by Paulo Coelho
“I am concentrating.”
That’s a lie, and he knows it. He may not be able to read my thoughts, but he knows that I’m not really here. My body is on fire from the adrenaline coursing through my veins, from the two falls I’ve suffered, and from everything else that fell along with the blows I received: her blouse, her jeans, her sneakers flung to the other side of the room. It’s impossible to foresee the next blow, but it’s perfectly possible to act with instinct, attention, and…
Yao lets go of my collar and bends my finger back in the classic finger lock. Just one finger and the body is paralyzed. One finger stops everything else from functioning. I try not to cry out, but I can see stars, and the pain is so intense that the dojo seems to have suddenly disappeared.
At first, the pain seems to make me concentrate on the one thing I should be concentrating on—the Path of Peace—but it immediately gives way to a feeling of her biting my lips as we kiss. My knees are no longer pinning down her arms. Her hands are grasping me hard; her nails are digging into my back; I can hear her moans in my left ear. Her teeth release their grip, her head shifts slightly, and she kisses me.
“Train your heart. That is the discipline every warrior needs. If you can control your heart, then you will defeat your opponent.”
That’s what I’m trying to do. I manage to extricate myself from his hold and grab his jacket again. He thinks I’m feeling humiliated; he has noticed my lack of practice and will almost certainly let me attack him now.
I have read his thoughts; I have read her thoughts; I surrender. Hilal rolls over in bed and sits astride my body. Then she undoes my belt and starts to unzip my trousers.
“The Path of Peace flows like a river, and because it resists nothing, it has won even before it has begun. The art of peace is unbeatable, because no one is fighting against anyone, only themselves. If you conquer yourself, then you will conquer the world.”
Yes, that is what I’m doing now. My blood is circulating faster than ever. The sweat runs into my eyes so that, for a fraction of a second, I can’t even see, but my opponent does not seize the advantage. In just two moves, he’s on the floor.
“Don’t do that,” I say. “I’m not a child who has to be allowed to win. My fight is taking place on another plane right now. Don’t let me win without having deserved the pleasure of being the best.”
He understands and apologizes. We are not fighting, we are practicing the Path of Peace. Again he grabs the collar of my jacket, and I prepare for a blow coming from the right, but, at the last moment, it changes direction. One of Yao’s hands grabs my arm and twists it in such a way that I’m forced to my knees to avoid having my arm broken.
Despite the pain, I feel much better. The Path of Peace appears to be a fight, but it isn’t. It’s the art of filling up what is missing and emptying out what is superfluous. I put all my energy into that, and gradually my imagination leaves the bed, the girl with her small breasts and hard nipples, the girl who is unzipping my trousers and then stroking my penis. I am fighting with myself, and I need to win this fight at all costs, even if that involves falling and getting up over and over. The kisses never given, the orgasms never achieved, the nonexistent caresses after the bout of wild, romantic, abandoned sex—all those things disappear.
I am on the Path of Peace, and my energy is being poured into that tributary of the river that resists nothing and thus follows its course to the end and reaches the sea as planned.
I get up again. I fall again. We fight for nearly half an hour, completely unaware of the other people there, all of whom are equally focused on what they’re doing, looking for the right position that will help them find the perfect posture in their everyday life.
Afterward, both of us are exhausted and dripping with sweat. He bows to me, I return his bow, and we head for the showers. He beat me every time, but there are no marks on my body; to injure your opponent is to injure yourself. Controlling your aggression in order not to harm the other is the Path of Peace.
I let the water run over my body, washing away everything that has accumulated and dissolved in my imagination. When desire returns, as I know it will, I will ask Yao to find another place where we can practice aikido—even if that place is the corridor of the train—and I will rediscover the Path of Peace.
Life is one long training session in preparation for what will come. Life and death lose their meaning; there are only challenges to be met with joy and overcome with tranquillity.
“THERE’S A MAN who needs to talk to you,” Yao says, while we’re getting dressed. “I said I’d arrange a meeting, because I owe him a favor. Will you do that for me?”
“But we’re leaving early tomorrow morning.”
“I mean at our next stop. I’m just an interpreter, of course, so if you don’t want to meet him, I’ll tell him that you’re busy.”
He isn’t just an interpreter, as he well knows. He’s a man who senses when I need help, even if he doesn’t know why.
“No,” I say. “That’s fine.”
“You know, I have a lifetime of experience in the martial arts,” he says. “And when Ueshiba was developing the Path of Peace, he wasn’t just thinking about overcoming a physical enemy. As long as there was a clear desire on the part of the student, he could learn to overcome his inner enemy as well.”
“I haven’t fought for a long time.”
“I don’t believe you. It might have been a while since you practiced aikido, but the Path of Peace continues inside you. Once learned, we never forget it.”
I can see where the conversation is leading. I could stop it right there, but I allow him to continue. He is a man with great experience of life and who was honed by adversity, a man who has survived despite having to change worlds many times in this incarnation. There’s no point trying to hide anything from him. I ask him to go on.
“You weren’t fighting with me but with her.”
“That’s true.”
