The Iliac Crest. Cristina Rivera Garza

contained myself. I have never been one for easy victories, after all. The answers, which I certainly knew, and which I could offer without joking or blushing, did not interest anyone. I laughed again, in silence, alone. I opened the back door and went down the stairs to the beach. I walked for hours. Lost. Lost in thought. Asking myself with every step if I was really alive. If these were, in fact, my bones.

      I BEGAN TO SPY ON THEM THE NEXT DAY. I LEFT MY DOOR AJAR so I could hear exactly when Amparo began her daily routine. She would get up at five thirty and tiptoe out of the Betrayed’s room to take a quick shower. She would already be moving around the kitchen half an hour later. Not only would she prepare hot concoctions but also lavish breakfasts with complicated aromas, all of which she carried on a tray to my ex-lover’s room. I realized, too, that she didn’t leave her alone while she ate, and she even helped her bring the spoon to her mouth when she was weak. Their closeness bothered me. From the crack in the door, I was able to see the delicacy with which they treated each other, the sweetness in their looks. Their mutual tenderness, developing over the course of only a few days, and with one of them in a semiconscious state, made me suspicious of the whole situation. I assumed that they knew each other from before and that, allied against me, they did nothing but plan some kind of feminine revenge. I imagined that the Betrayed had convinced Amparo to come with her to this lost house by the sea with the intention of convincing me of my cowardice. Surely, I told myself, there was an element of moral support because, in the few times we had spoken of our history, when the Betrayed clung to her story of my wickedness, I was usually able to wear down her accusations with unexpected questions and logical reasoning. I imagined that Amparo Dávila liked the challenge. More than just offering her an opportunity to air her complaints against men in general by using one in particular—something no woman would pass up—the journey guaranteed her a free stay somewhere comfortable on the coast. She must have been a beggar of sorts. A hobo or a bohemian. One of those free-spirited drifters who lost touch with reality and its rituals. She must have thought that she would be able to write about her disappearance here, at peace, without any interruptions and with only the ocean and silence in the background. And about all of this, I am afraid, Amparo Dávila was right.

      On that first day of espionage, however, I tried to relax. I went for a walk on the beach, where I distracted myself by collecting marine fossils and chasing tiny crabs. The ocean, as always, quieted my anxiety. I lay down on the sand, watching the slow transformation of the high clouds, and imagined the Betrayed’s feverish face, Amparo’s expansive eyes. Unexpectedly, and contrary to all the emotions that had brought me to the beach, I sympathized with them. There they were, weak and lost, trying to find a replica of human contact in each other’s company. Both disappeared, though each in her own way, they gave the impression that they had been forced to reappear in an attempt to make themselves real again, but that this could only occur through a framework of their own making. All those forces, all those injustices, all those painful stereotypes that I could see clearly in their faces nevertheless made me pity them both. Now I was far from considering them my sinister enemies. I even laughed at myself. I told myself that men always discover, when they least expect it, that the fear women provoke in them is really the result of mad schemes that exist nowhere but in their own minds. I decided to return and, walking barefoot on the sand, settled into a new state of calmness.

      But as soon as I opened the back door to the house, that calm turned to horror. I could hear them speak. At first I was only able to make out murmurs, but as I climbed the stairs I discovered that they were sharing words entirely unknown to me. Moreover, it didn’t sound like a foreign language. I listened closely. I sat down on the other side of the cracked door. I closed my eyes. I tried to absorb the sounds, the rhythms of words and phrases, searching for similarities to languages I knew or had at least heard during my travels, but it was of no use. To my utter bewilderment I knew that, in whatever time they had spent together, they had created their own language. I felt isolated and weak, like an exile living in an eternally unfamiliar country. And I understood and accepted that, at that very moment, I had become an outcast in my own home.

      The days following my discovery were full of long silences. I spied on them, to be sure, but I avoided them at the same time. I did not want to give the women a single opportunity to feel or, even worse, demonstrate their new power over me.

      “Let them talk alone, if they want,” I told myself repeatedly as I sped to the sanatorium. There I lost myself among patients and nurses, with very little awareness of, or consideration for, my surroundings. Instead of thinking about death, which was the only thing I was accustomed to thinking about both inside and outside of the hospital, I dwelled on the team of women that had stormed my house and taken over in the most cunning and premeditated way. And so, while I checked sores and administered morphine, while I closed a woman’s eyelids or took the trembling hand of a child, I obsessed only about decoding their conspiratorial language.

      My espionage continued. I got up early to confirm the rigor of Amparo’s routine. There were no exceptions: she was on her feet at five thirty in the morning. She never missed the coffee or tea. And each morning she went upstairs to the Betrayed’s room with the tray of food. I used that moment to try to capture the internal structure of their strange language. I leaned against the door with my eyes closed, concentrating as I had done only once before, many years ago, while studying my anatomy books. The sounds of their words were insufferably melodic, almost sweet. And I noticed an intriguing repetition on my third day of spying. It was a sound similar to the syllable glu. They incessantly repeated it and, in doing so, seemed to replicate the echo of the rain at the moment a drop of water falls heavily and definitively on the surface of the sea. Though, from my observations, I was only able to determine that the language was not, as I had first imagined, a copy of that juvenile game wherein the sound op is added between every syllable. Instead, it was a complete and sophisticated language composed of large grammatical units with a significant sense of repetition. Its guttural sounds gave the language the feeling of something distantly infantile, of certain round resonances. I was unable to grasp the rest of it—its internal rules, conjugations, moods. Every time I heard them chatting, I sunk into an immense, paralyzing rage. I could do nothing before their language. I could not infiltrate it.

      I SUPPOSE THE IDEA TO SLIP AMPARO DÁVILA MORPHINE CROSSED my mind almost immediately. Of the two, she appeared to be emotionally weaker, or at least stranger. My idea was that the woman would confess everything 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