Our town has the most suitable place for suicides. It has not been purposely built like a bridge or an attractive building. No, it has not .It is a cliff which falls just on the river. There are rocks and trees which alternate in the formation of a quick vertical panel. Above it, it is the sky; down there, the river striking the rocks in the middle of swirls that attract the look into a deep entrance like a belly. The riverside road flows next to the river from the north of the town and continues like this even after that place called ¨La Piedra Alta, ¨where there is a widening for the cars to drive in and stop in front of that view of the river that charms with its beauty, scarcely one step after the white concrete wall.
It used to be quite usual to find, in several and not very separate months, the body of somebody who had chosen to throw himself and commit suicide in ¨La Piedra Alta¨.
The river is not very deep in that area and the bodies appear on the rocks and with almost no water under them. There was an expression which had become familiar: another one in La Piedra Alta¨and perhaps it was this expression which has influenced me and given me the idea.
In the TV channel we must always be aware of the most shocking news; so for me who was in the news and had to provide this kind of information, I was always after traffic accidents, murders and the fight between local politicians. A seious traffic accident was like a feast , specially in summer , when nothing happened. Also there was somebody who said that my stepfather and my wife´s suicides pushed me towards this new and controversial activity.. It is a big lie. I created the topic myself and by the media requirement. Neither the chance nor the traumas are going to make the merit of my discovery disappear.
I told myself in one of those insomnia, full of voices from the past: the thing is to be in the place before the news happen, not to have to be hitting shoulder against shoulder with the other channel trying to gain the best angle of the accident or the most painful or furious declaration of a crazy person who feels like the protagonist of that moment. And I had the bright idea of standing on the falling that goes into the river and is like a little balcony a few metres ahead opposite¨La Piedra Alta itself. I was not wrong at all about the time. Nobody would kill himself before midnight, because the place is too crowded before that time; there are couples on motorbikes and in cars from the time they leave their jobs and look at the Argentinian coast where the sun sets. ¨La Piedra Alta was and is still the preferred place for lovers who waste their time there and stare far away at the coasts and the trees reflecting in the water, from where Anibal Sampayo´s song comes:
The Uruguay is not a river
It is a blue sky that travels.
For several nights the idea was becoming clearer, then it was only to get it, ready and bright like a stone from the river.
I decided to start with it the following Monday. On Sunday, after listening to the last news, I went home for dinner. Since the moment I lived alone, I did it only a few times; I preferred to stay in the bar until almost closing time joining the round of the meetings with that other time that flows among the tables. But, in the bar, you don´t understand the moment previous to the job. There you waste your time as a valueless coin. I felt that on that night the only way of accumulating strength, was being alone.
At two o´clock in the morning, when the sky was marvellous, and the ones who are on earth stay quiet or locked up, I started my plan walking across the town with my camera like a clandestine walker.
I stood quietly and hidden among the bushes and rocks which are opposite La Piedra Alta. Without telling anybody I did the same for several nights. You must not think that I didn´t have all kinds of doubts. That seemed a bit crazy until I had my reward.
It happened at three o´clock in the morning. A guy arrived and was standing there next to the wall for a while. I was staring at him from the moment he appeared, cut off against the sky. He looked down so intensely that for a moment I thought that some reflection from my camera would be calling his attention. Suddenly and as if he had remembered something, he threw himself. I was so surprised that
I couldn´t see his falling well.. A scream and the noise of the strike sounded almost together. I stood there for a while without being able to do anything.
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The noise of the scream and the strike had been very loud and it was difficult to believe they had not been heard from the road and that there was not anybody near there who did not go to the place to find out what had happened.
I felt something that would not happen in any other opportunities and it was a kind of guilt for what had taken place there. I gave some steps trying to phone the police, but it was as if the shining of the water had stopped my purposes. I delayed in recovering myself but I realized that only the exclusivity justified my effort. The silly Edmundo, who argued against me on the other channel paying with some favours and reports to several people who told him the news before they became official, would arrive there immediately.
With my breath agitated, I went back home, hiding the camera under my coat, as if it were a bird which might denounce me with the movement of its wings.
I prepared the material rather awkwardly because I couldn´t find the appropriate voice.
At seven a.m. everything was ready and I threw the bomb during the first news: ¨Suicide in La Piedra Alta¨¨. Filmed at the moment it happened.
