One day I’ll get tired of hearing her constantly repeating the same things and so to please her (my mother) I’ll marry a man whom I oblige myself to love. He and I will end up finding a way of dreaming a future together: a house in the country, children and our children’s future. We’ll make love often in the first year, less in the second and after third year, people perhaps think about sex only once a fortnight and transform that thought into action only once a month. Even worse, we’ll barely talk. I’ll force myself to accept the situation, and I’ll wonder what’s wrong with me, because he no longer takes any interest in me, ignores me and does nothing but talk about his friends, as if they were his real world.
When the marriage is just about it, it’ll fall apart. I’ll get pregnant. We’ll have a child, feel closer to each other for a while and then the situation will go back to what it was before.
I’ll begin to put on weight like the aunt that nurse was talking about. And I’ll start to go on diets, systematically defeated each day, each week by the weight that keeps creeping up regardless of the contracts I put on it. At that point, I’ll take those magic pills that stop you feeling depressed, then I’ll have a few more children, conceived during nights of love that pass all too quickly. I’ll tell everyone that children are my reason for living, when in reality my life is their for living.
People will always consider us a happy couple, and no one will know how much solitude, bitter, resignation lies beneath the surface happiness.
Until one day, my husband takes a lover for the first time, and I will perhaps kick up a fuss or think again of killing myself. By then, though I’ll be too old and cowardly, with two or three children who need my help, and I’ll have to bring them up and help them up and help them find a place in the world before I can just abandon everything. I won’t commit suicide, I’ll make a scene, I’ll threaten to leave and take the children with me like all men. My husband will back down, he’ll tell me he loves me and that it wont happen again. It won’t even occur to him that, if I really did decide to leave, my only option would me to go back to my parents house and stay there for the rest of my life, forced to listen to my mother going on and all day about how I lost one opportunity for being happy, that he was a wonderful husband despite his peccadillo, that my children will be traumatized by the separation.
Two or three years later, another woman will appear on his life. I’ll find out-because I saw them or because someone told me-but this time I’ll pretend that I don’t know. I used up all my energy fighting against the other lover, I’ve no energy left, it’s best to accept life as it really is and not as I imagined to be. My mother was right.
He will continue being a considerate husband, I’ll continue working at the library, eating sandwiches in the square opposite the theater, reading book I quite never manage to finish, watching TV programes that are the same as they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago.
Except that I’l eat my sandwiches with a sense of guilt because I’m getting fatter, and I won’t go to bars any more because I have a husband expecting me to come home and look after the children.
After that it’s a matter of waiting for the children to grow up and of spending all day thinking of suicide, without the courage to do anything do about it, One fine day,I’ll reach the conclusion that that’s what life is like, there’s no point worrying about it, nothing will change, And I’ll accept it.
-Excerpt from Veronika Decides to Die
