Laura Restrepo - Delirium

I COULDN’T HAVE CHOSEN a worse place to fall apart. Even though the last thing I wanted was to collapse in public, I couldn’t wait until I got to the van, my heart sinking right there in the hotel room when I looked out the window and glimpsed those black acacias swaying in the wind against the brightly lit night, those same acacias that Agustina was watching so intently the Sunday of the dark episode, as if she was hypnotized by them. The little that remained of my reserves of courage suddenly vanished as if down a drain, and it wasn’t so much the weight of my wife’s illness that crushed me as it was the distinct memory of her first lucid moment, that instant of recognition in which her face relaxed and she ran to me, throwing her arms around me and clinging to me like a drowning woman to a scrap of wood, that one unrepeatable minute when everything was solved, when the tragedy halted just before it sprang itself on me, as if it had repented of the intention to destroy us, Let’s go home, Agustina, I said to her, but it was already too late, the instant of possible salvation had passed, she was numb once more and no longer paying attention to me, her gaze fixed again on those acacias that waved their branches as if to say to her, You aren’t from here, you’re not of this world, you have no memories, you don’t know this man who’s claiming you, the only things binding you to him are scorn and rage.

So as soon as the Fearless Girl left to deal with the call she’d gotten on her handset, I could no longer remain standing and sat on the edge of the bed, scorched inside by the blaze of that memory, and when the girl returned, a few minutes later, she found the client she’d left alone in room 416 flat on his back, Mr. Stepansky? Mr. Stepansky, is something wrong? Yes, something is wrong, Señorita, I’m the husband of a woman who lost her mind in room 413, What do you mean? she asked, and I confessed that my name wasn’t Stepansky and I didn’t have friends who wanted to stay at the hotel, My name is Aguilar and I need to find out what happened to my wife; her name is Agustina Londoño and she’s a tall, pale young woman who dresses in black, this was twenty-eight days ago exactly, I gave her the dates and got mixed up trying to explain that I’d picked her up that Sunday but that I didn’t know who she’d come here with or when exactly she’d arrived, A gorgeous girl, like an artist, or an actress, but strange somehow, all dressed in black and with long hair? That’s a good description of my wife, I said, and of course, the Fearless Girl did remember her, I wasn’t here when they checked out, but I was the one who checked her in the night before, when they arrived, When who arrived? Why the woman you say is your wife and the man who was with her, wasn’t it you? That’s the problem, it wasn’t me.

Then the Fearless Girl excuses herself saying that if this has to do with cheating she’d rather not get involved, The thing is you never know, Mr. Stepansky, It’s Aguilar, That’s right, you told me, but what I’m trying to say, Mr. Aguilar, is that it’s a bad idea to take sides in this kind of thing because you never know, It has nothing to do with cheating, it’s a very serious mental health problem and you have to help me, it’s your duty as a human being, Wait, wait, Mr. Aguilar, first calm down a little, stay here with me for a second, and, oddly, she closed the door to the room as if to allow me a moment of peace in my suffering and then she sat down beside me on the bed, so close that our legs touched, Look, Mr. Aguilar, in a hotel like this all kinds of things happen, and every so often strange people arrive and do strange things, but believe it or not, all the strangeness is predictable in ways that you end up recognizing; the different kinds of strangeness can be reduced to five types, and I tell you this as someone who’s paid careful attention, it’s either sex, alcohol, drugs, beatings, or shootings, that’s what it boils down to, life is like that, even strange behavior can be monotonous, for example there’ve never been any stabbings or suicides here, Yes there have, I corrected her, a professor even in the worst of circumstances, No sir, there haven’t been, a Romanian committed suicide in another hotel on the same block but here at the Wellington we haven’t seen anything like that, and the girl in 413, the one you say is your wife, all I can say is that she might have been on drugs, or she might have been crazy, or just extremely nervous, it was hard to tell, but whatever it was, she was worked up, anyway, the suitcase that she left is still here, but when I asked her for it, the Fearless Girl answered that they couldn’t give it to anyone except the person it belonged to, management’s orders, But the person it belongs to is crazy, I said raising my voice and getting up, how can you expect her to come and claim a suitcase when she’s crazy, she went crazy here, in room 413 of this hotel, you yourself just admitted that you were a witness, and the Fearless Girl, pulling on my pants leg to make me sit down, said, No, Mr. Aguilar, she didn’t go crazy here, when she got here she was already crazy, or sick, or at least extremely upset.

We agreed not to talk any more at the hotel, the Fearless Girl only had forty-five minutes left until the end of her shift, if the gentleman liked they could make a date for later, at some café, Yes, the gentleman liked, of course the gentleman liked, and then she suggested that we meet at five past ten at a cheap restaurant on Thirteenth Road and Eighty-second Street, a place called Don Conejo; the Fearless Girl, now bringing a little bit of toilet paper from the bathroom for me to blow my nose with, told me that the empanadas there were excellent and that it was where she went when she got off work, starving. Don Conejo was nearby but not so near that anyone from the reception desk would see them, and anyway she was the only one who liked it because the others didn’t like to leave the place with their clothes reeking of grease, Look, Mr. Aguilar, I understand how worried you are about your wife and I’d be happy to help you any way I can, it broke my heart to see her like that, but we have to leave here now because if they find me like this they’ll fire me, just relax and we’ll talk later, I promise you that if you wait for me at Don Conejo I’ll help you, or at least I’ll keep you company in your sorrow, you know, when you work at a hotel in some ways you end up becoming a nurse; lots of lonely people with problems come to stay here, you’re not the first, believe it or not, but we should go now because the manager will kill me if he sees me having some strange conversation with a guest, I’m not a guest, No, you’re not a guest, which makes it even worse, who knows who you might be. That’s what the Fearless Girl said but as she said it she was smiling as if to let me know that she didn’t mind not knowing, I was a stranger who had cried as he looked out the window of one of the rooms in her hotel; in other words, I was the kind of man she was prepared to be friendly to and help and probably also sleep with, because that’s the way she was.

We returned to the lobby separately, she in the elevator and I by the stairs, and from a public phone I called Aunt Sofi to check on Agustina and let them know I’d be late, She’s sleeping, she told me, and I went out to walk the streets aimlessly in the cold with my hands in my pockets and the collar of my raincoat turned up, a third-rate Humphrey Bogart among the fierce transvestites and the college-girl prostitutes in skintight jeans. I looked at my watch every few seconds as if that would make the time go faster, needing it to be five past ten so that I could barrage her with the many questions that were swarming in my head, but also because her nearness was a relief in the midst of the hell I was going through.