Delirium (8 page)

WHO KNOWS WHAT
the people of Sasaima must say when they see Nicholas Portulinus sitting at the café in a corner by himself, a wool scarf wound tightly around his neck despite the heat, his gaze lost in space. But is there really a café in rural, rainy Sasaima, a remote mountain village? Of course not, it only shimmers amid the memories of a foreigner from another continent; it’s probably a feed store or a bar, an ice-cream shop at best, and those who enter must say, It’s the German, or It’s the teacher, and then leave him alone with his bottle of beer in his hand, taking for granted that all Germans, or at least all German musicians, are like this, strange and unmoored.

Portulinus sips his beer slowly, his face puffy above his wool scarf, until Blanca comes for him and takes him away, angry at those who doubt his sanity and determined not to acknowledge his collapse before others. But in spite of her resolve, day by day the strangeness becomes plainer, the strangeness that’s an ambiguous gleam in Portulinus’s eye when he falls silent, a look as if he’s walking lost in worlds he shares with no one, a birdlike nervousness of movement, a restlessness of swollen hands that leave damp marks on the surface of the table, hair that isn’t quite right, as if he’s forgotten to run a comb through it after a nap. It’s also a kind of panic that comes from within and spreads like a minor contagion, but more than anything, Portulinus’s madness is pain, the great pain living inside him.

Now, all these years later, two photographs of Grandfather Portulinus sit framed on the mantel at his youngest daughter, Eugenia’s, house, one taken when he was twenty-nine and the other when he was thirty-nine, which make it possible to establish a before and an after, like in those advertisements for plastic surgery or weight-loss formulas, except that in this case instead of improvement there’s pure decline, and the juxtaposition reveals how, in the space of ten years, the musician succumbed to an odious biological rhythm, a rhythm that must have been linked to his growing spiritual disquiet. Before: pleasant and seductive, curls that fall softly around the face, a gaze that scrutinizes while still remaining dreamy, an intense but balanced inner life. After: a flabby and long-suffering face, features recast, a dark and confused gaze, the swollen eyelids of an ugly woman who has cried for a long time, dull curls plastered clumsily against the left ear. Before, everything was still to be won, and after, everything is lost; the record is of irreversible damage to the spirit, a poisoning of the emanations of the soul.

DAY AFTER DAY
following the dark episode, I park for a while in front of the Wellington Hotel, far enough from the front door so that my beat-up van won’t rouse the suspicions of the doormen, and watch in the rearview mirror the movement of people on their way in or out, with or without suitcases, the flurry of bodyguards around some personage alighting from an armored Mercedes, the wariness of foreigners taking their chances on the streets of Bogotá, the bows of a bellboy in full regalia, the haggling of a street vendor selling sweets, the rapid steps of a woman crossing the street; in other words, the natural, predictable actions of all those who may be considered inhabitants of the land of the sane. They’re so lucky, goddamn it, I say to myself, and I wonder whether they can possibly be conscious of their enormous privilege.

I’m not sure what I’m waiting there for, parked outside the hotel. For Agustina’s lover to return, for me to recognize him, launch myself at him, and smash his face in? I suppose not. To demand an explanation of what happened to my wife, or the hurt he inflicted on her? Maybe. But the truth is that I don’t think the man will show up here, and anyway, deep down I don’t even believe that he’s her lover, since the only thing he did, as far as I know, was open a door; who’s to say he wasn’t the concierge. So I look out for vague signs, keeping watch with naïve and dim hope as if time might move backward and I could keep the dark episode from happening. Going over and over what’s past has become my principal curse, reexamining it in order to formulate it in new terms, to imagine different paths than the one already taken, to retrospectively alter the course of events and prevent them from leading up to this point of extreme suffering that Agustina and I have reached.

Sometimes I step into the hotel, making sure that the older man with glasses who attended me the Sunday I came to pick up Agustina isn’t on duty, then I sit at one of the tables in the lobby and order a tea with milk that a waiter brings me on a silver tray and for which I’m charged an exorbitant sum. I lie there in wait, among people hurrying about, waiting for the right moment to approach one of the desk clerks to ask for the guest register for that weekend; if they’d let me see it, I’d at least have a list of names, and behind one of those names would be a person who could tell me what I need to know, but of course I’m afraid to ask for it because they wouldn’t give it to me, they’d tell me not to stick my nose into matters that don’t concern me. But it does concern me, I’d shout at them, it’s the only thing in the world that matters to me, though then they’d have even more reason to call security, seeing me as a potential kidnapper.

