She is surprised that he sounds so impassioned, so upset, nothing I’d done before had ever shaken him, in the past few years I’d been disobedient and rude and a bad student, and my father had severely reprimanded me for all of that, but never like this, up until that night my father had always been distant with me, and even when he scolded me it was in a blank kind of way, but suddenly this was all I had to do to attract my father’s attention and scrutiny, to make him quake, to wipe everything from his mind but my date that night and my strict obedience of his orders, When you come home late it shows a lack of respect for me, I do respect you, Father, and if that’s your rule, I’ll always obey it, I was here by midnight, Father, as you ordered, But you were alone in that car with a boy, make sure it’s the last time it happens.
Then Agustina went to bed and she couldn’t stop wondering whether her father might possibly have guessed what had happened, that the boy in the Volkswagen had invited me to the movies but didn’t take me there; we stayed in the car and talked, eating hot dogs at the Icy Cream, until he pulled his Great White Candle out of his pants. Agustina couldn’t see it in the dark of the deserted street; she didn’t see it with her eyes, which refused to look, but she saw it with her hand and she discovered that it was enormous and felt like wax, then she had to let go of it so that she would be home by midnight just as she and her father had agreed, and there I found him waiting restlessly for me in the dark living room, his pipe smoldering.
Her father had never waited up for her before, nor had he spoken to her in a voice so charged with emotion, almost deranged, Agustina thinks, Why were you alone with that boy when I told you to go out in a group, He just gave me a ride home, Father, she replied, not wanting to confess what she’d discovered, and wondering whether her father had one, too, and whether it was the Great Staff with which he ruled, And then, in bed, I couldn’t sleep, says Agustina, and what kept me awake wasn’t the car or the night or the first date on my own, not even the thing that came out of the boy’s pants and felt like wax, but knowing that my father hadn’t gone to bed because he was worried about me, it had never happened before, says Agustina, never.
When I was invited to the movies again I said yes because I knew that it would bother my father and keep him up, and this time Agustina didn’t come home at exactly midnight but a little later in order to push her father a few inches further, she would bait him, but just a little, not so much that he’d hit her, just a little, to see whether what she thought she’d noticed that first time was true, that if she went out at night with a boy her father couldn’t ignore her, at last Agustina had learned to do something that would get her father’s attention, and this second time that she went out with a boy, a different boy, who did take her to the movies, Agustina asked him to let her touch the Great Candle, And he let me and this time it burned, it didn’t feel like wax but instead it burned and stung my palm, and Agustina went home knowing that her father, who maybe could guess what she had done, would be there waiting for her seething with rage but in the end there would be no explosion because he had no evidence, he could only brood over what he suspected she might have done in that car, unable to prove it, but it would hurt, it would hurt him, it would have to hurt her father whether she’d done anything or not, and he himself, with the palpable pulsing of his fears, had been the one to reveal the secret to her, grant her this power over him, give her room for maneuvering that she would know how to take advantage of from now on, while the question of who profited from this agony and who endured it, father or daughter, was something that chased in circles and couldn’t be decided.
Then comes the third time in her life that her father pays attention to her, But this time his suppressed fury has grown, says Agustina, although just by a few more degrees, not enough for him to hit me—he never hit me, only Bichi—but enough so that his voice quivers when he scolds me for having come home fifteen minutes late, my father forbids me to go out again with the new boy and this serves me as proof of his affection, of his intent, vigilant affection, I forbid it, Agustina, do you understand me?, you’re never to go out with that boy again, and it was then that Agustina swore to God that she’d never go out with him again, If you don’t like him I won’t, You’re right, Agustina, I don’t like him, there’s something strange about that boy, the way he looks at you, I have no idea who his parents are and I don’t want you hanging around with strangers, Yes, Father, yes, Father, yes, Father.
Once in bed, Agustina burned with fever and pride at being the object of her father’s disapproval and in a little solitary ceremony, secret and in the dark, she promised him never to go out with that boy again, This is my offering to you, Father, she prayed to herself, I’ll never go out with him again because you asked me not to, and I won’t go out with anyone who looks at me that way either, or anyone whose parents you don’t know, or anyone who you for any reason don’t trust, which in the end is everyone, And I kept my promise, I kept it every time, says Agustina, I was true to my word, I never went out with that boy or any other boy more than once, I always found new ones. As a gift to my father, who demanded their heads, I shunned the ones he shunned and offered their heads up to him in exchange for his presence in his armchair, waiting for me with his pipe, checking his watch over and over again to monitor when I returned.
