Delirium (20 page)

I COULDN’T HAVE CHOSEN
a worse place to fall apart. Even though the last thing I wanted was to collapse in public, I couldn’t wait until I got to the van, my heart sinking right there in the hotel room when I looked out the window and glimpsed those black acacias swaying in the wind against the brightly lit night, those same acacias that Agustina was watching so intently the Sunday of the dark episode, as if she was hypnotized by them. The little that remained of my reserves of courage suddenly vanished as if down a drain, and it wasn’t so much the weight of my wife’s illness that crushed me as it was the distinct memory of her first lucid moment, that instant of recognition in which her face relaxed and she ran to me, throwing her arms around me and clinging to me like a drowning woman to a scrap of wood, that one unrepeatable minute when everything was solved, when the tragedy halted just before it sprang itself on me, as if it had repented of the intention to destroy us, Let’s go home, Agustina, I said to her, but it was already too late, the instant of possible salvation had passed, she was numb once more and no longer paying attention to me, her gaze fixed again on those acacias that waved their branches as if to say to her, You aren’t from here, you’re not of this world, you have no memories, you don’t know this man who’s claiming you, the only things binding you to him are scorn and rage.

So as soon as the Fearless Girl left to deal with the call she’d gotten on her handset, I could no longer remain standing and sat on the edge of the bed, scorched inside by the blaze of that memory, and when the girl returned, a few minutes later, she found the client she’d left alone in room 416 flat on his back, Mr. Stepansky? Mr. Stepansky, is something wrong? Yes, something is wrong, Señorita, I’m the husband of a woman who lost her mind in room 413, What do you mean? she asked, and I confessed that my name wasn’t Stepansky and I didn’t have friends who wanted to stay at the hotel, My name is Aguilar and I need to find out what happened to my wife; her name is Agustina Londoño and she’s a tall, pale young woman who dresses in black, this was twenty-eight days ago exactly, I gave her the dates and got mixed up trying to explain that I’d picked her up that Sunday but that I didn’t know who she’d come here with or when exactly she’d arrived, A gorgeous girl, like an artist, or an actress, but strange somehow, all dressed in black and with long hair? That’s a good description of my wife, I said, and of course, the Fearless Girl did remember her, I wasn’t here when they checked out, but I was the one who checked her in the night before, when they arrived, When who arrived? Why the woman you say is your wife and the man who was with her, wasn’t it you? That’s the problem, it wasn’t me.

Then the Fearless Girl excuses herself saying that if this has to do with cheating she’d rather not get involved, The thing is you never know, Mr. Stepansky, It’s Aguilar, That’s right, you told me, but what I’m trying to say, Mr. Aguilar, is that it’s a bad idea to take sides in this kind of thing because you never know, It has nothing to do with cheating, it’s a very serious mental health problem and you have to help me, it’s your duty as a human being, Wait, wait, Mr. Aguilar, first calm down a little, stay here with me for a second, and, oddly, she closed the door to the room as if to allow me a moment of peace in my suffering and then she sat down beside me on the bed, so close that our legs touched, Look, Mr. Aguilar, in a hotel like this all kinds of things happen, and every so often strange people arrive and do strange things, but believe it or not, all the strangeness is predictable in ways that you end up recognizing; the different kinds of strangeness can be reduced to five types, and I tell you this as someone who’s paid careful attention, it’s either sex, alcohol, drugs, beatings, or shootings, that’s what it boils down to, life is like that, even strange behavior can be monotonous, for example there’ve never been any stabbings or suicides here, Yes there have, I corrected her, a professor even in the worst of circumstances, No sir, there haven’t been, a Romanian committed suicide in another hotel on the same block but here at the Wellington we haven’t seen anything like that, and the girl in 413, the one you say is your wife, all I can say is that she might have been on drugs, or she might have been crazy, or just extremely nervous, it was hard to tell, but whatever it was, she was worked up, anyway, the suitcase that she left is still here, but when I asked her for it, the Fearless Girl answered that they couldn’t give it to anyone except the person it belonged to, management’s orders, But the person it belongs to is crazy, I said raising my voice and getting up, how can you expect her to come and claim a suitcase when she’s crazy, she went crazy here, in room 413 of this hotel, you yourself just admitted that you were a witness, and the Fearless Girl, pulling on my pants leg to make me sit down, said, No, Mr. Aguilar, she didn’t go crazy here, when she got here she was already crazy, or sick, or at least extremely upset.

