Free Delirium by Laura Restrepo Page A

the room before I gave my approval.
    At that point she seemed to glare at me with a policewoman’s eyes; what if she worked for the police, like all receptionists in all hotels everywhere? You see, my friends were already here once, at this hotel, a few months ago, I was explaining more than necessary, And, well, my friends would like to have the same room they had last time because they liked the garden you can see from the window. She asked me which room it was, Room 413, I answered, and I felt sick saying that number, so intimately associated with my misfortune, I can’t show you 413 because it’s occupied right now, Señor, she said checking the screen and managing to hit the right keys on the computer despite her mile-long nails, each perfectly painted in stripes of red, white, and blue nail polish, like a miniature French flag, and I asked myself whether she painted the design herself, the nails of her left hand with her right, and the right-hand nails with her left?, she must be ambidextrous, this girl, to manage such a feat.
    Instantly my thoughts swung to Agustina’s lovely oval nails, always short and never painted, and to the mother-of-pearl case that once belonged to her grandmother Blanca, where she kept the files, tweezers, emery boards, and other tools for giving herself a
manicure
, Agustina pronounces the word in French, and when I hear her I grimace, The word exists in Spanish and it’s almost identical, Agustina, we say
manicura
, see how easy?, in this country we get a
manicura
and not a
manicure,
the advantage being that we don’t have to work so hard to pronounce it. Leaning there on the reception counter at the Wellington Hotel, I sweat in remorse when I realize how sharply I criticize Agustina for her rich-girl mannerisms, how cruel I am to her sometimes, but fortunately Agustina ignores my bitter remarks and keeps doing things her way, not only does she say
manicure
ten times over but she also impassively claims that the little orange emery board you use to expose the white half-moons of your nails must be made of orangewood, my wife manages to live in a poor man’s house like mine, where all we eat is hamburger because we can’t afford sirloin, while at the same time she considers fussy things like those emery boards indispensable; exactly a year ago, when I was invited by a German university to travel to a symposium on the poet León de Greiff, I spent almost all the extra money I had at the duty-free shop at the Frankfurt airport buying the Clinique face creams Agustina had asked for; Marta Elena, my first wife, always made do with Pond’s, which can be bought at any drugstore, but Agustina, like all her kind, has the unpleasant habit of systematically rejecting products made in this country and being prepared to pay anything for stuff from abroad, and now 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, ever since Agustina won’t see me, I’ve become the invisible man.
    At that moment, the Fearless Girl’s voice interrupts my musings, But if you want I can show you room 416, which is practically the same thing, her voice bringing me back abruptly, Room 416, of course, thank you very much, Señorita, so long as it has a view of the acacia garden, too. It does, Señor, from a different angle, but I think you’ll still be able to see the acacias, tell me when your friends plan to arrive, Aguilar makes up a date that she notes down, No problem, the little French flags confirm on the keyboard, room 413 will be available then and I promise you that those acacias won’t have gone anywhere, My friends are the kind of people who pay attention to details like that, I say with a silly little laugh in an attempt to match her irony, Of course, Señor, the customer is always right.
    The Fearless Girl takes me by surprise by asking me point-blank what my name is, and I tell her