Laura Restrepo: Delirium

I’ll cure your broken wing, sings Agustina, rocking him against her, I’ll kiss it and make it better. The only problem is that the powers of divination come to her when they feel like it, not when she calls on them, that’s why the ceremony doesn’t always work the same way even though the two children put on their robes and do everything right, step by step, carefully performing each step, but it isn’t the same, Agustina complains, because the powers forsake me sometimes, the visions fade and Bichi is left defenseless, not knowing when the thing that’s sure to happen to him will happen. But when they’re going to come they announce their arrival with a flicker of the eyelids, the First Call, because Agustina’s powers were, are, her eyes’ ability to see beyond, to what’s still to come, to what hasn’t come yet. The Second Call is when the head tilts back of its own accord, as if it were descending a staircase, as if the neck were tugging it down and making it toss its hair like the Weeping Woman when she wanders the hills. I know Bichi is terrified by the Second Call, and he doesn’t want to know anything about the Weeping Woman or the wild rhythms of her flowing hair, which is why he begs me not to roll my eyes back in my head and toss my hair because If you keep doing that Agustina, I’ll go to my room, Don’t go Bichi Bichito, don’t go and I won’t do it anymore, I’ll control the shaking so I don’t scare you, because after all this is a ceremony of healing and comfort, I’d never hurt you, I only want to protect you, and in return you have to promise me that you’ll forgive my father even when he hits you, my father says it’s for your own good and parents know things that children don’t.

EVER SINCE MY WIFE has been acting so strange, I’ve dedicated myself to helping her, but I’ve only managed to irritate her with my futile selfless efforts. For example, yesterday, late at night, Agustina got angry because I wanted to take a cloth and dry the rug that she’d soaked, obsessed with the idea that it smelled strange, and the thing is, it disturbs me to see all the pots of water she sets around the apartment, she’s taken to performing baptisms, or ablutions, or who knows what kind of rituals invoking gods invented by her, washing everything and scouring it with excessive zeal, my unfathomable Agustina, any spot on the tablecloth or grime on a windowpane torments her, dust on the moldings makes her miserable, and the muddy footprints she claims my shoes leave make her furious; even her own hands seem disgusting to her though she scrubs them incessantly, her beautiful pale hands red and chafed now because she gives them no respite, and she gives me no respite, and she gives herself no respite.

As Agustina performs her mad ceremonies she gives orders to Aunt Sofi, who has volunteered her services as willing acolyte, and the two rush about with containers of water as if this is how they’ll exorcise anxiety, or regain lost control, and I can find no part to play in this story, nor do I know how to curb the mystical mania that’s invading the house in the form of cups of water that appear in rows along the baseboards, or on the window ledges. I open a door suddenly and upset a plate of water that Agustina’s hidden behind it, or I’m unable to go upstairs because she’s set pots of water on each step. How can I go up the stairs, Aunt Sofi, when Agustina’s blocked them? Stay down here for now, Aguilar, be patient and don’t move those pots because you know what a fuss she’ll make. And where will we eat, Agustina darling, now that you’ve covered the table with plates of water? She’s put them on the chairs, on the balcony, and around the bed, the river of her madness leaving its traces even on the bookshelves and in the cupboards; wherever she goes, quiet eyes of water open up, gazing into nothing or the unknown, and rather than being upset I feel the anguish of not knowing what bubbles are bursting inside her, what poisonous fish are swimming the channels of her brain, and all I can think to do is wait until she’s off guard, and empty cups and plates and buckets and return them to their place in the kitchen, and then I ask you why you look at me with hatred, Agustina my love, it must be because you don’t remember me, but sometimes you do, sometimes she seems to recognize me, vaguely, as if through a fog, and her eyes offer reconciliation for an instant, but only for an instant before I immediately lose her and the same terrible hurt invades me.

