Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption Read online

  His father's first posting was to Brazil. Eduard dreamed of beaches, carnival, soccer matches, and music, but they ended up in the Brazilian capital, far from the coast--a city created to provide shelter only to politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, and to their children, who didn't quite know what to do, stuck in the middle of all that.

  Eduard hated living there. He spent the day immersed in his studies, trying--but failing--to relate to his classmates, trying--but failing--to work up some interest in cars, the latest sneakers, and designer clothes, the only possible topics of conversation with the other young people.

  Now and then, there would be a party, where the boys would get drunk on one side of the room, and the girls would feign indifference on the other. There were always drugs around, and Eduard had already experimented with almost all the possible varieties, not that he could get very excited about any of them; he either got too agitated or too sleepy and immediately lost interest in what was going on around him.

  His family was concerned. They had to prepare him to follow in his father's footsteps, and although Eduard had almost all the necessary talents, a desire to study, good artistic taste, a facility with languages, an interest in politics, he lacked one essential quality for a diplomat: He found it difficult to talk to other people.

  His parents took him to parties, told him to invite his school friends home and gave him a generous allowance, but Eduard rarely turned up with anyone. One day his mother asked him why he didn't bring his friends to lunch or supper.

  "I know every brand of sneakers and I know the names of all the girls who are easy to get into bed. After that there's nothing left to talk to them about."

  Then the Brazilian girl appeared on the scene. The ambassador and his wife felt better when their son began going out on dates and coming home late. No one knew exactly where she had come from, but one night, Eduard invited her home to supper. She was a well-brought-up girl, and his parents felt content; the boy had finally started to develop his talent for relating to other people. Moreover, they both thought--though neither actually said anything--that the girl's existence removed one great worry from their minds: Eduard clearly wasn't homosexual.

  They treated Maria (that was her name) with all the consideration of future in-laws, even though they knew that in two years' time they would be transferred to another post, and they had not the slightest intention of letting their son marry someone from an exotic country. They had plans for him to meet a girl from a good family in France or Germany, who could be a dignified companion in the brilliant diplomatic career the ambassador was preparing for him.

  Eduard, however, seemed more and more in love. Concerned, his mother went to talk to her husband.

  "The art of diplomacy consists in keeping your opponent waiting," said the ambassador. "While you may never get over a first love affair, it always ends."

  But Eduard seemed to have changed completely. He started bringing strange books home, he built a pyramid in his room, and, together with Maria, burned incense every night and spent hours staring at a strange design pinned to the wall. Eduard's marks at school began to get worse.

  The mother didn't understand Portuguese, but she could see the book covers: crosses, bonfires, hanged witches, exotic symbols.

  "Our son is reading some dangerous stuff."

  "Dangerous? What's happening in the Balkans is dangerous," said the ambassador. "There are rumors that Slovenia wants independence, and that could lead us into war."

  The mother, however, didn't care about politics; she wanted to know what was happening to her son.

  "What about this mania for burning incense?"

  "It's to disguise the smell of marijuana," said the ambassador. "Our son has had an excellent education; he can't possibly believe that those perfumed sticks draw down the spirits."

  "My son involved in drugs?"

  "It happens. I smoked marijuana too when I was young; people soon get bored with it. I did."

  His wife felt proud and reassured. Her husband was an experienced man, he had entered the world of drugs and emerged unscathed. A man with such strength of will could control any situation.

  One day Eduard asked if he could have a bicycle.

  "We've got a chauffeur and a Mercedes Benz. Why do you want a bicycle?"

  "To be more in touch with nature. Maria and I are going on a ten-day trip," he said. "There's a place near here with huge deposits of crystal, and Maria says they give off really positive energy."

  His father and mother had been brought up under a Communist regime. To them crystals were merely a mineral product composed of certain atoms, and did not give off any kind of energy, either positive or negative. They did some research and discovered that these ideas about "crystal vibrations" were beginning to be fashionable.

  If their son started talking about such things at official parties, he could appear ridiculous in the eyes of others. For the first time the ambassador acknowledged that the situation was becoming serious. Brasilia was a city that lived on rumors, and as soon as his rivals at the embassy learned that Eduard believed in these primitive superstitions, they might think he had picked them up from his parents, and diplomacy, as well as being the art of waiting, was also the art of keeping up a facade of normality whatever the circumstances.

  "My boy, this can't go on," said his father. "I have friends in the Foreign Office in Yugoslavia. You have a brilliant career as a diplomat ahead of you, and you've got to learn to face reality."

  Eduard left the house and didn't come back that night. His parents phoned Maria's house, as well as all the mortuaries and hospitals in the city, to no avail. The mother lost her confidence in her husband's abilities as head of the family, however good he might be at negotiating with complete strangers.

  The following day Eduard turned up, hungry and sleepy. He ate and went to his room, lit his incense sticks, said his mantras, and slept for the rest of that evening and night. When he woke up, a brand new bicycle was waiting for him.

