unmoored.
Portulinus sips his beer slowly, his face puffy above his wool scarf, until Blanca comes for him and takes him away, angry at those who doubt his sanity and determined not to acknowledge his collapse before others. But in spite of her resolve, day by day the strangeness becomes plainer, the strangeness that’s an ambiguous gleam in Portulinus’s eye when he falls silent, a look as if he’s walking lost in worlds he shares with no one, a birdlike nervousness of movement, a restlessness of swollen hands that leave damp marks on the surface of the table, hair that isn’t quite right, as if he’s forgotten to run a comb through it after a nap. It’s also a kind of panic that comes from within and spreads like a minor contagion, but more than anything, Portulinus’s madness is pain, the great pain living inside him.
Now, all these years later, two photographs of Grandfather Portulinus sit framed on the mantel at his youngest daughter, Eugenia’s, house, one taken when he was twenty-nine and the other when he was thirty-nine, which make it possible to establish a before and an after, like in those advertisements for plastic surgery or weight-loss formulas, except that in this case instead of improvement there’s pure decline, and the juxtaposition reveals how, in the space of ten years, the musician succumbed to an odious biological rhythm, a rhythm that must have been linked to his growing spiritual disquiet. Before: pleasant and seductive, curls that fall softly around the face, a gaze that scrutinizes while still remaining dreamy, an intense but balanced inner life. After: a flabby and long-suffering face, features recast, a dark and confused gaze, the swollen eyelids of an ugly woman who has cried for a long time, dull curls plastered clumsily against the left ear. Before, everything was still to be won, and after, everything is lost; the record is of irreversible damage to the spirit, a poisoning of the emanations of the soul.
DAY AFTER DAY following the dark episode, I park for a while in front of the Wellington Hotel, far enough from the front door so that my beat-up van won’t rouse the suspicions of the doormen, and watch in the rearview mirror the movement of people on their way in or out, with or without suitcases, the flurry of bodyguards around some personage alighting from an armored Mercedes, the wariness of foreigners taking their chances on the streets of Bogotá, the bows of a bellboy in full regalia, the haggling of a street vendor selling sweets, the rapid steps of a woman crossing the street; in other words, the natural, predictable actions of all those who may be considered inhabitants of the land of the sane. They’re so lucky, goddamn it, I say to myself, and I wonder whether they can possibly be conscious of their enormous privilege.
I’m not sure what I’m waiting there for, parked outside the hotel. For Agustina’s lover to return, for me to recognize him, launch myself at him, and smash his face in? I suppose not. To demand an explanation of what happened to my wife, or the hurt he inflicted on her? Maybe. But the truth is that I don’t think the man will show up here, and anyway, deep down I don’t even believe that he’s her lover, since the only thing he did, as far as I know, was open a door; who’s to say he wasn’t the concierge. So I look out for vague signs, keeping watch with naïve and dim hope as if time might move backward and I could keep the dark episode from happening. Going over and over what’s past has become my principal curse, reexamining it in order to formulate it in new terms, to imagine different paths than the one already taken, to retrospectively alter the course of events and prevent them from leading up to this point of extreme suffering that Agustina and I have reached.
Sometimes I step into the hotel, making sure that the older man with glasses who attended me the Sunday I came to pick up Agustina isn’t on duty, then I sit at one of the
Portulinus sips his beer slowly, his face puffy above his wool scarf, until Blanca comes for him and takes him away, angry at those who doubt his sanity and determined not to acknowledge his collapse before others. But in spite of her resolve, day by day the strangeness becomes plainer, the strangeness that’s an ambiguous gleam in Portulinus’s eye when he falls silent, a look as if he’s walking lost in worlds he shares with no one, a birdlike nervousness of movement, a restlessness of swollen hands that leave damp marks on the surface of the table, hair that isn’t quite right, as if he’s forgotten to run a comb through it after a nap. It’s also a kind of panic that comes from within and spreads like a minor contagion, but more than anything, Portulinus’s madness is pain, the great pain living inside him.
Now, all these years later, two photographs of Grandfather Portulinus sit framed on the mantel at his youngest daughter, Eugenia’s, house, one taken when he was twenty-nine and the other when he was thirty-nine, which make it possible to establish a before and an after, like in those advertisements for plastic surgery or weight-loss formulas, except that in this case instead of improvement there’s pure decline, and the juxtaposition reveals how, in the space of ten years, the musician succumbed to an odious biological rhythm, a rhythm that must have been linked to his growing spiritual disquiet. Before: pleasant and seductive, curls that fall softly around the face, a gaze that scrutinizes while still remaining dreamy, an intense but balanced inner life. After: a flabby and long-suffering face, features recast, a dark and confused gaze, the swollen eyelids of an ugly woman who has cried for a long time, dull curls plastered clumsily against the left ear. Before, everything was still to be won, and after, everything is lost; the record is of irreversible damage to the spirit, a poisoning of the emanations of the soul.
DAY AFTER DAY following the dark episode, I park for a while in front of the Wellington Hotel, far enough from the front door so that my beat-up van won’t rouse the suspicions of the doormen, and watch in the rearview mirror the movement of people on their way in or out, with or without suitcases, the flurry of bodyguards around some personage alighting from an armored Mercedes, the wariness of foreigners taking their chances on the streets of Bogotá, the bows of a bellboy in full regalia, the haggling of a street vendor selling sweets, the rapid steps of a woman crossing the street; in other words, the natural, predictable actions of all those who may be considered inhabitants of the land of the sane. They’re so lucky, goddamn it, I say to myself, and I wonder whether they can possibly be conscious of their enormous privilege.
I’m not sure what I’m waiting there for, parked outside the hotel. For Agustina’s lover to return, for me to recognize him, launch myself at him, and smash his face in? I suppose not. To demand an explanation of what happened to my wife, or the hurt he inflicted on her? Maybe. But the truth is that I don’t think the man will show up here, and anyway, deep down I don’t even believe that he’s her lover, since the only thing he did, as far as I know, was open a door; who’s to say he wasn’t the concierge. So I look out for vague signs, keeping watch with naïve and dim hope as if time might move backward and I could keep the dark episode from happening. Going over and over what’s past has become my principal curse, reexamining it in order to formulate it in new terms, to imagine different paths than the one already taken, to retrospectively alter the course of events and prevent them from leading up to this point of extreme suffering that Agustina and I have reached.
Sometimes I step into the hotel, making sure that the older man with glasses who attended me the Sunday I came to pick up Agustina isn’t on duty, then I sit at one of the
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