Delirium (38 page)

FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES
all I did was shake, Agustina baby, I swear to you that after that phone call I was literally shaking, naked and helpless there like a newborn baby, until the telephone rang for a second time and I thought, Now it really is Rorro, but I was wrong again, this time it was a phone call from Mr. Sánchez, one of the security guards at the center, who spoke in gasps, unable to find the words to describe what was happening, They’re here, they’re here, Don Midas, and they’re searching, they’re tearing up the hardwood floor in the gym, they’ve already destroyed it and they’re still looking.

The first thing that popped into my head was that after the stir Agustina made that afternoon, the police must be raiding the center and taking it apart to find Dolores’s body, so I asked the guard, Who’s there, Mr. Sánchez, the police? No, Don Midas, it isn’t the police, it’s Mr. Spider’s bodyguards, Paco Malo, the Sucker, and six others, and Mr. Spider is outside with Mr. Silver, waiting in a car. I was still confused, but I managed to ask, Looking for what?, because all this came as a complete surprise, Agustina darling, if it was Spider’s thugs then they couldn’t be looking for Dolores, since after all they knew the stretch of wasteland where they’d left her mortal remains, so I went back to interrogating Sánchez, What the fuck are Spider’s men looking for at my Aerobics Center at this hour of the night? Money, Don Midas, they say that this is where you must have hidden the stash that you…what do I mean?, I’m sorry, I’m just repeating what they say, Don Midas, they’re looking for some money that according to them you stole from Don Spider and Don Silver, I’m calling to warn you, Don Midas, they say that if they don’t find anything here, they’re heading straight over there, to your apartment, these people are pissed off, Don Midas, there are lots of them and they’re extremely angry, they say that if the money isn’t here, it must be there, and pardon my language, boss, I’m just repeating what I’ve heard, they’re saying that if they have to string you up by the balls to find out where you hid it, then they’ll string you up.

You might ask, Agustina sweetheart, how I managed to think and respond in the middle of my intergalactic trip on Santa Marta Golden, a trip that was making my neurons, soft and spongy as marshmallows, bounce tamely around in the padded cell of my brain, and I tell you that either fear must work miracles or the double hit of adrenaline produced by those two calls gradually cleared away the fog, because at last I put two and two together and came to some conclusions, by which I mean that I assembled the previous month’s sequence of events as follows: one, Pablo’s cousins show up at my Aerobics Center asking to join and I rudely turn them down flat, without realizing the consequences of my actions; two, Pablo Escobar finds out and decides to teach me a lesson; three, Pablo sets a trap for me, ordering me through Mystery to ask for an excessive amount of money from Rony Silver and Spider Salazar; four, Pablo makes the money disappear and never returns it; five—and I had no way to confirm this fifth step but I deduced it logically—Pablo gets in touch with Rony and Spider and lies to them, making them think that he did return the money to me on the established date and with all the agreed-upon profits, and that he delivered it to me in full in order for me to pass their shares on; sixth and last, while I was mentally piecing together the map of the five previous points, Rony and Spider were on their way to my apartment with their gang of thugs to snip off my balls with fingernail clippers and yank off any detachable part of me, up to and including my eyelashes, to get me to tell them where I’d hidden the money that I’d supposedly swiped, so there you have it all laid out for you, baby, in six separate steps and a single move; why did the chicken cross the road? to get to the other side, riddle solved.

I admit that I’ve always been a brute to you, but you have to grant me this one thing: in the middle of my panic and the every-man-for-himself thinking that came over me, Agustina angel, I remembered you, incredible, yes, but true, I remembered you, I knew that if I fled my apartment I’d never get the call from Rorro, and it really did worry me not to know the outcome of your psycho interlude, but it’s also true that this was the extent of my heroic altruism, because there was no way I could sit there waiting for news of you until the Sucker and his hordes came to rip me to shreds, so with great sorrow and wishing you the best of luck from afar, I got the hell out of there, which meant that I had no more news of you; no news of you or Rorro or Spider or the pretty girls who used to sleep with me or of absolutely anyone until today, when who should I be fated to see but you, the rest never again, kaput, that’s it, total blackout, all lines of communication cut.

It’s as if I’ve already let go of everything and settled in the great beyond, and the longer I spend shut up here, the more I become convinced that the other life I stubbornly and methodically insisted on building in the air never really existed; now that I have infinite free time I’ve taken to philosophizing, I’ve become a speculative bastard, I like to reflect on the line that goes “for life is a dream, and dreams are only dreams,” I don’t know which poet wrote it but I’ve made it my bedtime mantra, Agustina doll, and I’d like to know who it’s by. Do me a favor and ask your husband, Professor Aguilar, he must have the information, or maybe that’s not his field of expertise. Your brother Joaco, the
paraco
Ayerbe, impotent Spider, my sumptuous apartment, the Aerobics Center with all its anorexics, Dolores and her hideous death, even my beloved BMW R100RT are all ghosts to me, actors and scenery from a play that’s finished now. The stagehands have carried everything away and now the curtain has fallen, even Pablo is a ghost, the whole country itself is ghostly, and if it wasn’t for the bombs and the bursts of machine-gun fire that echo in the distance, the tremors reaching me here, I’d swear that the place called Colombia had stopped existing long ago.

