Delirium (33 page)

BEFORE THE WEEPING
over Schubert, maybe three months before, things had become unbearable and I’d turned to Social Security, discovering that because of my restricted policy as a university professor, my wife only qualified for treatment at the charity hospital La Hortúa, where she was assigned to a doctor named Walter Suárez, who subjected his patients to sleeping cures, shooting them full of sodium amytal. She was admitted to one of the halls in the psychiatric ward and put to bed, and all I could do was watch her sleep, and accept that as soon as she opened her eyes, or moved her lips to try to say something, Doctor Walter Suárez’s assistants would appear with another dose of the barbiturate, a yellowish powder with a sulfurous stench that they dissolved and injected intravenously, and that’s how I spent my days and nights, in contemplation of that sleeping beauty who glowed pale and distant on the worn hospital sheets that had seen so much human suffering, her hair like a creeping vine that had claimed the pillow centuries ago; I couldn’t take my eyes off the soft and slightly trembling shadow that her eyelashes projected on her cheeks as if she were an old doll forgotten on a shelf in an antiques store, and I looked for hidden messages in the rhythm of her breath, the tone of her skin, the temperature of her hands, the silence of her organs, the ripple of time over her still body, Are you dreaming, Agustina, or just swimming in a sea of fog? Are you barricaded alone in your little death, or is there a crack I can slip through to keep you company?

As I watched over her to make sure that, helpless in her unconsciousness, my wife wouldn’t make an involuntary movement and tear out the needle through which the sleep-inducing drug entered her vein, so that she wasn’t bothered by drafts or caught uncovered by the early-morning chill or tormented by nightmares or possessed by who knows what incubuses, as I sat waiting for the ghostly hours at La Hortúa to pass, I often recalled the terrible stories of the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, peopled with naked girls lying drugged, girls in whom no trace of love, shame, or fear was left. Three times a day the effects of the drug wore off and I had to feed her and take her to the bathroom, and then for a few minutes her body came back to life but her soul was still lost, her gaze turned inward and her movements became mechanical and remote, like a marionette’s.

Six other patients shared the room with Agustina, all of them also there to find rest from guilt, hallucinations, and worries with Doctor Walter’s famed sodium amytal, and one of them, the one in the next bed, was an old woman as light as a breath of air, whose husband, a man as old as she was, brushed her hair, massaged her legs to stimulate her circulation, and rubbed lotion on her hands because, as he would say, My Teresa doesn’t like her hands to be dry, Have you seen how white my Teresa’s hands are, young Aguilar?, Look, not a mark, and that’s because they’ve never seen the sun, since whenever she goes out she puts on gloves to protect them. This gentleman had an unusual name; he was called Eva, because, as he explained to me, Eva was short for Evaristo, and I played endless chess games with Don Evaristo as our respective girls sank down to regions very close to death, and sometimes Don Eva would bring a guitar and sit next to his Teresa singing old boleros in her ear in a ruined but impeccably modulated voice, the voice of a professional singer of serenades, and over and over again he’d sing her the song that goes “pretty little girl with locks of gold, pearly teeth, ruby lips,” and he’d say to me, It’s Teresa’s favorite, ever since we got married I’ve sung it for her on all our anniversaries, of course there are other songs that she likes, too, like “Acacias,” and “Sabor a Mí,” “Bésame Mucho,” and “Pardon Me Young Man But Don’t Presume,” Don Evaristo told me, My Teresa is a very discerning woman, a lover of good music and all fine things, but wait, come here, come closer, see how she smiles when I sing “Pretty Little Girl,” I don’t know whether you can tell because it’s just the faintest hint of a smile, but knowing even her subtlest expressions as I do, I know that a smile lights up her face each time I sing that song.