  "Go and see your crystals," said his mother. "I'll explain to your father."

  And so, on that dry, dusty afternoon, Eduard cycled happily over to Maria's house. The city was so well designed (in the architects' opinion) or so badly designed (in Eduard's opinion), that there were almost no corners; he just kept straight on down a high speed lane, looking up at the sky full of rainless clouds, then he felt himself rising up at a tremendous speed toward the sky, only to plummet down again and land on the asphalt. Crash!

  I've had an accident.

  He tried to turn over, because his face was pressed against the asphalt, and realized he had no control over his own body. He heard the noise of cars braking, people talking in alarmed voices, someone approaching and trying to touch him, then a shout: "Don't move him! If anyone moves him, he could be crippled for life!"

  The seconds passed slowly, and Eduard began to feel afraid. Unlike his parents, he believed in God and in the afterlife, but even so, it seemed grossly unfair to die at seventeen, staring at the asphalt, in a land not his own.

  "Are you all right?" he heard someone say.

  No, he wasn't all right; he couldn't move, but he couldn't say anything either. The worst thing was that he didn't lose consciousness; he knew exactly what was happening and what his situation was. Why didn't he faint? At precisely the moment when he was looking for God with such intensity, despite everything and everyone, God had no pity on him.

  "The doctors are on their way," someone whispered to him, clutching his hand. "I don't know if you can hear me, but keep calm. It's nothing serious."

  Yes, he could hear, he would have liked that person--a man--to keep on talking, to promise him that it was nothing serious, even though he was old enough to know that people only say that when the situation is very serious indeed. He thought about Maria, about the place where there were mountains of crystals full of positive energy, unlike Brasilia, which had the highest concentration of negativity he had ever encountered in his meditations.

>   The seconds became minutes, people continued trying to comfort him, and for the first time since it all happened, he began to feel pain. A sharp pain that came from the center of his head and seemed to spread throughout his entire body.

  "They're here," said the man who was holding his hand. "Tomorrow you'll be riding your bike again."

  But the following day Eduard was in the hospital, with both his legs and one arm in casts, unable to leave for at least a month, and having to listen to his mother's nonstop sobbing, his father's anxious phone calls, and the doctor's reassurances, reiterated every five minutes, that the crucial twenty-four-hour period had passed, and there was no injury to the brain.

  The family phoned the American Embassy, which never believed the diagnoses of the state hospitals and had its own sophisticated emergency service, along with a list of Brazilian doctors it considered capable of attending its own diplomats. Now and then, as part of a "good neighbor policy," it allowed these services to be used by other diplomats.

  The Americans brought along their state-of-the-art machines, carried out a further barrage of tests and examinations, and reached the conclusion they always reach: The doctors in the state hospital had correctly evaluated the injuries and had taken the right decisions.

  The doctors in the state hospital may have been good, but the programs on Brazilian television were as awful as they are anywhere else in the world, and Eduard had little to do. Maria's visits to the hospital become more and more infrequent; perhaps she had found someone else to go with her to the crystal mountains.

  In contrast to his girlfriend's erratic behavior, the ambassador and his wife went to see him every day but refused to bring him the Portuguese books he had at home on the pretext that his father would soon be transferred; so there was no need to learn a language he would never have to use again. Eduard therefore contented himself with talking to the other patients, discussing football with the nurses, and devouring any magazines that fell into his hands.

  Then one day a nurse brought him a book he had just been given, but that he judged "much too fat to actually read." And that was the moment that Eduard's life began to set him on a strange path, one that would lead him to Villete and to his withdrawal from reality, and that would distance him completely from all the things other boys his age would get up to in the years that followed.

  The book was about visionaries whose ideas had shaken the world, people with their own vision of an earthly paradise, people who had spent their lives sharing their ideas with others. Jesus Christ was there, but so was Darwin and his theory that man was descended from the apes; Freud, affirming the importance of dreams; Columbus, pawning the queen's jewels in order to set off in search of a new continent; Marx, with his belief that everyone deserved the same opportunities.

  And there were saints too, like Ignatius Loyola, a Basque soldier who had slept with many women and killed many enemies in numerous battles, until he was wounded at Pamplona and came to understand the universe from the bed where he lay convalescing. Teresa of Avila, who wanted somehow to find a path to God, and who stumbled across it when she happened to walk down a corridor and pause to look at a painting. Anthony, who, weary of the life he was leading, decided to go into exile in the desert, where he spent ten years in the company of demons and was racked by every conceivable temptation. Francis of Assisi, a young man like himself, who was determined to talk to the birds and to turn his back on everything that his parents had planned for his life.

  Having nothing better to do, he began to read the "fat book" that very afternoon. In the middle of the night, a nurse came in, asking if he needed help, since his was the only room with the light still on. Eduard waved her away, without even looking up from the book.

