The Iliac Crest. Cristina Rivera Garza

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СКАЧАТЬ once she found herself under the chemical’s influence. Instead of contradicting and protecting herself with uncomfortable silences, she would tell me about the progression of her disappearance. She would reveal the motivations that brought her here. She would tell me how long she had known the Betrayed and why she had shown up just hours before her on that stormy night. Most of all, I hoped she would tell me the rules of their secret language. I must confess that I was genuinely curious, but what motivated me above all else was that insufferable situation. It was impossible for me to continue living as I had: cornered in my own home, excluded from their common language, alone, deaf.

      In a hospital for the terminally ill where, more than cure, all we wanted to do was minimize physical pain as much as possible, morphine was a substance as common as dirt. We used it for everything. When a woman cried, we silenced her with morphine. If a man wrinkled his face, we smoothed it with morphine. We gave morphine to the cripples and the lunatics, to those who spoke and those who were silent, to those who couldn’t endure and those who endured it all, to those who came to die and those who were sent by other institutions because of their undesirable condition. All of them, in the most democratic way, would receive their dose of morphine sooner rather than later. It was the only way that they, as well as we, were able to maintain a certain level of sanity, a certain appearance of reality. And that is precisely what I tried to salvage from Amparo Dávila’s frenzied brain.

      I did it on a night similar to when she’d first arrived. It was raining and, with that as a pretext, I lit the fireplace. I took out the same book her arrival had interrupted that night and I waited. It was not long until she came out of her room, attracted, no doubt, to the color and warmth of the flames. I offered her a glass of anisette once she settled onto the rug.

      “I’ve never tried this before,” she said, taking the liquor. I guessed, correctly, that it would facilitate the ingestion of the powerful liquid morphine developed at the institution. Soon her eyes shone with an all-too-familiar glow. After her fourth glass of anisette she lay down on the rug, her head almost at the foot of the hearth. She stretched out her arms and closed her eyes. I couldn’t help but compare her to a heavenly image. The only thing missing was a cross.

      “How did you get here?” I asked as I crossed my legs, as if I really were at ease.

      Amparo opened her eyes and imperceptibly moved her face toward me, looking at me with her right eyebrow fiercely raised.

      “I didn’t come by accident,” she finally confessed, with a severity that allowed no doubt or interruption. “I’m here because I believe you can help me.”

      She changed her position but didn’t sit up. On her side, with her left forearm under her cheek and her right hand between her thighs, she rested in a kind of fetal position. I thought her body language could not have been more eloquent: her confession appeared in this ephemeral stage with everything impossibly balanced.

      “How can I help you?” I asked.

      This time, just as I had calculated, Amparo did not answer in the irate way that had silenced her before. She closed her eyes as if trying to remember and, to my surprise, as if it were a pleasing memory. Then she opened her eyes, and their expanding effect emerged like clockwork. We suddenly found ourselves in the middle of an immense esplanade without any shores or identifiable details. We were both made so small, so insignificant, that it was almost impossible to hear ourselves. The space between us grew and diminished at the same time, and I had to close my eyes to avoid my own disappearance.

      “A conspiracy,” she said gravely, “disappeared me.”

      The lightning bolt that illuminated the little room at that moment seemed as sickly and as stale as the confession I’d heard come from her lips.

      “I am sure that the man who commanded them,” she continued with the glass again at her lips, “came to die in your hospital. Not because he wanted to. He was moved from institution to institution until there was no other option but to send him here.” She finished her drink and extended her glass toward me for more.

      I had expected that the morphine would make her speech more loquacious, less structured, but as she spoke in her melodic and quiet voice, I realized my plan had backfired. It became clear that Amparo Dávila was accustomed to morphine and, the peacefulness of the moment aside, the substance would not provoke the mental state that usually brought on hurried confessions, unplanned revelations, or excessive tears. Far from letting down her defenses, the woman peacefully settled behind her own walls with incalculable astuteness. I realized then that she was quite like the hospital in this regard.

      “You might remember his case, even though, in reality, it was many years ago.” She held one of her pauses I had grown accustomed to and resumed after savoring another sip of anisette. “I believe he tried to organize the terminally ill against the institution’s authorities and, when he failed, escaped to the reefs where he eventually died.” She paused again, breathed deeply, and narrowed her eyes. “Some sort of new Prometheus, if you understand what I’m trying to say,” she concluded, looking back at the fireplace. Her arms were wrapped around her crossed legs and her head rested on her knees. To me, she seemed a very young, very spiritual, very vulnerable woman. I was starting to feel compassion for her when the fear, the same punctual and rigorous fear as before, made me maintain my silence. It was obvious Amparo had come with the intention of using me, and understandably that awakened my disgust and irritation.

      “And you think I can help you?”

      “If he’s the one I’m looking for, if this is the last place he lived, then this is where the manuscript he stole from me should be.”

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