Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  THE NOTE THAT WAS slipped under the door of my cubicle was written in the kind of adolescent, absurdly rounded handwriting in which the i is topped with a horrible little circle instead of a dot. I still have that note, and I keep it with me in my wallet because it was the starting point of my relationship with Agustina; this was ten or twelve days after I met her and it went like this, “Professor Aguilar, I’m the person you met the other day at the film society and I need to ask you a favor, which is that I want to write my autobiography but I don’t know how, you may ask whether anything memorable or important has ever happened to me, anything that deserves to be told, and the answer is no, but it happens to be an obsession of mine anyway and I think you could help me with it, since you’re a literature professor, after all.”

  Instead of including her telephone number so that I could reply, she gave me her address, and then she continued on in a second paragraph that was even odder than the first, and that kept me awake that night tossing and turning as I tried to gauge the precise degree of her flirtatiousness. What could such a ladi-da girl want with a man like me? Could she really be making a pass at me? “Listen, Professor, before we start working on the autobiography I’d like to see your hands, that’s the first thing I notice in a man, his hands, you don’t know how fascinated I am by men’s hands, when they do fascinate me, of course, because although I always notice them I hardly ever really like them because they’re never the way I imagine them. When we met as we were leaving the film club I couldn’t see yours because you had them in your pockets, so I thought that maybe you could send me a photocopy of your hand, either of the two, really, but make sure it’s both sides, the palm side and the other side, maybe you can tell me what that other side is called, I mean the reverse-palm, but anyway, put your hand in the photocopier like a piece of paper, and make the copy and send it to me, although of course my other fascination is hair, the hair of any mammal but especially the hair of the human male, and when I see a man with nice hair I can hardly stop myself from reaching out to touch it, although actually I couldn’t see your hair either because you were wearing that little black wool cap, I hear that you’re a lefty and I’d like to know why lefties are always wearing stocking caps no matter what the weather’s like, but don’t think I didn’t notice your eyebrows, your eyelashes, and your beard, because I did, and I liked them all because they were silky and thick and dark though I especially liked your mustache, with those little gray hairs that make it glisten, but I realize that asking you to cut a lock of your hair and send it to me would be going too far, so if you’ll let me have that photocopy of your hand and your answer to my other question, I’ll be satisfied, Agustina Londoño.”

  In the literature department at the National University there’s only one photocopier, and it’s in the dean’s office, where besides the dean and the students who mill around filling out forms or asking to see their grades, there’s the secretary, Doña Lucerito, a permanent fixture and a nice lady except when it comes to anything having to do with the photocopier, which she presides over with a stinginess maddening to us professors who need to use it, because not only does she give us a reproachful look when we come more than once a week but she also makes us keep track of how much paper we use, which meant that I couldn’t see how I would manage to sneak in and photocopy my hand. But I left my cubicle and strode decisively toward the dean’s office, firmly resolved to succeed and prepared to have it out with the dean or Lucerito herself, or even look like an idiot in front of my students if I had to in order to win the affections of the lady charging me with such strange feats, laughing to myself at the things a gray-haired man in his forties could end up doing clandestinely. My crowning achievement was pressing the buttons with my right hand to take a picture of my left hand, front and back, or reverse-palm, to use the term coined by that strange creature Agustina, and I put the two photocopies into an envelope along with a reply in the negative regarding my collaboration on her autobiography, explaining that it was called autobiography and not plain biography precisely because it was oneself and not anyone else who should write it, and in closing I gambled everything by asking her to meet me the following Sunday in the hydrangea garden in Independence Park at ten thirty in the morning.

  I waited for her in the park from twenty past ten until after eleven, convinced that it was a miserable waste of time because there wasn’t the slightest chance she’d come, and yet, just when I was about to leave, she actually showed up, bringing me some popcorn as a gift, which we sat on a bench to share and which she ended up eating herself while I told her about the seminar I was teaching on Gramsci, Lukács, and Goldmann’s theories of the novel, and then she showed me what she’d done with those photocopies of my left hand, and it made me laugh because it seemed a flagrant assault on my rationalist core; Agustina had shrunk the images down and turned them into a reversible card, palm on one side, back of the hand on the other, and laminated it, I call it the Hand That Touches, she told me, I gave it to one of those street laminators who’ll laminate your name if you don’t watch out, and look, he did a perfect job, I carry it in my wallet and it’s my amulet.

  And now Aunt Sofi and I were standing in the corner of the living room where Agustina kept us corralled crying, Back, pigs!, and there was something terrifying about it all, something demonic. As Agustina occupied herself by dragging away the furniture and objects on our side and moving them to her side, we were able to talk a little about the bomb. Aunt Sofi told me that through the window she’d seen a mushroom cloud two hundred feet tall rising over the city, and when I asked her whether it had affected Agustina much, she told me that after the tremor had woken her, she’d gotten up in a state of excitement saying that this was the sign, What sign, child? The sign that I must prepare for my father’s arrival, Do you want me to help you?, Aunt Sofi asked cautiously, If you want to help, get out of the house this instant.

