Delirium (35 page)

The telephone rang and I answered right away, thinking it would be Rorro letting me know that everything was cool and under control, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t Rorro, it was an anonymous female voice speaking at the other end of the line, Mr. Midas McAlister, do you remember me? How was I supposed to remember anything, Agustina doll, when it was an unknown voice, completely unrecognizable, I had no fucking idea who it was, especially considering how high I was, and then the owner of the voice reminded me, A little while ago I was at your Aerobics Center with my two cousins, do you remember?, and I was thinking two cousins, uh-huh, what the fuck was this person talking about, You’ve got a terrible memory, Mr. McAlister, and I struggled to pull myself together, The three of us came to sign up and you suggested that it would be better if we went somewhere else, is it coming back to you?, Oh yes, right, right, I kept saying vaguely, still having no idea what was about to hit me, and laboriously retrieving from the fog of the past the image of those three bleached blondes in shiny lycra who stepped out of a lime-green convertible, Oh yes, I said, you were the ones who came to ask about classes and in the end decided that you’d rather enroll somewhere else, No sir, we didn’t decide, it was you who decided that you didn’t want us at your establishment, well I’m glad that you remember and I’m calling to let you know that my cousin Pablo remembers, too, and when I heard Pablo’s name the whole scene flashed before my eyes as clearly as if I were watching it on television, and before I could say a word, the woman swore a curse on me and then hung up. What was the curse? Well, something to make the bravest man quake in his boots: I’m just calling you, Mr. McAlister, to give you a message from my cousin Pablo, Pablo asked me to tell you that insults to his family are the only kind he doesn’t forgive. Do you want to know what I did then?, well you guessed it, I started to shake.

WHEN I SAW THAT
Anita had sent me a message on my beeper, I was surprised to discover that I’d given her the number; I could’ve sworn I hadn’t. The first night that I talked to her I was so engrossed in the police-detective reconstruction of the infamous dark episode at the hotel that if I gave her my number I didn’t even realize it, but now, while I was having breakfast at Marta Elena’s house with my two sons, I heard again from the unforgettable Anita, whom I’d more or less forgotten in the thirty-two hellish hours it had been my fate to live since I’d left her in Meissen.

There I was heating up corn cakes and frying eggs for Toño and Carlos, who were leaving for school in half an hour, when I received a text message from Anita that read, “I have information for you urgent meet me at Don Conejo tonight 9 pm signed Anita at the Wellington it’s about your wife and I know you’ll be interested,” and my reaction was odd, because I immediately thought, Yes, I would meet her, but I wasn’t motivated by concern for Agustina, which to tell the truth was hovering at a low point several degrees below zero for the first time since I’d known her, meaning that I wanted nothing more to do with my wife; after so many days and nights of thinking only of her, in a single sweep she’d been wiped as if by magic from my poor head stuffed to the bursting point with abuse, indifference, jealousy, and worries, Yes, I thought, I’m definitely interested in this beeper invitation, though not for Agustina’s sake but because of Anita herself.

I was at Marta Elena’s that morning because I had spent the night there; my son Toño had slept on the sofa in the living room so that I could have his bed, and for the first time since I was separated from my ex-wife I had spent the night at her house, or the house that used to be ours and now belongs to her and the boys. The thing I’d like to explain is how I ended up doing something so out of the ordinary. What happened was this: during the whole day following the debacle of the divided house, Agustina was sunk in a deep sleep, equal in intensity to the frenetic activity that she’d displayed during the night, but of the opposite nature, and toward evening, when she got up, she returned to the attack, the whole thing all over again, as frantic and ferocious as it was the first time, the imaginary border, her father’s visit, and insults, this time in every language. She shouted, Back, filthy thing;
cosa inmunda
; Out, dirty bastard;
Vade retro, Satanas
; Out, scum, until I couldn’t take it anymore, All right, Agustina, if you want me to go, I’ll go, I told her, and I left.

Expelled from my own house by a conspiracy of my crazy wife and my dead father-in-law, and without a cent in my pocket, from whom could I beg for shelter if not my children and former wife? Marta Elena, so trustworthy, so responsible, so predictable, still pretty despite the matronly look she’d acquired and despite the twenty-six years she’d spent working faithfully for the same company, without missing a single day or ever arriving late at the office, Marta Elena, the extraordinary mother, my comrade-at-arms, the person with whom I’d shared my adolescence, Marta Elena, so solid, so good, my great lifelong friend; I’ve never been able to figure out what could have come over me to make me stop loving Marta Elena.

When I woke up in her house I realized that for the first time in countless nights I had slept soundly, then I heard the still-sleepy voices of my sons who were beginning to shuffle barefoot around the house, and Marta Elena’s calm voice starting the day off with crisp instructions, Quiet or you’ll wake your father; Here’s your shirt, Toño, I’ve ironed it for you; Carlos, take your sneakers because you have gym class today. For an instant it was clear to me that precisely these, and no others, were the voices of happiness, and that the only truly good thing in this world was hearing them when I woke up. Opening my eyes, I discovered that all around me, in the bedroom that my son Toño had let me have, there were no objects, with a few exceptions, that I wasn’t familiar with or that I hadn’t placed there myself, that didn’t speak to me of my own history, that hadn’t remained in the same place for years, Good morning boys, good morning Marta Elena, I shouted from bed.