The owner of the channel phoned me at eight, when we were giving the news about the suicide again, and he congratulated me.
From then on I stayed in the same place every morning, first in a lonely sacrifice; then the channel arranged the timetable so I didn´t have to collect any news from midday until the 8 p.m. news. The warrior rest, but without Brigitte Bardot or anybody else.
I had to wait for fifteen nights until a woman, in a squared blouse, repeated the same steps. On her bedroom night-table a letter would be found: it said that her fiancé had abandoned her.
The message said:¨You are going to remember me¨. She was a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl called Blanca, who turned out to be my son´s highschool mate..Until a few months before my son had hoped that she accepted him as her boyfriend. He told me about it the day after the TV programme( this time he didn´t wait until Sunday to visit me). He didn´t say anything about the most unbelievable thing but he did tell me how wonderful and angelical the girl was, and how stupid, the guy who had abandoned her, was.
My T.V. colleagues,- even some of them from the same channel-started to gossip quietly and look at me in a different way. And even more when time passed and the suicides in the river increased and I improved my specialization. There was also a relation with the newspaper people to tell them anything that happened before 3 a.m. which was the limit time.
I could take shocking photos of some early suicides, making the technical police know about them through the newspaper.
Edmundo and his cameramen had a style of opinion which used the definite tone about the most varied topics. But they gave a special moving tone with the invention of martyrs and heroes, starting from mediocre and incapable people.
A lost case-no matter if it was about a thief, a murderer or a suicide- was for them the rotten thing in which they began, for or against , the rebelliousness and the incense.
Undoubtedly what they would most lament would be not to be able to exhibit the last suicides like martyrs, without remembering or reminding my beautiful images of them with the starred sky or a black curtain behind them.
The uncountable failed people who ended as suicides had always been Edmundo´s preferred characters. He wrote against the incomprehensible society and the slavery of the money.
If the dead person had written something during his life even if they were secret trials of relief or charming songs for its rhytm and chorus, for Edmundo he became a Dante that the town lost.
The government automatically was pointed as responsible for having forgotten the years the failed person had spent among us. Edmundo was kept in his place by publicity of big shops, got by his brother, and then he complained, when he was on T.V. against the insensible owners of those shops. It was a procedure that had already infested all the media. I guess I am pointed at with the
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finger because I am independent.
The owner of the channel behaved like a real man, because when I was attacked, he was already there
with his son, who was a lawyer, and he had a lot of arguments about the freedom of expression, the role of the press and the truth of the known facts. For some people I almost became a tutor of the town .My documents were the proof for some difficult situations the police had to clear. A man accused of murder was immediately released when I showed the filming of the suicide. I did it two days later because I had not been able to arrange the material.
. This accused person went to the channel to recognize in front of everybody what I had done.
Weeks passed and I learnt a lot and had my own conclusions.
My `programme was expected . Logically it was the only one which couldn´t be announced, but, on the other way, it was showed a second time according to the comments and praises of each proposal.
As time passed I designed a presentation that would be confirmed as a characteristic: some whirlpools of water impelled by Schuman´s music started facing the picture¨Zapatos rotos¨from Van Gogh, situated on a rock, which they finally covered.
My name was there as if it was formed under the water and immediately the first suicide I had filmed. It appeared awkwardly behind the white wall. The music stopped and there were the same metres of plot but there was nobody there now.The spectator´s eye knew the references when the new suicide who prepared to throw himself, appeared .
After filming all the flight and falling, the most important and shortest part, of the first programme and of the last one as well,- the music returned and some beautiful Beaudelaire´s lines lit in white on the basaltic rock that occupied the inferior right angle of the screen:
I am the wound and the knife
I am the punch and the cheek
I am the limbs and the wheel
And the victim and the murderer.
The scenery was perfectly ready and luxurious, as if it had been done for a first time, for the newcomer. And strictly in black and white. I despised the colour, except when it was quite advisable for any detail of clothing. Nobody knows how they used their tongue to combat me, just stressing a statistic of increasing number of suicides in ¨La Piedra Alta, from the moment they were being filmed. That was only part of the truth. What there was really was a choice for that place.
No more revolver shoots, gas, ropes, or poisons, those truculent ways of saying goodbye to life.
