Laura Restrepo - Delirium

The rest of my apartment doesn’t interest me and that’s why I didn’t even try to show it to you, it’s immense and boring and I’ve declared it part of the vast outer wastes, which must be why I haven’t bought furniture for the living room yet, and why I haven’t once sat down to eat in the dining room, which seats twelve, because eating alone makes me sad and the idea of having to invite eleven guests makes me feel like passing out, but the most pathetic thing of all is the terrace, which has a red-and-white-striped umbrella in the center of its eight hundred square feet, an umbrella that has yet to shade anyone from the sun, and around it there are six dwarf palm trees in pots that could grow as high as the sky for all I care; I don’t think I’ve ever set foot on that terrace, or maybe I did once, just once, the day I came to look at the apartment to buy it. The living room, the study, the big dining room and the little one, the terrace, the kitchen, all of that is across the border; my bedroom is my kingdom, as far as I’m concerned, and the king-size bed where I sleep with pretty girls whose names I don’t even ask for is a replica of the maternal womb.

It was in that very bed that I was dozing the morning after my encounter with Mystery when the telephone rang at about ten, propelling me into a sitting position, I, who had come to the firm decision to lounge lazily between the sheets until one, then to get up and go jogging, shower for a full half hour, have some granola and carrot juice for breakfast, and finally go blasting out to find the money for Pablo. But the telephone rang and it was Spider’s voice saying, Come to my office, I have some gossip for you, and I said, Spider, my man, tell me whatever it is on the phone because I’m not in the mood to get up, but in his best ministerial voice, Spider let me know that the matter was private and top priority and I sped out to see him, giving up the jogging and the granola and the endless shower for fear that there might be some problem in getting the money for Pablo.

When I arrived, Spider poured me a whiskey, steered me into an empty conference room, and there, the two of us sitting alone at the end of the mile-long table, he leaned over as if to whisper some secret in my ear. I really thought he was going to tell me that he wanted out of the deal with Pablo, and I started to shake, the possibility frightening me more than anything in the world, first because my craving for the stunning profits had already taken root and second for fear of revenge, because everybody knows the Boss doesn’t take no for an answer. Do you know when it was, Spider asked me, puffing his moist breath in my ear, and I replied, bewildered, When what was, When I almost managed it, Managed what, Spider my man, Well what do you think I mean, you sleepy-headed fool, I’m asking you whether you know when it was that I almost got an erection last night. And I couldn’t believe the man had dragged me out of bed for something so idiotic, so I said to him, Of course I know, you old bastard, you almost got it up when you heard how much money you were going to make with Escobar, I’m serious, Midas my boy, do you know when it was? It’ll be the day hell freezes over, I would have liked to answer, but instead I gathered my patience and asked with a conspiratorial air, So, old boy, tell me when it was.

Then Spider said that the night before he’d felt the stirrings of an erection each time one girl did something naughty to the other one, Do you mean like them smacking each other’s asses? That’s right, when they went like this and like that with the little whip, too bad it was all fake, and Spider informed me that for the second phase of Operation Lazarus he wanted the emphasis to be on the rough stuff, but this time for real, without all the pretending and toys. So you mean you want me to find you a professional masochist, one of those women in black leather and chains? Figure it out for yourself, Midas my boy; I’m giving you some general guidelines and you take care of the details, the only thing I’ll spell out for you is that ever since last night I’ve been in the mood to see a girl suffer for real. All right, I said to play along with him, but inside, Agustina doll, I made the decision to hold the session in private, without Joaco or Ayerbe or the gringo as witnesses, so they wouldn’t find out about this new failure. Because we didn’t want to waste our second shot, which after all would be the next to last, and even though I’d shaken on the bet knowing I couldn’t win, deep down it drove me fucking crazy to have to lose, because a bet is a bet, Agustina baby, and in the end you want to win no matter how stupid it is.

You’re staring at me with those big black eyes of yours, Agustina darling, and you’re thinking that I didn’t go along with Spider’s idea to win the bet but out of obsequiousness. Why didn’t I tell Spider the truth, why didn’t I tell him that not even a crane could give his poor pecker a lift? Are you thinking that it was for the same old reason and that if I let Spider have his way it’s because I’m incapable of breaking the hold that he and all the old-money types have over me? That it’s because even though I try to hide my admiration for them, it’s stronger than my pride, which is why sooner or later I always end up rolling over for them? If you come straight out with that moralistic crap, sweetheart, if you tell me that my worst sin is obsequiousness, I’ll have to accept it even though it pains me greatly, because in the strictest sense it’s true; there’s something they have that I’ll never have, no matter whether I give myself a hernia trying, something you have, too, and you don’t realize you have, Agustina princess, or you do but you’re crazy enough not to care, and that is a grandfather who inherited land and a great-grandfather who brought in the first streetcars, and diamonds that belonged to your great-aunt and a library of books in French that your great-great-grandfather collected and a christening gown of embroidered batiste kept in tissue paper for four generations until the day your mother removes it from its chest and takes it to the Carmelite nuns to have them scrub away the marks left by time and starch it, because it’s your turn and you’re going to wear it, too, to be baptized.

Do you understand, Agustina? Can you understand the stomach-churning agonies and the character weaknesses that not having any of that inflicts on someone like me, and what it’s like to know that what you lack will never be forgotten by them , the people with the christening gowns starched by Carmelite nuns? Consider the syndrome. Even if you’ve won the Nobel Prize in Literature, like García Márquez, or you’re the richest man on the planet, like Pablo Escobar, or you come in first in the Paris-Dakar rally, or you’re a fucking amazing tenor in the Milan Opera, in this country you’re nothing compared to one of those people with the starched christening gowns. Do you think your family appreciates a man like your husband, good old Aguilar, who’s given up everything, including his career, to fight your craziness? Your family doesn’t even register Aguilar, Agustina princess; to say that your mother hates him is to flatter him, because the truth is your mother doesn’t even see him, and when it comes right down to it, you don’t either, and that’s just the way it is, no matter how he martyrs himself for you, Aguilar will always be invisible because he didn’t have a christening gown. And me? well it’s the same story, princess, they kneel down and suck my dick because if it wasn’t for me they’d be ruined, with their fallow lands and their diamond pendants that they don’t dare take out of their safes for fear of thieves and their embroidered christening gowns that stink of mothballs. But that doesn’t mean they see me. They suck my dick, but they don’t see me.