IF ONLY AGUSTINA would talk to me, if only I could get inside her head, which has become a space forbidden to me. Trying to get her to say something, I bring out the album of photographs from when she was a girl and leaf through it slowly, without seeming too interested, pausing as if by chance at the people in her family that I think I recognize. This tall, thin lady who must be her mother, Eugenia, surprises me because she’s not as witchlike as I imagined; in fact, with that black hair, those red lips, and that white skin, she looks more like Snow White than a witch, Look Agustina, I say to her, see how much you look like your mother, but Agustina ignores me. This arrogant boy in a baseball uniform is clearly the kind of kid who’s never up to any good; dark-skinned and older than Agustina, he must be her brother Joaco, always ready to perform some feat for the camera, like lifting a heavy object or plunging headfirst into the pool. This smaller boy with a pale face and jet-black eyes like his mother and sister must be the youngest, Carlos Vicente, the one they call Bichi, looking as if he’s just been rescued from an orphanage. Here we see the whole clan sitting in a half circle and smiling at the photographer, and who is that pretty woman crossing an excellent pair of legs?, my God, it’s Aunt Sofi, all those years ago Aunt Sofi was a knockout. And Londoño, Agustina’s father, the tribal sheik? He’s nowhere to be seen, unless he’s the one taking the pictures; someone had to take them, of course, and everything indicates that Londoño is directing the farce but not acting in it.
There are other people, plenty of nice poses, ball games, celebrations in comfortable settings, predictable rituals of mass-produced happiness, happy birthday to you, the triumphal march from Aïda, should auld acquaintance be forgot, in all the old familiar places, Mozart’s Requiem, the day you were born a little star smiled, the whole repertory of a life moving tidily through each of its stages, as if on purpose so the photographer can record it and stick it neatly in albums. And sometimes, never in the center, the girl who Agustina was appears, looking apprehensively at the camera, as if she doesn’t feel entirely protected by this aura of well-being, as if she doesn’t quite belong to this group of humans.
My intention when I brought out the album was to get Agustina’s attention, to return her to a past that would disturb her and startle her from her isolation; I wanted to wrest a clue from her, or at least a comment, something that would give me a starting point. But her gaze slides over her own people as if she doesn’t know them, as if I were showing her photographs of the floor staff at Sears or pictures from a two-year-old French newspaper. For the first time, I feel that something connects me to the people in her family, and that is our insignificance in her eyes; we’re insignificant because we signify nothing, because we emit no signals, because Agustina isn’t susceptible to the signs we make. When I return the photographs to their place on the shelf, I think that all I’ve managed to prove with my sad experiment is that delirium has no memory, that it reproduces by parthenogenesis, sparks itself, and shuns affection, but especially that it has no memory.
Then I look for other hints, new threads to grasp, asking myself, for example, what revelation might be had from a crossword puzzle, what fundamental combination of words or what clue might allow me to understand something that a moment ago meant nothing to me and that’s suddenly of life-or-death importance. Because in her madness Agustina has developed a passion for crossword puzzles and to my surprise, on Sunday she got up early and said that she wanted to read the newspaper, something she’s never done in her life because she’s one of those people who doesn’t concern herself with what’s going on in the outside world, but on Sunday she got up early and I got up with her, nourishing some hope, because after all it was Sunday, which has always been a day of truce and harmony for us.
In fact, I’ll go even further and say that I was almost certain that precisely because it was Sunday Agustina’s madness would lift, or at least ease; in any case, I was prepared to interpret even the faintest sign as a symptom of the expected improvement. I watched her put a sweatshirt on over her pajamas and then, at her express request, the two of us went down to the drugstore to buy the Sunday edition of El Tiempo. When we returned Agustina climbed back into bed without taking off her sweatshirt and that was the first blow to my hopes because it looked as if I would never get her naked body back; that she didn’t take off her sweatshirt could be understood as a warning, something akin to wearing a suit of armor, and she didn’t start reading the paper we’d just brought back but instead began to fill in the horizontal and vertical rows of the crossword with an interest that for days she’d shown in nothing but her water rituals.