  The men and women who shook the world were ordinary men and women, like him, like his father, like the girlfriend he knew he was losing. They were full of the same doubts and anxieties that all human beings experienced in their daily routine. They were people who had no special interest in religion or God, in expanding their minds or reaching a new level of consciousness, until one day they simply decided to change everything. The most interesting thing about the book was that it told how, in each of those lives, there was a single magical moment that made them set off in search of their own vision of Paradise.

  They were people who had not allowed their lives to pass by unmarked, and who, to achieve what they wanted, had begged for alms or courted kings, used diplomacy or force, flouted laws or faced the wrath of the powers-that-be, but who had never given up, and were always able to see the advantages in any difficulty that presented itself.

  The following day, Eduard handed over his gold watch to the nurse who had given him the book, and asked him to sell it, and, with the money, to buy all the books he could find on the same subject. There weren't any more. He tried reading the biographies of some of those visionaries, but they were always described as if they were someone chosen, inspired, and not an ordinary person who, like everyone else, had to fight to be allowed to say what he thought.

  Eduard was so impressed by what he had read, that he seriously considered becoming a saint and using the accident as an opportunity to change the direction of his life. But he had two broken legs, he had not had a single vision while in hospital, he hadn't stopped by a painting that shook him to his very soul, he had no friends who would build him a chapel in the middle of the Brazilian plateau, and the deserts were all far away and bristling with political problems. There was, however, something he could do: he could learn to paint and try to show the world the visions those men and women had experienced.

  When they removed the casts and he went back to the embassy, surrounded by all the care, kindness, and attention that the son of an ambassador could hope for from other diplomats, he asked his mother if he could enroll in a painting course.

  His mother said that he had already missed a lot of classes at the American school and that he would have to make up for lost time. Eduard refused. He did not have the slightest desire to go on learning about geography and sciences; he wanted to be a painter. In an unguarded moment, he explained why:

  "I want to paint visions of paradise."

  His mother said nothing but promised to talk to her women friends and ascertain which was the best painting course available in the city.

  When the ambassador came back from work that evening, he found her crying in her bedroom.

  "Our son is insane," she said, her face streaming with tears. "The accident has affected his brain."

  "Impossible!" the ambassador replied, indignant. "He was examined by doctors especially selected by the Americans."

  His wife told him what her son had said.

  "It's just youthful rebelliousness. Just you wait; everything will go back to normal, you'll see."

  But this time waiting did no good at all, because Eduard was in a hurry to start living. Two days later, tired of marking time while his mother's friends deliberated, he decided to enroll himself in an art course. He started learning about color and perspective, but he also got to know people who never talked about sneakers or makes of car.

  "He's living with artists!" said his mother tearfully to the ambassador.

  "Oh, leave the boy alone," said the ambassador. "He'll soon get sick of it, like he did of his girlfriend, like he did of crystals, pyramids, incense, and marijuana."

  But time passed, and Eduard's room became an improvised studio, full of paintings that made no sense at all to his parents: circles, exotic color combinations and primitive symbols all mixed up with people in attitudes of prayer.

  Eduard, the solitary boy, who in his two years in Brazil had never once brought friends home, was now filling the house with strange people, all of them badly dressed and with untidy hair, who listened to horrible music at full blast--endlessly drinking and smoking and showing a complete disregard for basic good manners. One day the director of the American school called his mother.

  "I think your son must be involved in drugs,"
she said. "His school marks are well below average, and if he goes on like this, we won't be able to renew his enrollment."

  His mother went straight to the ambassador's office and told him what the director had said.

  "You keep saying that with time, everything will go back to normal!" she screamed hysterically. "There's your crazy, drug-addict son, obviously suffering from some serious brain injury, and all you care about are cocktail parties and social gatherings."

  "Keep your voice down," he said.

  "No, I won't, and I never will again if you don't do something. The boy needs help, don't you see? Medical help. Do something!"

  Concerned that the scene his wife was making might embarrass him in front of his staff, and worried that Eduard's interest in painting was lasting longer than expected, the ambassador, a practical man, who knew all the correct procedures, drew up a plan of attack.

  First he phoned his colleague the American ambassador and asked politely if he could again make use of the embassy's medical facilities. His request was granted.

  He went back to the accredited doctors, explained the situation, and asked them to go over all the tests they had made at the time. The doctors, fearing a lawsuit, did exactly as they were asked and concluded that the tests revealed nothing abnormal. Before the ambassador left they demanded that he sign a document exempting the American Embassy from any responsibility for sending him to them.

  The ambassador immediately went to the hospital where Eduard had been a patient. He talked to the director, explained his son's problem, and asked that, under the pretext of a routine checkup, a blood test be done to see if there were any drugs in the boy's system.

  They did a blood test, and no trace of drugs was found.

  There remained the third and final stage of his strategy: talking to Eduard himself and finding out what was going on. Only when he was in possession of all the facts could he hope to make the correct decision.