“So many questions!” exclaims Belén Alvite, head of the Centre d’Estudi i Prevenció de Conductes Addictives (Cepca), looking at the service’s mobile phone, which is smoking. It’s mid-afternoon and they still haven’t finished answering all the questions that teenagers from all over the island have sent in about suicide. That taboo subject. The interest of young people has exceeded the expectations placed on an initiative that Alvite caught on the fly. When she found out that Nadia Banegas, from Musicaldansa, was editing ‘Norway today’, based on the true story of two teenagers who met up on a fjord to take their own lives, it was clear to her that she wanted to work with her.
Yesterday, some 400 high school students from Sa Colomina, Sa Real and Santa Maria watched, from the seats of Can Ventosa, the story of July and August (played by Lucía Serra and Max Pérez), two young people who meet on the internet and flee to the top of a fjord with the aim of taking their own lives. “I’m going to kill myself. And I want to do it with someone else. Does anyone want to die with me?”, July asks in a chat from his room. A message in a bottle thrown into the digital ocean to which 17-year-old August replies, claiming to have tried. “A little bit.” And without success. The stage, to which hundreds of students from the Pitiusas Islands are connected from their classrooms, becomes the 600-metre-high fjord where the couple, equipped with warm clothes, a tent, sleeping bags, beers and sandwiches, chat before jumping into the void. A jump that will last ten seconds. “What do you plan to do in those ten seconds?” they ask each other before counting, in real time, those ten seconds. Those ten very long seconds. “An eternity, ten seconds.”
People who need help have two telephone lines to turn to: Teléfono de la Esperanza (717 003 717) or Teléfono Contra el Suicidio (911 385 385), dedicated to suicide prevention.
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