“It's 15 minutes.You stop breathing.And out"

The normal thing is that the elderly are not reflected in the people of their age, but I will tell you an exception that I lived on November 9, when meeting Carlos Santos Vellicia, a 66 -year -old man (two more than me) thanhad traveled to Madrid to take his life.It was after eating, crossing the door of the Sun in his company, in the direction of the central hotel where he would expire the next day, when I discovered the existence of a curious synchrony between his movements and mine.We were not only one man and another man, we were two older individuals, with characteristic tics of older individuals, two almost elderly to which any target spectator would have placed, in the best of cases, in the last third of his life.

The hotel room, without reaching the category of a suite, was large and bright and was composed of two clearly differentiated spaces, one to sleep and another to be.The first had a double bed, with their respective nightciles, and the second, a tresillo and a low table, all willing, as usual, around the television apparatus.Between both spaces there was a small step destined to underline, with the level difference, the inequality of its functions.The window, spacious, gave a terrace from which the roofs of old madrid were appreciated.

Once accommodated, Carlos at one end of the couch, I in the armchair closest to that end, the specular shakes were accentuated.Thus, while he spoke in a tone where I seemed to detect a certain euphoria (the one that precedes the final act?), I recognized in his eyebrows the clumsy cut that I apply to mine and discovered in the holes of his nose and earsThe surviving hairs of the hunts that are usually victims, from a certain age, these pilosities.It was not all: I also saw in his gaze that curious mixture of challenge and helpless that I discover in mine when I stumble upon my face in the mirrors of the elevators.

"I received the first ax," Carlos began to tell me fifteen years ago, when I have two serious myocardial infarctions,.In the second, according to all the devices on the wall, he was dead.You already know that everything is monitored on the screens and screens were dead.And I also.These bastards, I thought, are now living.The doctors asked me that if I listened to moved a finger or blink, but I had no energy at all.Nothing.Dead, dead.For those things in life, it is obvious that I resurrected, and resurrected like a baby, crying.For me it was very hard, because I was a runner, I sprinkled, and I had to stop doing sports.I have two pieces of necrosed hearts.You never recover that.I have heart failure, tachycardia and arrhythmia.

"But it seems that you have been able to lead a more or less normal life since then," I heard me say.

Normal nothing!I had to go down, land.I spent three or four years very bad because I felt a useless.I stopped working because travel agencies did not want to give me work (it was a tourist guide).I wanted to work again and with the first one I did I had to go to Seville and I did not arrive.The driver had to stop the coach and call an ambulance that led me to the emergency room, with which the group was abandoned.

AND?

I had to consider my life and I raised it very well: I'm going to commit suicide, I thought, but in my way, in my air, I go to the southern seas.I will go to Australia, from there to New Zealand.From there I will go down and when I arrive at the islands of the southern seas I will look for the sorcerer on duty, I will be friends with him and the night I want to leave, I will tell him: "Witch, place me, that I want to fall asleep and I don't want to wake up".That was what I had in mind, but, as John Lennon said, life is what is happening to you while you insist on doing other things.Well, I don't know what happened.But it was shit.I have spent ten or twelve years without being with an aunt because I panicked.The doctors told me: "You are no longer the lion who was before...".I have been a lion in every way: work, with women, with everything.Now I am a small and tanky kitten.The aunts, outside.There was no life.

While listening to Carlos, I tell the number of lamps in the room, first from left to right and after right to left.And I must obtain the same result;If not, a catastrophe will happen.It is an ancient, childish mechanism, to combat anguish.Telling me.That is why I also tell the fingers of the hands of my interlocutor, always in the two directions.And if he gets up to go to the bathroom, because he has urinary incontinence, he has the steps he takes and those he gives when he returns, and I feel great relief if his number coincides.All this while listening to him.He is now telling me about the Hernia Disc, which appeared later, and for which he had to get into the operating room.

It was tremendous says, because I couldn't even jump.Deprivations, deprivations and deprivations.The column gave me continuous pain.Until they made me resonances and the bug appeared.

What bug?

A root cyst, they did not know since when I was there, and it is the worst thing, you cannot operate or touch because you are paralyzed, it goes to the brain.

