So then we were even, and from that moment on I devoted myself to imitating my friend Joaco in every way. Because at the Boys School, my pretty pale princess, I didn’t learn algebra or discover trigonometry or develop any kind of interest in chemistry; at the Boys School I learned to walk like your brother, to eat like him, to look at people the way he did, to say what he said, to despise the teachers for being of inferior social status, and, in a broader sense, to radiate contempt as a supreme weapon of control; how could Joaco not be my beacon and guide when my father was a stone in a graveyard where my mother and I left carnations on the Day of the Dead, and meanwhile his father had given him a brand-new Renault 9 with an incredible sound system when we were just kids in ninth grade; it was in Joaco’s Renault 9 that my ears were opened to the miracle of meesees braun yugotta lobleedotta by Yairman Yairmees, and how we admired Joaco because he was the only one who could pronounce Herman’s Hermits and sing Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter with all the syllables; everything was dazzling, a revelation, when Joaco let me step into his world.
Blasting along full fucking throttle in that Renault 9 we blew through stop signs and red lights, showing off our alpha-male status by tossing coins at the prostitutes on the corners and parking at the Icy Cream, wild-haired and triumphant as young cannibals, to order hot dogs and malteds from the car, and how could I have suspected, recently arrived from the provinces and living in a dark little apartment in the respectable neighborhood of San Luis Bertrand, tell me, Agustina doll, how was I to know that there existed such a thing as a vanilla malted, that glorious invention, and that if you asked for it over the intercom they brought it to you in the car. The albums that Joaco had sent to him from New York, and the new smell of his Renault 9, and the golden freedom of boys without a license whizzing along the Northbound Highway, it was all too much for me, my heart beat with a strange, wild anxiety, and all I could do was repeat to myself, Someday this will all be mine, mine, mine, and meanwhile they sang Jesterdei by the Beekles and also the Sowns of Seilens by Simonan Garfoonkel, always cursing Simonan for having stolen the song from the Indians of Latin America, ending with the ultimate apocalyptic explosion, the cosmic orgasm that was Satisfackchon by the Roleen, AICANGUET-NO! SATISFACK-CHON! Those words became my battle cry, my wish, my mantra; my credo was Anaitrai!, my secret Anaitrai!, my magic spell Anaitrai! Go on, Joaco, tell me what Anaitrai means, what a powerful, amazing fucking word, but he was very conscious of the superiority that his command of English gave him over us and was happy to leave me hanging, It means what it means, he declared pompously, and then he sang alone, with his perfect accent, I can’t get no satisfaction ‘cause I try, and I try, and I try, and then I asked again, practically dying, Come on, man, don’t be a jerk, tell me what Anaitrai means, tell me what Aicanguet-no is or I’ll bust your face, but he, unyielding and remote, knew exactly what to say to put me in my place, Don’t beg, McAlister, you can only understand if you’re meant to understand it.
Of course I invented my own desperate tricks for social survival, like the time I discovered a Lacoste shirt among my father’s old clothes, worn out and faded from use and too big for me, but that didn’t matter, nothing could dim the glory of my discovery and with fingernail scissors I set myself the task of detaching the little alligator logo, and from then on I went to the trouble of sewing it each day to the shirt I was going to wear, you laugh, Agustina princess, and I’m laughing, too, but you have no idea how going around with that Lacoste alligator on my chest helped me have confidence in myself and become the person I am today.
