2
Political madness in Laura Restrepo’s Delirio
Stephen M. Hart
In my study,
White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America (1993), I argued that one of the most important components of the fiction written by Latin American and Spanish women in the second half of the twentieth century was that characterized by ‘sexual politics’ (see particularly Chapter 4). In retrospect it is now clear that the two most influential writers who focussed on sexual politics were Marta Traba and Luisa Valenzuela, whose paradigmatic works,
Conversación al sur (
Mothers and Shadows; 1981) and
Cambio de armas (
Other Weapons; 1982) deserve a special highlight. These two works offered powerful visions of how sex and politics could inform each other, and they treated uncomfortable themes such as femicide, delirium, paranoia and sexual torture. These are themes, as we shall see, that are highly relevant for the novel examined in this chapter, Laura Restrepo’s
Delirio (
Delirium; 2004).
1 Delirio (Bogotá: Santillana Ediciones, S.L., 2004); there is an English translation: Delirium, trans. Natasha Wimmer (London: Vintage, 2008). This novel offers a powerful twenty-first-century statement about the inter-relation between delirium and political oppression, and between sexual and economic torture. So we can certainly trace some continuity with those twentieth-century canonic works that articulated sexual politics in Latin America as viewed from a female perspective. But we should note the presence of a certain discontinuity. For this Colombian literary text is, in some crucial ways, different from the creative writing produced in other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru. Its ideological expression is more disorientating, and this is because the problems it articulates are more urgent.
Unlike countries such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru, Colombia has not yet had or completed a truth commission, that is to say it has not embarked on a process that is equivalent to those truth commissions carried out in the four above-mentioned countries. Argentina was the first country in Latin America to set up its own truth commission; the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas was set up on 15 December 1983, completed its investigation on 20 September 1984, and pointed to extensive human rights violations (i.e. that around 30,000 people had been disappeared), which led to a number of prosecutions of civil and military individuals in Argentina. Then in Chile the Rettig Report, officially called
The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, in 1991 documented the human rights abuses that had occurred in Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and it too led to prosecutions. In Uruguay, in 2000–02, a Comisión Para la Paz concluded that human rights abuses occurred, and this led to court trials. In Peru there was also a Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación; it took place from 13 July 2001 until 28 August 2003 and investigated the human rights abuses committed during the conflict in Peru that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. It too produced a concrete engagement with the national legal system, leading to imprisonment of guilty parties. Whatever the errors of these truth commissions – and this is not the place to rehearse them – the fact is that they had an important an empiric impact on the wellbeing of the nation, in terms of consciousness-raising about human rights and engagement with and faith in the legal and civic system, and they delivered a sobering blow to those individuals who believed that the rule of law could be ignored with impunity.
2 Kathryn Sikkink and Carrie Booth Walling in their article, ‘The Impact of Human Rights Trials in Latin America’, Journal of Peace Research, 44.4 (July 2007), 427–45.Despite the civil unrest that has affected Colombia since the middle of the twentieth century – since 1964 some three million people have been displaced and 220,000 people have been killed, and civil peace has been consistently disrupted and undermined during this period by terrorist organizations such as M-19 and FARC, not to mention the role of the drug cartels during this period – Colombia, unlike the above-mentioned Latin American countries, has not engaged fully with and completed a truth commission. It is true that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner has been active in Colombia since 1997, and there have been a number of truth-seeking missions, pioneered, for example, by the International Center for Transitional Justice, which have led to semi-official national committees that have issued recommendations but, to date, Colombia has not had a truth commission of the type that has taken place in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru. There are a number of reasons for this – and it should be noted that serious peace talks have occurred between the government and FARC in recent years, as occurred notably in talks that occurred in Havana in the summer of 2016 – but the lack of an official truth commission has had a deleterious impact on the capability of resolution on these types of political issues. Kathryn Sikkink and Carrie Booth Walling in their article, ‘The Impact of Human Rights Trials in Latin America’ (2007), for example, have demonstrated that the pessimistic claims of sceptics who claim that human rights trials threaten democracy, increase human rights violations, and exacerbate conflict are not supported by empirical evidence from Latin America.
3 Ibid.For all this, we should not see Colombia in exclusionist terms. Mexico, after all, provides the comparable case of a country that has decided not to take the route of a truth commission as a pathway towards truth and reconciliation. In a workshop held on 5 December 2014 sponsored by the Kellogg Institute, Guillermo Trejo asked whether holding a Mexican truth commission would be a viable way out of Mexico’s ‘ongoing security and human rights crisis’.
