THE LIFE AFTER

 THE LIFE AFTER

Robert had been a literature teacher for twenty years and, even without being particularly convinced of it, he had been  not bad with his job.  It had been when he met Jean Paul that something in him got upset , and his life definitely changed.

Jean Paul was a man of nearly sixty, who was employed in a funeral home. Robert met him , by chance, one night, at the card table in a friends’ house.  It was not so much his current job  that had impressed Robert, but rather the learning that Jean Paul had spent ten years of his life in the Foreign Legion, and, later he had been the owner of a well known night club in Marseille.

Being in front of Jean Paul , who, despite his age, still had a youthful appearance, but, more than the appearance, he had the vitality, even the impatience, of a young man., had put him ( Robert) in crisis. Here’s someone who changed his life several times, who was not afraid of changing his life, he said himself. While he , Robert, had remained in his same place, laid down in his job, in his life, where he certainly was not bad, but neither could consider himself satisfied. Yet he, resigned, had remained in the not wide enclosure of his life, which was also a prison, he had not even thought of changing his life until he had found in front of Jean Paul, with his sly look, with his decisive gestures, with his agility, with his dynamism. It was then that Robert felt that he too had to change his life, that he urgently needed another life from the one he had led, without conviction, too long. Then he had thought about what he could to do and, discarding what had seemed impossible to him, such as climbing the highest peaks, or becoming an acrobat, or a formula one racing-driver, he had thought of all people who would like to change radically their lives, but ( they) don’t make up their mind to do it. Here: he would have helped people who would liked to start another life, a new life which had anything to do with the one they had lived until then.

Robert had opened his agency alone, with only one room available as the headquarters of the agency. But he immediately worked very much for advertising. He felt, he knew that his call had to be irresistible. Since he had long been a teacher of literature, ah how many verses of poetries had come to his mind. But, above all, those of a poetry, above which he had even cried, oh , when he was a teenager. “ YES, FATE WAS TO YOU ADVERSE! BUT FOR LIGHT HEARTS/ ANOTHER LIFE IS AT  DOORS” Leaving aside the___ADVERSE FATE___and the LIGHT HEARTS____” ANOTHER LIFE IS AT  DOORS” , it seemed to him perfect as an invitation. To this verse, which would have become the name of his agency, he added: “ A NEW LIFE IS WAITING FOR YOU! ON, COME HERE! You will see, it will be easy!” For some time he had been alone doing everything. The clients had arrived in large numbers since the start ( the opening). It was incredible how many people were eager to change radically their lives. At first his clients had been husbands who wanted to leave their wives, and wives who couldn’t stand their husbands, but they, alone, without a push, were unable to implement their decision, especially when, in addition to leaving the wife or the husband, that decision would have also involved to leave sons, and daughters. Ah, it hadn’t been hard to help those clients, even rather boring and whining ones.

But soon, as his agency became very well known, much more interesting clients began to arrive. It was more difficult, more complicated to help them. Robert had had to hire some employees, his agency had grown and his business was booming.

In the transition period, when he had already decided to hire employees and to expand his agency, but he had not yet done so, Robert had happened to help no more young women who, in order to realize their aspirations, their projects, would have had to take off, to abandon not only their husbands , their sons, their daughters, but also their beloved grandchildren, and they, those elderly women , by alone, would not have done it. Oh, how much Robert was happy, even proud to have been able to give the necessary push to these women , so that they could leave their former life behind. He had felt almost capable of….of doing magic, if not miracles.

At his now enlarged agency , which now had a spacious and luminous headquarters, and had ten employees, whom Robert called his collaborators, clients began to arrive , with the most varied, even complicated requests. There were those who wanted to change their sex, those who wanted to change their face, and even people who asked to be helped to change their identity.

