Delirio is not a long book, but it took me a while to finish it. For one thing, it’s in Spanish and my Spanish is just so-so. But even aside from that, it’s a difficult book to decode. There are multiple and sometimes mystifying shifts in time, speaker and point of view. At first I thought that these changes could easily have been more clearly signaled by using more paragraph breaks and more punctuation. Gradually I came to love the style for being just the way it is and I saw that the addition of more formatting marks would have only got in the way. Thank goodness, though, that all those unbroken passages are just a few pages long.
Certainly the novel is worth the effort. It is set in 1980s Bogotá, which was of course one hell of a place and time. Within the relatively small country of Colombia, there were a half dozen armed revolutionary groups, a vast and violent cocaine industry, and a heavily armed national security force that largely made its own rules. The U.S. partially funded this force and also firmly supported the small group of oligarchs who ran the Colombian government. The government was only nominally democratic and in fact was only nominally a government at all since it was never quite clear how much Colombian territory they actually controlled at any one time. It seemed that no part of the country was safe from terrorist attacks and crime was rampant. Surface travel was especially risky, as many major highways were controlled by armed brigands of one kind or another. A number of good-sized cities were safely accessible only by air.
But of course life went on. And life on the personal level is what Delirio is mostly about. One of the main characters is a man named Aguilar. Aguilar used to be a university professor, but his university has shut down due to political turmoil. He’s now working for Purina, distributing bags of dog food. He lives in a middle class area of Bogotá and is married to Agustina, who is some years younger than he. This is Aguilar’s second marriage. His ex-wife and their two sons live in another town. The novel begins when Aguilar returns home from a business trip. Agustina isn’t home when he arrives. Instead he gets a message from a man whose voice he does not know informing him that his wife is in room such and such of a rather nice hotel and that she needs him to come immediately to bring her home. When he goes to the hotel room, he finds that Agustina has fallen into madness; it seems to Aguilar (and I am directly paraphrasing the text here) that she is lost inside her own head, living on a parallel plane, which is quite nearby, but which is inaccessible. When she speaks, it is as if her words are in a foreign language, one that is vaguely familiar to Aguilar but which he cannot understand.
The chief narrative drive in the story comes from Aguilar’s attempts to find out how and why this has happened, and especially to discover what transpired while he was absent. It is a kind of detective story and as the book goes on, we begin to understand more and more about Agustina and about the roots of her madness. But Aguilar’s detective efforts are not the only source of information. We learn much more from other voices telling other stories, stories connected to Agustina’s family history. One of the speakers is Agustina herself, remembering her childhood. Another is Midas McAlister, her former lover. Others are members of her family, including her mother’s older sister and her German immigrant grandfather, Portulinus.
For the first third of the novel it was hard for me to see how all the disparate voices could be connected, either to each other or to the mystery of Agustina’s madness. As the story went on, my reading of it slowly changed. As the main stories each came to their climax, the connections between them became clearer and more powerful. At the same time I began to feel that the story was not really about Agustina, but rather about madness itself, the many forms that it can take, its long relation to wealth, power and privilege, and how it so often includes a connection to sexual repression. This novel begins with interesting characters and is carried forward by what its characters do and say, but it ends up somewhere else, somewhere with a different kind of truth. This is not a book called Agustina; it is a story about Delirio.
Restrepo was 54 when Delirio was published in 2004. By that time she was firmly established as a teacher and writer. But she didn’t start out that way, and what little I know of her early life I find both fascinating and instructive. Laura Restrepo was born in Bogotá in 1950. She was the elder of two sisters. Her father, despite having left school at age 13, had come to own a successful business–one that required or at least allowed long periods of residence abroad, during which his wife and daughters accompanied him. The family’s constant travel meant that during the time when most children would have been in elementary and middle school, she received little formal education. Instead, her father was a believer in the educational value of literature, history, architecture and art and made the effort to expose his daughters to all these as they travelled. He also encouraged reading and in an interview Restrepo remembered being much influenced by three of his suggestions: William Saroyan, John Steinbeck and Nikos Kazantzakis.