The armor thing requires particular emphasis, because before the dark episode, what we did on Sunday mornings was make love, and in my opinion we did it with impressive zeal, as if we were compensating for the hurried sex we were obliged to have during the week because I had to get up early in the morning and by the end of the day I was exhausted. On Sundays we’d make love from the time we got up until we were overtaken by hunger, then we’d go downstairs and eat whatever we could find in the refrigerator and come back up again and keep at it, then we would sleep or read for a while before moving again into each other’s arms; sometimes she wanted us to dance and we would dance slower and slower and closer and closer together until we ended up back in bed. I don’t know, it was as if Sunday really was a holy day and nothing bad could touch us then, which is why I woke up that morning full of hope, and in fact Agustina turned to me, seeking out my company again after days of icy indifference, though not to kiss me but to ask me to tell her what Spanish province begins with GUI, ends in A, and is nine letters long, and even so, that was like a gift; the sole fact that she recognized me and spoke to me was already like the difference between night and day.
Tell me the name of the salivary gland located behind the lower maxillary, Aguilar, this was the kind of question she asked me, which made me rack my brains and search the encyclopedia for the correct response that would elicit praise from her, a smile that for an instant would wipe from her face the almost blank expression that now marks it like a scar, reminding me that I loved this person once, that I still loved her, that I’d be able to love her again, this person barricaded inside her sweatshirt who got into my bed to solve a crossword puzzle and spent all day working at it with a fanatical obsession that undermined my hopes, until by evening I’d become convinced that if I asked her What’s my name? she wouldn’t be able to answer, though she’d be quick to say, What ancient Yucatán tribe is six letters long and starts with IT. I was afraid that if I could enter into her head, like a doll’s house, and walk through the compressed space of the various rooms, the first thing I’d see, in the main room, would be candles the size of matches lit around a little coffin holding my own corpse, me dead, forgotten, faded, stiff, a Ken-size doll in Barbie’s all-pink house, a ridiculous Ken abandoned in his tiny moss-green living room, I myself moss-green, too, because I’ve been dead for a while.
But again my head betrayed me, again the wound bled, Take off that sweatshirt and let’s make love, I said to Agustina, with an ugly hint of aggression in my voice that undoubtedly sprang from my anger that she wouldn’t do it with me but would with the man at the hotel. She hurled the crossword puzzle away and left the room, and when I went to find her she was rushing around with containers of water again and wouldn’t speak to me or look at me, though I tried everything I could to undo my mistake and interest her once more in the crossword puzzle, Look, Agustina, who would’ve thought, the word that starts with P that we’re missing here is palimpsest, look, it fits perfectly, but Agustina no longer wanted to have anything to do with me or the crossword puzzle or this miserable world. Could it be my fault that she’s gone crazy? Or is her madness infecting me?
I’VE ACQUIRED ANOTHER POWER, says the girl Agustina, one that shakes me so hard it leaves me half dead, a power that sucks all my strength; looking back, she says, I think that’s how I spent my childhood, gathering strength and accumulating power to keep
my father from leaving home. Yesterday, today, many times, she’s heard him fight with her mother and threaten her with the same words, do this and I’m out of here, do that and I’m out of here, and more than anything Agustina doesn’t want her father to go because when he’s here and he’s happy it’s the best thing in the world, and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing like his laugh, like his clean smell of Roger & Gallet and his English shirts with blue-and-white stripes; sometimes, when the house is dark, I look at my father and it’s as if he’s shining, as if there’s a halo around him of cleanliness, elegance, and good smells, I like it when he asks me to blow my nose or wipe some bit of food off my lips because then he hands me his white handkerchief drenched in Roger & Gallet cologne. I’ve seen how Maricrís Cortés’s father sits her on his knees and I cling close to my father hoping he’ll do the same but he doesn’t, maybe if I ask him he will but I don’t dare ask because it isn’t really my father’s way to sit his children on his knees, but I touch the gray wool of his pants, which is so soft because it’s pure cashmere, my mother says, and it isn’t really gray but charcoal, because the colors my father wears have only English names, and I idolize him even though he doesn’t pay much attention to me because his favorites are Joaco, for spoiling, and Bichi, for taunting, and because he has to work all day and when he’s here he’s busy with his stamp collecting.
