At that moment of utter anarchy only a single thing was perfectly clear to me, Agustina darling, and that was that I wanted you out of my bedroom, out, vanished, gone, you were shouting in the only place where I demand perfect silence, you were wreaking havoc in the only corner of the world that I like to keep neat, you had spun out of control precisely within the four walls where I keep everything under control, Enough, angel, chaos in my private paradise is more than I can stand, Rorro can’t take you away a minute too soon, I need to get back into a healthy rhythm, work out the kinks with a good soak in the Jacuzzi and then turn on the fireplace with a click of the remote control, and naked by the fire like the first man in his primeval cave, smoke a blunt of Santa Marta Golden and do my best to forget, let my mind go blank and soar in the placid void of blue vastness.
I managed to establish that the first step was to call Rorro to come and get you, but problems arose with step number two, where to send you. Return you to your mother, batty as you were, defenseless and exposed? no, certainly not, you would never have forgiven me and even I’m not capable of something that cruel. Send you alone to your apartment, where Rorro could keep you company until your husband came back from Ibagué, good old Aguilar, who is apparently the most self-sacrificing loony-bin keeper in the city? that wasn’t a bad plan, in fact, it was clearly the best, or the only good one, but it wouldn’t work because I had no idea where you lived, you’d never told me where your apartment was and considering the level of mental chaos you were operating on, asking you would have been a waste of time. To a hospital, then? I suggested it to you, wanting to know whether you thought it might be a good idea for me to send you to a psychiatric clinic and you, instantly grasping every word, as if you’d gone from speaking only Sanskrit or Russian to a sudden comprehension of Spanish, threw your arms around me and begged me please not to send you to a hospital, anything but a hospital, maybe you were afraid that they would lock you away forever, fry your brain with electroshock therapy, give you pills that would put you to sleep for all eternity like Sleeping Beauty, I don’t know what it was that terrified you so much, but the forlorn, despairing look on your face made me abandon that idea, It’s settled, I ordered Rorro, take her to a hotel, treat her with tender, loving care because you’re looking at a real angel, she’s a little upset but she’ll be over that in two seconds, here, Rorro, here’s my card number so you can put her up at the Wellington, they know me there and you can tell them I’ll be by later to sign the bill, I want you to shut yourself up with her in a suite, give me a call to report mission accomplished, and then wait for further instructions; now take her away, but listen up, I want it to be the best suite, where she can eat well and take a nice bath and sleep off whatever’s wrong with her in a good bed until she’s back to normal, you take care of her tonight, Rorro my good buddy, and tomorrow, if she wakes up feeling better, bring her back here.
But the devil has his way with the best-laid plans and this was such an absolutely fucked-up day that even then I couldn’t relax; despite the excellence of the Santa Marta Golden that I was smoking nice and slow, letting it filter down to the core of my being, I was tortured by remorse, unable to rest, I’d managed to get you out of my sanctum sanctorum, Agustina sweetheart, and now I was doing my best to push you out of my thoughts, too, but somehow you kept coming back. As that golden smoke twined around me, my conscience was plagued by a buzz of pestering horseflies, and those horseflies were particular moments from the past that seemed like carbon copies of the moment we were living now, almost duplicates, I don’t know, Agustina princess, I guess that looking back it would be fair to say I’ve always abandoned you when you needed me, that I’ve let you down at every crucial moment.
The telephone rang and I answered right away, thinking it would be Rorro letting me know that everything was cool and under control, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t Rorro, it was an anonymous female voice speaking at the other end of the line, Mr. Midas McAlister, do you remember me? How was I supposed to remember anything, Agustina doll, when it was an unknown voice, completely unrecognizable, I had no fucking idea who it was, especially considering how high I was, and then the owner of the voice reminded me, A little while ago I was at your Aerobics Center with my two cousins, do you remember? and I was thinking two cousins, uh-huh, what the fuck was this person talking about, You’ve got a terrible memory, Mr. McAlister, and I struggled to pull myself together, The three of us came to sign up and you suggested that it would be better if we went somewhere else, is it coming back to you? Oh yes, right, right, I kept saying vaguely, still having no idea what was about to hit me, and laboriously retrieving from the fog of the past the image of those three bleached blondes in shiny lycra who stepped out of a lime-green convertible, Oh yes, I said, you were the ones who came to ask about classes and in the end decided that you’d rather enroll somewhere else, No sir, we didn’t decide, it was you who decided that you didn’t want us at your establishment, well I’m glad that you remember and I’m calling to let you know that my cousin Pablo remembers, too, and when I heard Pablo’s name the whole scene flashed before my eyes as clearly as if I were watching it on television, and before I could say a word, the woman swore a curse on me and then hung up. What was the curse? Well, something to make the bravest man quake in his boots: I’m just calling you, Mr. McAlister, to give you a message from my cousin Pablo, Pablo asked me to tell you that insults to his family are the only kind he doesn’t forgive. Do you want to know what I did then? well you guessed it, I started to shake.
WHEN I SAW THAT Anita had sent me a message on my beeper, I was surprised to discover that I’d given her the number; I could’ve sworn I hadn’t. The first night that I talked to her I was so engrossed in the police-detective reconstruction of the infamous dark episode at the hotel that if I gave her my number I didn’t even realize it, but now, while I was having breakfast at Marta Elena’s house with my two sons, I heard again from the unforgettable Anita, whom I’d more or less forgotten in the thirty-two hellish hours it had been my fate to live since I’d left her in Meissen.
There I was heating up corn cakes and frying eggs for Toño and Carlos, who were leaving for school in half an hour, when I received a text message from Anita that read, “I have information for you urgent meet me at Don Conejo tonight 9 pm signed Anita at the Wellington it’s about your wife and I know you’ll be interested,” and my reaction was odd, because I immediately thought, Yes, I would meet her, but I wasn’t motivated by concern for Agustina, which to tell the truth was hovering at a low point several degrees below zero for the first time since I’d known her, meaning that I wanted nothing more to do with my wife; after so many days and nights of thinking only of her, in a single sweep she’d been wiped as if by magic from my poor head stuffed to the bursting point with abuse, indifference, jealousy, and worries, Yes, I thought, I’m definitely interested in this beeper invitation, though not for Agustina’s sake but because of Anita herself.
I was at Marta Elena’s that morning because I had spent the night there; my son Toño had slept on the sofa in the living room so that I could have his bed, and for the first time since I was separated from my ex-wife I had spent the night at her house, or the house that used to be ours and now belongs to her and the boys. The thing I’d like to explain is how I ended up doing something so out of the ordinary. What happened was this: during the whole day following the debacle of the divided house, Agustina was sunk in a deep sleep, equal in intensity to the frenetic activity that she’d displayed during the night, but of the opposite nature, and toward evening, when she got up, she returned to the attack, the whole thing all over again, as frantic and ferocious as it was the first time, the imaginary border, her father’s visit, and insults, this time in every language. She shouted, Back, filthy thing; cosa inmunda; Out, dirty bastard; Vade retro, Satanas; Out, scum, until I couldn’t take it anymore, All right, Agustina, if you want me to go, I’ll go, I told her, and I left.