Doppelgänger (chapter 1)
Since last month, I've been on a frantic search that occupies my mind night and day. I feel obsessed with the subject, and no one in my family can bear to hear me talk about it. Especially my mother. In the meantime, I've done a lot of research on the internet and discovered that there's a widespread belief that each of us can have around 7 look-alikes scattered around the world, the so-called doppelgänger, with whom you may or may not share your genetic code. Will I finally find my double this time?
For a long time, people have commented to me that they know someone who looks just like me, but who lives in a part of town where I never go, or who does another job that has nothing to do with mine. This time, the comment was made by a physiotherapist while she was seeing me. She said that my double had been a friend of hers in the past. I thought this opportunity was too good to pass up, so I asked my physiotherapist to drop her former friend a note. I've been waiting for a reply ever since.
I've been waiting for it sitting down, which doesn't bode well. You know that expression "you can sit and wait", which they use whenever the outcome seems impossible? But I'm not sitting for nothing. Because of my profession, I'm always injured. But this time it was serious. I'm a professional volleyball player. I've been dedicated to volleyball since my father died and I fell into depression. The doctor recommended that I take up a sport as a way of overcoming my depression and finding friends. Here I am, an injured player. But friends...
My father was a rigger, working in oil extraction on the offshore. His salary was good, which made him a hero in our family, but he had the disadvantage that we only saw him during his days off. I grew up like that, enjoying his company only one week a month. When I was little, this was the cause of constant fights between him and my mother. From behind the closed door I could hear her shouting "Where do you go on your days off?". It didn't make sense at the time, but today...
After a while, the fights stopped. At this time, my mother was in a good mood, even though my father continued to live with us only one week a month. She, who had previously been thrifty, began to spend a large part of his salary on nice clothes and at the beauty salon. She often spent the afternoons away from home, returning only in the evening. When my father came home on his days off, he would shower me with presents and pamper me like a princess. All our relatives said we were a margarine commercial family! On these occasions, the dissonant voice of an unmarried aunt insisted on commenting that the two of them seemed 'so cold towards each other'. But someone would always retort that surely when the lights went out in the bedroom, a volcano would ignite, which always provoked laughter and put an end to the matter. Those were really happy times!
I grew up like that, spoiled and raised in a stable and happy family, until one day I suddenly learned that my father had died during a fire on the oil rig. My mother reacted stoically. Few tears rolled down her irrepressibly made-up face during the wake. But I... I couldn't go on crying in corners as I had been doing ever since. Something had to be done urgently. An educated person shouldn't display their emotions in public! That's why, at 16, I was prescribed tranquilizers, started seeing a psychoanalyst and played volleyball three times a week. Peace quickly reigned in the house. Six months later, my mother remarried. "It was a flash in the pan," she said with a Monalisa smile to anyone who made any comment on the subject.
Before long, things got complicated at home. My stepfather was a terribly jealous man and would make caustic comments about any of my mother's characteristics that bothered him, in other words, almost everything. I no longer recognized the mother I used to have. She was now a withered woman, without vanity or joy, who threw her venom at me at the first chance she got. The environment became oppressive, and to escape it, I married an airline pilot at the age of twenty. One lesson my mother had taught me perfectly: for a couple to remain happy, everyone needs to have their own life. The alternation of travel and time off in my husband's work schedule made him the ideal man.
What I didn't expect to feel in my new married life was the loneliness I was faced with shortly after the honeymoon. My dead father, my withered mother, my absent husband and the lack of close friends or a sister caused me to fall victim to a new bout of depression. It was in the midst of this crisis that I heard my physiotherapist's comment. In the absence of anything else to occupy me while I was injured, I threw myself wholeheartedly into the search for my doppelgänger.
On the BBC website, I saw several reports about people who had discovered their doppelgänger by chance. In many cases, they were identical, but not related in any way, not even by common ancestry. In other cases, they were twin brothers who had been raised by different families and hadn't heard of each other until then. In a short space of time, I sent numerous messages to my physiotherapist, reminding her of my request that she pass on a message from me to her former friend if she knew of her whereabouts. Life went on without news until, when the phone rang this afternoon, I was surprised by a voice identical to my own. It was her who was now looking for me.
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Voltar