Veronika decides to die   ::   Coelho Paulo

The family phoned the American Embassy, which never believed the diagnoses of the state hospitals and had its own sophisticated emergency service, along with a list of Brazilian doctors it considered capable of attending its own diplomats. Now and then, as part of a “good neighbor policy,” it allowed these services to be used by other diplomats.

The Americans brought along their state-of-the-art machines, carried out a further barrage of tests and examinations, and reached the conclusion they always reach: The doctors in the state hospital had correctly evaluated the injuries and had taken the right decisions.

The doctors in the state hospital may have been good, but the programs on Brazilian television were as awful as they are anywhere else in the world, and Eduard had little to do. Maria s visits to the hospital become more and more infrequent; perhaps she had found someone else to go with her to the crystal mountains.

In contrast to his girlfriend’s erratic behavior, the ambassador and his wife went to see him every day but refused to bring him the Portuguese books he had at home on the pretext that his father would soon be transferred; so there was no need to learn a language he would never have to use again. Eduard therefore contented himself with talking to the other patients, discussing football with the nurses, and devouring any magazines that fell into his hands.

Then one day a nurse brought him a book he had just been given, but that he judged “much too fat to actually read.” And that was the moment that Eduard’s life began to set him on a strange path, one that would lead him to Villete and to his withdrawal from reality, and that would distance him completely from all the things other boys his age would get up to in the years that followed.

The book was about visionaries whose ideas had shaken the world, people with their own vision of an earthly paradise, people who had spent their lives sharing their ideas with others. Jesus Christ was there, but so was Darwin and his theory that man was descended from the apes; Freud, affirming the importance of dreams; Columbus, pawning the queen’s jewels in order to set off in search of a new continent; Marx, with his belief that everyone deserved the same opportunities.

And there were saints too, like Ignatius Loyola, a Basque soldier who had slept with many women and killed many enemies in numerous battles, until he was wounded at Pamplona and came to understand the universe from the bed where he lay convalescing. Teresa of Ávila, who wanted somehow to find a path to God, and who stumbled across it when she happened to walk down a corridor and pause to look at a painting.