Delirium (24 page)
They’re silver, you shouted at me from one end of the table to the other and that was the first thing your mouth ever said to me, your mouth with its thin lips and perfect teeth. I’m not kidding when I say that I understood more things that day than you’d expect of the twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy I was then; for example I took careful note of your teeth, because thanks to orthodontia, yours were as perfect as your brothers’, and that same afternoon, snooping around in your bathrooms and trying to find out what this world was made of, this world that was so different from mine and that was driving me crazy with wanting, I found out that your family didn’t brush their teeth with toothbrushes like other mortals but with a gringo device called a Water Pik, and I came up with the plan: to begin to save money by selling pictures of naked girls at school, first to buy a Water Pik and then to have my teeth fixed. And that’s how the world works, Agustina princess, I was precocious enough to realize from an early age that you don’t get anywhere with yellow, crooked, rotten teeth, while perfect smiles like the Londoño children’s smiles and the one I bought for myself later were worth as much as or more than a college education.
Of course it was also a revelation to me that the food served by two maids dressed perfectly for the part on those eggshell dishes at the table for twelve at your parents’ house, a table that by the way is almost identical to the one I have today in my own apartment, that food, as I was saying, the chocolate with corn-flour buns, the cheese rolls, and the cream cookies, was exactly the same as the food my mother served me on our unbreakable plastic Melmac dishes in our living-dining room in San Luis Bertrand; that detail amused me, Agustina princess, it amused me to see that although you called it tea and we called it a snack, at five in the afternoon the two families served the same down-home food, the very same cheese rolls in the heart of Bogotá’s most fashionable neighborhood as in San Luis Bertrand, and from that I deduced that the unbridgeable gap between your world and mine was only a matter of appearances and surface polish, which amused me but also encouraged me to fight for what I wanted.
Well, if it’s just a question of packaging, I said to myself that day (and I’ve already told you that I was only thirteen), then I’ll be able to bridge that seemingly unbridgeable gap, and in fact by the time I was thirty I had bridged it and your mouth had already been mine, and I had two authentic Baccarat crystal chandeliers, a never-used dining table seating twelve, twenty-four silver place settings, and an impeccable smile, and yet look at me today, a shadow of my former self, brought down by the mistaken perception—it was too much to expect of a child’s intelligence, after all—that the difference was merely a question of packaging. It wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, and here I am, paying for my mistake in blood.
MY SKIN STILL CRAWLS
when I remember the episode of the dividing line because perhaps never before had my wife rejected me so ferociously. With her teeth clenched and hatred in her eyes, Agustina ordered me to stay behind the line and I did what I could to obey her, hoping she would calm down, but the geographic division she imposed wasn’t fixed and that made things even harder, which is to say that the line shifted depending on her whim; at one point I sat on one of the chairs in the dining room, which strangely had remained on my side, at which Agustina hurried to annex that peninsula to her own territory, reclaiming the dining room as hers and throwing me out.
If you tried to take a step in any direction she was on you like a tiger, Out, you bastard, she said to me, my father doesn’t want to see you in any way, shape, or form, and that goes doubly for you, you filthy pig, she said to poor Aunt Sofi, whose face was screwed into an expression of guilt, anguish, or utter exhaustion; she who up until that moment had shown such fortitude and presence of mind now seemed shaken by the exceptional virulence of this development, she hadn’t seen anything like it since she’d come to stay with us and to tell the truth I hadn’t either, what was happening now was really serious, Go do your dirty business elsewhere, you disgusting pigs, Agustina was raving so madly and her abuse was so over the top that it couldn’t just be abuse, or hyperbolic use of language, it had to be true that she felt an enormous urgency to get us out of the house, it had to be true that the supposed presence or arrival or return of this father of hers was an earth-shattering event that split things in two, leaving Agustina with her father on one side and all other despicable mortals on the other.
Watching her, I wanted to bang my head against the wall thinking of everything I never asked her about this Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño, who, despite having been dead for years, now turned out to be the mysterious guest in the wings, the person turning me out of my own home and driving me from my wife, the man who was the living incarnation of everything I hated, and yet who was the object of baffling, almost religious worship for Agustina. The hardest thing of all was to witness the control that Mr. Londoño exercised over his daughter, to the point that it brought to mind the word
possession
, which doesn’t even form part of my vocabulary since it belongs to the realm of the irrational, which is of no interest to me, and yet it was that word, and none other, that kept occurring to me that night. I couldn’t help feeling the conviction that my wife was possessed by her father’s will; the split in her manifested itself so intensely that I was having a hard time reining in my own thoughts and remembering that it was my wife’s sick mind that was molding itself to her father’s purported wishes, and not the other way around.
