Delirium (31 page)

That’s the Londoño Catalog of Basic Falsehoods, but each one of them branches out into a hundred shades of fabrication, and meanwhile I’m watching you, Agustina sweetheart, sitting there at the other end of the table, and I realize that while listening once more to that whole repertory of half-truths you haven’t been able to eat a bite and your food is growing cold on your plate, and I see your lovely white hands twisting as if they’d like to pull each other apart, your hands in those strange gloves that you never take off and that soon, around dessert time, maybe, will make Joaco say to you, in an irritated way, that it would be nice if you could at least take them off when you sit down at the table, and when he says that you’ll turn pale and you won’t say anything and you’ll be on the verge, the verge of the thing that has no name because your mother has taken it upon herself to erase the word from the list of words permitted in your house.

And Joaco talks animatedly, my adorable little nutcase, about how they’ll go riding with Bichi when he comes, and your mother announces that she’ll have a big pan of caramel cream
arequipe
for him to eat all by himself, and she predicts how thrilled Bichi will be when he sees that his room in the house in La Cabrera is still intact, I haven’t touched a thing, says your mother, moved, because she really is, almost to the point of tears, His clothes and toys are still there, your mother says, and her voice breaks, everything is just as it was when he left, as if no time had passed. As if nothing had happened, right, Eugenia?, because in your family nothing ever happens, that’s what I want to say to her so that Agustina will stop wringing her hands, my poor girl, who keeps drifting further away and growing paler, while I ask myself what I can do to wipe that panicked expression off your face, that look of impending doom, of something drawing nearer that has no name. When Bichi comes, Eugenia is going to organize a trip to Sasaima, the first in years ever since the property had been left in the hands of the estate agent because of the violence, But we’re going to arrange a return to the hot country, says Eugenia, her eyes wet, I’m going to have the whole house painted and the pool repaired and we’ll celebrate Bichi’s arrival with a big family trip to Sasaima, and Joaco nods, he makes it clear that this time, too, he’ll bow to his mother’s wishes in small matters, as he always does.

Neither of the two mention the fierce argument they had just before lunch, shut up alone in the library, which doesn’t have thick enough walls to have prevented the others from hearing them from outside and flinching, but even Joaco’s wife, who is clueless and dumb as a brick, catches on that they have to pretend they didn’t hear Joaco shouting in the library as he warned his mother that if Bichi came to Bogotá with that boyfriend he has in Mexico, neither Bichi nor his faggot boyfriend would set foot in this house; not this house or the one in La Cabrera or the one in the hot country either, Because if they come I’ll throw them out, and your mother, who’s shouting too but not as loud, repeats the same sentence over and over again, Hush, Joaco, don’t say such a terrible thing, the terrible and unspeakable thing being, to her mind, that Bichi has a boyfriend, not that Joaco will throw Bichi and his boyfriend out, but anyway, the rest of us outside pretend not to hear, and keep our mouths shut. As if they’d already forgotten what they were shouting about in the library a moment ago, as if Bichi didn’t have a boyfriend in Mexico or as if by not mentioning the subject they were willing it not to exist, over lunch your mother and Joaco go on planning the improvements they’ll make at Sasaima for Bichi’s visit.

When everyone’s finished eating, one maid gathers the plates, another brings in dessert, and just as you reach out your hand to take an apple from the fruit bowl, your brother Joaco, who has been making an enormous effort to contain himself, suddenly snaps and demands that you remove those filthy gloves this instant.

ON THE RIVER,
Nicholas Portulinus saw Ophelias floating, child Ophelias like his sister Ilse, who was older than Nicholas and never left Germany, or if she did, it was because the river carried her away to other lands. During the wet season, when they had to spend long hours in the open galleries of the big house in Sasaima talking as they watched the rain fall in sheets, Nicholas told Blanca and Farax about Ilse, about how in his hometown of Kaub she brought such shame on the family that it threatened to fall apart. In words veiled by decorum and sorrow Nicholas revealed to them the extreme tension generated around the sad figure of Ilse, even translating two letters from the German, one in which his father urges him to keep watch over his sister’s moral conduct and another in which his forbidding mother alludes euphemistically to certain “improper” and “very distasteful” acts that Ilse performs in front of company and that disgrace the rest of the family. Regarding the nature of these embarrassing acts, Nicholas disclosed that it had to do with a certain prickling; Ilse was afflicted by an itch so relentless that it led to her undoing.

Though it’s often said that no one is lost because of stigmas that can be borne with resignation, discretion, and in secret, it became clear that this was not Ilse’s case on the day that a group of relatives dressed in black arrived at the Portulinus house in Kaub to offer their condolences upon the death of a great-aunt. Circumspect and recollecting the deceased in a hushed silence, they sat in a circle of chairs around a rug and a small table; it was as if they were waiting before an empty stage, hands in laps, for a show to start, although of course they knew that there would be no show, and that in fact the show bringing them together had just ended, in other words the long death throes of the great-aunt, dead of some nameless illness, unmentionable like all illnesses that send great-aunts to their graves. Those present kept their eyes fixed on some small object, perhaps a ring, a bit of paper, or a coat button that they fingered as they waited for the ritual of paying their respects to be completed and for the moment to arrive at which they could say their farewells, until one of the chairs began to creak and everyone turned and saw, to their astonishment, that the girl Ilse, also dressed in black and almost a woman now, not to mention very pretty, as the relatives had just told her parents, had her hand under her skirt and was rubbing her crotch spasmodically, with vacant eyes, as if she were alone, as if decency were not imperative at wakes, as if her parents, ashamed and confused, weren’t pulling her by the arm to drag her out immediately.

