Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  It’s a good thing you opened the door, McAlister, he said in his eternal tone of veiled threat, I have orders from Don Pablo to give you a message, Mystery, my man, old buddy, I’m sorry about the wait, my friends and I were just having a little private party here and it never occurred to me it would be you, Shut up and listen, because I’ve got some big news for you, or I should say the Boss wants to do you a favor, Of course, Mystery, we can talk right here if you want, or even better in your Mazda so we’re out of the cold, I suggested, doing my best to keep the wretch out of the Aerobics Center so that my esteemed partners wouldn’t get a look at the kind of thugs I dealt with, it was best if they only saw the miracle and steered clear of the saint, because I’ll tell you this much, Agustina princess, Mystery wasn’t pretty, nothing holy about him, that’s for sure, with his eyes bloodshot from crack, that skeletal look, foul breath, and greasy hair.

  Mystery, my man, what brings you here, I said to him as we got in his car, but it gave me the creeps, Agustina darling, I swear, I got into that Mazda like I was headed for the electric chair, and I only did it to avoid a disastrous encounter between Mystery the sewer rat and my high-class Bogotá rat friends. Give me the news, then, Mystery, man, Nothing big, just a word from the Boss, And what is it?, Don Pablo wants you to get him two hundred million in cash by the day after tomorrow, Two hundred million?, You heard me, two hundred, and he’ll return it to you in fifteen days at five to one, Five to one?, I repeated, Do I hear an echo?, Mystery retorted, with the nervous irritation of a desperate crackhead, Well, well, how generous of Pablo, I said soothingly, while mentally I calculated that a return that big would more than compensate for this god-awful little interval I was enduring, And why is that?, I asked Mystery, to conceal my eagerness, Could the great Pablo possibly have cash-flow problems? You know how things are, these are times of persecution. I imagined that Pablo, who had the Search Bloc, the DEA, and the Cali cartel on his heels lately, must not be hanging out with samba girls at his Naples property, but hunkered down in some hiding place, eyeball to eyeball with the grim reaper, And how will Pablo return it to me, if I may inquire, I asked Mystery, He’ll pay it in monitos, that was what he said to tell you, Monitos are money orders, Agustina sweetheart, that’s what they’re called in money-laundering lingo, It’ll be a great pleasure, my dear Mystery, but the tricky thing is that I can’t come up with two hundred million in cash overnight, Well you see, McAlister, this is a take it or leave it kind of deal, I’ll be back in fifteen days with the monitos in my pocket and it’s up to you whether you come up with the pesos or not, oh, and one last thing, the Boss only wants you, the Informer, and the Cripple in on this, said Mystery and he vanished into the night, his tires squealing and his unhealthy aura lingering in the air behind him.

  I stood there for a while feeling queasy, how the hell could I get that much money if I could only go to Spider and Silverstein, because you must realize by now, Agustina love, that it was those two Pablo Escobar meant when he referred to the Cripple and the Informer. Did Pablo know that Rony Silver worked for the DEA? well of course he did, that was why he licked his lips each time he could grease Silver’s palm, and why it was Pablo himself who told me, when we started to do business together, that I should go after the gringo and get him involved, Those DEA guys are working both ends, Escobar had said, laughing, which is why when they fall, they go down twice as hard.

  I DON’T KNOW, I think to myself, this tragedy is starting to take on shades of melodrama. Even Aunt Sofi, so calm and collected, sometimes talks as if she’s in a soap opera. And what about Agustina, who seems plucked straight from the pages of Jane Eyre, and what about me, living with this anguish and these outbursts and this lack of understanding and selfhood, especially that, I feel as if my wife’s illness has subjugated my identity, as if I’m a man who’s been emptied out inside in order to be stuffed, like a cushion, with concern for Agustina, love for Agustina, anxiety about Agustina, resentment of Agustina. Madness is a compendium of unpleasant things: for example, it’s pedantic, it’s hateful, and it’s tortuous. It contains a large component of unreality and maybe that’s why it’s theatrical, and I’m also on the verge of believing that it’s defined by an absence of humor, and that’s why it’s so melodramatic.