I’ve always had the feeling that during her crises my wife goes through patches of devastating isolation, it’s as if she’s brutally alone on a stage while I observe her performance from a seat where I’m surrounded by the rest of humanity, and yet this time I knew that I was the solitary one, while she was accompanied by a force greater than herself, the will of her late father. Agustina talked endlessly about her father and his approaching visit, speaking so quickly that it was hard to understand her, something that was made even more difficult because half of the time she was talking to herself, aspirating the sentences as if she were plucking them from the air and wanted to swallow them, Agustina, my love, don’t swallow your words because you’ll choke, but my voice couldn’t reach her; between us there was only estrangement and distance, we were two exhausted creatures unable to draw near each other even though we were in the same cave, while down below the city throbbed silently, cowering and broken, as if the horror of that night had crushed it and now it was waiting for the start of the next round. Agustina darling, let’s not let madness, that old foe, extinguish any spark of hope, but Agustina isn’t listening because tonight she and the madness are one.
My wife is crazy, I acknowledged to myself that night for the first time, and yet the thought wasn’t enough to convince me, it can’t be, Agustina darling, because you’re still there behind your madness, despite everything you’re still there, and probably I’m still there deep down, why should I be gone, do you remember me, Agustina?, do you remember yourself? I’d never been afraid that she would hurt me physically, how could she when I was five inches taller and twice her weight and mass, but that night the fear was there; everything about her indicated a desire to assault, to wound, and her way of grabbing things and brandishing them showed determination, even an urgent desire, to hit with them. The last thing I ever wanted was to come to blows with the woman I love, but she was doing everything she could to start something, seeking by any means possible a kind of desperate final outburst of physical violence that would put an end to my decision not to attack her no matter what. It was as if she were trying to rob me of the infinite love for her that lets me systematically evade all her provocations and keep our coexistence peaceful; maybe Agustina understood that this was the only way she could do away with the main obstacle to her father’s arrival, because I was that obstacle.
Who had this Mr. Londoño been, what had his relationship to his daughter been, where had his power over her come from? I would’ve given anything to know. When I got to the apartment that night with the suitcase that Agustina had brought with her to the Wellington in my hand, sad trophy and resounding proof of my defeat, I was obsessed with the man my wife had spent one night with—well, just one night that I knew of, God knows how many others there might have been—and I set the suitcase in plain sight on the dining-room table so that she would come upon it suddenly, I needed to know what her reaction would be, whether she was capable of looking me in the eye, but what she did was hurl it furiously toward my side of the apartment, Who left this shit here, she asked and then she immediately forgot about it; the delirium induced by her father’s imminent arrival made her hyperkinetic, stricken by a fever that caused her to nearly emanate light, and I began to realize that even if the story of her lover was true and behind my back Agustina had one hundred other lovers, the true, indestructible rival, the one anchored in the depths of her disturbance, and possibly also her love, was the ghost of this father about whom I couldn’t form the vaguest idea, apart from the caricaturish notion of the Bogotá landowner that I’d had from the start, The man has that advantage over me, I thought, the advantage of being an unknown quantity.
Shut behind the wall of rejection that my wife had erected, I remembered the crazy autobiography that at some point she’d wanted me to help her write, though we never made it to the first page, now I’m convinced that it was really a plea for help, that she needed to go over the events of her life with someone to make sense of them and put her mother and father in their proper place, bringing them out from inside where they tormented her, but back then how was I to know; the truth is that I thought the ludicrous idea of the autobiography was another one of those stabs in the dark that she was making simply because she refused to take note of what direction she was really headed. This was how it happened: after I was introduced to her that time at the film society, I left feeling awed by her beauty, which honestly struck me like a lightning bolt, but like a lightning bolt that dazzles and then disappears, by which I mean that it left me without the slightest sense of nervous anticipation of a second chapter to follow that first encounter, sure as I was that this strange, delectably lovely girl was one of those shooting stars that crosses one’s path and speeds on, so it came as a great surprise when I found a note in my cubicle at the university signed by none other than her.
MY FATHER TOLD ME
to be back by midnight, says Agustina, and I don’t want to be even a single minute late; I must obey orders, especially because they come directly from my father. It was out of the goodness of his heart that he let me go to the movies with the boy in the Volkswagen on the condition that I be home before midnight, and as I turned my key in the lock at the agreed-upon time, there was my father, wide awake and waiting for me in an armchair in the living room. Is that you, Father?, and in the dark came his deep voice and the puff of his pipe, glowing like a watchful eye. Who were you with in that car?, It was just me and the boy who brought me home, Never again, thundered my father, You’ll never ride alone in a car with a boy again because I forbid it.
She is surprised that he sounds so impassioned, so upset, nothing I’d done before had ever shaken him, in the past few years I’d been disobedient and rude and a bad student, and my father had severely reprimanded me for all of that, but never like this, up until that night my father had always been distant with me, and even when he scolded me it was in a blank kind of way, but suddenly this was all I had to do to attract my father’s attention and scrutiny, to make him quake, to wipe everything from his mind but my date that night and my strict obedience of his orders, When you come home late it shows a lack of respect for me, I do respect you, Father, and if that’s your rule, I’ll always obey it, I was here by midnight, Father, as you ordered, But you were alone in that car with a boy, make sure it’s the last time it happens.