Delirium (30 page)

Do you mean you?, asks Aguilar, I mean the daughter, Agustina, and that’s why I shouted, No, Bichi, don’t do it, that’s why I begged him with my inner voice, the one that makes no sound but that reverberates, Don’t do it, Bichi, you don’t know what the mother is capable of, you shouldn’t trust her, you should fear the mother’s extreme weakness, the mother’s weakness is more dangerous that the Father’s wrath, but the younger son didn’t believe it and that’s why the photographs fell there for everyone to see, the photographs that the Father had taken of the Naked and Willing Aunt, the usurper of her sister’s husband, the Terrible Aunt who would be expelled with the Father so that the mother would no longer be so sad and distant, the younger brother wanted vengeance for himself and also for the mother, so that she wouldn’t be the snow queen with the shard of ice in her heart anymore, he wanted to defeat the Father’s authority and melt his mother’s icy heart, and Bichi the Lamb, He of the Hurt Back, gazed at us all from the lofty summit of his towering height, the reign of the Lamb lasting for a single minute, the kneeling family bowing their heads at the evidence of betrayal, the sister alone remaining apart, with her eyes closed, because she was the only one who already knew, knew that the Great Revelation of the photographs had just taken place, that the mystery had been laid bare, that Pandora’s box had been opened and the Furies unleashed, and Father was transformed, for the first time Father was smaller than a dwarf, tinier than a mouse, and Aunt Sofi, she of the big breasts, covered her face with her hands, while the older brother was the only one who dared to touch the photographs and look at them one by one, and Father didn’t even try to stop him because Father was a dwarf, a mouse who could only watch for the reaction of the mother, Father was waiting for the mother to let her sword fall on him, the younger brother was waiting for the mother to let her sword fall on Father’s neck, and only I knew that it couldn’t be, that we wouldn’t seal our Pact with the mother and that on the contrary our powers would be annihilated forever and the Great Revelation would become meaningless drivel, a pathetic children’s game.

Agustina looks at me and laughs. You make fun of me, Aguilar, because you say that when I’m raving I talk like Tarzan, You talk like the Pope, I say, Yes, it’s true, sometimes I can’t help talking like the Pope when he blesses the crowds from the balcony of Saint Peter’s.

AND YOUR MOUTH, AGUSTINA?,
I learned a few things about your lovely mouth, too. It was unnerving, believe me, to see you sitting at the other end of the dining-room table again, like when we were children, though not at your house in La Cabrera this time but at your cold-country place, which is where you Londoños have always looked your best, or shone in your full splendor, lordly and at ease in old corduroy pants and high boots for riding your own horses, casually wearing tweed jackets or baggy sweaters hand knit from the new, strong-smelling wool of sheep that, like the horses, also belong to you, and I’m certainly not talking about those tight sweaters that my own mother knitted for me with green and gray skeins of yarn bought at the variety store on the corner; you have to understand that there’s a world of difference between the one and the other.

The clothing you Londoños wear in what you yourselves call the cold country is especially impressive when you pair it with a languor that nicely matches the mood of your surroundings, as well as with the reading of books in French by the fire and the presence of the dogs that you treat better than humans, and here we come to another key point, the kinship with dogs, which is something you have to be born with, like christening robes; I, for example, have to scrub my hands after touching a dog because the smell clings to me and drives me crazy, but that doesn’t happen to any of you Londoños, who no matter what you do or what kind of people you get mixed up with, always play for the squeaky-clean team of Roger & Gallet when it comes to smell, except for you, Agustina darling, who prefer some kind of suspiciously Oriental scents that exasperate your brother Joaco and make him sneeze.

I remember how impressed I was each time Joaco would say, On Friday we’re going to the cold country, meaning your house in the highlands, or Today my mother is in the hot country, which meant at the Sasaima estate, or if not, We’re going to stay here, and here was the house in La Cabrera, and how could I not be dazzled, when each morning I listened to my mother thank the Holy Father for having granted her a loan at the Central Mortgage Bank to pay for that 200-square-foot apartment in San Luis Bertrand where I slept almost every night from the time I was twelve until I was nineteen, the apartment that was an unspeakable embarrassment for me and to which I never wanted to bring any of my friends, least of all Joaco; I duped them all with the story that I lived in the penthouse of a building in El Chicó, telling them that they couldn’t visit me there because my mother was terminally ill and even the slightest disturbance might be fatal, my poor mother, if she’d only known what lies I spread about her, so respectable and selfless in her little black suit and worn-down shoes, always holding her rosary, making pilgrimages from store to store in search of the best prices on lentils and rice.

My mother was right at home in a neighborhood where everyone was more or less the same, you might say that she fit the prevailing pattern of mothers in San Luis Bertrand, but there was no way I could ever bring her to school for my friends to see, these are delicate problems I’m talking to you about, Agustina angel; you, who’ve actually met my sainted mother, know that she ties her stockings above the knee with a tight knot that shows when she crosses her legs, terrible, I’ve always told her that if she limps from phlebitis it’s because those stocking tourniquets cut off her circulation, but anyway, neither my neighborhood nor my blessed mother are fit to be seen, and you can’t imagine, Agustina princess, the schemes I’ve had to come up with to keep them both hidden from everyone, as if they didn’t exist.

To meet Joaco and the rest of the gang at the building where I supposedly lived in El Chicó, I first had to take a bus from San Luis to Parallel and Ninety-second Street, and then hurry eight long blocks in order to arrive a few minutes beforehand and slip a tip to the doorman, so that there was no chance he might give me away; thanks to this early practice, I became a master in the art of pretending. To this very day, baby, no one from your side of the world has met my mother or knows of the existence of this apartment in San Luis Bertrand, well, no one except you; how I must have loved and trusted you to bring you here for an afternoon snack on unbreakable plastic dishes with my dear mother, under sacred oath not to reveal the secret, which incidentally you’ve kept religiously for me ever since.

