Laura Restrepo - Delirium

And now Dolores’s little son was an orphan and there she lay as if surrendered to her fate, resigned to dying; maybe after all those fake rehearsals she was ready for her last and only true performance, as it turned out to be, This time it really was for real, I said to her as a kind of tribute.

And what came next, Agustina doll, was purely procedural and technical, lifting the girl off the machine, rolling her up in a rug, and at an order from Spider to his thugs, watching her leave for parts unknown in the trunk of the Mercedes, Don’t come back until you’re 100 percent sure she’s gone forever and won’t be heard of again until Judgment Day, those were Spider’s curt instructions, and when the two killers and their victim were gone, I went up and turned off the disco music, which through all of this had kept thundering like a noise from hell, and I lovingly cleaned my Nautilus 4200 and polished the steel until there were no marks left on it, because after all the machine was innocent, then I turned out the gym lights and sat in silence on the floor at the foot of Spider’s chair, and I buried my head between my knees and I started to think of you, my glorious Agustina, which is what I do when I’d rather not think about anything.

I SMELLED IT as soon as I opened the apartment door: it was the acrid scent of strangeness. It suffuses the house when Agustina isn’t herself anymore, when she’s in the middle of one of her crises, and I’ve learned to recognize it and make it part of my own sadness, which smells just like it; I know I’ve begun to exude the same scent.

After leaving Anita in Meissen the night of the Paloquemao bomb, I’d returned to Salmona Towers along Twenty-sixth Street, listening to the sirens of ambulances made invisible by the thick dust cloud of the disaster, the radio reporting forty-seven dead as well as an unspecified number of bodies in the wreckage, but I could only think about the shards that had surely cut Agustina’s feet. Miraculously, the explosion hadn’t shattered any of the windows of my apartment and I realized that nothing had happened to her feet because when I finally arrived, she had shoes on; she was fully dressed and wearing high heels and that surprised me. I interpreted it at first as an encouraging sign, because since the dark episode my wife had succumbed to slovenliness in matters of appearance, everything yielding to the pure centripetal force of her introspection except for the brief moments when she recovered some degree of consciousness of her physical existence. Madness is navel-gazing, my wife spends day and night in pajamas, or at most a sweatshirt, forgetting to eat, to listen, to look, it’s as if her entire horizon of events is contained within herself. That’s why I was surprised to see her in dark pants, high heels, and a jacket again, with her hair up, as if she were ready to go out but had to take care of a few things around the house before she left, these being essentially a compulsive transferring of objects from one place to another and back again, although what was happening now wasn’t the familiar hauling of containers of water, but rather a kind of domestic reorganization that obeyed no visible logic but that required all of her concentration and energy; anyone who hasn’t lived with a crazy person has no idea what boundless energy they can expend, the number of movements they make per second.

On her niece’s orders, Aunt Sofi is standing in a corner of the living room, afraid to move because each time she tries, Agustina gets angry and won’t let her; Agustina also orders me to stay where I am and establishes the rules of a new ceremony that we don’t understand, a fresh epiphany of dementia that involves Agustina exerting relentless control over her territory. We live on this side, Agustina on that side, and she is as careful as a goalkeeper or a customs agent to make sure no one crosses that imaginary boundary, My father is coming to visit me, she announces suddenly, my father warned me that if you were in my house, he would cancel his visit because he doesn’t want to see you here, stay over there, goddamn it, that’s where you bastards live and this is where I live, get back, you, get back, she shouts at me.

MEANWHILE I WAS THINKING of you, which is what I do when I’d rather not think about anything, Agustina sweetheart, you might say I’m fascinated by the texture you take on in memory, smooth and slippery with no hint of responsibility or regret, it’s something like stroking your hair, the pure pleasure of stroking your hair, so long as there are no consequences; God played a dirty trick on us with the whole idea that one thing leads to another until it becomes some fucking unstoppable chain reaction, I swear that hell must be a place where they lock you up with the consequences of your actions and make you duke it out with them. That’s why I’d rather remember you the way I saw you the first few times that your brother Joaco invited me home after school and there you were and it was as if the air stood still, you were like nothing I’d ever seen before, the fanciest doll in the most expensive store in town, my rich friend’s gorgeous sister, which is maybe why you’ve gone around acting crazy ever since, to force us to remember that you’re flesh and blood and make us accept you with all your consequences.

Your brother Joaco is one of those people who never had to wear hand-me-downs, but I’m the kind of guy who only today, after all kinds of struggle, has the means to dress like Joaco Londoño, but I don’t, anyway, Agustina baby, because I allow myself the luxury of doing my own thing. So I’m a true phenomenon of self-improvement, a champion of self-help, but I’ll always bear the stigma of having shown up at the Boys School on the first day of classes looking all wrong, despite my efforts, and especially the efforts of my sweet mother, who bought me everything new, combed my hair the best she could, and sent me out with my skin shiny from soap and scrubbing, but she missed a few details, and after all how could she not, when the woman was a widow who had just arrived in the capital with barely enough money to live respectably, which more than explains the countless errors she made regarding my appearance and attire on that critical first day of school: for example, a cheap leather briefcase, a green wool cardigan she’d knitted herself, and scratchy wool pants, but among all these outrages, my lovely Agustina, there was one, the white socks, that was fatal, because to the cry of “White socks, black pants, homo alert,” your brother Joaco, young leader of the pack, came after me and beat me to a pulp, which I thank him for to this day because he walloped the whole fatherless-boy-from-the-provinces identity out of me once and for all, and that same afternoon I stole money from my mother’s purse to buy myself black socks and a pair of jeans, then I made her cry by announcing that she’d better not knit me any more cardigans because I wasn’t going to wear them, and I had scarcely recovered from the thrashing that Joaco gave me when I went after him myself and kicked the shit out of him, and I really did kick the shit out of him, even breaking a bone or two.

So then we were even, and from that moment on I devoted myself to imitating my friend Joaco in every way. Because at the Boys School, my pretty pale princess, I didn’t learn algebra or discover trigonometry or develop any kind of interest in chemistry; at the Boys School I learned to walk like your brother, to eat like him, to look at people the way he did, to say what he said, to despise the teachers for being of inferior social status, and, in a broader sense, to radiate contempt as a supreme weapon of control; how could Joaco not be my beacon and guide when my father was a stone in a graveyard where my mother and I left carnations on the Day of the Dead, and meanwhile his father had given him a brand-new Renault 9 with an incredible sound system when we were just kids in ninth grade; it was in Joaco’s Renault 9 that my ears were opened to the miracle of meesees braun yugotta lobleedotta by Yairman Yairmees, and how we admired Joaco because he was the only one who could pronounce Herman’s Hermits and sing Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter with all the syllables; everything was dazzling, a revelation, when Joaco let me step into his world.