Don Evaristo stayed religiously by his wife’s side from the time he arrived at the hospital at eight on the dot in the morning until the clock struck eight at night, and when he got up to go he always asked me to look after her in the same words, I’m off to work and I leave the heart of my heart in your care, he’d say patting me on the shoulder; on one of these occasions, I asked him what he did, and Don Eva replied, I work nights singing boleros at the Blue Star, a popular, reputable bar near here, and once when I was walking to the hospital along Twelfth Street near Tenth, I happened upon the famous Blue Star, which actually turned out to be a roadhouse and brothel of the lowest sort, and since it was seven thirty in the morning and they were cleaning the place, the woman who was sweeping had the doors wide open so that I could peek in and see a row of wooden tables with clay candlesticks in the middle, dusty curtains hiding dismal little rooms with cots and washbasins, red lightbulbs that by night must have disguised the shabbiness, and a wooden platform with a single microphone where I imagined Don Eva singing “Pretty Little Girl” so that the whores and their clients could dance while he pined for his Teresa, who lay next to my Agustina, the torments of her madness lulled with sodium amytal, and a minute later, Don Eva emerged from one of the tiny rooms, and behind him came a fat girl who by all indications seemed to be one of the women who worked there; at first Don Eva tried to avoid meeting me, but since it was inevitable, he greeted me warmly and introduced me to the woman who was with him, This is Jenny Paola, he said, and shrugged his shoulders in apology, doing his best to explain, I take care of my Teresa and Jenny Paola takes care of me, what’s to be done, young Aguilar, human beings are vulnerable creatures in desperate need of companionship…

The days passed identically from the first to the fourth, and then on the fifth, when we were in the middle of one of our interminable chess matches, I announced to Don Eva that I wasn’t going to let them drug my wife anymore and that I was taking her away tomorrow, I couldn’t stand the agony of seeing her this way, blank, lifeless, nonexistent, Anything but this, I said, Don Eva, anything but something so much like death, You’re doing the right thing, boy, take her away, what you say is true, And what about you, Don Eva, why don’t you bring Teresa home with you, you could watch over her there by day and find someone to take your place at night while you’re working, Oh no, Don Eva said, I couldn’t do that to my Teresa, you can’t imagine how frightened she gets when she’s awake.

Hours later, as Agustina and I were leaving La Hortúa, we were welcomed by one of those Bogotá afternoons that are beyond compare, I’m referring to the high-altitude sky of an intense hydrangea blue and the smell of mountain vegetation, and unlike Teresa, my Agustina wasn’t terrified to be awake again, in fact she seemed happy and ready to return to the world of the living; The sun is so nice, she said, leaning on a stone wall where the rays fell, her head slightly tilted, half puzzled and half amused, as if she hadn’t seen me for a while and now I seemed slightly different but she couldn’t quite say why, Your hair is shinier, she said at last, stretching out her hand to touch it, and you’ve gotten some gray hairs, Please, Agustina, I’ve had gray hairs since you’ve known me, Yes, but it isn’t the same, she declared without taking the time to explain, and she didn’t want to go straight home, so we walked with our arms around each other along the streets of the city center, as dazzled as Bogotá’s founder, Don Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, must have been the first time he set foot on this high plain more than four centuries ago and thought it blessed.

The city responded to our enthusiasm by displaying the humility of a newly established town and the Plaza de Bolívar welcomed us with the golden glow of a slanting light; at Agustina’s request, we went into the cathedral, where I showed her Jiménez de Quesada’s tomb, Look, Agustina, we were just talking about him and here’s his tomb, then she walked to the vestry, where she bought six big red candles, lighting them and setting them beside the tomb, Wouldn’t you rather offer them to some saint?, I asked her, Look, over there is Saint Joseph with the Christ Child in his arms, and in that chapel there’s a saint ascending among cherubim who must be the Virgen del Carmen, and there’s the Dolorosa with beams of light shooting from her crown, any one of them would work, whereas there’s no guarantee of the saintliness of the founder of Santa Fé de Bogotá, who knows how good he really was, Good enough, because once they get to heaven they’re all alike, Agustina assures me, And why six candles?, I ask her, One for each of my five senses, so that from now on they don’t betray me, And the sixth?, The sixth is for my sanity; let’s see whether by some miracle this Don Gonzalo brings it back.

