by Paulo Coelho
“Well, there’s no shortage of conflicts,” says Hilal. “We’re surrounded by them, even in this carriage.”
Having been quiet for some time, she seems to have gone back to the beginning of the journey and to be intent on stirring up a situation that has already been resolved. She won the battle and wants to demonstrate her newly acquired power. My editor knows that these words are aimed at her.
“Conflicts are for undiscerning souls,” she replies, making a generalization that nonetheless hits its intended target. “The world is divided into those who understand me and those who don’t. In the case of the latter, I simply leave them to torment themselves trying to gain my sympathy.”
“That’s funny,” says Hilal, “I’m just the same. I’ve always been that way, and I’ve always got where I wanted to get, one example being that now I’m sleeping in a berth in this carriage.”
Yao gets up. He obviously isn’t in the mood for this kind of conversation.
My publisher looks at me. What does he expect me to do? Take sides?
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” says the editor, looking straight at Hilal now. “I always thought I was prepared for everything until my son was born, and then the world seemed to fall in on me. I felt weak and insignificant and incapable of protecting him. Only children believe they’re capable of everything. They’re trusting and fearless, so they believe in their own power and get exactly what they want. When children grow up, they start to realize that they’re not as powerful as they thought and that they need other people in order to survive. Then the child begins to love and to hope his love will be requited; as life goes on, he develops an ever greater need to be loved in return, even if that means having to give up his power. We all end up where we are now: grown-ups doing everything we can to be accepted and loved.”
Yao has returned, balancing a tray bearing tea and five mugs.
“That’s why I asked about the Aleph and love,” my editor goes on. “I wasn’t talking about love between a man and a woman. Sometimes, when I watched my son sleeping, I could see everything that was happening in the world: the place he had come from, the places he would go to, the trials he would have to face to achieve what I dreamed he would achieve. He grew up, and I loved him just as much, but the Aleph disappeared.”
Yes, she had understood the Aleph. Her words are followed by a respectful silence. Hilal is completely disarmed.
“I’m lost,” she says. “It feels as if the reasons I had for getting where I am now have completely disappeared. I could get out at the next station, go back to Ekaterinburg, devote the rest of my life to the violin, and continue to understand nothing. On the day of my death, I will ask: what was I doing there?”
I touch her arm.
“Come with me.”
I was about to get up and take her to the Aleph, to remind her why she had decided to cross Asia by train. I was prepared to accept whatever decision she might make. I thought of the homeopathic doctor whom I had never seen again after our joint return to a past life; perhaps it would be the same with Hilal.
“Just a moment,” Yao says.
He asks us all to sit down again, distributes the mugs, and places the teapot in the center of the table.
“When I lived in Japan, I learned the beauty of simple things. And the simplest and most sophisticated thing I experienced was drinking tea. I got up just now in order to repeat the experience and to explain that despite all our conflicts, all our difficulties, all our meanness and generosity, we can still love the simple things in life. The samurai used to leave their swords outside before going into a house, sitting down in the correct posture, and taking part in an elaborate tea ceremony. During that time, they could forget all about war and devote themselves to worshipping beauty. Let’s do that now.”
He fills each mug with tea. We wait in silence.
“I went to fetch the tea because I saw two samurai ready to do battle, but when I returned, the honorable warriors had been replaced by two souls who understood each other with no need for soothing tea. Let us drink together anyway. Let us concentrate all our efforts on achieving Perfection through the imperfect gestures of everyday life. True wisdom means respecting the simple things we do, for they can take us where we need to go.”
We respectfully drink the tea that Yao has poured for us. Now that I have been forgiven, I can savor the taste of the young leaves before they were picked by calloused hands, dried, and made into a drink that creates harmony all around. None of us is in a hurry; as we travel on, we are constantly destroying and rebuilding ourselves and who we are.
When we have finished, I again invite Hilal to follow me. She deserves to know the full story and to decide for herself.
WE ARE IN THE VESTIBULE between carriages. A man of about my age is talking to a woman who is standing precisely where the Aleph is. Given the special energy of that place, they might stay there for some time.
We wait for a while. A third person arrives, lights a cigarette, and joins the other two.
Hilal makes as if to go back into the lounge. “This is our space. They should be in the next carriage.”
I ask her to stay where she is. We can wait.
“Why were you so aggressive, when she obviously wanted to make peace?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I’m lost. Every time we stop, every day that passes, I feel more and more lost. I thought I had such a need to light that fire on the mountain, to be by your side, to help you fulfill some mission unknown to me. I thought that she would react the way she did and do everything possible to stop that from happening. And I prayed for the strength to overcome all obstacles, to accept the consequences, to be humiliated, insulted, rejected, and despised, and all in the name of a love I never thought could exist but which does exist. And I’ve come very close to achieving that. I now sleep in the berth next to yours, which is empty because God decided that the person who was going to occupy it would drop out at the last moment. She didn’t make that decision; it came from on high, I’m sure of that. Now, though, for the first time since I got on this train bound for the Pacific coast, I suddenly have no desire to carry on.”
