She tried to imagine what it would be like to die, but failed to reach any conclusion.
Besides, there was no point worrying about that, for in a few minutes’ time she would know.
How many minutes?
She had no idea. But she relished the thought that she was about to find out the answer to the question that everyone asked themselves: does God exist?
Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death and she had got used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents’ generation and her grandparents’ generation still went to church, said prayers and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said.
At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience – and that was no small achievement – Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion.
In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: what if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists.
‘If God exists, and I truly don’t believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, He will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologise for having made us spend time here.’
To hell with taboos and superstitions. Her devout mother would say: God knows the past, the present and the future. In that case, He had placed her in this world in the full knowledge that she would end up killing herself, and He would not be shocked by her actions.
Veronika began to feel a slight nausea, which became rapidly more intense.
In a few moments, she would no longer be able to concentrate on the square outside her window. She knew it was winter, it must have been about four o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was setting fast. She knew that other people would go on living. At that moment, a young man passed her window and saw her, utterly unaware that she was about to die. A group of Bolivian musicians (where is Bolivia? why don’t magazine articles ask that?) were playing in front of the statue of France Prešeren, the great Slovenian poet, who had made such a profound impact on the soul of his people.
Would she live to hear the end of that music drifting up from the square? It would be a beautiful memory of this life: the late afternoon, a melody recounting the dreams of a country on the other side of the world, the warm cosy room, the handsome young man passing by, full of life, who had decided to stop and was now standing looking up at her. She realised that the pills were beginning to take effect and that he was the last person who would see her.
He smiled. She returned his smile – she had nothing to lose. He waved; she decided to pretend she was looking at something else, the young man was going too far. Disconcerted, he continued on his way, forgetting that face at the window for ever.
But Veronika was glad to have felt desired by somebody one last time. She wasn’t killing herself because of a lack of love. It wasn’t because she felt unloved by her family, or had money problems or an incurable disease.
Veronika had decided to die on that lovely Ljubjlana afternoon, with Bolivian musicians playing in the square, with a young man passing by her window, and she was happy with what her eyes could see and her ears hear. She was even happier that she would not have to go on seeing those same things for another thirty, forty or fifty years, because they would lose all their originality and be transformed into the tragedy of a life in which everything repeats itself and where one day is exactly like another.
Her stomach was beginning to churn now and she was feeling very ill indeed. ‘It’s odd, I thought an overdose of tranquillizers would send me straight to sleep.’ What she was experiencing, though, was a strange buzzing in her ears and a desire to vomit.
‘If I throw up, I won’t die.’
She decided not to think about the stabbing pains in her stomach and tried to concentrate on the rapidly falling night, on the Bolivians, on the people who were starting to shut up their shops and go home. The noise in her ears was becoming more and more strident and, for the first time since she had taken the pills, Veronika felt fear, a terrible fear of the unknown.
It did not last long. Soon afterwards, she lost consciousness.
When she opened her eyes, Veronika did not think ‘this must be heaven’. Heaven would never use a fluorescent tube to light a room, and the pain – which started a fraction of a second later – was typical of the Earth. Ah, that Earth pain – unique, unmistakable.
She tried to move and the pain increased. A series of bright dots appeared, but, even so, Veronika knew that those dots were not the stars of Paradise, but the consequences of the intense pain she was feeling.
‘She’s coming round,’ she heard a woman say. ‘You’ve landed slap bang in hell, so you’d better make the most of it.’
No, it couldn’t be true, that voice was deceiving her. It wasn’t hell, because she felt really cold and she was aware of plastic tubes coming out of her nose and mouth. One of the tubes – the one stuck down her throat – made her feel as if she were choking.
She made as if to remove it, but her arms were strapped down.
‘I’m joking, it’s not really hell,’ the voice went on. ‘It’s worse than hell, not that I’ve ever actually been there. You’re in Villete.’
Despite the pain and the feeling of choking, Veronika realised at once what had happened. She had tried to kill herself and someone had arrived in time to save her. It could have been one of the nuns, a friend who had decided to drop by unannounced, someone delivering something she had forgotten she had ordered. The fact is, she had survived, and she was in Villete.
Villete, the famous and much-feared lunatic asylum, which had been in existence since 1991, the year of the country’s independence. At that time, believing that the partitioning of the former Yugoslavia would be achieved through peaceful means (after all, Slovenia had only experienced eleven days of war), a group of European businessmen had obtained permission to set up a hospital for mental patients in an old barracks, abandoned because of high maintenance costs.
Shortly afterwards, however, the wars commenced: first in Croatia, then in Bosnia. The businessmen were worried. The money for the investment came from capitalists scattered all round the globe, from people whose names they didn’t even know, so there was no possibility of sitting down in front of them, offering a few excuses and asking them to be patient. They resolved the problem by adopting practices which were far from commendable in a psychiatric hospital, and for the young nation that had just emerged from a benign communism, Villete came to symbolise all the worst aspects of capitalism: to be admitted to the hospital, all you needed was money.
There was no shortage of people who, in their desire to get rid of some family member because of arguments over an inheritance (or over that person’s embarrassing behaviour), were willing to pay large sums of money to obtain a medical report that would allow the internment of their problematic children or parents. Others, fleeing from debts or trying to justify certain attitudes that could otherwise result in long prison sentences, spent a brief time in the asylum and then simply left without paying any penalty or undergoing any judicial process.
Villete was the place from which no one had ever escaped, where genuine madmen