“Now say with me. I’m alive. And my life has been good. When I think about my life, about what I am, only one word comes into my mind: thank you. Yes. Thank you. Because my life is a miracle. Because my life is a gift. Thank you. Thank you, life.”
They all rhythmically repeat the same words. Then they sit for a few seconds in silence. They’re all waiting for the facilitator to say something, to tell them what to do next. They don’t dare open their eyes. Javier Miranda starts to think that the workshop is a bit of a con, a small circus for those wounded in combat, for those who cannot return to the battlefield. And so they’re offered several sessions with this determinedly cheerful preacher, intent on convincing them that you can also be joyful in defeat.
“Right, you can open your eyes now,” the man says at last.
And he again welcomes them back with a smile. He asks them all how they feel. He makes them see that they’re feeling better, that this exercise has given them a new glow, that their initial mood of despondency has lifted. Then he makes them all say their name out loud. Just their name. Merny is terrified. She’s never done anything like this before. She’s never had to tell so many people her name. When her turn comes, she hesitates, she almost feels as if the word will lose its way in her throat, that when she tries to say it, her name will run away, will get lost inside her body. Then she discovers that it’s all much easier than she thought. She says “Merny.” Out loud. And then she experiences a sense of relief. And pride. Yes, when she says her name and finds that nothing terrible happens, that she’s alright, that her name is just as much a name as anyone else’s, Merny feels pride, a strange peace, the satisfaction of having passed a test.
“Why are we here? Each of you has a very personal reason for being here. It may be that the reason is a cause of shame or sadness to you. You feel weak, vulnerable. You’re afraid. Do you know what? You’re not alone. No, you’re not the only ones. Look around. There are men and women here, young and old. There are white people, brown people, black people. We none of us look very alike. You probably didn’t even know each other until today. And yet I’m sure that at the moment you’re all experiencing more or less the same emotions. And I’m going to tell you something. A lot of people wouldn’t even dare come to this workshop. I mean it. Even the name frightens them. People just like you, who feel the same, but who have allowed themselves to become frozen, who have closed the door on their life and given up. But you haven’t, you’ve taken the risk, you did it, you’re here, at the first session of a workshop called ‘Learning to die.’ That’s why I’m applauding. I’m applauding you. I mean it. Because I’m really excited to see you here. Because you’re amazing and I congratulate you.”
They take the bus back to the apartment. Javier Miranda doesn’t want to go on the subway. He prefers to be above ground so that he can see the city. It’s midday, the sky is intensely blue and clear and the sun, high up, is like a white stone. They manage to get a seat and sit down next to each other. Merny says nothing. She only speaks when he asks:
“So what did you think of it?”
“Odd.”
“In a good way or a bad way?”
“I don’t know, just odd.”
He looks at her and smiles. And she smiles too.
She doesn’t even reread the e-mails now, she knows them by heart. She has read them so often that she might even be able to recite them. She doesn’t need to look at them. At some point, a transition, a journey took place, and the words of Ernesto Durán stopped being something outside her, on the computer screen or printed on a piece of paper, and became something that lives and breathes inside her. She has even found herself counting adjectives. There are so few. More than once, she has been surprised by the memory of a particular phrase, for example: “There was a ravine inside my body.” Karina takes a worryingly short time to mentally locate that sentence in the first few lines of the fifth paragraph of the third letter sent by Durán on June 12 at 6:24 in the evening.
She hears a report on the radio about people who are setting up a strange society, the National Patients’ Union. They want to form a kind of trade union where people can defend themselves against doctors, protect themselves from medicine. It immediately occurs to Karina that Ernesto Durán is likely to be involved, that he’s probably one of the leaders of this infant organization. She tries to listen as closely as possible to the item. That same night, on television, she sees an interview with some of the people behind the movement. The first to speak is a lady who describes how she was bitten on the arm by some strange creature, which she assumed was an insect, although she didn’t know which kind. It wasn’t any common-or-garden variety, not a mosquito or a gnat or a midge. It was something else, she says. Anyway, her arm started to swell up and turn purple and she had no option but to go to the emergency room. She was seen by the doctor on duty, who — according to her — merely poked around in her inflamed arm with a syringe. He didn’t ask her anything, or say anything, or give any explanations. Karina guesses that the woman is telling the truth because, even now, when she recalls the moment, she grows angry and finds it hard to get the words out, she seems about to weep with rage. When the doctor finally grew tired of scraping around beneath her skin, he said that he’d found nothing, left her under observation for two hours and then gave her an antibiotic, explaining that the antibiotic wasn’t for the bite, but for what he’d been doing with that wretched syringe. “Don’t worry about the bite,” the doctor said. “It’s nothing. It’ll clear up in time.” She paid a small fortune and went home with an idea jumping about inside her head: a National Patients’ Union.
Then several other people speak. A boy whose little sister died from a lack of oxygen in a hospital in the west of the city. A man with only one leg, who accuses an anesthesiologist of negligence. A nurse who claims to know the world of doctors from the inside and who says that, as well as being a nurse, she, too, is in need of nursing. There’s no sign of Ernesto Durán. Karina even tries to get in touch with the organization, and manages to speak to one of the people interviewed, but to no avail. No one knows him, no one knows anything about Durán.
“You’re not well. This obsession of yours isn’t normal.”
Adelaida thinks someone has put the evil eye on Karina, that someone — who knows, perhaps Ernesto Durán himself — has paid for some kind of spell to be put on her and send her mad. She also believes that Karina should fight back with the same medicine. Through herbs, a medium, voodoo, or a soothsayer, some power that doesn’t belong to the known world, that calls for more faith than science. Karina has given her a vague, truncated version of what’s happening to her. She hasn’t again experienced quite what she did in the video store, although there have been a couple of similar incidents, the worst of which happened only two days ago, on the subway. It was, of course, the rush hour. Karina was standing, crammed up against the other passengers. It took only two seconds for her to realize she was about to have an attack. She was gasping for air, her heart was pounding, she broke out in a cold, sticky sweat, her tongue swelled up so much she felt as if she had a huge toad in her mouth, a rough-skinned creature scraping against the roof of her mouth and preventing her from breathing, suffocating her. She jumped out at the next station, swearing that she would never again travel on the subway.
Adelaida insists that it isn’t something physical or biological. No syringe can protect you against the evil eye. No antibiotics can do battle with a curse. Faced by such a situation, science crumbles, it’s a war that has to be waged by different means, with different weapons. Karina prefers to think that it’s just a phase, part of the temporary anxiety she’s feeling, that it won’t last, that she’ll wake up one morning and it will be gone, that somewhere a pleasant, calm Thursday awaits her, with no fear, no feelings of asphyxia, no dizziness, a Thursday when Ernesto Durán will not even be a memory.