Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  WHAT I’M TRYING TO DO is this: reach into the quagmire of madness to rescue Agustina from the depths, because only my arm can pull her out and save her from drowning. That’s what must be done. Or maybe not, maybe the right thing would be just the opposite, to leave her alone, let her make her way out on her own. I’ve loved Agustina so much; ever since I’ve known her I’ve protected her from her family, her past, the workings of her own mind. Have I alienated her from herself? Does she hate me for it, and is that why she can’t find herself now, or me? I’m striving to liberate her from her inner anguish whatever the cost, refusing to accept the possibility that just now she might be better off inside than out, that behind the walls of her delirium, Agustina is perfectly happy.

  Sitting at the window, Agustina is gazing out with such a lost air that she seems to exist out there, at the point of escape toward which she’s directing her gaze, and not within the four walls of the apartment that enclose her. I look at her and remember a phrase that suddenly takes on new meaning: the beautiful indifference of hysteria. Agustina is silent and indifferent, shedding language as one might remove a superfluous adornment. Aunt Sofi tells me that hours earlier she’d helped Agustina wash her hair with chamomile shampoo and that afterward, upon seeing how calmly Agustina was drying her hair with a brush and the hair dryer, she left her alone for a minute while she busied herself in the kitchen. Minutes later she missed the sound of the hair dryer and went up to see what was happening and found Agustina sitting where she is now, dazed, as still as a statue, with her hair half dried. That must have been at around five in the afternoon and since then Agustina hasn’t moved, or opened her mouth.

  I beg Agustina to say something, a single word at least, but it’s hopeless, then I sit next to her, imitating the way she’s staring emptily into space, and after a while she opens her mouth and shows me her tongue: it’s horribly injured, raw, as if it’s been burned. Upon seeing this, a kind of howl escapes from my throat, alarming Aunt Sofi and making her come running. Feigning calm—I don’t know where the woman finds such composure—she carefully examines Agustina’s lacerated tongue, concludes that raw sugar is the only thing that’s good for curing sores inside the mouth and brings some on a plate. Agustina sticks out her hurt tongue and lets the sugar be put on it with the docility of an animal that’s been beaten, but no matter how many times I ask her how she’d done such a terrible thing to herself, she won’t explain. Aunt Sofi apologizes to me for her inexcusable negligence. If only you’d seen her in the bathroom a little while ago, using the hair dryer as if nothing was wrong, as if fixing her hair was the most natural thing in the world, as if tonight she was going out to eat or to the movies, as if she wasn’t sick or plotting to martyr herself as soon as I turned my back…I interrupt Aunt Sofi suddenly because a terrible thought has crossed my mind: Could Agustina have eaten glass? My God! Could she have eaten glass and be torn up inside, too? No, says Aunt Sofi, relax Aguilar, her tongue looks bad but it isn’t cut or bleeding; it looks as if it was burned. But with what? What could she have used to burn herself so hideously? I can’t take it anymore. I need to hide in the bathroom, cry a little. Cry without stopping for a day, two days, three.

  Ever since she hurt her tongue, Agustina can’t speak or eat anything, so her only sustenance has been Pedialyte, a serum for dehydrated children. But today she refuses even that. With a glass of serum in her hand, Sofi implores her to take a sip, but Agustina pretends that she can’t hear her and when Sofi insists too much, she pushes the glass away sharply, then she comes to me, and struggling to speak the words, she says, I don’t like the yellow Pedialyte, Aguilar, I want the pink kind that comes in cherry flavor. Don’t make me laugh, Agustina, I tell her, and the truth is that I’m laughing as I haven’t laughed since the Sunday all this began, and despite the horror of seeing the incomprehensible way she’s hurt her tongue, I keep laughing to myself as I walk to the pharmacy to buy her the red cherry-flavored serum, because at certain exceptional moments, sometimes in the middle of the worst crises, normality seems to take pity on us and make brief appearances.