I believe that the traumatic living circumstances of my adolescence must be the reason I was hypnotized, and still am hypnotized, by the idea that the Londoños could split their week among three different houses and do it without traveling, because traveling meant something else entirely to your family, you took trips, you flew to faraway places, but that side of things was less interesting to me as a child; what really blew me away was the idea that you could have a regular life simultaneously in three different houses, without carrying suitcases back and forth, because you had clothes in all three places, and LPs and televisions and a cook and a gardener and toys and slippers, everything three times over, even pajamas waiting for you under the pillow wherever you went, or in other words family life beautifully contained within an equilateral triangle, with an amazing house at each corner, each in a separate climate and only an hour and a half away from the other two; that’s all there was to it, Agustina princess, for me that was the height of elegance, the holy trinity, the ultimate in geometric perfection.

And now, in the dining room again, Agustina still has those ridiculously huge eyes and that insanely long hair, her fingers still extend through the holes of those gloves, gloves like a cyclist’s or a junkie’s that irritate her brother Joaco, and her slender body is still lost in the black clothes that her mother finds highly inappropriate for a sunny day in the country. From the start they were a little put off by your presence, Agustina darling, you’ve always made a habit of violating their dress code and making them feel uncomfortable. The place?, your family’s highlands estate; the time, Saturday noon; the action, the devastating chain of events that would culminate in our respective downfalls, but to introduce it properly let’s say that it all began the day before, on Friday, at six in the afternoon, with me alone in bed in my dark bedroom while the rest of the world tumbled down around me, my Aerobics Center overrun by the ghost of a dead woman, my finances collapsing because of Pablo, and my friends Spider and Silver embarked on a personal crusade against me as if the unpleasant consequences of their own greed were my fault, and just then the telephone rings and it’s your brother Joaco inviting me to spend the weekend at his house in the cold country. I turn him down flat and I’m about to hang up and sink back into my self-imposed blackout when he drops your name, Agustina is coming with us, he says, What?, I ask, startled and suddenly interested, because this is the first thing anyone has said in days that manages to capture my attention, Yes, that’s right, Joaco confirms, I said Agustina is coming with us, and when I ask him how this miracle came about he explains that your husband is in Ibagué on who knows what kind of business, and then I change my mind about this trip to the cold country: All right, I’ll come.

I accepted Joaco’s invitation, Agustina doll, because not even the worst funk could prevent me from taking advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend a few days with you, with those big dogs lying at our feet in the silent galleries open to the rippling of the eucalyptus trees in the afternoon, the scent of manure, and the comforting sight of inherited lands stretching off into the distance, what a fucking pretty thing, Agustina princess, if I’m lying when I call it nirvana, let my hand be chopped off. And suddenly there we were, back in paradise with the eucalyptuses and the dogs and all the rustic trappings, and you were as quick and teasing as you’d ever been, your smiles so easy that I, who hadn’t seen you for months, started to believe that you were cured; we had a few Heinekens and you whipped me at Scrabble, you’ve always been a fiend at Scrabble, and also at solving crossword puzzles and playing charades and instantly picking up on double entendres and riddles, in general your thing is making clever use of language and playing mischievously with words.

It was a gorgeous day, you were astonishingly beautiful, and there was just one problem, Agustina sweetheart, and that was that your eyes got even bigger than they already were and your hair grew a tiny bit longer each time your mother opened her mouth to utter one of her usual interpretations of things, so plainly counter to any evidence, and then, in that dining room so lavishly hung with paintings of colonial saints that it looks like a chapel, I realized that each lie was like torture for you and that each omission was a snare for your fragile mind, and you sat there quietly, while your mother, Joaco, and Joaco’s wife snatched the words from one another’s mouths as they discussed the big news, that Bichi had called from Mexico to say he’d be coming to the country for a few weeks before year’s end, after all those years away, Bichi, who left as a child, would return as an adult, and I see how you’re shaken and overcome, after all, your little brother must be the only person you’ve ever really loved, and who knows what crazy kind of birds must have started flapping around inside your head with the announcement of his return.

But the rest of the family is also in a state of excitement and your mother keeps approaching the subject and retreating from it, glossing over things with that amazing gift for concealment she’s always had and that Joaco plays along with so well because he’s been practicing since he was little, and the plain truths keep getting caught in the honeyed ambiguity that smoothes and civilizes everything until there’s no substance left to any of it, or until it produces convenient historical revisions and lies as big as mountains that are gradually transformed into realities by mutual consensus, I’m referring to gems like this: Bichi left for Mexico because he wanted to go to school there, not because your father was always beating him for acting like a girl; Aunt Sofi doesn’t exist, or at least she doesn’t exist so long as no one mentions her; Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño loved his three children equally and was a faithful husband until the day he died; Agustina left home at seventeen because she was a rebel, a hippie, and a pothead, not because she’d rather run away than confess to her father that she was pregnant; Midas McAlister never impregnated Agustina or abandoned her afterward, and she never had to go alone to have an abortion; Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño didn’t die of heart failure but from moral distress the day that he was driving along a hippie street and happened to see his only daughter, Agustina, sitting on the sidewalk selling necklaces of colored beads and seeds; Joaco didn’t cheat his siblings out of the family inheritance but instead is doing them the favor of managing it for them; there is no man named Aguilar, and if he does exist he has nothing to do with the Londoño family; darling Agustina isn’t stark raving mad, she just is the way she is—that’s how Eugenia and Joaco put it, not specifying what way that is—or she’s nervous and needs to take Equanil, or she didn’t sleep well last night, or she needs psychoanalysis, or she’s difficult for the sake of being difficult, or she’s always been a little strange.