People found out that free falling had another value , without the violence of a bloody body on a bed or hanging from a tree (disagreeable image that was the only one filmed by Edmundo,) and I did not want to include in my programme, fearing it wouldn´t do any well to it. It had a vertical and hard doll like a post, and what is even more important, it was an image without vibration or soul. Because of the kind of it , it couldn´t have the unchangeable previous moments.
After some months I elaborated some reports about the suicides´behaviour. I ordered some short serious notes without any pretension but very humbly, as the topic deserves.
In them there is a clear evidence of the opposite styles used by Edmundo and his people who knew how to tell the news to the ones who were on their side and gave them a fatherly and vain tone to the ones who stood on the opposite side.
For him there were two kinds of people: the owners of the truth and the ones who were blind and had bad intentions.
While I was doing my job completely in the open-air, they spoke only of the ones who asked them for a report.
My programmes were becoming more and more recognized for their sobriety, totally different from the live argentine programmes, with sensational scenes, uselessly told by a melodramatic narrator . Edmundo tried to imitate them, asking a person who had just heard of a tragedy, what he felt. On the contrary, I never spoke to the suicides´families.
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My first treatise to suicide as a topic to reflect was from the moment I made the comparison between several suicides, old and young, men and women.
The conclusions seemed clear in the moment of alternating images and contrasting behaviours. The old ones arrived and threw themselves without hesitating, as if they were asleep. The young ones, several cases of adolescents I had, stood there for a moment and you could even think that something different had taken them to that place at that strange time, usually between 3 or 4 o´clock in the morning. But if you got the zoom closer you could see their absent faces, a complete expressiveness,
and there were no doubts it was going to happen in a few seconds.
It was more typical, also of the young people, a more spectacular way of throwing themselves, more theatrical, moving their arms as if they were getting ready for a rehearsal.
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.Where I did not notice any remarkable differences-and I spoke about it in a programme-was in the
behaviour between men and women in the last moment of their decision. .The positions and the expressions adopted by them had no relevant opposition. I understand that I must insist on the curiosity that I observed as something common of every age: the similarity and deliberate unimportance of the last movements. Almost everybody comb their hair unconsciously or they touch a leg with their hands .Some of them combed for a long time before throwing themselves. Among the young ones I also emphasize the quite frequent fact of taking off their clothes and wear only their underwear. I filmed many of them while they were carefully folding their shirt, trousers or skirt and leaving their shoes one next to the other.
The old ones always threw themselves with their clothes on, and, as I said before, without stopping next to the wall. I don´t want to forget about the scream, either. All of them throw themselves silently, but when they are half-way, most of them give a terrible scream, which is cut off by the unpleasant strike against the rocks
I remember a girl who did not scream and who also threw herself in a strange way: bent and seizing her belly with her hands.
I didn´t present any programme which revealed my suspects about the relation between the gestures-lost looks towards the sky, the distance,, downwards, the almost unseen movement of their lips, the swing of some steps, like the one who is learning to walk or dance-and the general biography of the suicide..
I want to be clear enough, if I don´t reveal my observations about the likely relation between those facts and the beliefs and behaviour of those people, is because I understand that I must not involve myself in their private problems. These might affect the relatives of the dead people, who usually show a kind of feeling- more apparent than real- and they would accuse and reproach me.
I also stayed aside these topics because when I knew details about life, for example the girl who could have been my son´s girlfriend, was very painful for me.
Basically I have understood that those last moments complete the truth of life. Therefore, I should dedicate a deep study to the topic that in the cicumstances of running through the audience, I wasn´t able to do it. Mine were documents, not suppositions. I shouldn´t interfere with the facts that would always be thinkable and unsatisfactory..It is easy for me to risk, without being vain, that the potential suicides must feel a strong identification with the programme-there are some people who record it in their video-cassettes- will they become suicides afterwards?
Some of them, alleging their closeness to the suicides, have been in the channel to ask for the programme they could not record. ( In all those cases I thought they had a twinkling in their eyes which was impossible to hide and which seemed strangely familiar to me.).Another important thing: it has been noticed , in spite of the months the programme has been on , no person seemed to remember there was a camera filming them at the moment he/she became the protagonist.
