Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  Trying to guess whether he would be accepted as a student or not, the boy lifted his eyes from the keyboard from time to time to cast a sidelong glance at the famed German teacher, who was sweating and puffing beside him in his robe and slippers, but he couldn’t decipher the teacher’s expression or understand the meaning of those good, good, goods that the Maestro muttered indiscriminately, whether he played well or made mistakes. When the piece ended, it was with apprehension that he sensed the great musician coming up behind him, brushing his shoulder with his hand, and saying, almost into his ear, I must call my wife; and then the Maestro made a great show of leaving, inclining his bulk forward and not watching where he was going, as if he were in a hurry to be somewhere else.

  Abelito Caballero, left alone in the now silent room, suddenly became aware of an excessive weight on his back and realized that he hadn’t removed his knapsack, which he proceeded to do, and then blew his nose to clear the stuffiness brought on by the smell of damp that permeated the parlor. Folding his arms, he settled down to wait, until he spotted the flicker of a small presence in one of the corners. Getting up, he discovered, crouched behind a chair, the thin, shy girl who had come to the door yesterday and today. If you want, we can set up the military parade again, he said, and when she nodded, he took the lead soldiers out of his knapsack and they got to work, the two of them kneeling on the floor. I’m Abelito, I don’t think I told you my name yesterday. And my name is Eugenia, I didn’t tell you mine, either.

  Meanwhile Portulinus went looking for Blanca all around the house and found her at last in the larder, What the devil are you doing in the larder, confound it Blanquita, come at once! there’s a prodigy in the parlor, he announced, dragging her by the hand, Come, Blanquita darling, come and meet him, it’s the boy, he’s playing “The Greedy Cat” on the piano, hurry, it’s the boy!, it’s Farax!, and she, alarmed to see her husband in such a state, tried to calm him and allay the intensity of his outburst, Don’t make things up, Nicholas, how can it be Farax when Farax only exists in your dreams, Quiet, woman, you don’t know what you’re saying, come, you must meet Farax.

  SO THIS, AGUSTINA princess, is how we came to the end of the farce, because life sets the stage, and we little puppets dance to whatever tune they play for us. What happened was that this Dolores and the loser with the whip put on their act, a pretty vile spectacle but since there’s no accounting for taste when it comes to sex, I bet you can’t guess who was thrilled out of his skull by the cheap violence, well who but Spider, I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I told you that nothing had ever sent him into such ecstasies, I swear I saw him turning purple in his wheelchair shouting at the pimp, Hit her harder! Stop playing, get serious! Hit her for real! and obnoxiously egging him on like a paralytic Nero sending the lions in to wreak havoc, drunk with delight.

  It was then that I decided to go up to my office and wash my hands of that miniature Roman circus, because although you may say, Agustina doll, that I’d put up with anything for Spider’s sake, this was so depressing that even I had to draw the line. His little squeals of glee, not to mention all that giggling and squirming, overrode my sense of duty; he may have been baptized in a starched christening gown and his great-grandfather may have brought civilization to our country, but he’s still a yokel with no scruples who struck it rich, and I promise you, Agustina doll, that that night he was like a happy Neanderthal, but since everything changes from one minute to the next, and when you least expect it what’s white turns to black and what’s black turns to white, in that same way Spider’s satisfaction with Dolores’s tricks began to turn to annoyance, The thing isn’t working quite right, Midas my boy, he told me, puffing so hard he could barely get the words out, this woman is 80 percent swindler and 20 percent actress, and there’s plenty of moaning and fake wailing and crocodile tears, but almost no true feeling; it’s been rehearsed so carefully that there’s hardly anything real about it. And how could I explain to Spider that this wasn’t the moment to be picky, since after all the woman wasn’t Our Lord Jesus Christ, about to let herself be crucified for some random Christian’s sexual salvation.

