Sergio Y.

by Alexandre Vidal Porto

  “Yes, it’s called Angelus,” she said.

  “Angelus? That’s different . . . Is it in Manhattan?”

  “Yes. On Hudson Street, almost at the corner of Charles. Do you know where that is?”

  “More or less. It’s in the West Village, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I know where it is. So, Sergio is okay and happy?”

  “He’s doing great. I don’t think he could be any better. And a lot of that happiness he owes to you. As a mother, I also owe a lot to you. I only hope I can repay you some day.”

  “Please send him my regards. I have a daughter doing her MBA in New York. She’s graduating next year. Tell him when I go to her graduation ceremony, I’ll pay a visit to his restaurant.” The clerk had Tereza’s order ready and was patiently waiting for our conversation to end.

  “I’ll tell him. I’m sure he’ll love to know that I ran into you in the supermarket.”

  We parted ways with a hesitant handshake that evolved into a kiss on the cheek.

  I asked the clerk for two hundred grams of curd cheese. While he removed the cheese from the window, I basked in the good news I had just received regarding Sergio and his restaurant.

  Sergio’s father was a well-known businessman. He ran a family chain of appliance stores with locations throughout Brazil. Sergio could live well wherever he pleased, and he could choose to do whatever he wanted. But, as the only son of Salomão Yacoubian, one might expect him to be living in São Paulo, fulfilling his destiny in the family business.

  Apparently, due to life’s vagaries, he had not yet fulfilled that destiny. He had studied cooking and was about to open a restaurant in New York, all with his parents’ support. Who could have foreseen this? I for one would never have guessed it. I was surprised. Learning about his situation and his progress was by far the best news I had heard that day.

  Sergio might become famous one day. He would appear in magazines and documentaries. People would make reservations three months in advance to sit at one of the few tables in his restaurant in the West Village.

  I think this is what I wanted for him.

  He could, however, turn into yet another failed little rich boy, whose life went nowhere. The restaurant could fail, he could change his mind, he could open another business and it too could fail. Laila Shops would give him a business card and an allowance, and that would be that. He would go on with his life without major consequences for him or anyone else.

  During therapy, his interest in the culinary arts never came up. For me, the image of Sergio as a chef, a restaurant owner, was almost an implausible one, one which I would have to get used to. But the truth was that I did not have enough information to judge his decision. What I had were impressions. I could not gauge the strength of his will.

  However, regardless of his reasons for doing so, it was clear Sergio had decided to take his destiny into his own hands. At least for now, he would not be selling stoves, would not be filling the role of presumptive heir to a chain of stores where thousands of Brazilians bought their flat-screen televisions in forty-eight installments.

  For this, it seems, he needed to leave São Paulo. At least for a while. He had charted his own life strategy, which now he was living out. Apparently, he was happy.

  Even if partially so, Sergio’s happiness had been credited to me by his own mother. What I felt at that moment was a sense of pride and satisfaction.

  Nearly four years after our last session, that was all I knew about him. Right then and there, in my mind, I discharged Sergio Y. He entered my huge gallery of satisfied clients.

  Finally, I could forget him.

  The meeting with Tereza Yacoubian had cheered me up. I felt gratified. What is more, I even liked her perfume. I left the supermarket and, in a spirit of general satisfaction, I went to a shoe store and bought some moccasins I had been eyeing, but that had seemed too expensive before I had met the mother of my satisfied patient.

  OBSESSION, DEATH, BURIAL

  AND TRANSFORMATION

  I am a bit of a germaphobe. I say “a bit” because I believe my obsession is under control. I have my preferences and my way of doing things, but they do not result in mental blocks which prevent me from leading a normal life. If I were to wash my hands every time I had the urge, I would do it about thirty times a day. However, if needed, I can go a whole day without washing them, although it might cause me great consternation.

  About six or seven years ago I came to the conclusion that newsprint made my hands dirty. This caused me such discomfort that at a certain point I simply decided to stop reading newspapers altogether so as not to dirty my fingers. One day, someone told me about Japanese gloves made for this exact purpose: handling newspaper without staining one’s fingers. I found them in a store in Liberdade and I bought twelve packets all at once. They cost me an arm and a leg, but for many years they gave me peace of mind while reading.

  Now things are different. I read the news online. I spray an antiseptic solution once every night on my computer keyboard just to satisfy my obsessional neurosis. I also use a mini vacuum cleaner and a hand sanitizer. With these measures I manage.

  Every day, between midnight and one A.M., after reviewing my day’s notes, I turn on my computer. First, I check my e-mail. I reply to those messages that require immediate attention. Then, I proceed to the others. When I have answered everything I can, usually at about 1:30 A.M., I start reading the online newspapers.

  Sometimes, depending on when I go to bed, I can read the next day’s edition. When this happens, I have the advantage of waking up having already read the day’s news. The downside is that, during the day, the news rarely surprises me because I have already read it. But at least it frees up time for other activities.

  My early morning reading sessions help me relax. The light from the screen hypnotizes me after a while. Slowly, I begin to doze off. I’m not the only one who uses reading to induce sleep. A lot of people do. Around 2 to 2:15 A.M., I turn off the computer, get up, brush my teeth and go to bed.