  Last Tuesday, for example, after surviving a few horrendous days, Agustina and I had a period of quiet. It only lasted a little while, but it was heavenly. By seven I had finished making the day’s deliveries and I came home with my heart in my throat, not knowing how I would find her on my return, and to my great surprise she greeted me neither with the aloofness of her prayers nor with the wrath of her attacks, but with a warm smell of cooking that misted the windowpanes in the kitchen. And in the middle of that smell, a youthful, carefree-looking Agustina was making soup on the stove, and she said to me, as if nothing had happened, It’s a nice vegetable soup, Aguilar, I hope you like it. When I heard her I stood there frozen, paralyzed by surprise, not daring to move for fear that this incredible untroubled normality visiting my house for the first time in so many days would vanish; not kissing Agustina for fear of being rejected and at the same time fearing that her mood would change if I didn’t kiss her; not telling her about the round of deliveries that day to avoid bringing up the subject of the lady from Quinta Camacho, a nice person who lives alone with her cocker spaniel and who calls each month to order a sack of Purina, and with whom I’ve never exchanged more than thank-yous, she thanking me when I deliver her order and I thanking her when she pays me, and who nevertheless, I don’t know how, gradually became a source of suspicion for Agustina regarding my faithfulness; all of this was before the dark episode, of course, I’m talking about jealous scenes and silly fights that until recently were a part of our life as a couple and that bored me terribly, and that I nevertheless miss now.

  So that Tuesday, when I found Agustina making vegetable soup, I just stood there in the middle of the kitchen doing nothing, holding a package from Only Supercenter with the black velvet panty hose that Aunt Sofi had requested by beeper, as if nourishing myself on that amazing tranquillity sure to vanish at any moment and not return for who knows how long, and it was Agustina herself who spoke first to say that if I was tired why didn’t I take a bath while she finished cooking, and she said it in the same cheerful voice she used to have before all this began. I went up to shower as she had suggested, and I stayed waiting in the bedroom, silent and trembling expectantly until she called me; she called me by my name, my last name, that is, with a shout that could almost be called happy. Soup’s ready, Aguilar, she shouted from the kitchen, and I went slowly down the stairs, step by step, so as not to break the spell; she filled three bowls, one for me, one for Sofi, and one for herself, setting them on the table with hot French bread, and we sat down and ate in silence. But it was a silence without recriminations or tensions, a relaxed and benign silence that made me believe that we were finally beating it, that now we were almost home free, that Agustina was being cured of whatever it was that had come over her.

  A little while later she climbed in bed on my side, entwined her legs with mine, turned on the television and said, How nice, The Pest is on, it’s been so long since I’ve seen it, and she started to laugh at some of the characters’ jokes and I laughed, too, cautiously, alert to any sign, any change, remembering that a few months ago I would have been annoyed if she had interrupted my reading by turning on the television, I wouldn’t have said anything but it would have annoyed me, especially if the show was a mindless one like The Pest, and to think that the very same action that would have bothered me before now brought me back to life, as if this was all life needed to be, as if The Pest’s jokes were enough, and with Agustina still peaceful I surprised myself by being prepared to kneel down to give thanks, and I would have done it if I’d known to which god I owed the miracle. Agustina watched television and I watched her, her face familiar and beautiful again, as if the evil fog had cleared at last. But when The Pest was over and I asked her whether she wanted to turn the television off now, she looked at me again with a blank expression on her face and I knew that the respite was over.

  The truth is, my wife’s face ha
s changed since she’s been sick, to use a word I’ve heard her use to describe her own state these days. I miss her mocking look of a lost girl, the look that disturbed me so much the first time I saw it, outside of the film society, and that made me say something very gauche to her that I wouldn’t have said if I hadn’t been so naïve, You have the enormous eyes of a starving child, I told her, giving her fuel to make fun of me for a whole week, but in the end what I said wasn’t so far off, and every once in a while there they are again, those eyes of a starving child, but only for a few moments, because when she looks at me without seeing me it’s as if she no longer has eyelashes or retinas or irises or eyelids, and all that’s left is hunger, a ferocious hunger that can’t be satisfied. Agustina, my beautiful Agustina, is shrouded in a cold brilliance that signals distance, behind the barred door of the delirium that won’t let her out or me in. Now she has a permanent look of having just spotted a hair on her plate, a grimace of simultaneous surprise and disgust, the opposite of a smile, a flutter of disappointment. And I ask myself how long this will last.

