Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

  What I do want to talk to you about is what an ordeal it was getting you out of the center once you had reached the final stage of full-blown delirium, because you weren’t seeing or hearing anything, much less prepared to listen to reason; I tried to take you back to my apartment on my motorcycle but I don’t know if you realize how hard it is to get someone who’s convulsing onto a motorcycle, so with great sorrow I left my cherished R100RT at the center, called a taxi, brought you to my refuge and opened its doors to you, thinking that maybe in the calm of my bedroom and with another little toke of weed you might relax, Come on, Agustina darling, get in my bed and I’ll cover you with my blanket of vicuna-pup skin, see how soft?, yes, I guess you’re right, vicuna-pup skin is probably banned by all kinds of animal protection societies, but there’s no need to worry, because those societies don’t generally have access to my bedroom, and what if I bring you a Baileys with a few ice cubes and we watch a movie on the Betamax, how does that sound?, I understand, Baileys is too sweet and the picture quality is no good, well fuck Baileys and the Betamax, there’s no point arguing about that, wait a minute, I’ve got the hottest new song right here, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, “The Girl Is Mine,” haven’t you heard it?, but sweetheart, you’re out of touch, this song has conquered the planet and the two guys who sing it made millions, what’s wrong, you don’t like it, you want me to turn it off?, shit, Agustina, this is getting old, that fucking psychic crap makes you really impossible.

  I didn’t know what to do with you anymore or how to deal with your fit, so I took you into my bathroom, doll, which to me is like the quintessence of hedonism, almost everything good that’s ever happened to me has happened in that bathroom, which itself is as big as a small apartment in San Luis Bertrand and completely done in Kalopa black granite imported from Malawi, its Finnish sauna suffused with the smell of birch, its huge window with the morning sun pouring through, its pile of Newsweek, Time, and Semana magazines beside the toilet, and especially its twin sinks, one next to the other, the truth is I’ve never understood what the point is of having two but it gives me almost orgasmic pleasure to have both. So I try to introduce you to the joys of steam and water, convinced that this will do the trick, but you don’t agree at all and put up an epic resistance that leaves us both soaked from head to toe, And now what do I do with you, you spoiled brat, you wild thing, you’re going to die of cold and fever in those wet clothes, but suddenly I had an idea, or more than an idea, it was as if a lightbulb had come on in my head, Wouldn’t it be nice to be alone, I thought, and I felt an infinite relief at the mere possibility, it would be so nice to be alone in the quiet of my room, and as I let myself be swept away by this radical desire for solitude, I realized that my Christ-like patience and compassion had been entirely used up, and in an instant I had called Rorro, Who’s Rorro?, What do you mean who’s Rorro, for God’s sake, Agustina, you know perfectly well who Rorro is, good old Rorro, my right-hand man at the gym, giant with a quarter-inch of forehead, not too bright but as decent as they come, the person in charge of all the stretching classes, weight training, and spa treatments, I didn’t have to think twice because I knew there was nothing the man wouldn’t do for me, so I called him and said, Come on over, Rorro, do me a favor and bail me out here.

  At that moment of utter anarchy only a single thing was perfectly clear to me, Agustina darling, and that was that I wanted you out of my bedroom, out, vanished, gone, you were shouting in the only place where I demand perfect silence, you were wreaking havoc in the only corner of the world that I like to keep neat, you had spun out of control precisely within the four walls where I keep everything under control, Enough, angel, chaos in my private paradise is more than I can stand, Rorro can’t take you away a minute too soon, I need to get back into a healthy rhythm, work out the kinks with a good soak in the Jacuzzi and then turn on the fireplace with a click of the remote control, and naked by the fire like the first man in his primeval cave, smoke a blunt of Santa Marta Golden and do my best to forget, let my mind go blank and soar in the placid void of blue vastness.

  I managed to establish that the first step was to call Rorro to come and get you, but problems arose with step number two, where to send you. Return you to your mother, batty as you were, defenseless and exposed?, no, certainly not, you would never have forgiven me and even I’m not capable of something that cruel. Send you alone to your apartment, where Rorro could keep you company until your husband came back from Ibagué, good old Aguilar, who is apparently the most self-sacrificing loony-bin keeper in the city?, that wasn’t a bad plan, in fact, it was clearly the best, or the only good one, but it wouldn’t work because I had no idea where you lived, you’d never told me where your apartment was and considering the level of mental chaos you were operating on, asking you would have been a waste of time. To a hospital, then?, I suggested it to you, wanting to know whether you thought it might be a good idea for me to send you to a psychiatric clinic and you, instantly grasping every word, as if you’d gone from speaking only Sanskrit or Russian to a sudden comprehension of Spanish, threw your arms around me and begged me please not to send you to a hospital, anything but a hospital, maybe you were afraid that they would lock you away forever, fry your brain with electroshock therapy, give you pills that would put you to sleep for all eternity like Sleeping Beauty, I don’t know what it was that terrified you so much, but the forlorn, despairing look on your face made me abandon that idea, It’s settled, I ordered Rorro, take her to a hotel, treat her with tender, loving care because you’re looking at a real angel, she’s a little upset but she’ll be over that in two seconds, here, Rorro, here’s my card number so you can put her up at the Wellington, they know me there and you can tell them I’ll be by later to sign the bill, I want you to shut yourself up with her in a suite, give me a call to report mission accomplished, and then wait for further instructions; now take her away, but listen up, I want it to be the best suite, where she can eat well and take a nice bath and sleep off whatever’s wrong with her in a good bed until she’s back to normal, you take care of her tonight, Rorro my good buddy, and tomorrow, if she wakes up feeling better, bring her back here.

