I know it was the lepers even though later, at night, when we’re home and everything is over, my father tells me a thousand times that what happened today on the street was a student protest against the government. It doesn’t matter what they tell me, I don’t believe them, and the next day my father shows me the pictures of the student revolt that were published in the papers, but even the pictures don’t make me believe him. My father tries to explain that my mother didn’t want my little brother and me to be upset, and that’s why she wouldn’t let us see the students running between the cars, bleeding, with their heads smashed. But I know it isn’t true, I know that the lepers have come at last. Thousands of lepers have left Agua de Dios and invaded Bogotá; Sacred Hand of my Father, protect me from the invasion of the lepers. Though I know you shouldn’t really trust the Hand too much.
I JUST MANAGE to hit the brake so I don’t run over the beggar who suddenly appears out of the rain and crosses in front of my van, what the fuck is this suicidal lunatic doing, I almost killed him but apparently he couldn’t care less, it’s just part of his routine, a hazard of the trade, and before I realize what’s happening he sticks a begging hand in my window, Give me something for coffee, brother, I’m freezing my balls off out here, his voice is casual as if two seconds before I hadn’t nearly mowed him down and he seems satisfied, even proud of having achieved the practical and premeditated goal of stopping me by any means necessary to ask me for change: here you are again, dementia my old friend, wily bitch, I recognize your chameleon-like methods, you feed on normality and turn it to your own ends, or you mimic it so well you supplant it.
When my son Toño was seven he asked me once, Is it true that people are crazy inside, Dad? Now, pondering his question, I remember something from the day I met Agustina. I mean in person, because back then she was famous all over the country as the seer who had just used her telepathic powers to find a young Colombian hiker who’d been missing for days in Alaska, and since he was the son of the then-Minister of Mines, his fate had captured the attention of the press as the rescue mission proceeded, with the joint efforts of a group of marines there on the frozen tundra and, oh! who but Agustina Londoño here in Bogotá, coming up with parapsychological clues, intuitively sticking pins into a map of the Arctic, and issuing paranormal predictions from the very office of the Minister of Mines. When the lost boy was finally found, the whole country, from the cabinet ministers on down, flamed with patriotic fervor as if we had qualified for the Copa América, and the press didn’t hesitate to give full credit to Agustina’s visionary powers, discounting the will of God as well as the efforts of the marines, who in the end were the ones who rescued him from who knows what kind of avalanche, glacier, or northern peril.
A few days after the denouement, I was introduced to her as we were leaving a film club. All I was told was, This is Agustina, and not making the connection with the Alaska story, I saw only an ordinary Agustina, though a very beautiful one, who couldn’t stop talking about how wonderful the film was and the first thing that occurred to me was, What a pretty girl, though she’s completely crazy. But the word crazy didn’t have negative associations for me at the time. In the days that followed I was able to establish that Agustina was sweet and fun, and, according to my son Toño’s theory, that she was crazy inside.
Agustina dressed all in black, like a cross between a Spanish belle and a witch in lace mantillas, astonishingly short miniskirts, and cutoff gloves that left her long, gothically white fingers bare; Agustina made a living reading tarot cards, telling fortunes, casting the I Ching, and playing the lottery, or at least that’s what she said but she really lived on a monthly allowance from her family; Agustina had very long hair and smoked marijuana and traveled each spring with her family to Paris and hated politics and intoxicated her admirers with a bold, barbaric perfume called Opium; Agustina lived alone in an apartment with no furniture, but with candles and cushions and mandalas drawn on the floor; she rescued stray cats and was a disturbing mix of orphan and daddy’s girl, rich kid and Woodstock grandbaby. Whereas I, a middle-class professor, sixteen years her senior, was a Marxist of the old school and a dyed-in-the-wool militant, and therefore I scorned crazy chic in all its permutations and was uncomfortable with the phenomenon calling itself magic realism, so fashionable at the time, because I considered myself far removed from the superstitions and miracle worshipping of those around us, of whom Agustina was the prime representative.
But it was enough that she could make me laugh with her sharp wit and irreverence; it was enough that she would take my hand in hers to read my palm and ask me why I was so hard on myself when I was a good guy, a nice guy, meaning why did I take everything so seriously. It was enough that she called me an old man because I smoked Redskins, because I wore a wedding band and talked about the class struggle; it was enough that she taunted me by claiming that there was no such thing as proles — that was the word she used — and that she didn’t say, as I did, stockings instead of nylons, and brassiere instead of bra, and that she didn’t wear pants like the ones I had on, muddy-colored, made of synthetic fabric, bell-bottomed. They weren’t exactly muddy-colored or bell-bottomed, but she’d hit the mark with the synthetic fabric and she’s merciless when she finds an opening through which to get in her digs. It was enough that upon letting go of my hand she left it impregnated with a penetrating and sensual smell that I, who know nothing about drugs, thought was marijuana, and when I told her she laughed and explained that it wasn’t marijuana but a perfume called Opium; and it was enough, too, that a few months later, when I went to buy her a flask of Opium as a present, I found out that French perfume cost what I made in two weeks. It was enough that she began calling me simply Aguilar, erasing my first name with a single stroke and leaving me reduced to my last name, but above all it was enough that one sunny morning in Independence Park she bent down to tie one of my shoelaces which had come undone; just like that, with no warning.
We were both sitting on a bench and I was trying unsuccessfully to get her off to a real start on one of her many enthusiastically planned and rapidly abandoned projects, an autobiography that she’d asked me to help her write, and just then she saw that my shoe was untied, and she bent down and tied it for me, and when I asked her whether an Opium girl’s reputation wouldn’t be tarnished by tying the shoelaces of a prole in synthetic fabric, she made a face. It was pure demagoguery. And yet it wasn’t demagoguery, and that’s why I fell in love; nor was it deference or submission but simply the kind, unpremeditated gesture of someone who notices an untied shoe and leans over to tie it, whoever the foot in it belongs to.