The Winner Stands Alone

by Paulo Coelho; Margaret Jull Costa

  For both of them it took a real effort to stop themselves from turning on their laptops or their mobile phones, but they managed it. And they returned to Moscow with their hearts full of good memories and with smiles on their faces.

  He plunged back into work, surprised to see that everything had continued to function perfectly well in his absence. She left for London the following week and never came back.

  Igor employed one of the top private surveillance agencies—normally used for industrial or political espionage—which meant having to look at hundreds of photos in which his wife appeared hand in hand with her new companion. Using information provided by her husband, the detectives managed to provide her with a made-to-measure “friend.” Ewa met her “by chance” in a department store; she was from Russia and had, she said, been abandoned by her husband, couldn’t get work in Britain because she didn’t have the right papers, and had barely enough money to feed herself. Ewa was distrustful at first, but then resolved to help her. She spoke to her new lover, who decided to take a risk and get the friend a job in one of his offices, even though she was an illegal worker.

  She was Ewa’s only Russian-speaking “friend.” She was alone. She had marital problems. According to the psychologist employed by the surveillance agency, she was ideally placed to obtain the desired information. He knew that Ewa hadn’t yet adapted to her new life, and what could be more natural than to share her intimate thoughts with another woman in similar circumstances, not in order to find a solution, but simply to unburden her soul.

  The “friend” recorded all their conversations, and the tapes ended up on Igor’s desk, where they took precedence over papers requiring his signature, invitations demanding his presence, and gifts waiting to be sent to customers, suppliers, politicians, and fellow businessmen.

  The tapes were far more useful and far more painful than any photos. He discovered that her relationship with the famous couturier had begun two years earlier, at the Fashion Week in Milan, where they had met for professional reasons. Ewa resisted at first; after all, he lived surrounded by some of the most beautiful women in the world, and she, at the time, was thirty-eight. Nevertheless, they ended up going to bed with each other in Paris, the following week.

  When Igor heard this, he realized that he felt sexually aroused and couldn’t understand why his body should react in that way. Why did the simple fact of imagining his wife opening her legs and being penetrated by another man provoke in him an erection rather than a sense of revulsion?

  This was the only time he feared he might be losing his mind, and he decided to make a kind of public confession in an attempt to diminish his sense of guilt. In conversation with colleagues, he mentioned that “a friend of his” had experienced sexual pleasure when he found out that his wife was having an extramarital affair. Then came the surprise.

  His colleagues, most of them executives and politicians from various social classes and nationalities, at first expressed horror at the thought. Then, after the tenth glass of vodka, they all admitted that this was one of the most exciting things that could happen in a marriage. One of them always asked his wife to tell him all the sordid details and the words she and her lover used. Another declared that swingers’ clubs—places frequented by couples interested in group sex—were the ideal therapy for an ailing marriage. A slight exaggeration perhaps, but Igor was glad to learn that he wasn’t the only man who found it arousing to know that his wife had slept with someone else. He was equally glad that he knew so little about human beings, especially the male of the species. His conversations usually focused on business matters and rarely entered personal territory.

  HE’S THINKING NOW ABOUT WHAT was on those tapes. During their week in London (the fashion weeks are held consecutively to make life easier for the professionals involved), the couturier declared himself to be in love with her; hardly surprising, given that he had met one of the most unusual women in the world. Ewa, for her part, was still filled with doubts. Hussein was only the second man with whom she had made love in her life; they worked in the same industry, but she felt immensely inferior to him. She would have to give up her dream of working in fashion because it would be impossible to compete with her future husband, and she would go back to being a mere housewife.

  Worse, she couldn’t understand why someone so powerful should be interested in a middle-aged Russian woman.

  Igor could have explained this had she given him a chance: her mere presence awoke the light in all those around her; she made everyone want to give of their best and to emerge from the ashes of the past filled with renewed hope. That is what had happened to him as a young man returning from a bloody and pointless war.

  TEMPTATION RETURNS. THE DEVIL TELLS him that this isn’t exactly true. He himself had overcome his traumas by plunging into work. Psychiatrists might consider working too hard to be a psychological disorder, but for him it had been a way of healing his wounds through forgiveness and forgetting. Ewa wasn’t really so very important. He must stop focusing all his emotions on a nonexistent relationship.

  “You’re not the first,” said the Devil. “You’re being led into doing evil deeds in the erroneous belief that this will somehow create good deeds.”

  IGOR IS STARTING TO FEEL nervous. He’s a good man, and whenever he’s been obliged to behave harshly, it has been in the name of a greater cause: serving his country, saving the marginalized from unnecessary suffering, following the example of his one role model in life, Jesus Christ, and, like him, using a combination of turning the cheek and wielding the whip.

  He makes the sign of the cross in the hope that Temptation will leave him. He forces himself to remember the tapes and what Ewa had said: that however unhappy she might be with her new partner, she would never return to the past because her ex-husband was “unbalanced.”

  How absurd. It appeared she was being brainwashed by her new environment. She must be keeping very bad company. He’s sure she was lying when she told her Russian “friend” that she had only got married again because she was afraid of being alone.

