suicide techniques
We’re on our way back. Between one stoplight and another my brother is compelled to ask for clinical details about my eyes. The technicalities of the surgery. The quality control of the instruments. The documentation required by the insurance company before they’ll authorize surgery. He asked what options the doctors were considering: the outlook or the prognosis, that word that sounds more like an incurable disease than a remedy. And what are you going to do? asks my brother. If…without daring to finish the sentence. If things don’t go well? I ask, not daring to be more precise. No one has ventured a hypothesis. I’ve suspended the future while I squeeze, thirstily, all I can from the present. But what are you going to do? insists my brother, if the thing doesn’t go well? The Thing is the operation and it won’t be one but two. I have two chances, I say. And if both operations fail? I pretend to reflect for a moment but I’m blank, and in that cloud appears an answer that I’d never considered. Kill myself? Another cloud now, a cloud of silence. My brother’s face must be annoyed; his dim eyes blink in slow motion, while mine have forgotten to. I can tell from his measured but sarcastic voice that he doesn’t think I could do it. And how would you do it, do that, in your condition? You wouldn’t have anyone to lend you a hand, or at least an eye. My brother’s words stick into me like safety pins, they wake me up. Lend me an eye, I say to myself, treasuring the image all I can. Silence. You’re very quiet, says Félix, aren’t you? Yeah? I say, leaving a lot of air between his question and mine. Yes, very quiet. You haven’t told me how you’re supposedly going to do it, do that, he says, and he emphasizes the word so much I can see it in cursive, crushed by irony. How am I going to do it? I wonder secretly while I rewind suicidal tape in my memory. I press play on the paradoxical suicides. The lyrics of the song explain: what makes you live can kill you in excess. The refrain repeats: too much sun, too much sugar, too much water, too much oxygen. Too much maternal love. Too much truth. What are you talking about? interrupts Félix, who isn’t one for subtleties while he’s driving. I was remembering a friend who in the deep depression of a stampeding manic phase called me to ask for insulin. Twice I’ve gotten that call, from two different girlfriends, I tell him. And what did you do? asked my brother, wondering why those things never happened to him, confessing that he wouldn’t know what to do. And he stops. What else could I do but send them to the pharmacy to buy their own poison? I say. To the pharmacy? In Chilean pharmacies, I say, they sell insulin without a prescription. You didn’t know? Then it’s my brother who sinks into a long silence, from which he emerges minutes later with aplomb, with self-possession, putting his hand on mine before he takes it away again to shift gears and assure me that I’m not going to do that. Commit suicide. He’s right but I don’t tell him so; nor do I clarify that neither of my friends went ahead with the insulin. My brother doesn’t ask the question I expect, and I wonder why but don’t have an answer. Fleeing the morbidity, employing his emergency humor, Félix says instead. I can only accept that in extreme cases. But Félix, since when do you defend assisted suicide? I ask, holding back an admiring smile. I start reminding him of angry arguments with my parents, because death, in our family, has always been a dinner-table topic. We’ve attended medical classes in every after-dinner conversation. You’re right, I wasn’t serious, my brother says now, annoyed; just ignore me. Oh, but Félix, I think aloud, regretting that I can’t see his face, regretting above all that I can’t caress his eyelids, feel his eyes with my fingertips, Félix, I murmur, lightening things, I don’t have any plans to do it, but you could really work things in your favor. Maybe there’s an inheritance, and without me there’d be more for you two. It’s so easy for a blind woman to fall from a balcony. So quick, such a sure ending. It’s not a bad idea, says Félix, taking a sharp turn and speeding up; still, he objects, there’s one problem we haven’t considered. Who would take care of the cleanup? He honks the horn and brakes at a light and waits for a moment, he explains, for the light to change and me to answer. It’s a somewhat peculiar worry, I tell him in a stagey voice. But fundamental, he says, without dropping his new character, and then he doesn’t say anything more about that and instead opens his mouth to announce that we’re there, and I hear a suddenly sad or mournful tone, I feel an awkward kiss between my eyebrows. You need help, sis? he murmurs, his voice as though strumming a chord in the air. No, I say, I’m good. And he tells me, too late, be careful not to bump your head.