  But you know how far Spider is willing to go to satisfy his urges, Agustina doll; it was more than clear that his thirst for the pain of others wouldn’t be satisfied with ordinary pantomime, so he demanded that the woman be submissive and docile, and questioned the pimp’s professionalism and dedication to his duties as whip-wielder, and since neither of the two paid much attention to him he started getting on my back, hinting that it was my fault for not lining up a real show, a more convincing scenario, so right then and there, I, Pilate McAlister, washed my hands of it all; Spider had already laid the blame for his erectile dysfunction on me once, to give a scientific name to the problem afflicting his floppy dick, and as obsequious as I may be, Agustina kitten, I wasn’t going to take the rap again.

  So I shut myself up in my office, lowered the blind of the window that overlooks the gym so I couldn’t see anything that was going on down there, took a hit of weed, and immersed myself in Pac-Man, which is what I do to take my mind off things that irritate me. Pac-Man, adorable Agustina, is the greatest invention of the century; when you’re playing Pac-Man there’s no pain or love or regrets, and your thoughts are no longer your own, so I turned on the monitor, hooked up my electronic toy, and let myself be hypnotized.

  I wasn’t myself anymore, Agustina darling, just a little ball all mouth and teeth, a ball roaming the labyrinth and eating pellets to give me strength to wipe out the little ghosts that crossed my path, and I started to win bonus points and my score went through the roof, because you’re looking at the world champion of that stupid game, Agustina princess, I swear the bastard hasn’t been born who could beat me at Pac-Man, I can gobble up the entire pellet supply in a single round, and if every so often I could hear Spider bellowing for blood from downstairs, I pretended it had nothing to do with me, I was remote from it all and looking out for number one, pac, pac, pac, eating pellets and darting around my labyrinth, I was just a little ball with a wild craving for pellets and a primal hatred of ghosts, and if any female cry reached my ears, I pretended not to hear it, I’m sorry, Dolores my girl, I can’t help you, you’re off my radar, but of course sometimes she would make some frightening noise and then I would get nervous and distracted, letting the ghosts take over, and Pac-Man lost lives like crazy.

  It’s not that I’m sentimental, but I made the mistake of talking to Dolores before the show, I had brought her up to my office to settle the bill and we chatted a little, just the usual small talk, and when I gave her the money, I added a tip that she thanked me for on behalf of her little boy and that was when I committed an inexcusable error: I foolishly asked her what her son was called and it turned out that his name was John Jairo, or Roy Marlon, or William Ernesto, one of those double-barreled bilingual names, but the problem was that the boy crept into my consciousness, because putting a child at risk by torturing the mother is hardly my style, and that’s why I was so jumpy.

  Then the great performance, that vaudeville of lashes and hooks and skewers and pinches and butt-slapping, reached its climax, and suddenly everything was quiet and from down below, the noise of the gym machines started up, the old familiar hum of the pulleys, the sharp clang of weights falling into place, the clatter of the presses, and I relaxed, thinking that the two escorts, Paco Malo and the Sucker, having had their fill of sadomasochism, were warming up on the machines now, Go for it, you flabby pair of thugs, let’s see you lose those little bellies you started at L’Esplanade, I thought, putting some disco music on full blast for them to work out to, and I submerged myself in Pac-Man with maniacal concentration, I don’t know how many hours I spent like that, Agustina doll, I swear that when I’m playing I lose all track of time, pac, pac, pac, opening and closing my big mouth and devouring pellets, pac, pac, pac, around and around the labyrinth overrunning ghosts, and I would’ve kept it up all night if the Sucker hadn’t stuck his head in my offi
ce to say that there was a problem and Mr. Spider needed me downstairs. Holy Mary Mother of God, I sighed, stopping the game and trying my best to be patient, because who could bear Spider whining and begging forgiveness for his latest erotic-sentimental defeat and demanding that I set up the next extravaganza for the next day, and when I got down there he was looking very old and very fat and infinitely weary in his wheelchair, So what’s the problem, Spider my friend, I asked condescendingly, The problem is that the little woman kicked the bucket, Midas my boy, God save her soul.