  But the devil has his way with the best-laid plans and this was such an absolutely fucked-up day that even then I couldn’t relax; despite the excellence of the Santa Marta Golden that I was smoking nice and slow, letting it filter down to the core of my being, I was tortured by remorse, unable to rest, I’d managed to get you out of my sanctum sanctorum, Agustina sweetheart, and now I was doing my best to push you out of my thoughts, too, but somehow you kept coming back. As that golden smoke twined around me, my conscience was plagued by a buzz of pestering horseflies, and those horseflies were particular moments from the past that seemed like carbon copies of the moment we were living now, almost duplicates, I don’t know, Agustina princess, I guess that looking back it would be fair to say I’ve always abandoned you when you needed me, that I’ve let you down at every crucial moment.

  The telephone rang and I answered right away, thinking it would be Rorro letting me know that everything was cool and under control, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t Rorro, it was an anonymous female voice speaking at the other end of the line, Mr. Midas McAlister, do you remember me? How was I supposed to remember anything, Agustina doll, when it was an unknown voice, completely unrecognizable, I had no fucking idea who it was, especially considering how high I was, and then the owner of the voice reminded me, A little while ago I was at your Aerobics Center with my two cousins, do you remember?, and I was thinking two cousins, uh-huh, what the fuck was this person talking about, You’ve got a terrible memory, Mr. McAlister, and I struggled to pull myself together, The three of us came to sign up and you suggested that it would be better if we went somewhere else, is it coming back to you?, Oh yes, right, right, I kept saying vaguely, still having no idea what was about to hit me, and laboriously retrieving from the fog of the past the image of those three bleached blondes in shiny lycra who stepped ou
t of a lime-green convertible, Oh yes, I said, you were the ones who came to ask about classes and in the end decided that you’d rather enroll somewhere else, No sir, we didn’t decide, it was you who decided that you didn’t want us at your establishment, well I’m glad that you remember and I’m calling to let you know that my cousin Pablo remembers, too, and when I heard Pablo’s name the whole scene flashed before my eyes as clearly as if I were watching it on television, and before I could say a word, the woman swore a curse on me and then hung up. What was the curse? Well, something to make the bravest man quake in his boots: I’m just calling you, Mr. McAlister, to give you a message from my cousin Pablo, Pablo asked me to tell you that insults to his family are the only kind he doesn’t forgive. Do you want to know what I did then?, well you guessed it, I started to shake.

  WHEN I SAW THAT Anita had sent me a message on my beeper, I was surprised to discover that I’d given her the number; I could’ve sworn I hadn’t. The first night that I talked to her I was so engrossed in the police-detective reconstruction of the infamous dark episode at the hotel that if I gave her my number I didn’t even realize it, but now, while I was having breakfast at Marta Elena’s house with my two sons, I heard again from the unforgettable Anita, whom I’d more or less forgotten in the thirty-two hellish hours it had been my fate to live since I’d left her in Meissen.

  There I was heating up corn cakes and frying eggs for Toño and Carlos, who were leaving for school in half an hour, when I received a text message from Anita that read, “I have information for you urgent meet me at Don Conejo tonight 9 pm signed Anita at the Wellington it’s about your wife and I know you’ll be interested,” and my reaction was odd, because I immediately thought, Yes, I would meet her, but I wasn’t motivated by concern for Agustina, which to tell the truth was hovering at a low point several degrees below zero for the first time since I’d known her, meaning that I wanted nothing more to do with my wife; after so many days and nights of thinking only of her, in a single sweep she’d been wiped as if by magic from my poor head stuffed to the bursting point with abuse, indifference, jealousy, and worries, Yes, I thought, I’m definitely interested in this beeper invitation, though not for Agustina’s sake but because of Anita herself.

  I was at Marta Elena’s that morning because I had spent the night there; my son Toño had slept on the sofa in the living room so that I could have his bed, and for the first time since I was separated from my ex-wife I had spent the night at her house, or the house that used to be ours and now belongs to her and the boys. The thing I’d like to explain is how I ended up doing something so out of the ordinary. What happened was this: during the whole day following the debacle of the divided house, Agustina was sunk in a deep sleep, equal in intensity to the frenetic activity that she’d displayed during the night, but of the opposite nature, and toward evening, when she got up, she returned to the attack, the whole thing all over again, as frantic and ferocious as it was the first time, the imaginary border, her father’s visit, and insults, this time in every language. She shouted, Back, filthy thing; cosa inmunda; Out, dirty bastard; Vade retro, Satanas; Out, scum, until I couldn’t take it anymore, All right, Agustina, if you want me to go, I’ll go, I told her, and I left.

