Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  I really don’t know why I need to upset Agustina by making her listen to this, my nerves must be shot, or it must be the urge to know what happened while I was gone, or the exhaustion of all these sleepless nights, or jealousy, jealousy above all, what a terrible thing jealousy is.

  You know, Agustina, I asked myself a thousand questions that Sunday after I listened to the messages, as I sped in the van to the Wellington to pick you up, questions like why they were calling from a hotel and not from a hospital if something had happened to you, and is she really in such bad shape that she couldn’t let me know herself? And why didn’t the person who called identify himself? If it’s a trap what kind of trap could it be? Could you have been hit by a car, kidnapped, could you have fallen, broken a bone, had a fight with your mother, could it have been a stray bullet, a mugging, but then why call me to a hotel? Someone else might have suspected that his wife had shut herself up in a hotel room to kill herself, but I never considered that possibility, I promise you, Agustina, it didn’t even occur to me, because I know that suicide isn’t part of your extensive repertoire. Do you know how many questions a person can ask himself over the sixty blocks that stretch from our apartment to that hotel? At least four a block, which means 240 questions, all pointless and absurd. But among them one question stood out, a doubt more pertinent than the rest, and that was whether you’d love me, Agustina, whether you’d still love me despite whatever had happened to you.

  I press the repeat button on the answering machine, and Agustina, who has remained silent throughout, twists her wrist out of my grip, goes into the kitchen, brings back a jar of water, and pours the whole thing on the sofa. It’s got to be cool, she says, hot things are bad, hot things hurt.

  BUT LET’S GET BACK to our story, Agustina doll, let’s get back to the bet that was made that Thursday at L’Esplanade. We were so carried away that we talked about nothing else all week, phone calls back and forth, big laughs at the expense of Spider and his limp dick. I made all the preparations for the first round, which was set for Friday at nine, and the others kept stopping by the Aerobics Center or giving me a buzz so I could bring them up-to-date. To refer to the matter without setting off any alarms we started to call it Operation Lazarus, after that resurrection thing.

  In an unrelated turn of events, I get a visit at the Aerobics Center from a trio of fat harpies who step out of a shocking lime-green sports car as big as a boat, three dark-skinned blondes so brutally bleached it’s as if they’ve tried to wipe out any trace of color, coconuts, they’re called, I don’t know whether I’m making myself clear, but I’m talking about a depressing threesome, my lovely Agustina, really cheap-looking bimbos. They show up in imitation leopard-print leggings, platform sneakers, and crap like that, all three of them bursting with enthusiasm at the idea of losing dozens of pounds and swearing to God that they’re mentally prepared to start lifting weights, devote themselves to spinning, strictly follow the pineapple diet, practice yoga, and do everything they’re asked, coming three times a week or more if necessary to get their figures back, because that’s how they put it, their figures, so last-generation. What about stepping classes? Oh yes, wonderful, sign me up, And aerobic dance? Oh yes, how exciting, I’ll take that, too, they were signing up for everything and once they had confessed their weights and ages to me and we were on intimate terms, when we were already practically like family, in fact, they hug me and come right out and tell me that they’re Pablo’s cousins by marriage and that it was Pablo’s wife, their first cousin, who personally recommended my gym to them, and, annoyed, I say, What Pablo are you talking about, Why the only Pablo, who else, Pablo Escobar.

  Just a minute, lovely ladies, I say cunningly to mask my utter horror, I have appearances to keep up here and it’s obvious from the start that you’ve got too much money, that’s what I say so I don’t have to tell them to their faces that only narco whores like them would think of putting on false eyelashes to do spinning, that no amount of jogging will ever work off those hereditary spare tires, and that their massive thighs, flat asses, and short legs are signs of the lowest social origins.