Another person arrives and joins the group. He comes armed with three cans of beer. It looks like their conversation is going to last quite a long time.
“I know what you mean. You think you’ve reached the end, but you haven’t. And you’re quite right that you need to understand why you’re here. You came to forgive me, and I want to show you why. However, words kill, and only through direct experience will you understand everything—or rather, only then will we understand everything, because I don’t know how the story ends, either, what the last line or last word will be.”
“Let’s wait for them to leave, then, so that we can enter the Aleph.”
“That’s what I thought, too, but they’re clearly going to be here for a while, precisely because of the Aleph. They may not be aware of it, but they’re experiencing a feeling of euphoria and plenitude. It occurred to me while I was watching them that I may need to guide you and not just show you everything all at once.
“Come to my room tonight. It’s hard to sleep in this carriage, anyway, but just close your eyes, relax, and lie down beside me. Let me embrace you as I did in Novosibirsk. I’m going to try to reach the end of that story alone, and then I will tell you exactly what happened.”
“That’s what I hoped to hear. An invitation to your room. But please don’t reject me again.”
The Fifth Woman
“I DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO WASH MY PAJAMAS.”
Hilal is wearing only a T-shirt she has just borrowed from me. It covers the top half of her body but leaves her legs bare. I can’t tell if she’s wearing anything underneath or not. She gets into bed.
I stroke her hair. I need to use all the tact and delicacy at my command, to say everything and nothing.
“All I need at the moment is for you to embrace me, a gesture as old as humanity itself, and which means far
more than the meeting of two bodies. An embrace means: I don’t feel threatened by you; I’m not afraid to be this close; I can relax, feel at home, feel protected and in the presence of someone who understands me. It is said that each time we embrace someone warmly, we gain an extra day of life. So please, embrace me now,” I say.
I place my head on her breast, and she holds me in her arms. I again hear her heart beating fast and realize that she’s not wearing a bra.
“I would very much like to tell you what I’m about to attempt, but I can’t. I’ve never yet reached the end, the point where all things are resolved and explained. I always stop at the same moment, just as we’re leaving.”
“Leaving what?” asks Hilal.
“Just as we’re leaving the square, but don’t ask me to explain any further. There are eight women, you see, and one of them says something to me that I can’t hear. In the last twenty years, I’ve met four of those women, but none could take me as far as the end of the story. You’re the fifth of those women. This journey didn’t happen by chance, and given that God doesn’t play dice with the Universe, I now know why that story about the fire lit on a mountain made you come in search of me, although I only understood this when we entered the Aleph together.”
“I need a cigarette. Can you explain more clearly? I thought you wanted to be with me.”
We sit up in bed and light a cigarette each.
“I wish I could be clearer and tell you everything, starting from the point where I read the letter, which is always the first thing to appear. After that, I hear the voice of my Superior telling me that the eight women are waiting for us. And I know that at the end, one of the women says something to me, but I can’t tell whether it’s a blessing or a curse.”
“So you’re talking about past lives, about a letter in a past life?”
That’s all I need her to understand, just as long as she doesn’t ask me to explain which life I’m talking about.
“Everything happens here in the present. We condemn or save ourselves here and now, all the time. We’re constantly changing sides, jumping from one carriage to the next, from one parallel world into another. You have to believe that.”
“I do. I think I know what you’re talking about.”
A train passes, heading in the opposite direction. The lit windows flash rapidly past; we hear the noise, feel the blast of air. The carriage rocks even more than usual.
“What I need to do now is to go over to the other side, which is in this same ‘train’ called time and space. It’s not hard to do. You simply have to imagine a ring of gold moving up and down your body, slowly at first, and then gradually gaining speed. It worked incredibly well when we were in Novosibirsk together. That’s why I’d like to repeat the experience. You embraced me and I embraced you, and the ring sent me almost effortlessly back into the past.”
“Is that all it takes? You just have to imagine a ring?”
My eyes are fixed on the computer on the little table in my berth. I get up and bring it over to the bed.
“We think that a computer is full of photos and images that provide a real window on the world, but the fact is that behind what we see on the screen, there is nothing but a succession of zeros and ones, what programmers call binary language.
“We have a need to create a visible reality around us; in fact, if we hadn’t done that, we humans would never have survived our predators. We invented something called ‘memory,’ just like in a computer. Memory protects us from danger, allows us to live as social beings, to find food, grow, and pass everything we’ve learned on to the next generation, but it’s not the main matter of life.”
I replace the computer on the table and come back to the bed.
