Veronika Decides to Die (On the Seventh Day 2)

THAT'S YOUTH for you; it sets its own limits without even asking if the body can take it. Yet the body always does."

Mari wasn't tired; she had slept late, then decided to go for a walk in Ljubljana--Dr. Igor required the members of the Fraternity to leave Villete every day. She had gone to the movies and fallen asleep again in her seat, watching a profoundly boring film about marital conflict. Was there no other subject? Why always repeat the same stories--husband with lover, husband with wife and sick child, husband with wife, lover, and sick child? There were more important things in the world to talk about.

The conversation in the refectory did not last long; the meditation had left the group members feeling relaxed and they were all ready to go back to their wards, except Mari, who instead went out into the garden. On the way she passed the living room and saw that the young woman had not yet managed to get to bed. She was playing for Eduard the schizophrenic, who had perhaps been waiting all that time by the piano. Like children, the insane will not budge until their desires have been satisfied.

The air was icy. Mari came back in, grabbed a coat and went out again. Outside, far from everyone's eyes, she lit a cigarette. She smoked slowly and guiltlessly, thinking about the young woman, the piano music she could hear, and life outside the walls of Villete, which was becoming unbearably difficult for everyone.

In Mari's view this difficulty was due not to chaos or disorganization or anarchy, but to an excess of order. Society had more and more rules, and laws that contradicted the rules, and new rules that contradicted the laws. People felt too frightened to take even a step outside the invisible regulations that guided everyone's lives.

Mari knew what she was talking about; until her illness had brought her to Villete, she had spent forty years of her life working as a lawyer. She had lost her innocent vision of justice early in her career, and had come to understand that the laws had not been created to resolve problems but in order to prolong quarrels indefinitely.

It was a shame that Allah, Jehovah, God--it didn't matter what name you gave him--did not live in the world today, because if he did, we would still be in paradise, while he would be mired in appeals, requests, demands, injunctions, preliminary verdicts, and would have to justify to innumerable tribunals his decision to expel Adam and Eve from paradise for breaking an arbitrary rule with no foundation in law: Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat.

If he had not wanted that to happen, why did he put the tree in the middle of the garden and not outside the walls of paradise? If she were called upon to defend the couple, Mari would undoubtedly accuse God of administrative negligence, because, in addition to planting the tree in the wrong place, he had failed to surround it with warnings and barriers, had failed to adopt even minimal security arrangements, and had thus exposed everyone to danger.

Mari could also accuse him of inducement to criminal activity, for he had pointed out to Adam and Eve the exact place where the tree was to be found. If he had said nothing, generation upon generation would have passed on this earth without anyone taking the slightest interest in the forbidden fruit, since the tree was presumably in a forest full of similar trees, and therefore of no particular value.

But God had proceeded quite differently. He had devised a rule and then found a way of persuading someone to break it, merely in order to invent punishment. He knew that Adam and Eve would become bored with perfection and would, sooner or later, test his patience. He set a trap, perhaps because he, Almighty God, was also bored with everything going so smoothly: If Eve had not eaten the apple, nothing of any interest would have happened in the last few billion years.

When the law was broken, God--the omnipotent judge--even pretended to pursue them, as if he did not already know every possible hiding place. With the angels looking on, amused by the g

ame (life must have been very dreary for them since Lucifer left heaven), he began to walk about the garden. Mari thought what a wonderful scene in a suspense movie that episode from the Bible would make: God's footsteps, the couple exchanging frightened glances, the feet suddenly stopping in their hiding place.

"Where art thou?" asked God.

"I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself," Adam replied, without knowing that by making this statement, he had confessed himself guilty of a crime.

So, by means of a simple trick, pretending not to know where Adam was or why he had run away, God got what he wanted. Even so, in order to leave no doubts among the audience of angels who were intently watching the episode, he decided to go further.

"Who told thee that thou was naked?" said God, knowing that this question could have only one possible response: "Because I ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."

With that question, God demonstrated to his angels that he was a just God, and that his condemnation of the couple was based on solid evidence. From then on, it wasn't a matter of whether it was the woman's fault or of their asking for forgiveness: God needed an example, so that no other being, earthly or heavenly, would ever again dare to go against his decisions.

God expelled the couple, and their children paid for the crime too (as still happens with the children of criminals) and thus the judiciary system was invented: the law, the transgression of the law (no matter how illogical or absurd), judgment (in which the more experienced triumphs over the ingenuous), and punishment.

Since all of humanity was condemned with no right of appeal, humankind decided to create a defense mechanism against the eventuality of God deciding to wield his arbitrary power again. However, millennia of study resulted in so many legal measures that, ultimately, we went too far, and justice became a tangle of clauses, jurisprudence, and contradictory texts that no one could quite understand.

So much so that, when God had a change of heart and sent his Son to save the world, what happened? He fell into the hands of the very justice he had invented.

The tangle of laws created such confusion that the Son ended up nailed to a cross. It was no simple trial; he was passed from Ananias to Caiphas, from the priest to Pilate, who alleged that there were insufficient laws in the Roman code. From Pilate to Herod, who, in turn, alleged that the Jewish code did not permit the death sentence. From Herod back to Pilate again, who, looking for a way out, offered the people a juridical deal: He had the Son beaten and then displayed to the people with his wounds, but it didn't work.

Like prosecutors nowadays Pilate decided to save himself at the expense of the condemned man: he offered to exchange Jesus for Barabbas, knowing that, by then, justice had become a grand spectacle requiring a denouement: the death of the prisoner.

Finally Pilate used the article of law that gave the judge, and not the person being judged, the benefit of the doubt. He washed his hands, which means: "I'm not quite sure either way." It was just another ruse to preserve the Roman juridical system without injuring relations with local magistrates, and even transferring the weight of the decision onto the people, just in case the sentence should cause any problems, and some inspector from the imperial capital came to see for himself what was going on.

Justice. Law. Although both were vital in order to protect the innocent, they did not always work to everyone's liking. Mari was glad to be far from all that confusion, although tonight, listening to the piano, she was not quite so sure that Villete was the right place for her.

"If I were to decide once and for all to leave here, I wouldn't go back to the law. I'm not going to spend my time with crazy people who think they're normal and important, but whose sole function in life is to make everything more difficult for others. I'll be a seamstress, an embroiderer, I'll sell fruit outside the municipal theater. I've already made my contribution to the futile insanity of the law."

In Villete you were allowed to smoke, but not to stub your cigarette out on the lawn. With great pleasure she did what was forbidden, because the great advantage of being there was not having to respect the rules and not even having to put up with any major consequences if you broke them.

She went over to the front gate. The guard--there was always a guard there, after all, that was the law--nodded to her and opened the door.

"I'm not going out," she said.

"Lovely piano music," said the guard. "I've listened to it nearly every night."

"It won't last much longer," she said and walked rapidly away so as not to have to explain.