  So I got rid of them, Agustina doll, will you understand me if I say I have to keep a sharp eye out so that the level of the clientele doesn’t plummet? And of course, letting in three mob lovelies like that, relatives of Escobar on top of everything else, would spell the end of the center, which ultimately is nothing but a front for the big money that comes from the laundering, so I kicked the coconuts out, Try the competition, darlings, Spa 92 or Superfigure at Fifteenth and 103rd, you’ll lose weight faster there, I advised them, trusting that Pablo, a businessman first and foremost, would approve of my basic precautionary measures.

  But apparently I was wrong. My analysis failed and I screwed myself royally, because Pablo turned out to be a man of honor first and a dealmaker second. But that’s another story, Agustina angel; just hold on to it in a corner of your crazy little head, because it’ll have a role to play later on. For now forget those three women as I forgot them at the time, watching them as they left in a huff and drove away down the street in their lime-green convertible, disappearing from my memory as soon as they turned the corner.

  SOMETIMES RAGE AT BICHI stirs in Agustina and she scolds him just like her father, Don’t talk like a girl, she screams at him and immediately she’s sorry, but she simply can’t bear the idea that her father will leave home because of all the things that make him lose his temper, I hate it when my father raises his mighty hand against my little brother, says Agustina, I feel pangs in my stomach and I want to vomit when I see that each day my father is making Bichi more unhappy and withdrawn. But I also can’t stand the idea of my father leaving home.

  Come on, girlie boy, don’t just stand there and take it, answer back, hit me harder, my father says mockingly to Bichi as he corners him with soft jabs, taunting him, and I say, Yes Bichito, hit him!, hit him Carlos Vicente Jr., show him you’ve got guts, if only you’d come back at him with all the fury of your manhood and testosterone and break that big nose of my father’s, smash his mouth so that he bleeds even just a little bit and then maybe at last he’ll be satisfied and feel proud of you and happy here with all of us, but Bicho is weak, he fails his sister when she needs him most, he only knows how to take it and take it until he’s had enough and then he goes up to his room to bawl like a girl. Then all of my hatred is turned on my father and I want to shout in his face that he’s a monster, a disgusting beast, a tyrant, that he’s a coward mistreating a child, but in the end I don’t say anything because the powers flee in disarray, and panic overtakes me, and then I think that maybe the same thing happens to my mother, who can bear anything so long as my daddy doesn’t leave her.

  But our ceremony is something else altogether, because during our secret ceremony Bichi and I become powerful beyond anyone’s control, it’s the supreme moment of our rule and command, our victory ritual. We climb up on the wardrobe, get the photographs out from the crack between the wall and the beam, and put them on my bed, first any which way, however they fall, while we organize everything else with the television turned up loud so that no one suspects. Bichi waits for me without his underwear, while I, with no panties on and that tickling feeling, go down the back stairs to the pantry and steal one of the linen napkins that my mother says used to belong to Grandmother Blanca, the German’s wife. They’re wide napkins, starched, that our mother puts out in the big dining room when guests come for dinner, and they have old-fashioned initials embroidered in one corner. During this part of the ceremony, Agustina must be very careful because her uniform skirt is short and pleated and if it sways the servants will realize that she’s not wearing anything underneath. Taking the napkin would get me in trouble but that would be the least of it, the really bad thing would be if someone told my mother that I was running around with no panties on, because she’d be capable of killing me for that.

  I bring a washbowl full of water from the bathroom, and once I’m back in my r
oom we close the door, light the candles, and turn out the light, and with the water in the washbowl we perform our ablutions, which means that we wash our face and hands until they’re free of sin, and then Agustina folds Grandmother Blanca’s napkin into a triangle, makes her little brother lie on the bed and lift his legs, puts the napkin under him like a diaper, shakes on Johnson’s baby powder and rubs it in well, then fastens the diaper with a safety pin. Next we dress ourselves in our vestments, mine an old burgundy velour robe of my mother’s with the black mantilla that my grandmother used to wear to church around my shoulders; yours, Bichi, the diaper, and over the diaper a black kimono with white-and-yellow flowers from one Halloween when they dressed me up as a Japanese girl, we’d like to paint our faces but we don’t for fear that afterward the traces of paint would give us away.

