But he was thirsty, he tried to sit up and he stretched his hand out toward me, toward the glass that I was giving him, his fingers brushed mine, which still retain the memory of that touch, but he didn’t take the glass, instead he slid down again on his side, slowly, like his blood, which was now a big dark puddle on the white marble of the entranceway, the tips of Bichi’s shoes were at the edge of the puddle and I pushed him back with my arm, Don’t touch that blood I told him, but Bichi didn’t listen, Did you think, brother of mine, that the blood that day was like the waters of the Styx and that touching it would make us invincible?
The rest of the afternoon was very long, sunny at first but then less so until the air turned violet and each thing grew a precise shadow, as if cut out with scissors, and the cold started to come down from the mountains but I didn’t feel it because I was standing at the edge of that man’s blood, unable to take my eyes off it or move, my eyes wide open and my sight growing sharper and sharper, standing there like a pillar of salt because the sight of blood freezes my powers and traps me, Bichi wasn’t with me anymore and neither was Joaco and even the guard himself seemed to have gone, maybe the only part of him left before me was his body, his black poncho, and his blood but I kept standing there, motionless, my presence required by what was happening, which was that a man was dying, for the first time in my life someone was dying.
At some point during that long afternoon two men in gray coats arrived in a police van, one of them putting on rubber gloves and kneeling down in front of the dead man, who by then seemed to belong to me after all the hours I’d spent watching him, or maybe keeping him company if he was aware of my company. I had already memorized his thin mustache and the blank gaze of his one open eye and the two shoes that had fallen off leaving his feet in plain sight, and later in life I learned that it’s a kind of law that the dead always lose their shoes. Agustina thought, This dead man is mine because I was the only one with him when he died, I’m the only one here staring at his socks which are brown with little white dots, and I’m surprised to discover that even the dead wear socks; Agustina swears that back then she believed men were split into two groups, on one side were those who wore black or charcoal-gray socks, like her father, and on the other side was everyone else, those who wore socks that were essentially brown with light-colored dots.
The man with the rubber gloves tried to move the dead man but he wouldn’t budge, as if he preferred to stay clutching his poncho in that uncomfortable position, then the man in the coat started to search the dead man’s pockets and found a small battery-powered radio that was still playing, turned down low but playing, emitting music and commercials and torrents of words as if the guard could still hear it and Agustina thought: The radio is the only part of him that’s still alive. From another pocket they took four coins and a small comb that the man in gloves put in a plastic bag with the radio, which he’d turned off so that it wouldn’t keep playing, and then the other man who was with him also put on gloves, extending the index and middle finger of his right hand and curling the other two fingers and thumb under the way priests do when they’re blessing the faithful from the altar, He’s going to bless him so he doesn’t go to hell, I thought, but no, it wasn’t that, what he did with the upraised fingers was probe my dead man’s wounds; one by one he stuck his two fingers into each wound while saying, Sharp instrument, left armpit, six centimeters; sharp instrument, four centimeters, right intercostal gap between the seventh and eighth rib, counting all the holes in the body while a woman in blue made notes in her pad until they reached nine and he said: Nine stab wounds, one perforating the liver.
As they walked back and forth to the police van, the two men and the woman stepped in the guard’s blood and left red footprints in the marble entranceway until my father and mother came home at the same time but in separate cars and there was a terrible uproar, Agustina could hear their words but she couldn’t understand them, How could this happen, the children shouldn’t be seeing this, Joaco, Agustina, Bichi, go to your rooms immediately, How can it be that neither Aminta nor Sofi are here, how could they be so irresponsible. Father, there were nine stab wounds with a sharp instrument, Mother, there were nine stab wounds with a sharp instrument; we tried to tell them about the little radio and the glass of water but they wouldn’t listen, Father, what does perforating the liver mean, Mother, where is the liver, but my father double-locked the door to the house with us inside and my dead man was left outside, I never found out what his name was and I still wonder whether the water I gave him trickled out through the holes in his body, too.
