Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  Nicholas was scorched by these reproaches as if by a red-hot poker, reproaches that Ilse bore with resignation as well as stubbornness, not altering her behavior one bit; there was something voracious and insatiable about his sister’s silence that at once terrified and fascinated the boy, and when he found her with her hands bound behind her, a measure that was imposed on her with increasing frequency, he would wait until his parents were away to untie her, and when she returned to her usual habits, he would whisper in her ear in the most persuasive tones, Don’t do that, Ilse, because Father will come and tie you up again. Who can say how many hours young Nicholas spent leaning against that locked door, feeling beat for beat how his sister’s ferocious welts throbbed on the other side. Then the snow fell, the snow melted, the birds sang in the blooming cherry trees, and the boy Nicholas gradually developed tastes and manifested talents while the girl Ilse brooded over conundrums, cloistered in her room and caught up in her own rhythms, and began to look increasingly like a shadow of herself.

  Then Nicholas learned to steal the key, penetrate the chamber of mysteries, and make his sister’s martyrdom his own, sitting beside her and pretending that he, too, had his hands bound behind his back. You see, Ilse?, he consoled her, they’ve punished me just like you, you aren’t the only bad one. But she didn’t seem to hear him, always preoccupied with the itch that was devouring her, first her insides, then her legs, her torso, her breasts, her ears, her nose; all of her, including her eyes and voice and hair and presence, were consumed by her inner hunger, all except her sex, which radiated inflammation and neglect, sad agent of her downfall; and also of her brother Nicholas’s downfall? Because it happened then that Nicholas’s mother gave her beloved son a little piano in recognition of his precocious talent, a white piano, as Portulinus specifies in his diary, and Nicholas, as well as complying with maternal expectations by impressing everyone at family gatherings, played Ländler and waltzes in secret just for Ilse, Dance, my pretty sister, and Ilse came out of her lonely corner and danced, ungainly dances but dances all the same, and as if that weren’t enough, sometimes she even laughed as she danced, and it was then that Nicholas realized what music was for and wished with all his heart to someday become a professional musician.

  But in the middle of the night during an endless winter, Ilse threw herself into the Rhine in a paroxysm of fever and drowned, and then Nicholas realized something else that as an adult he would confirm in the flesh, which is that before the onslaught of madness, sooner or later even music succumbs. It could be said that the itching of his sister’s sex settled in her brother’s soul, since Portulinus now spent his days repeating the names of rivers in alphabetical order, the Hase, the Havel, the Hunte, the Kocher, the Lech, and the Leide, perhaps to accompany Ilse on her long journey, Ilse, who drifts under the old stone bridge of Kaub in her hurry to go nowhere, while on the other side of the ocean Blanca sits on a black stone on the banks of the Sweet, watching the river run.

  AUNT SOFI TOLD ME that she had savings in Mexico, and she offered to pay whatever it took to give Agustina the necessary medical treatment. After the incident of the divided house, from which we emerged exhausted, battered, and badly shaken, she told me point-blank what she had probably refrained from saying for days out of respect for my intimacy with Agustina and for what she cryptically called Your Methods; Aunt Sofi exploded at last, scolding me for not seeing that Agustina received the proper professional attention, Anyone can see that love and patience aren’t solving the problem, she told me, and for the first time since she’d been with us she seemed exasperated, although she excused herself by explaining that she felt close to the end of her strength, that her nerves were frayed, that she couldn’t imagine how day after day I could stand the state of extreme tension in the house. If I may say so, Aunt Sofi went on, asking permission to speak but continuing before I granted it, It seems criminal not to have the girl treated by a specialist, for her sake and yours, too. Doctors, hospitals, drugs, treatments, I replied, in the three years we’ve been living together there’s nothing we haven’t tried, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing: psychoanalysis? couples therapy? lithium? Prozac? behavior therapy? Gestalt?, you name it, Aunt Sofi, and you’ll see that it’s already been crossed off the list, that we’ve been down that path before.

