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Just as on every other day, I want to commit suicide. It's morning, the sunrise is for the time being swathed in clouds, and there are no passersby, so I can still permit myself to want to commit suicide. In any case, the whole business, which I have been repeating for such a long time, I can't even remember since when, will probably last another five or ten minutes. After which I'll either go back inside, or I'll . . . "Either," my ass! I've spent too many mornings waiting for a suicidal urge, freezing like an idiot on this window ledge, to go on believing it might still come. Something else will happen. Soon, someone—a passer-by under my window—will notice me. After which, out of excessive concern for me, he’ll shout: "Hey you! You nut! What the hell are you trying to do, kill yourself?" Or he’ll irritate me: "Mister, it’s no good killing yourself." And I, as is my wont, will go back inside, afflicted by a certain feeling of shame, I’ll start cursing at my lack of courage and, above all, at that urge which refuses to come. Then I will . . .

"Hey you, what are you trying to do down there? Kill yourself?"

This time, strangely enough, the voice comes from somewhere overhead. I look up and, on the seventh floor, maybe the eighth, I can’t really tell, I see a bearded man with glasses (someone who’s recently moved here, or else the boyfriend of some neighbor) shaking a lit cigarette at me.

"What the hell are you fooling around at?"

“Nothing," I reply, attempting an innocent smile.

“What do you take me for? An idiot? You’re telling me that you’re standing there, hunched over on the ledge, and you’re not up to anything?”

The man is yelling at me from the seventh floor, as is clear to me now. Two windows higher . . .

“But what do you want me to do?”

It’s clear that he’s confused by the question. He hesitates for a few seconds, before resuming the dialogue.

“Well . . . I don’t know,” he says at last. “How the hell should I know?”

“Well then, if you don’t know, why do you expect me to do something?”

“Because you’re standing there, at the window, as if you wanted . . .”

He loses his temper:

“What do you take me for? Some kind of idiot? I’m sure you were intending to commit suicide, damn it! Don’t try to tell me that that wasn’t your intention!”

“Not true!” I shake my head determinedly. “Does it look to you like I’m crazy? I came out to take a breath of fresh air.”

Although the distance between us is quite great, I can see his eyes boggling, then I notice how he makes the sign of the cross with the hand in which he’s holding the cigarette.

“On the window ledge? In your underpants?”

“Precisely,” I say. “Do you think that I would commit suicide like this? What normal person would commit suicide wearing only his underpants?”

“Don’t try to explain, I’ve seen other nutcases like you! So what if you’re in your underpants, does that mean you can’t . . . ?”

He breaks off his shouting and gesticulating, as though he has just been struck by a revelation. Then—probably as a result of that revelation—all of a sudden he spits at me. Miffed at not hitting his target, he doesn’t stop there. The next instant, just as unexpectedly, he furiously flings his cigarette at the ledge where I’m standing. I manage to dodge it at the last moment. And, losing my balance, I barely manage to grab hold of the window frame, thereby saving myself from an unwanted fall, unwanted inasmuch as it wouldn’t have been due to the urge I’ve been feeling for so long. Before I get a chance to swear at him, he does so:

“Fuck you! Look at what I’m talking to! Go on then, kill yourself, you nut! Nobody said I had to look after you! One fewer idiot in the world . . .”

“I’d be grateful if you fucked . . . I mean, fuck you!”

I shout back, realizing in time that I had started out a wee too politely for an effective obscenity.

The man overhead waves his hand, as if to say: “I’m not going to get sick over some idiot who’s thinking of committing suicide at the exact moment I decide to look out of the window.” He mutters something else, and then vanishes back inside. Because there’s no more point in me standing here and, above all, because I’m starting to feel a chill, I go back inside as well.

On this occasion, the dialogue with the man who stepped in to save me was longer than usual. Moreover, in order to find suitable answers to his irritated questions, I had had to put my spontaneity somewhat to the test.

I slump in the armchair and start to laugh. There’s nothing else for me to do, given that I’m fully aware of how ridiculous my attempts to leave this world are. In fact, I think I’m the only one who’s aware of just how ridiculous. The people who see me with my arms opened wide, on the ledge of my window, more often than not take the situation very seriously. Some of them, pedestrians passing my block of flats below, even start talking to me from down there, about various reasons to be happy, about the life which, in spite of countless inconveniences, is still worth living:

“Yes,” some admit sagely, “yes, life is like a bad cake base. It crumbles when you least expect, it breaks in two, pieces of it go to hell. But what about the icing? What about the syrup? If you know how to coat the base in syrup, if you know how to add the right filling, in the end you’ll have a delicious cake. With a bad base, granted, but still delicious . . .”

