Delirium (27 page)

I watched Aunt Sofi sneak into the kitchen and I thought, Clever woman, she’s going to smuggle us some food, remembering just then that the only thing I’d had in my stomach for hours was those few bites of Anita’s pink doughnut, sweet, pretty Anita, would Anita, the girl from Meissen, be asleep now?, and yet it wasn’t food that Aunt Sofi brought from the kitchen, hidden in her pocket, but the little battery-powered radio so that we could listen to the news, What must have happened to all those poor people who were hurt, asked Aunt Sofi, and she hadn’t finished the sentence when Agustina discovered us and snatched away the shawl and the poncho and turned off the radio; still, we managed to hear that Pablo Escobar was claiming responsibility for the attack.

IT WAS A SIMPLE TURN
of the screw that catapulted me from glory to ruin, Agustina darling, I swear. It started with the back-and-forth of gossip and secrets in the gyms, dressing rooms, and bathrooms at the center, one of those conspiracies that builds up underground until it explodes and shit flies everywhere, and I suspect that the person who set off the bomb was this woman Alexandra, who is physically a goddess but mentally not all there, though I don’t know, the truth is I can’t be sure it was her, she’s someone who’s been coming to the center for years to work out and at first she was kind of a girlfriend of mine, I told you I sleep with the prettiest ones and she was no exception, so we were more or less together for a while, but I extricated myself from that fast, because as I was saying, she’s a chick with an outstanding body but a fucked-up mind, and on second thought maybe it’s paranoid of me to blame her for something that happened so long afterward.

When it comes down to it, it could have been anyone, because anyone could’ve read
El Espacio
and started the rumor, although it’s strange, very strange, Agustina sweetheart, that someone from this side of town would pick up that trashy tabloid; in general my clientele thinks there’s no point wasting time on bad news, especially if it involves people they don’t know, and if they ever feel like reading, they read
El Tiempo
, which lets them know what’s going on the way they like to hear it. But it was my bad luck that a story in
El Espacio
about the mysterious disappearance of a nurse had to make its way to the Aerobics Center, especially since Dolores’s vanishing was an unremarkable occurrence if ever there was one, the kind of thing that goes completely unnoticed in this country, I mean, if no one complains when a whole hospital is robbed and plundered, who’s going to get worked up about a single missing nurse, but you know how it is when your luck turns.

El Espacio
went after the story of the phantom nurse and released a statement by her boyfriend which said that the last time he saw her she was entering a gym on the north side of town. So far not great, though bearable, Agustina doll, but the next day
El Espacio
runs a longer story and bingo!, specifies that the gym in question is Midas McAlister’s Aerobics Center, and publishes a picture of Dolores, alive and smiling, a younger and less worn-down Dolores than the one I met, but definitely Dolores, no doubt about it, although
El Espacio
doesn’t call her that, they call her Sara Luz Cárdenas Carrasco, and they don’t describe her as a whore specializing in S&M who died fulfilling her true destiny as a professional shit-eater, but as a registered nurse whose colleagues say they’ve heard nothing from her, and there’s also the testimony of the man who claims that he’s her boyfriend and that his name is Otoniel Cocué, who, as you’ll have guessed, Agustina darling, is none other than the pimp, although he doesn’t share that bit of information and instead identifies himself as an accountant because he certainly couldn’t reveal the nature of his miserable illegal profession, and as a result his accusations are only half-truths, the kicking and squirming of a man in over his head; for example, he claims that the nurse Sara Luz, his fiancée, exercised at the Aerobics Center, and that she went in one night and never came out.

But the women in the 7:00 a.m. super-rumba class catch wind of all of this—from Alexandra, if my suspicions are correct—and they tell the women in the noon spinning class, who tell the women in the five o’clock spinning class, who pass it on to the eight o’clock class and the women in the massage rooms and the women in the tanning booths, in other words by evening the story has taken on Hollywood dimensions and when they see me stroll by, some women clam up, others laugh, and the most brazen come up to me to ask what happened; and then of course there’s the flirt who tells me straight out that if I’m Bluebeard she volunteers to be the next victim. Certain games become popular, like getting spooked, hearing moans, spotting the killer, or pointing out suspects, and so it goes, the Aerobics Center brimming with rumors, fears, ghosts, jokes, and teasing, and one thing leads to another according to the inexorable law of consequences until I get a visit from the police, who have a warrant to search the place and question me, but as you might expect, sweetheart, they find nothing and I don’t let anything slip, Women come in and out of here all day, Sergeant, I tell a lieutenant who immediately reminds me of his rank, Of course, Lieutenant, excuse me, I was saying that at least three hundred women come through this door every day, and three hundred leave by the same door, and then the lieutenant performs some routine procedures, like checking the attendance records to verify that in fact there is no Sara Luz recorded, and I very calmly pass him the sign-in book, Go ahead, Lieutenant, take a look if you want.

And now prepare yourself, Agustina doll, because the story is about to take a turn for the surreal, imagine my surprise when I see that on one line, in grandiose handwriting in blue fountain pen, the lieutenant has found the signature of one Sara Luz Cárdenas Carrasco, her name written out in full and with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, I swear I almost fell over backward, it must have been that idiot Dolores the night of her tragic performance, the fool probably saw the book where gym members signed in and thought it would be cool or trendy to sign her name there, too, after all why not, she probably thought of herself as an artist or a model, so I had to smooth things over by explaining to the lieutenant that there was nothing strange about someone attending one of our free promotional sessions, This is a public place, Lieutenant, anyone can come in, maybe the girl did stop by but that means absolutely nothing, I repeated several times, though also and most important I slipped the man enough cash to make him keep his mouth shut and leave me in peace, or relative peace because the whole business was getting me down and it was starting to look like there was no way out.

