The suicide note E-Book

Anibal Hall

• Herausgeber: Libella ediciones
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 186

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Jesús Valls' life is a whirlwind of vicissitudes. A perennial burden leads him to plan a deliberate ending of life. However, a metaphysical event an intervention of science and the overwhelming presence of love take an unexpected role in his destiny.

Leseprobe

The suicide note

The suicide note

Hall, Aníbal

Table of Contents

Cover

Legal

The suicide note

Hall, Aníbal

The Suicide Note / Aníbal Hall - 1st ed. - La Plata: libella, 2022.

EPUB digital book

Digital file: available for download and onlineISBN 978-987-48835-7-5.

1. Argentine Narrative. I. Title.

CDD A863

Published in 2022 by Ediciones Libella

- Editora Natalia Alterman

www.libellaediciones.com.ar

Cover design and layout: Leonardo Solari

Digitalización: Proyecto451

No part of this publication may be reproduced, in whole or in part, nor recorded or transmitted by any information retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including mechanical, photochemical, electronic, magnetic, photocopying or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author.

“La vida no es igual para todos,      

Solo la muerte es igual para todos”

Johan Liebheart

CHAPTER I

Finally, I made the fatal decision to kill him. I had always been terrified at the thought of killing someone, whether intentionally or by mere accident. It would mean to live burdened by the weight of guilt, thinking of how many ways it could have been avoided. However, I made the decision to kill my worst enemy, and I will do it premeditatedly and with no remorse. It is not easy for me to explain this. I try to find words that normally no one dares to utter.

In my case, with shorter or longer agonies, I have died many times in my life and all of them I survived, as a punishment. I know that true death is oblivion, that some public figures never die, because permanent memories bring them alive to the present, the same thing that happens with beloved relatives. Well, that will not happen to me, because as soon as I kill that implacable enemy that is myself, oblivion will erase my steps in this world and no one will even remember my name. The life I have had to live does not deserve to be lived. It is my will, I have the right over my body, I choose.

That is why I am here, addressing this note to the only judge capable of objectively weighing and giving the right value to the actions and decisions I have made throughout my existence. That judge is my own soul and the prosecutor will be my conscience. They have revealed all secrets, traumas, pain, hidden shames, regrets, delusions, madness, beliefs disguised as faith and so many other forms acquired by the silent ghosts with whom I shared my wounds. Let no one be blamed for my death: I am the only one to blame for the fact that my physical disappearance will also drag millions of healthy cells to death, although I also hope that some organ can be rescued and transplanted, so that it paradoxically ends up being of use to someone, something that I did not achieve with myself while I was alive. If there really is a God, I beg Him to redeem me from everything and declare me innocent, though I believe that God never really forgives, since He has been merciless to me. I never felt his presence and, as He is not seen, I looked for Him by imitating those who found it easy to believe. For those who seek security in the faith they profess, may God take care of them, because they are good and believe in Him. And the guilt and fear of punishment leads them to the convenient thinking that it is better to believe than to know. I have tried to find a way to see Him, to argue with Him. Where is He? Am I the only one who thinks this way? Am I crazy? Looking for Him, I always found the Devil. God never gave me anything. I don’t owe Him and He doesn’t owe me anything, may He purify me if He exists and doesn’t hate me, so that I can arrive clean to reincarnate in another form of new life, because this end is nothing more than the crossing of a portal to another dimension. And this assumption gives me the courage for the most difficult decision that a person in their right mind can make. For a believer, my decision is a heresy, an insult to God, but I do not agree with this opinion nor with the God to whom I implored a thousand times and a thousand times did He ignore me. Today, I am an apostate who professes no religion and, if I compare, I see that in the name of different religions and ideologies, some people immolate themselves by fire, others are suicide bombers or Japanese kamikazes, which are suicides as honorable as that of the one who rushes to certain death to defend his country or that of the soldier who throws himself on a grenade about to explode to save his comrades. But in my case, I only intend to submit to a voluntary euthanasia to put an end to the endless quotidian deaths that link the days of my existence, to my irremediable destiny of error and vicissitude. I consider myself to be an orphan of faith and disinherited by fate.