Minute by minute, my father kept watch over my nights, and I went out with a different boy each time and I asked each of them to let me touch the Great Candle, and that was how I learned that there were many different varieties and sizes, some burning hot and some cold, some swift and some slow; only with my hand, only my hand, never letting them get close to other parts of my body, never between my legs, or at least that’s how it was for the first few months, doing it with my hand was enough to make Father guess it from the shadows on my face, though he couldn’t say anything to me because he didn’t have proof, shadows and expressions are almost the same as nothing, and just by putting my hand on the Great Candle of every boy who took me to the movies or the Icy Cream on 100th Street, I could be sure that my father’s attention would be fixed on me until midnight, the trick of arriving fifteen or twenty minutes late worked well and it thrilled me to know that he would be suffering agonies.
Never before, says Agustina, had I held the keys to my father’s love, and to think that I only discovered them when boys started asking me out to the movies; never before and never again would my father pay so much attention to me. This is the last time you go out with that boy, he would demand, which was his way of punishing me, and especially of punishing himself because I had arrived twenty-five minutes late, You’re not letting him take you out again, because he’s from Pereira or Bucaramanga or Cali, my father only likes boys from established Bogotá families, and when it comes down to it, he doesn’t even like them if they chew gum or handle their silverware clumsily, Father always finds something wrong with them, and I know that the possibility of pleasing him is in my hands, I just have to make a small sacrifice, says Agustina, I have to sacrifice the boys, who aren’t worth much anyway, in return for the great reward of my father’s attention, his unwavering concentration on me until midnight, Yes, Father, I’ll give them up; for you, I’ll give up those who came before and those who have yet to come, one by one and all at once, so long as you stay up waiting for me and so long as when I come in you look at me with that terrible question mark in your eyes, eyes that want to be sure I didn’t do anything in the car, and I swear to my father that I didn’t but I know how to say it so that I sow poisonous seeds of doubt in him, and the truth is that I did it at the movies but only a little bit, and I did it for you, Father, to keep you alert and on guard, because at last I’d learned how to wield my powers over you, but I don’t know whether it was your love I won in the cars of my thousand and one boyfriends, Father, whether it was your love or only your punishment.
LIKE A “GIFT OF THE NIGHT” is how, in his diary, Nicholas Portulinus describes the boy from Anapoima who came asking for piano lessons from the great mu
sician of Germany and Sasaima, the apparition who, with hands still soft but already skilled, played “The Greedy Cat” for the Maestro with a professionalism that seemed at odds with his long golden girl’s hair, with his voice that oscillated between the high peaks of childhood and the valleys of a deepness that was already gaining ground. In the presence of this unexpected guest, this lovely, talented boy who’d arrived from out of nowhere, as if he’d dropped from the sky or escaped from a dream, the great Maestro was left transfixed and utterly vulnerable, like someone who’d just witnessed a miracle. But unlike the fighters in the Greek ruins, the cherished spawn of delirium, the young performer of “The Greedy Cat” was real, real as could be, most definitely of flesh and blood, almost cruelly beautiful, childlike, overflowing with talent. It was as if this Farax were invented by Nicholas in one of his reveries, but Farax isn’t wounded like the marble youths, he’s not bleeding from any wound, he’s surprisingly alive and healthy, and he can be touched, or he could be touched, or one would like to touch him; one can see how much Nicholas would like to touch him, and in fact he dares to touch his shoulder, or if it’s too much to say touches, if the verb must be qualified, he scarcely brushes his shoulder the day everything begins.