  The imaginary line that divided the apartment in two began to firm up and stopped fluctuating so much; Aunt Sofi and I were assigned to a corner that had no access to the door, the telephone, the bathroom, or the kitchen, and everything else, including the second floor, became the exclusive property of Agustina, Don’t sit on the sofa, damn you, that’s for me and my father, or Into your pen, you scum, that side over there is for pigs and this side over here is for us, and of course this Us referred to Agustina and her father, because not a trace was left of the us that she and I had been, In that sense my niece is just like her mother, says Aunt Sofi, always seeking Carlos Vicente’s love, always forgiving him, in life and now in death, too.

  I didn’t see it at the time, but every tragedy has its humorous side, and today I can remember what happened with a sort of fondness and even laugh, because Agustina really had us pigs screwed, not even letting us have a glass of water or make a telephone call. Aunt Sofi was getting impatient and she said that she was going to step over the line no matter what because she had to go to the bathroom and she couldn’t hold it any longer, Even if Agustina is furious, I have to pee, she said and she managed to slip away and run up the stairs, heading for the upstairs bathroom since it would have been impossible to make it into the other one without Agustina seeing her, and a few minutes later she came down with a shawl for herself and a poncho for me, because the icy fog that comes down from Monserrate each night was descending on us now.

  I watched Aunt Sofi sneak into the kitchen and I thought, Clever woman, she’s going to smuggle us some food, remembering just then that the only thing I’d had in my stomach for hours was those few bites of Anita’s pink doughnut, sweet, pretty Anita, would Anita, the girl from Meissen, be asleep now?, and yet it wasn’t food that Aunt Sofi brought from the kitchen, hidden in her pocket, but the little battery-powered radio so that we could listen to the news, What must have happened to all those poor people who were hurt, asked Aunt Sofi, and she hadn’t finished the sentence when Agustina discovered us and snatched away the shawl and the poncho and turned off the radio; still, we managed t
o hear that Pablo Escobar was claiming responsibility for the attack.

  IT WAS A SIMPLE TURN of the screw that catapulted me from glory to ruin, Agustina darling, I swear. It started with the back-and-forth of gossip and secrets in the gyms, dressing rooms, and bathrooms at the center, one of those conspiracies that builds up underground until it explodes and shit flies everywhere, and I suspect that the person who set off the bomb was this woman Alexandra, who is physically a goddess but mentally not all there, though I don’t know, the truth is I can’t be sure it was her, she’s someone who’s been coming to the center for years to work out and at first she was kind of a girlfriend of mine, I told you I sleep with the prettiest ones and she was no exception, so we were more or less together for a while, but I extricated myself from that fast, because as I was saying, she’s a chick with an outstanding body but a fucked-up mind, and on second thought maybe it’s paranoid of me to blame her for something that happened so long afterward.

  When it comes down to it, it could have been anyone, because anyone could’ve read El Espacio and started the rumor, although it’s strange, very strange, Agustina sweetheart, that someone from this side of town would pick up that trashy tabloid; in general my clientele thinks there’s no point wasting time on bad news, especially if it involves people they don’t know, and if they ever feel like reading, they read El Tiempo, which lets them know what’s going on the way they like to hear it. But it was my bad luck that a story in El Espacio about the mysterious disappearance of a nurse had to make its way to the Aerobics Center, especially since Dolores’s vanishing was an unremarkable occurrence if ever there was one, the kind of thing that goes completely unnoticed in this country, I mean, if no one complains when a whole hospital is robbed and plundered, who’s going to get worked up about a single missing nurse, but you know how it is when your luck turns.

  El Espacio went after the story of the phantom nurse and released a statement by her boyfriend which said that the last time he saw her she was entering a gym on the north side of town. So far not great, though bearable, Agustina doll, but the next day El Espacio runs a longer story and bingo!, specifies that the gym in question is Midas McAlister’s Aerobics Center, and publishes a picture of Dolores, alive and smiling, a younger and less worn-down Dolores than the one I met, but definitely Dolores, no doubt about it, although El Espacio doesn’t call her that, they call her Sara Luz Cárdenas Carrasco, and they don’t describe her as a whore specializing in S&M who died fulfilling her true destiny as a professional shit-eater, but as a registered nurse whose colleagues say they’ve heard nothing from her, and there’s also the testimony of the man who claims that he’s her boyfriend and that his name is Otoniel Cocué, who, as you’ll have guessed, Agustina darling, is none other than the pimp, although he doesn’t share that bit of information and instead identifies himself as an accountant because he certainly couldn’t reveal the nature of his miserable illegal profession, and as a result his accusations are only half-truths, the kicking and squirming of a man in over his head; for example, he claims that the nurse Sara Luz, his fiancée, exercised at the Aerobics Center, and that she went in one night and never came out.