4 See https://kellogg.nd.edu/truth-commission-mexico. The short answer to the question is yes, but the country has refused to take this route. Mexico’s new president, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has focused on over-small or over-big issues in order to avoid the issue of human rights, i.e. by calling for a truth commission on 43 missing students as well as a truth commission on the conquest of Mexico by Spain in 1519–21.
5 David Agren, ‘Mexico’s new president creates truth commission to investigate 43 missing students’, The Guardian, 3 December 2018; Mark Stevenson, ‘Mexican president calls for truth commission on conquest’, Fox News, 26 March 2019. Colombia, as mentioned above, has taken a more circuitous route along the truth commission route. It is true that a Colombian truth commission has been set up recently, and it has a broad international remit, as its recent important visit to Edinburgh, which occurred on 11 March 2020, suggests.
6 https://www.scottishlegal.com/article/colombian-truth-commission-delegation-visits-edinburgh. But there are some who would argue that if a country only sees the need for a truth commission in a real way in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is too little, too late. It has gathered a head of steam some 30 years after other equivalent truth commissions occurred in other Latin American countries. For many the era of the truth commission has passed; its raison d’être has disappeared.
What are the implications of the absence of a truth commission in Colombia for contemporary female novelists? As we shall see, essentially, literature written in Colombia in the twenty-first century has taken on the role of the missing truth commission, and this has been particularly the case with female novelists. In this chapter I will be looking at one further representative novel of the twenty-first century, which essentially takes on the issue of violence against women, femicide, injustice, and impunity, and provides the type of corrective vision for society that is needed as a kind of compensatory restorative justice as a result of the lack of any meaningful peace commission in Colombia. In this sense we can describe Restrepo’s novel
Delirio – which epitomizes the ‘violence against women’ strand within twenty-first-century women’s writing in Colombia – as attempting to achieve a recuperative justice for all Colombian women who have suffered gendered and political violence characterized by impunity. Like Jaramillo Morales’s
Acaso la muerte discussed in the previous chapter,
Delirio does not provide a strictly sociological study but, instead, creates a non-empirical ideation of a violent event against women that is based on and distilled from a number of informational sources, and in which the force of the narrative is due to the technical mastery involved in bringing various narrative strands together rather than its possession of a putative empirical truth, as might occur in a sociological study. The various sources that
Delirio draws on include the well-known narrativizations of the vicious internecine civil war that occurred in Colombia in the 1980s and the 1990s between the Colombian State and anti-State organizations such as the FARC,
7 The FARC, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), was an anti-State guerrilla group founded in 1964 which used military activity, terrorism, kidnapping for the purposes of ransom, extortion, illegal mining and illegal drug distribution in order to put pressure on the Colombian government. It signed a ceasefire with the Colombian government in 2016. the M-19,
8 The M-19 (Movimiento 19 de abril; 19 April Movement) was an anti-State Colombian guerilla organization founded as a result of the allegedly illegal and fraudulent presidential elections of 19 April 1970 in which Gustavo Rojas Pinilla lost the presidential race. It used armed activity, terrorism, the kidnapping of high-profile politicians, and the siege of national government and foreign government buildings in order to put pressure on the Colombian government. It was alleged to have links with the Medellín drug cartel run by Pablo Escobar. In the late 1980s the M-19 gave up its weapons in order to become a political party. and Pablo Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel.
9 Pablo Escobar (1949–93) was a Colombian drug smuggler who founded the Medellin drug cartel, supplying cocaine to an ever-growing market in the 1980s and 1990s. Known as ‘The King of Cocaine’, the enormous wealth he obtained as a result of these illicit activities (estimated as in excess of £25 billion) made him one of the richest people in the world, and he used his wealth to destroy business rivals and influence Colombia’s political system. He was shot and killed by Colombian National Police in Medellín in 1993. Indeed the war between the Colombian State, on the one hand, and anti-State terrorism, on the other, forms the backdrop against which the emplotment of violent acts against women (in this case Agustina, the female protagonist suffering from delirium, and Dolores, a sex worker who is murdered in a gym) is woven. Even so, we should not forget that this is a novel – as José Saramago the Nobel Prize winner, said of
Delirio, it was ‘one of the finest novels written in recent memory’.
10 Cover blurb; Delirium, trans. Natasha Wimmer (London: Vintage, 2008). As often occurs in the novel form the balance between the fictional and the ‘real’ is fluid and osmotic. Agustina and Dolores are fictional exemplars of the experience of violence against women while Pablo Escobar is ‘real’ in Restrepo’s
Delirio in the same manner that Nancy is fictional (though based on Eliza Grimwood) and Bill Sikes (based on William Sykes) is real (notwithstanding a slight typographical change in the spelling of his name in the novelistic version) in Charles Dickens’s novel,
Oliver Twist (1838).