Robert and his collaborators had a great deal of trouble to find specialized surgery clinics for those clients. And they had even greater difficulties in solving the problem of the documents to be provided to clients who wanted to change identity. As he realized that resorting to professional counterfeiters would entail too many risks, including the risk that his agency could be closed, Robert ended up to decide that his agency would be directly involved , without resorting to third parties, in the manufacture of the documents  which needed people who wanted not only   to change radically their life, but also to become someone else. Sure, it was an illegal activity, but Robert had succeeded, with the help of his collaborators, some of whom had a past which he hadn’t even suspected when he had hired them, and also with the help and the advises of very powerful exponents in voluntary associations, to fix everything, in the sense of making sure that it would have been very unlikely that anyone would start investigating his agency. So if it would never have occurred to anyone to investigate what was going in his agency, he could easily also afford the manufacture of the documents which had to certify the new identity of his clients. They would have been false documents, sure, but no one would have known it, after all since the clients who came to his agency to be helped to change their identity, as well as their life, were people who were determined to leave everything behind, even to leave the country where they had lived until then.

Business was booming, ANOTHER LIFE IS AT DOORS____was now well known and renowned , newspapers and televisions talked about it in laudatory terms, and they competed to interview Robert and also the clients who had contacted or who intended to contact the agency, completely satisfied all the first, confident and full of hope the others. Clients kept on arriving from all over the country and also from abroad. Robert not only hired others collaborators, enlarging the headquarters, but even opened branch offices in other cities. He could be really satisfied.

Then, after years of prosperity, of well being, he suddenly found himself facing something which found him totally unprepared, which he really hadn’t foreseen. Clients who years earlier had come to the agency , and who had been helped to leave their current life behind, to venture into an at all new life, here that they came back with that request which, every time, made Robert jump on the chair , and which gave him a great discomfort. Since those clients now wanted to return to the life they had left behind years ago.  The first of those returning clients had been a man who now wanted to come back to his family, which he had abandoned ten years earlier, when he had disappeared, without giving any further news (of himself)

Robert had been completely disconcerted, also anguished, since he had not been able to help that man.  His wife, whom he had abandoned, had married again, she had rebuilt her life. She said that she believed her first husband was dead from long. The sons of that man,. who had grown up, no more wanted to have to do anything with him, since he had abandoned them as they were children.

But then, later, clients had returned, to help whom it was even more impossible. Clients who had changed gender, clients who had changed face, even clients who had changed identity, who now asked to be helped to come back to the life they had left, life they had been so much impatient to leave. Robert had felt more and more grieved, even anguished in front of those men, those women, almost all no longer young, who asked him to help them, when he couldn’t do anything for them. Then it occurred to him…..no, not to think to close his agency, which was still prosperous and which would have gone on even without him, no, it happened to him instead to think that it would be better if he had disappeared, if no one, therefore not even his clients, had known more anything of him.

Then….Jean Paul came in his mind. Yes,  it had been from the chance meeting with that strange, extraordinary guy that his decision to change his life was born, and he, Robert, had founded the ANOTHER LIFE IS AT  DOORS.

Since he hadn’t seen him for time, Robert asked to friends and acquaintances about Jean Paul.

They, with  a considerable embarrassment, put him aware of….Jean Paul’s latest venture. They told Robert that Jean Paul had been kicked out of the funeral home, where he was employed,because he had been caught injuring and mutilating corpses.  All those who reported the fact to Robert did it with a face more than disgusted, which was enough to say all the horror they felt for Jean Paul. “ Ah, for someone like him the right place is the Foreign Legion”   “ Jean Paul? He had to stay in the Foreign Legion” they said-  Robert, instead, in learning this undertaking, certainly not honorable of Jean Paul, came to think that…but he certainly must have outraged corpses precisely because he again wanted to change his life, because he could no longer stand  that job in the funeral home, and he wanted to be kicked out. Of course, it must have been like this, Robert repeated to himself. 

Jean Paul, ah, yes, he was a man who hadn’t been afraid to change his life several times, and never had let himself to be grieved by the life he had left behind.