Brida. Paulo Coelho

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      For a whole week, Brida devoted half an hour a day to spreading the tarot cards on the table in the living room. She went to bed at ten o’clock and set the alarm for one in the morning. She would get up, make a quick cup of coffee, and sit down to contemplate the cards, trying to decipher their hidden language.

      The first night, she was very excited. Brida was convinced that Wicca had taught her some kind of secret ritual and so she tried to spread the cards in exactly the same way, expecting some occult message to be revealed. After half an hour, apart from a few minor visions, which she felt were merely the fruits of her imagination, nothing of any great note had happened.

      She did the same thing on the second night. Wicca had said that the cards would tell their own story and, to judge by the courses Brida had attended, it was a very ancient story indeed, dating back more than three thousand years, to a time when mankind was closer to the original wisdom.

      ‘The pictures seem so simple,’ she thought. A woman forcing open the mouth of a lion, a cart pulled by two mysterious animals, a man sitting before a table covered with sundry objects. She had been taught that the deck was a book, a book in which the Divine Wisdom had noted down the main changes that take place during our journey through life. But its author, knowing that humanity learned more easily from vice than from virtue, had arranged for this sacred book to be transmitted across the generations in the form of a game. The deck was an invention of the gods.

      ‘It can’t be that simple,’ thought Brida, every time she spread the cards on the table. She had been taught complicated methods, elaborate systems, and those cards arranged in no particular order began to have a troubling effect on her reasoning. On the third night, she threw the cards down angrily on the floor. For a moment, she thought that this angry reaction might have some magical inspiration behind it, but the results were equally unsatisfactory, just a few indefinable intuitions, which, again, she dismissed as mere imaginings.

      At the same time, the idea of her Soulmate didn’t leave her for a moment. At first, she felt as if she were going back to her adolescence, to dreams of an enchanted prince crossing mountains and valleys in search of his lady of the glass slipper or in order to awaken a sleeping beauty with a kiss. ‘Finding your Soulmate is something that only happens in fairy tales,’ she told herself, half-joking. Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe that she was now so eager to enter, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.

      ‘Perhaps because they weren’t content with feeling joy.’ She found the idea slightly absurd, but nevertheless recorded it in her diary as a ‘creative’ thought.

      After spending a week obsessed with the idea of the Soulmate, Brida became gripped by a terrifying feeling: what if she chose the wrong man? On the eighth night, when she woke again to carry out her vain contemplation of the tarot cards, she decided to invite her boyfriend out to supper the following night.