And now Blanca appears onstage, with Nicholas dragging her by the hand, to behold the prodigy with her own eyes. Come, Blanca my dear, Nicholas has told her, you’re going to hear music like nothing you’ve heard before, and Blanca comes, annoyed and disbelieving, inured long ago to surprises and worried about the ripples of delusion that again crease her husband’s forehead. Blanca seeks strength that she no longer possesses to tackle once again the tiring task of deflating Nicholas’s fantasies and reducing them to their proper proportions, and yet, as she confesses in her diary, when she sees the child sitting at the piano she’s overcome by a strange feeling, “Suddenly I felt that I’d been given back the capacity to forgive,” to forgive life its rigors and herself her mistakes, to forgive Nicholas his terrors and start over again. “If I had to explain the strange, deep-seated feeling that came over me when I saw and heard Abelito, whom Nicholas has called Farax from the beginning, I would have to say that he struck me as the living image of the Nicholas I knew years ago, when everything was still promise and possibility, with no hints of shadow,” in other words, when her husband was still the sturdy man recently arrived from Germany whose visions seemed merely a poetic touch and whose twisted nature had yet to reveal itself.
Suddenly, seeing this boy playing “The Greedy Cat” on the piano, Blanca has before her again an immaculate, unburdened, carefree Nicholas, and she reproaches herself for allowing the flutter of a pleasant but unfounded feeling that life is granting her a second chance. As for Farax, as soon as he sees the fine-featured woman with dreamy eyelashes and dark circles under her eyes coming into the parlor hand in hand with the Maestro, he has the feeling that his hands will be paralyzed by fear and he won’t be able to play his best, but this proves untrue; his hands respond with joy and confidence because Farax feels at home before this woman with the somber gaze, as if he is with his mother or his sister, as if he is with someone he could love, or maybe someone he already loves from the first instant.
To listen to the visitor, Nicholas and Blanca sit together holding hands, he all aquiver with expectation, barely perched on the edge of the sofa and smacking his lips as if he’s hungry and about to be served a great delicacy, she trying to do two things at once, watching the boy with one eye and following her husband’s gaze with the other. Farax, meanwhile, gives himself over to the rhythm of the dance, forgetting his distinguished audience, rocking on the stool to keep time and accompanying the melody with an unconscious crooning, sweet and innocent. When “The Greedy Cat” comes to an end, one of those famous sentences is spoken, of the sort that is seemingly simple but loaded with hidden meaning and that seals the destiny of the speaker as well as the recipient. You and I understand each other, Nicholas says to Farax, using the casual tú instead of the formal usted although they hardly know each other, although there is an age difference of almost twenty years, although one is the master and the other the apprentice. Farax doesn’t know how to react to this unexpected form of address, to the Maestro’s smoldering gaze, to the brush of the Maestro’s hand on his shoulder, but he understands that his life will change in the wake of this We understand each other that wafts past his ears like a damp breath. Could we hear something else?, asks Blanca, moved, in a voice that isn’t quite hers, and Farax, as if understanding the transcendent nature of the moment, starts to play the Blue Danube waltz with all the requisite solemnity.
Beyond the euphoria revealed in Nicholas’s and Blanca’s respective diary entries, one might ask whether this was really the “sweetest of sweet” instants that Blanca describes, and if it was, was it so for all three of them?, for two of them?, did anyone have a foreboding of pain and future shadows? During that first meeting, which of them was jealous, and of whom? What did Nicholas see in this Abelito to whom he gave the name Farax: a promising disciple?, a rival in the trade?, a rival in love?, an object of desire?, did he see his heir, the continuer of his art and in a certain way also of his life?, or rather did he see in him the one who would trigger his ruin, the bringer of the silent news of his approaching end? In her diary, Blanca asks herself the question in broader terms when she speculates whether decisive moments are decisive from the instant they occur, or whether they only become decisive in light of what comes after them and what they bring about. Meanwhile, there’s no diary or letter to explain what Eugenia was doing in the big parlor that exuded dampness, what corner she’d been relegated to when her father, her mother, and Farax all forgot her, leaving her alone with the lead soldiers lined up in marching order.
