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one who found us.”
    â€œHow can I remember that? Anyway, if she was under the stairs, she must have been a devil.”
    â€œI thought you didn’t believe in that stuff.”
    â€œWhy do you think people keep away from places like that? I think it’s written in the Bible: the devil hides there.”
    The conversation then moved on to aromatherapy, a discipline my sister had recently taken up. I realized it was time to go. I downed my coffee and put an end to my visit.
    â€œGet some sleep,” Rita said with a sardonic expression as she waved good-bye. “I think the flu’s gotten to your brain.”

How to Become Enlightened in One Weekend
    That afternoon, my Epiphany gift to myself was correcting the laggards’ essays. Some couldn’t even spell Werther’s name. I gave some of them a pass out of compassion. Others were given a reprieve so that I wouldn’t have to read their stuff again in September. I’d become pragmatic.
    I bundled up the essays in my folder ready for the next morning. My first class was with that group.
    The light was fading. I switched on my reading lamp so that I could read a few more entries in Rheingold’s dictionary before dinner. I was struck by his definition of a German word that is no longer used much these days.
    Weltschmerz
: literally, “world-weariness.”
    The word seemed to have been created for Goethe’s hero. At the end of his entry, Rheingold points out that
Weltschmerz
sufferers are often the sons or (less frequently) daughters of rich parents who don’t have to worry about their next meal or having a roof over their heads and are therefore free to indulge in a feeling of existential malaise.
    This definition made me think of my sister. Although shedidn’t have a Romantic bone in her body, Rita had made it very clear as an adolescent that the world was piling its pain upon her. And how!
    Maybe it’s because our mother died when we were very young, and we were left in the care of a man who neglected us because of his other priorities. Rita had inherited my mother’s apartment, where she now lives with her husband, and I got some shares that I never touched, plus a feeling of bitterness that still lingers on.
    Rita and I were quite close until she turned twenty. Even though she had become despotic and nasty by then, as an adolescent she still thought she could change. I called her the “course kid,” because she was always trying something new: Tai Chi, Reiki, Biodanza, and so on.
    She was trying to feel good about herself, a sheer egotistical impulse that didn’t bear any fruit. Then again, I found her amusing. She always had something new to talk about, and I listened with curiosity, even though I didn’t think any of that stuff could make a person happy.
    â€”
    I remember that one weekend—I was a university student then—I agreed to go along with her to a course of what in those days was called “transcendental meditation.” The guru was a tanned fiftysomething. He had rented a farmhouse in the Empordà region, where—the leaflet informed us—we would share the miraculous experience of enlightenment after just one weekend.
    I found myself in an attic with about twenty other young people who were avid to learn what existence was all about.
    After breakfast on the Saturday morning, the guru summoned us to the garden for a chat. He began by dismissing the “false gurus”—that is to say, his competitors—and assured us thatenlightenment was within the reach of all those who dared open their eyes.
    â€œAnd you’re already enlightened,” he told us. “But the thing is, you don’t know it yet.”
    Everything was pretty normal until then. After that, we went into a hall, where each one was given a thick mat and a hard pillow. The guru told us everything about the lotus position and the half-lotus position, warning us that it might