She tried to move, and the pain increased. A series of bright dots appeared, but, even so, Veronika knew that those dots were not the stars of paradise but the consequences of the intense pain she was feeling.

“She’s coming to,” she heard a woman say. “You’ve landed slap bang in hell, so you’d better make the most of it.”

No, it couldn’t be true; that voice was deceiving her. It wasn’t hell, because she felt really cold and she was aware of plastic tubes coming out of her nose and mouth. One of the tubes—the one stuck down her throat—made her feel as if she were choking.

She made an attempt to remove it, but her arms were strapped down. “I’m joking, it’s not really hell,” the voice went on. “It’s worse than hell, not that I’ve ever actually been there. You’re in Villete.”

Despite the pain and the choking feeling, Veronika realized at once what had happened. She had tried to kill herself, and someone had arrived in time to save her. It could have been one of the nuns, a friend who had decided to drop by unannounced, someone delivering something she had forgotten she had ordered. The fact is she had survived, and she was in Villete.

Villete, the famous and much-feared lunatic asylum, which had been in existence since 1991, the year of the country’s independence. At that time, believing that the partitioning of the former Yugoslavia would be achieved through peaceful means (after all, Slovenia had only experienced eleven days of war), a group of European businessmen had obtained permission to set up a hospital for mental patients in the old barracks, abandoned because of high maintenance costs.

Shortly afterward, however, the wars commenced: first in Croatia, then in Bosnia. The businessmen were worried. The money for the investment came from capitalists scattered all round the globe, from people whose names they didn’t even know, so there was no possibility of sitting down in front of them, offering a few excuses, and asking them to be patient. They resolved the problem by adopting practices that were far from commendable in a psychiatric hospital, and for the young nation that had just emerged from a benign communism, Villete came to symbolize all the worst aspects of capitalism: To be admitted to the hospital, ail you needed was money.

There was no shortage of people who, in their desire to get rid of some family member because of arguments over an inheritance (or over that person’s embarrassing behavior), were willing to pay large sums of money to obtain a medical report that would allow the internment of their problem children or parents. Others, fleeing from debts or trying to justify certain attitudes that could otherwise result in long prison sentences, spent a brief time in the asylum and then simply left without paying any penalty or undergoing any judicial process.

Villete was the place from which no one had ever escaped, where genuine lunatics—sent there by the courts or by other hospitals—mingled with those merely accused of insanity or those pretending to be insane. The result was utter confusion, and the press was constantly publishing tales of ill treatment and abuse, although they had never been given permission to visit Villete and see what was actually happening. The government was investigating the complaints but could get no proof; the shareholders threatened to spread the word that foreign investment was difficult in Slovenia, and so the institution managed to remain afloat; indeed, it went from strength to strength.

“My aunt killed herself a few months ago,” the female voice continued.

“For almost eight years she was too afraid even to leave her room, eating, getting fat, smoking, taking tranquilizers and sleeping most of the time. She had two daughters and a husband who loved her.”

Veronika tried but failed to move her head in the direction of the voice.

“I only saw her fight back once, when her husband took a lover. Then she kicked up a fuss, lost a few pounds, smashed some glasses and—for weeks on end—kept the rest of the whole neighborhood awake with her shouting. Absurd though it may seem, I think that was the happiest time of her life. She was fighting for something; she felt alive and capable of responding to the challenges facing her.”

What’s all that got to do with me? thought Veronika, unable to say anything. I’m not your aunt and I haven’t got a husband.

“In the end, her husband got rid of his lover,” said the woman, “and gradually, my aunt returned to her former passivity. One day she phoned to say that she wanted to change her life: She’d given up smoking. That same week, after increasing the number of tranquilizers she was taking because she’d stopped smoking, she told everyone that she wanted to kill herself.

“No one believed her. Then, one morning she left a message on my machine, saying good-bye, and she gassed herself. I listened to that message several times: I had never heard her sound so calm, so resigned to her fate. She said she was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn’t go on.”

Veronika felt sorry for the woman telling the story, for she seemed to be doing so in an attempt to understand her aunt’s death. In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those people who decide to die?

No one can judge. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering or the total absence of meaning in their lives. Veronika wanted to explain that, but instead she choked on the tube in her mouth, and the woman hurried to her aid.

She saw the woman bending over her bound body, which was full of tubes and protected against her will. She openly expressed desire to destroy it. She moved her head from side to side, pleading with her eyes for them to remove the tubes and let her die in peace.

“You’re upset,” said the woman. “I don’t know if you’re sorry about what you did or if you still want to die; that doesn’t interest me. What interests me is doing my job. If the patient gets agitated, the regulations say I must give them a sedative.”

Veronika stopped struggling, but the nurse was already injecting something into her arm. Soon afterward, she was back in a strange dreamless world, where the only thing she could remember was the face of the woman she had just seen: green eyes, brown hair, and a very distant air, the air of someone doing things because she has to do them, never questioning why the rules say this or that.

Paulo Coelho heard about Veronika’s story three months later, when he was having supper in an Algerian restaurant in Paris with a Slovenian friend, also called Veronika, who happened to be the daughter of the doctor in charge at Villete.

Later, when he decided to write a book about the subject, he considered changing his friend’s name in order not to confuse the reader. He thought of calling her Blaska or Edwina or Marietzja, or some other Slovenian name, but he ended up keeping the real names. When he referred to his friend Veronika, he would call her his friend Veronika. When he referred to the other Veronika, there would be no need to describe her at all because she would be the central character in the book, and people would get irritated if they were always having to read “Veronika the lunatic,” or “Veronika the one who tried to commit suicide.” Resides, both he and his friend Veronika would only take up a very brief part of the book, this one.

His friend Veronika was horrified at what her father had done, especially bearing in mind that he was the director of an institution seeking respectability and was himself working on a thesis that would be judged by the conventional academic community.

“Do you know where the word ‘asylum’ comes from?” she was saying. “It dates back to the Middle Ages, from a person’s right to seek refuge in churches and other holy places. The right to asylum is something any civilized person can understand. So how could my father, the director of an asylum, treat someone like that?”