  Since she looked at me in astonishment, I made an effort to provide her with a reasonable explanation, The thing is, Aunt Sofi, when Agustina is well she’s such an exceptional woman, she’s so delightful that sometimes all the times that she’s been sick are wiped from my mind, and each time we get through a crisis, I’m convinced that this was the last manifestation of a passing problem; to put it another way, Aunt Sofi, I’ve always refused to acknowledge that Agustina is sick, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried everything within my means to cure her, I even left my job as a professor, well, at first it was because they closed the university, but as everyone knows it reopened months ago, and Purina leaves me enough free time to give her the attention she needs, and yet I have to confess that I’ve never been through anything as serious as this; there have certainly been ups and downs, of every variety and magnitude, attacks of melancholia in which Agustina withdraws into a silence charged with secrets and woes, frenetic periods in which she pursues some obsessive, excessive activity to the point of collapse, yearnings with a mystical slant in which prayers and rituals predominate, voids of affection in which she clings to me with the desperation of an orphan, and periods of distancing and indifference in which she doesn’t see me or hear me or even seem to recognize me, but until now no spell has been so deep, violent, or prolonged as this.

  In the previous episode, which was five months ago, she took to listening to Schubert’s trios and crying along with them for hours on end; in the morning, when I left, she’d be calm and busy at something else, and when I returned in the afternoon I would find her desolate again, assuring me that Schubert was the only one in the world who understood her troubles; the funny thing is that this harmonic accord only involved the trios, or the trios and Death and the Maiden, because she could listen unmoved to the rest of his complete works, And why didn’t you hide the trios?, Aunt Sofi asks, I didn’t need to, I answer, one day she simply forgot about them.

  AND THEN YOU AND I were on my motorcycle hauling ass out of there, no helmets, Agustina baby, fleeing your mother and your brother Joaco and especially your own craziness, which was hot on our heels; fortunately a BMW R100RT like mine is the only machine in the world with enough pickup to escape that kind of horror show. In the dining room of your house in the cold country all the alarms had gone off, first your hands twisting, then that ugly grimace contorting your face, and finally the maximum red alert, the ultimate SOS, which is when your voice turns metallic and you start to preach, and this time you were snottily warning about some legacy, and I’m sorry, Agustina doll, but I have to say the whole thing was a little freaky, because when you start talking that way it’s actually scary to see, like the voice coming out of you isn’t yours anymore.

  You got very upset about the legacy thing, but there was something else, too, I’m trying to remember, I think you were also talking about dominion, you were saying something about how you couldn’t escape the legacy, or that we were living under the dominion of the legacy, I don’t know, Agustina baby, I really couldn’t say exactly because there’s nothing to be exact about, since when you’re raving you start talking in this nervous, complicated gibberish and you get extremely angry, making pronouncements that must seem like matters of life or death to you but that don’t mean anything to anyone else; of course it isn’t your fault, and I’d guess you don’t even have much to do with what’s happening to you, but the truth is that when you let loose I get goose bumps, everything you do slants suspiciously toward the religious, if you know what I mean, you start to use fancy words and predict things like a prophet, but a whiny, annoying prophet, know what I’m saying, baby?, an out-of-it, fucking crazy prophet, so that even now, at this very
moment, when you’re here talking to me relaxed and in your right mind, even now I’m afraid to say certain words in front of you, like legacy or gift of sight, because I know from experience that they work on your brain like a code that triggers the craziness and opens the door to disaster.

  That’s why there in the dining room in the cold-country house, in the middle of Eugenia and Joaco’s planning for the welcome-home parties and festivities for Bichi, when you started talking in that metallic voice, I prepared myself mentally to take action as soon as necessary. Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, I said to myself, and when your brother Joaco ordered you to take off your gloves I knew that was the last straw and I got up from the table, having already decided to get you out of there and take you far away; I grabbed your hand and said to you, Come on, finish your coffee and let’s go, Please excuse us, Eugenia, please excuse us, Joaco, I need to get back to Bogotá in a hurry because I have to be who knows where, I don’t even remember anymore what excuse I concocted for us, all I know is that I took you by the hand, that you offered no resistance, and that we climbed onto the motorcycle.