If I don’t give you a detailed account of what came next, Agustina sweetheart, it’s because in the end there were no further police or legal repercussions for me beyond that routine inspection ending with the usual bribe to the authorities; the lingering problem was more subjective, or emotional, maybe, because the gym clientele didn’t want the excitement to be over and they kept adding to the story and updating it in their imaginations, with talk about Ms. X passing by and the neighbors hearing music until late the night before, a sobbing woman bricked up in the wall, cars coming in and out of the parking lot, a creepy vibe in a certain room, and speculation as to who that poor girl must have been.

Anyway, Agustina darling, I won’t bore you much longer, but the honest truth is that the ghost of Dolores, or Sara Luz as she was called now, started to grow and suffocate me and give the Aerobics Center a bad name, to the point that even I, each time I smoked a joint to relax a little, was plunged into the most unpleasant fantasies in which my own gym became an Inquisition torture chamber and my beloved machines were turned into racks and Dolores was crucified on the Nautilus 4200, What the fuck, I thought, this is her revenge, and I tried to kick-start a dialogue so that we could come to some kind of agreement: I promise you, blessed soul of Dolores, that as soon as the scandal dies down I’ll send money to your John Jairo, or Henry Mario, or whatever your kid’s name is, so he can go to school, I promise you, my dear Sara Luz, that if you help me stop the gossip, I’ll bankroll a technical-school degree for your William Andrés some day.

On top of everything, while all this was going on, time was passing, and the date went by on which, according to Mystery, Pablo had promised to make good on our investment, so as you can imagine, Agustina baby, Spider Salazar and Ronald Silverstein were all over me, Has it come yet, What’s the meaning of this, What the hell is going on, and there I was taking the blame and saying how sorry I was in an effort to put out this second blaze, I understand, Spider my friend, it’s the pits, Silver old man, you’re both right, it’s shit, I realize this delay is shit, but everything will work out in the end, you’ll see; that’s what I told them, Agustina princess, but the truth was that I had no idea what might be going through Escobar’s head since Mystery wouldn’t even keep his appointments with me. I spent hour after hour waiting for him at the cemetery hoping he’d show up with the money at last, or at least with an explanation, but there was nothing, the days passed and nothing. Go on, Midas, Spider commanded imperiously, find Pablo and let him know that this little delay is putting us in a tight spot, Relax, Spider old man, as soon as his messenger shows up I’ll pass on the complaint, You never told me, Midas my boy, that you weren’t in direct contact with Escobar, Well, yes, or I mean, no, I used to be but now the situation has changed a little, try to understand, Spider my man.

That week our Thursday dinner at L’Esplanade was extremely tense; since Spider and Silver couldn’t pester me in front of Joaco and Ayerbe, who didn’t know what was going on, they satisfied themselves by making merciless fun of me, and I was feeling awful, so that even though I ordered my favorite dish, partridge in a chestnut chocolate sauce, I couldn’t eat a bite, and the truth is, my stomach wasn’t up for partying, what with my friends fucking with me, Dolores’s hounding of me, the crisis at the Aerobics Center, Pablo’s delay, and on top of it all, the stranglehold of the loans I’d had to take out to get together all the cash for Pablo.

This was a Thursday, Agustina princess, and the very next day, bam!, there was that bombing at L’Esplanade and we all survived in one piece, those of us who weren’t at the restaurant, that is, because anyone who was there came out in multiple pieces; I escaped by twenty-four hours, sweetheart, it was my amazing luck that the bomb went off on Friday, because if it had gone off a day earlier I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. It was a massive explosion, and the diners, the cooks, that frog Courtois and his incredible wine cellar, the ladies with crocodile purses and crocodile skin, and even the cat were blown up, and when Escobar claimed responsibility for the attack, everyone asked what reason he could possibly have had to break his truce with the Bogotá oligarchy, planting a huge bomb in a restaurant full of rich people right in the heart of the residential north side of town. Some said that he was furious and blinded by pride because he’d been blackballed at a country club, or because the DEA was putting the squeeze on him, or because of the extradition threats, or because he was banned from running for office, or because the government wasn’t abiding by its agreements with him, or all of the above, but whatever it was, the residents on the north side of the city started to shake because until then they’d thought that Pablo’s war wasn’t with them, but the dead and the wounded and the rubble of L’Esplanade proved otherwise. Escobar’s problem, I tried to explain to them without success, is that he got tired of the balancing act, of us taking his money with one hand and trying to kill him with the other.

And Spider, like a pesky fly on a noble steed, was after me constantly, Explain this to me, Midas my boy, now that Pablo has come unglued, what the fuck is going to happen to our investment?, who’s got an answer for me?, and Rony Silver chimed in, too, and then there was Mystery, vanished into thin air, and finally I sank into a state of profound melancholy and retreated alone to my bedroom to turn off everything that I possibly could from my bed with the remote control and sleep twelve or fourteen hours straight with the blinds shut in a single long peaceful night.

And there in my room in the dark, Agustina princess, with the telephone unplugged, I thought about Pablo, remembering our second and last meeting, which wasn’t at his Naples estate this time, no samba dancers or giraffes or Olympic-size pool, but in a shabby house that smelled like the den of a rogue tiger, I never knew which of the neighborhoods of Medellín it was in because they brought me there with my eyes blindfolded, but anyway the Boss’s hiding place this time was only furnished with a few chairs and beds and there he was in a T-shirt and baseball cap, fatter than before, and he made me laugh because he showed me a picture that had been taken a few months earlier; guess where, Agustina darling? In front of the White House in Washington, if you can believe it, because according to what he told me he could enter and leave the United States whenever he felt like it.