Through the process of my systematic spying on that world of yours I came to realize the particular skill that I had and your brother Joaco lacked, and it was at your house and the Boys School that what I’ll call the divine paradox was revealed to me, the lowly boy from the provinces with the mother in house-slippers, the cramped apartment in San Luis Bertrand, and the crocheted doily on the television: I knew how to make money, princess, it was as easy for me as breathing, while your brother, the son of rich men and the grandson of rich men, himself raised with money, had lost the knack, and my insight was to understand early on that the Joacos of this world weren’t going to have anything but what they had inherited, and that it meant something when people here say, “Great-grandfather a mule driver, grandfather lord of the manor, son a man of leisure, grandson a beggar,” in other words, there’s a slow spiral downward, Agustina princess, with past splendor gradually losing its luster without anyone noticing and the original fortune dwindling until all that’s left are the mannerisms, the pomp, the sense of superiority, the grand gestures, the alligator on the Lacoste shirt conspicuous on the chest. Whereas I, who came from nothing, was acquiring a talent, Agustina darling, a skill born of necessity and despair: the gift of making money, cold hard cash.
But I was still lacking the most important thing, Agustina angel, the truly important thing amid all that lesser detail, and that was coming to my friend Joaco’s house and finding you there, doing chores with your mother, because then a sigh of truth rose from the very depths of my being, bursting from my chest, Oh, Mrs. Londoño, yugotta lobleedotta! Because year after year, growing up alongside us but out of reach, there you were, Agustina my love, Joaco’s incredibly beautiful sister, the farthest and strangest star, so slender and white, always lost in your own head like someone hiding with the junk in the attic, you were the gold medal, the grand prix reserved for the best of us, the only trophy that your brother Joaco could never snatch, because he might be the richest and get the best grades and wear name-brand clothes, he might be the shit at tennis and waterskiing, the one with the spring vacations in Paris and the eternal tan, but there was one thing your brother Joaco couldn’t have, Agustina angel, and that was you.
The second time I saw you was in the dining room of your house in La Cabrera, which to me seemed like a sultan’s palace, and there you were making little towers of cookies with butter and jam, Joaco and me at one end of the table and you at the other end alone under the big crystal chandelier absorbed in your towers, so little, so transparent, with your huge black eyes and your insanely long hair, your hair was so long, Agustina baby! Back then I think it almost reached the floor, and when I tore my eyes away from you at last, I looked around and realized that this room contained all the elements of my happiness, what I mean is that just then something clicked in my head and I knew that everything I needed to be happy was right there, those too-high ceilings, like they were meant for giants not humans, that chandelier of crystal prisms that sent bits of rainbow dancing over the white tablecloth, those vases so crammed with roses that it looked as if a whole rose garden must have been cut to fill them, that porcelain as delicate as eggshells, those heavy knives and forks that were nothing like the light, tinny utensils we used in San Luis.
They’re silver, you shouted at me from one end of the table to the other and that was the first thing your mouth ever said to me, your mouth with its thin lips and perfect teeth. I’m not kidding when I say that I understood more things that day than you’d expect of the twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy I was then; for example I took careful note of your teeth, because thanks to orthodontia, yours were as perfect as your brothers’, and that same afternoon, snooping around in your bathrooms and trying to find out what this world was made of, this world that was so different from mine and that was driving me crazy with wanting, I found out that your family didn’t brush their teeth with toothbrushes like other mortals but with a gringo device called a Water Pik, and I came up with the plan: to begin to save money by selling pictures of naked girls at school, first to buy a Water Pik and then to have my teeth fixed. And that’s how the world works, Agustina princess, I was precocious enough to realize from an early age that you don’t get anywhere with yellow, crooked, rotten teeth, while perfect smiles like the Londoño children’s smiles and the one I bought for myself later were worth as much as or more than a college education.
Of course it was also a revelation
to me that the food served by two maids dressed perfectly for the part on those eggshell dishes at the table for twelve at your parents’ house, a table that by the way is almost identical to the one I have today in my own apartment, that food, as I was saying, the chocolate with corn-flour buns, the cheese rolls, and the cream cookies, was exactly the same as the food my mother served me on our unbreakable plastic Melmac dishes in our living-dining room in San Luis Bertrand; that detail amused me, Agustina princess, it amused me to see that although you called it tea and we called it a snack, at five in the afternoon the two families served the same down-home food, the very same cheese rolls in the heart of Bogotá’s most fashionable neighborhood as in San Luis Bertrand, and from that I deduced that the unbridgeable gap between your world and mine was only a matter of appearances and surface polish, which amused me but also encouraged me to fight for what I wanted.
