Laura Restrepo - Delirium

Now I’m going to spare you the details of the next chapter in Operation Lazarus because it was a dirty business. All you need to know is that for the second phase of the bet I didn’t try hard at all, no careful attention to detail or subtleties, I just looked in the newspaper for an S&M ad, picked up the phone, and hired a showgirl calling herself Dolores who had a little private act with her pimp involving mild torture; once we’d come to an agreement about the fee and set a date, I washed my hands of the whole affair. On the agreed-upon night, Dolores arrived at the Aerobics Center with her whip, gear, and instruments of punishment and the thing was pathetic, Agustina my love, like a small-town circus. She was perfunctory and uninspired, what you might call a bureaucrat of torture, and he was a hustler with slicked-back hair and a burgundy dinner jacket, and I swear to you, princess, that all I felt at the sight of them was gloom, so I did my duty and turned on the gym lights, then I left them down there performing for Spider and his two escorts, Paco Malo and the Sucker, who follow Spider like evil shadows, while I went up to my office, sat down with my calculator, and started to do some math because by then it had been a few days since I’d sent all the money to Escobar through Mystery and we were waiting for the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. I told you that the S&M woman was called Dolores, well, remember that name, Agustina doll, because Dolores’s unlucky star is still shedding its fucking black light on us.

IT HAPPENED IN THE sixth month of Agustina’s only pregnancy, her only pregnancy with me, that is, because she’d been pregnant once before, and that first time had ended in a voluntary abortion, she’d told me about it herself and in passing let fall the name of a Midas McAlister who was the man she’d been sleeping with. The name, Midas McAlister, was stamped on my brain, not only because it wasn’t the first time I’d heard my wife mention it but because it sounded familiar from somewhere else, too, probably the society pages of El Tiempo, or even more likely, gossip in which he was labeled a money launderer. But to return to our story, we’d spent five months waiting for the baby when the doctors told us that a condition called preeclampsia would probably cause us to lose it. From that moment on, Agustina once again devoted herself entirely, as she had when I first met her, to that convoluted form of knowledge that makes me so irritated and suspicious and that consists of interpreting reality from the wrong side of the cloth, or in other words guided not by clear and obvious signs but by a series of secret winks and hidden manifestations that she settles on at random and that are nevertheless invested not merely with the power of revelation but also with the power to decide the course of her life.

The doctors told us that only something like absolute rest might eventually make the pregnancy go smoothly and save the baby, and my Agustina, who clung to the child with all her might, chose to lie in bed day and night without moving, nearly petrified, afraid of any movement that might trigger the loss, and it was then that she began to notice the creases that formed in the sheets. Wait, Aguilar, don’t move, she’d say when she woke up, lie still for a minute, I want to see what the sheets look like this morning. At first I had no idea what was happening and just watched the way she smoothed her fingers over the creases and wrinkles of the bedclothes, taking great care not to disturb them, The message is that everything will be all right and when the child is born I’ll call him Carlos after my little brother, she’d inform me in relief, and then she’d be plunged into a torpor from which I couldn’t wrench her even with breakfast, which I brought to her in bed every day because I knew it comforted her. What message, Agustina? What message are you talking about? The one that was written here last night in the sheets. For God’s sake, Agustina, what do the sheets know! They know plenty about us, Aguilar, haven’t they been soaking up our dreams and moods all night long? Don’t worry, Aguilar, the sheets say the child is all right for now.

But the sheets didn’t always bring us encouraging news, and more often it would happen that after studying the nonexistent map traced on the bed, Agustina would begin to cry inconsolably. The baby is suffering, she’d tell me between sobs, gripped by a despair that I didn’t know how to ease, certainly not by mentioning the lab tests, which indicated stability, or by reminding her of the doctors’ optimistic appraisals, or appealing to common sense. Like the sentence of a cruel judge, the folds in the sheets determined our fate and that of our child, and there was no human power that could make Agustina realize how irrational it all was.

Unfortunately, neither the doctors’ efforts nor Agustina’s heroic dedication did any good. We lost the baby and as a result the divinatory powers of the sheets were simply confirmed and their tyranny over us was strengthened. But this didn’t happen right away. On the contrary, a few weeks after the loss, Agustina, who never mentioned the affair again and who seemed recovered in body and spirit, threw herself energetically into a business exporting hand-stamped batiks. It was a happy era, in which the apartment was turned into a full-fledged factory, and I kept stumbling into stretching frames, rolls of Bali cotton, and buckets of vegetable oils. We couldn’t cook because the stove was the place where the wax was heated, so we made do with sandwiches and salads, or with fried chicken that we ordered from the restaurant on the corner, and in order to bathe we had to remove yards of cloth that dripped indigo and cochineal and who knows what other organic dyes from the shower, and I remember with particular horror a sticky yellow mass that Agustina called kunyit ; the cursed kunyit stuck to everything, to the soles of our shoes, to my students’ papers, to the rugs, especially the rugs, because when kunyit attacked a rug, it had to be left for dead.

The batik phase was one of our best times. Because you were radiant, Agustina, inventing designs and testing blends of colors. You painted a red dot on your forehead and wrapped yourself in saris, sarongs, pashminas, and pareus, and we spent all day listening to records by Garbarek, Soeur Marie Keyrouz, and Ravi Shankar. Do you remember Paksi, Agustina? Paksi, the woman who sold crafts from Java and who looked like she was from the mountains of Boyacá, but said that she was born in Jogjakarta, the one who offered to teach you the technique and who we then had a hard time getting out of the house. But at the end of that year the batik business started to go under. Agustina, who had invested a fortune in materials and hadn’t managed to export anything, grew sad and listless, so disheartened that she couldn’t even get rid of the paraphernalia still cluttering our space, now simply junk and the dreary evidence of failure. Don’t worry, Agustina darling, I tried to console her, minimizing the importance of the fiasco, but nothing helped, and she sank into a deep depression.

It was then that she began talking to me once more about the dictates of the sheets, which this time were telling her that the time had come to try to get pregnant again. I replied in exasperation that I couldn’t care less what the sheets said, If that’s what you want, if you’re prepared to run the risks again, then you can count on me and we’ll try, but I warn you that I’m sick of this whole business, and I refuse to accept that you have to consult the sheets, or the Ouija board, or the saints even to sleep with me, but of course Agustina wouldn’t listen, Agustina has never listened to me, she wouldn’t hear my protests and she kept waiting for messages and signs to appear telling her how to act and think. It was as if she’d lost the ability to form an opinion of her own, and she became paralyzed by the prospect of having to make any decision for herself. All she could say was, The doctor says…, the sheets indicate…, according to the horoscope…, last night you told me…, since you refuse…, my mother thinks…, the woman who reads my cards…Agustina was like an automaton, and she clung to outside opinions and random signs that sunk us neck-deep in a swamp of indecision. But this wasn’t madness yet. And if it was, it had just barely announced itself.