the unconditional
(If I don’t mention my older brother, it’s because I never saw him. I didn’t see anyone well through the fog in my eyes, but I only heard from Joaquín secondhand: messages sent with a secretary, a call while he sped home to pack and say goodbye to his wife, who also complained of his absence, and his kids one after the other, almost clones, and his two maids. He’d rush out and arrive just in time to catch the plane taking off for China. He never managed to come by and say hi. I’m sorry, he told me, I’m dying to see you. Yes, don’t worry, I answered, furious and resentful, offended as a mistreated lover. Have a nice trip, I told him, knowing in my whole body, from hair to feet, that he was running away from me again. I decided to let him go, forget him so much that I never even mentioned you to my brother: a good boy with bad luck, a good guy with a much better eye than you, Ignacio. Was it that I forgot him, or that it was better for you to know nothing about him? About how he started to run away from me when we were children, the day I came home from the hospital and fell on him like dead weight? Because the never-written contract of being an older brother made him into my slave. He took my hand and dragged me through the too-eternal snows of New Jersey, both of us wrapped in radiant orange raincoats with synthetic fur around the hoods; he would guide me like an eskimo to the bus stop, help me onto the yellow bus that picked us up every day, hand me the book I was reading so I’d be entertained during the ride; he carried my lunchbox and made sure I ate my food and sometimes his before he examined the leftovers. My brother was never more scrawny than in those photos, never more silent, more insomniac, more possessed and cornered. How old were we? Nine and seven? Eight and six? Ten and eight? Any and all ages, and in the background a bridge lit up to offset the winter afternoons. From the windows he surveyed the burning lights while I read some book from the school library and my mother cooked dinner. Joaquín went on observing the steel bridge, counting every one of its light bulbs while his body stretched and swelled, emerging from viscous childhood as from an egg. And he sat there one night with the bridge as his ally, finishing his homework, though really he was waiting for my mother to finish washing the dishes so he could tell her, his adolescent voice breaking, that studying and working at the same time was too much. Working? said my mother, looking at my father who was looking, cowed, at Joaquín. He was handing in his resignation and they accepted it because they weren’t brave enough to make him be my nurse and my school tutor in addition to having to be my brother, which he hadn’t even agreed to. No one had ever consulted him. He only wanted to study, he explained, his head sinking down between the blue lapels of his jacket, strangled by the striped tie, with pride and shame, frightened of himself. In exchange he promised to be the best in his class, restore their pride as parents. And then my mother lowered her head and said yes in a frightened voice; she was afraid of my brother, so circumspect, so gaunt, so forged of scrawny dignity, and my father gave him two little pats on the back to tell him sure, son, of course, of course, you could have said something sooner. And then I was left alone with them, at their mercy, terrified of the vigilance they called care, suffocated by the weight of improvised sins entirely of their making. I was left without the shield of my older brother. Félix, when he was born so much later — such a vulnerable tadpole — could never give me the same protection. Gradually I became a good girl at school and a spoiled brat at home, spending my time locked in my room with a pile of books. Joaquín disappeared into his math exercises, the three set squares, the circular ruler, the compass, alone; downcast and resentful, my brother walked through the halls at school solving equations and not noticing me, moving deeper into hard sciences, more and more like my father but afraid of girls because they all seemed too much like me, they all wanted something from him. So you’ll understand why I haven’t told you about my brother abandoning me and my parents abandoning him and later how I also abandoned them all, everyone, in search of someone with a true vocation for sacrifice, someone drowning in love or indoctrinated in the need to love, someone with an absurdly heroic passion, some guy with a pure and absolutely unconditional death wish.)