Delirium Read Online Free PDF Page A

impersonal, gradually turned into a rapid volley of awkwardly phrased and poorly thought-out remarks, so full of mutual recrimination that the result was a repugnant intimacy, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, as if a stranger had stepped on someone else’s foot by mistake in the street and the two had dropped everything in order to spend the afternoon spitting in each other’s faces. I said, What you want, Señora, isn’t to help your daughter recover but to take her away from me, and she shouted, You stole my daughter, with a shrillness that she must still be regretting, because the pitifulness of a petit bourgeois like me is a matter of course, but it’s unforgivable in a woman of her stature. I had worked myself into a nervous frenzy and I suppose she had too because she could hardly catch her breath, until I finally said no to her four or five times in a row, No no no no, Señora, Agustina is not leaving here, and then Eugenia hung up without saying goodbye and that was that.

    BEING A MUSICIAN by profession, Grandfather Portulinus made a living by giving piano lessons to the daughters of the well-to-do families of the town of Sasaima, among them Blanca Mendoza, a slight girl who was hardly a promising pianist as she had clumsy hands and little ear for music, and in fact Portulinus never even managed to teach her the scales, but instead he ended up marrying her, although he was twice her age. If he did, it was partly for love and partly out of obligation, because he had gotten her pregnant through a thoughtless, inconsiderate act that was committed without her parents’ knowledge and probably against her will, an ill-fated start to any marriage, but in the end what mattered most wasn’t what was augured but the way the man dealt with his fate, and twenty long years of unswerving conjugal loyalty were proof that if Grandfather Portulinus had married the girl who was now Grandmother Blanca, it was because he loved her, not because he had to.
    Besides giving piano lessons, Portulinus composed music to order for marriages, serenades, and celebrations, certain folk dances like
bambucos
and
pasillos
, which, as Grandmother used to say, were catchy and lively despite his Germanness, and they touched people’s hearts even though their lyrics made reference to sky-blue summers, the snows of yesteryear, pine forests, the ocher shades of fall, and other yearnings equally unknown in equatorial Sasaima, where no one doubted that Nicholas Portulinus was a good man, and if certain oddities of character were noted in him, they were dismissed as being attributable to his foreignness. But the truth is that every so often, as if in waves, Grandfather Portulinus suffered mood swings of varying severity and for months he would give up teaching, stop playing and composing, and only roar or mutter, seemingly plagued by noises not of this world, or at least that’s what he complained to his wife. Blanca, sweet Blanca, your name is enough to clear away the shadows, he would say to her when she took him out into the countryside to soothe him, and he would run holding her hand and then trip and fall, rolling in the tall, sweet-smelling summer grasses, though it should be understood that this was not summer in Sasaima, since in Sasaima there’s only one single continuous season all 365 days of the year, but that other summer, so far away now, lingering in a foreigner’s mournful memory.

    THE HOTEL ROOM was luxurious, or striving to be so; I remember yards of fabric in drapes and upholstery and a peach-colored carpet that exuded the smell of newness. At the far end was Agustina, sitting on the floor, as if trapped between the wall and a table with a lamp on it, a place where no one would think to sit unless they had fallen. She looked pale and thin and her hair and clothes were bedraggled, as if she hadn’t eaten or bathed for days, as if she had been subjected to all sorts of humiliations. And yet her eyes were shining, I