Well, if it’s just a question of packaging, I said to myself that day (and I’ve already told you that I was only thirteen), then I’ll be able to bridge that seemingly unbridgeable gap, and in fact by the time I was thirty I had bridged it and your mouth had already been mine, and I had two authentic Baccarat crystal chandeliers, a never-used dining table seating twelve, twenty-four silver place settings, and an impeccable smile, and yet look at me today, a shadow of my former self, brought down by the mistaken perception—it was too much to expect of a child’s intelligence, after all—that the difference was merely a question of packaging. It wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, and here I am, paying for my mistake in blood.
MY SKIN STILL CRAWLS when I remember the episode of the dividing line because perhaps never before had my wife rejected me so ferociously. With her teeth clenched and hatred in her eyes, Agustina ordered me to stay behind the line and I did what I could to obey her, hoping she would calm down, but the geographic division she imposed wasn’t fixed and that made things even harder, which is to say that the line shifted depending on her whim; at one point I sat on one of the chairs in the dining room, which strangely had remained on my side, at which Agustina hurried to annex that peninsula to her own territory, reclaiming the dining room as hers and throwing me out.
If you tried to take a step in any direction she was on you like a tiger, Out, you bastard, she said to me, my father doesn’t want to see you in any way, shape, or form, and that goes doubly for you, you filthy pig, she said to poor Aunt Sofi, whose face was screwed into an expression of guilt, anguish, or utter exhaustion; she who up until that moment had shown such fortitude and presence of mind now seemed shaken by the exceptional virulence of this development, she hadn’t seen anything like it since she’d come to stay with us and to tell the truth I hadn’t either, what was happening now was really serious, Go do your dirty business elsewhere, you disgusting pigs, Agustina was raving so madly and her abuse was so over the top that it couldn’t just be abuse, or hyperbolic use of language, it had to be true that she felt an enormous urgency to get us out of the house, it had to be true that the supposed presence or arrival or return of this father of hers was an earth-shattering event that split things in two, leaving Agustina with her father on one side and all other despicable mortals on the other.
Watching her, I wanted to bang my head against the wall thinking of everything I never asked her about this Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño, who, despite having been dead for years, now turned out to be the mysterious guest in the wings, the person turning me out of my own home and driving me from my wife, the man who was the living incarnation of everything I hated, and yet who was the object of baffling, almost religious worship for Agustina. The hardest thing of all was to witness the control that Mr. Londoño exercised over his daughter, to the point that it brought to mind the word possession, which doesn’t even form part of my vocabulary since it belongs to the realm of the irrational, which is of no interest to me, and yet it was that word, and none other, that kept occurring to me that night. I couldn’t help feeling the conviction that my wife was possessed by her father’s will; the split in her manifested itself so intensely that I was having a hard time reining in my own thoughts and remembering that it was my wife’s sick mind that was molding itself to her father’s purported wishes, and not the other way around.
I’ve always had the feeling that during her crises my wife goes through patches of devastating isolation, it’s as if she’s brutally alone on a stage while I observe her performance from a seat where I’m surrounded by the rest of humanity, and yet this time I knew that I was the solitary one, while she was accompanied by a force greater than herself, the will of her late father. Agustina talked endlessly about her father and his approaching visit, speaking so quickly that it was hard to understand her, something that was made even more difficult because half of the time she was talking to herself, aspirating the sentences as if she were plucking them from the air and wanted to swallow them, Agustina, my love, don’t swallow your words because you’ll choke, but my voice couldn’t reach her; between us there was only estrangement and distance, we were two exhausted creatures unable to draw near each other even though we were in the same cave, while down below the city throbbed silently, cowering and broken, as if the horror of that night had crushed it and now it was waiting for the start of the next round. Agustina darling, let’s not let madness, that old foe, extinguish any spark of hope, but Agustina isn’t listening because tonight she and the madness are one.
