I accepted Joaco’s invitation, Agustina doll, because not even the worst funk could prevent me from taking advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend a few days with you, with those big dogs lying at our feet in the silent galleries open to the rippling of the eucalyptus trees in the afternoon, the scent of manure, and the comforting sight of inherited lands stretching off into the distance, what a fucking pretty thing, Agustina princess, if I’m lying when I call it nirvana, let my hand be chopped off. And suddenly there we were, back in paradise with the eucalyptuses and the dogs and all the rustic trappings, and you were as quick and teasing as you’d ever been, your smiles so easy that I, who hadn’t seen you for months, started to believe that you were cured; we had a few Heinekens and you whipped me at Scrabble, you’ve always been a fiend at Scrabble, and also at solving crossword puzzles and playing charades and instantly picking up on double entendres and riddles, in general your thing is making clever use of language and playing mischievously with words.
It was a gorgeous day, you were astonishingly beautiful, and there was just one problem, Agustina sweetheart, and that was that your eyes got even bigger than they already were and your hair grew a tiny bit longer each time your mother opened her mouth to utter one of her usual interpretations of things, so plainly counter to any evidence, and then, in that dining room so lavishly hung with paintings of colonial saints that it looks like a chapel, I realized that each lie was like torture for you and that each omission was a snare for your fragile mind, and you sat there quietly, while your mother, Joaco, and Joaco’s wife snatched the words from one another’s mouths as they discussed the big news, that Bichi had called from Mexico to say he’d be coming to the country for a few weeks before year’s end, after all those years away, Bichi, who left as a child, would return as an adult, and I see how you’re shaken and overcome, after all, your little brother must be the only person you’ve ever really loved, and who knows what crazy kind of birds must have started flapping around inside your head with the announcement of his return.
But the rest of the family is also in a state of excitement and your mother keeps approaching the subject and retreating from it, glossing over things with that amazing gift for concealment she’s always had and that Joaco plays along with so well because he’s been practicing since he was little, and the plain truths keep getting caught in the honeyed ambiguity that smoothes and civilizes everything until there’s no substance left to any of it, or until it produces convenient historical revisions and lies as big as mountains that are gradually transformed into realities by mutual consensus, I’m referring to gems like this: Bichi left for Mexico because he wanted to go to school there, not because your father was always beating him for acting like a girl; Aunt Sofi doesn’t exist, or at least she doesn’t exist so long as no one mentions her; Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño loved his three children equally and was a faithful husband until the day he died; Agustina left home at seventeen because she was a rebel, a hippie, and a pothead, not because she’d rather run away than confess to her father that she was pregnant; Midas McAlister never impregnated Agustina or abandoned her afterward, and she never had to go alone to have an abortion; Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño didn’t die of heart failure but from moral distress the day that he was driving along a hippie street and happened to see his only daughter, Agustina, sitting on the sidewalk selling necklaces of colored beads and seeds; Joaco didn’t cheat his siblings out of the family inheritance but instead is doing them the favor of managing it for them; there is no man named Aguilar, and if he does exist he has nothing to do with the Londoño family; darling Agustina isn’t stark raving mad, she just is the way she is — that’s how Eugenia and Joaco put it, not specifying what way that is — or she’s nervous and needs to take Equanil, or she didn’t sleep well last night, or she needs psychoanalysis, or she’s difficult for the sake of being difficult, or she’s always been a little strange.
That’s the Londoño Catalog of Basic Falsehoods, but each one of them branches out into a hundred shades of fabrication, and meanwhile I’m watching you, Agustina sweetheart, sitting there at the other end of the table, and I realize that while listening once more to that whole repertory of half-truths you haven’t been able to eat a bite and your food is growing cold on your plate, and I see your lovely white hands twisting as if they’d like to pull each other apart, your hands in those strange gloves that you never take off and that soon, around dessert time, maybe, will make Joaco say to you, in an irritated way, that it would be nice if you could at least take them off when you sit down at the table, and when he says that you’ll turn pale and you won’t say anything and you’ll be on the verge, the verge of the thing that has no name because your mother has taken it upon herself to erase the word from the list of words permitted in your house.
And Joaco talks animatedly, my adorable little nutcase, about how they’ll go riding with Bichi when he comes, and your mother announces that she’ll have a big pan of caramel cream arequipe for him to eat all by himself, and she predicts how thrilled Bichi will be when he sees that his room in the house in La Cabrera is still intact, I haven’t touched a thing, says your mother, moved, because she really is, almost to the point of tears, His clothes and toys are still there, your mother says, and her voice breaks, everything is just as it was when he left, as if no time had passed. As if nothing had happened, right, Eugenia? because in your family nothing ever happens, that’s what I want to say to her so that Agustina will stop wringing her hands, my poor girl, who keeps drifting further away and growing paler, while I ask myself what I can do to wipe that panicked expression off your face, that look of impending doom, of something drawing nearer that has no name. When Bichi comes, Eugenia is going to organize a trip to Sasaima, the first in years ever since the property had been left in the hands of the estate agent because of the violence, But we’re going to arrange a return to the hot country, says Eugenia, her eyes wet, I’m going to have the whole house painted and the pool repaired and we’ll celebrate Bichi’s arrival with a big family trip to Sasaima, and Joaco nods, he makes it clear that this time, too, he’ll bow to his mother’s wishes in small matters, as he always does.
Neither of the two mention the fierce argument they had just before lunch, shut up alone in the library, which doesn’t have thick enough walls to have prevented the others from hearing them from outside and flinching, but even Joaco’s wife, who is clueless and dumb as a brick, catches on that they have to pretend they didn’t hear Joaco shouting in the library as he warned his mother that if Bichi came to Bogotá with that boyfriend he has in Mexico, neither Bichi nor his faggot boyfriend would set foot in this house; not this house or the one in La Cabrera or the one in the hot country either, Because if they come I’ll throw them out, and your mother, who’s shouting too but not as loud, repeats the same sentence over and over again, Hush, Joaco, don’t say such a terrible thing, the terrible and unspeakable thing being, to her mind, that Bichi has a boyfriend, not that Joaco will throw Bichi and his boyfriend out, but anyway, the rest of us outside pretend not to hear, and keep our mouths shut. As if they’d already forgotten what they were shouting about in the library a moment ago, as if Bichi didn’t have a boyfriend in Mexico or as if by not mentioning the subject they were willing it not to exist, over lunch your mother and Joaco go on planning the improvements they’ll make at Sasaima for Bichi’s visit.