Delirium (5 page)

At the head of the table was Spider, paralyzed from the waist down, with me to his left, and to his right your brother Joaco, who’d just socked away a fortune as a go-between in the privatization of Telefónica, and also Jorge Luis Ayerbe, who had the press after him because of a massacre of Indians in the Cauca region, which is where his ultratraditional, paramilitary-sponsoring family is from, because a few months back the Ayerbes had sent their little private troop of
paracos
to scare some Indians off state land that, according to Jorge Luis, had been the legitimate property of his family since the time of the viceroys; nothing unusual, since hiring mercenaries is what’s done to control trespassing, except that this time the
paracos
started setting fire to the Indians’ shelters with the Indians inside, and as a result Jorge Luis was hounded by a raging pack of human rights defenders and an orgy of NGOs.

The other person present was, as always, Ronald Silverstein, the gringo we call Rony Silver, who poses in public as the manager of a Chevrolet dealership and operates under the table as a DEA agent, an open secret, completely fucking absurd, considering that Spider, who can get away with anything because he’s so loaded, always makes the same lame joke right in front of him, That Rony Silver, he’s double trouble, wouldn’t you say, boys?, and I myself used to take the liberty of calling Silver 007 to his face, the gringo smiling away, tolerating my rudeness because he got a cut from me and those DEA people are more crooked than anybody, it wasn’t just Silver who was getting down on all fours for me but every one of them, champions of the double standard, and your father and your brother Joaco, too, that’s right, they may have been rich in pesos before, but it was me, Midas McAlister, who multiplied their profits and made them rich in dollars, because you know there’s a reason they call me Midas, which is that everything I touch turns to gold, or at least that’s the way it used to be, because now everything I touch turns to shit, including you, Agustina darling, I’m sorry, believe me.

AT GAI REPOS
the three of us, my mother, Bichi, and I, slather ourselves with sunscreen and still we get as pink as shrimp the first few days of summer vacation while father and Joaco, who are naturally dark, tan right away and say, Be careful of the sun, it’s too strong for you. Only I know, Bichi, how much you would’ve liked it if your first finger was longer than your middle finger and you never burned in the sun; only I know how anxiously you wished things had turned out that way, but they didn’t, Bichi Bichito, you have to realize that, and you have to understand why my father scolds you for it, and scolds you with good reason. Your black curls and your pale skin and your big dark eyes like the Christ Child’s are worth nothing to you, because you would much rather have been strong and a little bit ugly like them, like Joaco and my father. Angel Face, they call Bichi, because he’s so pretty, and Aunt Sofi calls him Doll but our father doesn’t like it, it makes him lose his temper.

Let’s close the curtains, Bichi Bichito, so that it’s dark in our temple, Agustina says, and the boy replies, I like it better when you say plunged into shadow, All right, so that it’s plunged into shadow, and let’s do it all secretly, so no one else will ever know. Each time her father hits her little brother there’s a ceremony in the black night of a dark room, with a priestess who is Agustina and a novice who’s you, Bichi; you’re the sacred victim, the sacrificial goat, the Agnus Dei, and with your bottom still red from father’s slaps, you, the Lamb, pull down your underwear to show me where it hurts and then you take your underwear all the way off, and I take my panties off, too, and I stay like that, with nothing under my school uniform, a prickly unease between my legs, a delicious little bit of fear that my mother will burst into the room and discover everything, because Bichi and his sister know very well, although they never say so, that their ceremony must be performed like this, without underwear; if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be sacred and the powers wouldn’t be free to visit us, because it’s they who choose me and not the other way around, and their visit is always connected to the tickles I feel down there.

This is the Third Call, this is our secret, although of course the true secret, the greatest mystery, the treasure of the temple, is the photographs, and that’s why the real ceremony begins only when we bring them down from their hiding place on one of the ceiling beams, at the place where the beam meets the wall, leaving a small space that’s invisible unless someone climbs on top of the wardrobe, but the only ones who can get up there are you and I, because that’s the sanctum sanctorum, the place where the photographs are hidden and kept safe. You, Bichito, are in charge of lighting the wands of incense that make us dizzy with their threads of sweet smoke, and the two children laugh, huddled together with the joy of conspirators, because they know that never ever will anyone else find these photographs, nor will they know that I have them or that we celebrate our mass with them or that it’s from them that I get my powers or that I found them by chance one afternoon after school, says Agustina, when I was rummaging secretly through the things my father keeps in his study, because although the children aren’t allowed to go in, they do all the time, Agustina because she knows there are forbidden things there and her brother Joaco because he always finds some money to steal and invest in the business ventures of his friend Midas McAlister, who sells cigarettes, secondhand comics, pictures of soccer stars, and Amazonian amulets at the Boys School, anything for the idiots who hand over their allowances in exchange for junk.