  Today I was bringing Agustina a cheese sandwich. I made it for her with butter, toasting it in the waffle iron the way she likes it, and I was about to go into the bedroom when I heard Aunt Sofi ask to be forgiven, she was saying something like, Can you forgive me, Agustina?, and again, Will you ever be able to forgive me for what I did? So Aunt Sofi has a past and sins of her own. At last I’m going to find something out, I thought, and unnoticed, I waited outside the door for the conversation to begin, but the minutes went by and Agustina was still silent, neither granting forgiveness nor denying it, and then Aunt Sofi gave up, the sandwich got cold, and I went back to the kitchen to heat it up again.

  Upon returning to the bedroom I found Agustina dozing and Sofi watching the news, and watching was the right word for it, because she had turned down the volume and was making do with the picture, and I shook my wife a little by the shoulder to make her eat but I only managed to get her to say, without looking at me, that she hated cheese sandwiches, and at that Aunt Sofi felt obliged to intervene, as she always does, Forgive your wife, dear, her problem is that she’s suffering and she has disguised her pain as indifference, and as I chewed the rejected sandwich, I replied, Yes, I forgive my wife, Aunt Sofi, but tell me, what about you? who’s supposed to forgive you?, Were you listening?, she said, then she asked whether I really wanted her to tell me and went on without waiting for an answer, I’ll tell you for poor Agustina’s sake, because it has to do with the involuntary role I played in this tragedy, and it involves something I did that hurt her badly, It would be better if we went downstairs, Aunt Sofi, I said, taking her by the arm, let’s leave Agustina here asleep and talk in the living room, If I don’t put my feet up for a while they’ll explode, she said, sitting on the sofa, and I helped her settle her feet on a pile of pillows. Then I got out a bottle of Ron Viejo de Caldas, thinking it might smooth the way for a conversation that promised not to be easy, and there we were, each of us with a drink in one hand, I in the cane rocker and Aunt Sofi on the sofa with her feet up, A little music?, I asked to lighten the mood, and I put on Celina and Reutilio.

  It was one of those things, Aunt Sofi said, as if she were about to start talking, but then she stopped, and was quiet for a good fifteen minutes, seeming to enjoy the relief of having her shoes off, savoring the Caldas sip by sip, and allowing herself to be soothed by the balm of Cuban son, and I let her be, the woman certainly deserved a moment’s peace. Then she let out a laugh that was somehow lighthearted and at odds with the difficult story she’d announced she had to tell, and she asked me to listen to what Celina was singing, Listen to her, she’ll explain everything, start the song over that’s just finished playing, and I did as she asked and Celina began to sing the part of “The Old Horse” that goes “When love comes like this it’s not your fault, when willing hearts meet love has no timetable or date.” So willing hearts met and it wasn’t your fault, That’s right, Aguilar, willing hearts met and it was no one’s fault, It’s never anyone’s fault, Aunt Sofi, now pour yourself another drink and let’s focus on the matter of forgiveness, tell me why you were asking Agustina to forgive you, I was asking her to forgive me for some photographs that destroyed her family.

  According to Aunt Sofi, her sister, Eugenia, and Eugenia’s husband, Carlos Vicente Londoño, invited Aunt Sofi to live with them when they moved north, To a house that was enormous, Aunt Sofi told me, well, a house that still is enormous, because Eugenia lives there now with her son Joaco and his family; how to explain Joaco, he’s someone alien to me, a man who has triumphed in life but who lives in a world that isn’t mine, he’s too big for his britches, as my mother would say, but he has one undeniable merit, which is that he has always taken care of Eugenia, and I tell you, Aguilar,
it’s a Herculean task, but that’s my nephew Joaco’s good side, he had to have some redeeming quality, you don’t know how patient and gentle he is with his mother. My sister, Eugenia, so beautiful, because believe me she was lovely, but she’s always been adrift in a kind of absence, Body without soul, city without people, Carlos Vicente would say when he looked at her, especially in the dining room, at dinner, when she was sitting at the head of the table under the slivers of rainbow from the chandeliers up above, her profile as perfect as a cameo, and just as still, just as stony.

