by Paulo Coelho
“That night, after rolling out our sleeping bags near some rocks, I reach out and touch her hand. She gently pulls back, saying that she’s married. I realize that I have made a foolish blunder; then, since I now have nothing to lose, I tell her about the visions I had as a child, about my mission to spread love throughout the world, about the doctor’s diagnosis of epilepsy.
“To my surprise, she understands exactly what I’m talking about. She tells me a little about her life. She says that she loves her husband and that he loves her, but that, with the passing of time, something important has been lost, and she prefers now to be far away from him, rather than watch her marriage slowly disintegrate. She had everything in life, and yet she was unhappy; although she could easily go through the rest of her life pretending that this unhappiness didn’t exist, she was terrified of falling into a depression from which she might never emerge.
“That is why she decided to give up everything and go in search of adventure, in search of things that leave her no time to think about a love that is dying. However, the more she looked, the more confused she became, the more alone she felt. She feels she has completely lost her way, and the experience we have just had seems to be telling her that she is on the wrong track and should go back to her daily routine.
“I suggest trying a less closely guarded trail, say that I know smugglers in Almaty who could help us, but she seems to have no energy, no will to go on.
“At that moment, the voice tells me to bless Esther and to dedicate her to the earth. Without really knowing what I am doing, I get up, open my backpack, dip my fingers in the small bottle of oil we have taken with us for cooking, place my hand on her head and pray in silence, asking, at the end, that she continue her search, because it is important for all of us. The voice is telling me—and I repeat the words out loud to her—that if just one person changes, the whole human race is changed. She puts her arms around me, and I can feel the earth blessing her, and we stay like that together for several hours.
“Afterward, I ask if she believes what I told her about the voice. She says that she both does and doesn’t. She believes that we all have a power that we never use and that I have clearly come into contact with that power through my epileptic fits, but this is something we can find out about together. She has been thinking of interviewing a nomad who lives to the north of Almaty and who is said by everyone to have magical powers. I am welcome to accompany her. When she tells me the man’s name, I realize that I know his grandson and that this could greatly facilitate matters.
“We drive through Almaty, stopping only to fill the tank with gas and buy some food, then we drive on in the direction of a tiny village near an artificial lake constructed by the Soviet regime. I find out where the nomad is staying, but despite telling one of his assistants that I know the man’s grandson, we still have to wait many hours, for there is a large crowd wanting the advice of this man they consider to be a saint.
“At last, we are ushered in. By acting as interpreter at that interview and by reading and rereading Esther’s article when it was published, I learn several things I needed to know.
“Esther asks why people are sad.
“‘That’s simple,’ says the old man. ‘They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.’
“Esther remarks that many people say to her, ‘You’re lucky, you know what you want from life, whereas I don’t even know what I want to do.’
“‘Of course they know,’ replies the nomad. ‘How many people do you know who say: I’ve never done what I wanted, but then, that’s life. If they say they haven’t done what they wanted, then, at some point, they must have known what it was that they did want. As for life, it’s just a story that other people tell us about the world and about how we should behave in the world.’
“‘Even worse are those people who say: I’m happy because I’m sacrificing my life for those I love.’
“‘And do you think that the people who love us want to see us suffering for their sakes? Do you think that love is a source of suffering?’
“‘To be honest, yes.’
“‘Well, it shouldn’t be.’
“‘If I forget the story other people have told me, I’ll also forget a lot of very important things life has taught me. What was the point of struggling to learn so much? What was the point of struggling to gain experience, so as to be able to deal with my career, my husband, my various crises?’
“‘Accumulated knowledge is useful when it comes to cooking or living within your means or wrapping up warm in winter or respecting certain limits or knowing where particular bus and train lines go. Do you believe that your past loves have taught you to love better?’
“‘They’ve taught me to know what I want.’
“‘I didn’t ask that. Have your past loves taught you to love your husband better?’
“‘No, on the contrary. In order to surrender myself to him, I had to forget all the scars left by other men. Is that what you mean?’
“‘In order for the true energy of love to penetrate your soul, your soul must be as if you had just been born. Why are people unhappy? Because they want to imprison that energy, which is impossible. Forgetting your personal history means leaving that channel clear, allowing that energy to manifest itself each day in whatever way it chooses, allowing yourself to be guided by it.’