We agreed not to talk any more at the hotel, the Fearless Girl only had forty-five minutes left until the end of her shift, if the gentleman liked they could make a date for later, at some café, Yes, the gentleman liked, of course the gentleman liked, and then she suggested that we meet at five past ten at a cheap restaurant on Thirteenth Road and Eighty-second Street, a place called Don Conejo; the Fearless Girl, now bringing a little bit of toilet paper from the bathroom for me to blow my nose with, told me that the empanadas there were excellent and that it was where she went when she got off work, starving. Don Conejo was nearby but not so near that anyone from the reception desk would see them, and anyway she was the only one who liked it because the others didn’t like to leave the place with their clothes reeking of grease, Look, Mr. Aguilar, I understand how worried you are about your wife and I’d be happy to help you any way I can, it broke my heart to see her like that, but we have to leave here now because if they find me like this they’ll fire me, just relax and we’ll talk later, I promise you that if you wait for me at Don Conejo I’ll help you, or at least I’ll keep you company in your sorrow, you know, when you work at a hotel in some ways you end up becoming a nurse; lots of lonely people with problems come to stay here, you’re not the first, believe it or not, but we should go now because the manager will kill me if he sees me having some strange conversation with a guest, I’m not a guest, No, you’re not a guest, which makes it even worse, who knows who you might be. That’s what the Fearless Girl said but as she said it she was smiling as if to let me know that she didn’t mind not knowing, I was a stranger who had cried as he looked out the window of one of the rooms in her hotel; in other words, I was the kind of man she was prepared to be friendly to and help and probably also sleep with, because that’s the way she was.

We returned to the lobby separately, she in the elevator and I by the stairs, and from a public phone I called Aunt Sofi to check on Agustina and let them know I’d be late, She’s sleeping, she told me, and I went out to walk the streets aimlessly in the cold with my hands in my pockets and the collar of my raincoat turned up, a third-rate Humphrey Bogart among the fierce transvestites and the college-girl prostitutes in skintight jeans. I looked at my watch every few seconds as if that would make the time go faster, needing it to be five past ten so that I could barrage her with the many questions that were swarming in my head, but also because her nearness was a relief in the midst of the hell I was going through.

When it was almost time I walked to Don Conejo and discovered that it was closed, so I crossed the street and sat in the café there, near the entrance so I could watch for her arrival; asking for a cup of tea, I burrowed even deeper into the collar of my raincoat, on the verge of collapse and not wanting to run into anyone who wasn’t her, but of course two old activist friends of mine happened to be sitting at the next table, and they came up to me because they were gathering signatures to protest the forcible disappearance of someone, I didn’t know who because I paid no attention to what they said and didn’t read the petition before I signed it, I have to get out of this place, I thought, and paying for the tea and waving goodbye to them, I went out just as the Fearless Girl was crossing the street, heading toward Don Conejo.

Except that at first glance I didn’t recognize her, because she’d taken off the short-skirted navy blue suit and now she was wearing black pants which for some reason didn’t look right on her, maybe because they were too tight, and she had put her hair up in a ponytail and now she didn’t seem as attractive to me, in fact I was almost convinced that she was someone else, but what settled the matter were her nails, there could only be one set of nails like that in the known world, and it wasn’t until she was a few feet away that I noticed that the suitcase she was carrying must be Agustina’s, You brought it for me!, I shouted, Yes, I brought it, let’s hope it doesn’t get me in trouble.