  In her youth, she had always felt rejected by others and never able to be herself. She always had to pretend to be interested in the same things as her friends, playing the same games, going to parties, and looking for some handsome man to be a faithful husband and give her security, a home, and children. “It was all a lie,” she said on the tapes.

  In fact, she always dreamed of adventure and the unknown. If she could have chosen a profession when she was still an adolescent, it would have been that of artist. When she was a child, she had loved making collages from photos cut out of Communist Party magazines; she hated the photos, but enjoyed coloring in the drab figures. Dolls’ clothes were so hard to find that her mother had to make them for her, and Ewa loved those outfits and said to herself that, one day, she would make clothes too.

  There was no such thing as fashion in the former Soviet Union. They only found out what was going on in the rest of the world when the Berlin Wall was torn down and foreign magazines started flooding into the country. As an adolescent, she was able to use these magazines to make brighter and more interesting collages. Then, one day, she decided to tell her family that her dream was to be a fashion designer.

  As soon as she finished school, her parents sent her to law school. They were very happy with their new-won freedom, but felt that certain capitalist ideas were threatening to destroy the country, distracting people from real art, replacing Tolstoy and Pushkin with spy novels, and corrupting classical ballet with modern aberrations. Their only daughter must be kept away from the moral degradation that had arrived along with Coca-Cola and flashy cars.

  At university, she met a good-looking, ambitious young man who thought exactly as she did, that they had to give up the idea that the old regime would return one day. It had gone for good, and it was time to start a new life.

  She really liked this young man. They started going out together. She saw that he was intelligent and would go f
ar in life, plus he seemed to understand her. He had, of course, fought in the Afghan war and been wounded in combat, but nothing very serious. He never complained about the past and never showed any signs of being unbalanced or traumatized.

  One day, he brought her a bunch of roses and told her that he was leaving university to start his own business. He then proposed to her, and she accepted, even though she felt only admiration and friendship for him. Love, she believed, would grow over time as they became closer. Besides, the young man was the only one who really understood her and provided her with the intellectual stimulus she needed. If she let this chance slip, she might never find another person prepared to accept her as she was.

  They got married with little fuss and without the support of their families. He obtained loans from people she considered dangerous, but she could do nothing to prevent the loans going ahead. Gradually, the company he had started began to grow. After almost four years together, she—shaking with fear—made her first demand: that he pay off the people who had lent him money in the past and who seemed suspiciously uninterested in recouping it. He followed her advice and often had reason to thank her for it later.

  The years passed, there were the inevitable failures and sleepless nights, then things started to improve, and from then on, the ugly duckling began to follow the script of all those children’s stories: it grew into a beautiful swan, admired by everyone.

  Ewa complained about being trapped in her role as housewife. Instead of reacting like her friends’ husbands, for whom a job was synonymous with a lack of femininity, he bought her a shop in one of the most sought-after areas of Moscow. She started selling clothes made by the world’s great couturiers, but never tried to create her own designs. Her work had other compensations, though: she visited all the major fashion houses, met interesting people, and it was then that she first encountered Hamid. She still didn’t know whether or not she loved him—possibly not—but she felt comfortable with him. When he had told her that he’d never met anyone like her and suggested they live together, she felt she had nothing to lose. She had no children, and her husband was so married to his work that he probably wouldn’t even notice she was gone.

  “I left it all behind,” Ewa said on one of the tapes. “And I don’t regret it one bit. I would have done the same even if Hamid—against my wishes—hadn’t bought that beautiful estate in Spain and put it in my name. I would have made the same decision if Igor, my ex-husband, had offered me half his fortune. I would have taken the same decision because I know that I need to live without fear. If one of the most desirable men in the world wants to be by my side, then I’m obviously a better person than I thought.”

  On another tape, she commented that her husband clearly had severe psychological problems.

  “My husband has lost his reason. Whether it stems from his war experiences or stress from overwork, I’ve no idea, but he thinks he knows what God intends. Before I left, I sought advice from a psychiatrist in order to try and understand him better, to see if it was possible to save our relationship. I didn’t go into details so as not to compromise him and I won’t do so with you now, but I think he would be capable of doing terrible things if he believed he was doing good.

  “The psychiatrist explained to me that many generous, compassionate people can, from one moment to the next, change completely. Studies have been done of this phenomenon and they call that sudden change ‘the Lucifer effect’ after Lucifer, God’s best-loved angel, who ended up trying to rival God himself.”

  “But why does that happen?” asked another female voice.

  At that point, however, the tape ran out.

  HE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE heard her answer because he knows he doesn’t consider himself on a par with God and because he’s sure that his beloved is making the whole thing up, afraid that if she did come back, she would be rejected. Yes, he had killed out of necessity, but what did that have to do with their marriage? He had killed when he was a soldier, with official permission. He had killed a couple of other people too, but only in their best interests because they had no means of living a decent life. In Cannes, he was merely carrying out a mission.