11 For discussion of the source of Nancy, see David Leafe, ‘Oliver’s murderous twist: The bloody killing of the real-life Nancy that so obsessed Charles Dickens it drove him to an early grave’, The Daily Mail, 18 April 2009 (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1171577/The-bloody-killing-real-life-Nancy-obsessed-Charles-Dickens-drove-early-grave.html; last consulted 3 January 2021). For discussion of the source of Bill Sikes, see Dayla Alberge, ‘Real-life Charles Dickens characters traced’, The Guardian, 1 February 2012; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/charles-dickens-real-character-names; last consulted on 3 February 2021).Restrepo’s Delirio is particularly relevant in that it treats the issues of corruption and impunity in Colombian politics, particularly as it relates to the war between the State and anti-State organizations, and focalizes that corruption and impunity through the image of a delirious woman. The emplotment in Restrepo’s novel takes the form of an investigation to find out the reason why the key witness of the novel, Agustina, is ‘delirious’. In Delirio the novel we have a detective figure – Aguilar – who embarks on this journey of investigation and we finally discover that it is as a result of the horrors of injustice, impunity and (especially) the sexual torture of a female body that the protagonist has gone mad. In Delirio the delirium is caused by the opprobrium of Colombia’s misguided sexual politics. The novel is, thus, to be seen as an allegory of all that was – and still is – wrong with Colombia’s political landscape, which, in the novel, is traced back to the traumas of the brutal wars between the State and anti-State operations and entities such as Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel, M-19 and FARC during the 1980s and 1990s. Given that the injustice is shown in Delirio as enacted within and on the female human body, we can safely argue that Delirio is a twenty-first century re-writing of the feminist notion that ‘the personal is political’.
Delirio opens with a disturbing scene; Aguilar receives a phone call and is told to go to a hotel in downtown Bogotá to pick up his wife, Agustina, who, only a few days previous, was normal and to all intents and purposes happy, but now is a gibbering wreck, withdrawn, hardly able to speak, and unable (or unwilling) to explain what has happened to her.
I knew something irreparable had happened the moment a man opened the door to that hotel rom and I saw my wife sitting at the far end of the room, looking out the window in the strangest way. […] I found her in a hotel in the north of the city, transformed into someone terrified and terrifying, a being I hardly recognised.
12 Delirium, trans. Natasha Wimmer (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 1: Spanish original: ‘Supe que había sucedido algo irreparable en el momento en que un hombre me abrió la puerta de esa habitación de hotel y vi a mi mujer sentada al fondo, mirando por la ventana de muy extraña manera. (…)la encontré en un hotel, al norte de la ciudad, transformada en un ser aterrado y aterrador al que apenas reconozco’.Through a series of snatches of conversations intercut with bursts of episodes, the reader is led on a complicated journey, full of unexpected twists and turns, designed to trace Agustina’s story back in time in order to find out why and how she has become overwhelmed by delirium. By the end of the novel, the search has become allegorical – Augustina has become a metaphor of Colombia’s body politic, and a concrete exemplification of what happens to a country if it is not governed by the law of the land.
As we might expect from a novel that seeks to tell the ‘truth’ about a past event, Delirio is set within an empirically recognizable stage-set. As Terrence Rafferty suggests:
Most of the action takes place in the Colombian capital, Bogotá — a city, one character says, ‘where everyone’s at war with everyone else’ — at a time when the whole country seems either insane or, perhaps worse, in love with insanity and helpless to change. Although Restrepo doesn’t specify the year, it appears to be 1983:
E.T. and
Flashdance are in the movie theaters, Ronald Reagan is president of the United States, and the most powerful man in Colombia is Pablo Escobar, darkly presiding over the vast cocaine empire of Medellín. Escobar ‘doesn’t like being called the King of Coca’, though; according to someone who knows him, ‘he prefers Father of the Nation’. And
Delirium is about his nation of frightened, maddened children, the Colombia he sired.