“We’ll continue practicing, then, whenever the journey allows us. I want to thank you, by the way, for what you said on the train, comparing life and death to moving from one carriage to another, and explaining that we do that many times in our life. I slept peacefully for the first time since I lost my wife. I met her in my dreams and saw that she was happy.”
“I was talking to myself, too, you know.”
I thank him for being a loyal adversary who would not let me win a fight I did not deserve to.
The Ring of Fire
First develop a strategy that utilizes everything around you. The best way to prepare for a challenge is to cultivate the ability to call on an infinite variety of responses.
I finally had access to the Internet. I needed to remember everything I had learned about the Path of Peace.
The search for peace is a form of prayer that generates light and heat. Forget about yourself for a while and understand that in that light lies wisdom and in that heat lies compassion. As you travel this planet, try to perceive the true form of the Heavens and the Earth. That will be possible only if you can stop yourself from becoming paralyzed by fear and ensure that all your gestures and attitudes are in keeping with your thoughts.
Someone knocks at the door. I’m so focused on what I’m reading that at first I can’t understand what the noise is. My first impulse is simply not to open the door, but what if it’s something urgent? Why else would someone come knocking at this late hour?
As I go over to the door, I realize that there is one person with enough courage to do just that.
Hilal is standing outside, wearing a red T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Without saying a word, she comes in and lies down on my bed. I lie down beside her. She rolls over toward me, and I put my arms around her.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“Where have you been?” is not an empty question. Anyone asking it is also saying “I missed you,” “I want to be with you,” “I need to know what you’ve been up to.”
I don’t an
swer. I simply stroke her hair.
“I phoned Tatiana, and we spent the evening together,” she says, in answer to the question I neither asked nor answered. “She’s a sad woman, and sadness is contagious. She told me she has a twin sister who’s a drug addict and incapable of holding down a job or a relationship. Tatiana’s sadness doesn’t stem from there, though, but from the fact that she’s successful, pretty, desirable, and enjoys her work, and, although she’s divorced, she’s already met another man who’s madly in love with her. The problem is that whenever she sees her sister, she feels terribly guilty. First, because she can’t do anything to help, and, second, because her victory makes her sister’s defeat seem all the more bitter. In other words, we’re never happy, whatever the circumstances. And Tatiana isn’t the only person to think like that.”
I continue to stroke her hair.
“You remember what I said at the embassy, don’t you? Everyone says that I have extraordinary talent, that I’m a great violinist and that success and acclaim are assured. My teacher told you so, adding, ‘But she’s very insecure, unstable.’ That’s not true—I have great technique, and I know where to look when I need inspiration, but that isn’t what I was born for, and no one will convince me otherwise. The violin is my way of running away from reality, my chariot of fire that takes me far from myself, and I owe my life to it. I survived so that I would meet someone who would free me from all the hatred I feel. When I read your books, I realized that you were that person. Of course.”
“Of course.”
“I tried to help Tatiana, saying that ever since I was a young girl, I’ve done my best to destroy all the men who came near me, simply because one of them tried unconsciously to destroy me. She wouldn’t believe it, though. She thinks I’m just a child. She agreed to meet me only so that she could get nearer to you.”
She moves a little closer. I can feel the warmth of her body.
“She asked if she could go with us to Lake Baikal. She says that even though the train passes through Novosibirsk every day, she has never had a reason to get on it before. But now she does.”
As I predicted, now that I’m lying here next to her, I feel only tenderness for the young woman by my side. I turn out the light, and the room is lit by the glow from the welding torches being used on a building site opposite my window.
“I said she couldn’t, that even if she did get on the train, she wouldn’t be allowed into your carriage. The guards won’t let you pass from one class to another. She thought I was just trying to put her off.”
“People here work all night,” I say.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, I’m listening, but I don’t understand. Another person comes looking for me in precisely the same circumstances as you, but instead of helping her, you drive her away. ”
“That’s because I’m afraid that she’ll get too close to you, and then you’ll lose interest in me. I don’t know exactly who I am or what I’m doing here, and it could all disappear from one moment to the next.”
I reach out my left hand for my cigarettes, then light one for me and one for her. I place the ashtray on my chest.
“Do you desire me?” she asks.
I feel like saying, “Yes, I desire you when you’re far away, when you’re just a fantasy. Today I practiced aikido for nearly an hour, thinking about you all the time—about your body, your legs, your breasts—and yet the fighting used up only a tiny part of that energy. I love and desire my wife, and yet I also desire you. I’m not the only man who desires you, nor am I the only married man ever to desire another woman. We all commit adultery in our thoughts, ask forgiveness, then do it all over again. But it isn’t fear of committing a sin that keeps me from touching you, even though you’re here in my arms. I don’t suffer from that kind of guilt. There’s something far more important now than making love to you. That’s why I feel perfectly at peace lying beside you, looking at the hotel room lit by the glow from the building site next door.”
However, instead I say, “Of course I desire you. Very much. I’m a man, and you’re a very attractive woman. Besides, I feel a great tenderness for you, a feeling that grows with each day that passes. I admire the way you can change so easily from woman to child, from child to woman. It’s like a bow touching the strings of a violin and creating a divine melody.”
