Laura Restrepo - Delirium

Well, if it’s just a question of packaging, I said to myself that day (and I’ve already told you that I was only thirteen), then I’ll be able to bridge that seemingly unbridgeable gap, and in fact by the time I was thirty I had bridged it and your mouth had already been mine, and I had two authentic Baccarat crystal chandeliers, a never-used dining table seating twelve, twenty-four silver place settings, and an impeccable smile, and yet look at me today, a shadow of my former self, brought down by the mistaken perception — it was too much to expect of a child’s intelligence, after all — that the difference was merely a question of packaging. It wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, and here I am, paying for my mistake in blood.

MY SKIN STILL CRAWLS when I remember the episode of the dividing line because perhaps never before had my wife rejected me so ferociously. With her teeth clenched and hatred in her eyes, Agustina ordered me to stay behind the line and I did what I could to obey her, hoping she would calm down, but the geographic division she imposed wasn’t fixed and that made things even harder, which is to say that the line shifted depending on her whim; at one point I sat on one of the chairs in the dining room, which strangely had remained on my side, at which Agustina hurried to annex that peninsula to her own territory, reclaiming the dining room as hers and throwing me out.

If you tried to take a step in any direction she was on you like a tiger, Out, you bastard, she said to me, my father doesn’t want to see you in any way, shape, or form, and that goes doubly for you, you filthy pig, she said to poor Aunt Sofi, whose face was screwed into an expression of guilt, anguish, or utter exhaustion; she who up until that moment had shown such fortitude and presence of mind now seemed shaken by the exceptional virulence of this development, she hadn’t seen anything like it since she’d come to stay with us and to tell the truth I hadn’t either, what was happening now was really serious, Go do your dirty business elsewhere, you disgusting pigs, Agustina was raving so madly and her abuse was so over the top that it couldn’t just be abuse, or hyperbolic use of language, it had to be true that she felt an enormous urgency to get us out of the house, it had to be true that the supposed presence or arrival or return of this father of hers was an earth-shattering event that split things in two, leaving Agustina with her father on one side and all other despicable mortals on the other.

Watching her, I wanted to bang my head against the wall thinking of everything I never asked her about this Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño, who, despite having been dead for years, now turned out to be the mysterious guest in the wings, the person turning me out of my own home and driving me from my wife, the man who was the living incarnation of everything I hated, and yet who was the object of baffling, almost religious worship for Agustina. The hardest thing of all was to witness the control that Mr. Londoño exercised over his daughter, to the point that it brought to mind the word possession , which doesn’t even form part of my vocabulary since it belongs to the realm of the irrational, which is of no interest to me, and yet it was that word, and none other, that kept occurring to me that night. I couldn’t help feeling the conviction that my wife was possessed by her father’s will; the split in her manifested itself so intensely that I was having a hard time reining in my own thoughts and remembering that it was my wife’s sick mind that was molding itself to her father’s purported wishes, and not the other way around.

I’ve always had the feeling that during her crises my wife goes through patches of devastating isolation, it’s as if she’s brutally alone on a stage while I observe her performance from a seat where I’m surrounded by the rest of humanity, and yet this time I knew that I was the solitary one, while she was accompanied by a force greater than herself, the will of her late father. Agustina talked endlessly about her father and his approaching visit, speaking so quickly that it was hard to understand her, something that was made even more difficult because half of the time she was talking to herself, aspirating the sentences as if she were plucking them from the air and wanted to swallow them, Agustina, my love, don’t swallow your words because you’ll choke, but my voice couldn’t reach her; between us there was only estrangement and distance, we were two exhausted creatures unable to draw near each other even though we were in the same cave, while down below the city throbbed silently, cowering and broken, as if the horror of that night had crushed it and now it was waiting for the start of the next round. Agustina darling, let’s not let madness, that old foe, extinguish any spark of hope, but Agustina isn’t listening because tonight she and the madness are one.

My wife is crazy, I acknowledged to myself that night for the first time, and yet the thought wasn’t enough to convince me, it can’t be, Agustina darling, because you’re still there behind your madness, despite everything you’re still there, and probably I’m still there deep down, why should I be gone, do you remember me, Agustina? do you remember yourself? I’d never been afraid that she would hurt me physically, how could she when I was five inches taller and twice her weight and mass, but that night the fear was there; everything about her indicated a desire to assault, to wound, and her way of grabbing things and brandishing them showed determination, even an urgent desire, to hit with them. The last thing I ever wanted was to come to blows with the woman I love, but she was doing everything she could to start something, seeking by any means possible a kind of desperate final outburst of physical violence that would put an end to my decision not to attack her no matter what. It was as if she were trying to rob me of the infinite love for her that lets me systematically evade all her provocations and keep our coexistence peaceful; maybe Agustina understood that this was the only way she could do away with the main obstacle to her father’s arrival, because I was that obstacle.

Who had this Mr. Londoño been, what had his relationship to his daughter been, where had his power over her come from? I would’ve given anything to know. When I got to the apartment that night with the suitcase that Agustina had brought with her to the Wellington in my hand, sad trophy and resounding proof of my defeat, I was obsessed with the man my wife had spent one night with — well, just one night that I knew of, God knows how many others there might have been — and I set the suitcase in plain sight on the dining-room table so that she would come upon it suddenly, I needed to know what her reaction would be, whether she was capable of looking me in the eye, but what she did was hurl it furiously toward my side of the apartment, Who left this shit here, she asked and then she immediately forgot about it; the delirium induced by her father’s imminent arrival made her hyperkinetic, stricken by a fever that caused her to nearly emanate light, and I began to realize that even if the story of her lover was true and behind my back Agustina had one hundred other lovers, the true, indestructible rival, the one anchored in the depths of her disturbance, and possibly also her love, was the ghost of this father about whom I couldn’t form the vaguest idea, apart from the caricaturish notion of the Bogotá landowner that I’d had from the start, The man has that advantage over me, I thought, the advantage of being an unknown quantity.

Shut behind the wall of rejection that my wife had erected, I remembered the crazy autobiography that at some point she’d wanted me to help her write, though we never made it to the first page, now I’m convinced that it was really a plea for help, that she needed to go over the events of her life with someone to make sense of them and put her mother and father in their proper place, bringing them out from inside where they tormented her, but back then how was I to know; the truth is that I thought the ludicrous idea of the autobiography was another one of those stabs in the dark that she was making simply because she refused to take note of what direction she was really headed. This was how it happened: after I was introduced to her that time at the film society, I left feeling awed by her beauty, which honestly struck me like a lightning bolt, but like a lightning bolt that dazzles and then disappears, by which I mean that it left me without the slightest sense of nervous anticipation of a second chapter to follow that first encounter, sure as I was that this strange, delectably lovely girl was one of those shooting stars that crosses one’s path and speeds on, so it came as a great surprise when I found a note in my cubicle at the university signed by none other than her.