Delirium (2 page)
Strange comedy, or tragedy for three voices, Agustina with her ablutions, Aunt Sofi who plays along with her, and I, Aguilar, an observer asking myself when reason fled, that thing we call reason; an invisible force, but when it’s missing, life isn’t life and what’s human is no longer human. What would we do without you, Aunt Sofi? At first I stayed home twenty-four hours a day watching Agustina and hoping that at any minute she would return to her senses, but as the days went by I began to suspect that the crisis wouldn’t come to an end overnight and I knew I’d have to pluck up the courage to face daily life again. Maybe the hardest part is accepting the stretch of middle ground between sanity and madness and learning to straddle it; by the third or fourth day of delirium the money I had on me ran out and ordinary demands arose again, if I didn’t go out to collect the money I was owed and do my weekly deliveries there wouldn’t be anything to buy food with or pay the bills, but there was no way for me to hire a nurse to stay with Agustina while I was gone and make sure she didn’t escape or do something hopelessly crazy, and it was then that the woman who said her name was Aunt Sofi rang the doorbell.
She showed up just like that, as if heaven-sent, with her two suitcases, her felt hat topped by a feather, her easy laugh, and her comfortable manner of a German from the provinces, and while she was standing in the doorway, before she’d been invited in, she explained to me that it had been years since she’d had anything to do with the family, that she lived in Mexico and had flown in to help care for her niece for as long as necessary. This struck me as odd, because my wife had never spoken to me about any aunt, and yet Agustina seemed to recognize her, or at least she recognized her hat, because she laughed, I can’t believe you still wear that little cap with the goose feather, that was all Agustina said to her but she said it warmly, cheerfully, and yet there was something that made me uneasy, if this woman hadn’t been in contact with the family, how had she learned of her niece’s breakdown, and when I asked her, she simply said, I’ve always known, Wonderful, I thought, either something’s not right here or I’ve just landed myself another seer.
The truth is, not only has this Aunt Sofi managed to lower the voltage on Agustina’s frenzy, she’s also gotten her to eat more, an enormous step forward because Agustina had been refusing anything except plain bread and pure water—those were her words, plain bread and pure water—so long as I wasn’t the one who gave them to her. But she happily accepts the cinnamon porridge Aunt Sofi feeds to her spoonful by spoonful as if she were a baby. Tell me, Aunt Sofi, why does Agustina reject food from me, but take it from you?, Because when she was little cinnamon porridge was what I would make for her when she was sick, What would we have done without you, Aunt Sofi, I say gratefully, while asking myself who on earth this Aunt Sofi must really be.
TELL ME WHAT THE SKY
looks like this summer, how the clouds pile up above us round and woolly as sheep, how my soul finds gentle rest deep in your eyes, Grandfather Portulinus persisted in asking Grandmother Blanca, referring not to any landscapes he could see but to those he dreamed, because by then he was mad, completely and utterly insane. She would take him by the hand and make him run until he was exhausted in order to tame the frenzy that otherwise could drag him down to the depths of hell, although to say he ran is a manner of speaking, since it was more the clumsy trot of a man who was by then a little fat and no longer young, and well on his way into the turmoil of dementia. Into, but also out of, of course, because sometimes he wasn’t crazy, and then he was a musician, a German musician called Nicholas, last name Portulinus, who in time would be Agustina’s grandfather and who had come from Kaub, a place with a river and a castle, only to end up amid the sugarcane fields of the scorching town of Sasaima, perhaps because the damp and elusive charm of those hot lands was so seductive for men like him, men with a tendency toward dreaminess and distraction. The matter of his origin was never entirely cleared up because it was something he rarely discussed, and if he did occasionally speak of it, he did so in that awkward Spanish of his, badly learned along the way, that never became more than the provisional language of someone who won’t specify whether he’s just arrived or whether he has yet to leave, and it wasn’t clear why he’d settled in this precise spot, although he himself maintained that if he’d chosen Sasaima out of all the towns on the planet, it was because he knew of none other with such a melodious name.
WHAT WOULDN’T I GIVE
to know what to do, but all I have is this terrible anguish, fourteen nights without sleeping, fourteen days without rest, and the determination to bring Agustina back no matter how much she resists. She’s furious and dislocated and defeated; her brain has shattered into pieces and the only thing I have to guide me in putting it back together is the compass of my love for her, my great love for her, but that compass isn’t steady now, because it’s hard for me to love her, sometimes very hard, because my Agustina isn’t nice and she doesn’t seem to love me anymore; she’s declared a war of tooth and claw in which we’re both being torn to pieces. War or indifference, I don’t know which of the two is hardest to fight, and I console myself by thinking that it isn’t she who hates me but the strange person who’s taken possession of her, that maniacal washerwoman who believes I’m merely someone who soils everything he touches.