Strange comedy, or tragedy for three voices, Agustina with her ablutions, Aunt Sofi who plays along with her, and I, Aguilar, an observer asking myself when reason fled, that thing we call reason; an invisible force, but when it’s missing, life isn’t life and what’s human is no longer human. What would we do without you, Aunt Sofi? At first I stayed home twenty-four hours a day watching Agustina and hoping that at any minute she would return to her senses, but as the days went by I began to suspect that the crisis wouldn’t come to an end overnight and I knew I’d have to pluck up the courage to face daily life again. Maybe the hardest part is accepting the stretch of middle ground between sanity and madness and learning to straddle it; by the third or fourth day of delirium the money I had on me ran out and ordinary demands arose again, if I didn’t go out to collect the money I was owed and do my weekly deliveries there wouldn’t be anything to buy food with or pay the bills, but there was no way for me to hire a nurse to stay with Agustina while I was gone and make sure she didn’t escape or do something hopelessly crazy, and it was then that the woman who said her name was Aunt Sofi rang the doorbell.

She showed up just like that, as if heaven-sent, with her two suitcases, her felt hat topped by a feather, her easy laugh, and her comfortable manner of a German from the provinces, and while she was standing in the doorway, before she’d been invited in, she explained to me that it had been years since she’d had anything to do with the family, that she lived in Mexico and had flown in to help care for her niece for as long as necessary. This struck me as odd, because my wife had never spoken to me about any aunt, and yet Agustina seemed to recognize her, or at least she recognized her hat, because she laughed, I can’t believe you still wear that little cap with the goose feather, that was all Agustina said to her but she said it warmly, cheerfully, and yet there was something that made me uneasy, if this woman hadn’t been in contact with the family, how had she learned of her niece’s breakdown, and when I asked her, she simply said, I’ve always known, Wonderful, I thought, either something’s not right here or I’ve just landed myself another seer.

The truth is, not only has this Aunt Sofi managed to lower the voltage on Agustina’s frenzy, she’s also gotten her to eat more, an enormous step forward because Agustina had been refusing anything except plain bread and pure water — those were her words, plain bread and pure water — so long as I wasn’t the one who gave them to her. But she happily accepts the cinnamon porridge Aunt Sofi feeds to her spoonful by spoonful as if she were a baby. Tell me, Aunt Sofi, why does Agustina reject food from me, but take it from you? Because when she was little cinnamon porridge was what I would make for her when she was sick, What would we have done without you, Aunt Sofi, I say gratefully, while asking myself who on earth this Aunt Sofi must really be.

TELL ME WHAT THE SKY looks like this summer, how the clouds pile up above us round and woolly as sheep, how my soul finds gentle rest deep in your eyes, Grandfather Portulinus persisted in asking Grandmother Blanca, referring not to any landscapes he could see but to those he dreamed, because by then he was mad, completely and utterly insane. She would take him by the hand and make him run until he was exhausted in order to tame the frenzy that otherwise could drag him down to the depths of hell, although to say he ran is a manner of speaking, since it was more the clumsy trot of a man who was by then a little fat and no longer young, and well on his way into the turmoil of dementia. Into, but also out of, of course, because sometimes he wasn’t crazy, and then he was a musician, a German musician called Nicholas, last name Portulinus, who in time would be Agustina’s grandfather and who had come from Kaub, a place with a river and a castle, only to end up amid the sugarcane fields of the scorching town of Sasaima, perhaps because the damp and elusive charm of those hot lands was so seductive for men like him, men with a tendency toward dreaminess and distraction. The matter of his origin was never entirely cleared up because it was something he rarely discussed, and if he did occasionally speak of it, he did so in that awkward Spanish of his, badly learned along the way, that never became more than the provisional language of someone who won’t specify whether he’s just arrived or whether he has yet to leave, and it wasn’t clear why he’d settled in this precise spot, although he himself maintained that if he’d chosen Sasaima out of all the towns on the planet, it was because he knew of none other with such a melodious name.