  I, on the other hand, wasn’t delicate, Aguilar, I wasn’t perfect, and unlike Eugenia, who was so slender, I had inherited the German frame you see today, and ever since I was young I’ve been big and heavy, like my father. But I was alive inside. The house was hers, the husband was hers, the children were her children. I, on the other hand, was a parasite, a freeloader, a spinster aunt they’d had to take in because I had nowhere to go, and everything I had in that house was borrowed. That’s how it looked from the outside, but on the inside things were almost the reverse. Eugenia was the lonely one, the quiet one, the one who was always properly behaved and perfectly dressed, the one unable to love without suffering, the one who subsisted on appearances, and I filled the voids of affection she left. It was I, not she, who ministered to her husband in bed like a wife and who loved her children like a mother, I who did the children’s homework with them and took them to the park and cared for them when they were sick, who handled the shopping and the housekeeping, because if it were up to Eugenia we would’ve eaten the same thing every day, not because she didn’t know how to cook, she’s a wonderful cook, but because of her sheer joylessness, because she left the servants to fend for themselves and never went into the kitchen, and because of the general lack of enthusiasm with which she got up each morning.

  Carlos Vicente Londoño was a good man in his conventional and stuffy way, divinely well dressed, always in a dark suit, always freshly shaven and immaculate, hungry for affection, for someone to make him laugh a little; he certainly wasn’t the most brilliant of men, suffice it to say that his great passions were stamp collecting and Playboy magazine. His tragedy was his youngest son, Bichi, a sweet, intelligent, imaginative boy, a good student, everything one might expect of a son and more, but with a certain tendency toward the feminine that his father couldn’t accept and that made him suffer untold agonies. Carlos Vicente was convinced that the obligation to correct the defect and set the boy straight rested in his hands and whenever I tried to bring up the subject, he would lose his temper; he had no qualms about asking me what right I had to express an opinion when I wasn’t the child’s mother. To make matters worse, the boy was irresistibly beautiful, if your Agustina is lovely, Aguilar, Bichi is even more so, and back then he radiated a bewildering kind of angelic light, but that only made things worse with his father.

  Eugenia had the habit of traveling for a week each year with her three children to Disney World, in Florida, and she invited me to come along but I refused on some pretext, unable to confess that I had my own Mickey Mouse at home, of course. That week was the most important week of the year for me; you can’t imagine, Aguilar, what a good time Carlos Vicente and I had, without ever having to pretend or hide because Eugenia herself took the opportunity to give the servants their vacation, Will you cook for Carlos Vicente, Sofi?, she asked me as she was packing, and I said, Of course I will, don’t worry, I’ll see to it, and see to it I certainly did! We danced at the cheap dance halls or we went to see Mexican movies, always downtown or in the south of the city, in those working-class neighborhoods where there was no way anyone we knew would go, you know it’s farther from the north to the south of Bogotá than it is from here to Miami, if you could’ve seen Carlos Vicente, always such the society gentleman that he looked as if he’d swallowed an umbrella, well, in the anonymity of the south he loosened up, he was nicer to people, he danced like a dream in the dive bars, we loved to go to the Swan, the Loose Screw, the Salomé, the Pagan Delight; we found out where Alci Acosta and Olimpo Cardenas were performing and we went to hear them sing, tipsy and swooning until dawn, life only gave us a week each year, but I swear, Aguilar, we knew how to make the best of it.

  Well, it was while Eugenia and the children were away one time that we discovered how much fun we could have taking photos. I knew how much Carlos Vicente liked the Playboy bunnies, and I made fun of him, What strange kind of animal are men, I’d say to him, that they prefer paper women to women of flesh and blood, and since he was an excellent photographer, he came up with the idea of photographing me naked and I was happy to oblige; Now next to the fireplace, he directed, all right, now on your way down the stairs, now on the rug, now do your hair like this, now put that on, now take everything off, I swear to you, Aguilar, I never saw Carlos Vicente so excited, he took five or six rolls that he sent away to be developed, where I don’t know, far from the neighborhood anyway, and then we would pore over the best ones, and make fun of the bad ones, in some I looked too fat and I covered his eyes so he couldn’t see them. Incredible, I interrupt her, I bet that collection wasn’t included in the family album alongside the first Communion pictures, Be quiet, Aguilar, let me finish telling you this before I regret it, a day or two before the travelers’ return we’d say goodbye to all that and burn the photographs in the fireplace, but sometimes there was one he liked a lot, and he’d say to me, Nothing can make me burn this picture, because it’s a work of art and you look gorgeous, Don’t be stubborn, Carlos Vicente, it’ll cause problems later on, Don’t worry, Sofi, he’d soothe me, I’ll keep it in the safe at my office and no one knows the combination.