After a period of astonishment, or rather several days spent examining the photographs, shut up in the bathroom, Agustina knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had taken them himself, my own father, not only because I found them in his study but because the furniture in them is just like his, the same window, the same desk, the same recliner, and also because my father’s hobby, besides stamp collecting, is photography; my father is an excellent photographer and at home we have twelve or fifteen albums of pictures he’s taken of us, at our first Communions, on our birthdays, on weekends at the house in the cold country and on vacations in Sasaima, on our visits to Paris, on our trip to see snow, and a thousand other occasions; all the pictures he takes of us prove how much he loves us, but there’s nothing like these photographs, the most incredible thing is that the woman in them looks just like Aunt Sofi, is Aunt Sofi herself, or rather at first Agustina couldn’t believe it but in the end she finally had to admit that it was, because whoever sees them realizes immediately, just as Bichi realized when she showed them to him for the first time, It’s her, said Bichi, it’s Aunt Sofi but with no clothes on, what huge breasts Aunt Sofi has.

IT’S BECAUSE SHE’S SIMPLE,
Agustina told me in a moment of calm, when I asked why she’d take food from Aunt Sofi and not from me. Aunt Sofi, who is simple, can understand why Agustina fills the house with containers of water while I, who am not simple, become upset over stupid things like something spilling, or tables being stained, or the rug getting wet, or Agustina catching a cold or going even crazier than she already is, or all of us in this house going crazy. Look, Aguilar, Aunt Sofi tells me, madness is contagious, like the flu, and when one person in a family has it, everyone catches it in turn, there’s a chain reaction that no one can escape except those who’ve been vaccinated, and I’m one of those, I’m immune, Aguilar, that’s my gift, and Agustina knows it and she trusts in that, whereas you have to learn to neutralize the charge, Tell me, Aunt Sofi, who is Agustina praying to with all this religious bustling about with water? The truth is I don’t know, I think she’s talking, not praying, Aunt Sofi replies, as Agustina, kneeling devoutly, covers a platter of water with a cloth and blesses it. And who is she talking to, Aunt Sofi? Why, to her own ghosts, And why does she need so much water? My understanding is that Agustina wants to clean this house, or purify it, says Aunt Sofi, and this gives me a start, as if I’d discovered shadows flickering in my wife that I’d never even suspected, And why does she want to purify the house? Because she says that it’s full of lies, this morning she was relaxed as she was eating the egg I made her for breakfast and she told me that it was the lies that were making her crazy, And what does she say about her own lie, about going away for the weekend with a man to a hotel behind my back? With what man, Aguilar, what are you talking about? About the man who was with her that Sunday at the Wellington Hotel, you don’t know how it torments me, You see? Now you’re the one who’s raving, Aguilar, that’s exactly what I mean when I say that you’re letting the madness contaminate you, But I saw him, Aunt Sofi, I saw him with my own eyes, Be careful, Aguilar, delirium can enter through the eyes, Then what was she doing with him, what can a man and woman possibly do in a hotel room but make love on the bed? Wait, Aguilar, wait, don’t jump to foolish conclusions, because we’re facing a more serious problem here, for the last few days Agustina has been talking about her father as if he wasn’t dead, How long has it been since her father died? More than ten years, but she seems to have forgotten it, I don’t know whether Agustina herself ever told you, Aguilar, but although she adored him, she didn’t cry when he died and she wouldn’t go to the funeral.

BLANCA, SWEET BLANCA,
your very name clears away the shadows, says Grandfather Portulinus to his young wife, but it isn’t true, because despite her efforts, Blanca isn’t always able to ease his torments, on the contrary, it often happens that her very presence is a slippery slope toward all things that split and tangle, because nothing provokes a nervous person like being told to be calm, nothing troubles him like being asked not to worry, nothing thwarts his urges to soar like the charitable ministrations of a good samaritan. This is confirmed for Blanca day after day, and yet she still makes the same mistake over and over again, as if when faced with her husband’s dark malady, she felt her ability to help reduced to a fumbling, clumsy distress.

There’s the sleeping tree, says Portulinus, pointing to a myrtle that stands by the side of the road leading to their house, not a mango or a
ceiba
or a
caracolí
or a
jacaranda
, or any of the sumptuous, sweet-smelling trees that in the warm country crowd close together in exaggerated profusion, heavy with rain, fruit, parasites, and birds, but a myrtle, scraggly and stunted, though giant in Portulinus’s memory, a myrtle that has accompanied him from the lands of his childhood and is therefore his, his tree, its shade the place where he chooses to lie down after his morning walk. He likes to repeat that the sleeping myrtle nourishes itself from airborne dreams imbibed through its outstretched branches, but someone less wrapped up in his own imaginings might simply notice that it’s a tree bearing little yellow or red seeds, depending on the season or the particular efforts of each seed, something unrelated to the matter of interest just now, which is that Portulinus and Blanca have sat down under the tree to take up, once again, a certain difficult conversation, during the course of which he watches her intently, restraining his eagerness to ask her the burning question, Our tree?, and experiencing a momentary relief when he hears her confirm, Our tree. Yours and mine? Yours and mine. You and me? You and me. The two of us? Yes, my dear, the two of us.