Delirium (11 page)

Agustina longs for that big, warm house, secure and brightly lit, with all of us safe inside and the dark street on the outside, so far from us that it was as if it didn’t exist and couldn’t hurt us with its perils, the street from which bad news comes of people who kill, of poor people with nowhere to live, of a war that’s spread out of Caquetá, the valley, and the coffee-growing region, and is on its way here with its throat-slitting, a war that has already reached Sasaima, which is why we haven’t returned to Gai Repos, news of roaming thieves and of corners where lepers crouch to beg, since if there was anything I feared, if there’s anything I do fear, it’s lepers, because pieces of their bodies fall off and the lepers don’t even notice. But her father locks up the house tight, and Agustina says to him wordlessly, You are the power, you are the true power, and I bow down before you, and she focuses all her attention on handing him the right key because she’s afraid that if she makes a mistake the spell will be broken and he won’t say Tina anymore or hold her hand. On those nightly rounds, says Agustina, I avoid anyone who might annoy my father and make him leave us, whether it’s my mother boring him, or poor Bichito, who irritates him so much, or especially her, Aunt Sofi, who is the main threat, it’ll be Aunt Sofi’s fault when my father and mother separate and we children are left at the mercy of the terrors outside. Or is it Aunt Sofi who keeps my father here? Do the powers visit her, too, especially when she undresses?

HOW CAN I WORK,
Blanca my dove, Grandfather Portulinus would say to his wife, when the dead are making my blood run cold, when they’re informing me of their sorrows with insistent little knocks on the table? Don’t worry, Nicholas, let me stand between you and the dead so they can’t come near you.

The preoccupations, or more accurately, obsessions, that plague Portulinus daily revolve around a multitude of puzzles and riddles that he makes himself solve as if they were matters of life or death. These include, for example, the orders sent to him by the spirits through something that Portulinus calls the letter board, and the spirits’ imperceptible taps at the window, to say nothing of the jumble of words formed in crossword puzzles, the messages hidden in the notes of Portulinus’s own compositions, the contents of the page of a book opened at random, the occult logic of the wrinkles in the sheets after a night of insomnia, the significant way handkerchiefs pile up in the handkerchief drawer, or even worse, the disturbing appearance of a handkerchief in the sock drawer.

One day, upon rising, Portulinus discovered a single slipper beside the bed and felt a shiver of terror at the tricks the fugitive slipper might be readying itself to play on him from its hiding place. You have to find it, he ordered Blanca, in a tone of voice that she found menacing. You have to find it, woman, because it’s lying in wait. Who, Nicholas? Who’s lying in wait? And in exasperation, exploding with rage, he replied, Why the cursed slipper! Cursed woman! I demand that you find the other slipper for me before it’s too late!

When faced with such situations, Blanca usually maintained her composure and the customary assurance of a wife who considers the desire for symmetry to be normal—every slipper should be accompanied by its mate, according to the laws of equilibrium—and maybe her behavior was justified, since this could simply be the tantrum of a husband who refused to walk around the house with one foot shod and the other bare, a fundamental and understandable wish for any man and even more so for a temperamental, clearly gifted musician like Portulinus. After all, no one would question the sanity of Chopin if he asked George Sand to help him find his other slipper; on the contrary, it would be madness for him to walk half shod along the corridors of that big, rambling Mallorcan house traversed by winds from every direction, a house that undoubtedly had icy marble or tile floors, surely hazardous for a feverish invalid who gets up for the sole purpose of going to the bathroom, so shaky and weak that it makes no sense to imagine him hopping on one foot, especially if he isn’t trudging to the bathroom but rushing to the piano because a new nocturne has come to him in the throes of his fever. And why shouldn’t what was true for the great Chopin also be true for Nicholas Portulinus, composer of
bambucos
and
pasillos
in the Colombian town of Sasaima?

Following the process of this logic, it’s easier to understand how, despite everything, Blanca’s domestic realism sometimes served as a bridge to normality for her husband, or as a parry of his frenzied thrusts, because although their approaches diverged—his unbalanced, hers obviously healthy—both ended up wanting the slipper to reappear, even if it was clear that it was always she, and never he, who took concrete action, asking the maid to come up to the room and rescue it from under the bed with a broom.

NO MORE. I CAN’T TAKE
it anymore. I’m unable to contain myself, I know it’s the stupidest thing I could do and yet I come right out and do it: when I get home I ask Agustina who the man in the hotel room with her was. Gesticulating like a Mexican matinee idol, I demand explanations, I throw a jealous fit, shouting at her, she who already has enough turmoil in her head, who cries at the slightest provocation, who defends herself by lashing out fiercely, who doesn’t even know what’s happened to her.