Is this where nerve endings arrive?

All.It is the interior of the spine.It is precisely between S2 and S3, near the sphincters of urine and excrement.

When do you discover it?

A year ago.And they tell me that there is no solution, that there is nothing to do.They have told me so many times, so many traumatologists, to the courts that gave me the disability of 65% they told me: "Lord Santos, do you vital testament because you have months, this has no cure, there is no solution, there is nothing".What are you doing?Well, I'm going to the US, I buy a gun and I hit a shot, or I threw me for a bridge...I have also gone to buildings from Malaga that I know, to look from an eighth floor and tell me: well, if I throw myself from here I will kill myself...But I am a peaceful person, glad of the soft, classic, harmonious music, I do not like noise, I have always been pacifist, I have never fought with anyone, I do not like violence or unpleasant things, many times it has fought to attract meboth homosexuals, when what are going to me are women.And he asked it: "But why, what the hell do I have?".And they answered me: "It is that you are so sweet, so soft, so tender, so fine, so thin, so little, that you invite you to protect yourself.".So thinking about those options was very unpleasant.First I contacted Exit, the Australians, and then with Dignitas, who is in Switzerland.Switzerland's were the ones who gave me the right of law to die dignity from Barcelona, and these, that of Madrid.And here I am.

Apart from the sphincter control problem, what other way does deterioration show?

I have less energy every time.In the morning, when I leave home, after breakfast and have taken Zaldiar, I have no energy, I can't walk more than ten minutes without sitting down to rest.The same happens to me when I'm standing, I have to look for some chair to sit down, because I am not good.I need to sit or, better, lie down.

Are you very medicated?

Yes, of course, with all the side effects of medication.My house looks like a pharmacy of the pills there are.

What kind of pills?

Of everything you can imagine, of everything, forty or fifty boxes, look if there are.In the morning, five or six pills;At noon, another five or six;At night, the same.And at the intervals, depending on what hurts me, because many others.The fact is that I always have to take the pillbox with me.Look, now I'm going to take one to reassure myself.

Do you want minibar water?

No, from the tap.

Carlos Santos retires to the bathroom to take the pill.I observe that the light has changed.The Sun no longer gives directly in the window, such as when we arrive at the hotel (about 4.30 in the afternoon), but the room still seems cheerful.It's me who is bleak, overwhelmed.While waiting for his return, I reread the letter he has written for the local police in Madrid, where he asks to notify his death to the owner of the pension where he lives, in Malaga, so that "as I have no family or heirs, I haveMy belongings, clothing, etc.., However you want".After the firm, he adds a kind of post -fuss that they remove their car from public roads "before they break or destroy it".As is delayed, also review the letter to the judge, where after summarizing his sufferings and detailing the terrible future that awaits him as the disease progresses (absolute uncontrol of sphincters, intense pain, paralysis and death), affirms that his will to dieIt is the result of his values and that no one has induced him to adopt this decision that makes “freely, voluntarily, without any person having to cooperate in a necessary, directly or indirectly, to carry it out” to carry it out ”.

As Carlos has not just left the bathroom, I begin to count, to entertain the wait, the vowels of the letter to the judge.Appears when I go for 65.

Was it an anxiolytic?I ask referring to the pill just taken.

Yes, but bass, 2.5 diazepam.

And do you take things to sleep?

Huy yes!They don't do anything to me either.

The vicious circle of tolerance and addiction.

There will come a time when...Well, there will be no times because I hope that tomorrow at this time I am finished.

The room light has changed again and my mood has obscured.They must be half past five or six less quarter in the afternoon.I get up and turn on a foot lamp while Carlos now speaks of an unpublished book he has worked on during the last fifteen years of his life.The divided man is titled.

-Who is the divided man?asked.

It is me, I and the world.Countries that have fallen in love, such as Italy, India, France...Do you know what Nepal is, Thailand, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Gambia...?And Europe as my own home.There is a place that is one of my favorites, the tomb of Gala Placidia, in Ravenna.I like to go and be alone.I usually close my eyes to see anything and let my imagination flow and try to imagine how the prelude to the end of the Roman Empire of the West was.Actually, I have lived.Others have not lived half.And I have lived it in luxury because it was all paid.

