Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  As we were passing the Country Clinic she took me by the arm and pulled me in, Come on, she shouted, there’s a little cafeteria here where we won’t run into anyone, the empanadas didn’t work out, so keep me company while I have a doughnut and coffee because I’m starving to death, and I wasn’t quick enough to say that this wasn’t the place, not this clinic, because it was the only souvenir I had yet to collect on my horrible memory tour, so by the time I realized what was happening I was already sitting and eating a pink doughnut in front of the sign that said EMERGENCY ROOM in cold blue letters, the same emergency room where Agustina was examined the night of the dark episode…You didn’t eat a thing, the Fearless Girl said, I did, I ate half a doughnut, Not you, your wife when she was at the hotel, You’re saying she didn’t eat at all? No, the man who was with her came down to the restaurant for dinner by himself, ordered his meal and arranged for the same thing to be taken to her in the room, but then the tray was left untouched in the hall, and when I tell you untouched, I mean untouched, she didn’t even lift the covers to see what was on the dishes, I know because the next day, Sunday, the same thing happened, he came down for breakfast alone and ordered breakfast to be taken up to her, and she didn’t eat that either, and when these things happen the waiters let us know, because it can be a sign that something weird is going on in a room, I don’t know, Mr. Aguilar, honestly, it didn’t seem like a lovers’ meeting, There are lovers’ meetings that end badly, I said, Oh, Mr. Aguilar, you’re hopeless, I’m telling you frankly that the two of them weren’t very romantic, now if I were spending the night with a boyfriend…

  It was so difficult, everything that’s happening is so difficult, I said to her after a long silence, though the silence was mine alone because she had continued speculating about what she would’ve done with a boyfriend in a hotel like the Wellington, You don’t know how hard all this has been, I repeated and realized that I still didn’t know her name, My name is Anita, I’ve told you three times already but all you care about is your own suffering, I also told you that I support my mother and my brothers and sisters and that besides working at the hotel I run a little business with a photocopy machine and a fax service in my garage, what else can I do, I can’t make ends meet otherwise, Where do you live, Anita, I asked, thinking to myself that it was good to be with this Anita, that it was good that her name was Anita, but that I liked her better with her hair down, If you want to make me feel better, Anita, let down your hair, I said to her but she ignored me and continued on with her extremely long story, of which all I retained was that Anita lived in Meissen, a working-class neighborhood that I knew well because decades ago I had gone there to organize meetings and sell copies of the newspaper Socialist Revolution, Meissen, my dear Anita, is a long fucking way out, Yes, Señor, tell me about it, each day I spend an hour and a half on the bus from Meissen to the hotel and another hour and a half getting home.

  It was funny to watch how Anita managed to balance her pink doughnut on the tips of her ten little French flags and bring it to her mouth, and like the doughnut, her generous, pouting lips were pink and round and oh so sweet, coming too close to mine with the excuse of telling me any old thing, but not even the lips of a desirable girl could make me forget the suitcase that was under the table, the source of my unhappiness and resentment, I’m going to open it right here, in front of you, Anita, because it would kill me to do it alone, and Anita, who had begun to speak to me more casually but who occasionally seemed to think better of it and become more formal again, said, Go ahead, Mr. Aguilar, open it, who cares, people will think they’re personal belongings that we’re bringing to a sick relative.

  I began taking out one thing after another, placing each on the Formica table, a few white cotton undergarments, a T-shirt of mine that says Bean Man and that Agustina likes to sleep in, two shirts that she must never have worn because they were clean and ironed, How odd that your wife arrived at the hotel looking like such a mess when she had clean clothes in her suitcase, said Anita, when I saw her I couldn’t believe such a beautiful woman would be out looking like that, like she’d been chewed up and spit out. I kept removing things, a case with a toothbrush and toothpaste, Clinique facial cleanser, Pablo Neruda’s Heights of Machu Picchu that I’d given her myself soon after meeting her, What’s Machu Picchu, Anita wanted to know, Some Incan ruins in the Peruvian Andes, and since she grabbed the book and saw the inscription from me on the first page, “To Agustina, atop the tallest mountain on earth,” she asked me whether I’d been up there with my wife, No, the truth is I haven’t, Then what did you mean when you wrote this, Well I don’t know, I must have liked her a lot, And who is Pablo Neruda, she persisted but I didn’t answer because I was absorbed in those objects, a hairbrush, a few other Clinique lotions, a cortisone skin cream, And what’s that for, For allergies, Agustina’s skin is so pale that sometimes she gets rashes and she uses skin creams.