The ends of our cigarettes glow more intensely as we both inhale.
“Why don’t you touch me, then?”
I put out my cigarette, and she does the same. I continue to stroke her hair and try to make that journey back into the past.
“I need to do something very important for us both. You remember the Aleph? Well, I need to go through the door that frightened us both so much.”
“And what should I do?”
“Nothing. Just stay by my side.”
I begin to imagine the ring of golden light moving up and down my body. It starts at my feet, goes up as far as my head and then back again. At first, I find it hard to concentrate, but gradually the ring begins to move more quickly.
“May I speak?”
Of course she can. The ring of fire is not of this world.
“There’s nothing worse than being rejected. Your light finds the light of another soul, and you think that the windows will open, the sun will pour in, and all your old wounds will finally heal. Then, suddenly, none of that happens. Perhaps I’m paying the price for all those men I hurt.”
The golden light, which had come into being by dint of sheer imagination—a well-known way of getting back to one’s past lives—is now beginning to move of its own accord.
“No, you’re not paying the price for anything. Neither am I. Remember what I said on the train, about how we’re experiencing now everything that happened in the past and will happen in the future. In this precise moment, in a hotel in Novosibirsk, the world is being created and destroyed. We’re redeeming all our sins, if that’s what we choose to do.”
Not only in Novosibirsk but everywhere in the Universe, time beats like God’s vast heart, expanding and contracting. She draws closer, and I feel her small heart beating, too, ever louder.
The golden ring around my body is moving faster now. The first time I did this exercise, right after reading a book about “discovering the mysteries of past lives,” I was immediately transported to mid-nineteenth-century France and saw myself writing a book on the same subjects I write about now. I learned what my name was, where I lived, what kind of pen I was using, even the sentence I had just written. I was so scared that I returned at once to the present, to Copacabana, to the room where my wife was sleeping peacefully by my side. The following day, I found out everything I could about the person I had been and, a week later, decided to meet myself again. It didn’t work. And however often I tried, I failed every time.
I spoke to J. about it. He explained that there is always an element of “beginner’s luck,” conceived by God simply to show that it’s possible, but after that, the situation goes into reverse and returns to what it was before. He advised me not to try again unless I had some really serious issue to resolve in one of my past lives—otherwise, it was just a waste of time.
Years later, I was introduced to a woman in São Paulo. She was a very successful homeopath who had a deep compassion for her patients. Whenever we met, I felt that I had known her before. We talked about this feeling, which she said she shared. One day, we were standing on the balcony of my hotel, gazing out at the city, and I proposed doing the ring-of-fire exercise together. We were both projected toward the door I had seen when Hilal and I discovered the Aleph. That day, the homeopath said good-bye to me with a smile on her face, but I never spoke to her again. She refused to answer my phone calls or to see me when I went to her clinic, and I soon realized that there was no point in insisting.
The door, however, was open; the tiny crack in the dike had become a hole through which the water was beginning to gush forth. Over the years, I met three other women whom I a
lso felt I had known before, but I didn’t make the same mistake again and performed the ring-of-fire exercise alone. None of those women knew that I was responsible for some terrible event in their past lives.
The knowledge of what I’d done didn’t paralyze me, though. I was determined to put it right. Eight women had been the victims of that tragedy, and I was sure that one of them would eventually tell me how the story had ended. I knew almost everything, you see, apart from the curse that had been put on me.
That was why I had set off on the Trans-Siberian Railway and, more than a decade later, plunged once more into the Aleph. The fifth woman is now lying by my side, talking about things that no longer interest me because the ring of fire is spinning faster and faster. No, I don’t want to take her with me back to where we first met.
“Only women believe in love; men don’t,” she says.
“Men do believe in love,” I say.
I am still stroking her hair. Her heartbeat is slowing now. I imagine that her eyes are closed, that she feels loved and protected, and that the idea of rejection has vanished as quickly as it appeared.
Her breathing slows, too. She moves, but this time merely to find a more comfortable position. I move as well, to replace the ashtray on the bedside table; then I fold her in my arms.
The golden ring is spinning incredibly fast from my feet to my head and back again. Then suddenly I feel the air around me vibrating, as if there had been an explosion.
THE LENSES OF MY EYEGLASSES are smeared. My fingernails are filthy. The candle scarcely gives off enough light for me to make out where I am, but I can see that the sleeves of the clothes I’m wearing are made of coarse fabric.
Before me is a letter. Always the same letter.
Córdoba, July 11, 1492
My dear,
We have few weapons left, but one of these is the Inquisition, which has been the target of vicious attacks.
The bad faith of some and the prejudices of others would have people believe that the Inquisitor is a monster. At this difficult and delicate moment, when this supposed Reform is fomenting rebellion in homes and disorder in the streets, slandering the court of Christ and accusing it of torture and other monstrous acts, we are still the authority! And authority has a duty to impose the maximum penalty on those who harm the general good, to amputate the infected limb from the ailing body and thus prevent others from following its example. It is therefore only right that the death sentence should be imposed on those who, by continuing to spread heresy, cause many souls to be hurled into the fires of Hell.