I’ve already said that before things happen, I get three calls, and the Third Call of the Blood sounded in my ears at the pool at Gai Repos, in Sasaima, and sounded again in the reproachful look my mother gave me, how many times have I seen her face twist at the things I do or say or the things that happen to me, it’s an expression of such disgust, and this time it was because the Spilled Blood came out of me, running down my legs and staining my bathing suit, and my beautiful mother with her horrified face, so thin and pale in her white summer dress, took me by the arm and said, You have to get out of the pool now.
She tried to wrap me in a towel but I, who was playing cops and robbers with my cousins and brothers, I, who was a robber, was only interested in not being caught, Let me go, Mother, they’ll capture me if I don’t jump in the water, the water is the robbers’ hideout, Mother, can’t you see they’re going to catch me. But she wouldn’t let me go, she squeezed my arm so hard it hurt, It’s come, Agustina, she told me, it’s come, but I didn’t know what had come, Cover yourself up with the towel and come in the house with me right now, but I threw away the towel and yanked my arm out of my mother’s grasp and jumped in the water and it was then that I saw it, coming out of me with no one’s permission and tinting the pool a watery blood color.
This is the Third Call, I thought, and I don’t know what happened next, all I remember is that finally, inside the house, Aunt Sofi gave me a Kotex, I already knew what they were because we stole them from my mother’s bathroom and used them as padding in the baskets for the little live chicks colored with aniline dye that we were given for our first Communions, chicks with green, lilac, pink, or blue feathers, chicks that only lasted a few days and then had to be buried; my father said it was wrong to dye them because the color poisoned them. Put this in your panties, Aunt Sofi said to me, handing me the Kotex, Come on, I’ll show you how, but Agustina was crying and didn’t want to do it, it seemed horrible to her that her blood should come out there and stain her clothes and that her mother should give her that reproachful look, the kind of look you give someone who does something dirty, who dirties-things-with-her-blood.
Then Aunt Sofi said, Poor girl, so young and she already has her period, and since outside my cousins and brothers were shouting for me to come back and play cops and robbers, I dried my tears and I said to my mother, I’ll go tell them what’s happened to me and I’ll be right back, and my mother’s eyes glittered and from her mouth came the Ban: No, Agustina, we don’t talk about these things. What things don’t we talk about, Mother? Things like this, do you understand, private things, and then it was she who went to the window and said to my cousins and brothers, Agustina isn’t coming out now because she wants to stay in here with us and play cards, What cards, Mother, no one’s playing cards in here, I want to keep playing cops and robbers, but my mother wouldn’t let me because she said the sun would make the hemorrhaging worse, that’s what she said, the hemorrhaging, it was the first time I’d heard that word, and when Bichi came in to ask me what was wrong my mother told him that nothing was wrong, that I just wanted to play cards. It was then that I understood for the third time that my gift of sight is weak when confronted with the power of Blood, and that the Hemorrhage is uncontrollable and unspeakable.
I COULDN’T HAVE CHOSEN a worse place to fall apart. Even though the last thing I wanted was to collapse in public, I couldn’t wait until I got to the van
, my heart sinking right there in the hotel room when I looked out the window and glimpsed those black acacias swaying in the wind against the brightly lit night, those same acacias that Agustina was watching so intently the Sunday of the dark episode, as if she was hypnotized by them. The little that remained of my reserves of courage suddenly vanished as if down a drain, and it wasn’t so much the weight of my wife’s illness that crushed me as it was the distinct memory of her first lucid moment, that instant of recognition in which her face relaxed and she ran to me, throwing her arms around me and clinging to me like a drowning woman to a scrap of wood, that one unrepeatable minute when everything was solved, when the tragedy halted just before it sprang itself on me, as if it had repented of the intention to destroy us, Let’s go home, Agustina, I said to her, but it was already too late, the instant of possible salvation had passed, she was numb once more and no longer paying attention to me, her gaze fixed again on those acacias that waved their branches as if to say to her, You aren’t from here, you’re not of this world, you have no memories, you don’t know this man who’s claiming you, the only things binding you to him are scorn and rage.