  Don’t worry, Mr. Aguilar, Anita said to me, suddenly grabbing my hand, if the man who was with your wife was her lover, she wouldn’t have worn plain panties like these but black lace ones or red low-cut ones and a more exciting bra, You don’t know her, Anita, my wife is the type who always wears plain white underwear, I see, then you must be married by the Church, No, Agustina and I live together without anyone’s blessing, Then, asked Anita, why do you wear a wedding band on your finger, It was given to me by my first wife, the mother of my children, look, her name is engraved inside, Marta Elena, and upon seeing this, Anita said, sweetening her voice and lowering her eyelids, What a character you are, Mr. Aguilar, you live with one woman and wear another woman’s ring, I think you need a third woman to set things straight, and, moving too close, she said, Tonight something is going to happen, as if insinuating that something sexual was going to happen between us, but I pushed abruptly backward, and she, taking the hint, hastened to clarify, I mean in the country, I have the feeling that something big is going to happen tonight in Colombia, And why not, I replied, after all something big happens almost every night, but nothing happened last night or the night before, so the odds are that we’re in for it today, and as I was halfway through the sentence I was suddenly curious to know what her hair smelled like, Let it down, Anita, I asked her again and since this time she listened to me, all that curly hair tumbled down on us, and grateful and softening inside, I pushed my nose into it and inhaled the sickly sweet perfume of her shampoo, Peach?, I asked, Incredible, Mr. Aguilar, you guessed, it’s L’Oréal Silky Peach.

  Without moving my nose from her hair I told her about an afternoon when I was fifteen and I rode too fast down a hill on a borrowed bicycle and ran into a barbed-wire fence that cut my right forearm badly and ripped a piece of skin from my neck, I still have both scars, look, Anita, you can see them, and she ran the tip of her index finger over the ugly mark across my throat and asked, Why are you telling me this, I’m telling you because of what happened afterward, in the neighborhood clinic where Doctor Ospinita, who practiced on a good-faith basis since he didn’t have a medical degree, disinfected my wounds and gave me twenty-seven stitches, all of this while I was fully conscious because anesthesia was an inconceivable luxury in a poor neighborhood like mine, Uh-huh, said Anita trying to look as if she were following me though she didn’t understand what this had to do with her, Look, the reason I’m telling you this is because it’s one of the sweetest memories of my life, I mean what happened to me with a lady at the clinic, she was a young woman and in my memory she’s very beautiful although I’ve forgotten her name and what her face looked like, or maybe I never knew her name or saw much of her face, she wasn’t the nurse, she was simply someone who happened to be there at the clinic, probably waiting for her turn, and when she saw me frozen in panic at the sight of the curved needle and the nylon thread that Ospinita was aiming at my neck, she amazingly sat at the head of the operating table and rested my head on her thighs, not caring that her clothes were being drenched with blood, in one hand holding up the bag for the transfus
ion that Ospinita was giving me to replace the blood I’d lost, and here comes the really important thing, Anita, the part I can’t forget, which is that with her free hand this woman stroked my hair, and her caresses put me in such a trance that I could only think of her hand, so I closed my eyes to concentrate on her touch, which allowed me to forget the pain and the fear and the sight of my own blood, and I just drifted there in the immense pleasure of those fingers stroking my hair; whenever I feel like I’m going to die, Anita, which is how I’ve been feeling every day lately, the memory of that woman keeps me going, or rather the memory of her hand, and if I tell you this it’s because your presence has a similar effect on me, and since this made Anita begin to purr like a cat, I leaned back again and changed tone, And speaking of fingers, I said in order to say something, my God, girl, what long nails you have, do you paint them yourself or do they do it for you at the salon, I’ll bet you don’t know, lovely Anita from Meissen, what emery boards are for.