13 Terrence Rafferty, ‘My Wife is Mad’, New York Times, 15 April 2007. It is not just the existence of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel that is the problem – more problematic is the way in which drug money is indistinguishably mixed up in the financing of State activities. As Ben Bollig suggests, it is also possible to read the novel as an allegory about the oligarchy’s feigned ignorance of its links with Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel. This occurs via the life-story of Midas McAllister:
The clearest thread, and the most compelling narrative, comes from Midas McAllister, a money launderer, part-time pimp and business associate of drug lord Pablo Escobar. McAllister, a social climber from the humblest of backgrounds, is both a common cynic and an acute analyst of Colombia in the age of narco-capitalism. His strand of the story echoes Restrepo’s own work as an investigative journalist and representative on the Colombian ceasefire commissions of the Eighties, and provides a sharp portrait of the links between a centuries-old class system, international politics and drug-dealing. It is also a memorable depiction of the excess of the Eighties, now making a comeback in the lives of the super-rich. In particular, Midas reveals the convenient pantomime by which Colombia’s oligarchy feigns ignorance of its reliance on the money made by Escobar’s cartel.
14 Ben Bolig, ‘A searing slice of madness’, The Guardian, 4 November 2007. Despite Bolig’s grim overall assessment of Restrepo’s novel it is interesting to note that Boyd Tonkin suggests that Delirio has ‘something remarkably like a happy ending’; see ‘Love in the time of class war and cocaine cartels’, The Independent, 21 September 2007.The covert crime that lies at the heart of this novel is the sexual torture and murder of a woman called Dolores, a sex worker who goes to Midas McAllister’s gym to service two clients; the gym owner takes her downstairs to the gym, leaves Paco Malo and the Sucker to it, and then goes upstairs to his office to pop some pills:
Then the great performance, that vaudeville of lashes and hooks and skewers and pinches and butt-slapping, reaches its climax, and suddenly everything was quiet and from down below, the noise of the gym machines started up, the old familiar hum of the pulleys, the sharp clang of weights falling into place, the clatter of the presses, and I relaxed, thinking that the two escorts, Paco Malo and the Sucker, having had their fill of sado-masochism, were warming up on the machines, Go for it, you flabby pair of thugs, let’s see you lose those little bellies you started at L’Esplanade.
15 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 175; Spanish original: ‘Luego ya vino el desenvolvimiento de la gran función, el vodevil de azotes y ganchos y chuzos y pellizcos y nalgadas, y de repente como que se aquietó aquello y empezaron a sonar abajo las máquinas del gimnasio, el viejo y conocido runrún de las poleas, el golpe seco de las pesas al asentarse contra la base, el traqueteo familiar de las prensas, y el Midas se relajó pensando que al menos los dos escoltas, el Paco Malo y el Chupo, saturados de sadomasoquería se habían dedicado más bien a calentar músculo en los aparatos, Que les aproveche, par de gorilones fofos, a ver si rebajan esas barriguitas sebadas en L’Esplanade.’But then what Midas McAllister has heard takes on a more sinister meaning when his drug-filled lethargy is interrupted:
I swear that when I’m playing I lose all track of time, pac, pac, pac, around and around the labyrinth overrunning ghosts, and I would’ve kept it up all night if the Sucker hadn’t stuck his head in my office to say there was a problem and Mr Spider needed me downstairs. Holy Mary Mother of God, I signed, stopping the game and trying my best to be patient, because who could bear Spider whining and begging forgiveness for his latest erotic-sentimental defeat and demanding that I set up the next extravaganza for the next day, and when I got down there he was looking very old and very fat and infinitely weary in his wheelchair, So what’s the problem, Spider my friend, I asked condescendingly. The problem is that the little woman kicked the bucket, Midas my boy, God save her soul.
I wouldn’t even tell you what I felt, Agustina darling, or rather I will tell you; at first I didn’t understand what Spider was saying, but when he pointed toward the other end of the room, where the machines are, there on one of the multipurpose stations, the Nautilus 4200 Single Stack Gym, my most beloved and recently acquired machine, equipped with a pec deck, leg extension station, abdominal bar ankle cuff, side tower, and 210-pound weight stack, there I saw Dolores lying all disjointedly, as if they’d broken her neck by strapping her down and pulling the cable back too far, as if they drawn and quartered her, as it they’d turned y Nautilus 4200 into a torture rack, as if they’d gone too far and something had snapped.
