Aleph

by Paulo Coelho

  And what seemed like paranoia becomes a reality. One of the men at the other table gets up and comes over to us.

  He doesn’t say a word. He merely looks at the young men we invited to supper, and the conversation stops. Everyone seems surprised to see him there. My publisher, slightly befuddled by the vodka and by the distribution problem in Moscow, asks something in Russian.

  “No, I’m not his father,” answers the stranger, “but I don’t know if he’s old enough to drink like that and to say things that are completely untrue.”

  His English is perfect, and he speaks with the rather affected accent of someone who has studied at one of the most expensive schools in England. His voice is cold and neutral, without a hint of emotion or aggression.

  Only a fool makes threats, and only another fool feels threatened. When someone uses that tone, though, it spells danger, because subjects, verbs, and predicates will, if necessary, be transformed into actions.

  “You chose the wrong restaurant,” he says. “The food here is terrible, and the service even worse. Perhaps you’d better find somewhere else to eat. I’ll pay the bill.”

  The food really isn’t very good, the drinks are clearly as bad as we were warned they were, and the service is appalling. However, the man isn’t concerned about our health and well-being: we are being thrown out.

  “Let’s go,” says the young reader.

  Before we can do anything, he and his friends have vanished. The man seems pleased and turns to go back to his own table. For a fraction of a second, the tension dissolves.

  “Well, I’m really enjoying the food and have no intention of going to another restaurant.”

  Yao spoke in a voice equally devoid of emotion or menace. There was no need for him to say anything; the conflict was over. My readers had been the only ones causing the problem. We could simply have finished our meal in peace. The man turns to face him. One of his colleagues picks up his cell phone and goes outside. The restaurant falls silent.

  Yao and the stranger stare at each other.

  “The food here can give you food poisoning and kill you almost instantly,” the stranger says.

  Yao remains seated. “According to statistics, in the three minutes that we’ve been talking, three hundred and twenty people in the world have died and another six hundred and fifty have been born. That’s life. I don’t know how many died of food poisoning, but some must have. Others died after a long illness, some suffered an accident, and probably a certain percentage got shot, while some poor woman died in childbirth and became part of the birth statistics. Only the living die.”

  The man who left the restaurant with his cell phone has come back, and the stranger standing by our table continues to show no emotion. For what seems like an eternity, no one in the restaurant speaks. At last, the stranger says, “Another minute has passed. Another hundred or so people must have died and another two hundred or so been born.”

  “Exactly.”

  Two more men appear at the door of the restaurant and walk over to our table. The stranger sees them and indicates with a jerk of his head that they should leave again.

  “The food here may be terrible and the service appalling, but if this is the restaurant of your choice, I can do nothing about it. Bon appétit.”

  “Thank you. But we’ll gladly take you up on your offer to pay the bill.”

  “Of course,” he says, addressing Yao only, as if no one else were there. He puts his hand in his pocket. We all imagine that he’s about to pull out a gun, but instead he produces an entirely unthreatening business card.

  “Get in touch if you ever need a job or get tired of what you’re doing now. Our property company has a large branch here in Russia, and we need people like you, people who understand that death is just a statistic.”

  He hands Yao his card, they shake hands, and he returns to his table. Gradually, the restaurant comes back to life, the silence fills with talk, and we gaze in astonishment at Yao, our hero, the man who defeated the enemy without firing a single shot. Hilal has cheered up, too, and is now trying to keep up with a ridiculous conversation in which everyone appears to have developed a sudden intense interest in stuffed birds and the quality of Mongolian-Siberian vodka. The adrenaline surge brought on by fear had an instantly sobering effect on us all.

  I mustn’t let this opportunity slip. I’ll ask Yao later what made him so sure of himself. Now I say, “You know, I’m very impressed by the religious faith of the Russian people. Communism spent seventy years telling them that religion was the opium of the people, but to no avail.”

  “Marx clearly knew nothing about the marvels of opium,” says my editor, and everyone laughs.

  I go on: “The same thing happened with the church I belong to. We killed in God’s name, we tortured in Jesus’ name, we decided that women were a threat to society and so suppressed all displays of female ingenuity, we practiced usury, murdered the innocent, and made pacts with the Devil. And yet, two thousand years later, we’re still here.”

  “I hate churches,” says Hilal, taking the bait. “My least enjoyable moment of this whole trip was when you forced me to go to that church in Novosibirsk.”

  “Imagine that you believe in past lives and that in one of your previous existences you had been burned at the stake by the Inquisition in the name of the faith it was trying to impose. Would you hate the Church even more then?”

  She barely hesitates before responding. “No. It would still be a matter of indifference to me. Yao didn’t hate the man who came over to our table; he simply prepared himself to do battle over a principle.”

  “But what if you were innocent?” my publisher interrupts. Perhaps he has brought out a book on this subject, too…

  “I’m reminded of Giordano Bruno. He was respected by the Church as a learned man but was burned alive in the center of Rome itself. During the trial, he said something along the lines of: I am not afraid of the fire, but you are afraid of your verdict. A statue of him now stands in the place where he was murdered by his so-called allies. He triumphed because he was judged by mere men, not by Jesus.”

