Laura Restrepo - Delirium

My eyes and Aunt Sofi’s eyes are fixed on Agustina, alert to her reaction, If Bichi’s coming then we have to clean, because this place is turned upside down, she said in excitement, but so naturally that no one could have suspected that only yesterday she was spewing hollow-voiced venom, and in fact the apartment was all topsy-turvy because of the notorious dividing line that she herself had drawn when she was waiting for that other, crazy visitor, her father, Then can we put the furniture back in place? asked Aunt Sofi, and Agustina said yes, that there was no reason why everything should be piled up on one side, It’s not like we were about to wax the floor or give dance lessons here, she said, as if she herself hadn’t been the engineer of the madness, We have to put all the furniture back and tidy this up completely, she ordered, and I felt a jolt of alarm, What do you mean, tidy it up completely? I asked, fearing that the pots of water, the purifications, and the whole ungodly commotion would start up again, Tidy it up, tidy it up, I mean put everything back the way it was, she answered, slightly irritated by such silly questions, and she set to it with renewed vigor, excessive vigor, I thought worriedly, It isn’t good for her to get so worked up, I whispered in Aunt Sofi’s ear, Why no, it’s not, but who’s to stop her, we must trust in God, Aguilar, Well, yes, Aunt Sofi, we’ll have to, won’t we.

As Agustina began reorganizing the house for the hundredth time, Aunt Sofi and I sat down to rest after that marathon trip to Sasaima and back, Tell me how you and Bichi ended up in Mexico, Aunt Sofi, I asked her, and just then Agustina interrupted us, saying, I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m not sure about these green walls, But they’re recommended by feng shui, I ventured to suggest, trying to reassure her, Screw feng shui, she said, I’m thinking that this space would look brighter if we painted the walls burnt orange, Well it was like this, Aunt Sofi told me, ignoring Agustina’s outbursts, after Eugenia delivered the coup de grâce by lying about the photographs, Bichi left the house just as he was, in a sweater and boots over his pajamas and nothing else, but looking so clearly as if he’d made up his mind that we all knew he wasn’t planning to come back, and meanwhile, in a matter of seconds, I had gone from being sure my life was over to suspecting that the only thing that was over was life as I’d understood it up until then, Enough of these passive little moves, Aunt Sofi ordered herself, it’s time for me to play my own ace. The bag she had taken to church with her was still within reach on a chair, next to the hat with a feather in it and the palm branch blessed by the priest. And don’t ask me why, she says, but instead of grabbing just the bag I ran off with all three things, hurrying up to my room to get the money I kept in a dresser drawer, which was $7,500 in traveler’s checks and 250,000 pesos, as well as my coat, my passport, and my little jewelry box, then I swept through Bichi’s room, snatching up the first pair of pants I saw in the closet, and I flew down the stairs, and when I say flew I mean flew, because my feet didn’t even touch the steps, and as I passed the television room where the rest of the family was gathered, I could see that Agustina was still on her knees, with a dumbfounded look on her face, and I felt a twinge in my heart, saying to myself, That girl is the one who’ll end up paying, and I promised myself to come back someday for her; as I went out, I saw that Bichi was already a few blocks away, and when I realized that I was still clutching the palm branch in one hand, I threw it far away from me, Goodbye, palm of martyrdom, and I ran after the boy and caught up with him, Let’s go, I said, and Bichi answered, We’re already gone.

I remember that I arrived at Don Conejo a little after nine, and there was Anita and her amazing breasts, Anita and her brown legs, Anita and her long hair smelling of peach shampoo; uncomplicated Anita, determined to get me into bed with her that night by any means possible, the two of us sitting in Don Conejo with a couple of beers and an order of spicy beef empanadas in front of us. Anita leaned into me with her breasts and her peach smell and said that she’d found out who had paid for the hotel suite my wife was in that weekend, Well, paid isn’t quite the right word, actually, the hotel is looking for him because he never paid, he left a credit card number that the bank reported as canceled the next day, and that isn’t the only bill he hasn’t settled with us, because between one thing and another he owes us a fortune, Anita won’t stop talking and I don’t want to listen, now that she’s about to reveal the name of the man who was with Agustina, I don’t want to know it anymore.

I don’t know why, but it no longer mattered, Agustina and I had eaten obleas at the place where the old lady was decapitated and everything else was beside the point; she had taken me by the hand to show me the house and gardens in Sasaima, This is the orchid grotto and this is the stable and this was my horse Brandy’s saddle, and this is the little clearing where we played soccer, and these galleries are where we played cops and robbers, this is the tree I hit when I fell off Brandy and I broke my collarbone, come here, Aguilar, and sit with me in the hammock, it was on these stalks of bamboo that my mother stuck pieces of fruit for the birds, there were cardinals, parakeets, bluebirds, and canaries, this is the basket that Aunt Sofi always took with her to gather eggs, and come now, Aguilar, you have to see the Sweet River, listen, you can hear it from here, you don’t know how smooth and black the stones of the Sweet River are, and they heat up in the sun, let’s go and sit on them and dangle our feet in the water. After those black stones, I thought, what did it matter to me anymore what the name of the man at the hotel was, let him be called whatever he wanted now that Agustina had taken me to see the river of her childhood, I don’t know, in some way I’d already gotten past the pain of having been cheated on, the betrayal or the mistake or whatever it was, and hearing a name now would just bring it all back.

So while Anita was talking I let my mind wander, focusing my attention on anything else, on her improbable nails that were no longer striped but now painted with stars, tiny blue stars on a silver background, which meant that they were still flags, though not French flags but some other country’s flags, flags with stars; Anita kept telling me things but I was thinking about the Cuban flag, with its single star, white? red? and the gringo flag, on which there were lots of stars but which was the reverse of the flags on Anita’s nails because its stars were white on a blue background; the Algerian flag, if I was remembering correctly, had a moon and a star; the Argentinean flag had a sun, and after all the sun is a star; I imagined that there must be stars on the flags of many Arab countries, like Iraq and Egypt, though those stars would probably be green, and as Anita tickled my forearm with the tips of her starry fingernails, I thought, What an incredible thirst for the heavens, there are stars on almost every flag on earth and yet the earth itself appears on no flag I’ve ever seen, and still I couldn’t help hearing the man’s name when Anita’s mouth finally uttered it, Midas McAlister? Midas McAlister was the one she was with? Yes, yes I know who Midas McAlister is, he’s an old boyfriend of Agustina’s, and then I felt sick and it occurred to me that it had been a bad idea to have that beer and those empanadas; suddenly there was a burning in my chest and I suspected that the culprit was the hot peppers, or maybe it was Midas McAlister, and I went looking for the restroom to splash water on my face and be alone for a minute.