“‘That’s all very romantic, but very difficult too, because that energy gets blocked by all kinds of things: commitments, children, your social situation…’
“‘…and, after a while, by despair, fear, loneliness, and your attempts to control the uncontrollable. According to the tradition of the steppes—which is known as the Tengri—in order to live fully, it is necessary to be in constant movement; only then can each day be different from the last. When they passed through cities, the nomads would think: The poor people who live here, for them everything is always the same. The people in the cities probably looked at the nomads and thought: Poor things, they have nowhere to live. The nomads had no past, only the present, and that is why they were always happy, until the Communist governors made them stop traveling and forced them to live on collective farms. From then on, little by little, they came to believe that the story society told them was true. Consequently, they have lost all their strength.’
“‘No one nowadays can spend their whole life traveling.’
“‘Not physically, no, but they can on a spiritual plane. Going farther and farther, distancing yourself from your personal history, from what you were forced to become.’
“‘How does one go about abandoning the story one was told?’
“‘By repeating it out loud in meticulous detail. And as we tell our story, we say goodbye to what we were and, as you’ll see if you try, we create space for a new, unknown world. We repeat the old story over and over until it is no longer important to us.’
“‘Is that all?’
“‘There is just one other thing: as those spaces grow, it is important to fill them up quickly, even if only provisionally, so as not to be left with a feeling of emptiness.’
“‘How?’
“‘With different stories, with experiences we never dared to have or didn’t want to have. That is how we change. That is how love grows. And when love grows, we grow with it.’
“‘Does that mean we might lose things that are important?’
“‘Never. The important things always stay; what we lose are the things we thought were important but which are, in fact, useless, like the false power we use to control the energy of love.’
“The old man tells her that her time is up and that he has other people to see. Despite my pleas he proves inflexible, but tells Esther that if she ever comes
back, he will teach her more.”
“Esther is only staying in Almaty for another week, but promises to return. During that time, I tell her my story over and over and she tells me hers, and we see that the old man is right: something is leaving us, we are lighter, although we could not really say that we are any happier.
“The old man had given us another piece of advice: fill that space up quickly. Before she leaves, she asks if I would like to go to France so that we can continue this process of forgetting. She has no one with whom she can share all this; she can’t talk to her husband; she doesn’t trust the people she works with; she needs someone from outside, from far away, who has, up until then, had nothing to do with her personal history.
“I say that I would like to do that and only then mention what the voice had prophesied. I also tell her that I don’t know French and that my only work experience so far has been tending sheep and working in a garage.
“At the airport, she asks me to take an intensive course in French. I ask her why she wants me to go to France. She repeats what she has said and admits she’s afraid of the space opening up around her as she erases her personal history; she’s afraid that everything will rush back in more intensely than before, and then there will be no way of freeing herself from her past. She tells me not to worry about buying a ticket or getting a visa; she will take care of everything. Before going through passport control, she looks at me, smiles, and says that, although she may not have known it, she had been waiting for me as well. The days we had spent together had been the happiest she had known in the last three years.
“I start working at night, as a bouncer at a striptease joint, and during the day I devote myself to learning French. Oddly enough, the attacks diminish, but the presence also goes away. I tell my mother that I’ve been invited to go abroad, and she tells me not to be so naive, I’ll never hear from the woman again.
“A year later, Esther returns to Almaty. The expected war has begun, and someone else has written an article about the secret American bases, but Esther’s interview with the old man had been a great success and now she has been asked to write a long article on the disappearance of the nomads. ‘Apart from that,’ she said, ‘it’s been ages since I told my story to anyone and I’m starting to get depressed.’
“I help put her in touch with the few tribes who still travel, with the Tengri tradition, and with local shamans. I am now fluent in French, and over supper she gives me various forms from the consulate to fill in, gets me a visa, buys me a ticket, and I come to Paris. We both notice that, as we empty our minds of old stories, a new space opens up, a mysterious feeling of joy slips in, our intuitions grow sharper, we become braver, take more risks, do things which might be right or which might be wrong, we can’t be sure, but we do them anyway. The days seem longer and more intense.
“When I arrive in Paris, I ask where I’m going to work, but she has already made plans: she has persuaded the owner of a bar to allow me to appear there once a week, telling him that I specialize in an exotic kind of performance art from Kazakhstan which consists of encouraging people to talk about their lives and to empty their minds.
“At first, it is very difficult to get the sparse audience to join in, but the drunks enjoy it and word spreads. ‘Come and tell your old story and discover a new one,’ says the small handwritten notice in the window, and people, thirsty for novelty, start to come.