  Be careful, Eugenia advised us, having come out to see us off, accompanied by her pack of friendly dogs, Don’t stay out past dark, it’s dangerous, Of course, I promised her, don’t you worry, we’ll be back early, but I knew that Eugenia knew that we wouldn’t be back, how could she not when we’d taken our bags; if you and I were leaving, baggage and all, it meant that we considered the weekend plans abruptly concluded, which was how your mother understood it and which came as a great relief to her, because by getting you out of there, Agustina baby, I was defusing the time bomb that had been activated by the subject of Bichi’s boyfriend, by Joaco blowing up, and by the spark of delirium that already shone in your eyes. When she saw that we were going your mother secretly approved and was even grateful and pretended that nothing was happening, Don’t forget to bring yucca rolls for breakfast tomorrow, she shouted as we were at the gate, Of course, Eugenia, how many yucca rolls do you want?, I answered her, which translated into Londoño language meant, I know that you know that something isn’t right here but don’t worry, I’ll let it pass, don’t worry, I’m not going to rub it in your face, because I know how to play that game, too, the game called I don’t think about it therefore it doesn’t exist, or So long as no one talks about it, it’s as if it never happened, Certainly, Eugenia, of course we’ll be back early, and on and on, blah blah blah, you know what I’m talking about, Agustina sweetheart, that exchange of words that mean exactly the opposite of what they say, and yet despite it all I feel sorry for your mother, have you ever stopped to think, Agustina baby, how different your poor mother’s life is than she dreamed it would be?

  And meanwhile you, my pretty little lunatic, were sitting behind me on the motorcycle still issuing your apocalyptic warnings, droning on about the famous legacy, until we shot off along that unpaved road and each time I showed signs of braking, you wouldn’t let me, Make it go faster, Midas, hurry, don’t stop, and then you were off again with the whole dominion and legacy thing, and I swear, Agustina baby, God help us when your head tilts at that weird angle. I don’t know how we managed not to kill ourselves on that road, me clinging to my motorcycle, you clinging to me, your madness clinging to you, and the four of us flying along blindly at a thousand miles an hour, until we reached the tiny town of Puente Piedra and there you informed me that we should stop for coffee, and I agreed; we went into a store and asked for two black coffees, and you burst out laughing, back to normal now and even finding it all funny, like you were your real self again, and not inhabited by that other person, Well, well, you said to me, giving me a hug, we escaped just in time, before things got ugly, What a tease you are, Agustina, I said, I think you wear those hideous gloves just to drive your brother Joaco insane, It’s true they’re nasty, you admitted, and you came up with the idea of burying them somewhere, so we got back on the motorcycle and found a field by the side of the road that seemed right to you.

  You took off your gloves, threw them into an irrigation ditch, and we stood there watching as the soupy green water swallowed them up. Since the day was still beautiful and the sun was inviting, we decided to lie down in the grass and suddenly everything seemed very amusing, Agustina doll, there you were, the owner of countless acres, and here we were, trespassers on someone else’s land, keeping a careful eye out in case they set the dogs on us, but happy, adolescents again, great friends, partners in crime; it must be true that those who’ve shared a bed never completely grow apart. We started to talk about Bichi’s return and you shivered with emotion at the news, When my father returns…, you said, You mean when Bichi returns, I corrected you, and I corrected you again the second time you said it, but by the third time I suspected that it would be better to change course, steering us away from that particular minefield.

  You don’t know what an uproar there’s been at the Aerobics Center, I said, and you had already heard about it because a few hours ago, in the cold-country house, Joaco’s wife, who was a gym regular, had brought it up, asking me whether the mystery of the disappeared woman had been solved. And in the middle of the conversation your brother Joaco suggested, either to mock you or to mock me, that I should bring you to predict the nurse’s whereabouts; Joaco was on a roll, With any luck Agustina will find her in Alaska, where she found the minister’s son, and that way the girls at the center will relax and stop blaming Midas. And later, in the field, I brought the subject up again as a way to distract you and stop your neurons from whirring, and I was happy when you took the bait, mysteries and stories about people who vanish have always been your thing, and I got you going by inventing silly versions of the drama for you, imitating the ghost of Sara Luz and the hysterical gym members who let themselves be scared by her, and I clowned around as much as I could, Agustina doll, trying to keep your hands from starting their wringing again, doing my best not to let that dangerous glow light up your eyes, and you got excited, you said that there was a connection between you and that woman, and that you felt that she had a message for you; I think she needs to tell me where she is, you said and I was alarmed, because no matter which way you looked at it, this seemed off base, so I insisted that we go to the movies instead, I wanted to see E.T., you were set on Flashdance, and since neither of us would give in, we settled on smoking a joint there in the coziness of the late-afternoon sun, and then we somehow started in on the whole nurse business again.