  I stepped away for a minute to call Aunt Sofi again and tell her that I was on my way, and when I returned to the table I said to the Fearless Girl, Look, Anita, if I were fifteen I’d ask you to stroke my hair for a while, but I’m old and a mess and in the middle of a crisis so we should leave instead, come on, I’ll give you a ride home. Do you have a car? she asked incredulously, as if I didn’t look like a car owner or as if she couldn’t believe her luck at being saved for a night from her hour-and-a-half bus ride, Do I have a car?, more or less, I’ve got an old wreck that barely deserves to be called a car, but it will get you home safe and sound.

  Now it seems funny to me to remember how confidently I spoke that last sentence, because it almost didn’t come true, by which I mean that on the drive south down Thirtieth Road past Nemesio Camacho Stadium with Anita in the passenger seat, the road nearly deserted at that time of night, we were shaken by a violent jolt that actually lifted the van from the pavement, while at the same time a blast of air hit our eardrums and a sharp noise, like thunder, came from the bowels of the earth and then gradually faded away, in successive layers of echoes, until an absolute silence fell over the city, and in the midst of this deadly quiet I heard Anita’s voice saying, A bomb, a big fucking bomb, it must have gone off nearby, I told you, Mr. Aguilar, I told you something horrible was going to happen tonight. But all I could think of was Agustina, wondering if she was all right.

  Anita turned on the car radio and that’s how we found out that someone had just blown up the police station in Paloquemao, about twelve blocks from where we were and eight blocks from the place where the explosion would surely have woken Agustina, terrifying her, if the blast hadn’t actually blown out the windows of my apartment, that is, and I was struck by the image of her getting out of bed in a state of shock and stepping on the broken glass, and the picture was so vivid that it became a certainty, I literally saw Agustina walking barefoot on the floor covered in shards, and I was overcome by the urgent need to be with her.

  I don’t know how long I was silent, lost in my obsession, driving to Meissen as fast as the van would go to drop off the girl beside me and return home without losing an instant, preoccupied by the idea that Agustina might somehow be hurt, while at the same time I surprised myself by turning over and over the possibility of such a thing happening; I don’t know, it was as if something not quite right were shifting inside me, something like the unspeakable notion of an eye for an eye, so deeply had I been hurt by her rejection of me. So when Anita spoke, I had forgotten her so thoroughly that her voice took me by surprise, Mr. Aguilar, she said, you won’t like what I’m about to say, you’ll be thinking what right do I have to get involved, but in my opinion it’s too hard on you being married to that crazy woman.

  BEGONE FROM ME all remorse, Nicholas Portulinus said out loud after the lunch of roast pork. Once he’d had a cup of herbal tea for his digestion and a long swallow of valerian extract, he repeated, Begone from me all remorse!, like a plea or a command requesting that the sleep-inducing properties of the valerian bestow upon him the brief bliss of a nap. Then he asked Blanca to unlace his boots, because his bloated body wouldn’t bend enough to permit the maneuver, and he lay down on his high bed protected by the gauzy cloud of a mosquito net, letting himself be lulled by the dull boom of the Sweet River, which tumbled into falls outside his window, and he saw again, in a certain kind of light that he himself would describe as an artificial glare, the polished surfaces of an ancient stage—at other times he will call it Greek ruins—on which two boys are fighting, wounding each other, and bleeding. “In the dream, I’m standing there bolted to the ground”—he will write later in his diary—” struck dumb by the metallic gleam of the blood and deaf to the call of the torn flesh. I don’t care about one of the fighters, the one whose back is to me so that I can’t see his face. I don’t know his name, either, but that doesn’t trouble me. I dream that his name doesn’t matter. The other boy, however, affects me deeply; I see that he’s the younger of the two and maybe the weaker, of that I’m not sure, but I do know that he’s whimpering and licking his wounds in a pitiful way.”