16 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 176; Spanish original: ‘te juro que cuando estoy en ésas pierdo por completo la noción del tiempo, pac, pac, pac, abro y cierro la bocota y devoro galletas, pac, pac, pac, subo y bajo por el laberinto destruyendo fantasmas, y hubiera seguido así, dándole la noche entera, si por mi oficina no se asoma el Chupo a decir que don Araña me requería abajo porque se había presentado un inconveniente. Ave María Purísima, suspiró el Midas poniéndole stop al juego en el momento más emotivo y armándose de paciencia, ahora quién se aguanta a la Araña lloriqueando y disculpándose por su nuevo fracaso erótico-sentimental y exigiéndome que le monte para mañana la próxima stravaganza, y al llegar abajo lo vio muy anciano y muy gordo e infinitamente hastiado entre su silla de ruedas, Qué hubo pues, Araña my friend, le preguntó el Midas en tono condescendiente, Lo que hubo fue que sacó la mano la mujercita, amigo Midas, que Dios la tenga en su gloria. Ni te cuento lo que sentí, Agustina bonita, mejor dicho sí te lo voy a contar, al principio no entendí lo que la Araña me estaba diciendo, pero cuando señaló con el dedo hacia el fondo, hacia donde están los aparatos, sobre una de las estaciones múltiples, la Nautilus 4200 Single Stack Gym, mi aparato más amado y recién adquirido, acondicionado con deck para pectorales, extention station para las piernas, barra para abdominales, ancle cuff, torre lateral y stack de 210 libras, allí sobre mi aparato vi que yacía la Dolores toda desarticulada, como si la hubieran desnucado al amarrarla y hacerle demasiado fuerte hacia atrás con la correa, como si la hubieran descuartizado, como si se hubieran puesto a jugar con ella convirtiendo en potro de tortura a mi Nautilus 4200, como si se les hubiera ido la mano y la hubieran reventado.’Very much like Luisa Valenzuela’s Cambio de armas, which contains sexual torture as the unmentionable horror at the centre of the novel, Delirium unveils Dolores’s disjointed and tortured body, murdered by sexual torture on a multipurpose station, as the core message of its story. And Dolores becomes one of Colombia’s disappeared:
And what came next, Agustina doll, was purely procedural and technical, lifting the girl off the machine, rolling her up in a rug, and at an order from Spider to his thugs, watching her leave for parts unknown in the trunk of the Mercedes, Don’t come back until you’re 100 percent sure she’s gone forever and won’t be heard of again until Judgment Day, those were Spider’s curt instructions, and when the two killers and their victim were gone, I went up and turned off the disco music, which through all of this had kept thundering like a noise from hell, and I lovingly cleaned my Nautilus 4200 and polished the steel until there were no marks left on it.
17 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, pp. 177–78; Spanish original: ‘Y lo que sigue de ahí en adelante, muñeca Agustina, es puro trámite y asunto técnico, bajar a la chica del aparato, enroscarla entre un tapete y, a una orden de la Araña a sus matones, verla partir hacia lo desconocido entre el baúl del Mercedes, Sólo regresan acá cuando estén al cien por cien seguros de que la difunta desapareció para siempre y nadie va a saber de ella hasta el día de la Resurrección de los Muertos, ésas fueron las instrucciones perentorias de la Araña, y cuando ya estaban lejos los dos criminales y la víctima, yo subí y desconecté la música disco, que a todas éstas seguía tronando como un ruido del infierno, limpié con cariño mi Nautilus 4200 y le brillé el acero hasta que no quedó huella, a fin de cuentas la máquina era inocente.’And Dolores would have remained without a trace ‘until Judgment Day’, to use Spider’s words, had it not been for the protagonist of Restrepo’s novel (of which, more below).
But Restrepo’s novel is not only about the blood and guts of sexual torture; it is also about the language people use when they are forced not to mention the unmentionable. Delirium is supremely clear at expressing how the members of Colombia’s oligarchy conduct their speech when it comes to delicate matters relating to the self or to the State. We have a good example of this in one of the scenes in the novel in which Agustina, at home with all of her family, is beginning to rant and rave about one of her bugbears, and her husband – the focaliser of the narrative of this novel – decides to simply cut her short; he grabs her hand, and removes her from the room. The important point here is how Eugenia reacts to this, with words that are coded and contain an alternative meaning:
Agustina baby, I was defusing the time bomb that had been activated by the subject of Bichi’s boyfriend, by Joaco blowing, and by the spark of delirium that already shone in your eyes. When she saw that we were going your mother secretly approved and was even grateful and pretended that nothing was happening, Don’t forget to bring yucca rolls for breakfast tomorrow, she shouted as we were at the gate, Of course, Eugenia, how many yucca rolls do you want?, I answered her, which translated into Londoño language meant I know that you know that something isn’t right here but don’t worry, I’ll let it pass, don’t worry, I’m not going to rub it in your face, because I know how to play that game, too, the game called I don’t think about it therefore it doesn’t exist, or So long as no one talks about it it’s as if it never happened, Certainly, Eugenia, of course we’ll be back early, and on and on, blah blah blah, you know what I’m talking about, Agustina sweetheart, that exchange of words that mean exactly the opposite of what they say, and yet despite it all I feel sorry for your mother, have you ever stopped to think, Agustina baby, how different your poor mother’s life is that she dreamed it would be?
