Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  But Eugenia, who seemed not to hear, told me that the decision had already been made, and that when she came by in two hours her daughter should be waiting for her downstairs in the lobby, passport in hand and suitcase ready, since there wouldn’t be anywhere to park and the neighborhood is so dangerous. And I said, Well no, Señora, Agustina is not leaving this house for any reason whatsoever, so go have seaweed plastered on yourself in Virginia if that’s what you want, and immediately I regretted it, it would have been better to issue a firm but polite no, I let her see the worst side of me, I thought, This woman thinks I’m a boor and I’ve just proved her right.

  Upset at having made such a mistake, I lost the thread of the conversation for a minute, and when I picked it up again, Eugenia was saying, You don’t know how that girl has made me suffer, she’s never shown me the slightest consideration, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, now it turned out that the victim was Eugenia and she wasn’t really calling to offer her help but to present a laundry list of grievances, and even though it was the first time that Agustina’s mother and I had spoken, we ended up fighting over the phone with the assurance of old antagonists and what began as a brief, dry exchange, in which each word was weighed so as not to go beyond the strictly impersonal, gradually turned into a rapid volley of awkwardly phrased and poorly thought-out remarks, so full of mutual recrimination that the result was a repugnant intimacy, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, as if a stranger had stepped on someone else’s foot by mistake in the street and the two had dropped everything in order to spend the afternoon spitting in each other’s faces. I said, What you want, Señora, isn’t to help your daughter recover but to take her away from me, and she shouted, You stole my daughter, with a shrillness that she must still be regretting, because the pitifulness of a petit bourgeois like me is a matter of course, but it’s unforgivable in a woman of her stature. I had worked myself into a nervous frenzy and I suppose she had too because she could hardly catch her breath, until I finally said no to her four or five times in a row, No no no no, Señora, Agustina is not leaving here, and then Eugenia hung up without saying goodbye and that was that.

  BEING A MUSICIAN by profession, Grandfather Portulinus made a living by giving piano lessons to the daughters of the well-to-do families of the town of Sasaima, among them Blanca Mendoza, a slight girl who was hardly a promising pianist as she had clumsy hands and little ear for music, and in fact Portulinus never even managed to teach her the scales, but instead he ended up marrying her, although he was twice her age. If he did, it was partly for love and partly out of obligation, because he had gotten her pregnant through a thoughtless, inconsiderate act that was committed without her parents’ knowledge and probably against her will, an ill-fated start to any marriage, but in the end what mattered most wasn’t what was augured but the way the man dealt with his fate, and twenty long years of unswerving conjugal loyalty were proof that if Grandfather Portulinus had married the girl who was now Grandmother Blanca, it was because he loved her, not because he had to.

  Besides giving piano lessons, Portulinus composed music to order for marriages, serenades, and celebrations, certain folk dances like bambucos and pasillos, which, as Grandmother used to say, were catchy and lively despite his Germanness, and they touched people’s hearts even though their lyrics made reference to sky-blue summers, the snows of yesteryear, pine forests, the ocher shades of fall, and other yearnings equally unknown in equatorial Sasaima, where no one doubted that Nicholas Portulinus was a good man, and if certain oddities of character were noted in him, they were dismissed as being attributable to his foreignness. But the truth is that every so often, as if in waves, Grandfather Portulinus suffered mood swings of varying severity and for months he would give up teaching, stop playing and composing, and only roar or mutter, seemingly plagued by noises not of this world, or at least that’s what he complained to his wife. Blanca, sweet Blanca, your name is enough to clear away the shadows, he would say to her when she took him out into the countryside to soothe him, and he would run holding her hand and then trip and fall, rolling in the tall, sweet-smelling summer grasses, though it should be understood that this was not summer in Sasaima, since in Sasaima there’s only one single continuous season all 365 days of the year, but that other summer, so far away now, lingering in a foreigner’s mournful memory.