  MY MOTHER IS GETTING ready because tonight she’s going out with my father, says Agustina, maybe they’ll go to the movies or some party. She’s happy and I’m keeping her company in the bathroom, a song is playing on the radio that I think is very pretty, my mother knows the words and I’m proud of her, she’s singing along with the voice on the radio which she never does in front of my father because he makes fun of her and says she has a tin ear, anyway my father thinks listening to the radio is something only lower-class people do. Leaning over the sink, Agustina’s mother is washing her black hair, and her only daughter, who is me, Agustina, is helping her rinse it with a jar of warm water, I pour the water over my mother’s bent head and watch how it slides down her neck carrying the remains of the suds down the drain, my mother, tall and thin, dressed only in a grape-colored nylon slip trimmed with lace, I remember it clearly, says Agustina, because it must have been one of the few times in my life that my mother and I ever had a conversation.

  Mother, I ask her, why don’t girls wear nylon slips, Girls wear underskirts, she tells me, to show off their flouncy dresses. Now Eugenia, Agustina’s mother, has pinned curls all over her head and she’s drying them with the hair dryer as her daughter watches, No, I’m not looking directly at my mother, only at my mother’s reflection in the mirror, I’m keeping her company in the bathroom because I like to watch how she puts her green wool dress on over the grape-colored slip, a very fitted dress because she’s so slender, Mother, I don’t want to wear the underskirt that makes my dress flouncy, I like dresses like the green one you’re wearing to go out with my father, You’ll have one when you’re big, when you go out with boys, Not with boys, thinks Agustina, I’ll go out with my father, For now you should wear your things, Eugenia continues, your dresses with embroidered bodices and full skirts, look at your friend Maricrís Cortés, she’s lovely in the dresses that her aunt Yoya sews for her.

  Tell me, Mother, what does your name mean, I’ve told you a thousand times already, Tell me again, Eugenia means of noble birth, And what does Agustina mean, It means venerable, Venerable?, I would rather have been called Eugenia, My mother puts on bright red lipstick and she tells me that when I’m fifteen she’ll let me wear lipstick, too, but it will be pearl pink, she doesn’t like it when young girls wear red lipstick, she says that their parents shouldn’t let them, that that’s what pearl pink is for, it’s more delicate and subtle. My mother dabs perfume behind her ears and on her wrists, the inside part, where there are little veins that carry the scent all over; she tells me that she only uses Chanel No. 5, which is what my father always gives her for her birthday, and she puts some on me, too, a little on my wrists and behind my ears, which is where it lasts. I ask her if she’ll let me wear Chanel No. 5 when I’m fifteen and she says no, that the best thing for young girls is pure rose water because the stronger scents make them seem old. When her perfume is dry she fastens her pearl necklace around her neck, but not before; she warns me that perfume should never touch pearls, because it kills them. Are they alive, then? Yes, they come from the sea alive and you keep them alive with the salt of your body. And the smell of perfume kills them? It’s the alcohol in perfume that kills them, silly.

  The telephone rings and my mother puts down the hair dryer to go answer it, maybe it’s my father calling to remind her that they’re going out tonight, my mother turns down the radio so she can hear him clearly and runs to tell him that she won’t be much longer, that she’s practically ready now, from the bathroom Agustina hears that they’re arguing on the phone and she knows that they’re fighting. Aren’t they going out after all, and won’t her mother wear the green dress? What was the point of the pearls, the curls, or the perfume that she put on for nothing, for no one? Her mother is still in the bedroom and the hair dryer is within Agustina’s reach on the bathroom cabinet, she turns it on and lets the warm air blow on her face. I curl a wet lock of hair, like my mother, then I dry it and turn off the hair dryer because the noise prevents me from hearing the angry words that are being spoken, my mother’s tearful voice, I look into the tube where the air comes from and I see that inside there’s a coil of wire. I turn it on again and I watch the coil turn bright red, like candy. I feel the urge to touch that red wire with the tip of my tongue. My tongue wants to touch it, so red, so red, my tongue comes closer, my tongue touches it.

