Delirium (19 page)
SOME THINGS ARE BEYOND
the control of my Sight, says Agustina, because they’re stronger than my gift of seeing. Not even the secret photographs of Aunt Sofi have the power to control these things, and of all of them, it’s the blood that disturbs me most. She means the Spilled Blood, which surprises and overwhelms her each time it escapes from where it should be, which is inside of people. When it obediently flows in its hidden pathways, blood doesn’t bother me because it’s invisible, it has no smell, and the rush of its many white and red globules isn’t noisy at all. One would think God created it to be quiet and secret, but that’s not true, since blood, like steamed milk, is always waiting for the chance to spill over, and when it starts it won’t stop.
Come, Bichi Bichito, little boy, come here and let me cut those fingernails of yours that are black from playing in the dirt, and Bichi, trusting, holds out his hand to his sister Agustina; my little brother’s hand is so sweet, he’s such an adorable boy with those black curls, and so defenseless, the two of us sit on the bed, with my left hand I hold his hand tight and in my right I hold the nail clippers, and meanwhile, with his free hand, he plays at making a little pile of the bits of lint on the wool bedspread, Bichi’s mind is elsewhere as I cut his fingernails, or maybe he’s not thinking of anything, maybe he’s so small that his thoughts are full of the bits of lint, making him forget his own hand as Agustina, who is hardly any older, cuts the fingernail of his little finger with a click.
A tiny piece of nail springs away and falls to the floor, and it’s the tiniest thing on the planet, if Bichi himself is as small as can be, imagine how tiny the nail on his little finger is. Says Agustina: At the time, I don’t think my little brother even knew how to talk yet. Stay still, baby, don’t wiggle so much, this finger is called the ring finger because you wear rings on it, I make another click and a tiny sliver of crescent moon flies through the air, That’s two nails, Bichito, only three left and if you don’t move we’ll be done very soon, this bigger finger is the middle finger, stay still or I can’t do it, there’s another click and the first unexpected thing is that this last bit of nail doesn’t spring into the air but falls softly straight down onto my skirt, the second thing, though not right away but after a long silence has passed, is the inexplicable howl that Bichi lets out seemingly just for the sake of it, and he doesn’t even pull away his hand, which is still caught in mine, his little hand offered up and exposed as if that cry had nothing to do with it.
Only after a while, when Bichi’s cry breaks and turns into sobs, only then do Agustina’s eyes see, for the first time since they opened to the world, how something warm and red is oozing out and staining the bedspread, by now Bichi has pulled his hand away and he brings it to his face which now is also sticky and stained, Let me see, Bichi, please, I try to look at his finger to understand what’s happening, but my head goes fuzzy because I’m shaking, fear takes away my powers, and so many voices bombard me that I can’t understand any of them, the worst of the voices, the one that paralyzes me most, is the one that keeps repeating that I’ve hurt Bichi, that I’ve done him harm, just like my father, I’m sorry, Bichito, please say you forgive me, and he shows me his hand red with blood and his eyes are full of tears, Quiet, my love, quiet, baby, if you cry like that I can’t see anything.
A faint voice reaches my mind and reveals to me that the soft nail I just cut isn’t a nail but the little piece of fingertip that his finger is now missing, I’ll fix it for you, Bichito my love, but don’t cry like that because they’ll punish me for hurting you, and Bichi tries not to cry, he’s still whimpering but very quietly, it’s incredible how his finger matches up with the tip that has come off, they could be stuck back together if it weren’t for the blood that keeps coming out, because this is the Blood, Bichi Bichito, this is what’s called the Spilled Blood, and now I can hear the Big Voice, which warns me Your little brother will die because all the blood inside of him will come out the tip of his finger, then I don’t care if they punish me or if Bichi screams and goes running to tell my mother because more than anything I don’t want Bichi to die, and I think I remember that I cried all that night and that some brown spots were left on the bedspread as a reminder of the bad thing I did, and when my brother Bichi and I were older, his finger was still a little bit short because the tip never grew back, he was missing the tip of his middle finger and he must be missing it still, each time I think of that I start to cry and can’t stop thinking that I was the last person you would’ve expected to hurt you, wherever you are, Bichi, little brother, I’d give anything to make what I did to you stop hurting. After that the thread of blood was hidden again and ran inside, waiting for a new chance to confuse me and blur my special sight.
