Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  I remember how impressed I was each time Joaco would say, On Friday we’re going to the cold country, meaning your house in the highlands, or Today my mother is in the hot country, which meant at the Sasaima estate, or if not, We’re going to stay here, and here was the house in La Cabrera, and how could I not be dazzled, when each morning I listened to my mother thank the Holy Father for having granted her a loan at the Central Mortgage Bank to pay for that 200-square-foot apartment in San Luis Bertrand where I slept almost every night from the time I was twelve until I was nineteen, the apartment that was an unspeakable embarrassment for me and to which I never wanted to bring any of my friends, least of all Joaco; I duped them all with the story that I lived in the penthouse of a building in El Chicó, telling them that they couldn’t visit me there because my mother was terminally ill and even the slightest disturbance might be fatal, my poor mother, if she’d only known what lies I spread about her, so respectable and selfless in her little black suit and worn-down shoes, always holding her rosary, making pilgrimages from store to store in search of the best prices on lentils and rice.

  My mother was right at home in a neighborhood where everyone was more or less the same, you might say that she fit the prevailing pattern of mothers in San Luis Bertrand, but there was no way I could ever bring her to school for my friends to see, these are delicate problems I’m talking to you about, Agustina angel; you, who’ve actually met my sainted mother, know that she ties her stockings above the knee with a tight knot that shows when she crosses her legs, terrible, I’ve always told her that if she limps from phlebitis it’s because those stocking tourniquets cut off her circulation, but anyway, neither my neighborhood nor my blessed mother are fit to be seen, and you can’t imagine, Agustina princess, the schemes I’ve had to come up with to keep them both hidden from everyone, as if they didn’t exist.

  To meet Joaco and the rest of the gang at the building where I supposedly lived in El Chicó, I first had to take a bus from San Luis to Parallel and Ninety-second Street, and then hurry eight long blocks in order to arrive a few minutes beforehand and slip a tip to the doorman, so that there was no chance he might give me away; thanks to this early practice, I became a master in the art of pretending. To this very day, baby, no one from your side of the world has met my mother or knows of the existence of this apartment in San Luis Bertrand, well, no one except you; how I must have loved and trusted you to bring you here for an afternoon snack on unbreakable plastic dishes with my dear mother, under sacred oath not to reveal the secret, which incidentally you’ve kept religiously for me ever since.

  I believe that the traumatic living circumstances of my adolescence must be the reason I was hypnotized, and still am hypnotized, by the idea that the Londoños could split their week among three different houses and do it without traveling, because traveling meant something else entirely to your family, you took trips, you flew to faraway places, but that side of things was less interesting to me as a child; what really blew me away was the idea that you could have a regular life simultaneously in three different houses, without carrying suitcases back and forth, because you had clothes in all three places, and LPs and televisions and a cook and a gardener and toys and slippers, everything three times over, even pajamas waiting for you under the pillow wherever you went, or in other words family life beautifully contained within an equilateral triangle, with an amazing house at each corner, each in a separate climate and only an hour and a half away from the other two; that’s all there was to it, Agustina princess, for me that was the height of elegance, the holy trinity, the ultimate in geometric perfection.

  And now, in the dining room again, Agustina still has those ridiculously huge eyes and that insanely long hair, her fingers still extend through the holes of those gloves, gloves like a cyclist’s or a junkie’s that irritate her brother Joaco, and her slender body is still lost in the black clothes that her mother finds highly inappropriate for a sunny day in the country. From the start they were a little put off by your presence, Agustina darling, you’ve always made a habit of violating their dress code and making them feel uncomfortable. The place?, your family’s highlands estate; the time, Saturday noon; the action, the devastating chain of events that would culminate in our respective downfalls, but to introduce it properly let’s say that it all began the day before, on Friday, at six in the afternoon, with me alone in bed in my dark bedroom while the rest of the world tumbled down around me, my Aerobics Center overrun by the ghost of a dead woman, my finances collapsing because of Pablo, and my friends Spider and Silver embarked on a personal crusade against me as if the unpleasant consequences of their own greed were my fault, and just then the telephone rings and it’s your brother Joaco inviting me to spend the weekend at his house in the cold country. I turn him down flat and I’m about to hang up and sink back into my self-imposed blackout when he drops your name, Agustina is coming with us, he says, What?, I ask, startled and suddenly interested, because this is the first thing anyone has said in days that manages to capture my attention, Yes, that’s right, Joaco confirms, I said Agustina is coming with us, and when I ask him how this miracle came about he explains that your husband is in Ibagué on who knows what kind of business, and then I change my mind about this trip to the cold country: All right, I’ll come.

  I accepted Joaco’s invitation, Agustina doll, because not even the worst funk could prevent me from taking advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend a few days with you, with those big dogs lying at our feet in the silent galleries open to the rippling of the eucalyptus trees in the afternoon, the scent of manure, and the comforting sight of inherited lands stretching off into the distance, what a fucking pretty thing, Agustina princess, if I’m lying when I call it nirvana, let my hand be chopped off. And suddenly there we were, back in paradise with the eucalyptuses and the dogs and all the rustic trappings, and you were as quick and teasing as you’d ever been, your smiles so easy that I, who hadn’t seen you for months, started to believe that you were cured; we had a few Heinekens and you whipped me at Scrabble, you’ve always been a fiend at Scrabble, and also at solving crossword puzzles and playing charades and instantly picking up on double entendres and riddles, in general your thing is making clever use of language and playing mischievously with words.

