Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  You’re staring at me with those big black eyes of yours, Agustina darling, and you’re thinking that I didn’t go along with Spider’s idea to win the bet but out of obsequiousness. Why didn’t I tell Spider the truth, why didn’t I tell him that not even a crane could give his poor pecker a lift? Are you thinking that it was for the same old reason and that if I let Spider have his way it’s because I’m incapable of breaking the hold that he and all the old-money types have over me? That it’s because even though I try to hide my admiration for them, it’s stronger than my pride, which is why sooner or later I always end up rolling over for them? If you come straight out with that moralistic crap, sweetheart, if you tell me that my worst sin is obsequiousness, I’ll have to accept it even though it pains me greatly, because in the strictest sense it’s true; there’s something they have that I’ll never have, no matter whether I give myself a hernia trying, something you have, too, and you don’t realize you have, Agustina princess, or you do but you’re crazy enough not to care, and that is a grandfather who inherited land and a great-grandfather who brought in the first streetcars, and diamonds that belonged to your great-aunt and a library of books in French that your great-great-grandfather collected and a christening gown of embroidered batiste kept in tissue paper for four generations until the day your mother removes it from its chest and takes it to the Carmelite nuns to have them scrub away the marks left by time and starch it, because it’s your turn and you’re going to wear it, too, to be baptized.

  Do you understand, Agustina? Can you understand the stomach-churning agonies and the character weaknesses that not having any of that inflicts on someone like me, and what it’s like to know that what you lack will never be forgotten by them, the people with the christening gowns starched by Carmelite nuns? Consider the syndrome. Even if you’ve won the Nobel Prize in Literature, like García Márquez, or you’re the richest man on the planet, like Pablo Escobar, or you come in first in the Paris-Dakar rally, or you’re a fucking amazing tenor in the Milan Opera, in this country you’re nothing compared to one of those people with the starched christening gowns. Do you think your family appreciates a man like your husband, good old Aguilar, who’s given up everything, including his career, to fight your craziness? Your family doesn’t even register Aguilar, Agustina princess; to say that your mother hates him is to flatter him, because the truth is your mother doesn’t even see him, and when it comes right down to it, you don’t either, and that’s just the way it is, no matter how he martyrs himself for you, Aguilar will always be invisible because he didn’t have a christening gown. And me?, well it’s the same story, princess, they kneel down and suck my dick because if it wasn’t for me they’d be ruined, with their fallow lands and their diamond pendants that they don’t dare take out of their safes for fear of thieves and their embroidered christening gowns that stink of mothballs. But that doesn’t mean they see me. They suck my dick, but they don’t see me.

  Now I’m going to spare you the details of the next chapter in Operation Lazarus because it was a dirty business. All you need to know is that for the second phase of the bet I didn’t try hard at all, no careful attention to detail or subtleties, I just looked in the newspaper for an S&M ad, picked up the phone, and hired a showgirl calling herself Dolores who had a little private act with her pimp involving mild torture; once we’d come to an agreement about the fee and set a date, I washed my hands of the whole affair. On the agreed-upon night, Dolores arrived at the Aerobics Center with her whip, gear, and instruments of punishment and the thing was pathetic, Agustina my love, like a small-town circus. She was perfunctory and uninspired, what you might call a bureaucrat of torture, and he was a hustler with slicked-back hair and a burgundy dinner jacket, and I swear to you, princess, that all I felt at the sight of them was gloom, so I did my duty and turned on the gym lights, then I left them down there performing for Spider and his two escorts, Paco Malo and the Sucker, who follow Spider like evil shadows, while I went up to my office, sat down with my calculator, and started to do some math because by then it had been a few days since I’d sent all the money to Escobar through Mystery and we were waiting for the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. I told you that the S&M woman was called Dolores, well, remember that name, Agustina doll, because Dolores’s unlucky star is still shedding its fucking black light on us.