  I won’t even tell you what I felt, Agustina darling, or rather I will tell you; at first I didn’t understand what Spider was saying, but when he pointed toward the other end of the room, where the machines are, there on one of the multipurpose stations, the Nautilus 4200 Single Stack Gym, my most beloved and recently acquired machine, equipped with a pec deck, leg extension station, abdominal bar, ankle cuff, side tower, and 210-pound weight stack, there I saw Dolores lying all disjointedly, as if they’d broken her neck by strapping her down and pulling the cable back too far, as if they’d drawn and quartered her, as if they’d turned my Nautilus 4200 into a torture rack, as if they’d gone too far and something had snapped.

  Is she dead?, I asked Spider and his two thugs, and now I understood what the sound of weights and pulleys had been that I’d heard a little while ago, and that had made me think the worst was over when it was precisely then that things were getting hideously out of control, Is she dead? She’s fucking dead, said Spider, dead, dead, dead and gone, but get a move on, Midas my boy, don’t stand there with that long face, the mourning and condolences will have to wait until later because now we have to get rid of the body, And the guy who was with her?, I asked, He went for a stroll, Don’t fuck with me, Spider, tell me where he is before it’s too late, I’m telling you, Midas my boy, we got rid of him because he didn’t want to play along with us; before the girl up and died on us we told her boyfriend that he’d better go home if he didn’t want to play rough, that he should just go and not worry, that his fiancée would be fine with us, Get out, Velvet Hands, this is a man’s game; Spider thought that his two sidekicks, Paco Malo and the Sucker, could do the job with more zeal than that lightweight, How was I to know, Midas my dear, that these two would turn out to be such bungling clods, and anyway the other guy was so yellow that he didn’t say a thing when we suggested that he leave us alone with the lady, says Spider, at first he made a little fuss but he gave up looking out for his partner when the Sucker advised him not to get touchy because he might end up with an extra asshole, You do the best you can on your own, baby, I’m out of here, that was his gallant farewell, and right there he took out a little comb to smooth down his hair as if that might restore his ruffled pride, then he wrapped himself up in his magician’s cape, and shazam, he disappeared as if by magic into the Bogotá night.

  And now Dolores’s little son was an orphan and there she lay as if surrendered to her fate, resigned to dying; maybe after all those fake rehearsals she was ready for her last and only true performance, as it turned out to be, This time it really was for real, I said to her as a kind of tribute.

  And what came next, Agustina doll, was purely procedural and technical, lifting the girl off the machine, rolling her up in a rug, and at an order from Spider to his thugs, watching her leave for parts unknown in the trunk of the Mercedes, Don’t come back until you’re 100 percent sure she’s gone forever and won’t be heard of again until Judgment Day, those were Spider’s curt instructions, and when the two killers and their victim were gone, I went up and turned off the disco music, which through all of this had kept thundering like a noise from hell, and I lovingly cleaned my Nautilus 4200 and polished the steel until there were no marks left on it, because after all the machine was innocent, then I turned out the gym lights and sat in silence on the floor at the foot of Spider’s chair, and I buried my head between my knees and I started to think of you, my glorious Agustina, which is what I do when I’d rather not think about anything.

  I SMELLED IT as soon as I opened the apartment door: it was the acrid scent of strangeness. It suffuses the house when Agustina isn’t herself anymore, when she’s in the middle of one of her crises, and I’ve learned to recognize it and make it part of my own sadness, which smells just like it; I know I’ve begun to exude the same scent.