And since she doesn’t respond I keep mercilessly insisting, I probably even shake her a little, So you don’t remember? I’ll make you remember then, I say and I play the man’s voice recorded on the machine; third and last message (but first in order of appearance for someone playing back the messages, because on this ancient answering machine time is recorded backward), the speaker very abrupt, Isn’t anybody there? Where the fuck can I call, then? Second message, same voice, which is beginning to sound impatient, Is anybody there? It’s about Agustina Londoño, it’s urgent, someone should come and pick her up at the Wellington Hotel because she’s in bad shape. First message, same voice, still neutral at this early stage, I’m calling to ask someone to come pick up Agustina Londoño at the Wellington Hotel, on Thirteenth Road between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth, she isn’t well.

I really don’t know why I need to upset Agustina by making her listen to this, my nerves must be shot, or it must be the urge to know what happened while I was gone, or the exhaustion of all these sleepless nights, or jealousy, jealousy above all, what a terrible thing jealousy is.

You know, Agustina, I asked myself a thousand questions that Sunday after I listened to the messages, as I sped in the van to the Wellington to pick you up, questions like why they were calling from a hotel and not from a hospital if something had happened to you, and is she really in such bad shape that she couldn’t let me know herself? And why didn’t the person who called identify himself? If it’s a trap what kind of trap could it be? Could you have been hit by a car, kidnapped, could you have fallen, broken a bone, had a fight with your mother, could it have been a stray bullet, a mugging, but then why call me to a hotel? Someone else might have suspected that his wife had shut herself up in a hotel room to kill herself, but I never considered that possibility, I promise you, Agustina, it didn’t even occur to me, because I know that suicide isn’t part of your extensive repertoire. Do you know how many questions a person can ask himself over the sixty blocks that stretch from our apartment to that hotel? At least four a block, which means 240 questions, all pointless and absurd. But among them one question stood out, a doubt more pertinent than the rest, and that was whether you’d love me, Agustina, whether you’d still love me despite whatever had happened to you.

I press the repeat button on the answering machine, and Agustina, who has remained silent throughout, twists her wrist out of my grip, goes into the kitchen, brings back a jar of water, and pours the whole thing on the sofa. It’s got to be cool, she says, hot things are bad, hot things hurt.

BUT LET’S GET BACK
to our story, Agustina doll, let’s get back to the bet that was made that Thursday at L’Esplanade. We were so carried away that we talked about nothing else all week, phone calls back and forth, big laughs at the expense of Spider and his limp dick. I made all the preparations for the first round, which was set for Friday at nine, and the others kept stopping by the Aerobics Center or giving me a buzz so I could bring them up-to-date. To refer to the matter without setting off any alarms we started to call it Operation Lazarus, after that resurrection thing.

In an unrelated turn of events, I get a visit at the Aerobics Center from a trio of fat harpies who step out of a shocking lime-green sports car as big as a boat, three dark-skinned blondes so brutally bleached it’s as if they’ve tried to wipe out any trace of color, coconuts, they’re called, I don’t know whether I’m making myself clear, but I’m talking about a depressing threesome, my lovely Agustina, really cheap-looking bimbos. They show up in imitation leopard-print leggings, platform sneakers, and crap like that, all three of them bursting with enthusiasm at the idea of losing dozens of pounds and swearing to God that they’re mentally prepared to start lifting weights, devote themselves to spinning, strictly follow the pineapple diet, practice yoga, and do everything they’re asked, coming three times a week or more if necessary to get their figures back, because that’s how they put it, their figures, so last-generation. What about stepping classes? Oh yes, wonderful, sign me up, And aerobic dance? Oh yes, how exciting, I’ll take that, too, they were signing up for everything and once they had confessed their weights and ages to me and we were on intimate terms, when we were already practically like family, in fact, they hug me and come right out and tell me that they’re Pablo’s cousins by marriage and that it was Pablo’s wife, their first cousin, who personally recommended my gym to them, and, annoyed, I say, What Pablo are you talking about, Why the only Pablo, who else, Pablo Escobar.

Just a minute, lovely ladies, I say cunningly to mask my utter horror, I have appearances to keep up here and it’s obvious from the start that you’ve got too much money, that’s what I say so I don’t have to tell them to their faces that only narco whores like them would think of putting on false eyelashes to do spinning, that no amount of jogging will ever work off those hereditary spare tires, and that their massive thighs, flat asses, and short legs are signs of the lowest social origins.

So I got rid of them, Agustina doll, will you understand me if I say I have to keep a sharp eye out so that the level of the clientele doesn’t plummet? And of course, letting in three mob lovelies like that, relatives of Escobar on top of everything else, would spell the end of the center, which ultimately is nothing but a front for the big money that comes from the laundering, so I kicked the coconuts out, Try the competition, darlings, Spa 92 or Superfigure at Fifteenth and 103rd, you’ll lose weight faster there, I advised them, trusting that Pablo, a businessman first and foremost, would approve of my basic precautionary measures.

But apparently I was wrong. My analysis failed and I screwed myself royally, because Pablo turned out to be a man of honor first and a dealmaker second. But that’s another story, Agustina angel; just hold on to it in a corner of your crazy little head, because it’ll have a role to play later on. For now forget those three women as I forgot them at the time, watching them as they left in a huff and drove away down the street in their lime-green convertible, disappearing from my memory as soon as they turned the corner.