  To put on their vestments, Agustina and her brother stand back to back and don’t look at each other until they’re ready, and then begins the most important part, the part with the photographs, the center of everything, the Last Call, because those photographs are our power cards: the aces of our truth. You and I know very well that the photographs are more dangerous than an atomic bomb, capable of destroying my father and ending his marriage to my mother and making our house and even all of La Cabrera explode, which is why before we lay them out on the black cloth we must always take the oath, speak the Words. Do you swear that you’ll never reveal our secret?, I ask you in a low, solemn voice and you, Bichi, half closing your eyes, say, Yes, I swear. Do you swear that you’ll never, under any circumstances or for any reason, show anyone these photographs that we’ve found and that belong to us alone? Yes, I swear. Do you swear that even if you’re killed, you won’t show them to anyone or confess to anyone that we have them? Yes, I swear. Do you know that they’re dangerous, that they’re a deadly weapon? Yes, I know. Do you swear by all that’s most sacred that no one will ever find out about our ceremony, or anything that happens in it? Yes, I swear.

  Then you make me take the same oath, with the same questions and the same answers, and we look at the photographs one by one and put them in their proper places on the bed, Aunt Sofi with her shirt undone, Aunt Sofi naked on the recliner in my father’s office, Aunt Sofi sitting on the desk in high heels and silk stockings, Aunt Sofi lying on her back and showing the camera her behind, Aunt Sofi displaying her breasts as she looks at the camera with a shy smile and tilts her head in an old-fashioned way, Aunt Sofi in bra and panties, and the one that you and I like best, the one we always place highest on the slope of the pillow: Aunt Sofi in jewelry, with her hair up, and dressed in a long gown that’s black and very elegant, but that leaves one breast covered and the other exposed, and neither you nor I can take our eyes off the enormous thing that Aunt Sofi has left out on purpose, fully intending for our father to fall in love with her and leave our mother, her own sister, who doesn’t have awesome breasts like hers.

  BUT HOW CAN I COMPOSE, sweet Blanca of mine, Portulinus asks his wife, when the living won’t leave me in peace either? Relax, Nicholas, lie down here beside me on the grass, beneath the branches of our myrtle, and let the good sun warm your bones. Then he takes up the endless stream of urgent appeals again, Did you say our myrtle, our tree?, in an identical repeat performance that proceeds to the tremulous final sentence, The two of us?, and he even tries a third time to seek the assurances that will let him rest but she, who at this point knows that there’s no rest to be had, is quick to say, Enough, that’s enough, Nicholas, you’re making me tired, alert as she is to the rhythms and reiterations that open the door in him to wild ravings, although she’d like to say, That’s enough, Nicholas, you’re driving me mad, but she knows not to tread on that sensitive spot. Despite her youth, Blanca is as solid as a rock and on that rock her husband has built his life, My fortress on high, he says, or My castle stronghold, or in German, My starkes Mädchen, and she confirms this whenever she can, as the pages of her diary attest: “I feel that my courage is enough for what will come, and where my beloved Nicholas is concerned, that could be anything. But I live for him alone and he’ll always have my love and support, whatever happens.”

  Blanca is starkes Mädchen but the one thing that makes her falter is harsh or accusatory words, and even more so on her husband’s warm, fleshy lips, a feverish carnation red, as prone to revelation as to outrageous outbursts. I always believed that the difficulties Nicholas sometimes had in expressing himself in Spanish were because he was a foreigner, Blanca confessed to her two daughters, Sofi and Eugenia, when they were adults, until a cousin of his who was passing through Colombia on her way back to Germany and who came down to Sasaima to visit told me that in his native language, too, he was sometimes coherent and other times confused and stumbled over his words. From this same woman I learned that as a child, in the town of Kaub, Nicholas had serious difficulties learning to speak, and that he could scarcely stutter, if that, since he usually took refuge in a stubborn silence in which there was room only for his inner melodies. When he was four, his father, fearing deafness or mental retardation, took him to a neighboring city to have him examined by a language specialist, with the result that what he already knew perfectly well was confirmed, that the young Nicholas, a talented and precocious piano player, was slow-witted and hopeless when it came to speaking. Not even his father’s threats and physical punishment could prevent him from obstinately closing his mouth and covering his ears to shut out the human voice, including his own, as if it was worming its way into his skull to burst inside him.