My ex-wife asked me to help her with breakfast and for a minute I seemed to be two people at once, as if I had never stopped heating up corn cakes for my sons in the mornings, and what I saw was so pleasing to me that I asked myself why it wouldn’t have worked in reality, at what point things had broken down; if this was where my children were growing up and where a woman who still loved me was keeping a place for me as if I might some day return, why in the hell, I asked myself, was I running absurdly around in pursuit of something I hadn’t lost. Of course I vaguely remembered the sense of dissatisfaction that had made me leave and driven me to look elsewhere, I remembered it, but only vaguely and I couldn’t see any justification for it, because at this exact moment everything was calling me to stay in this place where, despite my four years of absence, I’d always been present, and I was struck with uncommon force by the feeling that all the puzzle pieces of my life fit this house, which I had never lost despite having abandoned it; everything spurred me to return, everything except enthusiasm, and standing outside myself just then, enthusiasm didn’t strike me as a particularly important factor.

The boys left for school and I asked Marta Elena whether I could take a shower. She said that I could, directing me to the boys’ bathroom and then thinking better of it, The kids use up all the hot water in there, she said, you’d better shower in mine, so I went into Marta Elena’s bathroom and started to undress, not daring to close the door, which would’ve seemed ridiculous, since after undressing in front of Marta Elena for seventeen years there was no reason why I shouldn’t do it again, though I felt strange, and through the half-open door I could see that Marta Elena had finished getting dressed and was sitting on the bed, pulling on her stockings and I had the feeling, something very like vertigo, that this was the sight I’d like to see every morning for the rest of my life; now Marta Elena was adjusting her skirt and fastening her earrings, then putting on her shoes, and what’s odd is that she must have been thinking the same thing I was, because she didn’t close the door, either.

I took a quick shower, quick, I think, out of fear that she would finish getting ready and call to me from the bedroom that she was leaving; the idea of her going pained me. I felt good with her around, and I thought that I’d still like to be there when the boys got home from school so that I could go down with them to play basketball at the neighborhood courts and come back, hungry, to make the ravioli that Carlos likes, to ask Marta Elena how things had gone at the office and let my mind wander a little as she told me, with slight variations, the same stories I already knew by heart. So I took a quick shower, then started to put on the clothes I’d been wearing the day before, but I stopped, opening the doors of Marta Elena’s closet and confirming my suspicion that much of my clothing would still be hanging there, everything I hadn’t taken when I moved alone to Salmona Towers, and there it all was: my plaid shirts, my drill pants, my old leather jacket.

TODAY NICHOLAS PORTULINUS
is frying sausages for dinner and he serves them on a plate to his younger daughter, Eugenia. You’re a forest sprite, my poor little Eugenia, he tells her, you’re a silent sprite hidden away in your cave. It’s just the two of them, father and daughter, in the enormous kitchen, with sacks of oranges that the agent brought today piled against the walls and bunches of plantains hanging from the rafters. Eugenia is squeezing oranges with a heavy cast-iron juicer that is screwed to the table, from which comes not only the juice filling the pitcher but also an intense scent of orange blossoms. Nicholas Portulinus looks into the eyes of his younger daughter, Eugenia the strange, and asks her, Does the smell of oranges make you cry, too? At dawn today, he tells her, the road was carpeted with oranges crushed on the asphalt, because during the night they fell from the loaded trucks and the wheels of the cars rolled over them. I spent a long time sitting by the side of the road, little Eugenia, and the smell of oranges was very, very sad, and very, very strong. Eugenia watches him chew his food with the heavy jaw and wistful deliberation of an old cow and thinks with relief, Thank heavens Father isn’t queer today.

It’s July 20, and Independence Day is being celebrated in Sasaima; the servants have been given the night off, and Blanca, Farax, and Sofi have walked down to town to watch the parade and the fireworks, and then go to the community dance. They’ve announced that they’ll be back late, which means that if the festivities merit it they might not return until seven or eight the next morning, because tradition demands that the celebration be concluded at dawn with a town breakfast in the market square, and the mayor, who is a conservative, has announced that this year free tamales and beer will be served. Nicholas and Eugenia are left home alone, Blanca having called Eugenia aside before she left to entrust her with the care of her father, predicting that this time the task would be easy. He’s quiet, she said, all you have to do is keep your eye on him until he falls asleep, and in fact it is one of those rare peaceful moments when her father is all right and even talkative; since Eugenia isn’t used to her father speaking to her, she stutters and doesn’t know how to reply. Although it’s already nine, her father isn’t yet drifting in a ponderous prelude to sleep as he usually does, but instead he’s awake and on his face there’s something resembling a smile, today Father brims with chuckles, little gurgles, as he fries sausages in the kitchen and serves them on a plate to his younger daughter, seemingly reconciled to the simple reign of the everyday.

Eugenia looks at him and lets out a deep breath as if she really has been relieved of an exhausting responsibility. Father is queer, the girls say when they sense he’s slipping toward those murky regions where they can’t reach him, Father is queer, and no one knows what agony there is in the voice of a child who speaks those words. The first time that Eugenia thinks she noticed her father’s queerness was when she was five or six. While she was playing with shells from the river, her father was busying himself nearby clearing away the fallen leaves blocking one of the channels down which water flowed to the big house, and since the sun was strong, he was wearing a straw hat to protect his head, but it wasn’t a single hat; little Eugenia stopped playing, uneasy, when she noticed that her father was wearing not just one hat but two, one wide-brimmed straw hat on top of a smaller cloth cap. She thinks she remembers that it was horrible to suddenly realize that there was something irremediably strange about her father, something actually grotesque, so she went up to him to try to take off one of the two hats as if that would solve the larger problem, and he looked at her with unseeing eyes, infinitely remote eyes, and ever since then Eugenia thinks in terms of double hat when Father is queer, Father is double hat, she says to herself, and she is seized by dizziness.