  THE FRIDAY OF THE BET arrived at last, Agustina sweetheart, the day the coin would be tossed to see whether it came up erection or defeat, well, actually this would be the first attempt of three, and since Spider had made it clear that if anything in this world could touch his heart it was a pretty twosome, nice white girls with dirty minds, virginal dykes, bad kids from good families, I had set everything up according to his instructions, and I called him that morning, overcome by laughter, Everything’s ready for tonight, you old rascal, and Spider at the other end of the line, stuttering in embarrassment because his wife must have been nearby, said, What’s the story, Midas my boy, how’s that business of ours, and I was fooling around, singing the song that goes Lady, lady of high birth and low bed; you can’t imagine, Agustina darling, how worked up the man was. His manhood would be on the line that night, his pride or his humiliation in plain view of everyone, and still he was bragging on the phone, Put that deal through and don’t you worry, Midas my boy, because lately I’ve been raring to go, and cheering him on, I said, Excellent, Spider my man, you keep your cool, because the two investors I found for you will get that business up and running in a jiffy.

  Nine at night was the time set for the performance, and the place was the Aerobics Center, closed and empty by then; upstairs in my office were Rony Silver, your brother Joaco, Ayerbe, and I, hidden behind the two-way mirror in the best seats in the house, while below us the circus began with the two ballerinas doing their little number on the platform and the clown in his wheelchair, Spider all nervous laughter and prayers to God like a boy at his first Communion, and before him the pair of stark-naked girls weaving and making out to disco music under spotlights, pretty little things, giving their all, you might say, because the deal I made with them was for triple or nothing, triple if they got the client excited, nothing if they failed.

  Everything was just right, five star, top ten, but the truth is, Agustina pet, that from the start you could tell the thing was a bust. Spider was writhing from the waist up, but downstairs there was still no one home, and seeing that what they were doing wasn’t working, the two girls stepped up the swaying and exaggerated the touching, but nothing; they’d already taken off all their clothes, and nothing; they’d shown everything, down to their tonsils, and nothing; and somehow, back there behind the mirror, even the three of us fully functioning males lost interest after the thrill of the first fifteen minutes and began to talk politics, and Silver, who was good company that night, told us that at the American embassy, where he works, they have a machine that detects explosions and that just last T
uesday in Bogotá sixty-three bombs had gone off, Fucking stupid gringos, I said, they need machines to pick up blasts that slam us all against the ceiling, Pablo Escobar is in a bad mood, said your brother Joaco, all those bombs are because the Liberal Party has just expelled him from its slate for being a druglord, The man doesn’t like being called the King of Coca, said Silver, he prefers Father of the Nation, Of course he does, it sounds more democratic, It may sound that way, but it means the same thing, Come on, Silver, man, tell us what else you pick up with that bomb-detecting machine at the embassy, your goddamn spy box must be able to let the Pentagon know each time the president of Colombia farts.

  So there we were in full swing, Agustina doll, laughing at the gruesome national farce, when someone rings the bell outside, Who can it be at this time of night?, No one, I said, we won’t let them in, that’s all, but whoever it was had ideas of his own; tired of ringing he leaned on his car horn like he was trying to wake up the whole neighborhood, imagine, Agustina, a residential neighborhood and right there in front of the center some idiot decides to make a commotion like that, not caring who he disturbs, and Spider, who up until that moment had been a good sport, lost his temper, Tell that son of a bitch to cut the music, he shouted, because even God couldn’t get it up with that racket going on, but the guy on the horn was at the door again and he was kicking it like he wanted to break it down, I’ll be right back, I told the others, and high on adrenaline I took the stairs in two bounds, determined to tell the rude bastard off, and when I opened the door, Agustina doll, the blood froze in my veins; it was none other than Mystery, the bandit who was my contact with Pablo Escobar, and whom I would never in a million years meet at the Aerobics Center but rather on the outskirts of Bogotá, in the parking lot of Memory Gardens, what better place than a cemetery to meet Mystery, the walking corpse.