So as soon as the Fearless Girl left to deal with the call she’d gotten on her handset, I could no longer remain standing and sat on the edge of the bed, scorched inside by the blaze of that memory, and when the girl returned, a few minutes later, she found the client she’d left alone in room 416 flat on his back, Mr. Stepansky? Mr. Stepansky, is something wrong? Yes, something is wrong, Señorita, I’m the husband of a woman who lost her mind in room 413, What do you mean? she asked, and I confessed that my name wasn’t Stepansky and I didn’t have friends who wanted to stay at the hotel, My name is Aguilar and I need to find out what happened to my wife; her name is Agustina Londoño and she’s a tall, pale young woman who dresses in black, this was twenty-eight days ago exactly, I gave her the dates and got mixed up trying to explain that I’d picked her up that Sunday but that I didn’t know who she’d come here with or when exactly she’d arrived, A gorgeous girl, like an artist, or an actress, but strange somehow, all dressed in black and with long hair? That’s a good description of my wife, I said, and of course, the Fearless Girl did remember her, I wasn’t here when they checked out, but I was the one who checked her in the night before, when they arrived, When who arrived? Why the woman you say is your wife and the man who was with her, wasn’t it you? That’s the problem, it wasn’t me.
Then the Fearless Girl excuses herself saying that if this has to do with cheating she’d rather not get involved, The thing is you never know, Mr. Stepansky, It’s Aguilar, That’s right, you told me, but what I’m trying to say, Mr. Aguilar, is that it’s a bad idea to take sides in this kind of thing because you never know, It has nothing to do with cheating, it’s a very serious mental health problem and you have to help me, it’s your duty as a human being, Wait, wait, Mr. Aguilar, first calm down a little, stay here with me for a second, and, oddly, she closed the door to the room as if to allow me a moment of peace in my suffering and then she sat down beside me on the bed, so close that our legs touched, Look, Mr. Aguilar, in a hotel like this all kinds of things happen, and every so often strange people arrive and do strange things, but believe it or not, all the strangeness is predictable in ways that you end up recognizing; the different kinds of strangeness can be reduced to five types, and I tell you this as someone who’s paid careful attention, it’s either sex, alcohol, drugs, beatings, or shootings, that’s what it boils down to, life is like that, even strange behavior can be monotonous, for example there’ve never been any stabbings or suicides here, Yes there have, I corrected her, a professor even in the worst of circumstances, No sir, there haven’t been, a Romanian committed suicide in another hotel on the same block but here at the Wellington we haven’t seen anything like that, and the girl in 413, the one you say is your wife, all I can say is that she might have been on drugs, or she might have been crazy, or just extremely nervous, it was hard to tell, but whatever it was, she was worked up, anyway, the suitcase that she left is still here, but when I asked her for it, the Fearless Girl answered that they couldn’t give it to anyone except the person it belonged to, management’s orders, But the person it belongs to is crazy, I said raising my voice and getting up, how can you expect her to come and claim a suitcase when she’s crazy, she went crazy here, in room 413 of this hotel, you yourself just admitted that you were a witness, and the Fearless Girl, pulling on my pants leg to make me sit down, said, No, Mr. Aguilar, she didn’t go crazy here, when she got here she was already crazy, or sick, or at least extremely upset.
