Delirium

by Laura Restrepo

My wife’s unhinged mind is a dog snapping at me, but at the same time its barking is a call for help, a call to which I’m unable to respond;

I’m thinking of her face, which has always seemed incredibly beautiful to me, and of her dark eyes, which no longer see me, which means that I’ve become invisible,

I feel as if my wife’s illness has subjugated my identity, as if I’m a man who’s been emptied out inside in order to be stuffed, like a cushion, with concern for Agustina, love for Agustina, anxiety about Agustina, resentment of Agustina.

she’s always been adrift in a kind of absence, Body without soul,

he’ll make my name his own and crawl inside of me, he’ll burrow deep in my head and make his cave there,

my bedroom is my kingdom, as far as I’m concerned, and the king-size bed where I sleep with pretty girls whose names I don’t even ask for is a replica of the maternal womb.

With noise, with noise, what else?, can’t you hear it?, the silence is riddled with sounds that hide in it like creaks in the joists, and that eat away at it from within; you’d have to be deaf not to hear the humming and buzzing,

To compose I need pure silence, Blanca, the way poets need blank pages,

Your mother says it’s tinnitus, but she’s wrong, he says, it’s an extraterrestrial noise that doesn’t seem to come from a fixed point in space but from every direction at the same time.