And meanwhile you, my pretty little lunatic, were sitting behind me on the motorcycle still issuing your apocalyptic warnings, droning on about the famous legacy, until we shot off along that unpaved road and each time I showed signs of braking, you wouldn’t let me, Make it go faster, Midas, hurry, don’t stop, and then you were off again with the whole dominion and legacy thing, and I swear, Agustina baby, God help us when your head tilts at that weird angle. I don’t know how we managed not to kill ourselves on that road, me clinging to my motorcycle, you clinging to me, your madness clinging to you, and the four of us flying along blindly at a thousand miles an hour, until we reached the tiny town of Puente Piedra and there you informed me that we should stop for coffee, and I agreed; we went into a store and asked for two black coffees, and you burst out laughing, back to normal now and even finding it all funny, like you were your real self again, and not inhabited by that other person, Well, well, you said to me, giving me a hug, we escaped just in time, before things got ugly, What a tease you are, Agustina, I said, I think you wear those hideous gloves just to drive your brother Joaco insane, It’s true they’re nasty, you admitted, and you came up with the idea of burying them somewhere, so we got back on the motorcycle and found a field by the side of the road that seemed right to you.
You took off your gloves, threw them into an irrigation ditch, and we stood there watching as the soupy green water swallowed them up. Since the day was still beautiful and the sun was inviting, we decided to lie down in the grass and suddenly everything seemed very amusing, Agustina doll, there you were, the owner of countless acres, and here we were, trespassers on someone else’s land, keeping a careful eye out in case they set the dogs on us, but happy, adolescents again, great friends, partners in crime; it must be true that those who’ve shared a bed never completely grow apart. We started to talk about Bichi’s return and you shivered with emotion at the news, When my father returns…, you said, You mean when Bichi returns, I corrected you, and I corrected you again the second time you said it, but by the third time I suspected that it would be better to change course, steering us away from that particular minefield.
You don’t know what an uproar there’s been at the Aerobics Center, I said, and you had already heard about it because a few hours ago, in the cold-country house, Joaco’s wife, who was a gym regular, had brought it up, asking me whether the mystery of the disappeared woman had been solved. And in the middle of the conversation your brother Joaco suggested, either to mock you or to mock me, that I should bring you to predict the nurse’s whereabouts; Joaco was on a roll, With any luck Agustina will find her in Alaska, where she found the minister’s son, and that way the girls at the center will relax and stop blaming Midas. And later, in the field, I brought the subject up again as a way to distract you and stop your neurons from whirring, and I was happy when you took the bait, mysteries and stories about people who vanish have always been your thing, and I got you going by inventing silly versions of the drama for you, imitating the ghost of Sara Luz and the hysterical gym members who let themselves be scared by her, and I clowned around as much as I could, Agustina doll, trying to keep your hands from starting their wringing again, doing my best not to let that dangerous glow light up your eyes, and you got excited, you said that there was a connection between you and that woman, and that you felt that she had a message for you; I think she needs to tell me where she is, you said and I was alarmed, because no matter which way you looked at it, this seemed off base, so I insisted that we go to the movies instead, I wanted to see E.T., you were set on Flashdance, and since neither of us would give in, we settled on smoking a joint there in the coziness of the late-afternoon sun, and then we somehow started in on the whole nurse business again.
I was seeing everything in a positive light now, thanks to the excellent weed, and so I went along with it, calculating that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all, it would get colder soon anyway and we couldn’t agree on a movie or stay in that field forever, and Joaco might even be right when he said that one of your flashes of intuition could have a positive effect on the girls at the center, or positive from my point of view, that is, in the sense of throwing everybody off the scent with your visions, which if you’ll excuse me, sweetheart, I’ve always thought were a joke; I started to imagine you in the grip of your prophetic powers, half closing your eyes, breathing deeply, going into a trance, and coming up with a verdict that pinpointed the whereabouts of the alleged nurse in some faraway place; in other words, I visualized something like the following: me coming in with you just before the five o’clock super-rumba class, which is crowded enough on Saturdays, Listen up, please, listen up, I would shout, I know that everyone’s been concerned lately about a woman who unfortunately disappeared, and since we sincerely want to help find her, and since no one is more interested than we are in seeing that she appears so she can return home safe and sound to her loved ones, I’ve brought you the famous seer Agustina Londoño, and as soon as I mention your name everyone would recognize it and exclaim, It’s her, the girl who finds lost people! and I’d call for silence, then you’d run your fingers over the signature that the poor woman apparently left in our sign-in book and put your mental powers to work trying to find her, that was more or less what I had in mind when I approved the crazy plan to bring you to the center.
Once you were there, you’d do your thing and say with total conviction something like, I see her, I see her, I see a woman named Sara Luz Cárdenas Carrasco who’s run away with her Dominican boyfriend to San Pedro de Macorís, and they’re living there happily ever after, or, version number two, Where are you, Sara Luz? Sara Luz? Oh yes, now I see you, my sixth sense tells me that you’re in prison in New York City, oh no! you went to work as a drug mule, Sara Luz, the stewardess gave you away because she thought it was suspicious that you weren’t eating the chicken and carrots that she’d served you on a cardboard tray, they arrested you with Baggies of cocaine in your stomach at John F. Kennedy Airport and now you’re locked up and sentenced to 127 years of prison in a windowless cell, or version number three, maybe even better than the first two, No, ladies and gentlemen, this signature isn’t hers, my great gift of sight tells me that it’s a fraud, a fake, a name scrawled by someone who wasn’t the real Sara Luz Cárdenas, someone playing a stupid joke; I don’t know, Agustina doll, forgive me again, please, it was just another one of my stupid pranks, another pot trip, another one of those silly but amusing ideas that I let myself get carried away by; I really believed that for you it would just be a game and that it might help me or at least not hurt me, and how could I know it would end the way it did, when after all you’re the expert at guessing games.