Kill yourself and you'll live happily!

[A translation of '¡MÁTESE USTED Y VIVIRÁ FELIZ!' by Enrique Jardiel Poncela]

Oratory is one of the blind forces of Nature. I gladly thank the reader for their congratulating me

for having crafted this previous phrase, and I will promptly explain why I think that oratory is one

of the blind forces of Nature.

And to make it even clearer, I'll put on these sheets of paper a curious story. Hear me out.

****

Mateo Ramos was born with the gift of oratory, just as others are born with kidney failure. He

didn't inherit this ability, as his parents couldn't even leave him a decent brain as inheritance; so

it's very hard for me to explain just what circumstances led Mateo to have this gift of speech.

But there was no doubt that he had it. From the cradle, the strength of his eloquency would be

felt all around him. His cries demanding — for example — his bottle, wasn't the common cry of

other kids, an acute cry, persistent and irresistible, that made those who heard it remember king

Herod with nostalgic melancholy. His crying was pressing, electrifying, energetic and imperative,

just like a trumpet. As soon as they heard it, the whole household would move like lighting

searching for his bottle, and in a few seconds Mateo would find himself with six different bottles

to choose from. His gift for speech was starting to shine.

And it went on shining.

In the children's games, two words would suffice for all his tiny friends to give him their toys.

In school, no leaf of tree or paper would move against Mateo's will.

And in college he could mobilize his classmates to a strike or into a classroom with a short

speech of two or three minutes.

Like an expert inheritance lawyer, the will of the people was under his control.

In life he triumphed. And in love he failed; because he tried to make women fall in love with him

by focusing on his prose, and he never knew that what he'd have to focus on were his kisses.

As everyone that fails at love, Mateo became a pessimist.

(It's absurd: when a man sees his love rejected by a blond woman, instead of trying to love a

brunette woman, the logical thing, he dedicates the rest of his days to say that life is a hatefulcomedy,
Humanity a cage of jackals, and photolitography a rather important thing)

His pessimism made him withdrawn and unfriendly; he walked alone, called hot dog salesmen

names, kicked trees and blew raspberries to statues.

— He's a lost cause! — I thought when I saw him.

In those days, a certain Cultural Society happened to invite Mateo to give a lecture. Mateo

agreed. And his lecture's title, he declared, would be the rather funny advice "Kill yourself and

you'll live happily!"

I promised I wouldn't miss it.

The public filled the lecture room. There was such an expectation to hear the "king of oratory" as

the program advertised. Four gramophones waited for Mateo to start speaking to impregnate

every word on their virgin vinyl.

10 minutes later, it began.

Mateo Ramos started his lecture stressing that life was not worth living.

He made us see how our higher purpouse in life was in growing and multiplying, and built a

terrific argument, proving that growing was a tremendously boring thing and that multiplying only

brought pain and shocks.

When all of us were plenty convinced that growing and multiplying was a total equivocation,

Mateo went on to study the stimuli that humans might have to go on living. Among these, he

said, wealth, power, parenthood, love, etc...

— Great wealth is almost never obtained — he said — when you obtain it, our biggest fear is

losing it, and it turns our hearts to stone

— Power brings only anguish and tribulation — he declared — and Death erases any human

power in the end

— Parenthood — he said — can never compensate the pain of seeing our children suffer.

And he added reasons and more reasons to fortify his thesis with frightening eloquency.

Us listeners had given up. Almost all of us were crying, and many wailed loudly.

— And love — continued Mateo — is a giant lie. One year after having died, the person that

adored us will only remember us in our birthday. And five years later, not even then. What's left,

then, to be happy? Nothing, ladies and gentlemen, nothing! That's why I'd face Mankind and say

"Kill yourself and live happily" that's why I...

Mateo's oratory prowess kept attacking the edifice of human happiness. And his word had such

power of suggestion that a trickle of listeners were leaving the lecture room and started killing

themselves in the hall.

Every two or three seconds you'd hear another shot go.

— Another one has fallen! — I thought, anguished.

Mateo was steadfast, talking, and in the hall the streak of suicides continued.

Soon enough it was only me in the lecture room. I tried resisting Mateo, but I couldn't, and I left

to the hall and jumped into the stairwell hole

****

Out of 500 people that attended the lecture, only an applied mathematician and myself had

survived, after 3 months of rest.

As Spring was coming, and Mateo's speech couldn't influence us any longer, we were joyful for

surviving. One afternoon, having dinner, someone told us the terrible news:

— Mateo killed himself yesterday

Also Mateo? I couldn't understand that. Everyone knows that whoever preaches for something is

always the one to not do it. Surgeons won't let themselves be cut open; pharmacists never

consent to taking medicine; cooks barely eat 2 or 3 bites; tech vendors never listen to the radio,

and hens don't eat fried eggs.

Why, then, did Mateo, who preached suicide, end up killing himself?

The officer explained it to me the next day.

—Mateo — he said — was convinced by his own speech. It seems that he had bought one of the

vinyl disks that the gramophones recorded of his lecture. Well, when he played it in his turntable

and he heard himself speaking, his oratory was so strong that Mateo was left as impressed as his

vinyls, and he ate two kilograms of strychnine.

****

And thus I've explained why, in my own judgement, oratory is one of the blind forces of Nature.