When they introduced me to him I was disappointed, I was ready to meet the capo di tutti capi and what I see instead is a short fat guy with a mustache and a mop of black curls and a big paunch spilling over his belt. It was noon, it was hideously hot, and there I was, exhausted from all the traveling and stress, plopped down in the middle of a raging orgy, Pablo and his killers for hire wreathed in marijuana smoke and making out with some samba dancers in sequins and feathers that they had brought in on another plane straight from Rio, and as if the heat weren’t enough, the girls were dancing the samba right on top of us, shoving themselves in our faces and making it impossible to talk, and I was sweating a river, trapped in that carnival of crap when all I wanted was to clear up the terms of the deal fast so that I could get out of there.
But Pablo, who was very attentive to me and almost shy, kept asking whether his good friend Midas wouldn’t like more whiskey, how about a puff of Santa Marta Golden, how about a little roast goat, how about a samba girl to entertain me for a while, and I said, No, thanks very much, Don Pablo, I’m sorry but I’m on a tight schedule and I’d like to get back to Bogotá as soon as possible, while I was saying to myself that the last thing I needed in this godforsaken life was to get stoned and drunk in the infernal heat and gorge myself on goat and samba girls in the company of that gang of criminals in undershirts, My god, don’t let them guess what I’m thinking, I thought, because they’ll roast me over the fire, too.
And then Pablo brushes away the girls, calls me over to one side, and before he says goodbye speaks a single sentence, a sentence that opened my eyes once and for all, The rich men of this country are so very poor, Midas my friend, so very poor. Do you understand the implications of that, Agustina doll? It’s the kind of thing that someone who’s born poor can never understand, and here’s this fat, monstrously intelligent guy getting it clear right off the bat, and that’s why he’s the one on top, baby, you better believe it; born in the slums, raised in poverty, always oppressed by the infinite wealth and absolute power of those who for generations have called themselves rich, he suddenly stumbles on the great secret, the one he was forbidden to discover, and the secret is that at this point in his short life he’s already one hundred times richer than any of this country’s rich men, and if he wants he can make them eat out of his hand and tuck them away in his pocket.
This oligarchy of ours still believes it controls Escobar when the exact opposite is true; to Spider Salazar, to your father, to your shark of a brother, Pablo Escobar is nothing but a lowlife who doffs his hat for them; they’re making the same mistake I made, princess, and it’s a suicidal one: the truth is that the fat guy has already swallowed us whole, and that’s why his belly is so bloated. And me? You might say I was Escobar’s waiter: I served up my friends to him on a platter, and added myself as dessert, then handed him an Alka-Seltzer as a chaser.
IF ONLY AGUSTINA would talk to me, if only I could get inside her head, which has become a space forbidden to me. Trying to get her to say something, I bring out the album of photographs from when she was a girl and leaf through it slowly, without seeming too interested, pausing as if by chance at the people in her family that I think I recognize. This tall, thin lady who must be her mother, Eugenia, surprises me because she’s not as witchlike as I imagined; in fact, with that black hair, those red lips, and that white skin, she looks more like Snow White than a witch, Look Agustina, I say to her, see how much you look like your mother, but Agustina ignores me. This arrogant boy in a baseball uniform is clearly the kind of kid who’s never up to any good; dark-skinned and older than Agustina, he must be her brother Joaco, always ready to perform some feat for the camera, like lifting a heavy object or plunging headfirst into the pool. This smaller boy with a pale face and jet-black eyes like his mother and sister must be the youngest, Carlos Vicente, the one they call Bichi, looking as if he’s just been rescued from an orphanage. Here we see the whole clan sitting in a half circle and smiling at the photographer, and who is that pretty woman crossing an excellent pair of legs? my God, it’s Aunt Sofi, all those years ago Aunt Sofi was a knockout. And Londoño, Agustina’s father, the tribal sheik? He’s nowhere to be seen, unless he’s the one taking the pictures; someone had to take them, of course, and everything indicates that Londoño is directing the farce but not acting in it.
There are other people, plenty of nice poses, ball games, celebrations in comfortable settings, predictable rituals of mass-produced happiness, happy birthday to you, the triumphal march from Aïda, should auld acquaintance be forgot, in all the old familiar places, Mozart’s Requiem, the day you were born a little star smiled, the whole repertory of a life moving tidily through each of its stages, as if on purpose so the photographer can record it and stick it neatly in albums. And sometimes, never in the center, the girl who Agustina was appears, looking apprehensively at the camera, as if she doesn’t feel entirely protected by this aura of well-being, as if she doesn’t quite belong to this group of humans.
My intention when I brought out the album was to get Agustina’s attention, to return her to a past that would disturb her and startle her from her isolation; I wanted to wrest a clue from her, or at least a comment, something that would give me a starting point. But her gaze slides over her own people as if she doesn’t know them, as if I were showing her photographs of the floor staff at Sears or pictures from a two-year-old French newspaper. For the first time, I feel that something connects me to the people in her family, and that is our insignificance in her eyes; we’re insignificant because we signify nothing, because we emit no signals, because Agustina isn’t susceptible to the signs we make. When I return the photographs to their place on the shelf, I think that all I’ve managed to prove with my sad experiment is that delirium has no memory, that it reproduces by parthenogenesis, sparks itself, and shuns affection, but especially that it has no memory.
Then I look for other hints, new threads to grasp, asking myself, for example, what revelation might be had from a crossword puzzle, what fundamental combination of words or what clue might allow me to understand something that a moment ago meant nothing to me and that’s suddenly of life-or-death importance. Because in her madness Agustina has developed a passion for crossword puzzles and to my surprise, on Sunday she got up early and said that she wanted to read the newspaper, something she’s never done in her life because she’s one of those people who doesn’t concern herself with what’s going on in the outside world, but on Sunday she got up early and I got up with her, nourishing some hope, because after all it was Sunday, which has always been a day of truce and harmony for us.
In fact, I’ll go even further and say that I was almost certain that precisely because it was Sunday Agustina’s madness would lift, or at least ease; in any case, I was prepared to interpret even the faintest sign as a symptom of the expected improvement. I watched her put a sweatshirt on over her pajamas and then, at her express request, the two of us went down to the drugstore to buy the Sunday edition of El Tiempo. When we returned Agustina climbed back into bed without taking off her sweatshirt and that was the first blow to my hopes because it looked as if I would never get her naked body back; that she didn’t take off her sweatshirt could be understood as a warning, something akin to wearing a suit of armor, and she didn’t start reading the paper we’d just brought back but instead began to fill in the horizontal and vertical rows of the crossword with an interest that for days she’d shown in nothing but her water rituals.