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I DON’T KNOW, I think to myself, this tragedy is starting to take on shades of melodrama. Even Aunt Sofi, so calm and collected, sometimes talks as if she’s in a soap opera. And what about Agustina, who seems plucked straight from the pages of Jane Eyre, and what about me, living with this anguish and these outbursts and this lack of understanding and selfhood, especially that, I feel as if my wife’s illness has subjugated my identity, as if I’m a man who’s been emptied out inside in order to be stuffed, like a cushion, with concern for Agustina, love for Agustina, anxiety about Agustina, resentment of Agustina. Madness is a compendium of unpleasant things: for example, it’s pedantic, it’s hateful, and it’s tortuous. It contains a large component of unreality and maybe that’s why it’s theatrical, and I’m also on the verge of believing that it’s defined by an absence of humor, and that’s why it’s so melodramatic.

Today I was bringing Agustina a cheese sandwich. I made it for her with butter, toasting it in the waffle iron the way she likes it, and I was about to go into the bedroom when I heard Aunt Sofi ask to be forgiven, she was saying something like, Can you forgive me, Agustina? and again, Will you ever be able to forgive me for what I did? So Aunt Sofi has a past and sins of her own. At last I’m going to find something out, I thought, and unnoticed, I waited outside the door for the conversation to begin, but the minutes went by and Agustina was still silent, neither granting forgiveness nor denying it, and then Aunt Sofi gave up, the sandwich got cold, and I went back to the kitchen to heat it up again.

Upon returning to the bedroom I found Agustina dozing and Sofi watching the news, and watching was the right word for it, because she had turned down the volume and was making do with the picture, and I shook my wife a little by the shoulder to make her eat but I only managed to get her to say, without looking at me, that she hated cheese sandwiches, and at that Aunt Sofi felt obliged to intervene, as she always does, Forgive your wife, dear, her problem is that she’s suffering and she has disguised her pain as indifference, and as I chewed the rejected sandwich, I replied, Yes, I forgive my wife, Aunt Sofi, but tell me, what about you? who’s supposed to forgive you? Were you listening? she said, then she asked whether I really wanted her to tell me and went on without waiting for an answer, I’ll tell you for poor Agustina’s sake, because it has to do with the involuntary role I played in this tragedy, and it involves something I did that hurt her badly, It would be better if we went downstairs, Aunt Sofi, I said, taking her by the arm, let’s leave Agustina here asleep and talk in the living room, If I don’t put my feet up for a while they’ll explode, she said, sitting on the sofa, and I helped her settle her feet on a pile of pillows. Then I got out a bottle of Ron Viejo de Caldas, thinking it might smooth the way for a conversation that promised not to be easy, and there we were, each of us with a drink in one hand, I in the cane rocker and Aunt Sofi on the sofa with her feet up, A little music? I asked to lighten the mood, and I put on Celina and Reutilio.

It was one of those things, Aunt Sofi said, as if she were about to start talking, but then she stopped, and was quiet for a good fifteen minutes, seeming to enjoy the relief of having her shoes off, savoring the Caldas sip by sip, and allowing herself to be soothed by the balm of Cuban son, and I let her be, the woman certainly deserved a moment’s peace. Then she let out a laugh that was somehow lighthearted and at odds with the difficult story she’d announced she had to tell, and she asked me to listen to what Celina was singing, Listen to her, she’ll explain everything, start the song over that’s just finished playing, and I did as she asked and Celina began to sing the part of “The Old Horse” that goes “When love comes like this it’s not your fault, when willing hearts meet love has no timetable or date.” So willing hearts met and it wasn’t your fault, That’s right, Aguilar, willing hearts met and it was no one’s fault, It’s never anyone’s fault, Aunt Sofi, now pour yourself another drink and let’s focus on the matter of forgiveness, tell me why you were asking Agustina to forgive you, I was asking her to forgive me for some photographs that destroyed her family.

According to Aunt Sofi, her sister, Eugenia, and Eugenia’s husband, Carlos Vicente Londoño, invited Aunt Sofi to live with them when they moved north, To a house that was enormous, Aunt Sofi told me, well, a house that still is enormous, because Eugenia lives there now with her son Joaco and his family; how to explain Joaco, he’s someone alien to me, a man who has triumphed in life but who lives in a world that isn’t mine, he’s too big for his britches, as my mother would say, but he has one undeniable merit, which is that he has always taken care of Eugenia, and I tell you, Aguilar, it’s a Herculean task, but that’s my nephew Joaco’s good side, he had to have some redeeming quality, you don’t know how patient and gentle he is with his mother. My sister, Eugenia, so beautiful, because believe me she was lovely, but she’s always been adrift in a kind of absence, Body without soul, city without people, Carlos Vicente would say when he looked at her, especially in the dining room, at dinner, when she was sitting at the head of the table under the slivers of rainbow from the chandeliers up above, her profile as perfect as a cameo, and just as still, just as stony.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t delicate, Aguilar, I wasn’t perfect, and unlike Eugenia, who was so slender, I had inherited the German frame you see today, and ever since I was young I’ve been big and heavy, like my father. But I was alive inside. The house was hers, the husband was hers, the children were her children. I, on the other hand, was a parasite, a freeloader, a spinster aunt they’d had to take in because I had nowhere to go, and everything I had in that house was borrowed. That’s how it looked from the outside, but on the inside things were almost the reverse. Eugenia was the lonely one, the quiet one, the one who was always properly behaved and perfectly dressed, the one unable to love without suffering, the one who subsisted on appearances, and I filled the voids of affection she left. It was I, not she, who ministered to her husband in bed like a wife and who loved her children like a mother, I who did the children’s homework with them and took them to the park and cared for them when they were sick, who handled the shopping and the housekeeping, because if it were up to Eugenia we would’ve eaten the same thing every day, not because she didn’t know how to cook, she’s a wonderful cook, but because of her sheer joylessness, because she left the servants to fend for themselves and never went into the kitchen, and because of the general lack of enthusiasm with which she got up each morning.

Carlos Vicente Londoño was a good man in his conventional and stuffy way, divinely well dressed, always in a dark suit, always freshly shaven and immaculate, hungry for affection, for someone to make him laugh a little; he certainly wasn’t the most brilliant of men, suffice it to say that his great passions were stamp collecting and Playboy magazine. His tragedy was his youngest son, Bichi, a sweet, intelligent, imaginative boy, a good student, everything one might expect of a son and more, but with a certain tendency toward the feminine that his father couldn’t accept and that made him suffer untold agonies. Carlos Vicente was convinced that the obligation to correct the defect and set the boy straight rested in his hands and whenever I tried to bring up the subject, he would lose his temper; he had no qualms about asking me what right I had to express an opinion when I wasn’t the child’s mother. To make matters worse, the boy was irresistibly beautiful, if your Agustina is lovely, Aguilar, Bichi is even more so, and back then he radiated a bewildering kind of angelic light, but that only made things worse with his father.