Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  OF COURSE I DIDN’T BELIEVE shit when Spider told me to bet with confidence because his pecker wasn’t all the way dead yet; if I took the bet despite everything it was because ultimately I didn’t mind losing, or at least that was how I explained it to myself, since after all I’d skim the money they won from the wad that Pablo Escobar sent them through me and they wouldn’t even notice, how could they, when they were flapping their ears in delight at the rapturous and hygienic way they were getting rich, not sullying their hands in dirty business or being driven to sin or lifting a single finger, because all they had to do was wait for the filthy money to fall from heaven, already washed, laundered, and disinfected.

  Or could you possibly have thought things were any other way, princess? Can it be that you didn’t know where all those dollars came from, the dollars flowing to your brother Joaco and your father and all their buddies, and so many others from the Las Lomas Polo Club and the society circles of Bogotá and Medellín, the dollars with which they opened those fat bank accounts in the Bahamas, Panama, Switzerland, and every fiscal paradise in existence, as if they were international jet-setters? Why do you think your family welcomed me into their house like a sultan, Agustina kitten, why they dusted off the Baccarat crystal and the Christofle cutlery for me, and served me mousses and pâtés and blinis that your mother made with her own hands, even though I had gotten you pregnant and not even threats could make me marry you as your father demanded? Why do you think they treated me like a king despite it all, ignoring your rage and shame? Well, because it was thanks to me that they’d bought the lobster they were serving; don’t look so surprised, sweetheart, don’t tell me you hadn’t already solved that little puzzle, because what would that say about your powers of divination.

  The business I handled was bloodless and juicy, and had nothing to do with the Aerobics Center, which was just a front. To strip the veil from your eyes once and for all, Agustina doll, I’m going to give you a brief summary of the crooked dealings so that you see them in wide-screen Technicolor. Spider, Silver, Joaco, and a few others gave me X amount of money in checks in lowly Colombian pesos that I arranged to have delivered to Escobar, and when Escobar landed his shipment of cocaine in the USA, he returned their investment to them through me, but magic, oh magic!, now it was in dollars and had multiplied spectacularly, by three to one, four to one, even five to one, according to the blessed whim of Saint Escobar. And so, without tangling with the law or tarnishing their reputations, they became smug and invisible investors in drug-trafficking and fattened up their foreign bank accounts to the bursting point. Escobar was happy because he was laundering a fortune and I had no complaints, either, because I took a hefty cut.

  The whole thing involved risks, of course, and to get mixed up in it you had to have steady nerves, because if the shipment didn’t land, Pablo wouldn’t even return the investment. The five-to-one deal made the old-moneys drool like crazy but it had its downside like everything else, which was that no tantrums were allowed, or in other words, the Olympian investors couldn’t complain if the money was delayed or never reached them. Not to mention that any of them could be killed at any moment, according to the rights that Saint Escobar grants himself over the lives of those who get rich at his expense; I don’t know whether you’re following me, sweetheart, I know finances aren’t your strong point, but what I’m trying to tell you is that the instant you put a dollar from Pablo in your pocket, you automatically become his pawn, a worthless lackey at his beck and call. By now you must be able to imagine who it was risking his hide in gringo-land, poking the balls of the DEA big boys over there, why who else but yours truly, Midas McAlister at your service. As soon as Pablo sent word that the oven was hot, I would fly to Miami, set myself up in an oh-so-discreet hotel in Coconut Grove, wait for the suitcases to arrive full of cash from the street sales of the drug, take what was mine and dispatch the rest to the spotless investors of Bogotá. Mission accomplished, I head back home, end of story.