  I was seeing everything in a positive light now, thanks to the excellent weed, and so I went along with it, calculating that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all, it would get colder soon anyway and we couldn’t agree on a movie or stay in that field forever, and Joaco might even be right when he said that one of your flashes of intuition could have a positive effect on the girls at the center, or positive from my point of view, that is, in the sense of throwing everybody off the scent with your visions, which if you’ll excuse me, sweetheart, I’ve always thought were a joke; I started to imagine you in the grip of your prophetic powers, half closing your eyes, breathing deeply, going into a trance, and coming up with a verdict that pinpointed the whereabouts of the alleged nurse in some faraway place; in other words, I visualized something like the following: me coming in with you just before the five o’clock super-rumba class, which is crowded enough on Saturdays, Listen up, please, listen up, I would shout, I know that everyone’s been concerned lately about a woman who unfortunately disappeared, and since we sincerely want to help find her, and since no one is more interested than we are in seeing that she appears so she can return home safe and sound to her loved ones, I’ve brought you the famous seer Agustina Londoño, and as soon as I mention your name everyone would recognize it and exclaim, It’s her, the girl who finds lost people!, and I’d call for silence, then you’d run your fingers over the signature that the poor woman apparently left in our sign-in book and put your mental powers to work trying to find her, that was more or less what I had in mind
when I approved the crazy plan to bring you to the center.

  Once you were there, you’d do your thing and say with total conviction something like, I see her, I see her, I see a woman named Sara Luz Cárdenas Carrasco who’s run away with her Dominican boyfriend to San Pedro de Macorís, and they’re living there happily ever after, or, version number two, Where are you, Sara Luz? Sara Luz? Oh yes, now I see you, my sixth sense tells me that you’re in prison in New York City, oh no!, you went to work as a drug mule, Sara Luz, the stewardess gave you away because she thought it was suspicious that you weren’t eating the chicken and carrots that she’d served you on a cardboard tray, they arrested you with Baggies of cocaine in your stomach at John F. Kennedy Airport and now you’re locked up and sentenced to 127 years of prison in a windowless cell, or version number three, maybe even better than the first two, No, ladies and gentlemen, this signature isn’t hers, my great gift of sight tells me that it’s a fraud, a fake, a name scrawled by someone who wasn’t the real Sara Luz Cárdenas, someone playing a stupid joke; I don’t know, Agustina doll, forgive me again, please, it was just another one of my stupid pranks, another pot trip, another one of those silly but amusing ideas that I let myself get carried away by; I really believed that for you it would just be a game and that it might help me or at least not hurt me, and how could I know it would end the way it did, when after all you’re the expert at guessing games.

  BEFORE THE WEEPING over Schubert, maybe three months before, things had become unbearable and I’d turned to Social Security, discovering that because of my restricted policy as a university professor, my wife only qualified for treatment at the charity hospital La Hortúa, where she was assigned to a doctor named Walter Suárez, who subjected his patients to sleeping cures, shooting them full of sodium amytal. She was admitted to one of the halls in the psychiatric ward and put to bed, and all I could do was watch her sleep, and accept that as soon as she opened her eyes, or moved her lips to try to say something, Doctor Walter Suárez’s assistants would appear with another dose of the barbiturate, a yellowish powder with a sulfurous stench that they dissolved and injected intravenously, and that’s how I spent my days and nights, in contemplation of that sleeping beauty who glowed pale and distant on the worn hospital sheets that had seen so much human suffering, her hair like a creeping vine that had claimed the pillow centuries ago; I couldn’t take my eyes off the soft and slightly trembling shadow that her eyelashes projected on her cheeks as if she were an old doll forgotten on a shelf in an antiques store, and I looked for hidden messages in the rhythm of her breath, the tone of her skin, the temperature of her hands, the silence of her organs, the ripple of time over her still body, Are you dreaming, Agustina, or just swimming in a sea of fog? Are you barricaded alone in your little death, or is there a crack I can slip through to keep you company?