  IT HAPPENED IN THE sixth month of Agustina’s only pregnancy, her only pregnancy with me, that is, because she’d been pregnant once before, and that first time had ended in a voluntary abortion, she’d told me about it herself and in passing let fall the name of a Midas McAlister who was the man she’d been sleeping with. The name, Midas McAlister, was stamped on my brain, not only because it wasn’t the first time I’d heard my wife mention it but because it sounded familiar from somewhere else, too, probably the society pages of El Tiempo, or even more likely, gossip in which he was labeled a money launderer. But to return to our story, we’d spent five months waiting for the baby when the doctors told us that a condition called preeclampsia would probably cause us to lose it. From that moment on, Agustina once again devoted herself entirely, as she had when I first met her, to that convoluted form of knowledge that makes me so irritated and suspicious and that consists of interpreting reality from the wrong side of the cloth, or in other words guided not by clear and obvious signs but by a series of secret winks and hidden manifestations that she settles on at random and that are nevertheless invested not merely with the power of revelation but also with the power to decide the course of her life.

  The doctors told us that only something like absolute rest might eventually make the pregnancy go smoothly and save the baby, and my Agustina, who clung to the child with all her might, chose to lie in bed day and night without moving, nearly petrified, afraid of any movement that might trigger the loss, and it was then that she began to notice the creases that formed in the sheets. Wait, Aguilar, don’t move, she’d say when she woke up, lie still for a minute, I want to see what the sheets look like this morning. At first I had no idea what was happening and just watched the way she smoothed her fingers over the creases and wrinkles of the bedclothes, taking great care not to disturb them, The message is that everything will be all right and when the child is born I’ll call him Carlos after my little brother, she’d inform me in relief, and then she’d be plunged into a torpor from which I couldn’t wrench her even with breakfast, which I brought to her in bed every day because I knew it comforted her. What message, Agustina? What message are you talking about? The one that was written here last night in the sheets. For God’s sake, Agustina, what do the sheets know! They know plenty about us, Aguilar, haven’t they been soaking up our dreams and moods all night long? Don’t worry, Aguilar, the sheets say the child is all right for now.

  But the sheets didn’t always bring us encouraging news, and more often it would happen that after studying the nonexistent map traced on the bed, Agustina would begin to cry inconsolably. The baby is suffering, she’d tell me between sobs, gripped by a despair that I didn’t know how to ease, certainly not by mentioning the lab tests, which indicated stability, or by reminding her of the doctors’ optimistic appraisals, or appealing to common sense. Like the sentence of a cruel judge, the folds in the sheets determined our fate and that of our child, and there was no human power that could make Agustina realize how irrational it all was.

  Unfortunately, neither the doctors’ efforts nor Agustina’s heroic dedication did any good. We lost the baby and as a result the divinatory powers of the sheets were simply confirmed and their tyranny over us was strengthened. But this didn’t happen right away. On the contrary, a few weeks after the loss, Agustina, who never mentioned the affair again and who seemed recovered in body and spirit, threw herself energetically into a business exporting hand-stamped batiks. It was a happy era, in which the apartment was turned into a full-fledged factory, and I kept stumbling into stretching frames, rolls of Bali cotton, and buckets of vegetable oils. We could
n’t cook because the stove was the place where the wax was heated, so we made do with sandwiches and salads, or with fried chicken that we ordered from the restaurant on the corner, and in order to bathe we had to remove yards of cloth that dripped indigo and cochineal and who knows what other organic dyes from the shower, and I remember with particular horror a sticky yellow mass that Agustina called kunyit; the cursed kunyit stuck to everything, to the soles of our shoes, to my students’ papers, to the rugs, especially the rugs, because when kunyit attacked a rug, it had to be left for dead.