  TOMORROW, TOMORROW I’LL really do it, I said to myself each day, sitting in the lobby of the Wellington Hotel while I drank a cup of absurdly expensive tea. Until I did dare. Last Friday night I came into the Wellington at nine, knowing that I’d find the Fearless Girl in reception, with her long nails and stormy mane. And there she was, very businesslike and efficient, effortlessly improvising languages according to the nationality of each foreign guest, so I marched up to her, putting on my best face so that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that all I am is a poor bastard racked by despair because the woman I love went crazy on me, and in my best VIP voice I told her that I was there to make a reservation for a couple of friends who wanted to spend a few days in Bogotá, Bzz!, mistake, I made my first mistake, no one travels to Bogotá of their own accord; the only people who come here are those who have no choice, Anyway, I continued, these friends of mine are coming to Bogotá and they asked me to make a reservation for them, Of course, Señor, no problem, Well, yes, Señorita, there is a small problem, which is that they asked me to take a look at the room before I gave my approval.

  At that point she seemed to glare at me with a policewoman’s eyes; what if she worked for the police, like all receptionists in all hotels everywhere? You see, my friends were already here once, at this hotel, a few months ago, I was explaining more than necessary, And, well, my friends would like to have the same room they had last time because they liked the garden you can see from the window. She asked me which room it was, Room 413, I answered, and I felt sick saying that number, so intimately associated with my misfortune, I can’t show you 413 because it’s occupied right now, Señor, she said checking the screen and managing to hit the right keys on the computer despite her mile-long nails, each perfectly painted in stripes of red, white, and blue nail polish, like a miniature French flag, and I asked myself whether she painted the design herself, the nails of her left hand with her right, and the right-hand nails with her left?, she must be ambidextrous, this girl, to manage such a feat.

  Instantly my thoughts swung to Agustina’s lovely oval nails, always short and never painted, and to the mother-of-pearl case that once belonged to her grandmother Blanca, where she kept the files, tweezers, emery boards, and other tools for giving herself a manicure, Agustina pronounces the word in French, and when I hear her I grimace, The word exists in Spanish and it’s almost identical, Agustina, we say manicura, see how easy?, in this country we get a manicura and not a manicure, the advantage being that we don’t have to work so hard to pronounce it. Leaning there on the reception counter at the Wellington Hotel, I sweat in remorse when I realize how sharply I criticize Agustina for her rich-girl mannerisms, how cruel I am to her sometimes, but fortunately Agustina ignores my bitter remarks and keeps doing things her way, not only does she say manicure ten times over but she also impassively claims that the little orange emery board you use to expose the white half-moons of your nails must be made of orangewood, my wife manages to live in a poor man’s house like mine, where all we eat is hamburger because we can’t afford sirloin, while at the same time she considers fussy things like those emery boards indispensable; exactly a year ago, when I was invited by a German university to travel to a symposium on the poet León de Greiff, I spent almost all the extra money I had at the duty-free shop at the Frankfurt airport buying the Clinique face creams Agustina had asked for; Marta Elena, my first wife, always made do with Pond’s, which can be bought at any drugstore, but Agustina, like all her kind, has the unpleasant habit of systematically rejecting products made in this country and being prepared to pay anything for stuff from abroad, and now I’m thinking of her face, which has always seemed incredibly beautiful to me, and of her dark eyes, which no longer see me, which means that I’ve become invisible, ever since Agustina won’t see me, I’ve become the invisible man.

  At that moment, the Fearless Girl’s voice interrupts my musings, But if you want I can show you room 416, which is practically the same thing, her voice bringing me back abruptly, Room 416,
of course, thank you very much, Señorita, so long as it has a view of the acacia garden, too. It does, Señor, from a different angle, but I think you’ll still be able to see the acacias, tell me when your friends plan to arrive, Aguilar makes up a date that she notes down, No problem, the little French flags confirm on the keyboard, room 413 will be available then and I promise you that those acacias won’t have gone anywhere, My friends are the kind of people who pay attention to details like that, I say with a silly little laugh in an attempt to match her irony, Of course, Señor, the customer is always right.