  Portulinus wakes up at five in the afternoon and gets out of bed, although his mind is so scattered that it would be more accurate to say that he gets up without having completely awoken. He’s wearing a silk robe printed with a tangle of black branches on a forest-green background and the slippers that tend to lose themselves, which angers him so; his hair is plastered sideways from being pressed sweaty against the pillow and he’s still floating amid the passions of the dream that visited him during his nap. As if obeying an order, he takes up pen and staff paper and sits down at the piano, spending a few hours composing the song that for months has been buzzing in his ear, evading capture. From the garden, his wife, Blanca, spies on him through the latticework, happy to discover that Nicholas is composing again after months of idleness, “At last his creative energy is reborn”—she’ll write later in a letter—” and once again I hear the harmonies that spring from the depths of his soul.” Blanca, who also believes that her husband’s gaze has cleared a little, asks herself, Am I not the happiest woman in the world?, suspecting that at this moment she really is. That’s why, entranced, she watches her husband through the latticework as he fills one page of paper after another, pretending to set down notes and beats to make his wife happy, or to convince himself of his own happiness. But he’s really only scrawling flies and fly tracks, black dots and wild strokes that are the exact transcription of his painful internal clamor.

  There’s no point in asking what the bloody fighter boy he dreamed of was like, but rather what he is like, because Portulinus dreams of him often and has for years, which is what he tells his wife that night when the frogs, crickets, and cicadas pierce the darkness with their song. Blanca, my dear, he confesses to her, I dreamed of Farax again. Who is this Farax, Nicholas?, she asks, visibly upset, and why does he always accost you in dreams? He’s just my inspiration, he answers, trying to calm her, Farax is the name I give my inspiration when it visits me. But is it a he, or a she? It’s a he, and he grants me the intensity of feeling that I need for life to be worth living. Tell me, Nicholas, she insists, is it someone you know? Have I ever seen him? Is he a dream or a memory?, but Nicholas isn’t up to answering so many questions. His name is Farax, Blanquita darling, content yourself with that, and just then they’re interrupted by their daughter Eugenia, the quiet one, but she’s radiant now, bringing them the news that the piano student from Anapoima has knocked at the door again, asking for the Maestro.

  The blond boy is back, she tells them, her heart pounding. What boy are you talking about? The one who came yesterday with the lead soldiers in his knapsack, he wants to know whether Father will give him piano lessons. To receive the visitor Portulinus went down to the spacious parlor with chairs set around the Blüthner rosewood grand piano that Portulinus had had sent from Germany and that today, a whole lifetime later, stands in Eugenia’s house in La Cabrera, in the capital, now an enormous, sil
ent white elephant. Portulinus entered the parlor and saw that the visitor from Anapoima had sat down at the piano, though no one had given him permission, and was running a reverent hand over the precious dark-grained red wood, but instead of irritating Portulinus, this boldness struck him as a sign of character, and skipping the usual pleasantries he got straight to the point. If you want lessons, show me what you know, he ordered the boy, and the boy, although he hadn’t been asked, said that his name was Abelito Caballero and presented the list of references he had memorized, explaining that he’d come on the recommendation of the mayor of Anapoima and that he’d studied at the School of Music and Dance in Anapoima until he knew more than the only teacher, Madame Carola Osorio, which was why he wanted to receive more advanced training from Maestro Portulinus, but since the latter seemed uninterested in his story, the boy stopped volunteering information that hadn’t been requested and rolled up his sleeves to free his arms, shook his head to clear it, rubbed his hands to warm them, recited a prayer for God’s help, and began to play a creole waltz called “The Greedy Cat.”

  Although timidity caused the boy to stumble here and there, Portulinus, who had begun to breathe heavily as if he were choked by some powerful internal trauma, could only murmur, Good, good, good, no matter if “The Greedy Cat” slid gracefully by or faltered. Good, good, good, sighed Portulinus and he couldn’t believe his eyes, that shimmering golden hair, those hands still a child’s and yet already skilled, that black silk bow the newcomer wore knotted around his neck as if he were a doll, the tanned leather knapsack still on his back. Nor could Portulinus’s ears believe what they were hearing, music that seemed to descend sweetly from on high to gradually inhabit the parlor’s shadows; all that was certain was that his heart as well as his senses were telling him that what was happening had to do with an old prophecy, that this was the longed-for fulfillment of a promise at last.