Your favorite city?

London is my city for many reasons.One, because it was the first place where I found happiness.In Spain I had never been happy, my father hit me fiercely, just like the children of the Jesuit, who made you put your fingers like this, and they gave you the rule. All eso, una infancia muy desgraciada.My father and I lived in a small apartment and since childhood, every morning, I got out of bed, which was in the living room, I went to the kitchen, which was where the radio was, and moved the dial until I listened to a foreign language.There I left it.

I also recognize myself in that children's dream of being a foreigner, even at the price of not understanding anything.Did the natives understand something?Being a foreigner, in those years, was the most that you could aspire in life.What a brutal image, I think, that of the child in search of an unintelligible language, in a life another!

While Carlos gives details about his book, his life in London (where he lived several years) and his trips throughout the planet, I understand that this man got his dream of being a foreigner, although paying the hard price of uprooting, of loneliness, of isolation.Then the first yawn escapes, which is an alarm signal.In dramatic situations, or that I live as dramatic, it gives me, in addition to counting, for yawning, as if bored.I defend myself from the excesses of reality, of anguish, panic.Yawn in burials and intensive surveillance units of hospitals as a young man yawning in exams and work interviews.Yawn means I'm screwed.You are screwed, Juanjo, I tell myself, at the time of having the fingers the syllables of "You are screwed, Juanjo" (seven, a heptasyllable) and I am temptation to ask Santos for his little rites against the disease, against bad luck, against misfortune.

Fortunately, he has already begun to speak of euthanasia, his need to testify to help generate a public debate on the issue.On this issue, as in all, it manifests itself in a very brain way, including economic and statistical data on suicide that do not interest me too much.The emotional aspects affect me more, the fact that one has to die, when he has decided, clandestinely, in hotels, instead of doing so in the bed itself, or in that of a hospital, properly attended byprofessionals and surrounded by yours.Carlos does not care about in the middle in one place or another, he does not have anyone and his homeland is the world.He assures that he knows Europe as I know the rooms of my house.

-When I came to Madrid to talk for the first time with those of DMD add they asked me when I wanted to do it."Tomorrow," I replied, "since I'm here, tomorrow".Total, the four things I had gave them to four or five friends, and the savings were left to DMD, who told me that I owed them nothing.I already know, I replied, but what do I do, I don't smoke, I don't drink and not because I can't find a taste in anything.What spending money?Before, in Malaga, I loved buying cakes from Gloria, Los Mazapanes...Now you can offer me the moon and it will not make me or smile, it does not cause me, with the problem of gastric juices...I no longer spend a taste eating, I don't spend a taste with anything.What I want is to stop living, and if it can be before, better than after.In the pension I have only left clothes because it is useless.I have brought this.

"This" is a hand portfolio with which he has made the trip from Malaga and that contains the last luggage of his life: a pajamas, a shirt, socks, some shoes and some underpants.

A mute summarizes.It is assumed that tomorrow at this time I will no longer need at all.

In the wallet there is also a boat, wrapped in a plastic bag, which contains, explains, the so -called "self -liberation cocktail", composed of a hypnotic, to fall asleep, and a set of malaria drugs that at high dosesIt is deadly.The formula is available to DMD partners in the so -called self -liberation guide, and its components are easy to obtain, most of the recipe.It is, on the other hand, the same combination that almost all associations in the rest of the world recommend.

Although he has excited himself to tears when he remembered some aspects of his childhood, Carlos's general attitude is of a coldness that overwhelms.I think that perhaps it is his way of defending himself against this excess of reality, as mine is yawning or counting vowels, moldings, fingers, lamps...I remember then that at some point, when we headed to the hotel, he mentioned the possibility of talking to the director to make him a discount.

-The discount on all hotels added when I identify as a tour guide.

Ten percent?I asked absurdly.

What ten percent!Answer angry at least fifty percent!