  Expelled from my own house by a conspiracy of my crazy wife and my dead father-in-law, and without a cent in my pocket, from whom could I beg for shelter if not my children and former wife? Marta Elena, so trustworthy, so responsible, so predictable, still pretty despite the matronly look she’d acquired and despite the twenty-six years she’d spent working faithfully for the same company, without missing a single day or ever arriving late at the office, Marta Elena, the extraordinary mother, my comrade-at-arms, the person with whom I’d shared my adolescence, Marta Elena, so solid, so good, my great lifelong friend; I’ve never been able to figure out what could have come over me to make me stop loving Marta Elena.

  When I woke up in her house I realized that for the first time in countless nights I had slept soundly, then I heard the still-sleepy voices of my sons who were beginning to shuffle barefoot around the house, and Marta Elena’s calm voice starting the day off with crisp instructions, Quiet or you’ll wake your father; Here’s your shirt, Toño, I’ve ironed it for you; Carlos, take your sneakers because you have gym class today. For an instant it was clear to me that precisely these, and no others, were the voices of happiness, and that the only truly good thing in this world was hearing them when I woke up. Opening my eyes, I discovered that all around me, in the bedroom that my son Toño had let me have, there were no objects, with a few exceptions, that I wasn’t familiar with or that I hadn’t placed there myself, that didn’t speak to me of my own history, that hadn’t remained in the same place for years, Good morning boys, good morning Marta Elena, I shouted from bed.

  My ex-wife asked me to help her with breakfast and for a minute I seemed to be two people at once, as if I had never stopped heating up corn cakes for my sons in the mornings, and what I saw was so pleasing to me that I asked myself why it wouldn’t have worked in reality, at what point things had broken down; if this was where my children were growing up and where a woman who still loved me was keeping a place for me as if I might some day return, why in the hell, I asked myself, was I running absurdly around in pursuit of something I hadn’t lost. Of course I vaguely remembered the sense of dissatisfaction that had made me leave and driven me to look elsewhere, I remembered it, but only vaguely and I couldn’t see any justification for it, because at this exact moment everything was calling me to stay in this place where, despite my four years of absence, I’d always been present, and I was struck with uncommon force by the feeling that all the puzzle pieces of my life fit this house, which I had never lost despite having abandoned it; everything spurred me to return, everything except enthusiasm, and standing outside myself just then, enthusiasm didn’t strike me as a particularly important factor.

  The boys left for school and I asked Marta Elena whether I could take a shower. She said that I could, directing me to the boys’ bathroom and then thinking better of it, The kids use up all the hot water in there, she said, you’d better shower in mine, so I went into Marta Elena’s bathroom and started to undress, not daring to close the door, which would’ve seemed ridiculous, since after undressing in front of Marta Elena for seventeen years there was no reason why I shouldn’t do it again, though I felt strange, and through the half-open door I could see that Marta Elena had finished getting dressed and was sitting on the bed, pulling on her stockings and I had the feeling, something very like vertigo, that this was the sight I’d like to see every morning for the rest of my life; now Marta Elena was adjusting her skirt and fastening her earrings, then putting on her shoes, and what’s odd is that she must have been thinking the same thing I was, because she didn’t close the door, either.

  I took a quick shower, quick, I think, out of fear that she would finish getting ready and call to me from the bedroom that she was leaving; the idea of her going pained me. I felt good with her around, and I thought that I’d still like to be there when the boys got home from school so that I could go down with them to play basketball at the neighborhood courts and come back, hungry, to make the ravioli that Carlos likes, to ask Marta Elena how things had gone at the office and let my mind wander a little as she told me, with slight variations, the same stories I already knew by heart. So I took a quick shower, then started to put on the clothes I’d been wearing the day before, but I stopped, opening the doors of Marta Elena’s closet and confirming my suspicion that much of my clothing would still be hanging there, everything I hadn’t taken when I moved alone to Salmona Towers, and there it all was: my plaid shirts, my drill pants, my old leather jacket.

  TODAY NICHOLAS PORTULINUS is frying sausages for dinner and he serves them on a plate to his younger daughter, Eugenia. You’re a forest sprite, my poor little Eugenia, he tells her, you’re a silent sprite hidden away in your cave. It’s just the two of them, father and daughter, in the enormous ki
tchen, with sacks of oranges that the agent brought today piled against the walls and bunches of plantains hanging from the rafters. Eugenia is squeezing oranges with a heavy cast-iron juicer that is screwed to the table, from which comes not only the juice filling the pitcher but also an intense scent of orange blossoms. Nicholas Portulinus looks into the eyes of his younger daughter, Eugenia the strange, and asks her, Does the smell of oranges make you cry, too? At dawn today, he tells her, the road was carpeted with oranges crushed on the asphalt, because during the night they fell from the loaded trucks and the wheels of the cars rolled over them. I spent a long time sitting by the side of the road, little Eugenia, and the smell of oranges was very, very sad, and very, very strong. Eugenia watches him chew his food with the heavy jaw and wistful deliberation of an old cow and thinks with relief, Thank heavens Father isn’t queer today.