  The Fearless Girl takes me by surprise by asking me point-blank what my name is, and I tell her Sergio Stepansky, like an alter ego of the poet León de Greiff, which is the first thing that pops into my head, I’m not sure why I don’t want to reveal my name to this woman I’ve decided to trust, Follow me, Mr. Stepansky, it’s less a request than an order, so I walk behind her to the fourth floor. I was returning to the scene of events to relive what had happened, to obtain information, to remember, to purge, to find solace, to torture myself, to have something to hold on to, for exactly what I couldn’t say. My discomfort grew at each step and my breathing became agitated, so much so that the Fearless Girl asked me whether I was all right, It’s nothing, I answered, I smoke too much and I get out of breath on the stairs, but since we had come up in the elevator, she gave me one of those looks that made it clear that she could see I was a little odd, and yet she said politely, Yes, smoking is no joke.

  She was walking in front of me and even though some kind of death was lodged in my chest, I couldn’t stop looking at her legs; she really was pretty, this girl enumerating the hotel’s advantages for me, the merits that had earned it each of the five stars adorning its logo, If she only knew that I’m dying, I thought as she sang the praises of the Italian restaurant, the recently remodeled rooms, the gym with professional trainers on staff, the top floor bar open twenty-four hours a day, and there I was with my suffering on rewind, it was along this same seemingly interminable corridor, the same carpet muffling my steps, that the door that opened then opens again now; the tall, dark man who received me that day in room 413 looked more tired than upset, I still have a clear idea of his height and the color of his skin but I can’t manage to fill in the rest of him, he becomes blurred in my memory or maybe I never managed to look him in the face, and I didn’t hear his voice either because when I asked for Agustina all he did was let me in without a word, which means that I couldn’t say whether the male voice I’d heard recorded on the answering machine when I returned from Ibagué was his, the voice that advised me to pick up Agustina at this hotel. The man opened the door for me and then must have left immediately because he wasn’t there a second later, when I turned desperately to ask what had happened to my wife.

  The minute I cross the threshold, I seem to see Agustina again in the corner on the floor, gazing intently out the window at the acacias; the Fearless Girl’s handset rings and she answers, speaks to someone for a minute, and then says to me, Excuse me for a minute, Mr. Stepansky, but they need me downstairs, don’t worry, I’ll be back right away, soothing me because she suspects that something is wrong but my mind is on other things and I can’t quite fathom what she’s saying, Look around the room yourself if you want, adds the Fearless Girl, here’s the closet and here inside is the safe, here’s the bathroom, the television turns on like this, I’ll be right back, excuse me for a second, Mr. Stepansky.

  That day, there in her corner, my wife looked away from the acacias, then turned her head, everything happening so slowly that I had the impression that each of her movements was framed by a single, specific instant; upon seeing me she seemed to come back to life and her face softened as if suddenly bathed in relief, and she got up and came toward me like someone returning to her own kind after a long absence, You’re here, she said and I held her as tight as I could, I felt her press against me and I knew that we were saved, I still didn’t know what from, but we were saved, It’s all over now, Agustina, as bad as it was, it’s over now, let’s go home, my love, I whispered in her ear, but all of a sudden I felt her whole body grow tense and push away from mine; if at first she had sought me, now she tore herself brusquely away, if before she had recognized me, an instant later she didn’t know who I was; her gestures became theatrical and stagy, and she looked at me with deep dissatisfaction, Maybe it wasn’t me she was waiting for, is the thought that pierces my mind now like a stiletto, I’m not going anywhere with you, she said, and her voice sounded false like that of a bad actor reciting her lines from memory, and turning her back on me and returning to her corner, she collapsed again on the rug like a broken doll and became absorbed once more in the movement of the acacia branches in the wind.