18 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 256; Spanish original: ‘Agustina chiquita, yo estaba desactivando esa bomba de tiempo que se había armado con el asunto del novio del Bichi, con lo encarajinado que estaba Joaco por eso, con la chispa del delirio que ya refulgía en tus ojos, o sea que al ver que nos alejábamos tu madre secretamente aprobaba y hasta agradecía y hacía de cuenta que no pasaba nada, No olviden traer pandeyucas para el desayuno de mañana, gritó cuando ya traspasábamos el portal, Claro, Eugenia, cuántos pandeyucas quiere que le traigamos, le contesté yo, lo cual traducido a lenguaje Londoño equivalía a un Yo sé que usted sabe que aquí hay una tragedia montada pero quédese tranquila que se la dejo pasar, despreocúpese, no se la voy a echar en cara porque yo también sé jugar ese juego que se llama No pienso en eso ergo no existe, o No se habla de eso luego no ha sucedido, Cómo no, Eugenia, claro que volvemos temprano, y así, ta, ta, ta, tú sabes a qué me refiero, Agustina mi amor, a ese intercambio de frases que quieren decir justamente lo contrario, en medio de todo me da lástima tu madre, ¿alguna vez te has puesto a pensar, nena Agustina, qué distinta de sus sueños le vino a resultar la vida a tu pobre madre?’The important point about this quotation, which allows us to appreciate the stream-of-consciousness plus style indirect libre that Restrepo uses in her fiction, is that it also alludes to the presence of another technique, which is not often used with stream-of-consciousness, and this is the device of double-entendre. This is because stream-of-consciousness is seen almost universally as the truth-paradigm of fiction because – so the story goes – if a writer cannot tell the truth when he or she is using the stream-of-consciousness technique (that is, discourse as it appears in the brain before it has been thought about and doctored in order to sound ‘right’) he will never be able to do it. But, in Restrepo’s hands, curiously enough, this does happen and the double-entendre – complete with its ironic use of the two levels of discourse, the official line that is intended for consumption by externals and third parties and the truth that is only known, and kept that way, by a select few, in this case, the family members – is used alongside the freedom of the stream-of-consciousness technique.
There is another point about this delirium that needs to be made, and that is that it is, in Laura Restrepo’s novel, presented not just as an external force that appears to take over an individual’s mind and/or body but as an expression of an internal conflict, which is willed into being by the subject. This much is true, for example, of one of the principal sub-characters of the novel, Nicholas Portulinus, who dreams of the bloodied struggle between two individuals, Farax and Abelito, one of whom is real and the other (Farax) an imaginary being, and it is this parallel world that begins to obsess him, to such an extent that
once the parallel world is perfected in every detail, Nicholas detaches himself, breaking contact with the real world, and is left sealed and alone inside his bubble […] during the course of his ravings, Nicholas is swept away by an anxiety that feeds on itself; he’s like a man bewitched, unable to escape his delirium, though he doesn’t want to escape, either, because the relationship with is that of a slave to his master.
19 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, pp. 269–70; Spanish original: ‘una vez perfeccionado el mundo paralelo en todos sus detalles, Nicolás despega rompiendo contacto con el mundo real y queda solo y encapsulado entre su burbuja; (…) durante el proceso de su desvarío, Nicolás se ve arrastrado por una ansiedad que se autoalimenta, anda como hechizado, no puede salir del delirio, pero además no quiere hacerlo porque la relación que ha entablado con éste es la de un esclavo frente a su amo.’ As we can see in this passage, the point is that Nicholas is mastered and trapped by his delusion and – though the passage does not say this – it is clear that this parallel world is a willed universe, one in which he prefers to live rather than the real world. And what applies to Nicholas could also be said of Agustina. She needs to use the protective cocoon of her created world of anger tantrums and self-detachment in order to survive in the real world.
And the novel finally brings all the different themes and different stories together when, as we read in the final major section of the novel, Agustina – and she is foolishly encouraged in this by Midas McAllister, the gym-owner, since she has psychic gifts – visits the gym and ‘sees’ Dolores’s death, and begins screaming and shouting that she can see her blood, and the gym owner’s ploy to use her waywardness as a way of quietening down the rumours about the disappearance of Sara Luz, suddenly backfires, and the ‘truth’ that he had been desperately trying to hide, is publicly revealed in Agustina’s ‘stubborn trance’.