  The batik phase was one of our best times. Because you were radiant, Agustina, inventing designs and testing blends of colors. You painted a red dot on your forehead and wrapped yourself in saris, sarongs, pashminas, and pareus, and we spent all day listening to records by Garbarek, Soeur Marie Keyrouz, and Ravi Shankar. Do you remember Paksi, Agustina?, Paksi, the woman who sold crafts from Java and who looked like she was from the mountains of Boyacá, but said that she was born in Jogjakarta, the one who offered to teach you the technique and who we then had a hard time getting out of the house. But at the end of that year the batik business started to go under. Agustina, who had invested a fortune in materials and hadn’t managed to export anything, grew sad and listless, so disheartened that she couldn’t even get rid of the paraphernalia still cluttering our space, now simply junk and the dreary evidence of failure. Don’t worry, Agustina darling, I tried to console her, minimizing the importance of the fiasco, but nothing helped, and she sank into a deep depression.

  It was then that she began talking to me once more about the dictates of the sheets, which this time were telling her that the time had come to try to get pregnant again. I replied in exasperation that I couldn’t care less what the sheets said, If that’s what you want, if you’re prepared to run the risks again, then you can count on me and we’ll try, but I warn you that I’m sick of this whole business, and I refuse to accept that you have to consult the sheets, or the Ouija board, or the saints even to sleep with me, but of course Agustina wouldn’t listen, Agustina has never listened to me, she wouldn’t hear my protests and she kept waiting for messages and signs to appear telling her how to act and think. It was as if she’d lost the ability to form an opinion of her own, and she became paralyzed by the prospect of having to make any decision for herself. All she could say was, The doctor says…, the sheets indicate…, according to the horoscope…, last night you told me…, since you refuse…, my mother thinks…, the woman who reads my cards…Agustina was like an automaton, and she clung to outside opinions and random signs that sunk us neck-deep in a swamp of indecision. But this wasn’t madness yet. And if it was, it had just barely announced itself.

  SOME THINGS ARE BEYOND the control of my Sight, says Agustina, because they’re stronger than my gift of seeing. Not even the secret photographs of Aunt Sofi have the power to control these things, and of all of them, it’s the blood that disturbs me most. She means the Spilled Blood, which surprises and overwhelms her each time it escapes from where it should be, which is inside of people. When it obediently flows in its hidden pathways, blood doesn’t bother me because it’s invisible, it has no smell, and the rush of its many white and red globules isn’t noisy at all. One would think God created it to be quiet and secret, but that’s not true, since blood, like steamed milk, is always waiting for the chance to spill over, and when it starts it won’t stop.

  Come, Bichi Bichito, little boy, come here and let me cut those fingernails of yours that are black from playing in the dirt, and Bichi, trusting, holds out his hand to his sister Agustina; my little brother’s hand is so sweet, he’s such an adorable boy with those black curls, and so defenseless, the two of us sit on the bed, with my left hand I hold his hand tight and in my right I hold the nail clippers, and meanwhile, with his free hand, he plays at making a little pile of the bits of lint on the wool bedspread, Bichi’s mind is elsewhere as I cut his fingernails, or maybe he’s not thinking of anything, maybe he’s so small that his thoughts are full of the bits of lint, making him forget his own hand as Agustina, who is hardly any older, cuts the fingernail of his little finger with a click.

  A tiny piece of nail springs away and falls to the floor, and it’s the tiniest thing on the planet, if Bichi himself is as small as can be, imagine how tiny the nail on his little finger is. Says Agustina: At the time, I don’t think my little brother even knew how to talk yet. Stay still, baby, don’t wiggle so much, this finger is called the ring finger because you wear rings on it, I make another click and a tiny sliver of crescent moon flies through the air, That’s two nails, Bichito, only three left and if you don’t move we’ll be done very soon, this bigger finger is the middle finger, stay still or I can’t do it, there’s another click and the first unexpected thing is that this last bit of nail doesn’t spring into the air but falls softly straight down onto my skirt, the second thing, though not right away but after a long silence has passed, is the inexplicable howl that Bichi lets out seemingly just for the sake of it, and he doesn’t even pull away his hand, which is still caught in mine, his little hand offered up and exposed as if that cry had nothing to do with it.