My wife is crazy, I acknowledged to myself that night for the first time, and yet the thought wasn’t enough to convince me, it can’t be, Agustina darling, because you’re still there behind your madness, despite everything you’re still there, and probably I’m still there deep down, why should I be gone, do you remember me, Agustina?, do you remember yourself? I’d never been afraid that she would hurt me physically, how could she when I was five inches taller and twice her weight and mass, but that night the fear was there; everything about her indicated a desire to assault, to wound, and her way of grabbing things and brandishing them showed determination, even an urgent desire, to hit with them. The last thing I ever wanted was to come to blows with the woman I love, but she was doing everything she could to start something, seeking by any means possible a kind of desperate final outburst of physical violence that would put an end to my decision not to attack her no matter what. It was as if she were trying to rob me of the infinite love for her that lets me systematically evade all her provocations and keep our coexistence peaceful; maybe Agustina understood that this was the only way she could do away with the main obstacle to her father’s arrival, because I was that obstacle.
Who had this Mr. Londoño been, what had his relationship to his daughter been, where had his power over her come from? I would’ve given anything to know. When I got to the apartment that night with the suitcase that Agustina had brought with her to the Wellington in my hand, sad trophy and resounding proof of my defeat, I was obsessed with the man my wife had spent one night with—well, just one night that I knew of, God knows how many others there might have been—and I set the suitcase in plain sight on the dining-room table so that she would come upon it suddenly, I needed to know what her reaction would be, whether she was capable of looking me in the eye, but what she did was hurl it furiously toward my side of the apartment, Who left this shit here, she asked and then she immediately forgot about it; the delirium induced by her father’s imminent arrival made her hyperkinetic, stricken by a fever that caused her to nearly emanate light, and I began to realize that even if the story of her lover was true and behind my back Agustina had one hundred other lovers, the true, indestructible rival, the one anchored in the depths of her disturbance, and possibly also her love, was the ghost of this father about whom I couldn’t form the vaguest idea, apart from the caricaturish notion of the Bogotá landowner that I’d had from the start, The man has that advantage over me, I thought, the advantage of being an unknown quantity.
Shut behind the wall of rejection that my wife had erected, I remembered the crazy autobiography that at
some point she’d wanted me to help her write, though we never made it to the first page, now I’m convinced that it was really a plea for help, that she needed to go over the events of her life with someone to make sense of them and put her mother and father in their proper place, bringing them out from inside where they tormented her, but back then how was I to know; the truth is that I thought the ludicrous idea of the autobiography was another one of those stabs in the dark that she was making simply because she refused to take note of what direction she was really headed. This was how it happened: after I was introduced to her that time at the film society, I left feeling awed by her beauty, which honestly struck me like a lightning bolt, but like a lightning bolt that dazzles and then disappears, by which I mean that it left me without the slightest sense of nervous anticipation of a second chapter to follow that first encounter, sure as I was that this strange, delectably lovely girl was one of those shooting stars that crosses one’s path and speeds on, so it came as a great surprise when I found a note in my cubicle at the university signed by none other than her.
MY FATHER TOLD ME to be back by midnight, says Agustina, and I don’t want to be even a single minute late; I must obey orders, especially because they come directly from my father. It was out of the goodness of his heart that he let me go to the movies with the boy in the Volkswagen on the condition that I be home before midnight, and as I turned my key in the lock at the agreed-upon time, there was my father, wide awake and waiting for me in an armchair in the living room. Is that you, Father?, and in the dark came his deep voice and the puff of his pipe, glowing like a watchful eye. Who were you with in that car?, It was just me and the boy who brought me home, Never again, thundered my father, You’ll never ride alone in a car with a boy again because I forbid it.
Delirium Page 17