  I stop the music and pour another round of Ron Viejo de Caldas and just then Agustina appears in the living-room doorway in the same dirty sweatshirt that she has refused to take off since the dark episode, with the bewitched expression of someone waiting for something that won’t take place in the world she shares with the rest of us, and she shows us the pair of saucepans she’s holding. Oh God!, sighs Aunt Sofi, lowering her feet resignedly from the cushions, she’s starting up that water business again.

  GRANDMOTHER BLANCA and Grandfather Portulinus leave the old myrtle and walk toward the river. Portulinus advances with difficulty through the dense weave of too-intense greens; he’d like to cover the pores and orifices of his body so that the clinging vegetal smell won’t work its way into him, and he’s dazed by the heat and the damp, stopping to scratch his ankles, swollen with mosquito bites. Just a little bit farther, Nicholas, says Blanca, we’re almost there, and when your feet are in the water, you’ll feel better. It’s true, I can already hear the river, he says with relief, because the redemptive tumble of the waterfall has begun to reach his ears, the crash of clean water against the rocks of the precipice is nearby now. It’s the Rhine!, Portulinus exclaims with barely contained emotion, and his wife corrects him, It’s the Sweet River, dear, we’re in Sasaima. In Sasaima, of course, he repeats with a fragile laugh to hide his confusion. Of course, my darling Blanca, you’re right as always, this is the Sweet.

  Before leaping into space, the water pauses docilely in a pool surrounded by smooth black stones; husband and wife sit on one of the stones and Blanca helps Nicholas roll up his trouser legs and take off his boots and socks, and he, more relaxed now, lets the pleasant coolness of the water rise up his feet, flood his body, and soothe his mind, How lovely it is, Blanquita, how lovely it is to watch the water flow, and she tells him that she’s worried about the chronic flu that Nicasio, the steward, has. It must be consumption, says Portulinus. Not consumption, Nicholas, don’t say such things, God forbid, it’s just the flu, but the problem is that it’s chronic. Chronic flus are called tuberculosis, says Nicholas. In German, maybe, she replies, laughing, and he says, I like when you laugh, you look so pretty. Then she tells him, The Uribe Becharas loved the bambuco you composed for them for their daughter Eloísa’s wedding. They liked it?, he asks, I thought it would bother them because of the pa
rt about love bleeding out slowly drop by drop. And why would that bother them, when it’s so pretty. Yes, but you’re forgetting that the father of the groom died of hemophilia. Oh Nicholas!, you’re obsessed with illnesses today. Come here, Blanca my dove, let me hold you and together let’s watch the innocent way the water idles in the pool before it falls. There you have the lyrics for another bambuco, she jokes, and they continue on in the same vein, speaking about the things that make up their daily lives, about how many eggs the hens are laying, the lateness of the long rains, their daughter Eugenia’s love of birds and their daughter Sofía’s passion for dance, and Portulinus’s speech flows smoothly and coherently until Blanca sees that the river, which lulls and calms him, has put him to sleep.

  The Rhine, says Portulinus from his doze, and he smiles, half closing his eyes. Not the Rhine, my darling, the Sweet. Leave me be, woman, let my memory drift, what’s the harm in that?, the Recknitz, the Regen, the Rhine, he repeats, speaking slowly to savor the sonority of each syllable, and he doesn’t mention the Putumayo, the Amazon, or the Apaporis, which are also melodious though real and in this hemisphere, but the Danube, the Düssel, and the Eder, which are very far away if they’re anywhere at all, making Blanca realize that it’s time to go home. She dries his feet with her skirt, rubs saliva on the mosquito bites so they don’t sting, slips his boots back on him, tying the laces well so that he won’t step on them, takes his hand and leads him away, because she knows that she must prevent Portulinus’s dreams from chasing after the sounds of the water. On one of the pages in her diary, Grandmother Blanca will write, “When he’s tired and nervous from too much work, it soothes Nicholas to watch the river, but if he stays too long, he begins to get excited and then we must leave as soon as possible.” What Grandmother Blanca doesn’t say in her diary is that when Grandfather Nicholas repeats the names of the rivers of his country, the Aisch, the Aller, and the Altmülh, the Warnow, the Warta, and the Weser, he does it in strict alphabetical order. A madman’s habit, manias destined to send him to his grave, or to put it another way, tics and repetitions that help him disconnect from reality, or at least from what’s real for someone like Blanca. The Saale, the Spree, the Sude, and the Tauber, intones Nicholas like a prayer, and inside of him a noise begins to echo and carries him away.