I, who have lived leaving a loose end at every step, a perpetual misunderstanding where I realized that it is always possible to fail better, I hope not to fail this time. Make do without me, I am not needed. I leave as I came to this irreparable life, naked of affection, in silence and without the comfort of a cry that I gave so many times and nobody ever heard. I am someone who died of misfortune many times and this will be the last one.

We come to life with a crystal bowl between our hands, which is transparent so that we can show what we keep inside. Many persons have this bowl full of good things. However, some of us have dropped it, shattered it, because, consciously or not, we know that we have nothing good to show; we are those for whom existence has been something like a long illness, an exercise of pain, that is why I assume death as an mandatory part of my life, as the desire of not having been born, the desire of being dead to feel free of myself...

I sign this note, writing my full name as Jesús María Valls, then I put it in an envelope that I close by wetting the glue on the flap with my tongue and leave it on the table. For this last dinner —that they will not have the chance to charge me—, I ordered my favorite menu: a juicy steak, potatoes and fried eggs, accompanied with a bottle of red wine, which I drank slowly and with my mind in silence. Then, like a self-condemned man, I curl up in bed, trying to sleep. The wine helps to fall asleep. Since I want to carry out the execution in daylight, I want to be the one to turn off the light, in my last and final move.

A thick lethargy makes the night long, holding me between sleep and wakefulness, I get up several times to look out the window and listen to the sounds of nature, sounds that are life beats that I will silence from my ears when the dawn breaks its placenta to give birth to a golden and luminous sun. And while the world celebrates that light, I will go in pursuit of darkness.

The mystical ecstasy that possesses me helps me to climb up to the table to pass the rope through the ceiling brace, from which also hangs a cable with a lamp emitting a very white cold light. I am in a tourist cottage in the delta, located on the banks of the river, which I rented for three days to conceal my plan, because one day is enough for me. I have prepared everything I need, the clothes I’m wearing: the beige and green plaid shirt, the blue jeans, I put on my new underwear and socks and the best sneakers I have: the black ones with gray motifs. I shaved off and combed my hair carefully, since I am going to the most important appointment of my life. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, I check my eyes, my nose, my chin and my mouth, this is the last time I will see that face, which is the face of failure. But this time, instead of hating it like I did so many times before, I feel sorry for that beaten-dog look, which looks at me from the bottom of an abyss of pain.

I leave on a chest of drawers my wallet with a few pesos —my entire fortune—, a photo of my mother as a young woman and my documents so that the police will quickly identify me. That photo on my identity card is the only one I have. It was obligatory picture; after that I never had a portrait of my childhood, my adolescence or as an adult; once I tried to take a selfie and, as I didn’t like what I saw, I deleted it. But what I leave is enough to dispel any doubts that I am the one who ended this life that I lived apart from myself. I will do it without anyone’s help, so that it is clear that I planned and executed it and that I achieved the expected outcome for the first and last time in my existence.

I take care of minor details that anyone else in my place would find ridiculous: I have placed a bath towel on the floor, in case some fluid would come out of my hanged body and stain the floor; it would be unfortunate if a retching episode was my last sigh. I want to leave this world causing as little inconvenience as possible, since I cannot avoid that, when my body is discovered, policemen, prosecutors and curious people come to satiate the morbid curiosity that cases like mine usually inspire and speculate about the reasons of my suicide. Certain warning signs left, or a note, as it is my case, will shed light on the matter...

I look out the window as a gentle wind sways the very green leaves of an acacia tree and I notice a small yellow butterfly perched on the window glass: these are the last symbols of living, tangible things I see. When I tighten the rope around my neck, ready to cross the threshold, I am completely alive. In a second I will be completely dead, on my own free will. I know I will no longer hear the music I love so much, I will no longer smell the scent of a woman’s perfume or that of a tomato sauce with chicken, I will no longer see the stars at night or the color of other eyes nor will I dream of the caresses I never received from my mother, pregnant with me against her will. I believe she should have interrupted that pregnancy, so that today I would not have to interrupt my life. I will leave with the same dignity for paradise or hell, although I am convinced that leaving this world will be the entrance to a better one: nobody will miss me here. I will fly forever, like the birds painted on the dome of a church. I inhale, hold my breath, stick out my chest, lift my shoulders, smile at the ceiling, cross myself almost as a reflex and jump with my feet together and my hands glued to my hips, in a neat and elegant dive, which falls apart when asphyxia turns off the lights in my brain amidst convulsions and breathlessness. I feel a shadow descending upon me and embracing me, the wooden ceiling becomes heaven and my soul slips away without witnesses when an absolute peace begins to pour into me, I notice that, on the outside, the grass shines green, the birds fly happily, a dog barks and someone turns on a radio. The world keeps turning and my death does not change anything, as it will not change that of any of us, the inhabitants of a planet that is a speck of dust in the universe.

