Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  As I watched over her to make sure that, helpless in her unconsciousness, my wife wouldn’t make an involuntary movement and tear out the needle through which the sleep-inducing drug entered her vein, so that she wasn’t bothered by drafts or caught uncovered by the early-morning chill or tormented by nightmares or possessed by who knows what incubuses, as I sat waiting for the ghostly hours at La Hortúa to pass, I often recalled the terrible stories of the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, peopled with naked girls lying drugged, girls in whom no trace of love, shame, or fear was left. Three times a day the effects of the drug wore off and I had to feed her and take her to the bathroom, and then for a few minutes her body came back to life but her soul was still lost, her gaze turned inward and her movements became mechanical and remote, like a marionette’s.

  Six other patients shared the room with Agustina, all of them also there to find rest from guilt, hallucinations, and worries with Doctor Walter’s famed sodium amytal, and one of them, the one in the next bed, was an old woman as light as a breath of air, whose husband, a man as old as she was, brushed her hair, massaged her legs to stimulate her circulation, and rubbed lotion on her hands because, as he would say, My Teresa doesn’t like her hands to be dry, Have you seen how white my Teresa’s hands are, young Aguilar?, Look, not a mark, and that’s because they’ve never seen the sun, since whenever she goes out she puts on gloves to protect them. This gentleman had an unusual name; he was called Eva, because, as he explained to me, Eva was short for Evaristo, and I played endless chess games with Don Evaristo as our respective girls sank down to regions very close to death, and sometimes Don Eva would bring a guitar and sit next to his Teresa singing old boleros in her ear in a ruined but impeccably modulated voice, the voice of a professional singer of serenades, and over and over again he’d sing her the song that goes “pretty little girl with locks of gold, pearly teeth, ruby lips,” and he’d say to me, It’s Teresa’s favorite, ever since we got married I’ve sung it for her on all our anniversaries, of course there are other songs that she likes, too, like “Acacias,” and “Sabor a Mí,” “Bésame Mucho,” and “Pardon Me Young Man But Don’t Presume,” Don Evaristo told me, My Teresa is a very discerning woman, a lover of good music and all fine things, but wait, come here, come closer, see how she smiles when I sing “Pretty Little Girl,” I don’t know whether you can tell because it’s just the faintest hint of a smile, but knowing even her subtlest expressions as I do, I know that a smile lights up her face each time I sing that song.

  Don Evaristo stayed religiously by his wife’s side from the time he arrived at the hospital at eight on the dot in the morning until the clock struck eight at night, and when he got up to go he always asked me to look after her in the same words, I’m off to work and I leave the heart of my heart in your care, he’d say patting me on the shoulder; on one of these occasions, I asked him what he did, and Don Eva replied, I work nights singing boleros at the Blue Star, a popular, reputable bar near here, and once when I was walking to the hospital along Twelfth Street near Tenth, I happened upon the famous Blue Star, which actually turned out to be a roadhouse and brothel of the lowest sort, and since it was seven thirty in the morning and they were cleaning the place, the woman who was sweeping had the doors wide open so that I could peek in and see a row of wooden tables with clay candlesticks in the middle, dusty curtains hiding dismal little rooms with cots and washbasins, red lightbulbs that by night must have disguised the shabbiness, and a wooden platform with a single microphone where I imagined Don Eva singing “Pretty Little Girl” so that the whores and their clients could dance while he pined for his Teresa, who lay next to my Agustina, the torments of her madness lulled with sodium amytal, and a minute later, Don Eva emerged from one of the tiny rooms, and behind him came a fat girl who by all indications seemed to be one of the women who worked there; at first Don Eva tried to avoid meeting me, but since it was inevitable, he greeted me warmly and introduced me to the woman who was with him, This is Jenny Paola, he said, and shrugged his shoulders in apology, doing his best to explain, I take care of my Teresa and Jenny Paola takes care of me, what’s to be done, young Aguilar, human beings are vulnerable creatures in desperate need of companionship…

  The days passed identically from the first to the fourth, and then on the fifth, when we were in the middle of one of our interminable chess matches, I announced to Don Eva that I wasn’t going to let them drug my wife anymore and that I was taking her away tomorrow, I couldn’t stand the agony of seeing her this way, blank, lifeless, nonexistent, Anything but this, I said, Don Eva, anything but something so much like death, You’re doing the right thing, boy, take her away, what you say is true, And what about you, Don Eva, why don’t you bring Teresa home with you, you could watch over her there by day and find someone to take your place at night while you’re working, Oh no, Don Eva said, I couldn’t do that to my Teresa, you can’t imagine how frightened she gets when she’s awake.

