The Angel of Galilea by Laura Restrepo

Author:Laura Restrepo [Restrepo, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Vengeance of Izrafel

From the phone in the bakery I called Ofelia Mondragón, a very dear friend and old classmate with a doctorate in psychology. She devoted her morning office hours to helping rich kids stay away from drugs and get closer to their parents; in the afternoons she worked as a volunteer in a women’s public hospital for the mentally ill, commonly known as the Madwomen’s Asylum. The poorest, most violent and forsaken of the city’s disturbed women landed there, and amid the squalor and the plundering of hospital equipment, they were taken care of by people with the selflessness of saints. If they could not be cured, at least they were given some comfort.

The hospital telephone kept ringing and ringing, and I was boiling with impatience, until someone felt charitable enough to answer and tell me I would be put through. Minutes ticked by, and all I heard on the other end were distorted echoes, which sounded like muffled screams, as the phone kept swallowing coin after coin.

I felt uneasy connected to the dark world of the insane, as if it harbored some contagious virus that could travel by wire and penetrate my brain through my ear. Perhaps my persistent irrational fear of dementia comes from the belief that sooner or later it will be waiting for me just around the corner—that I’ll only have a few more blocks to go before I knock on its door and enter, never to emerge again, just as my grandmother and maternal aunts had done. And also my mother, who, toward the end of her days and because of this hereditary curse, fell victim to a full-blown arteriosclerosis that filled her bed and her imagination with little green dwarfs, jumpy and meddlesome like an army of frogs.

No one was picking up the receiver at the other end. What if one of the crazy women had answered the phone and then forgotten my request? And what if Ofelia never came, and there was no one to save my angel from the bubble that surrounded and isolated him? And what if Ofelia did come and cured my angel, stripping him of his power and his magic? I was debating whether to hang up or keep waiting, when I finally heard her voice.

“Ofelia, I am with someone who needs your help. It’s an emergency,” I said.

“Can you bring her? I’ll wait for you here.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

Everybody called my friend Lovely Ofelia. Her forehead, skin, nose, mouth, her oval face, were all reminiscent of the classical features on an antique medallion, but her eyes, enormous and often given to tears, seemed copied from Japanese comic books. Despite her degree from the Pontifical Xavieran University, earned by a thesis on the influence of the moon on depressive states, Ofelia trusted her intuition, which was so acute that it enabled her to perform unusual feats. Once, while we were with other friends vacationing at a beach resort, she lost a ring in the ocean and, before my eyes, recovered it in just a few seconds.

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