Delirium Read Online Free Page A

of tears, his godmother said that in the annals of the saints there is no Carlos Vicente because it isn’t a Christian name, who ever heard of Saint Carlos Vicente the bishop or Saint Carlos Vicente the martyr, so they convinced themselves that it was better to call him Joaquín, and it was then that the story of my father’s great frustration began. So that he would forgive her, Eugenia, the boy’s mother, promised him that their second son would be called Carlos Vicente, but then I was born and since I was a girl they named me Agustina and so the long wait got longer, the wait for the chosen one who would be given the Name, until it was Bichi’s turn to be born and by consensus and without discussion he was named Carlos Vicente Londoño, just as my father’s obsession dictated, but life is so fickle that my father never wanted to call him that, and so we had to invent all kinds of nicknames, like Bichi, Bichito, Charlie Bichi, Charlie, all not-quite-real names, like names for a pet.
    Why should it be your fault, Bichi Bichito, for not looking like my father, for looking exactly like my mother and me; she, you, and I with skin that’s almost too white. Can you believe it, my mother was brought up to be proud of being Aryan, and who does she marry but someone who looks down on her for being washed-out and poor; whiteys, my father calls us when he sees us in our bathing suits at the pool at Gai Repos, the family estate in Sasaima, and before Bichi can ask her again what Gai Repos means, Agustina tells him: It means happy rest in one of the European languages that grandfather Portulinus could speak, he was the one who first came to Sasaima and bought the ranch; I’ve explained it to you a thousand times and this is the thousand and first time, but you never get it, you’re such trouble, Bichi Bichito, sometimes I think my father is right when he says that you’re the kind of boy who lives in the clouds and no one can make you come down.

    THOUGH SHE’S NEVER MET ME and probably never will, my mother-in-law Eugenia won’t forgive Agustina for living with me. Before the delirium, when Agustina hadn’t yet forsaken reality, I never bothered to ask her about her past, her family, or her memories, good or bad, partly because I was so busy with teaching and partly, to be honest, because I didn’t really care, I felt tied to the Agustina who lived with me here and now, not to the Agustina who belonged to other times and other people, and now, when that past might be crucial in helping to reassemble the puzzle of her memory, I mourn the questions I didn’t ask, yearning for those interminable stories that fell on deaf ears, about fights with her parents or past loves. I blame myself for everything I refused to see because I wanted to keep reading, because I didn’t have time, because I didn’t think it was important, or because I couldn’t be bothered to listen to stories about strangers, by which I mean stories about her family, which bored me to death.
    Those people, her family, have always refused to meet me because they think I’m a peon, Agustina herself confessed to me once that that was their word for me, peon, or in other words a bourgeois nobody, a third-rate professor, and that was before I was out of work; Agustina told me that there were other strikes against me, too, like the fact that I’m not divorced from my first wife, that I don’t speak any foreign languages, that I’m a communist, that I don’t make enough money, that I dress like a bum. It’s no surprise that there’s a wall of contempt between her people and mine, but the strange thing, the truly fascinating thing, is that the class Agustina belongs to doesn’t only exclude other classes but also purges itself; it’s always getting rid of its own kind, those who for subtle reasons don’t quite fulfill the requirements, like Agustina or Aunt Sofi, and I ask myself whether they were condemned at birth or whether it was a consequence of