  “Are you trying to justify an injustice and a crime?”

  “Not at all. The murderers vanished from the map, but Giordano Bruno continues to influence the world with his ideas. His courage was rewarded. After all, a life without a cause is a life without effect.”

  It is as if the conversation is being guided in the direction I want it to go.

  “If you were Giordano Bruno,” I say, looking directly at Hilal now, “would you be able to forgive your executioners?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I belong to a religion that perpetrated horrors in the past. That’s what I’m getting at, because, despite everything, I still have the love of Jesus, which is far stronger than the hatred of those who declared themselves to be his successors. And I still believe in the mystery of the transubstantiation of bread and wine.”

  “That’s your problem. I just want to keep well away from churches, priests, and sacraments. Music and the silent contemplation of nature are quite enough for me. But does what you’re saying have something to do with what you saw when…” She pauses to consider her words. “When you said you were going to do an exercise involving a ring of light?”

  She doesn’t say that we were in bed together. For all her strong character and hasty temperament, she is trying to protect me.

  “I don’t know. As I said on the train, everything that happened in the past or will happen in the future is also happening in the present. Perhaps we met because I was your executioner, you were my victim, and it’s time for me to ask your forgiveness.”

  Everyone laughs, and I do, too.

  “Well, be nicer to me, then,” she says. “Be a little more attentive. Say to me now, in front of everyone, the three-word sentence I long to hear.”

  I know that she wants me to say “I love you.”

  “I will say three three-word sentences,” I say.
“One, you are protected. Two, do not worry. Three, I adore you.”

  “Well, I have something to add to that. Only someone who can say ‘I love you’ is capable of saying ‘I forgive you.’ ”

  Everyone applauds. We return to the Mongolian-Siberian vodka and talk about love, persecution, crimes committed in the name of truth, and the food in the restaurant. The conversation will go no further tonight. She doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, but the first, most difficult, step has been taken.

  AS WE LEAVE, I ask Yao why he decided to take that line of action, thus putting everyone at risk.

  “But nothing happened, did it?”

  “No, but it could have. People like him aren’t used to being treated with disrespect.”

  “I was always getting kicked out of places when I was younger, and I promised myself that it would never happen again once I was an adult. Besides, I didn’t treat him with disrespect; I simply confronted him in the way he wanted to be confronted. The eyes don’t lie, and he knew I wasn’t bluffing.”

  “Even so, you did challenge him. We’re in a small city, and he could have felt that you were questioning his authority.”

  “When we left Novosibirsk, you said something about that Aleph thing. A few days ago, I realized that the Chinese have a word for it, too: ‘qi.’ Both he and I were standing at the same energy point. I don’t want to philosophize about what might have happened, but anyone accustomed to danger knows that at any moment of his life he could be confronted by an opponent. Not an enemy, an opponent. When an opponent is sure of his power, as he was, you have to confront them or be undermined by your failure to exercise your own power. Knowing how to appreciate and honor our opponents is a far cry from what flatterers, wimps, or traitors do.”

  “But you know he was—”

  “It doesn’t matter what he was; what mattered was how he handled his energy. I liked his style of fighting, and he liked mine. That’s all.”

  The Golden Rose

  I HAVE A TERRIBLE HEADACHE after drinking all that Mongolian-Siberian vodka, and none of the pills and potions I’ve taken seem to help. It’s a bright, cloudless day, but there’s a biting wind. It may be spring, but ice still mingles with the pebbles on the shore. Despite the various layers of clothing I’ve put on, the cold is unbearable.

  But my one thought is: My God, I’m home!

  Before me lies a vast lake, so big that I can barely see the far shore. Against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, a fishing boat is setting out across the lake’s transparent waters and will presumably return this evening. All I want is to be here, entirely present, because I don’t know if I will ever come back. I take several deep breaths, trying to soak up the beauty of it all.

  “It’s one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen.”

  Encouraged by this remark, Yao decides to feed me some facts. He explains that Lake Baikal, called the North Sea in ancient Chinese texts, contains roughly twenty percent of the world’s surface fresh water and is more than twenty-five million years old. Unfortunately, none of this interests me.

  “Don’t distract me; I want to absorb this whole landscape into my soul.”

  “It’s very big. Why don’t you just plunge straight in and merge your soul with the soul of the lake?”

  In other words, risk suffering thermal shock and dying of hypothermia in Siberia. He has finally managed to get my attention. My head is heavy, the wind unbearable, and we decide to go straight to the place where we are to spend the night.

  “Thank you for coming. You won’t regret it.”

  We go to an inn in a little village with dirt roads and houses like the ones I saw in Irkutsk. There is a well near the door, and a little girl is standing by it, trying to draw up a bucket of water. Hilal goes to help her, but instead of pulling on the rope, she positions the child perilously near the edge.

  “According to the I Ching,” I tell her, “you can move a town, but you cannot move a well. I say that you can move the bucket but not the child. Be careful.”