We agreed not to talk any more at the hotel, the Fearless Girl only had forty-five minutes left until the end of her shift, if the gentleman liked they could make a date for later, at some café, Yes, the gentleman liked, of course the gentleman liked, and then she suggested that we meet at five past ten at a cheap restaurant on Thirteenth Road and Eighty-second Street, a place called Don Conejo; the Fearless Girl, now bringing a little bit of toilet paper from the bathroom for me to blow my nose with, told me that the empanadas there were excellent and that it was where she went when she got off work, starving. Don Conejo was nearby but not so near that anyone from the reception desk would see them, and anyway she was the only one who liked it because the others didn’t like to leave the place with their clothes reeking of grease, Look, Mr. Aguilar, I understand how worried you are about your wife and I’d be happy to help you any way I can, it broke my heart to see her like that, but we have to leave here now because if they find me like this they’ll fire me, just relax and we’ll talk later, I promise you that if you wait for me at Don Conejo I’ll help you, or at least I’ll keep you company in your sorrow, you know, when you work at a hotel in some ways you end up becoming a nurse; lots of lonely people with problems come to stay here, you’re not the first, believe it or not, but we should go now because the manager will kill me if he sees me having some strange conversation with a guest, I’m not a guest, No, you’re not a guest, which makes it even worse, who knows who you might be. That’s what the Fearless Girl said but as she said it she was smiling as if to let me know that she didn’t mind not knowing, I was a stranger who had cried as he looked out the window of one of the rooms in her hotel; in other words, I was the kind of man she was prepared to be friendly to and help and probably also sleep with, because that’s the way she was.
We returned to the lobby separately, she in the elevator and I by the stairs, and from a public phone I called Aunt Sofi to check on Agustina and let them know I’d be late, She’s sleeping, she told me, and I went out to walk the streets aimlessly in the cold with my hands in my pockets and the collar of my raincoat turned up, a third-rate Humphrey Bogart among the fierce transvestites and the college-girl prostitutes in skintight jeans. I looked at my watch every few seconds as if that would make the time go faster, needing it to be five past ten so that I could barrage her with the many questions that were swarming in my head, but also because her nearness was a relief in the midst of the hell I was going through.
When it was almost time I walked to Don Conejo and discovered that it was closed, so I crossed the street and sat in the café there, near the entrance so I could watch for her arrival; asking for a cup of tea, I burrowed even deeper into the collar of my raincoat, on the verge of collapse and not wanting to run into anyone who wasn’t her, but of course two old activist friends of mine happened to be sitting at the next table, and they came up to me because they were gathering signatures to protest the forcible disappearance of someone, I didn’t know who because I paid no attention to what they said and didn’t read the petition before I signed it, I have to get out of this place, I thought, and paying for the tea and waving goodbye to them, I went out just as the Fearless Girl was crossing the street, heading toward Don Conejo.
Except that at first glance I didn’t recognize her, because she’d taken off the short-skirted navy blue suit and now she was wearing black pants which for some reason didn’t loo
k right on her, maybe because they were too tight, and she had put her hair up in a ponytail and now she didn’t seem as attractive to me, in fact I was almost convinced that she was someone else, but what settled the matter were her nails, there could only be one set of nails like that in the known world, and it wasn’t until she was a few feet away that I noticed that the suitcase she was carrying must be Agustina’s, You brought it for me!, I shouted, Yes, I brought it, let’s hope it doesn’t get me in trouble.
We went walking along Fifteenth Road, which was torn up for some construction project, and the movement of the dump trucks and the deafening noise of the drills drowned out my questions, so I walked quietly along, thinking only about the suitcase I was carrying now, which was the proof that everything had been premeditated; my wife hadn’t come to that hotel room by chance or accident but had packed her things and left the apartment voluntarily and with a specific purpose, and her purpose was her meeting with that man, who knows how long she’d been planning it, and on and on, a flurry of similar speculations that I prefer not to recall, I was so intent on endlessly working myself up over the whole thing that I didn’t even know where I was walking, with the Fearless Girl running after me perched on platform shoes that made it hard for her to step around the gaping holes in the pavement and trying to shout over the roar of the drills, telling me who knows what about her life, something about her mother’s varicose veins, about the cost of schooling for her brothers and sisters.
Delirium Page 14
