Laura Restrepo: Delirium

WHAT WOULDN’T I GIVE to know what to do, but all I have is this terrible anguish, fourteen nights without sleeping, fourteen days without rest, and the determination to bring Agustina back no matter how much she resists. She’s furious and dislocated and defeated; her brain has shattered into pieces and the only thing I have to guide me in putting it back together is the compass of my love for her, my great love for her, but that compass isn’t steady now, because it’s hard for me to love her, sometimes very hard, because my Agustina isn’t nice and she doesn’t seem to love me anymore; she’s declared a war of tooth and claw in which we’re both being torn to pieces. War or indifference, I don’t know which of the two is hardest to fight, and I console myself by thinking that it isn’t she who hates me but the strange person who’s taken possession of her, that maniacal washerwoman who believes I’m merely someone who soils everything he touches.

There are moments when Agustina seems to accept a truce and scrawls pictures to explain what’s wrong with her. She draws rings surrounded by bigger rings, rings that detach themselves from other rings like clusters of anxiety, and she says that they’re the cells of her resurrected body reproducing themselves and saving her. What are you talking about, Agustina, I ask her, and she tries to explain by drawing new rings, now tiny and crowded, furiously shading them in on a sheet of notebook paper, They’re particles of my own body, Agustina insists, pressing so hard with the pencil that she tears the paper, irritated because she can’t explain, because her husband can’t understand her.

It’s the weight of my guilt working against me, guilt that I don’t know my wife better despite having lived with her for what will soon be three years. I’ve managed to establish two things about the strange territory of her madness: one, that it is by nature voracious and can swallow me up as it did her, and two, that the vertiginous rate at which it grows means that this is a fight against the clock and I’ve stepped in too late because I didn’t know soon enough how far the disaster had advanced. I’m alone in this fight, with no one to guide my steps through the labyrinth or to show me the way out when the moment comes. That’s why I have to think carefully; I must order the chaos of facts coolly and calmly, without exaggerating, without dramatizing, seeking succinct explanations and precise words that will allow me to separate concrete things from phantoms, and acts from dreams. I have to moderate my voice, remain calm, and keep the volume low, or we’ll both be lost. What’s happening to you, Agustina darling, what were you doing at that hotel, who hurt you? I ask, but this only unleashes all the rage and noise of that other time and other world in which she’s entrenched, and the more worried I am, the more venomous she becomes. She won’t answer me, or she doesn’t want to, and maybe she doesn’t know the answer herself or can’t formulate it amidst the storm that’s erupted inside her.

Since everything around me is collapsing into uncertainty, I’ll start by describing the few things I know for sure: I know I’m on Thirteenth Road in the city where I live, Bogotá, and that the traffic, which is always heavy anyway, is impossible because of the rain. I know that my name is Aguilar, that I was a literature professor until the university was shut down because of unrest, and that since then, I’ve gradually become almost a nobody, a man who delivers dog food in order to survive, though maybe it’s to my advantage that I have nothing to occupy me except my stubborn resolve to get Agustina back. I also know — I know it now, although two weeks ago I didn’t — that any delay on my part would be criminal.

When it all began I thought it was a nightmare that we’d wake up from at any minute, This can’t be happening to us, I kept repeating to myself and deep down I believed it. I wanted to convince myself that my wife’s breakdown would last only for a few hours, that it would be over when the effect of the drugs had worn off, or the acid, or the alcohol, or whatever it was that had alienated her like this; that in any case the problem was something external, devastating but temporary, or maybe some brutal act that she couldn’t tell me about but from which she’d recover little by little. Or one of those murky episodes that are increasingly common in this city where everyone’s at war with everyone else; stories of people who’re sold doctored drugs in some bar, or who’re attacked, or who’re given burundanga , an herbal extract that makes them do things against their will. At first I assumed it had been something like this, and in fact I still haven’t given up the idea, and that’s why my first impulse was to take her to the nearest emergency room, at the Country Clinic, where the doctors found her agitated and delirious, but with no trace of foreign substances in her blood. The reason it’s so difficult to believe that they really found no evidence of foreign substances in her blood, the reason I refuse to accept that diagnosis, is because it would imply that the only problem is my wife’s naked soul, and that the madness issues directly from her, without the mediation of outside elements, without mitigating factors. For an instant, the same evening this hell was loosed, her expression softened and she begged me for help, or at least she tried to make contact, saying, Look, Aguilar, see my naked soul; I remember those words with the sharp clarity that a wound remembers the knife that made it.

IN THE MIDDLE OF the drunken chaos, the polo players were shouting at Spider, who was still on the ground, Get up, Spider, don’t be a pussy, while Spider was down there in the dark and the mud, at death’s door and unable to move because, as we later learned, he had just shattered his spine on that rock. A few days later, when he came around to realizing he was still alive, he had himself flown to Houston in a private plane, to one of those mega-hospitals where your father was taken, too, in his time, Agustina kitten, because in this miserable excuse for a country anybody who gets sick and has some money makes a pilgrimage to Texas convinced that as long as the treatment’s in English they’ll be cured, that the miracle will work if it’s paid for in dollars, as if Houston were Fátima or Lourdes or the Holy Land, as if they didn’t already know that livers blooming with cirrhosis couldn’t be made right even by the technological God of the Americans. And no matter whether the doctors squeeze a fortune out of them in electrocardiograms, sonograms, or stress tests, or thread a stent through the kernel of their souls, they almost always end up the same as they would’ve here, six feet under and pushing up daisies; just look at what happened to your father, sweetheart, who took himself off to Houston only to return a little later in cold storage on an Avianca flight, just in time for his own burial in the Central Cemetery of Bogotá.

But to get back to Spider: as you must have heard, angel, that was what messed up your head and put an end to my lucky streak, and believe me I’m sorry you’re sick, Agustina, you know better than anyone that if I ever hurt you it wasn’t on purpose. What happened with Spider was that after four major operations and a pile of cash spent on rehab, the doctors in Houston, Texas, managed to save his skin but not his pride, because he wound up paraplegic and impotent, the poor bastard, shoveled into a wheelchair like a potted plant, and probably incontinent on top of it all, although Spider swears he’s not, that not being able to screw or walk is humiliation enough and that the day he shits himself, too, he’ll shoot himself without a second thought. When he’s wallowing in self-pity, Spider says that that son of a bitch Parsley was the lucky one, since now he must be chasing mares up in heaven. What it all means, darling, is that this has been a chain of disasters and the first broken link was Spider; psychologically he was broken, is what I mean, although his huge fortune is still intact. Things happen the way they happen and whoever loses is lost, and in this three-way game Spider lost, you lost, and I lost, to say nothing of the supporting cast.