La Cabrera was a modern neighborhood, with private streets to protect us and guards in ponchos stationed twenty-four hours a day in little huts with bulletproof windows in front of each house, and we children were never left on our own because my mother or Aminta or any of the other maids, if not Aunt Sofi, who by now had come to live with us, were there to watch us, but one afternoon Aminta snuck away to see her boyfriend, and Agustina doesn’t know where the other adults were, but she and her two brothers were left alone and someone rang the doorbell, Don’t open the door, Agustina, don’t open it, Bichito, we’re not allowed to open the door, but I looked out the window and saw that it was the neighbors’ guard, he was wearing his black wool poncho and from outside he made me understand that he wanted a glass of water, Look, Joaco, it’s a watchman and he just wants water, and I ran to the kitchen to get it and opened the door to give it to him and he drank it in two swallows, but the third time he tried to bring the glass to his mouth it fell to the ground and shattered, then he leaned a little against the wall and slid slowly down it, he must have been hot because he took off the poncho without saying a word and then he was on the floor clutching it.
Bichi came out to see what was happening and he stood there beside me and after a while the security-guard man asked me from the floor to please give him more water, and that thing had already started to happen: the Blood was slowly coming from him, making its way out of his body, and a voice told Agustina that only water could control the will of the Blood that is Spilled, the guard asked me to bring him water and I understood what he meant, he was letting me know that he wouldn’t die if I gave him water so I ran to the kitchen to get him another glass, What are you doing, Joaco shouted and she said, I’m bringing him more water because he’s thirsty, He’s not thirsty, he’s dying, can’t you see that somebody hurt him and he’s dying?
But he was thirsty, he tried to sit up and he stretched his hand out toward me, toward the glass that I was giving him, his fingers brushed mine, which still retain the memory of that touch, but he didn’t take the glass, instead he slid down again on his side, slowly, like his blood, which was now a big dark puddle on the white marble of the entranceway, the tips of Bichi’s shoes were at the edge of the puddle and I pushed him back with my arm, Don’t touch that blood I told him, but Bichi didn’t listen, Did you think, brother of mine, that the blood that day was like the waters of the Styx and that touching it would make us invincible?
The rest of the afternoon was very long, sunny at first but then less so until the air turned violet and each thing grew a precise shadow, as if cut out with scissors, and the cold started to come down from the mountains but I didn’t feel it because I was standing at the edge of that man’s blood, unable to take my eyes off it or move, my eyes wide open and my sight growing sharper and sharper, standing there like a pillar of salt because the sight of blood freezes my powers and traps me, Bichi wasn’t with me anymore and neither was Joaco and even the guard himself seemed to have gone, maybe the only part of him left before me was his body, his black poncho, and his blood but I kept standing there, motionless, my presence required by what was happening, which was that a man was dying, for the first time in my life someone was dying.
At some point during that long afternoon two men in gray coats arrived in a police van, one of them putting on rubber gloves and kneeling down in front of the dead man, who by then seemed to belong to me after all the hours I’d spent watching him, or maybe keeping him company if he was aware of my company. I had already memorized his thin mustache and the blank gaze of his one open eye and the two shoes that had fallen off leaving his feet in plain sight, and later in life I learned that it’s a kind of law that the dead always lose their shoes. Agustina thought, This dead man is mine because I was the only one with him when he died, I’m the only one here staring at his socks which are brown with little white dots, and I’m surprised to discover that even the dead wear socks; Agustina swears that back then she believed men were split into two groups, on one side were those who wore black or charcoal-gray socks, like her father, and on the other side was everyone else, those who wore socks that were essentially brown with light-colored dots.
The man with the rubber gloves tried to move the dead man but he wouldn’t budge, as if he preferred to stay clutching his poncho in that uncomfortable position, then the man in the coat started to search the dead man’s pockets and found a small battery-powered radio that was still playing, turned down low but playing, emitting music and commercials and torrents of words as if the guard could still hear it and Agustina thought: The radio is the only part of him that’s still alive. From another pocket they took four coins and a small comb that the man in gloves put in a plastic bag with the radio, which he’d turned off so that it wouldn’t keep playing, and then the other man who was with him also put on gloves, extending the index and middle finger of his right hand and curling the other two fingers and thumb under the way priests do when they’re blessing the faithful from the altar, He’s going to bless him so he doesn’t go to hell, I thought, but no, it wasn’t that, what he did with the upraised fingers was probe my dead man’s wounds; one by one he stuck his two fingers into each wound while saying, Sharp instrument, left armpit, six centimeters; sharp instrument, four centimeters, right intercostal gap between the seventh and eighth rib, counting all the holes in the body while a woman in blue made notes in her pad until they reached nine and he said: Nine stab wounds, one perforating the liver.