  It was a gorgeous day, you were astonishingly beautiful, and there was just one problem, Agustina sweetheart, and that was that your eyes got even bigger than they already were and your hair grew a tiny bit longer each time your mother opened her mouth to utter one of her usual interpretations of things, so plainly counter to any evidence, and then, in that dining room so lavishly hung with paintings of colonial saints that it looks like a chapel, I realized that each lie was like torture for you and that each omission was a snare for your fragile mind, and you sat there quietly, while your mother, Joaco, and Joaco’s wife snatched the words from one another’s mouths as they discussed the big news, that Bichi had called from Mexico to say he’d be coming to the country for a few weeks before year’s end, after all those years away, Bichi, who left as a child, would return as an adult, and I see how you’re shaken and overcome, after all, your little brother must be the only person you’ve ever really loved, and who knows what crazy kind of birds must have started flapping around inside your head with the announcement of his return.

  But the rest of the family is also in a state of excitement and your mother keeps approaching the subject and retreating from it, glossing over things with that amazing gift for concealment she’s always had and that Joaco plays along with so well because he’s been practicing since he was little, and the plain truths keep getting caught in the honeyed ambiguity that smoothes and civilizes everything until there’s no substance left to any of it, or until it produces convenient historical revisions and lies as big as mountains that are gradually transformed into realities by mutual consensus, I’m referring to gems like this: Bichi left for Mexico because he wanted to go to school there, not because your father was
always beating him for acting like a girl; Aunt Sofi doesn’t exist, or at least she doesn’t exist so long as no one mentions her; Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño loved his three children equally and was a faithful husband until the day he died; Agustina left home at seventeen because she was a rebel, a hippie, and a pothead, not because she’d rather run away than confess to her father that she was pregnant; Midas McAlister never impregnated Agustina or abandoned her afterward, and she never had to go alone to have an abortion; Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño didn’t die of heart failure but from moral distress the day that he was driving along a hippie street and happened to see his only daughter, Agustina, sitting on the sidewalk selling necklaces of colored beads and seeds; Joaco didn’t cheat his siblings out of the family inheritance but instead is doing them the favor of managing it for them; there is no man named Aguilar, and if he does exist he has nothing to do with the Londoño family; darling Agustina isn’t stark raving mad, she just is the way she is—that’s how Eugenia and Joaco put it, not specifying what way that is—or she’s nervous and needs to take Equanil, or she didn’t sleep well last night, or she needs psychoanalysis, or she’s difficult for the sake of being difficult, or she’s always been a little strange.

  That’s the Londoño Catalog of Basic Falsehoods, but each one of them branches out into a hundred shades of fabrication, and meanwhile I’m watching you, Agustina sweetheart, sitting there at the other end of the table, and I realize that while listening once more to that whole repertory of half-truths you haven’t been able to eat a bite and your food is growing cold on your plate, and I see your lovely white hands twisting as if they’d like to pull each other apart, your hands in those strange gloves that you never take off and that soon, around dessert time, maybe, will make Joaco say to you, in an irritated way, that it would be nice if you could at least take them off when you sit down at the table, and when he says that you’ll turn pale and you won’t say anything and you’ll be on the verge, the verge of the thing that has no name because your mother has taken it upon herself to erase the word from the list of words permitted in your house.

  And Joaco talks animatedly, my adorable little nutcase, about how they’ll go riding with Bichi when he comes, and your mother announces that she’ll have a big pan of caramel cream arequipe for him to eat all by himself, and she predicts how thrilled Bichi will be when he sees that his room in the house in La Cabrera is still intact, I haven’t touched a thing, says your mother, moved, because she really is, almost to the point of tears, His clothes and toys are still there, your mother says, and her voice breaks, everything is just as it was when he left, as if no time had passed. As if nothing had happened, right, Eugenia?, because in your family nothing ever happens, that’s what I want to say to her so that Agustina will stop wringing her hands, my poor girl, who keeps drifting further away and growing paler, while I ask myself what I can do to wipe that panicked expression off your face, that look of impending doom, of something drawing nearer that has no name. When Bichi comes, Eugenia is going to organize a trip to Sasaima, the first in years ever since the property had been left in the hands of the estate agent because of the violence, But we’re going to arrange a return to the hot country, says Eugenia, her eyes wet, I’m going to have the whole house painted and the pool repaired and we’ll celebrate Bichi’s arrival with a big family trip to Sasaima, and Joaco nods, he makes it clear that this time, too, he’ll bow to his mother’s wishes in small matters, as he always does.