Farax came from far away and to judge by the modesty of his clothes and the battered state of his knapsack, it seemed unlikely, even impossible, that he would have money to pay for room and board in town, so the Portulinuses invited him to dine with them that night and to sleep there if he so desired, and in fact he did so desire, not just that night but all the following nights for the next eleven months. If only silence were white!, Nicholas shouted at dawn the first time Farax spent the night with them, If only silence weren’t so damnably filthy and tainted, he said with a sigh, bursting into his wife, Blanca’s, bedroom and waking her up. What are you talking about?, she asked, sitting up in bed and struggling to see where such a thorny topic would take them at this hour of the night. I’m saying, Blanca, that I wish silence wasn’t polluted. Polluted how, she asked just to gain time, at least enough to put on her robe. With noise, with noise, what else?, can’t you hear it?, the silence is riddled with sounds that hide in it like creaks in the joists, and that eat away at it from within; you’d have to be deaf not to hear the humming and buzzing, or are you still asleep and that’s why you can’t understand me? Nicholas shook her, grasping her by the trim of her nightdress, while she begged him to lower his voice so he wouldn’t frighten the children and the visitor, and at the same time tried surreptitiously to find the drops for the tinnitus, or chronic ringing, that her husband suffered from in both ears. To compose I need pure silence, Blanca, the way poets need blank pages, or do you think Lord Byron could have written anything worthwhile on a sheet that was already full of words; and seeing that his wife was deathly pale from being shaken he let go of her and smoothed her crumpled nightdress and disheveled hair. It’s all right, Blanquita my dear, it’s all right, he said, sitting down beside her, it’s all right, nothing’s the matter, don’t look so frightened, I just want you to understand that despite what people think, silence isn’t beneficial or restful.
Now melancholy instead of frenzied, he explained to her that there were basically two kinds of noises that plagued him and drove him to distraction, or that actually there were many but these two were the worst and most persistent, one sibilant and sly, like the sound an old woman with no teeth might make whispering an interminable secret in your ear, and the other rasping, so
metimes like the purr of a cat and sometimes mechanical, like the clatter of a waterwheel or a millstone. When the whispering noise takes possession of my ears I can compose but I can’t think, and with the other noise the opposite occurs. It’s all in your head, Nicholas, go to bed, darling, I don’t hear any old ladies or cats, and then he left the room cursing her and slamming the door.
The next day at breakfast, as the young guest busied himself serving oatmeal to Sofi and Eugenia, the couple’s two daughters, or rather the two surviving after the early deaths of five other children, Nicholas repeated at the table the same description he’d given Blanca the night before of his auditory woes. The difference, he says, is that now the rasping noise doesn’t sound like a waterwheel or a millstone but like a chair being dragged along a very long passageway. You’re right, Professor, Farax replies in that disturbing voice of a child who minute by minute is leaving childhood behind, and who at the instant he speaks is already a bit more of a man than he was when he was serving the oatmeal, You’re right, Maestro, that’s why I go high up into the mountains, where I seek the inner and outer peace I’ve lost. These words seem wise and profound to Nicholas, who has the look on his face of someone who has heard the ultimate truth revealed, and he smiles placidly. You do understand me, he whispers to Farax, you and I understand each other, a statement that Blanca interprets as an indirect reproach for the clumsy words she spoke a few hours earlier on the same subject, and for the first time she experiences what from then on will become a constant, that anything she says will sound coarse to her husband when contrasted with the angelic and extraordinary pronouncements that issue from Farax’s lips.
A few days later it’s Blanca’s thirty-fourth birthday, and the trio and the two children celebrate what is unanimously pronounced a perfect day, a time that Nicholas describes in his diary in English as “domestic bliss,” spent walking along the river, collectively analyzing a Bach fugue, taking turns reading aloud passages from Shakespeare and Goethe. Heaven, as Blanca put it, smiled on them again that day, enabling Nicholas to rise in the morning with the swelling of his body sufficiently reduced so that his good looks were partially restored and to wake Blanca with a bouquet of daisies that he’d cut himself from around the stone fountain, and also that night at dinner to give her a pearl necklace with a note reading, Take these, my tears. Enraptured by this message, Blanca ran to her diary and wrote “Am I not the happiest woman in the world?”, but something bad, something she didn’t want to record, must have happened later on in the festivities, because the next sentence in her diary, written in different ink now and in a different spirit, says “Today I turned thirty-four and I was immensely happy, and yet the house is plunged into a strange silence…” Nicholas’s diary gives no clues to what happened, either; the only thing set down on the page corresponding to that date is “Today, which is her birthday, Blanca is wearing her hair up, gathered on top of her head, which accentuates the elegant shape of her face and makes me desire her greatly. I ask myself how it’s possible that such a woman could love me.”
Delirium Page 18