The decision to get out of the middle had not altered his customs at all.Thus, before traveling to Madrid he went to Renfe to consult prices and discounts considering that he had the golden card for over 60 years.Since he paid everything with the credit card, he also consulted the hotel rates to make sure to leave the accurate amount on the checking account so that each one charged his own.And he calculated that the best time to take the potion would be around noon, so that DMD volunteers who would have to accompany him were free in the middle of the afternoon: "Better than at night," he said in the email where he listed all theDetails of practical.

As the afternoon continues to fall, and with it my mood, I get up and turn on another light that is somewhat away from my position.I have to take five first legs, but I only come out four back.Bad matter.

I tell her about Switzerland, I feel very cold again.I have read some things that...

As I told you, Carlos insists, I was born in Spain, but that does not make me Spanish.When I arrived in England, they told me: "Look, Carlos, here things are done well, not as in your country, and they are done well from the beginning because if you do not have to do them again and that costs time and money".That was reality, the Spaniards came with the suitcases those wood tied with a rope.I was one of those.The day they told me "you are one of ours, you are a true professional", that day went to me...So all that of coldness sweats me, he doesn't tell me anything.What coldness?What have I come here, to take cupcakes, to dance some Sevillanas?I'm not humor to dance Sevillanas or I can dance them, I can hardly move.Define me coldness.What matters to me is that they tell me: "Lord Santos, on the day, at that time, you show up in this direction...".Tomorrow I will get up, I will have any breakfast anything, and about twelve or two, the earliest hour, I will prepare the potingue, I take it, I tumbo...DMD volunteers will stay with me until I slept.In Switzerland, with the pentobarbital, it's fifteen minutes.Already, you stop breathing, and out.Fifteen minutes, what are we going to be and hours and hours.

Do you like to read?I can ask me, I look like an idiot.

Yes, I have been a great book devouring, but I can't.My head is only in one thing and there is nothing more.I've already given all my books.

Did you have a good library?

Yes, big, very wide.I have got rid of everything.I am a man of whims.Look what belt.

Gets up to see it.

Very nice, I do say observing the buckle, formed by a large, silver currency, where the motto of the French Republic is read (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité).

It is a belt that is a jewel, of pure silver.I have designed it, I have done it, it is a unique belt.When I have taken something on top it has been designed by me.I have taken a paper and a pen and I started drawing what I wanted.As I have always had friends of everything, in Mallorca I had one who was a jeweler and he made my twins, my ring...

Be careful with the step I tell him, you've already fallen a couple of times.

...I have been detaching everything.Now, as you can see, I do not wear a chain around the neck, I don't carry anything, the ship has reached the end of the trip.

Do you have nostalgia?

No, I have lived a good, rich life, that most mortals have not lived.

What if we go down to have coffee?

Whatever you want.

We leave the room.Mentally count the steps we take to the elevator, the seconds that it takes to arrive, the number of letters of the word elevator (eight, three vowels and five consonants, a rarity).We settled at a hotel cafeteria table.I ask a green tea and he tea with cold milk.They bring us with the drink some pastes that do not feel like.It offers them, but I reject them, warning that you are sad to stay there.In this, I notice in the atmosphere something that adds unease to the sorrow, as if it were Sunday afternoon.And it's not Sunday, it's Tuesday, but I realize that this Tuesday is a party in Madrid (La Almudena).I have to go, I tell myself, I have reached my limit, I am no longer able to suppress the yawn, or stop counting, I have counted the buttons of the waiter's jacket, the number of soil tiles, the number of legs thatadd up to all the chairs in the cafeteria...Carlos Santos just wanted me to help him testify to his decision to cause a debate about euthanasia.I have material left to give that testimony, to open, once again, the discussion.I do not want to see my older man (who is going to die tomorrow) every time the cup is taken to his lips, every time he remembers his will to become abroad, every time he looks at me with that mixture of helplessness and characteristic challenge ofMy gaze.Solidarity has limits, and I think I have reached mine.You must protect yourself, I tell myself.

-If you ask me to tell you a normal day of my life...-To saying in those moments Carlos Santos.

I ask you to say.

