Laura Restrepo - Delirium

The rest of the afternoon was very long, sunny at first but then less so until the air turned violet and each thing grew a precise shadow, as if cut out with scissors, and the cold started to come down from the mountains but I didn’t feel it because I was standing at the edge of that man’s blood, unable to take my eyes off it or move, my eyes wide open and my sight growing sharper and sharper, standing there like a pillar of salt because the sight of blood freezes my powers and traps me, Bichi wasn’t with me anymore and neither was Joaco and even the guard himself seemed to have gone, maybe the only part of him left before me was his body, his black poncho, and his blood but I kept standing there, motionless, my presence required by what was happening, which was that a man was dying, for the first time in my life someone was dying.

At some point during that long afternoon two men in gray coats arrived in a police van, one of them putting on rubber gloves and kneeling down in front of the dead man, who by then seemed to belong to me after all the hours I’d spent watching him, or maybe keeping him company if he was aware of my company. I had already memorized his thin mustache and the blank gaze of his one open eye and the two shoes that had fallen off leaving his feet in plain sight, and later in life I learned that it’s a kind of law that the dead always lose their shoes. Agustina thought, This dead man is mine because I was the only one with him when he died, I’m the only one here staring at his socks which are brown with little white dots, and I’m surprised to discover that even the dead wear socks; Agustina swears that back then she believed men were split into two groups, on one side were those who wore black or charcoal-gray socks, like her father, and on the other side was everyone else, those who wore socks that were essentially brown with light-colored dots.

The man with the rubber gloves tried to move the dead man but he wouldn’t budge, as if he preferred to stay clutching his poncho in that uncomfortable position, then the man in the coat started to search the dead man’s pockets and found a small battery-powered radio that was still playing, turned down low but playing, emitting music and commercials and torrents of words as if the guard could still hear it and Agustina thought: The radio is the only part of him that’s still alive. From another pocket they took four coins and a small comb that the man in gloves put in a plastic bag with the radio, which he’d turned off so that it wouldn’t keep playing, and then the other man who was with him also put on gloves, extending the index and middle finger of his right hand and curling the other two fingers and thumb under the way priests do when they’re blessing the faithful from the altar, He’s going to bless him so he doesn’t go to hell, I thought, but no, it wasn’t that, what he did with the upraised fingers was probe my dead man’s wounds; one by one he stuck his two fingers into each wound while saying, Sharp instrument, left armpit, six centimeters; sharp instrument, four centimeters, right intercostal gap between the seventh and eighth rib, counting all the holes in the body while a woman in blue made notes in her pad until they reached nine and he said: Nine stab wounds, one perforating the liver.

As they walked back and forth to the police van, the two men and the woman stepped in the guard’s blood and left red footprints in the marble entranceway until my father and mother came home at the same time but in separate cars and there was a terrible uproar, Agustina could hear their words but she couldn’t understand them, How could this happen, the children shouldn’t be seeing this, Joaco, Agustina, Bichi, go to your rooms immediately, How can it be that neither Aminta nor Sofi are here, how could they be so irresponsible. Father, there were nine stab wounds with a sharp instrument, Mother, there were nine stab wounds with a sharp instrument; we tried to tell them about the little radio and the glass of water but they wouldn’t listen, Father, what does perforating the liver mean, Mother, where is the liver, but my father double-locked the door to the house with us inside and my dead man was left outside, I never found out what his name was and I still wonder whether the water I gave him trickled out through the holes in his body, too.

I’ve already said that before things happen, I get three calls, and the Third Call of the Blood sounded in my ears at the pool at Gai Repos, in Sasaima, and sounded again in the reproachful look my mother gave me, how many times have I seen her face twist at the things I do or say or the things that happen to me, it’s an expression of such disgust, and this time it was because the Spilled Blood came out of me, running down my legs and staining my bathing suit, and my beautiful mother with her horrified face, so thin and pale in her white summer dress, took me by the arm and said, You have to get out of the pool now.

She tried to wrap me in a towel but I, who was playing cops and robbers with my cousins and brothers, I, who was a robber, was only interested in not being caught, Let me go, Mother, they’ll capture me if I don’t jump in the water, the water is the robbers’ hideout, Mother, can’t you see they’re going to catch me. But she wouldn’t let me go, she squeezed my arm so hard it hurt, It’s come, Agustina, she told me, it’s come, but I didn’t know what had come, Cover yourself up with the towel and come in the house with me right now, but I threw away the towel and yanked my arm out of my mother’s grasp and jumped in the water and it was then that I saw it, coming out of me with no one’s permission and tinting the pool a watery blood color.

This is the Third Call, I thought, and I don’t know what happened next, all I remember is that finally, inside the house, Aunt Sofi gave me a Kotex, I already knew what they were because we stole them from my mother’s bathroom and used them as padding in the baskets for the little live chicks colored with aniline dye that we were given for our first Communions, chicks with green, lilac, pink, or blue feathers, chicks that only lasted a few days and then had to be buried; my father said it was wrong to dye them because the color poisoned them. Put this in your panties, Aunt Sofi said to me, handing me the Kotex, Come on, I’ll show you how, but Agustina was crying and didn’t want to do it, it seemed horrible to her that her blood should come out there and stain her clothes and that her mother should give her that reproachful look, the kind of look you give someone who does something dirty, who dirties-things-with-her-blood.

Then Aunt Sofi said, Poor girl, so young and she already has her period, and since outside my cousins and brothers were shouting for me to come back and play cops and robbers, I dried my tears and I said to my mother, I’ll go tell them what’s happened to me and I’ll be right back, and my mother’s eyes glittered and from her mouth came the Ban: No, Agustina, we don’t talk about these things. What things don’t we talk about, Mother? Things like this, do you understand, private things, and then it was she who went to the window and said to my cousins and brothers, Agustina isn’t coming out now because she wants to stay in here with us and play cards, What cards, Mother, no one’s playing cards in here, I want to keep playing cops and robbers, but my mother wouldn’t let me because she said the sun would make the hemorrhaging worse, that’s what she said, the hemorrhaging, it was the first time I’d heard that word, and when Bichi came in to ask me what was wrong my mother told him that nothing was wrong, that I just wanted to play cards. It was then that I understood for the third time that my gift of sight is weak when confronted with the power of Blood, and that the Hemorrhage is uncontrollable and unspeakable.