the mad king

I'm going to tell you a story, said Zedka. A powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which all the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad.

The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone, and which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and the inspectors however had also drunk the poisoned water and they thought the king's decisions were absurd and resolved to take no notice of them.

When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard these decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. They marched on the castle and called for his abdication.

In despair, the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: "Let us go and drink from the communal well. Then, we will be the same as them."

And that was what they did: the king and the queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such wisdom, why not allow him to continue ruling the country?

The country continued to live in peace, although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbours. And the king was able to govern until the end of his days.

Veronika laughed.

Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete (the asylum of Ljubljana, Slovenia)?

People who have all drunk from the same well.

Exactly, said Zedka. They think they're normal, because they all do the same thing. Well, I'm going to pretend that I have drunk from the same well as them.

I already did that, and that's precisely my problem.

There's a group of people here, men and women who could have left, who could be back home, but who don't want to leave. There are many reasons for this: Villete isn't as bad as people say, although it's far from being a five-star hotel. Here inside, everyone can say what they like, do what they want, without being criticised, after all, they're in a mental hospital.

After so many years, Veronika was now experiencing something she had never dreamed of: a mental hospital, madness, an insane asylum, where people were not ashamed to say they were mad, where no one stopped doing something they were enjoying just to be nice to others.

She began to doubt that Zedka was serious, or if it wasn't just a way by which mental patients could pretend that the world they lived in was better than that of others. But what did it matter? She was experiencing something interesting, different, totally unexpected: imagine a place where people pretend to be mad in order to do exactly what they want.

Paulo Coelho - Veronika Decides to Die