At fifteen Restrepo returned with her father to Bogotá and attempted to earn a high school diploma. Despite being far behind her peers in almost every formal subject, she obtained her diploma–the first person in her father’s family to do so. During this time she rebelled against her father’s controlling ways and broke off with him. This was the last time she saw her father as he died just a few years later. Restrepo went on to earn a university degree in Philosophy and later an advanced degree in Political Science.
Restrepo had become a Trotskyite during her time at university and for a period of roughly nine years, when she was in her mid twenties and early thirties, she worked as a socialist activist, first in Colombia, then in Spain and then in Argentina. She then returned to Bogotá and began working as a political journalist, most notably for Semana, a weekly review of politics and current events.In 1983, Belisario Betancur, the president of Colombia at the time, added Restrepo to the high level commission that would attempt to negotiate peace with the M-19 guerrillas. The negotiations were difficult and the atmosphere highly charged. As the process went on, Restrepo become increasingly skeptical of the government’s true motives and intentions. She began receiving death threats and had to flee to Mexico, where she lived in exile for six years. During this time she left off journalism and began writing fiction. She was finally able to return to Colombia in 1989, which was also the year her first novel was published. Since then she has written nine more novels. She was a Cornell University Professor-at-Large from 2007 to 2013 and for several years was an adjunct Professor at the University of Seville. She had resided for various periods of time in Colombia, Mexico, Spain and the United States.
It is worth noting that Delirio is set in Bogotà in the 1980s, a time when Restrepo was tapped to help negotiate with M-19 and also a time when the single most powerful person in Colombia was Pablo Escobar. Restrepo’s first book about this period was also her first published work. It was published in 1986 and focuses on the M-19 negotiations that the author had been a part of. Though technically a novel, its main purpose seems to have been to expose to the world some of what went on behind the scenes in that process. The book’s title is generally listed as Historia de un entusiasmo (Story of a Fascination) but other sources show it as Historia de una traición (History of a Betrayal). Delirio, which was published almost twenty years later, deals only very generally with revolutionary terrorism and makes no specific mention of M-19. It does, however, touch on some of the more complex relationships between the government in Bogotà and the drug lords in other parts of the country. One of the pleasures of Delirio is that Pablo Escobar, though seemingly far away from Bogotá, is a major force in the lives of some of the characters. Escobar himself has a few scenes in the novel and threatens to steal the show.
I can’t help thinking of Restrepo as having been seriously plugged in to this era, as having been a participant and not just an observer. This gives Delirio credibility and an unusual sharpness. This comes from our strong sense that many of these characters and their histories are based closely on some of the people Restrepo personally knew, people whose actual stories she learned. I have no hard evidence for this; I could well be deluded. But many readers have suggested that Restrepo’s general intentions as a novelist are often at least quasi-journalistic. She wants us to know the truth about events.
I don’t mean to suggest that Restrepo feels that the truth about events is the only thing that matters, that it is somehow more important than the personal or inner truths that constitute our deepest understanding of the world. On the contrary, I think this later sort of truth is exactly what she is after. She insists, though, that the truth of events is where we have to start. She reminds us that there are things we may not want to face, and also that in both the public and the private spheres there are those who are tenaciously committed to lies and deception, mostly with an eye toward enlarging their own privileges and devaluing even the most basic rights of others. You need to get past all the bullshit, says the old Trotskyite, and see it for what it is. And for that you need to pay attention. As Aguilar tries to discover what precipitated Agustina’s descent into madness, he remembers how in days gone by he had often failed to really listen when Agustina talked about her past, about things that happened in her family or with her old friends. He remembers one particular time when he ignored her and just continued with his reading. And now events have overtaken him. Now it seems too late.
In public and in private, ain’t that just the way it goes.