I pass painlessly from everything to nothing, I feel myself levitating, floating silently, detached from that other me I see hanging from a rope. I am no longer in that body, not even my shadow that also hangs attached to the wall. I am suspended, ethereal in the spectral darkness; I am a soul without consciousness, a transparent body on my way to the pale and somber light of a chandelier that attracts my being. When I reach that light, a state of ecstasy takes hold of me, everything is harmony and peace, and I feel that I begin my metaphysical journey in the afterlife, in the silence of another world. A presence unknown to me confirms my view. Affable and reliable, this presence invites me to enter a portal where I see my parents and other relatives and friends who died long ago. They have the image I keep of them: my father as a forty-three-year-old man, with his smile and mischievous look; my mother, who survived him for a long time, as I remember her, advanced in age but with her proud forehead held high; a cousin who was murdered while resisting a robbery when he was in his early twenties, although, the last time I saw him, he must have been fourteen and that’s how I see him now. Finally, a high-school classmate and girlfriend, who was diagnosed with leukemia and soon died. My schoolmates went to the funeral, but I did not want to see her dead body and now she is here, perhaps because she loved me, and I see her just like I remember her. This is a meeting of ethereal presences wrapped in an unknown vibratory energy. This is the astral world and in this plane, surrounded by affections, a panoramic vision of my life appears before me. As in a movie, the most trivial events give room to those that tattooed the scars I carry in my soul, brought by an involuntary memory that does not hide the dark secrets that I tried in life to hide even from myself, overwhelmed by guilt and shame.

The succession of images begins at the age of four or so, maybe when I began to be aware of what was going on around me. And there I am, in the genesis of what was to be my existence, in my sad childhood, covering my ears to the screaming fights of my parents that distress me to such an extent that I want to go to bed without dinner. I never had any stories to help me sleep. Instead, I used to embrace the dark fever of my nightmares, which I found more bearable than hearing them arguing. It scared me a lot to see the violence with which they fought and threatened each other. My father drank and always arrived smelling of alcohol, and smoked constantly despite his diabetes. And my mother, a hysterical woman who argued with him vociferously, would cry all the time, perhaps out of helplessness, and complained of constant headaches.

My father used to blame my mother for getting pregnant and argued that this had forced him to stay here instead of traveling to Spain with his mother, while my mother would retort that he should take the child and leave, if that was what he wanted. Growing up in that confrontational environment where both of them blamed each other for my existence, I came to the conclusion that I was an unwanted child, that a mistake of two adults had put me in this life. Now, looking at myself from the outside, as a spectator of my own odyssey, I realize that I am a child who learned to speak by replying to this abandonment with silences. I am a child who lives in anguish and the only relief I find is when my aunt Ercilia, my mother’s sister, comes to visit us. She is a teacher, she always brings me sweets and indulges me by hugging and caressing me. She loves me and suspects that I am having a hard time. That must be why I see that wounded child running to hug her when she arrives, so that she can kiss my aching soul. I grew up without grandparents: my paternal grandfather died before I was born and his widow left for Spain, where all her family was, and his only son stayed here, married to my mother, who was already pregnant. As a result, she earned the hatred of her mother-in-law, who would have wanted to take my father with her. He stayed, maybe because he was in love with my mother, but after a while, as he was not doing well in his work or with his health, he began to take it out on her, blaming her that he had not been able to emigrate because of her pregnancy and complaining about the country as if he were a foreigner. And whenever my mother told him that he still had time to leave, my father replied that he always took responsibility for his actions, even against his interests, so I was born in the midst of reproaches. As for the other grandparents, my mother’s parents, they lived in a province far away from us. There are some pictures of me in their arms when I was a little kid. But when they were coming to meet me, they died in a car accident. This took away from me the possibility of experiencing the love of my grandparents.

