AUNT SOFI TOLD ME that she had savings in Mexico, and she offered to pay whatever it took to give Agustina the necessary medical treatment. After the incident of the divided house, from which we emerged exhausted, battered, and badly shaken, she told me point-blank what she had probably refrained from saying for days out of respect for my intimacy with Agustina and for what she cryptically called Your Methods; Aunt Sofi exploded at last, scolding me for not seeing that Agustina received the proper professional attention, Anyone can see that love and patience aren’t solving the problem, she told me, and for the first time since she’d been with us she seemed exasperated, although she excused herself by explaining that she felt close to the end of her strength, that her nerves were frayed, that she couldn’t imagine how day after day I could stand the state of extreme tension in the house. If I may say so, Aunt Sofi went on, asking permission to speak but continuing before I granted it, It seems criminal not to have the girl treated by a specialist, for her sake and yours, too. Doctors, hospitals, drugs, treatments, I replied, in the three years we’ve been living together there’s nothing we haven’t tried, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing: psychoanalysis? couples therapy? lithium? Prozac? behavior therapy? Gestalt? you name it, Aunt Sofi, and you’ll see that it’s already been crossed off the list, that we’ve been down that path before.
Since she looked at me in astonishment, I made an effort to provide her with a reasonable explanation, The thing is, Aunt Sofi, when Agustina is well she’s such an exceptional woman, she’s so delightful that sometimes all the times that she’s been sick are wiped from my mind, and each time we get through a crisis, I’m convinced that this was the last manifestation of a passing problem; to put it another way, Aunt Sofi, I’ve always refused to acknowledge that Agustina is sick, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried everything within my means to cure her, I even left my job as a professor, well, at first it was because they closed the university, but as everyone knows it reopened months ago, and Purina leaves me enough free time to give her the attention she needs, and yet I have to confess that I’ve never been through anything as serious as this; there have certainly been ups and downs, of every variety and magnitude, attacks of melancholia in which Agustina withdraws into a silence charged with secrets and woes, frenetic periods in which she pursues some obsessive, excessive activity to the point of collapse, yearnings with a mystical slant in which prayers and rituals predominate, voids of affection in which she clings to me with the desperation of an orphan, and periods of distancing and indifference in which she doesn’t see me or hear me or even seem to recognize me, but until now no spell has been so deep, violent, or prolonged as this.
In the previous episode, which was five months ago, she took to listening to Schubert’s trios and crying along with them for hours on end; in the morning, when I left, she’d be calm and busy at something else, and when I returned in the afternoon I would find her desolate again, assuring me that Schubert was the only one in the world who understood her troubles; the funny thing is that this harmonic accord only involved the trios, or the trios and Death and the Maiden, because she could listen unmoved to the rest of his complete works, And why didn’t you hide the trios? Aunt Sofi asks, I didn’t need to, I answer, one day she simply forgot about them.
AND THEN YOU AND I were on my motorcycle hauling ass out of there, no helmets, Agustina baby, fleeing your mother and your brother Joaco and especially your own craziness, which was hot on our heels; fortunately a BMW R100RT like mine is the only machine in the world with enough pickup to escape that kind of horror show. In the dining room of your house in the cold country all the alarms had gone off, first your hands twisting, then that ugly grimace contorting your face, and finally the maximum red alert, the ultimate SOS, which is when your voice turns metallic and you start to preach, and this time you were snottily warning about some legacy, and I’m sorry, Agustina doll, but I have to say the whole thing was a little freaky, because when you start talking that way it’s actually scary to see, like the voice coming out of you isn’t yours anymore.
You got very upset about the legacy thing, but there was something else, too, I’m trying to remember, I think you were also talking about dominion, you were saying something about how you couldn’t escape the legacy, or that we were living under the dominion of the legacy, I don’t know, Agustina baby, I really couldn’t say exactly because there’s nothing to be exact about, since when you’re raving you start talking in this nervous, complicated gibberish and you get extremely angry, making pronouncements that must seem like matters of life or death to you but that don’t mean anything to anyone else; of course it isn’t your fault, and I’d guess you don’t even have much to do with what’s happening to you, but the truth is that when you let loose I get goose bumps, everything you do slants suspiciously toward the religious, if you know what I mean, you start to use fancy words and predict things like a prophet, but a whiny, annoying prophet, know what I’m saying, baby? an out-of-it, fucking crazy prophet, so that even now, at this very moment, when you’re here talking to me relaxed and in your right mind, even now I’m afraid to say certain words in front of you, like legacy or gift of sight, because I know from experience that they work on your brain like a code that triggers the craziness and opens the door to disaster.
That’s why there in the dining room in the cold-country house, in the middle of Eugenia and Joaco’s planning for the welcome-home parties and festivities for Bichi, when you started talking in that metallic voice, I prepared myself mentally to take action as soon as necessary. Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, I said to myself, and when your brother Joaco ordered you to take off your gloves I knew that was the last straw and I got up from the table, having already decided to get you out of there and take you far away; I grabbed your hand and said to you, Come on, finish your coffee and let’s go, Please excuse us, Eugenia, please excuse us, Joaco, I need to get back to Bogotá in a hurry because I have to be who knows where, I don’t even remember anymore what excuse I concocted for us, all I know is that I took you by the hand, that you offered no resistance, and that we climbed onto the motorcycle.
Be careful, Eugenia advised us, having come out to see us off, accompanied by her pack of friendly dogs, Don’t stay out past dark, it’s dangerous, Of course, I promised her, don’t you worry, we’ll be back early, but I knew that Eugenia knew that we wouldn’t be back, how could she not when we’d taken our bags; if you and I were leaving, baggage and all, it meant that we considered the weekend plans abruptly concluded, which was how your mother understood it and which came as a great relief to her, because by getting you out of there, Agustina baby, I was defusing the time bomb that had been activated by the subject of Bichi’s boyfriend, by Joaco blowing up, and by the spark of delirium that already shone in your eyes. When she saw that we were going your mother secretly approved and was even grateful and pretended that nothing was happening, Don’t forget to bring yucca rolls for breakfast tomorrow, she shouted as we were at the gate, Of course, Eugenia, how many yucca rolls do you want? I answered her, which translated into Londoño language meant, I know that you know that something isn’t right here but don’t worry, I’ll let it pass, don’t worry, I’m not going to rub it in your face, because I know how to play that game, too, the game called I don’t think about it therefore it doesn’t exist, or So long as no one talks about it, it’s as if it never happened, Certainly, Eugenia, of course we’ll be back early, and on and on, blah blah blah, you know what I’m talking about, Agustina sweetheart, that exchange of words that mean exactly the opposite of what they say, and yet despite it all I feel sorry for your mother, have you ever stopped to think, Agustina baby, how different your poor mother’s life is than she dreamed it would be?