Laura Restrepo - Delirium

When it was almost time I walked to Don Conejo and discovered that it was closed, so I crossed the street and sat in the café there, near the entrance so I could watch for her arrival; asking for a cup of tea, I burrowed even deeper into the collar of my raincoat, on the verge of collapse and not wanting to run into anyone who wasn’t her, but of course two old activist friends of mine happened to be sitting at the next table, and they came up to me because they were gathering signatures to protest the forcible disappearance of someone, I didn’t know who because I paid no attention to what they said and didn’t read the petition before I signed it, I have to get out of this place, I thought, and paying for the tea and waving goodbye to them, I went out just as the Fearless Girl was crossing the street, heading toward Don Conejo.

Except that at first glance I didn’t recognize her, because she’d taken off the short-skirted navy blue suit and now she was wearing black pants which for some reason didn’t look right on her, maybe because they were too tight, and she had put her hair up in a ponytail and now she didn’t seem as attractive to me, in fact I was almost convinced that she was someone else, but what settled the matter were her nails, there could only be one set of nails like that in the known world, and it wasn’t until she was a few feet away that I noticed that the suitcase she was carrying must be Agustina’s, You brought it for me! I shouted, Yes, I brought it, let’s hope it doesn’t get me in trouble.

We went walking along Fifteenth Road, which was torn up for some construction project, and the movement of the dump trucks and the deafening noise of the drills drowned out my questions, so I walked quietly along, thinking only about the suitcase I was carrying now, which was the proof that everything had been premeditated; my wife hadn’t come to that hotel room by chance or accident but had packed her things and left the apartment voluntarily and with a specific purpose, and her purpose was her meeting with that man, who knows how long she’d been planning it, and on and on, a flurry of similar speculations that I prefer not to recall, I was so intent on endlessly working myself up over the whole thing that I didn’t even know where I was walking, with the Fearless Girl running after me perched on platform shoes that made it hard for her to step around the gaping holes in the pavement and trying to shout over the roar of the drills, telling me who knows what about her life, something about her mother’s varicose veins, about the cost of schooling for her brothers and sisters.

As we were passing the Country Clinic she took me by the arm and pulled me in, Come on, she shouted, there’s a little cafeteria here where we won’t run into anyone, the empanadas didn’t work out, so keep me company while I have a doughnut and coffee because I’m starving to death, and I wasn’t quick enough to say that this wasn’t the place, not this clinic, because it was the only souvenir I had yet to collect on my horrible memory tour, so by the time I realized what was happening I was already sitting and eating a pink doughnut in front of the sign that said EMERGENCY ROOM in cold blue letters, the same emergency room where Agustina was examined the night of the dark episode…You didn’t eat a thing, the Fearless Girl said, I did, I ate half a doughnut, Not you, your wife when she was at the hotel, You’re saying she didn’t eat at all? No, the man who was with her came down to the restaurant for dinner by himself, ordered his meal and arranged for the same thing to be taken to her in the room, but then the tray was left untouched in the hall, and when I tell you untouched, I mean untouched, she didn’t even lift the covers to see what was on the dishes, I know because the next day, Sunday, the same thing happened, he came down for breakfast alone and ordered breakfast to be taken up to her, and she didn’t eat that either, and when these things happen the waiters let us know, because it can be a sign that something weird is going on in a room, I don’t know, Mr. Aguilar, honestly, it didn’t seem like a lovers’ meeting, There are lovers’ meetings that end badly, I said, Oh, Mr. Aguilar, you’re hopeless, I’m telling you frankly that the two of them weren’t very romantic, now if I were spending the night with a boyfriend…

It was so difficult, everything that’s happening is so difficult, I said to her after a long silence, though the silence was mine alone because she had continued speculating about what she would’ve done with a boyfriend in a hotel like the Wellington, You don’t know how hard all this has been, I repeated and realized that I still didn’t know her name, My name is Anita, I’ve told you three times already but all you care about is your own suffering, I also told you that I support my mother and my brothers and sisters and that besides working at the hotel I run a little business with a photocopy machine and a fax service in my garage, what else can I do, I can’t make ends meet otherwise, Where do you live, Anita, I asked, thinking to myself that it was good to be with this Anita, that it was good that her name was Anita, but that I liked her better with her hair down, If you want to make me feel better, Anita, let down your hair, I said to her but she ignored me and continued on with her extremely long story, of which all I retained was that Anita lived in Meissen, a working-class neighborhood that I knew well because decades ago I had gone there to organize meetings and sell copies of the newspaper Socialist Revolution , Meissen, my dear Anita, is a long fucking way out, Yes, Señor, tell me about it, each day I spend an hour and a half on the bus from Meissen to the hotel and another hour and a half getting home.

It was funny to watch how Anita managed to balance her pink doughnut on the tips of her ten little French flags and bring it to her mouth, and like the doughnut, her generous, pouting lips were pink and round and oh so sweet, coming too close to mine with the excuse of telling me any old thing, but not even the lips of a desirable girl could make me forget the suitcase that was under the table, the source of my unhappiness and resentment, I’m going to open it right here, in front of you, Anita, because it would kill me to do it alone, and Anita, who had begun to speak to me more casually but who occasionally seemed to think better of it and become more formal again, said, Go ahead, Mr. Aguilar, open it, who cares, people will think they’re personal belongings that we’re bringing to a sick relative.

I began taking out one thing after another, placing each on the Formica table, a few white cotton undergarments, a T-shirt of mine that says Bean Man and that Agustina likes to sleep in, two shirts that she must never have worn because they were clean and ironed, How odd that your wife arrived at the hotel looking like such a mess when she had clean clothes in her suitcase, said Anita, when I saw her I couldn’t believe such a beautiful woman would be out looking like that, like she’d been chewed up and spit out. I kept removing things, a case with a toothbrush and toothpaste, Clinique facial cleanser, Pablo Neruda’s Heights of Machu Picchu that I’d given her myself soon after meeting her, What’s Machu Picchu, Anita wanted to know, Some Incan ruins in the Peruvian Andes, and since she grabbed the book and saw the inscription from me on the first page, “To Agustina, atop the tallest mountain on earth,” she asked me whether I’d been up there with my wife, No, the truth is I haven’t, Then what did you mean when you wrote this, Well I don’t know, I must have liked her a lot, And who is Pablo Neruda, she persisted but I didn’t answer because I was absorbed in those objects, a hairbrush, a few other Clinique lotions, a cortisone skin cream, And what’s that for, For allergies, Agustina’s skin is so pale that sometimes she gets rashes and she uses skin creams.