  THE HOTEL ROOM was luxurious, or striving to be so; I remember yards of fabric in drapes and upholstery and a peach-colored carpet that exuded the smell of newness. At the far end was Agustina, sitting on the floor, as if trapped between the wall and a table with a lamp on it, a place where no one would think to sit unless they had fallen. She looked pale and thin and her hair and clothes were bedraggled, as if she hadn’t eaten or bathed for days, as if she had been subjected to all sorts of humiliations. And yet her eyes were shining, I remember that clearly, at the far end of the room Agustina’s eyes were shining, with an unhealthy gleam but they were shining, as if whatever was sapping her strength had been incapable of breaking the intensity of her gaze, in fact to the contrary, amid the sudden waste of her body I discerned a challenge in her eyes that filled me with fear, something disturbing, an excessive vibration that brought to mind the word delirium, Agustina was possessed by some delirium that simmered inside her with a slow, hostile shudder.

  And yet it had been only four days since I’d gone away and left her painting the walls of the front room of our apartment a mossy green, a color she herself had chosen because, as she explained to me, feng shui advises it for couples like us, and to prevent her from spouting some complicated Eastern theory, I was careful not to ask her what she meant by couples like us or why moss green would be good for us. I had to drive my van to Ibagué on Wednesday to deliver an order of Purina, so I decided to take advantage of a free stay my health insurance offered at Las Palmeras Holiday Resort, tacky and middle class, as I informed Agustina, but it had a pool and cabins and was in a stunning mountain valley in the warm country, and ultimately why find fault when I couldn’t have afforded anything better anyway. I wanted to spend a few days there with my two sons, Toño and Carlos, my children with Marta Elena, my first wife; for a while I’d needed some time with them to see how they were feeling, and to continue mending the family closeness that had been ruptured when I separated from their mother.

  That was my reason for not inviting Agustina, too, although she gets along well with the boys and they get along well with her; in fact, I can’t help but feel that there are moments when a generational bond is established among the three of them that leaves me out, or to put it another way, a slightly hypnotic and almost physical link, created when my two sons’ eyes light up at the sight of Agustina’s beauty, and she, in turn, gazes nostalgically at those sculpted adolescent bodies like someone relinquishing a place she isn’t fated to visit. What I mean is, things cool a few degrees between my sons and me when she’s there; our conversation turns a little stiff and we behave as though in the presence of company.

  When I informed Agustina that I was taking the trip alone, she threw one of those seismic fits that have led me to call her my rabid plaything, because Agustina is like that, witty and amusing but with a vicious temper. Afterward she refused to speak to me for several hours, and at last, when she was calmer, she asked how I could possibly not realize that she might like a break and some sunshine, too, that we had no time together during the week because I was at work and I spent Saturdays with Toño and Carlos. It broke my heart to hear Agustina’s reproaches because in a way she’s like an older daughter to me whom I sometimes neglect in favor of my other two children, and also because the sun and warmth make her even more desirable, cheering her up and toasting her skin, which is usually so excessively white that it’s almost blue, and it broke my heart, too, because all her complaints were true, as true as they were inevitable: nothing in the world, not even my devotion to her, would prevent me from using those coupons and free days to go off alone with my two boys.

  Upon se
eing that I wasn’t going to change my mind, Agustina pulled an old trick from her sleeve: she told me she had a feeling that something bad was going to happen, and only someone who has the dubious fortune of living with a visionary can understand the tyranny this represents, because by raising the alarm of impending danger, the visionary’s premonitions freeze trips, plans, and impulses in such a way that you never discover whether the supposed mishap would have come about or not; or actually it does come about even when it doesn’t, and the seer’s will ends up being imposed on everyone else’s. For example, Agustina warns, Don’t go to Ibagué with the boys because something will happen to you along the way, although what she’s really referring to is vague ill fortune, not a specific accident, but supposing she says, as she has before, Something bad might happen to you along the way, she has a high probability from the start of being right because life is hazardous in and of itself and likely to play dirty with us, but also because in a country like this, split from top to bottom by a mountain range, the highways, which are already in bad shape, twist and twine around abysses and as if that weren’t enough, they’re seized every other day by the army, the paramilitaries, or the guerrillas, who kidnap you, kill you, or assault you with grenades, beatings, gunfire, explosives, antipersonnel mines, or the massive detonation of propane tanks.

