Laura Restrepo - Delirium

Tell me the name of the salivary gland located behind the lower maxillary, Aguilar, this was the kind of question she asked me, which made me rack my brains and search the encyclopedia for the correct response that would elicit praise from her, a smile that for an instant would wipe from her face the almost blank expression that now marks it like a scar, reminding me that I loved this person once, that I still loved her, that I’d be able to love her again, this person barricaded inside her sweatshirt who got into my bed to solve a crossword puzzle and spent all day working at it with a fanatical obsession that undermined my hopes, until by evening I’d become convinced that if I asked her What’s my name? she wouldn’t be able to answer, though she’d be quick to say, What ancient Yucatán tribe is six letters long and starts with IT. I was afraid that if I could enter into her head, like a doll’s house, and walk through the compressed space of the various rooms, the first thing I’d see, in the main room, would be candles the size of matches lit around a little coffin holding my own corpse, me dead, forgotten, faded, stiff, a Ken-size doll in Barbie’s all-pink house, a ridiculous Ken abandoned in his tiny moss-green living room, I myself moss-green, too, because I’ve been dead for a while.

But again my head betrayed me, again the wound bled, Take off that sweatshirt and let’s make love, I said to Agustina, with an ugly hint of aggression in my voice that undoubtedly sprang from my anger that she wouldn’t do it with me but would with the man at the hotel. She hurled the crossword puzzle away and left the room, and when I went to find her she was rushing around with containers of water again and wouldn’t speak to me or look at me, though I tried everything I could to undo my mistake and interest her once more in the crossword puzzle, Look, Agustina, who would’ve thought, the word that starts with P that we’re missing here is palimpsest, look, it fits perfectly, but Agustina no longer wanted to have anything to do with me or the crossword puzzle or this miserable world. Could it be my fault that she’s gone crazy? Or is her madness infecting me?

I’VE ACQUIRED ANOTHER POWER, says the girl Agustina, one that shakes me so hard it leaves me half dead, a power that sucks all my strength; looking back, she says, I think that’s how I spent my childhood, gathering strength and accumulating power to keep my father from leaving home. Yesterday, today, many times, she’s heard him fight with her mother and threaten her with the same words, do this and I’m out of here, do that and I’m out of here, and more than anything Agustina doesn’t want her father to go because when he’s here and he’s happy it’s the best thing in the world, and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing like his laugh, like his clean smell of Roger & Gallet and his English shirts with blue-and-white stripes; sometimes, when the house is dark, I look at my father and it’s as if he’s shining, as if there’s a halo around him of cleanliness, elegance, and good smells, I like it when he asks me to blow my nose or wipe some bit of food off my lips because then he hands me his white handkerchief drenched in Roger & Gallet cologne. I’ve seen how Maricrís Cortés’s father sits her on his knees and I cling close to my father hoping he’ll do the same but he doesn’t, maybe if I ask him he will but I don’t dare ask because it isn’t really my father’s way to sit his children on his knees, but I touch the gray wool of his pants, which is so soft because it’s pure cashmere, my mother says, and it isn’t really gray but charcoal , because the colors my father wears have only English names, and I idolize him even though he doesn’t pay much attention to me because his favorites are Joaco, for spoiling, and Bichi, for taunting, and because he has to work all day and when he’s here he’s busy with his stamp collecting.

But Agustina, who little by little has learned to be patient, waits for her turn, which always comes at nine on the dot, the time she calls the ninth hour, which is when we prepare for the night by closing all the doors and windows to protect ourselves from thieves, and my father says to me, Tina, shall we go lock up? it’s the only time he calls me Tina and not Agustina and that’s when everything changes for a little while because he and I enter a world that we don’t share with anyone, he gives me his heavy key ring that jingles like a cowbell and takes my hand, and we make our way around both floors of the house, starting on the top floor; we even go into the rooms that are dark and since I’m with him I’m not scared, the light that my father radiates reaches into the corners and chases the fear away, he and I are silent, we don’t like to talk as we go about the sacred task of barring the shutters and bolting the doors, this is my old house, the one in the neighborhood of Teusaquillo, because the house after that was the one in La Cabrera, where it was never the ninth hour because it’s a modern building that locks automatically and because by then my father didn’t call me Tina anymore or give me his key ring to hold, because he had other things on his mind.

But this is the house on Caracas Avenue in Teusaquillo, and Agustina knows by heart which key fits where, the gold Yale with the notch at the top is for the door between the kitchen and the patio, the key that’s stamped with a rabbit is for the back gate, the little square one that says Flexon is for the other lock, and the two longest are for the big door to the street; Agustina, who doesn’t need to look at them because she recognizes them by touch, has them ready to pass to her father before he asks for them, at the moment he reaches out his hand, and she’s overwhelmed with happiness when he says, Bravo, Tina, that’s the one, you never get mixed up, you’re even better at it than I am, When he praises me like that I think maybe he really does appreciate me even though he doesn’t say so often, and I realize again that it was worth waiting for the ninth hour; whatever happens that night or the next day I’ll just have to wait for it to be nine again, when my father says, Come on, Tina, and the fog lifts, because once again he’ll offer Agustina his big, dark-skinned hand with its prominent veins, the wedding band on his ring finger, and on his wrist the Rolex that she was given when he died and that she started wearing herself even though it was enormous on her and hung like a bracelet; where must it be, the watch that was once her father’s and is now hers, lost, the watch lost, the hand lost, the memory too vivid and the smell permanently lodged in her nose, her father’s clean, cherished smell.

Agustina longs for that big, warm house, secure and brightly lit, with all of us safe inside and the dark street on the outside, so far from us that it was as if it didn’t exist and couldn’t hurt us with its perils, the street from which bad news comes of people who kill, of poor people with nowhere to live, of a war that’s spread out of Caquetá, the valley, and the coffee-growing region, and is on its way here with its throat-slitting, a war that has already reached Sasaima, which is why we haven’t returned to Gai Repos, news of roaming thieves and of corners where lepers crouch to beg, since if there was anything I feared, if there’s anything I do fear, it’s lepers, because pieces of their bodies fall off and the lepers don’t even notice. But her father locks up the house tight, and Agustina says to him wordlessly, You are the power, you are the true power, and I bow down before you, and she focuses all her attention on handing him the right key because she’s afraid that if she makes a mistake the spell will be broken and he won’t say Tina anymore or hold her hand. On those nightly rounds, says Agustina, I avoid anyone who might annoy my father and make him leave us, whether it’s my mother boring him, or poor Bichito, who irritates him so much, or especially her, Aunt Sofi, who is the main threat, it’ll be Aunt Sofi’s fault when my father and mother separate and we children are left at the mercy of the terrors outside. Or is it Aunt Sofi who keeps my father here? Do the powers visit her, too, especially when she undresses?