  Hours later, as Agustina and I were leaving La Hortúa, we were welcomed by one of those Bogotá afternoons that are beyond compare, I’m referring to the high-altitude sky of an intense hydrangea blue and the smell of mountain vegetation, and unlike Teresa, my Agustina wasn’t terrified to be awake again, in fact she seemed happy and ready to return to the world of the living; The sun is so nice, she said, leaning on a stone wall where the rays fell, her head slightly tilted, half puzzled and half amused, as if she hadn’t seen me for a while and now I seemed slightly different but she couldn’t quite say why, Your hair is shinier, she said at last, stretching out her hand to touch it, and you’ve gotten some gray hairs, Please, Agustina, I’ve had gray hairs since you’ve known me, Yes, but it isn’t the same, she declared without taking the time to explain, and she didn’t want to go straight home, so we walked with our arms around each other along the streets of the city center, as dazzled as Bogotá’s founder, Don Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, must have been the first time he set foot on this high plain more than four centuries ago and thought it blessed.

  The city responded to our enthusiasm by displaying the humility of a newly established town and the Plaza de Bolívar welcomed us with the golden glow of a slanting light; at Agustina’s request, we went into the cathedral, where I showed her Jiménez de Quesada’s tomb, Look, Agustina, we were just talking about him and here’s his tomb, then she walked to the vestry, where she bought six big red candles, lighting them and setting them beside the tomb, Wouldn’t you rather offer them to some saint?, I asked her, Look, over there is Saint Joseph with the Christ Child in his arms, and in that chapel there’s a saint ascending among cherubim who must be the Virgen del Carmen, and there’s the Dolorosa with beams of light shooting from her crown, any one of them would work, whereas there’s no guarantee of the saintliness of the founder of Santa Fé de Bogotá, who knows how good he really was, Good enough, because once they get to heaven they’re all alike, Agustina assures me, And why six candles?, I ask her, One for each of my five senses, so that from now on they don’t betray me, And the sixth?, The sixth is for my sanity; let’s see whether by some miracle this Don Gonzalo brings it back.

  THOUGH IT’S NOT CLEAR just when, Abelito Caballero, alias Farax, gradually becomes the center of the Portulinus household: Nicholas’s beloved piano disciple, Blanca’s companion in the tasks of feeding the rabbits, collecting the eggs from the henhouse, letting the dogs loose at night, shooing away the bats that nest in the rafters, and taking Nicholas on walks to clear his head, confidant of Sofi, who is just beginning to have secret loves, and accomplice in Eugenia’s slow, mute games. Writing regularly and at length in her diary, Blanca tells how she spends her days, without altering the general shape of things or omitting details, while Nicholas, in his own diary, shows a notorious lack of precision in his stories, which are sometimes cut off in the middle and other times lack a logical order, often becoming so tangled that it’s impossible to understand what they’re about, but this complete chaos, on a level that might be called lit
erary, contrasts with a curious and obsessive tendency to quantify certain events; for example, in the upper left-hand corner he writes “m. r. B”—marital relations with Blanca—each time he has them, which occurs with astonishing frequency, or to be more specific, almost every day. The longest period of abstinence recorded is scarcely five days long and corresponds to a week when he was severely depressed; another of the regular accounts he keeps in the margins is “dreamed of F last night,” or “dreamed of F during nap,” with the F definitely standing for Farax.