  Another thing Agustina usually accomplishes with her doom-filled warnings is to make me cancel plans that for one reason or another don’t appeal to her or aren’t to her advantage, and on top of that I have to be grateful to her because I can’t avoid the secret suspicion that it’s thanks to her that I’ve been rescued from disaster. And finally, if I don’t heed her warning and actually have an accident, even if it’s something as insignificant as the engine overheating on the journey up into the mountains, then she can chant an “I told you so” that sounds triumphant even as she tries not to gloat, so when faced with this new premonition, I willed myself to keep my cool, telling her simply, No, Agustina, I promise, nothing bad will happen on this trip. And how wrong I was this time, my God, how disastrously wrong.

  DO YOU HAVE A CIGARETTE, angel?, no, of course you don’t, Agustina doll, you’re not into that anymore; I, on the other hand, who used to be so healthy, the king of endorphins, lungs like brand new from so much exercise, have been smoking like a fiend ever since things fell apart, because believe it or not, nicotine’s the only thing that keeps me halfway afloat.

  That time at L’Esplanade, Spider was presiding from the head of the table propped up in his wheelchair, stiff as a frozen fish stick, the poor guy, and behind him at the next table were his two favorite lackeys, Paco Malo and the Sucker, who weren’t waiting outside the way bodyguards should wait, steaming up the glass in those Mercedes that make guys like your father so proud and that don’t do a thing for me, because I steer clear of heavy machinery, I ride easy, free as a bird, and full fucking throttle on my Bee Em Dubyoo bike, which is worth twice any of my friends’ heaps in pickup and price, always moving smooth, with no bodyguards or hassle, my only protection my guardian angel, because I’m still the same today as I was when you met me fifteen years ago, baby, and I’ll be the same till they bury me. And buried’s the perfect word for this death in life I’ve been condemned to. But anyway, Paco Malo and the Sucker were shoveling in their rations shoulder to shoulder with the bosses, spoiling the show and giving everybody the creeps, all because Spider, who was paranoid about kidnappings, had the gall to sit a pair of thugs at the next table and let them order French wine and dishes with fancy French names, what a ridiculous sight, these two guys with pistols practically bulging out of their armpits, in scummy little ties, smacking their lips as they chewed, and if Spider wasn’t so goddamn rich, that frog Courtois who owns L’Esplanade would never have permitted such a blatant show of disrespect.

  At the head of the table was Spider, paralyzed from the waist down, with me to his left, and to his right your brother Joaco, who’d just socked away a fortune as a go-between in the privatization of Telefónica, and also Jorge Luis Ayerbe, who had the press after him because of a massacre of Indians in the Cauca region, which is where his ultratraditional, paramilitary-sponsoring family is from, because a few months back the Ayerbes had sent their little private troop of paracos to scare some Indians off state land that, according to Jorge Luis, had been the legitimate property of his family since the time of the viceroys; nothing unusual, since hiring mercenaries is what’s done to control trespassing, except that this time the paracos started setting fire to the Indians’ shelters with the Indians inside, and as a result Jorge Luis was hounded by a raging pack of human rights defenders and an orgy of NGOs.

  The other person present was, as always, Ronald Silverstein, the gringo we call Rony Silver, who poses in public as the manager of a Chevrolet dealership and operates under the table as a DEA agent, an open secret, completely fucking absurd, considering that Spider, who can get away with anything because he’s so loaded, always makes the same lame joke right in front of him, That Rony Silver, he’s double trouble, wouldn’t you say, boys?, and I myself used to take the liberty of calling Silver 007 to his face, the gringo smiling away, tolerating my rudeness because he got a cut from me and those DEA people are more crooked than anybody, it wasn’t just Silver who was getting down on all fours for me but every one of them, champions of the double standard, and your father and your brother Joaco, too, that’s right, they may have been rich in pesos before, but it was me, Midas McAlister, who multiplied their profits and made them rich in dollars, because you know there’s a reason they call me Midas, which is that everything I touch turns to gold, or at least that’s the way it used to be, because now everything I touch turns to shit, including you, Agustina darling, I’m sorry, believe me.