  Neither of the two mention the fierce argument they had just before lunch, shut up alone in the library, which doesn’t have thick enough walls to have prevented the others from hearing them from outside and flinching, but even Joaco’s wife, who is clueless and dumb as a brick, catches on that they have to pretend they didn’t hear Joaco shouting in the library as he warned his mother that if Bichi came to Bogotá with that boyfriend he has in Mexico, neither Bichi nor his faggot boyfriend would set foot in this house; not this house or the one in La Cabrera or the one in the hot country either, Because if they come I’ll throw them out, and your mother, who’s shouting too but not as loud, repeats the same sentence over and over again, Hush, Joaco, don’t say such a terrible thing, the terrible and unspeakable thing being, to her mind, that Bichi has a boyfriend, not that Joaco will throw Bichi and his boyfriend out, but anyway, the rest of us outside pretend not to hear, and keep our mouths shut. As if they’d already forgotten what they were shouting about in the library a moment ago, as if Bichi didn’t have a boyfriend in Mexico or as if by not mentioning the subject they were willing it not to exist, over lunch your mother and Joaco go on planning the improvements they’ll make at Sasaima for Bichi’s visit.

  When everyone’s finished eating, one maid gathers the plates, another brings in dessert, and just as you reach out your hand to take an apple from the fruit bowl, your brother Joaco, who has been making an enormous effort to contain himself, suddenly snaps and demands that you remove those filthy gloves this instant.

  ON THE RIVER, Nicholas Portulinus saw Ophelias floating, child Ophelias like his sister Ilse, who was older than Nicholas and never left Germany, or if she did, it was because the river carried her away to other lands. During the wet season, when they had to spend long hours in the open galleries of the big house in Sasaima talking as they watched the rain fall in sheets, Nicholas told Blanca and Farax about Ilse, about how in his hometown of Kaub she brought such shame on the family that it threatened to fall apart. In words veiled by decorum and sorrow Nicholas revealed to them the extreme tension generated around the sad figure of Ilse, even translating two letters from the German, one in which his father urges him to keep watch over his sister’s moral conduct and another in which his forbidding mother alludes euphemistically to certain “improper” and “very distasteful” acts that Ilse performs in front of company and that disgrace the rest of the family. Regarding the nature of these embarrassing acts, Nicholas disclosed that it had to do with a certain prickling; Ilse was afflicted by an itch so relentless that it led to her undoing.

  Though it’s often said that no one is lost because of stigmas that can be borne with resignation, discretion, and in secret, it became clear that this was not Ilse’s case on the day that a group of relatives dressed in black arrived at the Portulinus house in Kaub to offer their condolences upon the death of a great-aunt. Circumspect and recollecting the deceased in a hushed silence, they sat in a circle of chairs around a rug and a small table; it was as if they were waiting before an empty stage, hands in laps, for a show to start, although of course they knew that there would be no show, and that in fact the show bringing them together had just ended, in other words the long death throes of the great-aunt, dead of some nameless illness, unmentionable like all illnesses that send great-aunts to their graves. Those present kept their eyes fixed on some small object, perhaps a ring, a bit of paper, or a coat button that they fingered as they waited for the ritual of paying their respects to be completed and for the moment to arrive at which they could say their farewells, until one of the chairs began to creak and everyone turned and saw, to their astonishment, that the girl Ilse, also dressed in black and almost a woman now, not to mention very pretty, as the relatives had just told her parents, had her hand under her skirt and was rubbing her crotch spasmodically, with vacant eyes, as if she were alone, as if decency were not imperative at wakes, as if her parents, ashamed and confused, weren’t pulling her by the arm to drag her out immediately.

  According to Blanca, who transcribes in her diary words that she claims to have heard Nicholas speak, Ilse’s behavior resulted from a stinging that “poisoned the most precious parts of her body,” or to put it in medical terminology, an itch affecting the genitals, which, as anyone who’s suffered from such a malady knows, not only requires one to scratch but also to masturbate, because it arouses as well as torments, producing an agitation similar to desire but more intense. After trying various treatments, the parents declared themselves unable to control their daughter and chos
e to lock her in her room for hours at a time, hours that little by little became days. In her confinement she sank into a slow mental decline that the doctors diagnosed as quiet madness, or a progressive retreat inward so that what she displayed on the outside was a disconcerting and, in the view of many, intolerable combination of introspection and exhibitionism, catatonia and masturbation.

  Ilse was in gradual retreat from the world, consumed by the burning itch in her crotch that derived from the scrofula or blight or rash that covered her sex, making it aggressively present but not fit to be seen, fevered with desire but at the same time undesirable, disgusting in the eyes of others and especially disgusting in Ilse’s own eyes. Meanwhile, Nicholas grew in splendor, as full of grace as a Hail Mary, according to his own mother, with the ability to recite long poems from memory and a gift for playing the piano. Nicholas, the fortunate child, the pride of parents for whom Ilse was an undeserved punishment, listened as his father, beside himself, shouted at Ilse, Don’t do that, you filthy girl, it’s disgusting, and watched him resort to brute force, half out of his mind and half racked with pain, to stop her from reaching her hand down there, which was the worst thing that could happen to the family. Anything would be better, wept his mother, anything, even death.