At the age of six I entered a public school. Many of my classmates knew each other and had been friends since kindergarten. Since I was the outsider, I was the target of cruel jokes, as kids usually do when they find someone they see as most vulnerable. And also for being unfit —not to say useless— for sports and anything that had to do with physical prowess, perhaps because I was sedentary and ate a lot of bread. Besides, I was not competitive. They just wanted to win, no matter what they played, while I was content to be allowed to participate. But when the team I played for lost, my teammates would fight and blame each other and, because I was indifferent to the situation, they insulted me and nobody wanted me on their team. I became ignored even by the girls, who echoed the boys’ comments. As for my grades, they were barely modest, so to speak, since I passed the grade with just enough and with a good deal of pity from my teachers, who saw me as a taciturn kid who had trouble concentrating. The school would summon my parents to talk about me, but they never had time to go every time they were called, which left me even more unprotected. I was an outcast child, poorly dressed, with outdated school supplies and worn-out notebooks, who no one was interested in befriending.

Then at home, some tin soldiers and the yellow and red striped rubber ball would give me a break. And I was also happy on Saturdays, when there was an outdoor festival organized in the neighborhood club, usually to raise funds for the church that was under construction. Later I would understand that churches are always under construction and I that liked to go there for the lights. The people who attended were all neighbors, they knew each other, and they joked and laughed from the stalls where they sold sweets, cakes, pies or handicrafts. And I, wandering alone in that kind of fair, got infected by the joy of others that mixed the vividly-shouted offers with the hoarse sound of the music in the loudspeakers that were near the roof. And when there was wind, nothing could be understood, it was just gusts of music and hubbub. At this time of my existence, it was not by chance that I was aware of events linked to the church, since I attended mass on Saturdays and Sundays. The egregore that circulated during the ceremony filled my soul with a peace that I did not have anywhere else. That need for faith would lead me to go around praying and repeating by heart, for example, a creed as if it were a mantra. Since I was a young believer, sometimes, when I was walking and the wind enveloped me, I felt it like an embrace of God whispering pleasant things in my ear. Lying promises that I probably invented to cushion the painful reality that made me envy the lives of others, because I was sure that none of those lives was as tough as mine.

The time came for me to receive the communion of Christians, after a catechism course that helped me a lot: there was a God who rewarded the good and punished the bad. I was convinced of being good after going to mass, confessing my sins and taking communion. And now that I knew how to write, at the age of eight I wrote my first letter to the Three Kings. It was an undated letter, with a trembling handwriting, typical of my age and worsened by my insecurity. I put on that piece of paper a request, a demand and a plea, it was my first good faith deal and I signed it with my first name. I had been told that they knew if we behaved well, so I looked forward to that night with a great deal of expectation. I went to bed early, hugging my first illusion tied to the lace of my slippers. I prepared grass and water for the camels. Now I would have the bicycle that I had asked for several times with no result! Since I was good, God would give me my prize. Besides, I had a guardian angel that would protect me from all evil. Yet, a day later, there I was, crying, huddled in my disappointment. I didn’t want to go out in the street, I felt too ashamed, and I didn’t want to face the other kids in the neighborhood when they gathered on the sidewalk. They would show me their gifts and I would exhibit my sadness. And their taunts would keep ringing in my head when I tried to sleep. The fable of living is so implacable when it makes us lose our innocence at such a young age... It hurt me to grow up and I lived with the pessimistic suspicion that perhaps I would never have the opportunity to exercise gratitude, because I had no reason to say thank you to my parents or to God. Actually, I had no one left to believe in. Learning from other kids that the Three Kings were in fact the parents helped me to stop blaming God, but I still didn’t understand how other parents bought gifts for their kids and mine didn’t. I still had no idea of the value of money nor could I understand that some people were poor and some were not.

At that stage of my life, I had a desire to die or to move where no one knew me in order to make up lies that made me look like someone else, someone less vulnerable... To do this, I had a plan: as soon as I got to that other place, I would seek out the neighborhood kids and gave them my possessions in a show of smugness. I had about twenty little balls, the red and yellow rubber ball, seven tin soldiers and a wooden spinning top. In that way, I would gain everyone’s friendship and affection and they would invite me to play with them.