I do not think it was because he believed that what I repeated outside the studio was to be used as an interesting artifice in a probable legal defense: that the recordings were a mere result of the coincidence of those events with my fishing moments. I guess the one who arrives at ¨La Piedra Alta¨with the intention of killing oneself, feels completely alone in the immensity of the landscape. For him/her, there is no camera, as well as neither past or future.
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But let´s go to my essential defense. It cannot be denied that I rescue the dignity of the memory.
Who, among the ones who feel abandoned by somebody he loves and commits suicide after overcoming incredulity and resistence, is not going to stick to some significant verses?—the verses always say more than us, the ones who go after the present.
When the programme is over I show these verses from:Än Irish pilot foresees his death¨¨ written by William Bitter.
I thought about everything, I thought it calmly
The years to come were a vain breath
And the ones already lived were also a vain breath
Compared with this life, with this death.
I note down as unforgettable programmes when I registered the twins´suicides with hardly one month between them. I started the recording of the second one with some details from the first one, almost superimposing images and with the resource of the presentation of the two behaviours seen on parallel screens.
It seemed that old graphic section of newspapers and magazines: ¨Discover the differences,¨ although being afraid of the irreverence, I didn´t say anything that reminded it.
I haven´t broadcasted them yet, but I have some Jorge Luis Borges´verses kept for some suicide I want to highlight . The verses are shown slowly, but on the screen:
I´ll turn the history into dust, dust into dust.
I´m looking at the last sunset.
I hear the last bird
I legate nothing to nobody.
The quality of my filmings deserve a different paragraph.. I bought lens for the darkness, which I imported specially from U.S.A. I can almost film the bottom of the cliff and afterwards I get a bit nearer and I take a final and clearer recording.
I also included an independent microphone to record the intensity and the echo of the screams.
What I get and process later on, are some minutes which have some invaluable plastic and scientific value. And everything is shown during the first news in the morning, so this makes the ones from the other channel become furious, and they show it in every opportunity they have, either alluding or ignoring me .
Edmundo´s programme even accused me for having made that area of the coast become a calling for the suicides. He and his friends became a kind of saints, predicating the value of the Christian virtues as if they were fighting with the inventor of death.
They recited biblical versicles with the musical background:¨live the life, live the life, live the love¨ which belonged to a singer who had been on fashion a few years ago. During the last weeks of his programme, Edmundo adopted a calm and solemn voice with which he invited all the people who had to bear injustice or suffered from depressions, to go and talk to him and change their desperation into hope. He wanted to build ¨The Temple of the truth¨,with them. He received everybody in his house.
The Town Hall- because of the imbecile´s initiative who dared to remember anything from my past, and I never answered ( the owner of the channel advised me to do so) , placed a system of lights that made several people who went there to carry out their wish, gave up.
It is clear that noone wished to be seen carrying out a ritual in which experience is valueless.
In that sense, has my programme taught anything?
In some opportunities I dared to throw stones and break the nearest light. It was not the case of leaving the area useless. What did they want? Did they want that the sordid findings of bodies after several days, returned? They were always in the middle of blood and a smell that sometimes didn´t allow us to do our job as reporters. Did they want that? Besides, in case you forget, La Piedra Alta is a place
of suicides, not of crimes.
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Would they have to close parks and motels that are places where the couples kill each other? I continued, according to my improving plan, including contributions. I composed an expression that synthesized the essence of the suicide in the most suitable moment of each programme.
It was the closing sentence of Mario Silva Garcia´s wonderful book, The Suicide: You wouldn´t abandon me, if you had not lost me already.¨¨
On the previous days before a Holy Week, where according to people who know, the number of suicides increase, they sent two boys to stand near my place hoping to compete with me. They would pretend that they weren´t sent by them, they couldn´t do anything else. But the stupid ones had stickers with the colours of the other channel on their camera..I noticed them with the zoom. The idea would be that later the boys revealed that filming, obtained in an independent way and by chance. They must
have believed that anyone can do it, that it is like filming a birthday party, asking people to repeat a toast, as if the suicides arrived there to rehearse a dance next to the wall and could do a repetition for the ones who had been disturbed. They wasted minutes filming couples I don´t even focus, for I know well that they choose another more intimate way when they want to kill themselves together.. During Holy Week there were two suicides and the improvised boys only sent some vague information.
