Delirium Read Free

him down to the depths of hell, although to say he ran is a manner of speaking, since it was more the clumsy trot of a man who was by then a little fat and no longer young, and well on his way into the turmoil of dementia. Into, but also out of, of course, because sometimes he wasn’t crazy, and then he was a musician, a German musician called Nicholas, last name Portulinus, who in time would be Agustina’s grandfather and who had come from Kaub, a place with a river and a castle, only to end up amid the sugarcane fields of the scorching town of Sasaima, perhaps because the damp and elusive charm of those hot lands was so seductive for men like him, men with a tendency toward dreaminess and distraction. The matter of his origin was never entirely cleared up because it was something he rarely discussed, and if he did occasionally speak of it, he did so in that awkward Spanish of his, badly learned along the way, that never became more than the provisional language of someone who won’t specify whether he’s just arrived or whether he has yet to leave, and it wasn’t clear why he’d settled in this precise spot, although he himself maintained that if he’d chosen Sasaima out of all the towns on the planet, it was because he knew of none other with such a melodious name.

    WHAT WOULDN’T I GIVE to know what to do, but all I have is this terrible anguish, fourteen nights without sleeping, fourteen days without rest, and the determination to bring Agustina back no matter how much she resists. She’s furious and dislocated and defeated; her brain has shattered into pieces and the only thing I have to guide me in putting it back together is the compass of my love for her, my great love for her, but that compass isn’t steady now, because it’s hard for me to love her, sometimes very hard, because my Agustina isn’t nice and she doesn’t seem to love me anymore; she’s declared a war of tooth and claw in which we’re both being torn to pieces. War or indifference, I don’t know which of the two is hardest to fight, and I console myself by thinking that it isn’t she who hates me but the strange person who’s taken possession of her, that maniacal washerwoman who believes I’m merely someone who soils everything he touches.
    There are moments when Agustina seems to accept a truce and scrawls pictures to explain what’s wrong with her. She draws rings surrounded by bigger rings, rings that detach themselves from other rings like clusters of anxiety, and she says that they’re the cells of her resurrected body reproducing themselves and saving her. What are you talking about, Agustina, I ask her, and she tries to explain by drawing new rings, now tiny and crowded, furiously shading them in on a sheet of notebook paper, They’re particles of my own body, Agustina insists, pressing so hard with the pencil that she tears the paper, irritated because she can’t explain, because her husband can’t understand her.
    It’s the weight of my guilt working against me, guilt that I don’t know my wife better despite having lived with her for what will soon be three years. I’ve managed to establish two things about the strange territory of her madness: one, that it is by nature voracious and can swallow me up as it did her, and two, that the vertiginous rate at which it grows means that this is a fight against the clock and I’ve stepped in too late because I didn’t know soon enough how far the disaster had advanced. I’m alone in this fight, with no one to guide my steps through the labyrinth or to show me the way out when the moment comes. That’s why I have to think carefully; I must order the chaos of facts coolly and calmly, without exaggerating, without dramatizing, seeking succinct explanations and precise words that will allow me to separate concrete things from phantoms, and acts from dreams. I have to moderate my voice, remain calm, and keep the volume low, or we’ll both be lost. What’s happening to you,