As they walked back and forth to the police van, the two men and the woman stepped in the guard’s blood and left red footprints in the marble entranceway until my father and mother came home at the same time but in separate cars and there was a terrible uproar, Agustina could hear their words but she couldn’t understand them, How could this happen, the children shouldn’t be seeing this, Joaco, Agustina, Bichi, go to your rooms immediately, How can it be that neither Aminta nor Sofi are here, how could they be so irresponsible. Father, there were nine stab wounds with a sharp instrument, Mother, there were nine stab wounds with a sharp instrument; we tried to tell them about the little radio and the glass of water but they wouldn’t listen, Father, what does perforating the liver mean, Mother, where is the liver, but my father double-locked the door to the house with us inside and my dead man was left outside, I never found out what his name was and I still wonder whether the water I gave him trickled out through the holes in his body, too.
I’ve already said that before things happen, I get three calls, and the Third Call of the Blood sounded in my ears at the pool at Gai Repos, in Sasaima, and sounded again in the reproachful look my mother gave me, how many times have I seen her face twist at the things I do or say or the things that happen to me, it’s an expression of such disgust, and this time it was because the Spilled Blood came out of me, running down my legs and staining my bathing suit, and my beautiful mother with her horrified face, so thin and pale in her white summer dress, took me by the arm and said, You have to get out of the pool now.
She tried to wrap me in a towel but I, who was playing cops and robbers with my cousins and brothers, I, who was a robber, was only interested in not being caught, Let me go, Mother, they’ll capture me if I don’t jump in the water, the water is the robbers’ hideout, Mother, can’t you see they’re going to catch me. But she wouldn’t let me go, she squeezed my arm so hard it hurt, It’s come, Agustina, she told me, it’s come, but I didn’t know what had come, Cover yourself up with the towel and come in the house with me right now, but I threw away the towel and yanked my arm out of my mother’s grasp and jumped in the water and it was then that I saw it, coming out of me with no one’s permission and tinting the pool a watery blood color.
This is the Third Call, I thought, and I don’t know what happened next, all I remember is that finally, inside the house, Aunt Sofi gave me a Kotex, I already knew what they were because we stole them from my mother’s bathroom and used them as padding in the baskets for the little live chicks colored with aniline dye that we were given for our first Communions, chicks with green, lilac, pink, or blue feathers, chicks that only lasted a few days and then had to be buried; my father said it was wrong to dye them because the color poisoned them. Put this in your panties, Aunt Sofi said to me, handing me the Kotex, Come on, I’ll show you how, but Agustina was crying and didn’t want to do it, it seemed horrible to her that her blood should come out there and stain her clothes and that her mother should give her that reproachful look, the kind of look you give someone who does something dirty, who dirties-things-with-her-blood.
Then Aunt Sofi said, Poor girl, so young and she already has her period, and since outside my cousins and brothers were shouting for me to come back and play cops and robbers, I dried my tears and I said to my mother, I’ll go tell them what’s happened to me and I’ll be right back, and my mother’s eyes glittered and from her mouth came the Ban: No, Agustina, we don’t talk about these things. What things don’t we talk about, Mother? Things like this, do you understand, private things, and then it was she who went to the window and said to my cousins and brothers, Agustina isn’t coming out now because she wants to stay in here with us and play cards, What cards, Mother, no one’s playing cards in here, I want to keep playing cops and robbers, but my mother wouldn’t let me because she said the sun would make the hemorrhaging worse, that’s what she said, the hemorrhaging, it was the first time I’d heard that word, and when Bichi came in to ask me what was wrong my mother told him that nothing was wrong, that I just wanted to play cards. It was then that I understood for the third time that my gift of sight is weak when confronted with the power of Blood, and that the Hemorrhage is uncontrollable and unspeakable.