According to Blanca, who transcribes in her diary words that she claims to have heard Nicholas speak, Ilse’s behavior resulted from a stinging that “poisoned the most precious parts of her body,” or to put it in medical terminology, an itch affecting the genitals, which, as anyone who’s suffered from such a malady knows, not only requires one to scratch but also to masturbate, because it arouses as well as torments, producing an agitation similar to desire but more intense. After trying various treatments, the parents declared themselves unable to control their daughter and chose to lock her in her room for hours at a time, hours that little by little became days. In her confinement she sank into a slow mental decline that the doctors diagnosed as quiet madness, or a progressive retreat inward so that what she displayed on the outside was a disconcerting and, in the view of many, intolerable combination of introspection and exhibitionism, catatonia and masturbation.

Ilse was in gradual retreat from the world, consumed by the burning itch in her crotch that derived from the scrofula or blight or rash that covered her sex, making it aggressively present but not fit to be seen, fevered with desire but at the same time undesirable, disgusting in the eyes of others and especially disgusting in Ilse’s own eyes. Meanwhile, Nicholas grew in splendor, as full of grace as a Hail Mary, according to his own mother, with the ability to recite long poems from memory and a gift for playing the piano. Nicholas, the fortunate child, the pride of parents for whom Ilse was an undeserved punishment, listened as his father, beside himself, shouted at Ilse, Don’t do that, you filthy girl, it’s disgusting, and watched him resort to brute force, half out of his mind and half racked with pain, to stop her from reaching her hand down there, which was the worst thing that could happen to the family. Anything would be better, wept his mother, anything, even death.

Nicholas was scorched by these reproaches as if by a red-hot poker, reproaches that Ilse bore with resignation as well as stubbornness, not altering her behavior one bit; there was something voracious and insatiable about his sister’s silence that at once terrified and fascinated the boy, and when he found her with her hands bound behind her, a measure that was imposed on her with increasing frequency, he would wait until his parents were away to untie her, and when she returned to her usual habits, he would whisper in her ear in the most persuasive tones, Don’t do that, Ilse, because Father will come and tie you up again. Who can say how many hours young Nicholas spent leaning against that locked door, feeling beat for beat how his sister’s ferocious welts throbbed on the other side. Then the snow fell, the snow melted, the birds sang in the blooming cherry trees, and the boy Nicholas gradually developed tastes and manifested talents while the girl Ilse brooded over conundrums, cloistered in her room and caught up in her own rhythms, and began to look increasingly like a shadow of herself.

Then Nicholas learned to steal the key, penetrate the chamber of mysteries, and make his sister’s martyrdom his own, sitting beside her and pretending that he, too, had his hands bound behind his back. You see, Ilse?, he consoled her, they’ve punished me just like you, you aren’t the only bad one. But she didn’t seem to hear him, always preoccupied with the itch that was devouring her, first her insides, then her legs, her torso, her breasts, her ears, her nose; all of her, including her eyes and voice and hair and presence, were consumed by her inner hunger, all except her sex, which radiated inflammation and neglect, sad agent of her downfall; and also of her brother Nicholas’s downfall? Because it happened then that Nicholas’s mother gave her beloved son a little piano in recognition of his precocious talent, a white piano, as Portulinus specifies in his diary, and Nicholas, as well as complying with maternal expectations by impressing everyone at family gatherings, played Ländler and waltzes in secret just for Ilse, Dance, my pretty sister, and Ilse came out of her lonely corner and danced, ungainly dances but dances all the same, and as if that weren’t enough, sometimes she even laughed as she danced, and it was then that Nicholas realized what music was for and wished with all his heart to someday become a professional musician.

But in the middle of the night during an endless winter, Ilse threw herself into the Rhine in a paroxysm of fever and drowned, and then Nicholas realized something else that as an adult he would confirm in the flesh, which is that before the onslaught of madness, sooner or later even music succumbs. It could be said that the itching of his sister’s sex settled in her brother’s soul, since Portulinus now spent his days repeating the names of rivers in alphabetical order, the Hase, the Havel, the Hunte, the Kocher, the Lech, and the Leide, perhaps to accompany Ilse on her long journey, Ilse, who drifts under the old stone bridge of Kaub in her hurry to go nowhere, while on the other side of the ocean Blanca sits on a black stone on the banks of the Sweet, watching the river run.

AUNT SOFI TOLD ME
that she had savings in Mexico, and she offered to pay whatever it took to give Agustina the necessary medical treatment. After the incident of the divided house, from which we emerged exhausted, battered, and badly shaken, she told me point-blank what she had probably refrained from saying for days out of respect for my intimacy with Agustina and for what she cryptically called Your Methods; Aunt Sofi exploded at last, scolding me for not seeing that Agustina received the proper professional attention, Anyone can see that love and patience aren’t solving the problem, she told me, and for the first time since she’d been with us she seemed exasperated, although she excused herself by explaining that she felt close to the end of her strength, that her nerves were frayed, that she couldn’t imagine how day after day I could stand the state of extreme tension in the house. If I may say so, Aunt Sofi went on, asking permission to speak but continuing before I granted it, It seems criminal not to have the girl treated by a specialist, for her sake and yours, too. Doctors, hospitals, drugs, treatments, I replied, in the three years we’ve been living together there’s nothing we haven’t tried, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing: psychoanalysis? couples therapy? lithium? Prozac? behavior therapy? Gestalt?, you name it, Aunt Sofi, and you’ll see that it’s already been crossed off the list, that we’ve been down that path before.