There are moments when Agustina seems to accept a truce and scrawls pictures to explain what’s wrong with her. She draws rings surrounded by bigger rings, rings that detach themselves from other rings like clusters of anxiety, and she says that they’re the cells of her resurrected body reproducing themselves and saving her. What are you talking about, Agustina, I ask her, and she tries to explain by drawing new rings, now tiny and crowded, furiously shading them in on a sheet of notebook paper, They’re particles of my own body, Agustina insists, pressing so hard with the pencil that she tears the paper, irritated because she can’t explain, because her husband can’t understand her.
It’s the weight of my guilt working against me, guilt that I don’t know my wife better despite having lived with her for what will soon be three years. I’ve managed to establish two things about the strange territory of her madness: one, that it is by nature voracious and can swallow me up as it did her, and two, that the vertiginous rate at which it grows means that this is a fight against the clock and I’ve stepped in too late because I didn’t know soon enough how far the disaster had advanced. I’m alone in this fight, with no one to guide my steps through the labyrinth or to show me the way out when the moment comes. That’s why I have to think carefully; I must order the chaos of facts coolly and calmly, without exaggerating, without dramatizing, seeking succinct explanations and precise words that will allow me to separate concrete things from phantoms, and acts from dreams. I have to moderate my voice, remain calm, and keep the volume low, or we’ll both be lost. What’s happening to you, Agustina darling, what were you doing at that hotel, who hurt you?, I ask, but this only unleashes all the rage and noise of that other time and other world in which she’s entrenched, and the more worried I am, the more venomous she becomes. She won’t answer me, or she doesn’t want to, and maybe she doesn’t know the answer herself or can’t formulate it amidst the storm that’s erupted inside her.
Since everything around me is collapsing into uncertainty, I’ll start by describing the few things I know for sure: I know I’m on Thirteenth Road in the city where I live, Bogotá, and that the traffic, which is always heavy anyway, is impossible because of the rain. I know that my name is Aguilar, that I was a literature professor until the university was shut down because of unrest, and that since then, I’ve gradually become almost a nobody, a man who delivers dog food in order to survive, though maybe it’s to my advantage that I have nothing to occupy me except my stubborn resolve to get Agustina back. I also know—I know it now, although two weeks ago I didn’t—that any delay on my part would be criminal.
When it all began I thought it was a nightmare that we’d wake up from at any minute, This can’t be happening to us, I kept repeating to myself and deep down I believed it. I wanted to convince myself that my wife’s breakdown would last only for a few hours, that it would be over when the effect of the drugs had worn off, or the acid, or the alcohol, or whatever it was that had alienated her like this; that in any case the problem was something external, devastating but temporary, or maybe some brutal act that she couldn’t tell me about but from which she’d recover little by little. Or one of those murky episodes that are increasingly common in this city where everyone’s at war with everyone else; stories of people who’re sold doctored drugs in some bar, or who’re attacked, or who’re given
burundanga
, an herbal extract that makes them do things against their will. At first I assumed it had been something like this, and in fact I still haven’t given up the idea, and that’s why my first impulse was to take her to the nearest emergency room, at the Country Clinic, where the doctors found her agitated and delirious, but with no trace of foreign substances in her blood. The reason it’s so difficult to believe that they really found no evidence of foreign substances in her blood, the reason I refuse to accept that diagnosis, is because it would imply that the only problem is my wife’s naked soul, and that the madness issues directly from her, without the mediation of outside elements, without mitigating factors. For an instant, the same evening this hell was loosed, her expression softened and she begged me for help, or at least she tried to make contact, saying, Look, Aguilar, see my naked soul; I remember those words with the sharp clarity that a wound remembers the knife that made it.
IN THE MIDDLE OF
the drunken chaos, the polo players were shouting at Spider, who was still on the ground, Get up, Spider, don’t be a pussy, while Spider was down there in the dark and the mud, at death’s door and unable to move because, as we later learned, he had just shattered his spine on that rock. A few days later, when he came around to realizing he was still alive, he had himself flown to Houston in a private plane, to one of those mega-hospitals where your father was taken, too, in his time, Agustina kitten, because in this miserable excuse for a country anybody who gets sick and has some money makes a pilgrimage to Texas convinced that as long as the treatment’s in English they’ll be cured, that the miracle will work if it’s paid for in dollars, as if Houston were Fátima or Lourdes or the Holy Land, as if they didn’t already know that livers blooming with cirrhosis couldn’t be made right even by the technological God of the Americans. And no matter whether the doctors squeeze a fortune out of them in electrocardiograms, sonograms, or stress tests, or thread a stent through the kernel of their souls, they almost always end up the same as they would’ve here, six feet under and pushing up daisies; just look at what happened to your father, sweetheart, who took himself off to Houston only to return a little later in cold storage on an Avianca flight, just in time for his own burial in the Central Cemetery of Bogotá.