We went walking along Fifteenth Road, which was torn up for some construction project, and the movement of the dump trucks and the deafening noise of the drills drowned out my questions, so I walked quietly along, thinking only about the suitcase I was carrying now, which was the proof that everything had been premeditated; my wife hadn’t come to that hotel room by chance or accident but had packed her things and left the apartment voluntarily and with a specific purpose, and her purpose was her meeting with that man, who knows how long she’d been planning it, and on and on, a flurry of similar speculations that I prefer not to recall, I was so intent on endlessly working myself up over the whole thing that I didn’t even know where I was walking, with the Fearless Girl running after me perched on platform shoes that made it hard for her to step around the gaping holes in the pavement and trying to shout over the roar of the drills, telling me who knows what about her life, something about her mother’s varicose veins, about the cost of schooling for her brothers and sisters.

As we were passing the Country Clinic she took me by the arm and pulled me in, Come on, she shouted, there’s a little cafeteria here where we won’t run into anyone, the empanadas didn’t work out, so keep me company while I have a doughnut and coffee because I’m starving to death, and I wasn’t quick enough to say that this wasn’t the place, not this clinic, because it was the only souvenir I had yet to collect on my horrible memory tour, so by the time I realized what was happening I was already sitting and eating a pink doughnut in front of the sign that said
EMERGENCY ROOM
in cold blue letters, the same emergency room where Agustina was examined the night of the dark episode…You didn’t eat a thing, the Fearless Girl said, I did, I ate half a doughnut, Not you, your wife when she was at the hotel, You’re saying she didn’t eat at all? No, the man who was with her came down to the restaurant for dinner by himself, ordered his meal and arranged for the same thing to be taken to her in the room, but then the tray was left untouched in the hall, and when I tell you untouched, I mean untouched, she didn’t even lift the covers to see what was on the dishes, I know because the next day, Sunday, the same thing happened, he came down for breakfast alone and ordered breakfast to be taken up to her, and she didn’t eat that either, and when these things happen the waiters let us know, because it can be a sign that something weird is going on in a room, I don’t know, Mr. Aguilar, honestly, it didn’t seem like a lovers’ meeting, There are lovers’ meetings that end badly, I said, Oh, Mr. Aguilar, you’re hopeless, I’m telling you frankly that the two of them weren’t very romantic, now if I were spending the night with a boyfriend…

It was so difficult, everything that’s happening is so difficult, I said to her after a long silence, though the silence was mine alone because she had continued speculating about what she would’ve done with a boyfriend in a hotel like the Wellington, You don’t know how hard all this has been, I repeated and realized that I still didn’t know her name, My name is Anita, I’ve told you three times already but all you care about is your own suffering, I also told you that I support my mother and my brothers and sisters and that besides working at the hotel I run a little business with a photocopy machine and a fax service in my garage, what else can I do, I can’t make ends meet otherwise, Where do you live, Anita, I asked, thinking to myself that it was good to be with this Anita, that it was good that her name was Anita, but that I liked her better with her hair down, If you want to make me feel better, Anita, let down your hair, I said to her but she ignored me and continued on with her extremely long story, of which all I retained was that Anita lived in Meissen, a working-class neighborhood that I knew well because decades ago I had gone there to organize meetings and sell copies of the newspaper
Socialist Revolution
, Meissen, my dear Anita, is a long fucking way out, Yes, Señor, tell me about it, each day I spend an hour and a half on the bus from Meissen to the hotel and another hour and a half getting home.

It was funny to watch how Anita managed to balance her pink doughnut on the tips of her ten little French flags and bring it to her mouth, and like the doughnut, her generous, pouting lips were pink and round and oh so sweet, coming too close to mine with the excuse of telling me any old thing, but not even the lips of a desirable girl could make me forget the suitcase that was under the table, the source of my unhappiness and resentment, I’m going to open it right here, in front of you, Anita, because it would kill me to do it alone, and Anita, who had begun to speak to me more casually but who occasionally seemed to think better of it and become more formal again, said, Go ahead, Mr. Aguilar, open it, who cares, people will think they’re personal belongings that we’re bringing to a sick relative.