I don´t know if they were sleeping or they didn´t have the decision at the moment of focusing. I didn´t know them so I didn´t need to talk to them when they were a few metres from me. The long-haired boys were shocking, because I couldn´t take them apart from the half-balded ¨head of their employer.
The silence of the night and the loneliness of the three of us among the bushes; it was an unpleasant situation.
The following mornings after these suicides on Holy Week I watched the other channel: they didn´t have anything but imprecise details, they didn´t even say the identity of the protagonists. And nothing about the flight or the preparation.. Mine, in both cases, were as usual, perfect information of identity and visual images with music and opportune silences.. A clock on the right vertex of the screen showed the exact time in which the protagonist entered the scene. And it was kept there until the end, transmitting the real duration of the facts.
Edmundo´s programme was over after a few days because it lost its advertisers. Instead they started a rural programme, one of those with folk music and moos, a calendar of animal fairs and wool prices.
I couldn´t forget things that had really impressed me and I couldn´t confess them not to lose the tone of strict professionalism, like that night when almost before the mist of dawn, I noticed through the camera a figure all in white who looked around the place and threw himself just as he had done not a long time before.
I had it already filmed but the person was wearing colourful clothes that time. It was L.L. and was killing himself for a second time. There was no scream this time, and the white figure I filmed and which I can still watch on my screen whenever I want to, was never found.
These confessions and the filming are here for whoever picks up these pages and is allowed to publish them.
I had the idea of pretending I was going on holidays for a week so I said goog-bye to my T.V. viewers. My fellow workers also believed my travel was true, and the first day I was absent , sent me greetings, wishing me a deserved rest in the wide streets of Mendoza- where I would be for some days, to visit afterwards the Christ of Los Andes in the border with Chile.. I talked about the feeling of emptiness you would have when you looked down through the window of the bus. I left the brochure with the details of the tour on my working table and I simulated my departure. A kind of restlessness of knowing what would happen with the suicides made me do it.
I wasn´t absent to my place of observation any of those imaginary days of licence. On the contrary, the lack of obligation permit me a real rest in that environment of enervant beauty.
I can offer my testimony about the greater attractiveness the river has in that area. I even dare tell the hyphotesis of the concentration of energy that must enrichen the air, with the water running over the rocks like a hair of reflections. I enjoyed the water and the music, the hypnotic lights and the parade of
tree-shadows and birds. The screen opened on fourth dimension. They were the only times when I
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Threw my hooks which I always carried quite visibly.
. I thought about the majesty of the hug of the river and on the privilege of the ones who dared throw
and are lucky that a camera immortalizes them. The act and its proof, a unity whose existence cannot be thought without the reporters. It was that night when I decided to write the story of my lonely enterprise, but outside the camera, on the paper, the place of the wills.
The fourth night something happened and it could not have been in my plans. The one who appeared slowly in front of the wall was Edmundo. I never doubted it was him, wearing the same clothes in which he accused me. He was in my lens from the first moment. It was nearly 5 o´clock in the morning. The dawn was coming and I had remained there longer than usual only because I didn´t have to work the following day. He moved ahead decidedly and looked at the far Argentinian coast. There he stood as if he were waiting to be lighted. . He had a serious face, he seemed to be listening to the anthem in a ceremony in which he was the main character.
The moon was shining fully on his face. I thought if I was in his mind at that moment. He didn´t take off his clothes. He had those nervous gestures, previous to the moment the cameras are going to focus on you. He threw himself. I could record his scream and I got closer after that , to prove the motionless of the body dislocated on the stones.
I must thank him that he left the proof for anybody who wants it; that nobody throws himself because he is being filmed. But I had to leave aside that precious material, without using it in my programme. My document will be missed and somebody will believe that Edmundo´s suicide was a gossip because we didn´t give the news and the channel, where he had worked, informed about it as if it was somebody completely strange, without any filming or photos.
What has been said previously will seem a delirant story, now that the least information of a suicide has been forbidden. They argue the reason that it is contagious: the leprosy of the suicide. I am going to order well the minutes of Edmundo¨s death together with these indications because maybe in the future somebody may write the complete story of La Piedra Alta. As a farewell I will write: Ïf I cannot move the superior potencies I will move the Aqueronte.¨(Virgilio, Eneida,VII)
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