The second time I saw you was in the dining room of your house in La Cabrera, which to me seemed like a sultan’s palace, and there you were making little towers of cookies with butter and jam, Joaco and me at one end of the table and you at the other end alone under the big crystal chandelier absorbed in your towers, so little, so transparent, with your huge black eyes and your insanely long hair, your hair was so long, Agustina baby! Back then I think it almost reached the floor, and when I tore my eyes away from you at last, I looked around and realized that this room contained all the elements of my happiness, what I mean is that just then something clicked in my head and I knew that everything I needed to be happy was right there, those too-high ceilings, like they were meant for giants not humans, that chandelier of crystal prisms that sent bits of rainbow dancing over the white tablecloth, those vases so crammed with roses that it looked as if a whole rose garden must have been cut to fill them, that porcelain as delicate as eggshells, those heavy knives and forks that were nothing like the light, tinny utensils we used in San Luis.
They’re silver, you shouted at me from one end of the table to the other and that was the first thing your mouth ever said to me, your mouth with its thin lips and perfect teeth. I’m not kidding when I say that I understood more things that day than you’d expect of the twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy I was then; for example I took careful note of your teeth, because thanks to orthodontia, yours were as perfect as your brothers’, and that same afternoon, snooping around in your bathrooms and trying to find out what this world was made of, this world that was so different from mine and that was driving me crazy with wanting, I found out that your family didn’t brush their teeth with toothbrushes like other mortals but with a gringo device called a Water Pik, and I came up with the plan: to begin to save money by selling pictures of naked girls at school, first to buy a Water Pik and then to have my teeth fixed. And that’s how the world works, Agustina princess, I was precocious enough to realize from an early age that you don’t get anywhere with yellow, crooked, rotten teeth, while perfect smiles like the Londoño children’s smiles and the one I bought for myself later were worth as much as or more than a college education.
Of course it was also a revelation to me that the food served by two maids dressed perfectly for the part on those eggshell dishes at the table for twelve at your parents’ house, a table that by the way is almost identical to the one I have today in my own apartment, that food, as I was saying, the chocolate with corn-flour buns, the cheese rolls, and the cream cookies, was exactly the same as the food my mother served me on our unbreakable plastic Melmac dishes in our living-dining room in San Luis Bertrand; that detail amused me, Agustina princess, it amused me to see that although you called it tea and we called it a snack, at five in the afternoon the two families served the same down-home food, the very same cheese rolls in the heart of Bogotá’s most fashionable neighborhood as in San Luis Bertrand, and from that I deduced that the unbridgeable gap between your world and mine was only a matter of appearances and surface polish, which amused me but also encouraged me to fight for what I wanted.
Well, if it’s just a question of packaging, I said to myself that day (and I’ve already told you that I was only thirteen), then I’ll be able to bridge that seemingly unbridgeable gap, and in fact by the time I was thirty I had bridged it and your mouth had already been mine, and I had two authentic Baccarat crystal chandeliers, a never-used dining table seating twelve, twenty-four silver place settings, and an impeccable smile, and yet look at me today, a shadow of my former self, brought down by the mistaken perception — it was too much to expect of a child’s intelligence, after all — that the difference was merely a question of packaging. It wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, and here I am, paying for my mistake in blood.
MY SKIN STILL CRAWLS when I remember the episode of the dividing line because perhaps never before had my wife rejected me so ferociously. With her teeth clenched and hatred in her eyes, Agustina ordered me to stay behind the line and I did what I could to obey her, hoping she would calm down, but the geographic division she imposed wasn’t fixed and that made things even harder, which is to say that the line shifted depending on her whim; at one point I sat on one of the chairs in the dining room, which strangely had remained on my side, at which Agustina hurried to annex that peninsula to her own territory, reclaiming the dining room as hers and throwing me out.
If you tried to take a step in any direction she was on you like a tiger, Out, you bastard, she said to me, my father doesn’t want to see you in any way, shape, or form, and that goes doubly for you, you filthy pig, she said to poor Aunt Sofi, whose face was screwed into an expression of guilt, anguish, or utter exhaustion; she who up until that moment had shown such fortitude and presence of mind now seemed shaken by the exceptional virulence of this development, she hadn’t seen anything like it since she’d come to stay with us and to tell the truth I hadn’t either, what was happening now was really serious, Go do your dirty business elsewhere, you disgusting pigs, Agustina was raving so madly and her abuse was so over the top that it couldn’t just be abuse, or hyperbolic use of language, it had to be true that she felt an enormous urgency to get us out of the house, it had to be true that the supposed presence or arrival or return of this father of hers was an earth-shattering event that split things in two, leaving Agustina with her father on one side and all other despicable mortals on the other.
Watching her, I wanted to bang my head against the wall thinking of everything I never asked her about this Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño, who, despite having been dead for years, now turned out to be the mysterious guest in the wings, the person turning me out of my own home and driving me from my wife, the man who was the living incarnation of everything I hated, and yet who was the object of baffling, almost religious worship for Agustina. The hardest thing of all was to witness the control that Mr. Londoño exercised over his daughter, to the point that it brought to mind the word possession, which doesn’t even form part of my vocabulary since it belongs to the realm of the irrational, which is of no interest to me, and yet it was that word, and none other, that kept occurring to me that night. I couldn’t help feeling the conviction that my wife was possessed by her father’s will; the split in her manifested itself so intensely that I was having a hard time reining in my own thoughts and remembering that it was my wife’s sick mind that was molding itself to her father’s purported wishes, and not the other way around.
I’ve always had the feeling that during her crises my wife goes through patches of devastating isolation, it’s as if she’s brutally alone on a stage while I observe her performance from a seat where I’m surrounded by the rest of humanity, and yet this time I knew that I was the solitary one, while she was accompanied by a force greater than herself, the will of her late father. Agustina talked endlessly about her father and his approaching visit, speaking so quickly that it was hard to understand her, something that was made even more difficult because half of the time she was talking to herself, aspirating the sentences as if she were plucking them from the air and wanted to swallow them, Agustina, my love, don’t swallow your words because you’ll choke, but my voice couldn’t reach her; between us there was only estrangement and distance, we were two exhausted creatures unable to draw near each other even though we were in the same cave, while down below the city throbbed silently, cowering and broken, as if the horror of that night had crushed it and now it was waiting for the start of the next round. Agustina darling, let’s not let madness, that old foe, extinguish any spark of hope, but Agustina isn’t listening because tonight she and the madness are one.