THOUGH IT’S NOT CLEAR
just when, Abelito Caballero, alias Farax, gradually becomes the center of the Portulinus household: Nicholas’s beloved piano disciple, Blanca’s companion in the tasks of feeding the rabbits, collecting the eggs from the henhouse, letting the dogs loose at night, shooing away the bats that nest in the rafters, and taking Nicholas on walks to clear his head, confidant of Sofi, who is just beginning to have secret loves, and accomplice in Eugenia’s slow, mute games. Writing regularly and at length in her diary, Blanca tells how she spends her days, without altering the general shape of things or omitting details, while Nicholas, in his own diary, shows a notorious lack of precision in his stories, which are sometimes cut off in the middle and other times lack a logical order, often becoming so tangled that it’s impossible to understand what they’re about, but this complete chaos, on a level that might be called literary, contrasts with a curious and obsessive tendency to quantify certain events; for example, in the upper left-hand corner he writes “m. r. B”—marital relations with Blanca—each time he has them, which occurs with astonishing frequency, or to be more specific, almost every day. The longest period of abstinence recorded is scarcely five days long and corresponds to a week when he was severely depressed; another of the regular accounts he keeps in the margins is “dreamed of F last night,” or “dreamed of F during nap,” with the F definitely standing for Farax.

Although husband and wife had vowed to respect the privacy and secrecy of each other’s diaries, there’s no doubt that Blanca regularly leafed through Nicholas’s, perhaps less out of an unhealthy curiosity than as a means of obtaining clues to her husband’s state of mind that would allow her to anticipate major attacks of rage and melancholy, and Nicholas was undoubtedly aware of this systematic spying, because when he didn’t want her to know something he would write it in German, as on the page for a day in the month of April, when the customary “dreamed of F last night” is followed by parentheses and in tiny, cramped, almost illegible handwriting “Ich bin mit auffälliger Erektion aufgewacht,” or I woke up with a considerable erection.

Not only did Nicholas give the boy piano lessons but he also made an effort to teach him to compose, unveiling the musical structure and lyrical secrets of
bambucos
and
pasillos
and introducing him to English and German poetry so that it might serve as a source of lyrical inspiration for his future compositions, and as if all that weren’t enough, he gave him, one by one, most of his own books, much to the surprise of Blanca, who watched entire shelves disappear from the library, their contents later appearing scattered across the floor of Farax’s room. Tell me why you’re giving the boy all your books, Nicholas, she asked him, but she received only vague replies like, So he can educate himself, woman, a musician without knowledge of the classics is nothing. Little by little he had given up all contact with his daughters, contact that had never been particularly close anyway, and whenever either of them required his attention he would reply, Ask Farax, he knows, or Get it from Farax, he has it, or Go with Farax, he’ll take you.

As the boy grew physically and spiritually stronger, as if nourished by the love and care of his adopted family, Nicholas was deteriorating, each day becoming more bloated, lost in his own musings, detached from everything around him, and prone to confusing real people with imaginary ones, especially Abelito with Farax, and vice versa. More painfully than in other instances his mind seemed to go to pieces at the spectacle of Abelito, the real boy, and Farax, the dream boy, battling each other on the smooth white marble of ancient ruins and wounding each other, bleeding, and in the process wounding Nicholas, too; or rather wounding only Nicholas, because he was the real victim of this imaginary combat, the one bleeding to death in the temple crumbling into dust amid the greatest splendor. I see a polished surface, Blanquita darling, I see a spotless expanse, I’m dazzled by the metallic gleam of blood on that expanse, I’m overwhelmed and transfixed by the enigma of spilled blood. What are you talking about, Nicholas, look, your lunch is getting cold, stop thinking about blood and unpleasant things, the girls and Farax are already at the table. Farax or Abelito?, he asks her, perturbed. Please, Nicholas, you know very well that they’re the same person. Yes, Blanquita, but only one of the two is real, only one of the two is strong, and I don’t know which it is. You’re dreaming, Nicholas, you got up from your nap but haven’t woken yet. I’m sorry, Blanca my dove, but it’s only in dreams—daydreams?—that I’m able to understand the true nature of things, and today I realized that the one who’s licking his wounds is bleeding to death. These are fancies of yours, Nicholas, you’re just hungry. You refuse to see that something terrible is going to happen, woman, because I can’t tell which one really exists, whether it’s Farax or me, Farax or Nicholas, one of the two will prevail and the other is fated to disappear, because there’s no room for both on the face of the earth.