  Although husband and wife had vowed to respect the privacy and secrecy of each other’s diaries, there’s no doubt that Blanca regularly leafed through Nicholas’s, perhaps less out of an unhealthy curiosity than as a means of obtaining clues to her husband’s state of mind that would allow her to anticipate major attacks of rage and melancholy, and Nicholas was undoubtedly aware of this systematic spying, because when he didn’t want her to know something he would write it in German, as on the page for a day in the month of April, when the customary “dreamed of F last night” is followed by parentheses and in tiny, cramped, almost illegible handwriting “Ich bin mit auffälliger Erektion aufgewacht,” or I woke up with a considerable erection.

  Not only did Nicholas give the boy piano lessons but he also made an effort to teach him to compose, unveiling the musical structure and lyrical secrets of bambucos and pasillos and introducing him to English and German poetry so that it might serve as a source of lyrical inspiration for his future compositions, and as if all that weren’t enough, he gave him, one by one, most of his own books, much to the surprise of Blanca, who watched entire shelves disappear from the library, their contents later appearing scattered across the floor of Farax’s room. Tell me why you’re giving the boy all your books, Nicholas, she asked him, but she received only vague replies like, So he can educate himself, woman, a musician without knowledge of the classics is nothing. Little by little he had given up all contact with his daughters, contact that had never been particularly close anyway, and whenever either of them required his attention he would reply, Ask Farax, he knows, or Get it from Farax, he has it, or Go with Farax, he’ll take you.

  As the boy grew physically and spiritually stronger, as if nourished by the love and care of his adopted family, Nicholas was deteriorating, each day becoming more bloated, lost in his own musings, detached from everything around him, and prone to confusing real people with imaginary ones, especially Abelito with Farax, and vice versa. More painfully than in other instances his mind seemed to go to pieces at the spectacle of Abelito, the real boy, and Farax, the dream boy, battling each other on the smooth white marble of ancient ruins and wounding each other, bleeding, and in the process wounding Nicholas, too; or rather wounding only Nicholas, because he was the real victim of this imaginary combat, the one bleeding to death in the temple crumbling into dust amid the greatest splendor. I see a polished surface, Blanquita darling, I see a spotless expanse, I’m dazzled by the metallic gleam of blood on that expanse, I’m overwhelmed and transfixed by the enigma of spilled blood. What are you talking about, Nicholas, look, your lunch is getting cold, stop thinking about blood and unpleasant things, the girls and Farax are already at the table. Farax or Abelito?, he asks her, perturbed. Please, Nicholas, you know very well that they’re the same person. Yes, Blanquita, but only one of the two is real, only one of the two is strong, and I don’t know which it is. You’re dreaming, Nicholas, you got up from your nap but haven’t woken yet. I’m sorry, Blanca my dove, but it’s only in dreams—daydreams?—that I’m able to understand the true nature of things, and today I realized that the one who’s licking his wounds is bleeding to death. These are fancies of yours, Nicholas, you’re just hungry. You refuse to see that something terrible is going to happen, woman, because I can’t tell which one really exists, whether it’s Farax or me, Farax or Nicholas, one of the two will prevail and the other is fated to disappear, because there’s no room for both on the face of the earth.

  In an attempt to keep track of Portulinus’s ravings, the following outline of several steps might be drawn up: first, Nicholas builds a bubble or a parallel world in which what he imagines acquires real-world worth, as when he meets Abelito and identifies him with the Farax of his dreams; in the second step, the bubble is divided into opposing halves, Abelito and Farax, for example, or Farax and Nicholas, that polarize Nicholas’s mind, making him flit unbearably fast between two extremes; third, Nicholas transfers his deepest feelings to the bubble, making everything inside it a matter of life or death, in such a way that after he’s built up an impossible conflict between the opposing forces, he crucifies himself on his own creation. I’m a helpless and horrified witness, Blanca laments, to the way he is caught in the pincer of opposites and driven to destruction. Fourth, once the parallel world is perfected in every detail, Nicholas detaches himself, breaking contact with the real world, and is left sealed and alone inside his bubble; fifth and last: during the course of his ravings, Nicholas is swept away by an anxiety that feeds on itself; he’s like a man bewitched, unable to escape his delirium, though he doesn’t want to escape, either, because the relationship he’s established with it is that of a slave to his master.