  The problem is that some news is so disturbing that instead of inducing sleep, it causes restlessness and anxiety.

  The first time a news story struck me as so disconcerting that I could not sleep was in 2001, on September 11. The detailed coverage of the attacks on New York disturbed me deeply. Today, the memory of all that destruction has dissipated. But I think I will never forget what I felt then. I spent the night awake, turning over images and thoughts in my mind that I could not digest.

  The second time I felt something similar, that kept me completely awake, was about a year ago, in February of 2011. I was about to turn off the computer when I came across the following item:

  New York police have identified the body found on Thursday as that of Sergio Yacoubian, the son of businessman Salomão Yacoubian. Yacoubian, 23, lived in Manhattan, where he owned a restaurant. The Brazilian fell from the fourth floor of his home in the West Village. Police believe he may have been the victim of a homicide, although there are no suspects yet. When contacted by this reporter in São Paulo, the family refused comment.

  Perhaps some unconscious defense mechanism was at work, but I did not associate the victim with my former patient right away. The name seemed familiar, but I needed a few seconds to make the connection between that dead Brazilian in Manhattan and the Sergio Y whom I had only really discharged from my care a few weeks ago.

  The news astonished me. My initial reaction was one of denial. I hoped to discover that it was a namesake, of the same age and same profession. He had been my patient. His mother had told me he was fine. He had everything he needed to be happy. He was young. It could not be him.

  But it was.

  In general, learning that someone of an advanced age has died does not move me. As a doctor, I am very familiar with the fact that age degenerates and kills the body. For me, it
is clear that life leads to death. For me, it is easy to accept.

  An old man has had time to experience life’s defining moments. The death of a man who has had time to live should arouse no pity. It is not that I do not regret the loss of that person, but the death of an elderly individual does not affect me very deeply. Everyone dies, really. It is just a matter of who goes first.

  On the other hand, I have a hard time assimilating the death of a young person. It moves me to hear when their lives have been cut short. They die of incurable diseases, needless traffic accidents, in a climate of outrage. Even when peaceful, their deaths are always violent.

  Not only do the young die prematurely; they also die in fear. And to die young and in fear is the worst way to die, because death looks the victim in the eye and it is recognized. The victim has time to see death coming and to understand that he is about to die.

  The body of the fearful boy found in the backyard of his home in Manhattan and the body of my former patient coincided in name, nationality and DNA. They lived in the same city. They were the same age. There were no dissimilarities.

  On the Internet, I tried researching the crime in the New York newspapers but to no avail. The death merited a small note in an unimportant newspaper. It was the only record.

  Sergio Y., twenty-three-year-old, Brazilian, a culinary school graduate, perhaps a promising restaurant owner, a former patient of Dr. Armando’s, was murdered in Manhattan.

  My teenage patient, Salomão Yacoubian’s sole heir, moves to New York to study cooking and ends up dead, at whose hands and why, nobody knows. For all practical purposes, this was the chain of events I first formed in my mind.

  Then came the questions. What happened? Did he get involved in drugs? Who killed him? A friend? A burglar? A girlfriend? An employee? How did a patient who had left my office full of optimism get to this point? What were the events leading up to his foreign death?

  There were no answers, Sergio’s death made no sense to me. I could think of nothing else. The circumstances surrounding his death became my obsession.

  The truth is that I knew very little. I did not have enough elements to satisfactorily answer the questions I had about the murder. I knew that death had been inflicted, that it had not been natural. I could deduce nothing further, I could only imagine.

  In the days that followed, I looked for information about Sergio Y.’s death in the press but found nothing.

  Four days after reading the news that had kept me awake all night, I found the following funeral notice, which was published in the two leading newspapers of São Paulo:

  It is with great sadness that Tereza and Salomão Yacoubian fulfill the duty of communicating the death of their son SERGIO EMÍLIO YACOUBIAN, which occurred on February 2nd in New York City. Mass for the benefit of his soul will be held on February 9, at 11 A.M., at the Armenian Apostolic Church of Brazil, on Avenida Santos Dumont, 55, in the city of São Paulo.

  I have since learned that, while I agonized over unanswered questions, Tereza and Salomão had gone to New York, accompanied by their lawyer, in order to release their son’s body.

  The New York City Police Department took five days to authorize sending the body to Brazil. The coffin went straight from the airport to the cemetery, where only the closest relatives attended the funeral. Once underground, Sergio Y. could finally disappear, yielding his place in the world to someone else.

  I chose a very dark charcoal suit for the Mass. I put on a white dress shirt and a purple tie, the color of mourning, to convey an air of solemnity, in my view appropriate when in the physical presence of death. The day was sunny, and I wore sunglasses. I sat in one of the last pews, my mind devoid of thoughts, waiting, listening to the priest recite the liturgy, taking my cue from the others when to stand and sit.

  Only once during Mass did my gaze cross paths with Tereza’s. She looked me straight in the eyes, quickly but deeply, for two seconds. Then she unlocked her eyes and stared off into infinity. At Mass, Tereza could see no one. There, the good I had done for Sergio Y. no longer mattered.

