My wife is crazy, I acknowledged to myself that night for the first time, and yet the thought wasn’t enough to convince me, it can’t be, Agustina darling, because you’re still there behind your madness, despite everything you’re still there, and probably I’m still there deep down, why should I be gone, do you remember me, Agustina? do you remember yourself? I’d never been afraid that she would hurt me physically, how could she when I was five inches taller and twice her weight and mass, but that night the fear was there; everything about her indicated a desire to assault, to wound, and her way of grabbing things and brandishing them showed determination, even an urgent desire, to hit with them. The last thing I ever wanted was to come to blows with the woman I love, but she was doing everything she could to start something, seeking by any means possible a kind of desperate final outburst of physical violence that would put an end to my decision not to attack her no matter what. It was as if she were trying to rob me of the infinite love for her that lets me systematically evade all her provocations and keep our coexistence peaceful; maybe Agustina understood that this was the only way she could do away with the main obstacle to her father’s arrival, because I was that obstacle.
Who had this Mr. Londoño been, what had his relationship to his daughter been, where had his power over her come from? I would’ve given anything to know. When I got to the apartment that night with the suitcase that Agustina had brought with her to the Wellington in my hand, sad trophy and resounding proof of my defeat, I was obsessed with the man my wife had spent one night with — well, just one night that I knew of, God knows how many others there might have been — and I set the suitcase in plain sight on the dining-room table so that she would come upon it suddenly, I needed to know what her reaction would be, whether she was capable of looking me in the eye, but what she did was hurl it furiously toward my side of the apartment, Who left this shit here, she asked and then she immediately forgot about it; the delirium induced by her father’s imminent arrival made her hyperkinetic, stricken by a fever that caused her to nearly emanate light, and I began to realize that even if the story of her lover was true and behind my back Agustina had one hundred other lovers, the true, indestructible rival, the one anchored in the depths of her disturbance, and possibly also her love, was the ghost of this father about whom I couldn’t form the vaguest idea, apart from the caricaturish notion of the Bogotá landowner that I’d had from the start, The man has that advantage over me, I thought, the advantage of being an unknown quantity.
Shut behind the wall of rejection that my wife had erected, I remembered the crazy autobiography that at some point she’d wanted me to help her write, though we never made it to the first page, now I’m convinced that it was really a plea for help, that she needed to go over the events of her life with someone to make sense of them and put her mother and father in their proper place, bringing them out from inside where they tormented her, but back then how was I to know; the truth is that I thought the ludicrous idea of the autobiography was another one of those stabs in the dark that she was making simply because she refused to take note of what direction she was really headed. This was how it happened: after I was introduced to her that time at the film society, I left feeling awed by her beauty, which honestly struck me like a lightning bolt, but like a lightning bolt that dazzles and then disappears, by which I mean that it left me without the slightest sense of nervous anticipation of a second chapter to follow that first encounter, sure as I was that this strange, delectably lovely girl was one of those shooting stars that crosses one’s path and speeds on, so it came as a great surprise when I found a note in my cubicle at the university signed by none other than her.
MY FATHER TOLD ME to be back by midnight, says Agustina, and I don’t want to be even a single minute late; I must obey orders, especially because they come directly from my father. It was out of the goodness of his heart that he let me go to the movies with the boy in the Volkswagen on the condition that I be home before midnight, and as I turned my key in the lock at the agreed-upon time, there was my father, wide awake and waiting for me in an armchair in the living room. Is that you, Father? and in the dark came his deep voice and the puff of his pipe, glowing like a watchful eye. Who were you with in that car? It was just me and the boy who brought me home, Never again, thundered my father, You’ll never ride alone in a car with a boy again because I forbid it.
She is surprised that he sounds so impassioned, so upset, nothing I’d done before had ever shaken him, in the past few years I’d been disobedient and rude and a bad student, and my father had severely reprimanded me for all of that, but never like this, up until that night my father had always been distant with me, and even when he scolded me it was in a blank kind of way, but suddenly this was all I had to do to attract my father’s attention and scrutiny, to make him quake, to wipe everything from his mind but my date that night and my strict obedience of his orders, When you come home late it shows a lack of respect for me, I do respect you, Father, and if that’s your rule, I’ll always obey it, I was here by midnight, Father, as you ordered, But you were alone in that car with a boy, make sure it’s the last time it happens.
Then Agustina went to bed and she couldn’t stop wondering whether her father might possibly have guessed what had happened, that the boy in the Volkswagen had invited me to the movies but didn’t take me there; we stayed in the car and talked, eating hot dogs at the Icy Cream, until he pulled his Great White Candle out of his pants. Agustina couldn’t see it in the dark of the deserted street; she didn’t see it with her eyes, which refused to look, but she saw it with her hand and she discovered that it was enormous and felt like wax, then she had to let go of it so that she would be home by midnight just as she and her father had agreed, and there I found him waiting restlessly for me in the dark living room, his pipe smoldering.
Her father had never waited up for her before, nor had he spoken to her in a voice so charged with emotion, almost deranged, Agustina thinks, Why were you alone with that boy when I told you to go out in a group, He just gave me a ride home, Father, she replied, not wanting to confess what she’d discovered, and wondering whether her father had one, too, and whether it was the Great Staff with which he ruled, And then, in bed, I couldn’t sleep, says Agustina, and what kept me awake wasn’t the car or the night or the first date on my own, not even the thing that came out of the boy’s pants and felt like wax, but knowing that my father hadn’t gone to bed because he was worried about me, it had never happened before, says Agustina, never.
When I was invited to the movies again I said yes because I knew that it would bother my father and keep him up, and this time Agustina didn’t come home at exactly midnight but a little later in order to push her father a few inches further, she would bait him, but just a little, not so much that he’d hit her, just a little, to see whether what she thought she’d noticed that first time was true, that if she went out at night with a boy her father couldn’t ignore her, at last Agustina had learned to do something that would get her father’s attention, and this second time that she went out with a boy, a different boy, who did take her to the movies, Agustina asked him to let her touch the Great Candle, And he let me and this time it burned, it didn’t feel like wax but instead it burned and stung my palm, and Agustina went home knowing that her father, who maybe could guess what she had done, would be there waiting for her seething with rage but in the end there would be no explosion because he had no evidence, he could only brood over what he suspected she might have done in that car, unable to prove it, but it would hurt, it would hurt him, it would have to hurt her father whether she’d done anything or not, and he himself, with the palpable pulsing of his fears, had been the one to reveal the secret to her, grant her this power over him, give her room for maneuvering that she would know how to take advantage of from now on, while the question of who profited from this agony and who endured it, father or daughter, was something that chased in circles and couldn’t be decided.