“One night, I experience something strange: it is not me on the small improvised stage in one corner of the bar, it is the presence. And instead of telling stories from my own country and then moving on to suggest that they tell their stories, I merely say what the voice tells me to. Afterward, one of the spectators is crying and speaks about his marriage in intimate detail to the other strangers there.
“The same thing happens the following week—the voice speaks for me, asking people to tell stories not about love, but about the lack of love, and the energy in the air is so different that the normally discreet French begin discussing their personal lives in public. I am also managing to control my attacks better; if, when I’m on stage, I start to see the lights or feel that warm wind, I immediately go into a trance, lose consciousness, and no one notices. I only have ‘epileptic fits’ at moments when I am under great nervous strain.
“Other people join the group. Three young men the same age as me, who had nothing to do but travel the world—the nomads of the Western world; and a couple of musicians from Kazakhstan, who have heard about their fellow countryman’s ‘success,’ ask if they can join the show, since they are unable to find work elsewhere. We include percussion instruments in the performance. The bar is becoming too small, and we find a room in the restaurant where we currently appear; but now we are starting to outgrow that space too, because when people tell their stories, they feel braver; when they dance, they are touched by the energy and begin to change radically; love—which, in theory, should be threatened by all these changes—becomes stronger, and they recommend our meetings to their friends.
“Esther continues traveling in order to write her articles, but always comes to the meetings when she is in Paris. One night, she tells me that our work at the restaurant is no longer enough; it only reaches those people who have the money to go there. We need to work with the young. Where will we find them, I ask? They drift, travel, abandon everything, and dress as beggars or characters out of sci-fi movies.
“She says that beggars have no personal history, so why don’t we go to them and see what we can learn. And that is how I came to meet all of you.
“These are the things I have experienced. You have never asked me who I am or what I do, because you’re not interested. But today, because we have a famous writer in our midst, I decided to tell you.”
“But you’re talking about your past,” said the woman in the clashing hat and coat. “Even though the old nomad…”
“What’s a nomad?” someone asks.
“People like us,” she responds, proud to know the meaning of the word. “People who are free and manage to live with only what they can carry.”
I correct her:
“That’s not quite true. They’re not poor.”
“What do you know about poverty?” The tall, aggressive man, who now has even more vodka in his veins, looks straight at me. “Do you really think that poverty has to do with having no money? Do you think we’re miserable wretches just because we go around begging money from rich writers and guilt-ridden couples, from tourists who think how terribly squalid Paris has become or from idealistic young people who think they can save the world? You’re the one who’s poor—you have no control over your time, you can’t do what you want, you’re forced to follow rules you didn’t invent and which you don’t understand…”
Mikhail again interrupted the conversation and asked the woman:
“What did you actually want to know?”
“I wanted to know why you’re telling us your story when the old nomad said you should forget it.”
“It’s not my story anymore: whenever I speak about the past now, I feel as if I were talking about something that has nothing to do with me. All that remains in the present are the voice, the presence, and the importance of fulfilling my mission. I don’t regret the difficulties I experienced; I think they helped me to become the person I am today. I feel the way a warrior must feel after years of training: he doesn’t remember the details of everything he learned, but he knows how to strike when the time is right.”
“And why did you and that journalist keep coming to visit us?”
“To take nourishment. As the old nomad from the steppes said, the world we know today is merely a story someone has told to us, but it is not the true story. The other story includes special gifts and powers and the ability to go beyond what we know. I have lived with the presence ever since I was a child and, for a time, was even capable of seeing her, but Esther showed me that I was not alone. She introduced me to other people with special gifts, people who
could bend forks by sheer force of will, or carry out surgery using rusty penknives and without anaesthesia, so that the patient could get up after the operation and leave.
“I am still learning to develop my unknown potential, but I need allies, people like you who have no personal history.”
I felt like telling my story to these strangers too, in order to begin the process of freeing myself from the past, but it was late and I had to get up early the next day to see the doctor and have him remove the orthopedic collar.
I asked Mikhail if he wanted a lift, but he said no, he needed to walk a little, because he felt Esther’s absence particularly acutely that night. We left the group and headed for a street where I would be able to find a taxi.
“I think that woman was right,” I said. “If you tell a story, then that means you’re still not really free of it.”
“I am free, but, as I’m sure you’ll understand, therein lies the secret; there are always some stories that are ‘interrupted,’ and they are the stories that remain nearest to the surface and so still occupy the present; only when we close that story or chapter can we begin the next one.”
I remembered reading something similar on the Internet; it was attributed to me, although I didn’t write it:
That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability, or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.
But I had better find out what Mikhail means.
