both truly prepared for that moment. And yet we all try and force the situation even if it means hearing the very words we don’t want to hear: ‘Go away.’ Anyone who fails to obey the voice and arrives earlier or later than he should, will never get the thing he wants.”

  “I’d rather hear her tell me to go away than be stuck with the Zahir day and night. If she said that, she would at least cease to be an idée fixe and become a woman who now has a different life and different thoughts.”

  “She would no longer be the Zahir, but it would be a great loss. If a man and a woman can make the Energy manifest, then they are helping all the men and women of the world.”

  “You’re frightening m
e. I love her, you know I do, and you say that she still loves me. I don’t know what you mean by being prepared; I can’t live according to other people’s expectations, not even Esther’s.”

  “As I understand it from conversations I had with her, at some point you got lost. The world started revolving exclusively around you.”

  “That’s not true. She was free to forge her own path. She decided to become a war correspondent, even though I didn’t want her to. She felt driven to find out why people were unhappy, even though I told her this was impossible. Does she want me to go back to being a railway track running alongside another railway track, always keeping the same stupid distance apart, just because the Romans decided that was the way it should be?”

  “On the contrary.”

  Mikhail started walking again, and I followed him.

  “Do you believe that I hear a voice?”

  “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. But now that we’re here, let me show you something.”

  “Everyone thinks I’m just having an epileptic fit, and I let them believe that because it’s easier. But the voice has been speaking to me ever since I was a child, when I first saw the Lady.”

  “What lady?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Whenever I ask you something, you say: ‘I’ll tell you later.’”

  “The voice is telling me something now. I know that you’re anxious and frightened. In the pizzeria, when I felt that warm wind and saw the lights, I knew that these were symptoms of my connection with the Power. I knew it was there to help us both. If you think that all the things I’ve been telling you are just the ravings of a young epileptic who wants to manipulate the feelings of a famous writer, I’ll bring you a map tomorrow showing you where Esther is living, and you can go and find her. But the voice is telling us something.”

  “Are you going to say what exactly, or will you tell me later?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment. I haven’t yet properly understood the message.”