  And he would only kill someone he loved if he saw that she was mad, had completely lost her way and begun to destroy her own life. He would never allow the decay of a mind to ruin a brilliant, generous past. He would only kill someone he loved in order to save her from a long, painful process of self-destruction.

  IGOR LOOKS AT THE MASERATI that has just drawn up opposite him in a no-parking zone. It’s an absurd, uncomfortable car which, despite its powerful engine—too low-powered for B roads and too high-powered for motorways—has to dawdle along at the same speed as other cars.

  A man of about fifty—but trying to look thirty—opens the door and struggles out because the door is too low to the ground. He goes into the pizzeria and orders a quattro formaggi to go.

  Maserati and pizza are something of a mismatch, but these things happen.

  Temptation returns. It’s not talking to him now about forgiveness and generosity, about forgetting the past and moving on, it’s trying a different tack and placing real doubts in his mind. What if Ewa were deeply unhappy? What if, despite her love for him, she was too deep in the bottomless pit of a bad decision, as Adam was the moment he accepted the apple and condemned the whole human race?

  He had planned everything, he tells himself for the hundredth time. He wanted them to get back together again and not to allow a little word like “goodbye” to erase their whole past life. He knows that all marriages have their crises, especially after eighteen years. However, he also knows that a good strategist has to be flexible. He sends another text message, just to make sure she gets it. He stands up and says a prayer, asking to have the cup of renunciation removed from him.

  The soul of the little seller of craftwork is beside him. He knows now that he committed an injustice; it wouldn’t have hurt him to wait until he had found a more equal opponent, like the pseudo-athlete with the hennaed hair, or until he could save someone from further suffering, as was the case with the woman on the beach.

  The girl with the dark eyebrows seems to hover over him like a saint, telling him to have no regrets. He acted correctly, saving her from a future of suffering and pain. Her pure soul is gradually driving away Temptation, helping Igor to understand that the reason he’s in Cannes isn’t to revive a lost love; that’s impossible. He’s here to save Ewa from bitterness and decay. She may have treated him unfairly, but the many things she did to help him deserve a reward.

  “I am a good man.”

  He goes over to the cashier, pays his bill, and asks for a small bottle of mineral water. When he leaves, he empties the contents of the bottle over his head.

  He needs to be able to think clearly. He has dreamed of this day for so long and now he is confused.

  5:06 P.M.

  Fashion may renew itself every six months, but one thing remains the same: bouncers always wear black.

  Hamid had considered alternatives for his shows—dressing security guards in colorful uniforms, for example, or having them all dressed in white—but he knew that if he did anything like that, the critics would write more about “these pointless innovations” than about what really mattered: the new collection. Besides, black is the perfect color: conservative, mysterious, and engraved on the collective unconscious, thanks to all those old cowboy films. The goodies always wear white and the baddies wear black.

  “Imagine if the White House was called the Black House. Everyone would think it was inhabited by the spirit of darkness.”

  Every color has a purpose, although people may think they’re chosen at random. White signifies purity and integrity. Black intimidates. Red shocks and paralyzes. Yellow attracts attention. Green calms everything down and gives things the go-ahead. Blue soothes. Orange confuses.

  Bouncers should wear black—so it was in the beginning and would be forever after.

  AS USUAL, THERE ARE THREE d
ifferent entrances. The first is for the press in general—a few journalists and a lot of photographers laden down with cameras. They seem perfectly polite, but have no qualms about elbowing a colleague out of the way to capture the best angle, an unusual shot, the perfect moment, or some glaring mistake. The second entrance is for the general public, and in that respect, the Fashion Week in Paris was no different from that show in a seaside resort in the South of France; the people who come in through the second entrance are always badly dressed and would almost certainly not be able to afford anything being shown that afternoon. However, there they are in their ripped jeans, bad-taste T-shirts, and, of course, their designer sneakers, convinced that they’re looking really relaxed and at ease, which, of course, they aren’t. Some do have what might well be expensive handbags and belts, but this seems somehow even more pathetic, like putting a painting by Velázquez in a plastic frame.

  Finally, there is the VIP entrance. The security guards never have any idea who anyone is. They simply stand there, arms crossed, looking threatening, as if they were the real owners. A polite young woman, trained to remember famous faces, comes over to them with a list in her hand.

  “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Hussein. Thank you so much for being here.”

  They go straight to the front. Everyone walks down the same corridor, but a barrier of metal pillars linked by a red velvet band marks out who are the most important people there. This is the Moment of Minor Glory, being singled out as special people, and even though this show isn’t part of the official calendar—we mustn’t forget that Cannes is, after all, a film festival—protocol must be rigorously observed. Because of that Moment of Minor Glory which occurs at all such similar events (suppers, lunches, cocktail parties), men and women spend hours in front of the mirror, convinced that artificial light is less harmful to the skin than the sun, against which they apply large amounts of sun factor. They are only two steps from the beach, but they prefer to use the sophisticated tanning machines in the beauty salons that are never more than a block away from the place where they’re staying. They could enjoy a lovely view if they were to go for a stroll along the Boulevard de la Croisette, but would they lose many calories? No. They are far better off using the treadmills in the hotel’s mini-gym.