  So in adulthood as well as in childhood, Nicholas Portulinus had a difficult relationship with words, which explains those deep silences that became more and more prolonged, If I talk to you too much, Blanca my dear, my love for you turns uncertain and slips away. That’s why he made up for it by composing children’s songs with simple lyrics that pleased her and made her feel that sometimes her husband was like a boy; she, who truly was a girl, saw her older husband as a sweet boy, silent and remote. But other times Nicholas would be moved to unleash a torrent of words and string together one sentence after another in bad Spanish, assembling mixed-up and dizzying trains of thought, and then Blanca was afraid and sought shelter beneath a black umbrella of inscrutability from the rain of syllables flooding her soul. At a breakneck pace and dragging out his r’s too much, he swears his eternal love to her, besieges her with promises of happiness, frightens her with jealous words and endless interrogations. He swamps her in speech: That’s enough, Nicholas, I can’t bear to hear another word, she implores him in a whisper and then a peaceful silence settles over the myrtle again. The pleasantness of midday stretches out around them, and the scattered pieces of the universe fall into place with no struggle or lingering bitterness.

  At this point in their lives, resting together under the myrtle tree, they are as one, or at least that’s what Blanca believes, because Portulinus is adrift, near and at the same time far. Portulinus thinks: Blanca is watching. If Blanca’s enormous eyes weren’t fixed on him he could recite his litany, but her vigilance prevents him from sailing as he pleases on the sea of his ruminations. In German and to himself, Portulinus begs Blanca to give him the space he needs and not to monopolize the air he breathes, that she not make all his worries her own or try to harness his thoughts, because Portulinus is and isn’t with Blanca on that placid Sasaima midday under the myrtle, now that inside of him everything has begun to double and triple in meaning. The air is charged with confusion and has grown thick; the dreams in his head gradually impose themselves on the world around him, and in the middle of the radiant green of the tropics there appear before him, bleached and nocturnal, Greek ruins that have nothing to do with this time and place, the same Greek ruins he dreamed of the night before, and before and before, hearkening back in a continuous delirium to the mists of his adolescence. What am I doing amid these ominous ruins, since when did all color fade, why am I losing myself in smudges of blood, whose is all this blood that trickles on the cold smoothness of
the marble and why is that boy wounded, what is he doing among the ruins and why is he bleeding, that sacred and ethereal being, that boy called Farax who exists only as a creature of my nights, that sweet, wounded Farax who has always lived in the annals of my memory?

  Blanca suspects that behind Nicholas’s apparent calm terrible thoughts are seething and her eyes grow huge and intense to prevent him from escaping, her gaze begging him please, by all he holds dear, to speak words that are sensible and prudent, as God intended, to renounce the too-many words and those words with a thousand meanings instead of one. Speak to me about things, not ghosts, Blanca begs her husband, not understanding that he’s wandering amid ruins where things and ghosts are one and the same. Do you love me, sweet Blanca of mine?, Portulinus asks her, and she assures him that she does, I already told you I do, I love you so much it hurts, she promises him over and over again, not understanding that it’s a different question that’s troubling him. He wants, needs, to ask her to distance herself: Go away, woman, let me dream alone, don’t talk to me about this tree here and the sun that’s warming us now, don’t trap me, I beg of you from the other side, where my soul has already fled. That’s what he would like to say to her but he pleads for something else entirely, with equal sincerity: Don’t leave me, Blanca darling, I’m nothing without you. And Portulinus’s parched and spinning head isn’t the only thing that’s discombobulated; above all, it’s reality itself, with the ambiguous weight of its double load.