  After leaving Anita in Meissen the night of the Paloquemao bomb, I’d returned to Salmona Towers along Twenty-sixth Street, listening to the sirens of ambulances made invisible by the thick dust cloud of the disaster, the radio reporting forty-seven dead as well as an unspecified number of bodies in the wreckage, but I could only think about the shards that had surely cut Agustina’s feet. Miraculously, the explosion hadn’t shattered any of the windows of my apartment and I realized that nothing had happened to her feet because when I finally arrived, she had shoes on; she was fully dressed and wearing high heels and that surprised me. I interpreted it at first as an encouraging sign, because since the dark episode my wife had succumbed to slovenliness in matters of appearance, everything yielding to the pure centripetal force of her introspection except for the brief moments when she recovered some degree of consciousness of her physical existence. Madness is navel-gazing, my wife spends day and night in pajamas, or at most a sweatshirt, forgetting to eat, to listen, to look, it’s as if her entire horizon of events is contained within herself. That’s why I was surprised to see her in dark pants, high heels, and a jacket again, with her hair up, as if she were ready to go out but had to take care of a few things around the house before she left, these being essentially a compulsive transferring of objects from one place to another and back again, although what was happening now wasn’t the familiar hauling of containers of water, but rather a kind of domestic reorganization that obeyed no visible logic but that required all of her concentration and energy; anyone who hasn’t lived with a crazy person has no idea what boundless energy they can expend, the number of movements they make per second.

  On her niece’s orders, Aunt Sofi is standing in a corner of the living room, afraid to move because each time she tries, Agustina gets angry and won’t let her; Agustina also orders me to stay where I am and establishes the rules of a new ceremony that we don’t understand, a fresh epiphany of dementia that involves Agustina exerting relentless control over her territory. We live on this side, Agustina on that side, and she is as careful as a goalkeeper or a customs agent to make sure no one crosses that imaginary boundary, My father is coming to visit me, she announces suddenly, my father warned me that if you were in my house, he would cancel his visit because he doesn’t want to see you here, stay over there, goddamn it, that’s where you bastards live and this is where I live, get back, you, get back, she shouts at me.

  MEANWHILE I WAS THINKING of you, which is what I do when I’d rather not think about anything, Agustina sweetheart, you might say I’m fascinated by the texture you take on in memory, smooth and slippery with no hint of responsibility or regret, it’s something like stroking your hair, the pure pleasure of stroking your hair, so long as there are no consequences; God played a dirty trick on us with the whole idea that one thing leads to another until it becomes some fucking unstoppable chain reaction, I swear that hell must be a place where they lock you up with the consequences of your actions and make you duke it out with them. That’s why I’d rather remember you the way I saw you the first few times that your brother Joaco invited me home after school and there you were and it was as if the air stood still, you were like nothing I’d ever seen before, the fanciest doll in the most expensive store in town, my rich friend’s gorgeous sister, which is maybe why you’ve gone around acting crazy ever since, to force us to remember that you’re flesh and blood and make us accept you with all your consequences.

  Your brother Joaco is one of those people who never had to wear hand-me-downs, but I’m the kind of guy who only today, after all kinds of struggle, has the means to dress like Joaco Londoño, but I don’t, anyway, Agustina ba
by, because I allow myself the luxury of doing my own thing. So I’m a true phenomenon of self-improvement, a champion of self-help, but I’ll always bear the stigma of having shown up at the Boys School on the first day of classes looking all wrong, despite my efforts, and especially the efforts of my sweet mother, who bought me everything new, combed my hair the best she could, and sent me out with my skin shiny from soap and scrubbing, but she missed a few details, and after all how could she not, when the woman was a widow who had just arrived in the capital with barely enough money to live respectably, which more than explains the countless errors she made regarding my appearance and attire on that critical first day of school: for example, a cheap leather briefcase, a green wool cardigan she’d knitted herself, and scratchy wool pants, but among all these outrages, my lovely Agustina, there was one, the white socks, that was fatal, because to the cry of “White socks, black pants, homo alert,” your brother Joaco, young leader of the pack, came after me and beat me to a pulp, which I thank him for to this day because he walloped the whole fatherless-boy-from-the-provinces identity out of me once and for all, and that same afternoon I stole money from my mother’s purse to buy myself black socks and a pair of jeans, then I made her cry by announcing that she’d better not knit me any more cardigans because I wasn’t going to wear them, and I had scarcely recovered from the thrashing that Joaco gave me when I went after him myself and kicked the shit out of him, and I really did kick the shit out of him, even breaking a bone or two.