Delirium Read Online Free PDF Page B

when it doesn’t, and the seer’s will ends up being imposed on everyone else’s. For example, Agustina warns, Don’t go to Ibagué with the boys because something will happen to you along the way, although what she’s really referring to is vague ill fortune, not a specific accident, but supposing she says, as she has before, Something bad might happen to you along the way, she has a high probability from the start of being right because life is hazardous in and of itself and likely to play dirty with us, but also because in a country like this, split from top to bottom by a mountain range, the highways, which are already in bad shape, twist and twine around abysses and as if that weren’t enough, they’re seized every other day by the army, the paramilitaries, or the guerrillas, who kidnap you, kill you, or assault you with grenades, beatings, gunfire, explosives, antipersonnel mines, or the massive detonation of propane tanks.
    Another thing Agustina usually accomplishes with her doom-filled warnings is to make me cancel plans that for one reason or another don’t appeal to her or aren’t to her advantage, and on top of that I have to be grateful to her because I can’t avoid the secret suspicion that it’s thanks to her that I’ve been rescued from disaster. And finally, if I don’t heed her warning and actually have an accident, even if it’s something as insignificant as the engine overheating on the journey up into the mountains, then she can chant an “I told you so” that sounds triumphant even as she tries not to gloat, so when faced with this new premonition, I willed myself to keep my cool, telling her simply, No, Agustina, I promise, nothing bad will happen on this trip. And how wrong I was this time, my God, how disastrously wrong.

    DO YOU HAVE A CIGARETTE, angel?, no, of course you don’t, Agustina doll, you’re not into that anymore; I, on the other hand, who used to be so healthy, the king of endorphins, lungs like brand new from so much exercise, have been smoking like a fiend ever since things fell apart, because believe it or not, nicotine’s the only thing that keeps me halfway afloat.
    That time at L’Esplanade, Spider was presiding from the head of the table propped up in his wheelchair, stiff as a frozen fish stick, the poor guy, and behind him at the next table were his two favorite lackeys, Paco Malo and the Sucker, who weren’t waiting outside the way bodyguards should wait, steaming up the glass in those Mercedes that make guys like your father so proud and that don’t do a thing for me, because I steer clear of heavy machinery, I ride easy, free as a bird, and full fucking throttle on my Bee Em Dubyoo bike, which is worth twice any of my friends’ heaps in pickup and price, always moving smooth, with no bodyguards or hassle, my only protection my guardian angel, because I’m still the same today as I was when you met me fifteen years ago, baby, and I’ll be the same till they bury me. And buried’s the perfect word for this death in life I’ve been condemned to. But anyway, Paco Malo and the Sucker were shoveling in their rations shoulder to shoulder with the bosses, spoiling the show and giving everybody the creeps, all because Spider, who was paranoid about kidnappings, had the gall to sit a pair of thugs at the next table and let them order French wine and dishes with fancy French names, what a ridiculous sight, these two guys with pistols practically bulging out of their armpits, in scummy little ties, smacking their lips as they chewed, and if Spider wasn’t so goddamn rich, that frog Courtois who owns L’Esplanade would never have permitted such a blatant show of disrespect.
    At the head of the table was Spider, paralyzed from the waist down, with me to his left, and to his right your brother Joaco, who’d just socked away a fortune as a go-between in the privatization of Telefónica, and also Jorge Luis Ayerbe, who had the press after him because of a massacre