  But the women in the 7:00 a.m. super-rumba class catch wind of all of this—from Alexandra, if my suspicions are correct—and they tell the women in the noon spinning class, who tell the women in the five o’clock spinning class, who pass it on to the eight o’clock class and the women in the massage rooms and the women in the tanning booths, in other words by evening the story has taken on Hollywood dimensions and when they see me stroll by, some women clam up, others laugh, and the most brazen come up to me to ask what happened; and then of course there’s the flirt who tells me straight out that if I’m Bluebeard she volunteers to be the next victim. Certain games become popular, like getting spooked, hearing moans, spotting the killer, or pointing out suspects, and so it goes, the Aerobics Center brimming with rumors, fears, ghosts, jokes, and teasing, and one thing leads to another according to the inexorable law of consequences until I get a visit from the police, who have a warrant to search the place and question me, but as you might expect, sweetheart, they find nothing and I don’t let anything slip, Women come in and out of here all day, Sergeant, I tell a lieutenant who immediately reminds me of his rank, Of course, Lieutenant, excuse me, I was saying that at least three hundred women come through this door every day, and three hundred leave by the same door, and then the lieutenant performs some routine procedures, like checking the attendance records to verify that in fact there is no Sara Luz recorded, and I very calmly pass him the sign-in book, Go ahead, Lieutenant, take a look if you want.

  And now prepare yourself, Agustina doll, because the story is about to take a turn for the surreal, imagine my surprise when I see that on one line, in grandiose handwriting in blue fountain pen, the lieutenant has found the signature of one Sara Luz Cárdenas Carrasco, her name written out in full and with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, I swear I almost fell over backward, it must have been that idiot Dolores the night of her tragic performance, the fool probably saw the book where gym members signed in and thought it would be cool or trendy to sign her name there, too, after all why not, she probably thought of herself as an artist or a model, so I had to smooth things over by explaining to the lieutenant that there was nothing strange about someone attending one of our free promotional sessions, This is a public place, Lieutenant, anyone can come in, maybe the girl did stop by but that means absolutely nothing, I repeated several times, though also and most important I slipped the man enough cash to make him keep his mouth shut and leave me in peace, or relative peace because the whole business was getting me down and it was starting to look like there was no way out.

  If I don’t give you a detailed account of what came next, Agustina sweetheart, it’s because in the end there were no further police or legal repercussions for me beyond that routine inspection ending with the usual bribe to the authorities; the lingering problem was more subjective, or emotional, maybe, because the gym clientele didn’t want the excitement to be over and they kept adding to the story and updating it in their imaginations, with talk about Ms. X passing by and the neighbors hearing music until late the night before, a sobbing woman bricked up in the wall, cars coming in and out of the parking lot, a creepy vibe in a certain room, and speculation as to who that poor girl must have been.

  Anyway, Agustina darling, I won’t bore you much longer, but the honest truth is that the ghost of Dolores, or Sara Luz as she was called now, started to grow and suffocate me and give the Aerobics Center a bad name, to the point that even I, each time I smoked a joint to relax a little, was plunged into the most unpleasant fantasies in which my own gym became an Inquisition torture chamber and my beloved machines were turned into racks and Dolores was crucified on the Nautilus 4200, What the fuck, I thought, this is her revenge, and I tried to kick-start a dialogue so that we could come to some kind of agreement: I promise you, blessed soul of Dolores, that as soon as the scandal dies down I’ll send money to your John Jairo, or Henry Mario, or whatever your kid’s name is, so he can go to school, I promise you, my dear Sara Luz, that if you help me stop the gossip, I’ll bankroll a technical-school degree for your William Andrés some day.

  On top of everything, while all this was going on, time was passing, and the date went by on which, according to Mystery, Pablo had promised to make good on our investment, so as you can imagine, Agustina baby, Spider Salazar and Ronald Silverstein were all over me, Has it come yet, What’s the meaning of this, What the hell is going on, and there I was taking the blame and saying how sorry I was in an effort to put out this second blaze, I understand, Spider my friend, it’s the pits, Silver old man, you’re both right, it’s shit, I realize this delay is shit, but everything will work out in the end, you’ll see; that’s what I told them, Agustina princess, but the truth was that I had no idea what might be going through Escobar’s head since Mystery wouldn’t even keep his appointments with me. I spent hour a
fter hour waiting for him at the cemetery hoping he’d show up with the money at last, or at least with an explanation, but there was nothing, the days passed and nothing. Go on, Midas, Spider commanded imperiously, find Pablo and let him know that this little delay is putting us in a tight spot, Relax, Spider old man, as soon as his messenger shows up I’ll pass on the complaint, You never told me, Midas my boy, that you weren’t in direct contact with Escobar, Well, yes, or I mean, no, I used to be but now the situation has changed a little, try to understand, Spider my man.