I began taking out one thing after another, placing each on the Formica table, a few white cotton undergarments, a T-shirt of mine that says Bean Man and that Agustina likes to sleep in, two shirts that she must never have worn because they were clean and ironed, How odd that your wife arrived at the hotel looking like such a mess when she had clean clothes in her suitcase, said Anita, when I saw her I couldn’t believe such a beautiful woman would be out looking like that, like she’d been chewed up and spit out. I kept removing things, a case with a toothbrush and toothpaste, Clinique facial cleanser, Pablo Neruda’s Heights of Machu Picchu that I’d given her myself soon after meeting her, What’s Machu Picchu, Anita wanted to know, Some Incan ruins in the Peruvian Andes, and since she grabbed the book and saw the inscription from me on the first page, “To Agustina, atop the tallest mountain on earth,” she asked me whether I’d been up there with my wife, No, the truth is I haven’t, Then what did you mean when you wrote this, Well I don’t know, I must have liked her a lot, And who is Pablo Neruda, she persisted but I didn’t answer because I was absorbed in those objects, a hairbrush, a few other Clinique lotions, a cortisone skin cream, And what’s that for, For allergies, Agustina’s skin is so pale that sometimes she gets rashes and she uses skin creams.
Don’t worry, Mr. Aguilar, Anita said to me, suddenly grabbing my hand, if the man who was with your wife was her lover, she wouldn’t have worn plain panties like these but black lace ones or red low-cut ones and a more exciting bra, You don’t know her, Anita, my wife is the type who always wears plain white underwear, I see, then you must be married by the Church, No, Agustina and I live together without anyone’s blessing, Then, asked Anita, why do you wear a wedding band on your finger, It was given to me by my first wife, the mother of my children, look, her name is engraved inside, Marta Elena, and upon seeing this, Anita said, sweetening her voice and lowering her eyelids, What a character you are, Mr. Aguilar, you live with one woman and wear another woman’s ring, I think you need a third woman to set things straight, and, moving too close, she said, Tonight something is going to happen, as if insinuating that something sexual was going to happen between us, but I pushed abruptly backward, and she, taking the hint, hastened to clarify, I mean in the country, I have the feeling that something big is going to happen tonight in Colombia, And why not, I replied, after all something big happens almost every night, but nothing happened last night or the night before, so the odds are that we’re in for it today, and as I was halfway through the sentence I was suddenly curious to know what her hair smelled like, Let it down, Anita, I asked her again and since this time she listened to me, all that curly hair tumbled down on us, and grateful and softening inside, I pushed my nose into it and inhaled the sickly sweet perfume of her shampoo, Peach? I asked, Incredible, Mr. Aguilar, you guessed, it’s L’Oréal Silky Peach.
Without moving my nose from her hair I told her about an afternoon when I was fifteen and I rode too fast down a hill on a borrowed bicycle and ran into a barbed-wire fence that cut my right forearm badly and ripped a piece of skin from my neck, I still have both scars, look, Anita, you can see them, and she ran the tip of her index finger over the ugly mark across my throat and asked, Why are you telling me this, I’m telling you because of what happened afterward, in the neighborhood clinic where Doctor Ospinita, who practiced on a good-faith basis since he didn’t have a medical degree, disinfected my wounds and gave me twenty-seven stitches, all of this while I was fully conscious because anesthesia was an inconceivable luxury in a poor neighborhood like mine, Uh-huh, said Anita trying to look as if she were following me though she didn’t understand what this had to do with her, Look, the reason I’m telling you this is because it’s one of the sweetest memories of my life, I mean what happened to me with a lady at the clinic, she was a young woman and in my memory she’s very beautiful although I’ve forgotten her name and what her face looked like, or maybe I never knew her name or saw much of her face, she wasn’t the nurse, she was simply someone who happened to be there at the clinic, probably waiting for her turn, and when she saw me frozen in panic at the sight of the curved needle and the nylon thread that Ospinita was aiming at my neck, she amazingly sat at the head of the operating table and rested my head on her thighs, not caring that her clothes were being drenched with blood, in one hand holding up the bag for the transfusion that Ospinita was giving me to replace the blood I’d lost, and here comes the really important thing, Anita, the part I can’t forget, which is that with her free hand this woman stroked my hair, and her caresses put me in such a trance that I could only think of her hand, so I closed my eyes to concentrate on her touch, which allowed me to forget the pain and the fear and the sight of my own blood, and I just drifted there in the immense pleasure of those fingers stroking my hair; whenever I feel like I’m going to die, Anita, which is how I’ve been feeling every day lately, the memory of that woman keeps me going, or rather the memory of her hand, and if I tell you this it’s because your presence has a similar effect on me, and since this made Anita begin to purr like a cat, I leaned back again and changed tone, And speaking of fingers, I said in order to say something, my God, girl, what long nails you have, do you paint them yourself or do they do it for you at the salon, I’ll bet you don’t know, lovely Anita from Meissen, what emery boards are for.
I stepped away for a minute to call Aunt Sofi again and tell her that I was on my way, and when I returned to the table I said to the Fearless Girl, Look, Anita, if I were fifteen I’d ask you to stroke my hair for a while, but I’m old and a mess and in the middle of a crisis so we should leave instead, come on, I’ll give you a ride home. Do you have a car? she asked incredulously, as if I didn’t look like a car owner or as if she couldn’t believe her luck at being saved for a night from her hour-and-a-half bus ride, Do I have a car? more or less, I’ve got an old wreck that barely deserves to be called a car, but it will get you home safe and sound.
Now it seems funny to me to remember how confidently I spoke that last sentence, because it almost didn’t come true, by which I mean that on the drive south down Thirtieth Road past Nemesio Camacho Stadium with Anita in the passenger seat, the road nearly deserted at that time of night, we were shaken by a violent jolt that actually lifted the van from the pavement, while at the same time a blast of air hit our eardrums and a sharp noise, like thunder, came from the bowels of the earth and then gradually faded away, in successive layers of echoes, until an absolute silence fell over the city, and in the midst of this deadly quiet I heard Anita’s voice saying, A bomb, a big fucking bomb, it must have gone off nearby, I told you, Mr. Aguilar, I told you something horrible was going to happen tonight. But all I could think of was Agustina, wondering if she was all right.
Anita turned on the car radio and that’s how we found out that someone had just blown up the police station in Paloquemao, about twelve blocks from where we were and eight blocks from the place where the explosion would surely have woken Agustina, terrifying her, if the blast hadn’t actually blown out the windows of my apartment, that is, and I was struck by the image of her getting out of bed in a state of shock and stepping on the broken glass, and the picture was so vivid that it became a certainty, I literally saw Agustina walking barefoot on the floor covered in shards, and I was overcome by the urgent need to be with her.