Laura Restrepo: Delirium

THOUGH SHE’S NEVER MET ME and probably never will, my mother-in-law Eugenia won’t forgive Agustina for living with me. Before the delirium, when Agustina hadn’t yet forsaken reality, I never bothered to ask her about her past, her family, or her memories, good or bad, partly because I was so busy with teaching and partly, to be honest, because I didn’t really care, I felt tied to the Agustina who lived with me here and now, not to the Agustina who belonged to other times and other people, and now, when that past might be crucial in helping to reassemble the puzzle of her memory, I mourn the questions I didn’t ask, yearning for those interminable stories that fell on deaf ears, about fights with her parents or past loves. I blame myself for everything I refused to see because I wanted to keep reading, because I didn’t have time, because I didn’t think it was important, or because I couldn’t be bothered to listen to stories about strangers, by which I mean stories about her family, which bored me to death.

Those people, her family, have always refused to meet me because they think I’m a peon, Agustina herself confessed to me once that that was their word for me, peon, or in other words a bourgeois nobody, a third-rate professor, and that was before I was out of work; Agustina told me that there were other strikes against me, too, like the fact that I’m not divorced from my first wife, that I don’t speak any foreign languages, that I’m a communist, that I don’t make enough money, that I dress like a bum. It’s no surprise that there’s a wall of contempt between her people and mine, but the strange thing, the truly fascinating thing, is that the class Agustina belongs to doesn’t only exclude other classes but also purges itself; it’s always getting rid of its own kind, those who for subtle reasons don’t quite fulfill the requirements, like Agustina or Aunt Sofi, and I ask myself whether they were condemned at birth or whether it was a consequence of their acts, whether it was original sin or some other sin committed along the way that expelled them from paradise and revoked their privileges; among her many faults, Agustina committed the cardinal sin of getting involved with me, because number one on the list of the internal rules that govern her people is not to fraternize with inferiors, much less sleep with them, although of course Agustina was already exiled when she chose to keep company with me, so who knows what other crimes she may have committed before.

I’d rather not think about my mother-in-law, but I can’t forget the absurd phone call she made after Agustina’s breakdown. Eugenia rarely calls here, and she hangs up if I answer, but the other day she deigned to speak to me for the first time in the three years I’ve been living with her daughter, and that was only because Agustina got extremely upset when she heard that it was her mother and refused to pick up the phone, I don’t want to talk to her because her voice makes me sick, she repeated over and over again until she went into one of her nervous states, so Eugenia had no choice but to talk to me, though without ever calling me by name, twisting herself into knots to avoid mentioning my connection to Agustina and speaking in an impersonal tone as if I were an operator or a nurse, in other words as if I were nobody and she were leaving a message on the machine, which was how she informed me that from now on she herself would look after Agustina, Look, Señor, what my daughter needs is a rest, she said to me, or rather didn’t say to me but to the nonentity at the other end of the line, This is to let you know that I’m coming today to take Agustina away to a spa in Virginia, What do you mean a spa in Virginia, Señora, what are you talking about? I shot back at her, and since Agustina was next to me screaming that her mother’s voice made her sick, I was having trouble hearing Eugenia, who was listing the healing treatments that her daughter would receive at one of the best spas in the world, thermal baths, floral therapy, seaweed massage, until I cut her off, Listen, Señora, Agustina isn’t well, she’s in a state of uncontrollable agitation and you come to me intending to take her away for some Zen meditation? And who are you, Señor, to tell me what’s best for my daughter, at least have the courtesy to ask her whether she wants to go or not. Agustina, your mother’s asking whether you want to go with her to some hot springs in Virginia, Listen for yourself, Señora, Agustina’s saying that all she wants is for us to hang up right now.

But Eugenia, who seemed not to hear, told me that the decision had already been made, and that when she came by in two hours her daughter should be waiting for her downstairs in the lobby, passport in hand and suitcase ready, since there wouldn’t be anywhere to park and the neighborhood is so dangerous. And I said, Well no, Señora, Agustina is not leaving this house for any reason whatsoever, so go have seaweed plastered on yourself in Virginia if that’s what you want, and immediately I regretted it, it would have been better to issue a firm but polite no, I let her see the worst side of me, I thought, This woman thinks I’m a boor and I’ve just proved her right.

Upset at having made such a mistake, I lost the thread of the conversation for a minute, and when I picked it up again, Eugenia was saying, You don’t know how that girl has made me suffer, she’s never shown me the slightest consideration, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, now it turned out that the victim was Eugenia and she wasn’t really calling to offer her help but to present a laundry list of grievances, and even though it was the first time that Agustina’s mother and I had spoken, we ended up fighting over the phone with the assurance of old antagonists and what began as a brief, dry exchange, in which each word was weighed so as not to go beyond the strictly impersonal, gradually turned into a rapid volley of awkwardly phrased and poorly thought-out remarks, so full of mutual recrimination that the result was a repugnant intimacy, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, as if a stranger had stepped on someone else’s foot by mistake in the street and the two had dropped everything in order to spend the afternoon spitting in each other’s faces. I said, What you want, Señora, isn’t to help your daughter recover but to take her away from me, and she shouted, You stole my daughter, with a shrillness that she must still be regretting, because the pitifulness of a petit bourgeois like me is a matter of course, but it’s unforgivable in a woman of her stature. I had worked myself into a nervous frenzy and I suppose she had too because she could hardly catch her breath, until I finally said no to her four or five times in a row, No no no no, Señora, Agustina is not leaving here, and then Eugenia hung up without saying goodbye and that was that.

BEING A MUSICIAN by profession, Grandfather Portulinus made a living by giving piano lessons to the daughters of the well-to-do families of the town of Sasaima, among them Blanca Mendoza, a slight girl who was hardly a promising pianist as she had clumsy hands and little ear for music, and in fact Portulinus never even managed to teach her the scales, but instead he ended up marrying her, although he was twice her age. If he did, it was partly for love and partly out of obligation, because he had gotten her pregnant through a thoughtless, inconsiderate act that was committed without her parents’ knowledge and probably against her will, an ill-fated start to any marriage, but in the end what mattered most wasn’t what was augured but the way the man dealt with his fate, and twenty long years of unswerving conjugal loyalty were proof that if Grandfather Portulinus had married the girl who was now Grandmother Blanca, it was because he loved her, not because he had to.