Laura Restrepo - Delirium

Don’t worry, Mr. Aguilar, Anita said to me, suddenly grabbing my hand, if the man who was with your wife was her lover, she wouldn’t have worn plain panties like these but black lace ones or red low-cut ones and a more exciting bra, You don’t know her, Anita, my wife is the type who always wears plain white underwear, I see, then you must be married by the Church, No, Agustina and I live together without anyone’s blessing, Then, asked Anita, why do you wear a wedding band on your finger, It was given to me by my first wife, the mother of my children, look, her name is engraved inside, Marta Elena, and upon seeing this, Anita said, sweetening her voice and lowering her eyelids, What a character you are, Mr. Aguilar, you live with one woman and wear another woman’s ring, I think you need a third woman to set things straight, and, moving too close, she said, Tonight something is going to happen, as if insinuating that something sexual was going to happen between us, but I pushed abruptly backward, and she, taking the hint, hastened to clarify, I mean in the country, I have the feeling that something big is going to happen tonight in Colombia, And why not, I replied, after all something big happens almost every night, but nothing happened last night or the night before, so the odds are that we’re in for it today, and as I was halfway through the sentence I was suddenly curious to know what her hair smelled like, Let it down, Anita, I asked her again and since this time she listened to me, all that curly hair tumbled down on us, and grateful and softening inside, I pushed my nose into it and inhaled the sickly sweet perfume of her shampoo, Peach? I asked, Incredible, Mr. Aguilar, you guessed, it’s L’Oréal Silky Peach.

Without moving my nose from her hair I told her about an afternoon when I was fifteen and I rode too fast down a hill on a borrowed bicycle and ran into a barbed-wire fence that cut my right forearm badly and ripped a piece of skin from my neck, I still have both scars, look, Anita, you can see them, and she ran the tip of her index finger over the ugly mark across my throat and asked, Why are you telling me this, I’m telling you because of what happened afterward, in the neighborhood clinic where Doctor Ospinita, who practiced on a good-faith basis since he didn’t have a medical degree, disinfected my wounds and gave me twenty-seven stitches, all of this while I was fully conscious because anesthesia was an inconceivable luxury in a poor neighborhood like mine, Uh-huh, said Anita trying to look as if she were following me though she didn’t understand what this had to do with her, Look, the reason I’m telling you this is because it’s one of the sweetest memories of my life, I mean what happened to me with a lady at the clinic, she was a young woman and in my memory she’s very beautiful although I’ve forgotten her name and what her face looked like, or maybe I never knew her name or saw much of her face, she wasn’t the nurse, she was simply someone who happened to be there at the clinic, probably waiting for her turn, and when she saw me frozen in panic at the sight of the curved needle and the nylon thread that Ospinita was aiming at my neck, she amazingly sat at the head of the operating table and rested my head on her thighs, not caring that her clothes were being drenched with blood, in one hand holding up the bag for the transfusion that Ospinita was giving me to replace the blood I’d lost, and here comes the really important thing, Anita, the part I can’t forget, which is that with her free hand this woman stroked my hair, and her caresses put me in such a trance that I could only think of her hand, so I closed my eyes to concentrate on her touch, which allowed me to forget the pain and the fear and the sight of my own blood, and I just drifted there in the immense pleasure of those fingers stroking my hair; whenever I feel like I’m going to die, Anita, which is how I’ve been feeling every day lately, the memory of that woman keeps me going, or rather the memory of her hand, and if I tell you this it’s because your presence has a similar effect on me, and since this made Anita begin to purr like a cat, I leaned back again and changed tone, And speaking of fingers, I said in order to say something, my God, girl, what long nails you have, do you paint them yourself or do they do it for you at the salon, I’ll bet you don’t know, lovely Anita from Meissen, what emery boards are for.

I stepped away for a minute to call Aunt Sofi again and tell her that I was on my way, and when I returned to the table I said to the Fearless Girl, Look, Anita, if I were fifteen I’d ask you to stroke my hair for a while, but I’m old and a mess and in the middle of a crisis so we should leave instead, come on, I’ll give you a ride home. Do you have a car? she asked incredulously, as if I didn’t look like a car owner or as if she couldn’t believe her luck at being saved for a night from her hour-and-a-half bus ride, Do I have a car? more or less, I’ve got an old wreck that barely deserves to be called a car, but it will get you home safe and sound.

Now it seems funny to me to remember how confidently I spoke that last sentence, because it almost didn’t come true, by which I mean that on the drive south down Thirtieth Road past Nemesio Camacho Stadium with Anita in the passenger seat, the road nearly deserted at that time of night, we were shaken by a violent jolt that actually lifted the van from the pavement, while at the same time a blast of air hit our eardrums and a sharp noise, like thunder, came from the bowels of the earth and then gradually faded away, in successive layers of echoes, until an absolute silence fell over the city, and in the midst of this deadly quiet I heard Anita’s voice saying, A bomb, a big fucking bomb, it must have gone off nearby, I told you, Mr. Aguilar, I told you something horrible was going to happen tonight. But all I could think of was Agustina, wondering if she was all right.

Anita turned on the car radio and that’s how we found out that someone had just blown up the police station in Paloquemao, about twelve blocks from where we were and eight blocks from the place where the explosion would surely have woken Agustina, terrifying her, if the blast hadn’t actually blown out the windows of my apartment, that is, and I was struck by the image of her getting out of bed in a state of shock and stepping on the broken glass, and the picture was so vivid that it became a certainty, I literally saw Agustina walking barefoot on the floor covered in shards, and I was overcome by the urgent need to be with her.

I don’t know how long I was silent, lost in my obsession, driving to Meissen as fast as the van would go to drop off the girl beside me and return home without losing an instant, preoccupied by the idea that Agustina might somehow be hurt, while at the same time I surprised myself by turning over and over the possibility of such a thing happening; I don’t know, it was as if something not quite right were shifting inside me, something like the unspeakable notion of an eye for an eye, so deeply had I been hurt by her rejection of me. So when Anita spoke, I had forgotten her so thoroughly that her voice took me by surprise, Mr. Aguilar, she said, you won’t like what I’m about to say, you’ll be thinking what right do I have to get involved, but in my opinion it’s too hard on you being married to that crazy woman.

BEGONE FROM ME all remorse, Nicholas Portulinus said out loud after the lunch of roast pork. Once he’d had a cup of herbal tea for his digestion and a long swallow of valerian extract, he repeated, Begone from me all remorse! like a plea or a command requesting that the sleep-inducing properties of the valerian bestow upon him the brief bliss of a nap. Then he asked Blanca to unlace his boots, because his bloated body wouldn’t bend enough to permit the maneuver, and he lay down on his high bed protected by the gauzy cloud of a mosquito net, letting himself be lulled by the dull boom of the Sweet River, which tumbled into falls outside his window, and he saw again, in a certain kind of light that he himself would describe as an artificial glare, the polished surfaces of an ancient stage — at other times he will call it Greek ruins — on which two boys are fighting, wounding each other, and bleeding. “In the dream, I’m standing there bolted to the ground”—he will write later in his diary—” struck dumb by the metallic gleam of the blood and deaf to the call of the torn flesh. I don’t care about one of the fighters, the one whose back is to me so that I can’t see his face. I don’t know his name, either, but that doesn’t trouble me. I dream that his name doesn’t matter. The other boy, however, affects me deeply; I see that he’s the younger of the two and maybe the weaker, of that I’m not sure, but I do know that he’s whimpering and licking his wounds in a pitiful way.”