Delirium (28 page)

The picture was really incredible, Pablo Escobar, the most wanted man in history, in a white shirt and with his face bare, no dark glasses or cap or fake beard or plastic surgery, just standing there, as he is, leaning like any tourist against the railing around the White House, which you could see behind him with its Greek columns and the triangular pediment of its north face, so as I looked at that picture, Agustina angel, I said, Unbelievable, Don Pablo, President Reagan is looking for you everywhere and there you are right at his front gate, and he replied, Reagan’s problem, Midas my friend, is that he’s the one behind bars.

And yet things had changed for Pablo since that carefree afternoon in the capital of the empire, because in this dark, empty place that was his hideout he didn’t strike me as his usual self; there was even one silly detail that made me think the end might be near for him, and it was a cardboard box holding the remains of some fried fish he’d been eating, I’m sure one of the gunmen guarding him had bought it for him at some stall, which was fine, but what I couldn’t understand, Agustina princess, was why Pablo hadn’t ordered for those cold, greasy leftovers to be taken away. I don’t know if you follow me, it was nothing, really, just the sort of thing I always notice, carelessness that I tend to interpret as a sign of decline.

Pablo doesn’t waste time, he gets straight to the point, so in twenty minutes we had settled the four business matters on the table and then he went on to question me about what has always been his great concern: he wanted to know what was being hatched in Bogotá with regard to the Extradition Treaty that would surrender drug traffickers to the United States, and when I told him it was almost certain that Congress would enforce it, I saw him tremble with righteous fury and heard him speak a momentous sentence, the same sentence that later echoed in my memory when the bomb exploded at L’Esplanade, and take careful note, Agustina princess, because what he said was the historic proclamation of his vengeance: I’m going to spend my fortune making this country weep. Do you realize what that means, doll?

Since Pablo is a phoenix and has the nine lives of a cat, he had soon overcome the difficulties he was in at the time of our second meeting and was the master of the universe again, and there were more samba dancers and armies of hired assassins and bloodbaths all over the nation, and meetings with ex-presidents of the Republic and giraffes and airplanes and Olympic-size pools, and so two years had gone by since I’d heard him utter his threat, and then the other night, when the bomb went off at L’Esplanade, I remembered it and thought: The time has come, goddamn it. I’m going to spend my fortune making this country weep, that’s what Pablo said to me, Agustina darling, and his fortune must be the biggest in the world, so if the man manages to squeeze one tear from us for each dollar he’s got, think how much crying we still have left to do.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME
you saw your sister, Eugenia, I ask Aunt Sofi, a more or less routine question with no notion of the kind of answer it will elicit, The last time? Why it was the day of the final judgment, the day the family was destroyed, What are you talking about, Aunt Sofi, About precisely that, Aguilar, about the day the family became simply a memory, and a bitter memory at that, I’m talking about a Palm Sunday thirteen years ago, A Sunday, I say, why is it that everything has to happen to us on Sunday?

Agustina was seventeen and finishing high school that year, Aunt Sofi tells me, and Joaco, who was twenty, was already in college, and Bichi had turned fifteen but he was still a child, though he was very tall, probably already as tall as he is now, which is six foot two, but he was childish and shy, too, a boy with few friends, desperately attached to home and especially to Agustina. It was six thirty in the evening, says Aunt Sofi, when it happened. Like every Sunday when they were at their house in La Cabrera, lunch consisted of banana–passion fruit sorbet, a proper chicken-and-potato
ajiaco
soup, and custard for dessert, and at three o’clock everyone was home, a fairly unusual occurrence, Joaco in tennis shoes and white shorts because he’d spent the morning playing sports at the club and the other two children, Agustina and Bichi, still in their pajamas, because on Sundays Carlos Vicente Senior made the special concession of allowing them to come to the table like that. My sister, Eugenia, and I had taken palm branches to be blessed at the twelve o’clock service at Santa María de Ángeles and on the way home we stopped at a little street market to buy avocados for the
ajiaco
, and since it was a beautiful afternoon we sat for a while in the sun on a low wall, although the real reason we sat there was because my sister, Eugenia, had broken a shoe strap, isn’t life incredible, Aguilar, if she hadn’t broken that strap we probably wouldn’t have started to talk, which we almost never did although we’d lived together all our lives except for a few brief intervals.

