Veronika stopped playing for a moment and looked out at Mari in the garden. She was wearing only a light jacket against the cold night air? Did she want to die?

No, I was the one who wanted to die .

She turned back to the piano. In the last days of her life, she had finally realized her grand dream: to play with heart and soul, for as long as she wanted and whenever the mood took her. It didn’t matter to her that her only audience was a young schizophrenic; he seemed to understand the music, and that was what mattered.

Mari had never wanted to kill herself. On the contrary, five years before, in the same movie theater she had visited today, she had watched, horrified, a film about poverty in El Salvador and thought how important her life was. At that time—with her children grown up and making their way in their own professions—she had decided to give up the tedious, unending job of being a lawyer in order to dedicate the rest of her days to working for some humanitarian organization. The rumors of civil war in the country were growing all the time, but Mari didn’t believe them. It was impossible that, at the end of the twentieth century, the European Community would allow a new war at its gates.

On the other side of the world, however, there was no shortage of tragedies, and one of those tragedies was El Salvador’s, where starving children were forced to live on the streets and turn to prostitution.

“It’s terrible,” she said to her husband, who was sitting in the seat next to her.

He nodded.

Mari had been putting off the decision for a long time, but perhaps now was the moment to talk to him. They had been given all the good things that life could possibly offer them: a home, work, good children, modest comforts, interests, and culture. Why not do something for others for a change? Mari had contacts in the Red Cross, and she knew that volunteers were desperately needed in many parts of the world.

She was tired of struggling with bureaucracy and law suits, unable to help people who had spent years of their lives trying to resolve problems not of their own making. Working with the Red Cross, though, she would see immediate results.

She decided that, when they left the movie theater, she would invite her husband for a coffee so that they could discuss the idea.

Just as a Salvadoran government official appeared on screen to offer a bored excuse for some new injustice, Mari suddenly noticed her heart beating faster.

She told herself it was nothing. Perhaps the stuffy atmosphere in the movie was getting to her; if the symptoms persisted she would go out to the foyer to get a breath of fresh air.

But events took on their own momentum; her heart began beating faster and faster, and she broke out in a cold sweat.

She felt afraid and tried hard to concentrate on the film, in an attempt to dispel any negative thoughts, but realized she could no longer follow what was happening on the screen. Mari could see the images and the subtitles, but she seemed to have entered a completely different reality, where everything going on around her seemed strange and out of kilter, as if taking place in a world she did not know.

“I don’t feel well,” she said to her husband.

She had put off making that remark as long as possible, because it meant admitting that there was something wrong, but she could not hold out any longer.

“Let’s go outside,” he said.

When he took his wife’s hand to help her to her feet, he noticed it was ice cold.

“I don’t think I can get that far. Please tell me what’s happening to me.”

Her husband felt afraid too. Sweat was pouring down Mari’s face, and there was a strange light in her eyes. “Keep calm. I’ll go out and call a doctor.”

She was gripped by despair. What he said made absolute sense, but everything—the theater, the semidarkness, the people sitting side by side staring up at the brilliant screen—all of it seemed so threatening. She was certain she was alive, she could even touch the life around her as if it were something solid. And that had never happened to her before.

“On no account leave me here alone. I’ll get up and go out with you, but take it slowly.”

They both made their apologies to the people in the same row and began walking to the exit at the back of the cinema. Mari’s heart was now beating furiously, and she was certain, absolutely certain, that she would never get out of that place. Everything she did, every gesture she made—placing one foot in front of the other, saying “Excuse me,” holding on to her husband’s arm, breathing in and out—seemed terrifyingly conscious and deliberate.

She had never felt so frightened in her life. “I’m going to die right here in this movie theater.”

And she was convinced that she knew what was happening because, many years before, a friend of hers had died in a movie theater of a cerebral aneurism.

Cerebral aneurisms are like time bombs. They are tiny varicose veins that form along the arteries—like the ballooning you get on worn tires—and they can remain there undetected during a whole lifetime. No one knows they’ve got an aneurism, unless its discovered accidentally—for example, after a brain scan carried out for other reasons—or at the moment when it actually ruptures, flooding everything with blood, leaving the person in an immediate state of coma, usually followed by death.

While she was walking down the aisle of the dark theater, Mari remembered the friend she had lost. The strangest thing, though, was the effect this ruptured aneurism was having on her perception. She seemed to have been transported to a different planet, seeing each familiar thing as if for the first time.

And then there was the terrifying, inexplicable fear, the sheer panic of being alone on that other planet: Death.