  DO YOU REALLY THINK, Agustina angel, that your noble family still lives on the bounty of the land they inherited? Well, climb out of that nineteenth-century romance, doll, because your grandfather Londoño’s fertile estates are nothing but pretty country today, and step down into the twentieth century and kneel before His Majesty King Don Pablo, ruler of the three Americas and absurdly rich thanks to the gringos’ glorious War on Drugs, lord and master of yours truly and also of your brother, as he once was of your esteemed father. Don’t you get it that the only things that flourish today on all those acres that Joaco inherited are polo ponies, country houses, and crimson sunsets, because the hard cash is slipped to him under the table from the crooks in the government and Pablo’s launderettes? And do you think Pablo comes to your brother, to Spider, to any of us, because he really needs our money? In the beginning, maybe, but not anymore, darling, of course not; if he still uses us it’s so he can control us, he came up with this arrangement to bring the country’s oligarchy to its knees, he hinted as much to me in a single sentence the first of the two times I’ve seen him in person.

  He’d made me catch a commercial flight to Medellín and wait at a downtown hotel for his men to come and pick me up, then they brought me to a secret airstrip and from there I was taken to Naples in his private plane, a Cessna Titan 404 piloted by a gringo Vietnam vet. Naples? Naples is the whimsical name chosen by Pablo for one of his many properties, a place in the heart of the jungle with three Olympic-size pools and motocross courses and a gorgeous zoo with elephants, camels, flamingos, and all kinds of animals, because believe it or not, Pablo is a Greenpeace kind of guy and a sportsman and a liberal and a champion of animal rights.

  When they introduced me to him I was disappointed, I was ready to meet the capo di tutti capi and what I see instead is a short fat guy with a mustache and a mop of black curls and a big paunch spilling over his belt. It was noon, it was hideously hot, and there I was, exhausted from all the traveling and stress, plopped down in the middle of a raging orgy, Pablo and his killers for hire wreathed in marijuana smoke and making out with some samba dancers in sequins and feathers that they had brought in on another plane straight from Rio, and as if the heat weren’t enough, the girls were dancing the samba right on top of us, shoving themselves in our faces and making it impossible to talk, and I was sweating a river, trapped in that carnival of crap when all I wanted was to clear up the terms of the deal fast so that I could get out of there.

  But Pablo, who was very attentive to me and almost shy, kept asking whether his good friend Midas wouldn’t like more whiskey, how about a puff of Santa Marta Golden, how about a little roast goat, how about a samba girl to entertain me for a while, and I said, No, thanks very much, Don Pablo, I’m sorry but I’m on a tight schedule and I’d like to get back to Bogotá as soon as possible, while I was saying to myself that the last thing I needed in this godforsaken life was to get stoned and drunk in the infernal heat and gorge myself on goat and samba girls in the company of that gang of criminals in undershirts, My god, don’t let them guess what I’m thinking, I thought, because they’ll roast me over the fire, too.

  And then Pablo brushes away the girls, calls me over to one side, and before he says goodbye speaks a single senten
ce, a sentence that opened my eyes once and for all, The rich men of this country are so very poor, Midas my friend, so very poor. Do you understand the implications of that, Agustina doll? It’s the kind of thing that someone who’s born poor can never understand, and here’s this fat, monstrously intelligent guy getting it clear right off the bat, and that’s why he’s the one on top, baby, you better believe it; born in the slums, raised in poverty, always oppressed by the infinite wealth and absolute power of those who for generations have called themselves rich, he suddenly stumbles on the great secret, the one he was forbidden to discover, and the secret is that at this point in his short life he’s already one hundred times richer than any of this country’s rich men, and if he wants he can make them eat out of his hand and tuck them away in his pocket.

  This oligarchy of ours still believes it controls Escobar when the exact opposite is true; to Spider Salazar, to your father, to your shark of a brother, Pablo Escobar is nothing but a lowlife who doffs his hat for them; they’re making the same mistake I made, princess, and it’s a suicidal one: the truth is that the fat guy has already swallowed us whole, and that’s why his belly is so bloated. And me? You might say I was Escobar’s waiter: I served up my friends to him on a platter, and added myself as dessert, then handed him an Alka-Seltzer as a chaser.