“The ring of fire is merely a trick to free us from memory. I read something about it somewhere once. I can’t remember the author’s name now, but he said that it’s what we do unconsciously every night when we dream: we enter our recent or remote past. We wake up thinking that we’ve dreamed the most ridiculous things while we slept, but that’s not true. We’ve visited another dimension, where things don’t happen exactly as they do here. We think it’s all nonsense, because when we wake up, we’re immediately back in a world organized by memory, which is our way of understanding the present. What we saw in our dreams is rapidly forgotten.”
“Is it really that easy to go back to a past life or enter a different dimension?”
“It is when we dream or when we deliberately provoke that state, but provoking such states isn’t really advisable. Once the ring has a grip on your body, your soul floats off into a kind of no-man’s-land. If it doesn’t know where it’s going, it will fall into a deep sleep, and then it can be carried off into areas where it won’t be welcome, and then it will either learn nothing or bring past problems into the present.”
We finish our cigarettes. I put the ashtray down on the chair that serves as my bedside table and ask her to embrace me again. Her heart is beating even faster.
“Am I one of those eight women?”
“Yes. All the people with whom we’ve had problems in the past keep reappearing in our lives, in what mystics call the Wheel of Time. We become more aware of this with each new incarnation, and those conflicts are gradually resolved. When everyone’s conflicts everywhere cease to exist, then the human race will enter a new phase.”
“So did we cause these conflicts in the past just so that we could resolve them later on?”
“No, the conflicts were necessary for humanity to be able to evolve in a way and a direction that still remain a mystery to us. Imagine a time when we were all part of a kind of biological soup that covered the planet. Cells reproduced in the same way for millions of years, then one of them changed. At that point, billions of other cells said, ‘That’s not right; that cell’s in conflict with the rest of us.’
“Meanwhile, that mutation made the other cells beside it change, too. ‘Mistake’ followed upon ‘mistake,’ and out of that soup came amoebas, fish, animals, and men. Conflict was essential to evolution.”
She lights another cigarette. “But why do we need to resolve those conflicts now?”
“Because the Universe, God’s heart, contracts and expands. The motto of the alchemists was Solve et coagula, which means ‘separate and bring together.’ Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.
“This afternoon, you and my editor quarreled. Thanks to that confrontation, you were each able to reveal a light that the other was unaware of. You separated and came together again, and we all benefited from that. Things could have turned out quite differently: a confrontation with no positive results. In that case, the matter would have proved less illuminating or would have had to be resolved later. It couldn’t remain unresolved, because the energy of hatred between the two of you would have infected the whole carriage. And this carriage, you see, is a metaphor for life.”
She’s not much interested in these theories. “Begin, then. I’ll go with you.”
“No, you won’t. You may be holding me in your arms, but you don’t know where I’m going. Don’t do it. Promise me you won’t imagine the ring. Even if I don’t find a complete solution, I promise I’ll tell you where I met you before. I don’t know that it was the first time this happened in all my past lives, but it’s the only one I’m sure of.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Promise,” I insist. “Today, I tried to take you back to the Aleph, but there were people there. That means I must go there before you do.”
She releases me from her embrace and makes as if to get up. I hold on to her.
“Let’s go to the Aleph now,” she says. “There won’t be anyone around at this hour.”
“Please believe me. Embrace me again and try not to move too much, even if you have difficulty sleeping. Let me see if I can get an answer first. Light the sacred fire on the mountain, because the place I’m going to is as cold as death.”
“I’m one of the women, aren’t I?” Hilal says again.<
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“Yes,” I say, still listening to her heart beating.
“I’ll light the fire and stay here to watch over you. Go in peace.”
I imagine the ring. Her earlier forgiveness leaves me freer, and soon the ring is moving up and down my body of its own accord, propelling me toward the place I do not want to go but to which I must return.
Ad Extirpanda
I LOOK UP from the letter and observe the elegant couple before me. The man is wearing a spotless white linen shirt and a velvet jacket with gold embroidery on the sleeves. The woman has on a fur jacket, and the woolen bodice of her dress is sewn with pearls while the high embroidered collar of her long-sleeved white blouse frames her anxious face. They are talking to my Superior.
“We’ve been friends for years,” she says, giving a forced smile, as if she wanted to convince us that nothing has changed, that this is all a misunderstanding. “You baptized her and set her on the path to righteousness.”
Then, turning to me, she adds, “And you know her better than anyone. You played together and grew up together and only grew apart when you chose to enter the priesthood.”
The Inquisitor remains impassive.
The couple look at me with pleading eyes, begging for my help. I have often slept in their house and eaten their food. They took me in after my parents died from the plague. I nod in agreement. I am five years older, but it’s true that I know her better than anyone. We did indeed play together and grow up together and, before I entered the Dominican Order, she was the woman with whom I would have liked to spend the rest of my days.
“We’re not talking about her friends.” It is her father’s turn to address the Inquisitor, and the smile on his face is equally false. “I don’t know what they do or what they have done. I believe the Church has a duty to put an end to heresy, just as it put an end to the threat from the Moors. These women must be guilty, because the Church is never unjust, but you both know that our daughter is innocent.”