  The child’s mother comes over and berates Hilal. I leave them to it and go to my room. Yao had been vehemently opposed to Hilal coming with us. Women are not allowed in the place where we are going to meet the shaman. I told him that I wasn’t particularly interested in making the visit. I know the Tradition, which is to be found everywhere, and I’ve met various shamans in my own country. I agreed to go only because Yao has helped me and taught me many things during the journey.

  “I need to spend every second I can with Hilal,” I had said while we were still in Irkutsk. “I know what I’m doing. I am on the path back to my kingdom. If she doesn’t help me now, I will have only three more chances in this life.”

  He didn’t understand exactly what I meant, but he gave in.

  I put my backpack down in one corner of my room, turn the heat up to maximum, close the curtains, and fall onto the bed, hoping my headache will go away. At this point, Hilal comes in.

  “You left me out there, talking to that woman. You know I hate strangers.”

  “We’re the strangers here.”

  “I hate being judged all the time and having to hide my fear, my emotions, my vulnerabilities. You think I’m a brave, talented young woman who is never intimidated by anything. Well, you’re wrong. Everything intimidates me. I avoid glances, smiles, close contact. You’re the only person I’ve really talked to. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  Lake Baikal, snowcapped mountains, limpid water, one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and this stupid conversation.

  “Let’s rest for a while, then we can go out for a walk. I’m meeting the shaman tonight.” She makes as if to put down her backpack, but I say, “You have your own room.”

  “But on the train…”

  She doesn’t complete her sentence and leaves, slamming the door. I lie there, staring up at the ceiling, wondering what to do. I can’t let myself be guided by my feelings of guilt. I can’t and I won’t, because I love another woman who is far away just now and who trusts her husband even though she knows him well. All my previous attempts at explanation have failed; perhaps here would be the ideal place to set things straight once and for all with this obsessive, adaptable, strong but fragile young woman.

  I am not to blame for what is happening. Neither is Hilal. Life has placed us in this situation, and I just hope it is for the good of both of us. Hope? I’m sure it is. I start praying and immediately fall asleep.

  WHEN I WAKE UP I go to her room, and from outside I can hear her playing the violin. I wait until she has finished, then knock on the door.

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  She looks at me, surprised and happy. “Are you feeling better? Can you stand the wind and the cold?”

  “Yes, I’m much better. Let’s go.”

  We walk through the village, which is like something out of a fairy tale. One day, tourists will come here, vast hotels will be built, and shops will sell T-shirts, lighters, postcards, models of the wooden houses. They will make huge parking lots for the double-decker coaches that will bring people armed with digital cameras, determined to capture the whole lake on a microchip. The well we saw will be destroyed and replaced by another, more decorative one; however, it won’t supply the inhabitants with water but will be sealed by order of the council so that no foreign children risk leaning over the edge and falling in. The fishing boat I saw this morning will vanish. The waters of the lake will be crisscrossed by modern yachts offering day cruises to the center of the lake, lunch included. Professional fishermen and hunters will arrive, armed with the necessary licenses for which they will pay, per day, the equivalent of what the local fishermen and hunters earn in a year.

  At the moment, though, it’s just a remote village in Siberia, where a man and a woman less than half his age are walking alongside a river created by the thaw. They sit down beside it.

  “Do you remember our conversation last night in the restaurant?”

  “More or less. I h
ad rather a lot to drink, but I remember Yao standing up to that Englishman.”

  “I talked about the past.”

  “Yes, I remember. I understood perfectly what you said, because during that moment when we were in the Aleph, I saw that your eyes were full of a mixture of love and indifference, and your head was covered by a hood. I felt betrayed and humiliated. But I’m not interested in what our relationship was in a past life. We’re here in the present.”

  “You see this river? Well, in the living room in my apartment at home is a painting of a rose immersed in just such a river. Half of the painting was exposed to the effects of the water and the elements, so the edges are a bit rough, and yet I can still see part of that beautiful red rose against a gold background. I know the artist. In 2003, we went to a forest in the Pyrenees, found a dried-up stream, and hid the painting under the stones on the streambed.

  “The artist is my wife. At this moment, she’s thousands of kilometers away and will still be sleeping because day has not yet dawned in her city, even though here it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. We’ve been together for more than a quarter of a century. When I met her, I was convinced that our relationship wouldn’t work out, and for the first two years, I was sure that one of us would leave. In the five years that followed, I continued to think that we had simply got used to one another and that as soon as we realized this, we would each go our separate ways. I thought that a more serious commitment would deprive me of my ‘liberty’ and keep me from experiencing everything I wanted to experience.”

  I see that Hilal is starting to feel uncomfortable.

  “And what has that got to do with the river and the rose?”

  “By the summer of 2002, I was already a well-known writer with plenty of money, and I believed that my basic values hadn’t changed. But how could I be sure? I decided to test things out. We rented a small room in a two-star hotel in France, intending to spend five months of the year there. There was just one small wardrobe in the room, and so we had to keep clothes to a minimum. We went for long walks in the forests and the mountains, ate out, spent hours talking, and went to the cinema every day. Living like that confirmed to us that the most sophisticated things in the world are precisely those within the reach of everyone.