This is how I spent my last few minutes in that other world: after I received the phone calls from Pablo’s cousin and the guard at the gym, I tossed the end of my joint into the fire, put on a random pair of pants, the first shirt I could find, my Harvard cap, and some red-and-black Nike Airs, then I grabbed the overnight bag that I’d prepared that morning to take to the Londoño estate, which was still ready and waiting for me by some trick of fate, though for a different trip than originally planned, and I slung a golf bag over my shoulder which, as a precautionary measure, I kept packed full of dollars, and without even stopping to turn off the lights or the fireplace with the remote control, I hurried down to the garage for my bike and only then did I realize that I had left it at the gym, so for an instant I paused in my flight and allowed myself a hint of sadness as I said goodbye to my BMW, and to my Jacuzzi, my twin-headed shower, my soft vicuna pup–skin blanket, my precious record collection, and my deluxe Bose sound system, then I went out into the street carrying my suitcase and golf bag and took the first taxi that came by, and checking to make sure that no one was following me, I headed toward my mother’s apartment in San Luis Bertrand, for the first time in the last fourteen years.

You don’t know, Agustina baby, the host of conflicting feelings that passed through my head on that nighttime trip of forced return to the womb, of obligatory reacquaintance with my origins, a trip that was either a full step backward or a vindication of my noble, saintly mother whom I’d kept hidden for so long because of those knots in her nylon stockings. I don’t know whether you get the paradox, sweetheart, but as it turned out, the maternal territory that I had kept carefully secret and hermetically isolated from my worldly clamor suddenly appeared as my salvation, a refuge to which I could never be traced and that no one would ever suspect, and all because of a strange law of fate that had me doubling back on myself to bite my tail; how can I put this, adorable Agustina, that night in the taxi, hugging my golf bag tight, I felt that I was returning to the only corner where redemption might be possible, and I haven’t stirred from here since, nearly holding my breath so no one can track me down, and it looks like I’ll be here for as long as I have left to live on this planet, because as I’m sure you’ve seen in the papers, sweet Agustina of mine, or maybe not, since you never read the papers, Congress has approved the enforcement of the Extradition Treaty, and the DEA—in other words, Ronald Silverstein, my friend Rony Silver, 007, Mr. Double Trouble—has put together a thick file on me in which sufficient and conclusive evidence is presented to accuse me of money laundering, and just as you see me here, princess, in slippers and unshaven and sitting beside you drinking hot chocolate lovingly prepared for me by my mother, I’m a criminal wanted for extradition by the United States of America and I’m being sought at this very moment by land, sea, and air by every security organization, intelligence bureau, and international police force in existence.

But of course nothing will happen to me so long as I stay locked away in my mother’s apartment with my giving and nurturing little mother, who’s more efficient than the remote control I left behind, because with her I don’t even have to push a button, she anticipates my desires before I can formulate them myself and she hurries to please me despite her limp. Sitting on the little sofa in the living-dining room, my mother and I watch soap operas and eat rice and lentils and pray the rosary at dusk, and you can imagine, Agustina darling, that given our modest expenses, we can live forever or even longer on the dollars I brought with me in the golf bag. Because I know for a fact that there’s no informer or spy or marine in this world, no hired killer of Pablo’s or bodyguard of Spider Salazar’s, who can find my hiding place so long as I stay here, safe and sheltered on the maternal lap; I’ve become a bear in permanent hibernation, a saint perched on top of my pillar, a Tibetan monk hidden away for one hundred years in a hermitage; I bet you’re surprised, angel, to see your friend Midas turned into a cheap philosopher, a stoical prophet of the end of time, amen.

Only you, Agustina doll, only you of all the people on earth knew that if I had disappeared without a trace you could find me here, and you came to me to be told what happened to you that fateful Saturday, and since you have every right to know, well, there you have it; I’ve shown you my slice of the cake without hiding anything from you, and I guess it will be up to everybody else to show you the rest now, my little soothsayer, as blind as you are clairvoyant. I really am happy to see you looking so pretty and so well, and I swear that in these circumstances you’re the last person I expected to run into. I know that you’ll keep the secret of San Luis Bertrand for me as faithfully as ever, and now I can’t think of anything else to tell you, well, except what you already know, which is that here I have all the time in the world to think of you, which is what I do when I’d rather not think about anything.

ANITA, THE LOVELY ANITA,
is waiting for me in all her glory at Don Conejo, and she’s wearing the navy blue suit that is her work uniform, the one with the little skirt that reaches to mid-thigh, but she’s changed out of her white shirt into a tight black blouse that the hotel manager surely would not approve of, because it exposes some truly thrilling cleavage; my Anita is a stunner no matter how you look at it, and she’s also changed into a pair of very high-heeled shoes that aren’t exactly the kind you could stand in all day behind the reception desk, The girl is looking for trouble, I think as soon as I see her, and now what do I do with her.

I’d returned from Sasaima around five with Agustina and Aunt Sofi, successfully skirting the perils we’d been warned of, and with the booty from Agustina’s grandparents’ wardrobe in hand, and if I hadn’t had that appointment at nine at Don Conejo, which nothing could have persuaded me to miss, I would’ve immersed myself in the diaries and letters that very night to find out as soon as possible who the German Portulinus and his wife, Blanca, really were. Sometimes you have to wait centuries for something to happen and then all of a sudden everything happens at once; as we were entering the apartment upon our return from Sasaima, the telephone rang, It’s Bichi for you, I said to Aunt Sofi without needing to ask, because who else could that young male voice with its Colombian-Mexican accent belong to, Bichi is coming to visit, announced Aunt Sofi when she hung up, he just called to confirm.