Although maybe not. Among the clerks on the night shift, I’ve noticed a girl with a lot of spirit, a fearless girl. I see it in the way she carries herself, like a woman fighting tooth and nail to make a living, in the way she has of looking people straight in the eye, in her skirt, four inches shorter than those of her fellow workers, in the brisk gesture with which her hand with its painted nails pushes back her ringleted hair. She shows every sign of being ready to ignore the hotel rules and risk her job in exchange for nothing, in exchange for helping someone in need; in fact she must already be irritating the manager with that disco miniskirt and nonregulation hairstyle, and all just because, because that’s how she seems to be, strong and staunch and used to doing as she pleases. This country is full of people like her, and I’ve learned to recognize them in a flash. But what if it isn’t true? I’m afraid of being wrong, and in the end I can’t build up the courage to ask her anything, though of course the main obstacle is really the conviction that as soon as I return to the scene of events, what happened will repeat itself in a kind of unbearable replay; what’s really holding me back, I mean, is the suspicion that those events are still pulsing in the place they occurred, and I’m afraid to face them. Tomorrow I’ll do it, I tell myself as I leave the Wellington, tomorrow I’ll be back, I’ll wait until the Fearless Girl finishes her shift, I’ll ask her to come with me to a café far from the hotel, far from the gaze of her supervisor, and I’ll interrogate her.

OF COURSE I DIDN’T BELIEVE
shit when Spider told me to bet with confidence because his pecker wasn’t all the way dead yet; if I took the bet despite everything it was because ultimately I didn’t mind losing, or at least that was how I explained it to myself, since after all I’d skim the money they won from the wad that Pablo Escobar sent them through me and they wouldn’t even notice, how could they, when they were flapping their ears in delight at the rapturous and hygienic way they were getting rich, not sullying their hands in dirty business or being driven to sin or lifting a single finger, because all they had to do was wait for the filthy money to fall from heaven, already washed, laundered, and disinfected.

Or could you possibly have thought things were any other way, princess? Can it be that you didn’t know where all those dollars came from, the dollars flowing to your brother Joaco and your father and all their buddies, and so many others from the Las Lomas Polo Club and the society circles of Bogotá and Medellín, the dollars with which they opened those fat bank accounts in the Bahamas, Panama, Switzerland, and every fiscal paradise in existence, as if they were international jet-setters? Why do you think your family welcomed me into their house like a sultan, Agustina kitten, why they dusted off the Baccarat crystal and the Christofle cutlery for me, and served me mousses and pâtés and blinis that your mother made with her own hands, even though I had gotten you pregnant and not even threats could make me marry you as your father demanded? Why do you think they treated me like a king despite it all, ignoring your rage and shame? Well, because it was thanks to me that they’d bought the lobster they were serving; don’t look so surprised, sweetheart, don’t tell me you hadn’t already solved that little puzzle, because what would that say about your powers of divination.

The business I handled was bloodless and juicy, and had nothing to do with the Aerobics Center, which was just a front. To strip the veil from your eyes once and for all, Agustina doll, I’m going to give you a brief summary of the crooked dealings so that you see them in wide-screen Technicolor. Spider, Silver, Joaco, and a few others gave me X amount of money in checks in lowly Colombian pesos that I arranged to have delivered to Escobar, and when Escobar landed his shipment of cocaine in the USA, he returned their investment to them through me, but magic, oh magic!, now it was in dollars and had multiplied spectacularly, by three to one, four to one, even five to one, according to the blessed whim of Saint Escobar. And so, without tangling with the law or tarnishing their reputations, they became smug and invisible investors in drug-trafficking and fattened up their foreign bank accounts to the bursting point. Escobar was happy because he was laundering a fortune and I had no complaints, either, because I took a hefty cut.

The whole thing involved risks, of course, and to get mixed up in it you had to have steady nerves, because if the shipment didn’t land, Pablo wouldn’t even return the investment. The five-to-one deal made the old-moneys drool like crazy but it had its downside like everything else, which was that no tantrums were allowed, or in other words, the Olympian investors couldn’t complain if the money was delayed or never reached them. Not to mention that any of them could be killed at any moment, according to the rights that Saint Escobar grants himself over the lives of those who get rich at his expense; I don’t know whether you’re following me, sweetheart, I know finances aren’t your strong point, but what I’m trying to tell you is that the instant you put a dollar from Pablo in your pocket, you automatically become his pawn, a worthless lackey at his beck and call. By now you must be able to imagine who it was risking his hide in gringo-land, poking the balls of the DEA big boys over there, why who else but yours truly, Midas McAlister at your service. As soon as Pablo sent word that the oven was hot, I would fly to Miami, set myself up in an oh-so-discreet hotel in Coconut Grove, wait for the suitcases to arrive full of cash from the street sales of the drug, take what was mine and dispatch the rest to the spotless investors of Bogotá. Mission accomplished, I head back home, end of story.