But Agustina, who little by little has learned to be patient, waits for her turn, which always comes at nine on the dot, the time she calls the ninth hour, which is when we prepare for the night by closing all the doors and windows to protect ourselves from thieves, and my father says to me, Tina, shall we go lock up?, it’s the only time he calls me Tina and not Agustina and that’s when everything changes for a little while because he and I enter a world that we don’t share with anyone, he gives me his heavy key ring that jingles like a cowbell and takes my hand, and we make our way around both floors of the house, starting on the top floor; we even go into the rooms that are dark and since I’m with him I’m not scared, the light that my father radiates reaches into the corners and chases the fear away, he and I are silent, we don’t like to talk as we go about the sacred task of barring the shutters and bolting the doors, this is my old house, the one in the neighborhood of Teusaquillo, because the house after that was the one in La Cabrera, where it was never the ninth hour because it’s a modern building that locks automatically and because by then my father didn’t call me Tina anymore or give me his key ring to hold, because he had other things on his mind.
But this is the house on Caracas Avenue in Teusaquillo, and Agustina knows by heart which key fits where, the gold Yale with the notch at the top is for the door between the kitchen and the patio, the key that’s stamped with a rabbit is for the back gate, the little square one that says Flexon is for the other lock, and the two longest are for the big door to the street; Agustina, who doesn’t need to look at them because she recognizes them by touch, has them ready to pass to her father before he asks for them, at the moment he reaches out his hand, and she’s overwhelmed with happiness when he says, Bravo, Tina, that’s the one, you never get mixed up, you’re even better at it than I am, When he praises me like that I think maybe he really does appreciate me even though he doesn’t say so often, and I realize again that it was worth waiting for the ninth hour; whatever happens that night or the next day I’ll just have to wait for it to be nine again, when my father says, Come on, Tina, and the fog lifts, because once again he’ll offer Agustina his big, dark-skinned hand with its prominent veins, the wedding band on his ring finger, and on his wrist the Rolex that she was given when he died and that she started wearing herself even though it was enormous on her and hung like a bracelet; where must it be, the watch that was once her father’s and is now hers, lost, the watch lost, the hand lost, the memory too vivid and the smell permanently lodged in her nose, her father’s clean, cherished smell.
Agustina longs for that big, warm house, secure and brightly lit, with all of us safe inside and the dark street on the outside, so far from us that it was as if it didn’t exist and couldn’t hurt us with its perils, the street from which bad news comes of people who kill, of poor people with nowhere to live, of a war that’s spread out of Caquetá, the valley, and the coffee-growing region, and is on its way here with its throat-slitting, a war that has already reached Sasaima, which is why we haven’t returned to Gai Repos, news of roaming thieves and of corners where lepers crouch to beg, since if there was anything I feared, if there’s anything I do fear, it’s lepers, because pieces of their bodies fall off and the lepers don’t even notice. But her father locks up the house tight, and Agustina says to him wordlessly, You are the power, you are the true power, and I bow down before you, and she focuses all her attention on handing him the right key because she’s afraid that if she makes a mistake the spell will be broken and he won’t say Tina anymore or hold her hand. On those nightly rounds, says Agustina, I avoid anyone who might annoy my father and make him leave us, whether it’s my mother boring him, or poor Bichito, who irritates him so much, or especially her, Aunt Sofi, who is the main threat, it’ll be Aunt Sofi’s fault when my father and mother separate and we children are left at the mercy of the terrors outside. Or is it Aunt Sofi who keeps my father here? Do the powers visit her, too, especially when she undresses?