  This is more or less the state of things inside Nicholas Portulinus’s head, but not entirely, of course, since nothing can ever be quite so precise, and anyway, it was taken for granted at the house in Sasaima that he should rave or be queer, as his daughters put it. The odd thing lately is that Blanca seems a little unbalanced, too; nothing has been the same since Farax knocked at the door with his old alpaca jacket and his knapsack full of lead soldiers. Farax has become the dream and the nightmare of both Nicholas and Blanca, the love object and the rival of both in an ascending spiral, a spiral that rises to where the air is so thin it’s impossible to breathe. Does Nicholas suspect that if Blanca had to choose between the two men living in the house, deep in her heart she would choose the younger one, even if her lips professed otherwise? I liked the number two, Bianchetta darling, Nicholas confessed to her one afternoon when the world was flooded with rain, two made it possible for me to get along, two filled the void between you and me, but three makes my head explode into a million pieces.

  BUT AT THE CENTER you didn’t say anything you were supposed to say, Agustina my love, you didn’t choose version number one, in which Dolores, or Sara Luz, goes with her boyfriend to the Dominican Republic, or version number two, in which she’s been working as a drug mule and is behind bars in the United States, or even version number three, which was by far the easiest, because how hard would it have been to declare that the signature in the sign-in book was a fake, and if the positive options were limitless and the number of possible destinations infinite, why couldn’t you reassure the five o’clock super-rumba class by telling them that the nurse, as she claimed to be, had ended up in Puglia, in the south of Italy, for example, or in Nunavut, in the north of Canada?

  No, of course not, because true to yourself you chose extremism, irrationality, and melodrama, as always; you started waving your arms and shouting wild things in front of fifty fitness fans who watched you in horror, quite a spectacle you made of yourself, my lovely Agustina, it would’ve made you blush if you hadn’t been so demented, and speaking in your worst metallic voice, the one that sounds like it’s echoing in a tin can, you started to say, Something happened here, something happened here, and from the moment you uttered that very first sentence my blood ran cold and I knew that there was no way to stop you now, that disaster was already imminent, Something happened here, you insisted with touching conviction and you went sniffing around the gym like a bloodhound, searching for clues here and there as I tried to convince you that we should go somewhere else, Come on, Agustina, I said to you under my breath so that the super-rumba class wouldn’t hear me, Come on, why don’t we forget about all of this, and instead I’ll take you to see Flashdance, that movie you wanted to see a little while ago, are you listening to me?, Flashdance, Agustina, d
oes it ring any bells?

  But no, nothing could stop you, you were determined to ferret out that Dolores, even if she was hidden at the end of the earth, and you wouldn’t give up until you had found her dead or alive, you were becoming more agitated and upset, and finally you blurted out, Something terrible happened here, and I didn’t know what to do with myself, there before all my clients, when the seer I myself had brought to put out the blaze started to fan the flames instead, and next you were seeing blood, I see lots of blood, you said, and I did what I could to discourage you, No, Agustina, not blood, I tell you honestly there was no blood, and that was true, princess, I don’t know what that whole blood thing was, because Dolores didn’t lose a drop, the poor thing was all broken up inside but there was no blood to speak of, I swear to God, why would I lie to you, and still you insisted, you’d already started down that path and there was no stopping you, I see blood, I see blood, terrible blood flooding the channels, But please, Agustina, what channels are you talking about?, That woman was killed here, you said, she was kicked to death, Not kicked to death, Agustina, I broke in, get a hold on yourself, sweetheart, try to keep your voice down, and I wasn’t lying to you about that either, angel, the whole kicking thing is a scene from a different movie, but in your cocktail shaker of a brain everything turns into the same slush, it was your monster of a father and your brute of a brother who wanted to kick Bichi to death for acting like a faggot, but as far as I know getting kicked was the only thing that didn’t happen to Dolores that night, and yet you, Agustina darling, were deep in a stubborn trance and no one could bring you out of it, but why bother to keep telling you about the massive disaster you caused, what point is there now in totaling losses and damages.