Delirium by Laura Restrepo

Author:Laura Restrepo
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780385521512
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

BEGONE FROM ME all remorse, Nicholas Portulinus said out loud after the lunch of roast pork. Once he’d had a cup of herbal tea for his digestion and a long swallow of valerian extract, he repeated, Begone from me all remorse!, like a plea or a command requesting that the sleep-inducing properties of the valerian bestow upon him the brief bliss of a nap. Then he asked Blanca to unlace his boots, because his bloated body wouldn’t bend enough to permit the maneuver, and he lay down on his high bed protected by the gauzy cloud of a mosquito net, letting himself be lulled by the dull boom of the Sweet River, which tumbled into falls outside his window, and he saw again, in a certain kind of light that he himself would describe as an artificial glare, the polished surfaces of an ancient stage—at other times he will call it Greek ruins—on which two boys are fighting, wounding each other, and bleeding. “In the dream, I’m standing there bolted to the ground”—he will write later in his diary—” struck dumb by the metallic gleam of the blood and deaf to the call of the torn flesh. I don’t care about one of the fighters, the one whose back is to me so that I can’t see his face. I don’t know his name, either, but that doesn’t trouble me. I dream that his name doesn’t matter. The other boy, however, affects me deeply; I see that he’s the younger of the two and maybe the weaker, of that I’m not sure, but I do know that he’s whimpering and licking his wounds in a pitiful way.”

Portulinus wakes up at five in the afternoon and gets out of bed, although his mind is so scattered that it would be more accurate to say that he gets up without having completely awoken. He’s wearing a silk robe printed with a tangle of black branches on a forest-green background and the slippers that tend to lose themselves, which angers him so; his hair is plastered sideways from being pressed sweaty against the pillow and he’s still floating amid the passions of the dream that visited him during his nap. As if obeying an order, he takes up pen and staff paper and sits down at the piano, spending a few hours composing the song that for months has been buzzing in his ear, evading capture. From the garden, his wife, Blanca, spies on him through the latticework, happy to discover that Nicholas is composing again after months of idleness, “At last his creative energy is reborn”—she’ll write later in a letter—” and once again I hear the harmonies that spring from the depths of his soul.” Blanca, who also believes that her husband’s gaze has cleared a little, asks herself, Am I not the happiest woman in the world?, suspecting that at this moment she really is. That’s why, entranced, she watches her husband through the latticework as he fills one page

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