HOW CAN I WORK, Blanca my dove, Grandfather Portulinus would say to his wife, when the dead are making my blood run cold, when they’re informing me of their sorrows with insistent little knocks on the table? Don’t worry, Nicholas, let me stand between you and the dead so they can’t come near you.
The preoccupations, or more accurately, obsessions, that plague Portulinus daily revolve around a multitude of puzzles and riddles that he makes himself solve as if they were matters of life or death. These include, for example, the orders sent to him by the spirits through something that Portulinus calls the letter board, and the spirits’ imperceptible taps at the window, to say nothing of the jumble of words formed in crossword puzzles, the messages hidden in the notes of Portulinus’s own compositions, the contents of the page of a book opened at random, the occult logic of the wrinkles in the sheets after a night of insomnia, the significant way handkerchiefs pile up in the handkerchief drawer, or even worse, the disturbing appearance of a handkerchief in the sock drawer.
One day, upon rising, Portulinus discovered a single slipper beside the bed and felt a shiver of terror at the tricks the fugitive slipper might be readying itself to play on him from its hiding place. You have to find it, he ordered Blanca, in a tone of voice that she found menacing. You have to find it, woman, because it’s lying in wait. Who, Nicholas? Who’s lying in wait? And in exasperation, exploding with rage, he replied, Why the cursed slipper! Cursed woman! I demand that you find the other slipper for me before it’s too late!
When faced with such situations, Blanca usually maintained her composure and the customary assurance of a wife who considers the desire for symmetry to be normal—every slipper should be accompanied by its mate, according to the laws of equilibrium—and maybe her behavior was justified, since this could simply be the tantrum of a husband who refused to walk around the house with one foot shod and the other bare, a fundamental and understandable wish for any man and even more so for a temperamental, clearly gifted musician like Portulinus. After all, no one would question the sanity of Chopin if he asked George Sand to help him find his other slipper; on the contrary, it would be madness for him to walk half shod along the corridors of that big, rambling Mallorcan house traversed by winds from every direction, a house that undoubtedly had icy marble or tile floors, surely hazardous for a feverish invalid who gets up for the sole purpose of going to the bathroom, so shaky and weak that it makes no sense to imagine him hopping on one foot, especially if he isn’t trudging to the bathroom but rushing to the piano because a new nocturne has come to him in the throes of his fever. And why shouldn’t what was true for the great Chopin also be true for Nicholas Portulinus,
composer of bambucos and pasillos in the Colombian town of Sasaima?
Following the process of this logic, it’s easier to understand how, despite everything, Blanca’s domestic realism sometimes served as a bridge to normality for her husband, or as a parry of his frenzied thrusts, because although their approaches diverged—his unbalanced, hers obviously healthy—both ended up wanting the slipper to reappear, even if it was clear that it was always she, and never he, who took concrete action, asking the maid to come up to the room and rescue it from under the bed with a broom.
NO MORE. I CAN’T TAKE it anymore. I’m unable to contain myself, I know it’s the stupidest thing I could do and yet I come right out and do it: when I get home I ask Agustina who the man in the hotel room with her was. Gesticulating like a Mexican matinee idol, I demand explanations, I throw a jealous fit, shouting at her, she who already has enough turmoil in her head, who cries at the slightest provocation, who defends herself by lashing out fiercely, who doesn’t even know what’s happened to her.
And since she doesn’t respond I keep mercilessly insisting, I probably even shake her a little, So you don’t remember? I’ll make you remember then, I say and I play the man’s voice recorded on the machine; third and last message (but first in order of appearance for someone playing back the messages, because on this ancient answering machine time is recorded backward), the speaker very abrupt, Isn’t anybody there? Where the fuck can I call, then? Second message, same voice, which is beginning to sound impatient, Is anybody there? It’s about Agustina Londoño, it’s urgent, someone should come and pick her up at the Wellington Hotel because she’s in bad shape. First message, same voice, still neutral at this early stage, I’m calling to ask someone to come pick up Agustina Londoño at the Wellington Hotel, on Thirteenth Road between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth, she isn’t well.
Delirium Page 7