  AT GAI REPOS the three of us, my mother, Bichi, and I, slather ourselves with sunscreen and still we get as pink as shrimp the first few days of summer vacation while father and Joaco, who are naturally dark, tan right away and say, Be careful of the sun, it’s too strong for you. Only I know, Bichi, how much you would’ve liked it if your first finger was longer than your middle finger and you never burned in the sun; only I know how anxiously you wished things had turned out that way, but they didn’t, Bichi Bichito, you have to realize that, and you have to understand why my father scolds you for it, and scolds you with good reason. Your black curls and your pale skin and your big dark eyes like the Christ Child’s are worth nothing to you, because you would much rather have been strong and a little bit ugly like them, like Joaco and my father. Angel Face, they call Bichi, because he’s so pretty, and Aunt Sofi calls him Doll but our father doesn’t like it, it makes him lose his temper.

  Let’s close the curtains, Bichi Bichito, so that it’s dark in our temple, Agustina says, and the boy replies, I like it better when you say plunged into shadow, All right, so that it’s plunged into shadow, and let’s do it all secretly, so no one else will ever know. Each time her father hits her little brother there’s a ceremony in the black night of a dark room, with a priestess who is Agustina and a novice who’s you, Bichi; you’re the sacred victim, the sacrificial goat, the Agnus Dei, and with your bottom still red from father’s slaps, you, the Lamb, pull down your underwear to show me where it hurts and then you take your underwear all the way off, and I take my panties off, too, and I stay like that, with nothing under my school uniform, a prickly unease between my legs, a delicious little bit of fear that my mother will burst into the room and discover everything, because Bichi and his sister know very well, although they never say so, that their ceremony must be performed like this, without underwear; if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be sacred and the powers wouldn’t be free to visit us, because it’s they who choose me and not the other way around, and their visit is always connected to the tickles I feel down there.

  This is the Third Call, this is our secret, although of course the true secret, the greatest mystery, the treasure of the temple, is the photographs, and that’s why the real ceremony begins only when w
e bring them down from their hiding place on one of the ceiling beams, at the place where the beam meets the wall, leaving a small space that’s invisible unless someone climbs on top of the wardrobe, but the only ones who can get up there are you and I, because that’s the sanctum sanctorum, the place where the photographs are hidden and kept safe. You, Bichito, are in charge of lighting the wands of incense that make us dizzy with their threads of sweet smoke, and the two children laugh, huddled together with the joy of conspirators, because they know that never ever will anyone else find these photographs, nor will they know that I have them or that we celebrate our mass with them or that it’s from them that I get my powers or that I found them by chance one afternoon after school, says Agustina, when I was rummaging secretly through the things my father keeps in his study, because although the children aren’t allowed to go in, they do all the time, Agustina because she knows there are forbidden things there and her brother Joaco because he always finds some money to steal and invest in the business ventures of his friend Midas McAlister, who sells cigarettes, secondhand comics, pictures of soccer stars, and Amazonian amulets at the Boys School, anything for the idiots who hand over their allowances in exchange for junk.

  After a period of astonishment, or rather several days spent examining the photographs, shut up in the bathroom, Agustina knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had taken them himself, my own father, not only because I found them in his study but because the furniture in them is just like his, the same window, the same desk, the same recliner, and also because my father’s hobby, besides stamp collecting, is photography; my father is an excellent photographer and at home we have twelve or fifteen albums of pictures he’s taken of us, at our first Communions, on our birthdays, on weekends at the house in the cold country and on vacations in Sasaima, on our visits to Paris, on our trip to see snow, and a thousand other occasions; all the pictures he takes of us prove how much he loves us, but there’s nothing like these photographs, the most incredible thing is that the woman in them looks just like Aunt Sofi, is Aunt Sofi herself, or rather at first Agustina couldn’t believe it but in the end she finally had to admit that it was, because whoever sees them realizes immediately, just as Bichi realized when she showed them to him for the first time, It’s her, said Bichi, it’s Aunt Sofi but with no clothes on, what huge breasts Aunt Sofi has.