The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession. Paulo Coelho
in it.’
‘What’s missing?’
‘I haven’t a clue. I look at the celebrity magazines with everyone smiling and contented, but since I am myself married to a celebrity, I know that it isn’t quite like that: everyone is laughing and having fun at that moment, in that photo, but later that night, or in the morning, the story is always quite different. “What do I have to do in order to continue appearing in this magazine?” “How can I disguise the fact that I no longer have enough money to support my luxurious lifestyle?” “How can I best manipulate my luxurious lifestyle to make it seem even more luxurious than anyone else’s?” “The actress in the photo with me and with whom I’m smiling and celebrating could steal a part from me tomorrow!” “Am I better dressed than she is? Why are we smiling when we loathe each other?” “Why do we sell happiness to the readers of this magazine when we are profoundly unhappy ourselves, the slaves of fame.”’
‘We’re not the slaves of fame.’
‘Don’t get paranoid. I’m not talking about us.’
‘What do you think is going on, then?’
‘Years ago, I read a book that told an interesting story. Just suppose that Hitler had won the war, wiped out all the Jews and convinced his people that there really was such a thing as a master race. The history books start to be changed, and, a hundred years later, his successors manage to wipe out all the Indians. Three hundred years later and the Blacks have been eliminated too. It takes five hundred years, but, finally, the all-powerful war machine succeeds in erasing the oriental race from the face of the earth as well. The history books speak of remote battles waged against barbarians, but no one reads too closely, because it’s of no importance.
Two thousand years after the birth of Nazism, in a bar in Tokyo, a city that has been inhabited for five centuries now by tall, blue-eyed people, Hans and Fritz are enjoying a beer. At one point, Hans looks at Fritz and asks: “Fritz, do you think it was always like this?”
“What?” asks Fritz.
“The world.”
“Of course the world was always like this, isn’t that what we were taught?”
“Of course, I don’t know what made me ask such a stupid question,” says Hans. They finish their beer, talk about other things and forget the question entirely.’
‘You don’t even need to go that far into the future, you just have to go back two thousand years. Can you see yourself worshipping a guillotine, a scaffold or an electric chair?’
‘I know where you’re heading – to that worst of all human tortures, the cross. I remember that Cicero referred to it as “an abominable punishment” that inflicted terrible suffering on the crucified person before he or she died. And yet, nowadays people wear it around their neck, hang it on their bedroom wall and have come to identify it as a religious symbol, forgetting that they are looking at an instrument of torture.’
‘Two hundred and fifty years passed before someone decided that it was time to abolish the pagan festivals surrounding the winter solstice, the time when the sun is farthest from the earth. The apostles, and those who came after them, were too busy spreading Jesus’ message to worry about the natalis invict Solis, the Mithraic festival of the birth of the sun, which occurred on 25 December. Then a bishop decided that these solstice festivals were a threat to the faith and that was that! Now we have masses, Nativity scenes, presents, sermons, plastic babies in wooden mangers, and the cast-iron conviction that Christ was born on that very day!’
‘And then there’s the Christmas tree. Do you know where that comes from?’
‘No idea.’
‘St Boniface decided to “christianise” a ritual intended to honour the god Odin when he was a child. Once a year, the Germanic tribes would place presents around an oak tree for the children to find. They thought this would bring joy to the pagan deity.’
‘Going back to the story of Hans and Fritz: do you think that civilisation, human relations, our hopes, our conquests, are all just the product of some other garbled story?’
‘When you wrote about the road to Santiago, you came to the same conclusion, didn’t you? You used to believe that only a select few knew the meaning of magic symbols, but now you realise that we all know the meaning, it’s just that we’ve forgotten it.’
‘Knowing that doesn’t make any difference. People do their best not to remember and not to accept the immense magical potential they possess, because that would upset their neat little universes.’
‘But we all have the ability, don’t we?’
‘Absolutely, we just don’t all have the courage to follow our dreams and to follow the signs. Perhaps that’s where the sadness comes from.’
‘I don’t know. And I’m not saying that I’m unhappy all the time. I have fun, I love you, I adore my work. Yet now and then, I feel this profound sadness, occasionally mingled with feelings of guilt or fear; the feeling passes, but always comes back later on, and then passes off again. Like Hans, I ask that same question; when I can’t answer it, I simply forget. I could go and help starving children, set up a foundation for street children, start trying to save people in the name of Jesus, do something that would give me the feeling I was being useful, but I don’t want to.’
‘So why do you want to go and cover this war?’
‘Because I think that in time of war, men live life at the limit; after all, they could die the next day. Anyone living like that must act differently.’
‘So you want to find an answer to Hans’s question?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Today, in this beautiful suite in the Hotel Bristol, with the Eiffel Tower glittering for five minutes every time the clock strikes the hour, with an empty bottle of wine beside me and my cigarettes fast running out, with people greeting me as if nothing very serious had happened, I ask myself: was it then, coming out of the cinema, that it all began? Should I have let her go off in search of that garbled story or should I have put my foot down and told her to forget the whole idea because she was my wife and I needed her with me, needed her support?
Nonsense. At the time, I knew, as I know now, that I had no option but to accept what she wanted. If I had said: ‘Choose between me and becoming a war correspondent’, I would have been betraying everything that Esther had done for me. I wasn’t convinced by her declared aim – to go in search of ‘a garbled story’ – but I concluded that she needed a bit of freedom, to get out and about, to experience strong emotions. And what was wrong with that?
I accepted, not without first making it clear that this constituted a very large withdrawal from the Favour Bank (which, when I think about it now, seems a ludicrous thing to say). For two years, Esther followed various conflicts at close quarters, changing continents more often than she changed her shoes. Whenever she came back, I thought that this time she would give it up – it’s just not possible to live for very long in a place where there’s no decent food, no daily bath, and no cinemas or theatres. I asked her if she had found the answer to Hans’s question, and she always told me that she was on the right track, and I had to be satisfied with that. Sometimes, she was away from home for months at a time; contrary to what it says in the ‘official history of marriage’ (I was starting to use her terminology), that distance only made our love grow stronger, and showed us how important we were to each other. Our relationship, which I thought had reached its ideal point when we moved to Paris, was getting better and better.
As I understand it, she first met Mikhail when she needed a translator to accompany her to some country in Central Asia. At first, she talked about him with great enthusiasm – he was a very sensitive person, someone who saw the world as it really was and not as we had been told it should be. He was five years younger than her, but had a quality that Esther described as