  Only after a while, when Bichi’s cry breaks and turns into sobs, only then do Agustina’s eyes see, for the first time since they opened to the world, how something warm and red is oozing out and staining the bedspread, by now Bichi has pulled his hand away and he brings it to his face which now is also sticky and stained, Let me see, Bichi, please, I try to look at his finger to understand what’s happening, but my head goes fuzzy because I’m shaking, fear takes away my powers, and so many voices bombard me that I can’t understand any of them, the worst of the voices, the one that paralyzes me most, is the one that keeps repeating that I’ve hurt Bichi, that I’ve done him harm, just like my father, I’m sorry, Bichito, please say you forgive me, and he shows me his hand red with blood and his eyes are full of tears, Quiet, my love, quiet, baby, if you cry like that I can’t see anything.

  A faint voice reaches my mind and reveals to me that the soft nail I just cut isn’t a nail but the little piece of fingertip that his finger is now missing, I’ll fix it for you, Bichito my love, but don’t cry like that because they’ll punish me for hurting you, and Bichi tries not to cry, he’s still whimpering but very quietly, it’s incredible how his finger matches up with the tip that has come off, they could be stuck back together if it weren’t for the blood that keeps coming out, because this is the Blood, Bichi Bichito, this is what’s called the Spilled Blood, and now I can hear the Big Voice, which warns me Your little brother will die because all the blood inside of him will come out the tip of his finger, then I don’t care if they punish me or if Bichi screams and goes running to tell my mother because more than anything I don’t want Bichi to die, and I think I remember that I cried all that night and that some brown spots were left on the bedspread as a reminder of the bad thing I did, and when my brother Bichi and I were older, his finger was still a little bit short because the tip never grew back, he was missing the tip of his middle finger and he must be missing it still, each time I think of that I start to cry and can’t stop thinking that I was the last person you would’ve expected to hurt you, wherever you are, Bichi, little brother, I’d give anything to make what I did to you stop hurting. After that the thread of blood was hidden again and ran inside, waiting for a new chance to confuse me and blur my special sight.

  La Cabrera was a modern neighborhood, with private streets to protect us and guards in ponchos stationed twenty-four hours a day in little huts with bulletproof windows in front of each house, and we children were never left on our own because my mother or Aminta or any of the other maids, if not Aunt Sofi, who by now had come to live with us, were there to watch us, but one afternoon Aminta snuck away to see her boyfriend, and Agustina doesn’t know where the other adults were, but she and her two brothers were left alone and someone rang the doorbell, Don’t open the door, Agustina, don’t open it, Bichito, we’re not allowed to open
the door, but I looked out the window and saw that it was the neighbors’ guard, he was wearing his black wool poncho and from outside he made me understand that he wanted a glass of water, Look, Joaco, it’s a watchman and he just wants water, and I ran to the kitchen to get it and opened the door to give it to him and he drank it in two swallows, but the third time he tried to bring the glass to his mouth it fell to the ground and shattered, then he leaned a little against the wall and slid slowly down it, he must have been hot because he took off the poncho without saying a word and then he was on the floor clutching it.

  Bichi came out to see what was happening and he stood there beside me and after a while the security-guard man asked me from the floor to please give him more water, and that thing had already started to happen: the Blood was slowly coming from him, making its way out of his body, and a voice told Agustina that only water could control the will of the Blood that is Spilled, the guard asked me to bring him water and I understood what he meant, he was letting me know that he wouldn’t die if I gave him water so I ran to the kitchen to get him another glass, What are you doing, Joaco shouted and she said, I’m bringing him more water because he’s thirsty, He’s not thirsty, he’s dying, can’t you see that somebody hurt him and he’s dying?