The Spy

by Paulo Coelho

“Blindfold her eyes, please.” “Must I wear that?” asked Mata Hari, as she looked at the cloth. Maître Clunet turned to the lieutenant questioningly. “If Madame prefers not to, it is not mandatory,” replied the lieutenant. Mata Hari was neither bound nor blindfolded; she stood, gazing steadfastly at her executioners, as the priest, the nuns, and her lawyer stepped away.

The memories always win, and with them comes a demon that is even more terrifying than melancholy: remorse.

“So you must learn to follow your destiny, whatever it may be, with joy. As flowers grow, they show off their beauty and are appreciated by all; then, after they die, they leave their seeds so that others may continue God’s work.”

“Flowers teach us that nothing is permanent: not their beauty, not even the fact that they will inevitably wilt, because they will still give new seeds. Remember this when you feel joy, pain, or sadness. Everything passes, grows old, dies, and is reborn.”

Never fall in love. Love is a poison. Once you fall in love, you lose control over your life—your heart and mind belong to someone else. Your existence is threatened. You start to do everything to hold on to your loved one and lose all sense of danger. Love, that inexplicable and dangerous thing, sweeps everything you are from the face of the earth and, in its place, leaves only what your beloved wants you to be.”

When we don’t know where life is taking us, we are never lost.

“I am not just talking about an economic crisis; I am speaking of a personal crisis, a crisis of values. Do you think people have already grown accustomed to the possibility of having long-distance conversations on that invention brought over by the Americans for the Paris World’s Fair? It’s now on every corner in Europe. “For millions of years, man spoke only to what he could see. Suddenly, in just one decade, ‘seeing’ and ‘speaking’ have been separated. We think we’re used to it, yet we don’t realize the immense impact it’s had on our reflexes. Our bodies are simply not used to it.

“Sin was not created by God; it was created by us when we tried to transform what was inevitable into something subjective. We ceased to see the whole and came to see just one part; and that part is loaded with guilt, rules, good versus evil, and each side thinking it’s right.”

Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears. We follow its winding and luminous paths, we let ourselves go to the highest peak or the deepest seas, but we trust in the hand that leads us. If we do not allow ourselves to be frightened, we will always awaken in a palace; if we fear the steps that will be required by love and want it to reveal everything to us, the result is that we will be left with nothing.

Love does not obey anyone and will betray those who try to decipher its mystery.

“Between us, the evidence we had was so poor that it wouldn’t have been fit to punish a cat.”