20 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 272; Spanish original: ‘tenacísimo trance adivinatorio’. This is the moment of catharsis in the novel – the point at which the truth about Dolores/Sara Luz is revealed and it provides a new meaning to the novel’s title, since it demonstrates that the ‘delirium’ experienced by various of the characters, but mainly by Agustina, is not a dislocation of the mind or of the senses but a ‘madness’ brought on by knowledge of the truth that the rest of the characters – who stand in this sense for society – are trying to repress, sweep under the carpet, get rid of. Midas McAllister, the gym owner, indeed, refers to this when he justifies his actions – he forced her to leave the gymnasium when her ‘ravings’ and ‘hallucinations’ get too close to the truth:
What I do want to talk to you about is what an ordeal it was getting you out of the center once you had reached the final stage of full-blown delirium, because you weren’t seeing or hearing anything, much less prepared to listen to reason.
21 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 273; Spanish original: ‘De lo que sí quiere hablarle el Midas es de la epopeya que fue sacarla del Aerobic’s una vez que alcanzó la fase superior del delirio consumado, Es que ni oías ni veías ni mucho menos querías saber de razones.’ The moment of anagnorisis is reached when Agustina sees the truth of Midas McAllister’s misdeed, and this recognition is the truth of Restrepo’s novel, and it is anything but the truth for the other characters in the novel – Midas McAllister rejects this point as ‘the final stage of full-blown delirium’, and also the point at which Agustina is not ‘seeing or hearing anything’, and also not listening to ‘reason’. Restrepo’s novel, therefore, turns the medical term ‘delirium’ on its head, emptying it of its dictionary meaning of ‘an abrupt change in the brain that causes mental confusion and emotional disruption’ and re-filling it with the meaning of ‘mental confusion and emotional disruption caused by the eruption of truth within a world of lies’. Restrepo’s novel up-ends, reverses and politicizes a medical term and, in effect, uses it as a weapon to attack the hypocrisy of Bogotá’s oligarchy who are happy to pocket the proceeds of criminal activity while abstracting and removing themselves as participants in that activity. In this novel, Pablo Escobar is the source of evil, Midas McAllister is the mediator, the Londoño family are the beneficiaries, and Agustina is the prophet of their doom. And this explains what had happened to Agustina when she is found in a hotel room, by her husband, Aguilar, at the beginning of the novel, the scene that initiates the detective novel-style search for answers to the mystery of how she ended up in that hotel room: we learn at the end of the novel that McAllister sent her with his henchman, Rorro, to the hotel room because she was delirious and he needed to get rid of her (Delirium, pp. 274–76).
Delirium is therefore used in the novel as a means of drawing a dividing-line between those who know the truth and need to tell the truth (these are the delirious) and those who know the truth and need not to tell the truth (these are the pragmatic). During the catharsis scene when Bichi’s father, Carlos Vicente Londoño, kicks Bichi in the back for being too effeminate, and Bichi goes off, retrieves the nude photos that his father had been taking of his own sister-in-law, Sofi, his wife’s sister, and throws them on the table so that everyone in the family gathering can see them – an act that would normally end a marriage instead leads to an elaborate sleight-of-hand played by Eugenia, Carlos Vicente’s wife who:
picked up the photographs, one by one, like someone gathering a deck of cards, and put them in her knitting bag, then, turning to face her son Joaco, she said […] You should be ashamed, Joaco, is this what you’ve been doing with the camera we gave you for your birthday, taking naked pictures of the maids? and, then, laying the subject to rest, she addressed her husband, Take the boy’s camera away from him, dear, and don’t give it back until he learns to use it properly.
22 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 299; Spanish original: ‘Eugenia recogió las fotos una a una, como quien recoge las cartas de una baraja, las guardó entre la bolsa de su tejido, encaró a su hijo Joaco y le dijo (…) Vergüenza debería darte, Joaco, ¿esto es lo que has hecho con la cámara fotográfica que te regalamos de cumpleaños, retratar desnudas a las muchachas del servicio?, y enseguida completó su parlamento dirigiéndose al marido, Quítale la cámara a este muchacho, querido, y no se la devuelvas hasta que no aprenda a hacer buen uso de ella.’As Sofi later suggested, she thought that her sister, Aguilar, had made a split-second decision to attempt to save her marriage by being pragmatic:
The performance she improvised just then was a masterful attempt to guarantee that despite the evidence, the secret would remain a secret; what I’m trying to tell you is that she knew her marriage would end not because Carlos Vicente was taking nude pictures of me bit because it was known that Carlos Vicente was taking nude pictures of me, and not even then, but only if it were admitted that it was known.