Do you remember what you talked about?, I ask, Yes, of course I remember, it began with the strap, the two of us discussing how the shoe could be fixed, Tomorrow, if you want, on the way to the Areneras clinic I can leave it at a shoe-repair place for you, I’ll take in the pair so that both can be reheeled, that’s what I said to my sister, Eugenia, At the time, Aunt Sofi says, I’d been working for several years as a volunteer nurse at a clinic for the children of the workers in the sand pits north of the city, and though I don’t recall what paths our conversation took, we ended up talking about Sasaima, a subject that we usually avoided because of the many unspoken things that had happened there, but that day, as luck would have it, we wound up discussing the eternal mystery of Farax’s passage through our childhood, Farax?, I ask, it sounds like a dog’s name, No, Aunt Sofi answers, he was a handsome blond boy, a piano student, his name was Abelito Caballero but we called him Farax, Where did the nickname come from, I ask. That I couldn’t tell you, nicknames are like sayings, you never know who came up with them. Anyway, that afternoon, for the first time in our lives, Eugenia and I began to approach the edges of the mysterious chasm of Farax’s stay in the house where we grew up, the brutal way things changed between my parents from the time Farax first appeared.

Eugenia and I were coming closer and closer to the heart of the matter, Aunt Sofi says, and it was I who adjourned the meeting, reminding her of the
ajiaco
, I who prevented us from going any further, Maybe you were afraid, I say, Yes, I might have been, maybe I believed that all secrets are kept in the same box, a single box of secrets, and that if you reveal one you risk exposing all the rest, And you were keeping a big secret from your sister, I say, Yes, well, I already confessed that to you, Aguilar, let’s not go over that again, All right, I agree, but tell me more about your conversation after the Palm Sunday service. Let’s go, Sofi said to Eugenia, your husband and children must be hungry, and Eugenia smiled—sadly, I think now—You’ve been living with us for how many years, she said to Sofi, and you always say it that way, your husband and your children, I wonder whether I’ll ever hear you say my brother-in-law and my nieces and nephews, and it was precisely because of words like these, which stung me so, that I always avoided conversations with my sister, Aunt Sofi says to me and then confesses that she was afraid of what might happen, On the one hand I felt the urge to reveal everything to Eugenia and beg her forgiveness a thousand times over, a forgiveness I knew that she could never give, but on the other hand some part of me rebelled and I felt a terrible urge to say to her face,
My
husband and
my
children, Eugenia, my husband and my children, because they’re more mine than they are yours, but the conversation took another turn and nothing more was said about Farax or the other, even pricklier, matter; it was left at that because they never had a chance to speak of it again.

It’s been one of our rules for living, Aunt Sofi says to me, that way of taking refuge in silence when the truth is about to surface, We’re paying a high price for that strategy, I say, I know, says Sofi, you’re talking about the tangles in Agustina’s head, That’s right, Aunt Sofi, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Anyway, the day was still glorious and the rest of the way home Eugenia and I laughed, and that was even more unusual, hearing my sister laugh, the two of us laughing because the broken strap was making her limp, and then during lunch Eugenia sat at the head of the table, beautiful, silent, and remote as always, while I served the
ajiaco
, running in and out of the kitchen to make sure that everything was ready, the trays of chicken and the ears of corn, the cream, the capers, and the avocados in their respective bowls, and the
ajiaco
with the green herb
guascas
piping hot in the big earthenware tureen, because on Sundays the food was served with a wooden spoon from black clay Ráquira dishes, just as it had been all our lives in my mother’s house, despite the fact that the local cuisine was never to my father’s taste, since he was Colombian when it came to composing traditional dance tunes but still German when it came time to eat, but as I was saying, Aguilar, in Carlos Vicente’s presence my sister, Eugenia, fell silent.

And Agustina?, I ask, Agustina, too, she was so entranced by her father that she couldn’t utter a word. After lunch everybody went off on their own, Carlos Vicente and Eugenia shut themselves in their bedroom, Joaco left in the car, and what Agustina was up to I don’t know, Try to remember, Aunt Sofi, I’d like to know what Agustina did after lunch, I don’t know, Aguilar, anything I told you would be a lie, and yet I remember perfectly that I went out into the front garden to prune the roses, and that Bichi put on a sweater and socks and boots over his pajamas and said that he was going to ride his bike around the neighborhood, although he really only rode around the block, over and over again, always clockwise, I saw him pass the house at least seven or eight times, so tall that the bike looked comically small and the cuffs of his pajama bottoms riding up over his ankles, with those black curls still uncombed, that beautiful face, those eyes that already had such depths, and an almost feminine delicacy of features, and I remember asking myself, When will that boy change, he’s such a solitary child, it must be fear of his father that keeps him from growing up and making friends, I remember all that with horrible clarity, Aunt Sofi says, I’ve read that when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, shadows were etched on the walls where they were cast, and everything that happened during our family atomic bomb has been chiseled into my memory, too, my pupils even retain the image of the long-stemmed yellow roses that I cut that afternoon for the dining-room vases.

