Alexandre Vidal Porto - Sergio Y.

That was when she discovered she could be happy forever — and she was.

With new documents that identified her as a man, one week later, she wrote two letters: one to Adam Viriaudis and the other to her father, Pinkas Simkevicius. The first one was a letter of introduction for her twin brother, Angelus, “a very skilled tailor, who received the same training I did at our father’s house in Lithuania,” who “sought employment at a respectable establishment and a better future in New York.”

The second letter, however, was written in a different handwriting and it was signed by a Russian greengrocer, “a friend of your daughter’s, the widow A. Zebrowskas,” who, she regretted to inform him, “had passed away two weeks earlier in Chicago, a victim of typhus.”

The following week, Angelus Zebrowskas arrived in New York. He brought only one suitcase filled with Frank’s clothes — adjusted to fit Angelus — and the letter from his twin sister, Adriana, addressed to Viriaudis, recommending his skill as a tailor. Helena’s uncle recognized Adriana’s tiny handwriting and employed Angelus as a cutter.

It is not known how the news of Adriana’s death was received by the Simkevicius family in Gekodiche. Angelus never again had any news from them. It was as if he had lost them all in a massacre, in a genocide.

Angelus worked hard and prospered. He married Carmela, a Sicilian with two small children, who, like Adriana, had become a widow soon after coming to the United States. In a few years, Carmela and Angelus had a clothing factory and three clothing stores. Angelus became a benefactor of the Italian community, which he fit into so well that after his death a stretch of Mulberry Street, in the heart of Little Italy, was renamed Angelus’s Way.

Angelus Zebrowskas’s secret was only discovered after his death, while his body was being prepared for burial. The subject was, however, quelled immediately. Carmela told the priest that Angelus had suffered an accident in Lithuania and that their marriage had never been consummated. She asked the priest that the subject be laid to rest once and for all.

“Father, God could not have given me a more dedicated husband, or a better father to my children,” she said before burying the subject.

Now the ties seemed clear to me between Adriana Simkevicius’s story and Sergio Y.’s impulse to leave Brazil for another country. For me, the explanation could be found, at least in part, in the unusual title of the biography found by Sergio on Ellis Island: In America: The Story of Our Father .

As I understand it — although I could be mistaken — if Adriana’s story corresponds to Sergio Y.’s, then Angelus’s should correspond to that of Sandra.

This parallelism would be the basis for Sergio’s going to New York. He would have followed Adriana’s example. He would have traveled to find himself. He took Sandra to New York, so that she could be as happy as Angelus was. Like him, he would become a bastion, reinvented in a new country.

Sergio and Adriana jumped off the diving board trusting that in the pool below — that in America — there was water.

Metaphorically, America was everything that they already were, but had not yet managed to be. It was in New York that Adriana and Sergio were reborn. Or better said, it was where Sandra and Angelus were born, because, in fact, Adriana and Sergio only went to New York to quietly die.

I walk the city and feel a little dizzy. I walk block by block. If there are no cars coming, I cross even if the crossing signal flashes red. I want to reach a conclusion.

How much happiness was there in the life of Sandra Yacoubian, who was killed on Grove Street? On the morning of the day she was murdered did she wake up thinking happy thoughts or sad ones? That day did she experience any joy in living?

The few times I have been to a sports stadium, I could not avoid thinking that every one of those persons — not to mention the flies, the cockroaches, the ants, the bacteria, everything alive in that stadium — would die. At different times, of course, but each in their own way would disappear.

It is obvious, but we forget. It must be some sort of defense mechanism we possess without knowing. It is like going to one of those hypermarkets on a Saturday afternoon and, in the checkout line, waiting, surrounded by carts overflowing with grocery, realizing that all that food will soon turn to shit. No one thinks it, but it is so.

This is more morbid than I would have liked, but that is because I need to remind myself — I have a tendency to feel immortal — that we all die at some point. Some prematurely, as was the case with Sandra. Others, long after their expiration date.

Death does not necessarily have anything to do with the deceased’s life. Happy and sad people die just the same. Death does not choose based on your mental state or level of happiness. That is the irony. One day you are happily walking along the beach. Feeling fine, walking from Leme to Leblon. And, all of a sudden, you feel a shock in the middle of your chest. The pain paralyzes your neck. Then your heart. And you go blank. You are dead. You were happy but died just the same.

All my patients will die too. The fact that their death will be tragic, or quick, or heroic is mere and complete happenstance. The death of Sergio Y. was criminal and premature, but was it fated? It is sad that he died murdered and young. But why should it have been any different?

Even if the body of the deceased were able to retain fond memories of its last day, those memories are final, finished. Not one more letter may be added or deleted. There can be no editing. Nothing more will happen to a man once he is buried — unless they decide to move the bones to make room for someone else.

Sergio Y. considered himself unhappy. Perhaps it was the same unhappiness which Adriana could not excise from her body.

For transsexual individuals, the body, its physical appearance, is the greatest source of distress.

Imagine being a woman, feeling you were a woman, yet being seen by the world as a man. An invisible woman, that is what Sergio Y. was. Doomed to never be seen, to always appear as what he was not. Imagine you, a woman, with hair growing out of control all over your face and breasts, speaking with a man’s voice, hysterctomized, with something hanging between your legs forever.

Angelus and Sandra were locked in a prison for years, hidden from the view of others, inside bodies that were not their own. One day, after a journey, after an ocean crossing, they finally managed to emerge and acquire a life of their own. The feeling Sergio complained of in his sessions with me consisted simply in his not being able to give life to who he really was, Sandra.

The role I had in achieving this happiness is hard to assess.

Considering that my only involvement in the matter was to instruct him to visit Ellis Island — or so I think — then what I did was very little. Just a random comment, without therapeutic intentions any deeper than that. Of course I thought his visit to the museum would trigger mental processes, but that was only because he was an intelligent person, and the museum is educational. I thought he would like Ellis Island because when I went I liked it. And there was also the whole story of his grandfather, who found his America in Belém.

Sergio might just as easily have decided to go to Ellis Island on his own, not because of my suggestion or anyone else’s. He would have found the book that pointed the way to his happiness and offered him an example to follow just the same. As you can see, my participation in all this was minimal, as my friend Eduardo had already brought to my attention.