23 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 300; Spanish original: ‘eso fue precisamente lo que hizo en ese instante, improvisar un acto magistral para garantizar que pese a las evidencias, el secreto siguiera siéndolo, lo que quiero decirte, le dice a Aguilar la tía Sofi, es que ella sabía que su matrimonio no se iba a terminar porque Carlos Vicente me retratara desnuda sino porque se supiera que Carlos Vicente me retrataba desnuda, y ni siquiera por eso, más bien porque se admitiera que se sabía.’The structuring of narrative events in Restrepo’s novels sketches before our eyes a picture of the world that is divided between those, like Aguilar, who may know the truth but do not always tell it (they are the pragmatic ones) and those, like Bichi and Agustina, who tell the truth even if that truth will unhinge their minds (they are the delirious ones). And the final part of the narrativization of this scene shows that Bichi’s older brother, Joaco, when forced to make a decision about which side of the line he is on, places himself firmly in the pragmatic camp. As Sofi also points out, Joaco is happy to tell an untruth in order to guard his father’s and his mother’s honour, by following the ‘code of appearances’:
24 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 300; Spanish original: ‘el código de las apariencias’.Even more surprising was the role that Joaco played; believe me, Aguilar, when I tell you that it was that afternoon that the pact between Joaco and his mother was sealed, What did he do?, Joaco looked his mother in the eye and spoke the following sentence, just as I’m repeating it to you, Forgive me, Mother, I won’t do it again.
25 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, p. 300; Spanish original: ‘y más sorprendente aún fue el papel de Joaco, créeme, Aguilar, cuando te digo que esa tarde quedó sellada para siempre la alianza entre Joaco y su madre, Aguilar pregunta qué hizo Joaco, Joaco miró a los ojos a su madre y le dijo la siguiente frase, tal como te la voy a repetir, Perdón, mamá, no lo vuelvo a hacer.’Given the perspicacity of her comments as revealed in the closing stages of the novel, it is likely that Aunt Sofi becomes Laura Restrepo’s mouth-piece, voicing the overall message of her novel, which relates specifically to the function of the truth–lie compromise as it operates within the family unit, but – given the context in which the actions of the novel operates – also functions as a metaphoric barometer of the truthfulness of Colombia’s body politics. Here are Aunt Sofi’s concluding comments:
Everything has been destroyed by a lie, my lie, the lie of my clandestine affair with my brother-in-law, and now my sister was trying to rebuild our world with another lie and preserve everything as it was before the shakeup, her marriage, the reputation of her household, even the possibility of me staying there despite everything, one lie cancelling out another, tell me whether it isn’t enough to drive a person crazy?
26 Delirium, trans. Wimmer, pp. 300–01; Spanish original: ‘Todo se había venido abajo por una mentira, la mía, la de mis amores clandestinos con mi cuñado, y ahora mi hermana intentaba reconstruir nuestro mundo con otra mentira y dejarlo todo tal como estaba antes del remezón, su matrimonio, la buena reputación de su casa, incluso la posibilidad de mi permanencia en ella pese a todo, mentira mata mentira, dime si no es como para volverse loco.’ (
Delirium, pp. 300–01)
The important point here is the connection Aunt Sofi draws between the creation of lies and the state of affairs it directly causes, i.e. that it is enough to drive a person crazy. The connection is therefore clearly enunciated: the lies created by pragmatic members of society in order to keep up appearances and maintain the status quo lead directly to the production of delirium – and this is what the novel Delirio is about.
Delirio is, as we can see, a delirious novel about a delirious woman. The delirium is not only a representational effect, it is re-doubled as a technique. The delirium is expressed as the shock-cut narration that bounces from different elements of the narration. Narrativity itself becomes delirious and ‘loses’ its own voice. It is shorn off metaphorically from its roots. Rather like Samuel Beckett’s play En attendant Godot (1953), which expresses absurdity in the form of the drama itself rather than simply discussing the absurdity of life, as occurs in the fiction of Marcel Camus, for example, Restrepo’s Delirio expresses the very existence of delirium in the dismembered mental consciousness and form of the novel. The dismemberment of Dolores’s body and Agustina’s mind is reflected in the dismemberment of the language of narrativity in Restrepo’s novel. This latter event also represents the dismemberment of the body politic of Colombia, which is corrupted and turned into a metaphor of complex, fraudulent dollarization of Colombia’s economy, as mirrored by an inflated ego of the erectionless main character in Delirio. The novel performs an ironic post-mortem on Colombia’s deceased body politic, and – spurred on by the lack of an empiric truth commission on the links between the drug cartel and the Colombian government – Delirio attempts to enact an edict of recuperative justice by probing, in the manner of a legal investigation, the delirium contained in one woman’s mind.