Around five thirty in the afternoon the maids brought hot chocolate with cheese buns and yucca rolls to the television room and one by one we all gathered there, even Joaco, who on Sundays didn’t usually come home until late at night, and, odder still, Carlos Vicente Senior was there, which really was strange because except at mealtimes he was either out or shut up in his study, not being a man who devoted much time to family life, but I tell you Aguilar, we were all there as if we’d been summoned, as if someone directing the scene had made sure that no one was missing, by which I mean to say that it was written that everyone be in attendance that Sunday. We’d probably all been drawn into the television room by the scent of the fresh-baked yucca rolls but that would be an easy explanation; the only real answer is to acknowledge that the scene had been scripted by fate long ago. Aunt Sofi was serving the hot chocolate, the two younger children were in an argument over which channel to watch, Carlos Vicente and Joaco had started a game of chess, and Eugenia was knitting a lilac-colored shawl, You may ask what the significance of these minor details is and I tell you again that they mean everything, because this was the last time for us.

Though no one was expecting her, Aminta came to visit; she was a maid who’d worked in the house for years, since she was very young, in fact, until the day, some eleven months before that Sunday, when she told us that she was pregnant; this is what’s terrible about Eugenia, her dark side, when she heard that Aminta was expecting a baby she fired her, the children cried, I tried to intercede, but Eugenia stood firm, maybe it was the same horror she’s always had of other people’s sexuality surging up in her again, a horror that’s probably also loathing of her own sexuality, I wouldn’t be surprised, but most important, this compulsion to censure and regulate the sex life of others was something she shared with Carlos Vicente, the two were united by the joyless pursuit, they coincided in it, they were accomplices in it, and it was the pillar of their authority, maybe even the mainstay of the family honor, as if by hereditary training they knew that whoever controls the sexuality of the rest of the tribe is in command, I don’t know whether you understand what I’m talking about, Aguilar, Of course I do, I say, if I didn’t, how could I ever understand this country of ours.

But Aunt Sofi continues to overflow with explanations as if she’s addressing them to herself, It’s a kind of force more powerful than anything else, something in the blood, a pitiless and indignant condemnation of sexuality in any form as something repugnant, Eugenia was insulted by couples who kissed in the park, to the extent that she complained because the police wouldn’t prevent them from doing
that
in public,
that
being anything having to do with sexuality, with sensuality, two things that she always refused to name, reducing them to a
that
uttered with a grimace as if merely mentioning them soiled her mouth. I don’t know where she got the phobia because neither my mother nor my father were like that, they had other fixations but not that one, nor did anyone else in Sasaima, in such matters Eugenia is more like Carlos Vicente, and I’d say that she learned the phobia from him and then developed her own extreme version; viewing people’s sex lives as a personal affront must be a hereditary trait of the families of Bogotá, or maybe it’s the very quality that gives them their stamp of distinction, I couldn’t tell you, Aguilar, but what I do know is that it’s there that the heart of the suffering lies, suffering that’s inherited, that spreads and is transmitted, suffering that people inflict on one another; in Eugenia’s case I suspect she’s just as hard on herself privately, but in the case of Carlos Vicente I know for a fact that it was only a front.

Let’s go back to that Sunday with Bichi riding his bicycle around the block, you pruning the roses, and Agustina holed up somewhere in the house, I suggest but then immediately ask, Or had Agustina gone out? No, no, she was still there, I just don’t know what she was doing, but of course she was there, Aunt Sofi assures me, the scene was set, the actors were ready, and now all that was lacking was the trigger to set things off, which wasn’t long in coming. It was a quarter past six that evening when Aminta arrived; it had been a while since we’d seen her and she’d brought her newborn daughter, intending to announce that in honor of my sister and me she would be called Eugenia Sofía, and to ask them whether they would be godparents at the baptism, To ask whom? Why Eugenia and Carlos Vicente, the baptism would take place in a few weeks and the baby was a little doll, Aminta had dressed her all in pink, the bonnet, the dress, the mittens, the booties, even the shawl she was wrapped in was pink, then Eugenia hugged Aminta as if to say, Now you’re pardoned, and although she didn’t say it I know she was thinking it, because for her, giving birth was like forgiveness for a great sin; my sister, Eugenia, said, and I’m repeating this word for word, With the yarn I have left when I finish this shawl I’m going to knit this little darling an outfit to keep her warm at night, that was exactly what she said, this was thirteen years ago but as I told you, Aguilar, I remember every gesture, every word, like the shadows etched on the walls of Hiroshima, and I’m sure that Agustina remembers it, too, step by step and word by word, because it’s emblazoned inside all of us who were there, throbbing in our hearts and memories.