Suicide at the Tower

After frustrating seven months of a “job” in the worst place to work in the world, Mexican bureaucracy, I decided to travel by train some cities in Europe with my children and my wife. At the end, we decided to extend our trip to Paris, where we had stayed in the past a couple of times. My son, a 9-year-old boy then, still kept that strange fascination the Eiffel tower caused on him from the very beginning, and again, as in the first time, he wanted to go every day, to have a look, at least.

My mood was not the best at all after anguishing experiences of treason and disloyalty while I “served the State”, but Paris had helped to palliate it a little. However, once in the tower, after walking along the Sienna, I felt an uncontrolled impulse to climb the pedestal on which one of the legs of the iron monument rests, which I easily got helped by the stony conformation of it. At the beginning, my children thought I was just kidding and I only wanted them to take me a picture before the authorities came. From there, however, it wasn’t a challenge to me to start climbing the leg itself. I did it with a blind impulse and the firm desire to take some distance from whoever tried to avoid it. My wife and the children, used to my strange conduct patterns, although nothing of the proportions of the one I attempted now, started to shout for somebody to impede this crazy adventure.

A few minutes later, a 6-men firefighters squad tried to reach me following the path I’ve traced, but the distance seemed impossible. The man in front of the others, although I didn’t understand him, I learned from his gestures and words was trying to convince me to please stop, to come back and avoid any damage to my person. However, it was a decision taken by me the night before, when I stood up while my family slept and I went to the hotel lobby to write some goodbye lines to my children and my wife. The same way as the man talked to me in French, I emphatically and with resolution responded him in Spanish not to insist.

-Understand -I said-, I’m determined, I’m fed up to make life impossible to the ones around me, but above all, I’m fed up to make it impossible to myself, it’s been more than fifty years trying to leave the depression darkness. It is not something that suddenly happened, it is a decision consciously taken due to void existence. Besides, it’s my fervent desire all the people down there to witness I’m doing this willingly.

In the mean time, the ticket office to visit the tower had been closed and police surrounded the zone without impeding people to be as close as they wanted.

Once I reached tower’s first stage, I pull out my jacket in which pockets I had kept the writings to my daughter, my son, and my wife, and threw it into the void. A panic shout emerged from the crowd’s throat, followed by a relief laugh when they realized it’d been the jacket what had fell on the floor. However, almost immediately after, I also threw myself into the void. The crowd couldn’t stop a harrowing cry out from their mouths, while I clearly saw the hard floor reaching my head, at the same speed one collapses at the sloppiest fall in a roller coaster. Finally, for a nanosecond, I felt how my skull shattered and my bowels burst.

Women in the crowd hysterically cried by the impression, while men didn´t believe what they were watching, and everybody seemed devastated.

A kind of phantom came out of the inert mass of bones, viscera, blood, and remains, and it posed inside of me, who, among the crowd, astonished contemplated the outcome of the tragic event in which destiny made me “participate” and witness.

The following day, Wednesday, April 30, 2003, lost on page 11 of LE FIGARO, a brief anonymous note, Suicide at the Eiffel tower, was published about a not less anonymous individual: A man committed suicide around 5 pm yesterday jumping from first stage of the Eiffel tower, after evading the protection bars installed in the monument. It’s the first suicide committed this year from the heights of the Paris monument.

Since then, I’ve “survived” some other similar situations, still waiting for my chance.