I get up at eight, half past morning.At half past nine or at ten o'clock I leave home.Where I go? To the library.Because?Because, first, I need to be sitting, I can't stand.Second, I can't be in a coffee three or four hours reading the newspapers and having a tea.In the library I do not have to have the tea, I have all the newspapers at my disposal and I go up to the first floor and I have internet.And I have two emails, one only for the English press, Financial Times, The Economist, The Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph..., finally, the best press, the one that continues to tell you what the hell happens to Spain, which continues to revalued the floors 48% and that if they plan to sell.That, two weeks ago.They are twice what they are worth and still do not go down.I spend the whole morning in the library, until two, which close.Sometimes I take paper and write something.As in the retired home and I return to the library until eight.At that time I'm going home because it's a bad neighborhood.It's night, I'm afraid, and I don't go out anymore.This is a day of my life from Monday to Friday.On Saturdays and Sundays, since there is no library, I try to organize in another way, in a pleasant bar that I have found, they have several newspapers, the Leo...

-Well, Carlos, I'm going to let you say in full attack by phobia.

And immediately, to mitigate abruptness, I add:

Do you sleep soon?Do you want to take something or is it early for dinner?

Hunger says I never have.If I am hungry then, I ask something light;If not, I get in bed, I'm tired.

I get up, get up, we look like two older people.

Where are you going?ask.

A Gran Vía, to take a taxi.

I accompany you.

And it accompanies me.It is already closed night and on the streets you breathe the festive atmosphere on Sunday, even Tuesday.In this he stops, we stop, he looks at me in the eye raising his head a little (it is somewhat lower than me) and asks:

Are you also a DMD partner?

Also.

Ah, Okay says, and we continue walking, now in silence.It is the first time in the entire afternoon that a silence is established among us that it is not urgent to fill with words.

He has refreshed then I say at the time of counting the syllables of "has refreshed" (five, a pentasyllable).

Yes, he nods.

Upon arriving in Callao, and as I get the impression that he is afraid of getting lost, I ask him if he wants him to accompany him again to the hotel.He says no, that although medicines disorient him, he has noticed where we have come.We give each other a long hug.

I see you tomorrow?Ask when we free ourselves from the long hug (the expression "long hug", calculate, has eleven letters, five vowels and six consonants).

I don't know, I'm sure I won't have courage to accompany you.

While I hope the arrival of a taxi, I observe Carlos Santos to move away with the characteristic movements of a man of my age.

The next day, Carlos Santos got up, had breakfast and went out to resolve a couple of bureaucratic affairs still pending in a pair of Madrid branch of his bank.At noon (about 12.45) rose in the company of a volunteer and a DMD volunteer to his large and bright room.

What do you think if I put my pajamas?She asked the volunteers.

Before they answered him, he got into the bathroom, where he left little in pajamas and with shoes (he had not removed the socks).He carefully folded the clothes he had just released and kept it in the closet.Then he took the ID and placed it on the table, on a small set of well folded tickets.Very close, he left the letter to the judge and the police.

Then he took the boat with the pills, which he had already pulverized, and introduced them into a glass, then throwing a portion of a strawberry yogurt that he had bought before climbing.He stirred well with the spoon until he achieved a homogeneous mass (which took his time, for quantity) and strawberry yogurt got blue due to the chemical reaction.The "cocktail" was taken to tablespoons ensuring volunteers that he was not so bad compared to the childhood oil of his childhood.He was sitting on the couch, perhaps at the same end from which he had spoken to me the day before.Leaving the shoes on the ground, placed his feet (with socks) on the edge of the low table and waited for the effects of concoction by telling his life to the volunteers.He was excited again, they told me, when he remembered some passages from his unfortunate childhood.As the minutes passed, he spoke more slowly, but without losing coherence at any time.He fell asleep around 13.40, and half an hour later, in the middle of the deep dream, he stopped breathing, without rales, without suffering, without pain, thus escaping a frightening clinical horizon.DMD volunteers left the room leaving everything as it was.

The next day, in the morning, another DMD volunteer phoned the hotel to warn them about what would be in room 511.The press, as usual in these cases, did not account for the event.The death of Carlos Santos Vellicia, if not because he wanted it to testify to her, would only have served to gain weight of the statistics tailor's drawer on suicide.Carlos Santos Vellicia has seven syllables, so, if it were a verse, it would be a heptasyllable.