I've started "Veronika decide morrer"

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Since Duolingo's Portuguese exercises have gotten a little to simple to improve my skills, I've decided to spend some hours every week reading Paulo Cuelho's Veronika decide morrer. I have an English copy of the book to check my translations against.

Since every translation is different depending on the translator's skill and viewpoint, it'll be interesting to see how far I get and how much my amateur translations differ from Margaret Jull Costa's, the person who translated my English edition of the book.

I won't tell myself that I'll push through the entire book. That would be daunting even if I didn't have a million other things to do. At some point during the day, I have to squeeze in some German practice, Spanish review, exercise, keeping that Duolingo Portuguese tree gilded, studying, work, personal writing, and perhaps speaking to other human beings. I'd rather focus on what little I can get through every time I can squeeze some time for the project, or I wouldn't start doing any of it at all.

So without further ado, the first two paragraphs of Veronika decide morrer:

 I read:

On November 11th of 1997, Veronika decided that - finally! - the time to kill herself had arrived. Carefully, she cleaned her room near num convento de freiras, disabled her heating, brushed her teeth, and se deitou.

From the make-up table, she got the four sleeping pills. Instead of crushing them and mixing them with water, she resolved to take them one by one, since there exited a great distance between the intention and the act, and she wanted to be free to change her mind. In the meantime, with each pill that she swallowed, she felt more convinced after five minutes, the boxes were empty.

I don't know what num convento de freiras means. For some reason, I want to say "near the train station", but that's not right. This might be an instant when knowing Spanish is detrimental because convento fixates my mind on convents and nuns. But I know that, in this context and in this language, num means "a". Or perhaps "an".

Se deitou means something like "stopped". More specifically, "stopped herself". Here's the thing though, I remember reading this English way bay in sophomore year of undergrad, and the closing words of the opening paragraph are something like "and laid on her bed".

So, am I remembering wrong?

Here's Margaret Jull Costa's translation:

I was right about the convent! And hold up . . . freiras = nuns. I'm not sure where exactly I got trains from, to be honest. Freight trains?

"Turned of the heat" sounds much cleaner than "disabled her heating", which makes me think of a brilliant scientist in a science fiction novel written by someone who . . . isn't a brilliant scientist. "Disabled her furnace" would have been better. That's not the word I'm looking for. My mother calls it "calefación", which I'm almost certain is an English word she's mispronouncing.

Costa killed the second paragraph when compared to my translation (yes, I'm arrogant enough that I foresee me liking my translations better in the future), but the truth is that neither of us truly captured Coelho's poetry. For example, the literal translation at one point would be something like "there's always a great distance between the intention and the act, and she wanted to be free to change her mind in the middle of the way". It sounds clunky, and I wish there was a way to say what Coelho said in English without being clunky.

The issue is in the word caminho. In Spanish, it would be camino. The literal translation would be "the way", or maybe "passageway", but neither of those evoke the same image as caminho for me. Caminho, in this context, is like a well traveled road between your house and your childhood best friend's house.

And I got sleepy.