  When Mass was over, before leaving, I went to the front of the altar to offer my condolences.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said without looking up.

  “I wouldn’t have missed it. I liked him very much,” I replied.

  She took my right hand with both her hands. She shook her head sadly, always with her eyes downcast. I reached out to shake Salomão’s hand, and he greeted me formally, not quite sure who I was.

  Before leaving the church, I felt an urgent need to wash my hands. At the sink in the bathroom next to the sacristy, with soapy hands, I had a near-hallucinatory event. Suddenly I had the impression that my hands were stained with blood. I felt blood on my palms, nails, and in between my fingers. Under the tap water, with plenty of soap, I slowly managed to remove that imaginary blood.

  It was shortly after that I started having frequent nightmares, involving the various doubts that remained in my mind surrounding Sergio Y.’s death.

  From the people I talked to—two friends of the family, who were also acquaintances of mine—I learned very little. I was unable to even learn the general circumstances surrounding what had happened. The only thing I knew was that he had been murdered. I still had no idea who the perpetrator had been or the reasons.

  I thought about calling Tereza. I could perhaps extract from her information that would help satisfy the tremendous curiosity I felt concerning her son’s death, one that was beginning to trouble me.

  Despite my desire to call, I did not. I could not be so brazen. I did not regret it. At the time, I did what seemed right, but the fact is I remained totally in the dark, knowing nothing about Sergio Y.’s murder.

  My curiosity turned into an obsession. I spent hours on end creating different scenarios in my mind surrounding my former patient’s death. I dreamed of possible murderers, Sergio’s falling body, his terrified face, dressed as a chef, his head bleeding, covered in snow in the backyard of his home.

  I began waking up in the middle of the night and lost my appetite completely. Two weeks after these symptoms began, an idea occurred to me as to how I might obtain answers to my most basic questions surrounding the case. My reasoning went as follows:

  Sergio had been murdered in his home in the West Village. According to the article in the newspaper, Manhattan police had opened an investigation into the murder. Therefore, the answers I sought I would find in the outcome of their investigations.

  Perhaps the police already knew the circumstances surrounding Sergio Y.’s murder. Who had killed him, and why. If the investigation had been completed, I might at least gain access to some of the answers.

  The records of the alleged murder must reside somewhere in the Manhattan court system. If a suspect had been arraigned, there would also exist information concerning the court case. With any luck, there would even be transcripts of witness depositions. My curiosity about the circumstances surrounding the death of Sergio Y. would be satisfied in the New York courts.

  The next day, while showering, after returning from the gym, something I already knew but had not thought of occurred to me: in the United States, information regarding court proceedings are public records. Therefore, anyone who files a formal request, even through a lawyer, can access information on any crime committed in the country.

  I asked a cousin—the son of my aunt Yeda, with whom my mother had lived on Jauaperi Street—who works as a lawyer, if he knew a firm in the US that could help me obtain information about a homicide that had occurred in Manhattan.

  “I’ll talk to our office in New York to see how we can do this. The crime was committed in Manhattan, right?” was the only question he asked me.

  Two days after our conversation, my cousin called. He had spoken to the New York firm, and they recommended a private investigation agency, which could navigate the intricacies of the pol
ice bureaucracy and identify and select relevant information of interest to me in the case. The American lawyer with whom my cousin had spoken offered to request the information from the agency.

  “It’ll set you back about two thousand dollars, but at least you’ll have no worries, and they’ll send you copies of all the files, everything aboveboard, I think it’s worth it. Here’s the e-mail of the guy in New York. Write to him, he’s waiting for you to contact him,” my cousin Jorge said.

  Later that same day, I wrote to Oliver Hoskings. I asked for information concerning the possible murder of a Brazilian citizen, Sergio Y., on February 2, 2010, in the West Village.

  I received an answer to my email about fifteen minutes later. Hoskings asked me to confirm the full name of the victim and that the death had occurred in the borough of Manhattan. I wrote to him confirming the information, and he promised to be in touch shortly.

  Three days later, I received a message from Oliver Hoskings stating that there was no record of a murder or an attempted murder of a Sergio Emílio Y. in Manhattan on the date indicated. He asked if I would like to broaden the search to three days before and three days after February 2nd, which I agreed to.

  He wrote to me again the next day. He said he could assure me that there was no death certificate for a Sergio Y. in Manhattan. However, he called my attention to a strange fact: another person with that same last name had been murdered on Grove Street in the West Village, on the day I had initially specified. He asked if I wanted information on that other individual. I was intrigued by the coincidence and said yes.

  Of all the information that Hoskings forwarded me, the only facts that did not make sense were the first name (Sandra) and the sex (female) of the murder victim on Grove Street, on February 2, 2010. My American lawyer had managed to piece together a narrative from his search of the court records.

  The body of Sandra Yacoubian was found facedown in a pool of her own blood by Edna Alves, a Brazilian maid. Ms. Yacoubian, born in São Paulo, Brazil, on January 10, 1988, was pushed from a fourth-floor window by a neighbor. She fell, broke her neck and bled to death in the backyard of the house she shared with her assassin at 12 Grove Street.