Others, out of a desire to be as convincing as possible, don’t hesitate to give me their own examples:

“My dear man,” says the person in question and looks anxiously left and right to assure himself that no one apart from me is listening, “my wife cheats on me at every opportunity she gets! I’m sent out of town on business . . . What does she do? She cheats on me! I’m admitted to hospital . . . she cheats on me, because she can’t wait for me to get better, oh no! I’m at a party with my friends, so she—it goes without saying—cheats on me. But so what, does it mean I have to suffer so much that I end up killing myself? Better to give her a couple of slaps, I cool off and . . . That’s my philosophy!”

Every time one of them gives me a talking to, I go back inside, giving him a broad, grateful wave, thereby offering him the satisfaction of believing that he’s saved me. From behind the curtain I watch him go on his way. Then I imagine him, at work, telling his co-workers about his brave act. And I am content. “Look,” I often happily think to myself, “if my suicidal urge still has no intention of coming to fruition, at least I have the satisfaction of being able to offer a man the unique chance of saving someone else from death.” Yes, I must admit, that is one of the few pure joys in my life . . .

But today I was unable to offer myself even this joy. Today all I managed to do was annoy the person who intervened to save me. And so I can’t imagine him recounting his brave deed to anyone . . . Because of this, the only thing left is for me to be bored.

I don’t know why, but when I was little—it happened a long, long time ago—my father deemed it fitting to tell me a story, an anecdote, a joke—yes, I think he told me it in the form of a joke—about a circus. So, a circus comes to town (I don’t remember which town), and the poster looked something like this:



THE MAIN ATTRACTION!
OUR CIRCUS PRESENTS A UNIQUE ACT:
THE BIRDMAN!
ONE DAY HE FLIES, THE NEXT DAY HE DOESN’T.
HE’S NOT FLYING TODAY!



I’ve no idea how my father thought I could get the joke. What is certain is that, at the time, only he laughed at the punch line. I looked at him as though he were a stale comedian, I slapped a complaisant smile on my child’s face—at least that’s what I think I did—and I went on playing. Except that from that moment on my father, every time something wasn’t quite right in his opinion, would remind me of that wonderful parable. If I didn’t want to do my homework, giving him a “later” that concealed an inclination to play, my father would smilingly admonish with upraised finger:

“The birdman, eh? He’s not flying today!”

If I was late taking out the garbage, I used to see the same raised finger and hear:

“Not flying today, is that it?”

I didn’t get the meaning of this joke, anecdote or whatever it may have been until I was about sixteen or seventeen. I can say that it was the first major revelation in my life. I had been going out with a girl for about two years. As far as I remember, my father, a man whose behavior was absolutely lacking in any inhibitions, got it into his head to talk to me about sex. As sex at that time was a mystery to me, I listened to him for half an hour with a fascination that I had the good sense to disguise beneath an embarrassed face. And at the end of that manly talk, my father asked me a most indiscreet question for my age:

“Tell me,” I heard, “do you have sex with your girlfriend?”

Probed in the hidden crannies of my carnal desires, blushing, embarrassed, I nonetheless managed to give a timid answer, after a few good seconds of hesitation:
“Not yet.”

Then, realizing that my manhood had been cast into doubt by the adult before me, I added, trying to seem more sure of myself:

“But it hasn’t been time wasted. She’s given me her word of honor that we’ll do it soon!”

I feel like laughing when I remember it. Just as my father felt like laughing when he heard it. And, amid his guffaws, he said:

“The birdman, eh? Today he’s not flying!”

I must admit that, getting the joke, anecdote or parable at last, I was so strongly affected by its meaning that the very same day, taking advantage of the fact that she was home alone, I impetuously demanded that my girlfriend should undress so that we could have sex. She, just as impetuously, slapped me twice and threw me out.

It’s not toward her, toward that girlfriend, that my memory now turns, however. But rather toward that moment of revelation. Which, for me, was the start of accounting for any incapacity in terms of the joke once told by my father.

And so it is now. Now, as I sit in the armchair looking at the window ledge I have so often felt beneath my bare soles, I repeat, amid stupid guffaws of laughter, that, almost naturally, the Birdman is not flying today either.