by Sarah Booker
“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 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.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. A manuscript! Surely it couldn’t be possible that Amparo Dávila—the poor woman who had shown up at my house in soaking-wet clothes, revealing that bone whose name I
still couldn’t recall—was merely in search of some paltry manuscript. It seemed impossible that she had taken buses and, after the highway ended, walked miles through torrential rain just to try to find a manuscript she had lost—many years ago at that. It seemed impossible that she had then, once in my house, waited so many days with the strange, controlled patience of a cinephile. Because what she said was true; the case she spoke of had occurred during my initial tenure at the hospital. Some two or three years after my arrival. I remembered her image of him perfectly: a new Prometheus, that type. The man had indeed tried to organize the terminal patients against us. His energy knew no limits. He talked with everyone, the half dead and the dying, trying to persuade them to join his movement that was not only just but urgent. He compelled them to die with dignity, to insist on fair treatment, to demand a coffin at least, to abolish the common grave. And he did it with moving speeches peppered with polysyllabic words, while those at death’s door, filled with impatience and horror, couldn’t even close their eyes. He urged them to die. They were living imprisoned in that state of emergency. The Impetuous Man obstructed their task solely with the act of speech, by speaking to them as if there were still something human within them. And because of that they hated him more than they hated us, we who cruelly but honestly bestowed on them the treatment of the dead. In the end, it was them and not us who chased him to the edge of the abyss. The disabled, the purulent, the vagrants, those without arms or hair, the sterile ones, all of them rose from their cots—their temporary tombs, really—to urge him to jump. They couldn’t stand him. They couldn’t put up with him one more day. The Impetuous Man, as those who worked there called him, had no alternative. He jumped. He jumped without looking back. Slowly, in plain view, crashing against the jagged, solid material of the reef, the man died. But later, much later.
“I thought,” I said once I’d stopped laughing, “I thought it had to do with something of real importance. The loss of a manuscript isn’t evidence of a disappearance, much less of one caused by a conspiracy.”
Her story, which I certainly hadn’t expected, had the virtue of putting me in a good mood. And because of that, instead of listening to her, I served myself more anisette, forgetting that this woman talked with my ex-lover in a language that belonged to just the two of them.
“It was a very special manuscript,” she retorted. “I’m sure that in it there were the codes of my memory, of my words. Of all my words.” It was difficult for her to talk now. “I haven’t written since then.”
“But I see you writing every day, Amparo,” I said, unable to avoid another burst of laughter.
“Oh no,” she said, “that isn’t writing.”
“Then what is it?”
“That is only remembering.”
PERHAPS IT WAS ONLY CURIOSITY THAT COMPELLED ME TO examine the hospital records. Perhaps it was something more. Impossible to know for sure. The only thing I know with absolute certainty is that, shortly after my failed attempt with the morphine, I briefly left my failing patients and headed for the office where bureaucrats with no training whatsoever—those who had accepted the position because it came with a good salary and an oceanfront house—spent their time organizing, in a strict but impenetrable manner, the records for each and every one of the patients who passed through our facilities. I avoided speaking to the men because their low rank made them resentful and, eventually, mean-spirited. Instead, I focused on striking up a conversation with the two women who cared for our historic documents. Because they were women, their rank, so clearly inferior to mine, didn’t provoke resentment but spurred a secret desire for upward mobility, which sometimes mixed with strange sexual urges. I was sure they wouldn’t hesitate to grant my request: to allow me to search the main archive for the records of a man whose name I did not know. The two women, sporting outdated glasses and garish colors on their lips, looked at each other, smiling with a dark complicity. Finally, as if it were a game, they gave me their decision.
“We will let you go in, Doctor, but only in exchange for a favor.” The two hunched their shoulders forward, which gave them the appearance of malignant magpies.
“It would be my pleasure,” I answered, using a phrase no one had ever used inside the hospital.
“We need to go to North City,” one of the women said with downcast eyes, aware of the gravity of what she was asking. “And because you’re one of the few people we know who has a car, we thought maybe . . .”
“When?” I interrupted, making it clear I would do it but that her request annoyed me.
“Next week. Sunday. At night.”
I thought about it for a moment. I calculated the risk. I evaluated my own desire. I closed my eyes. I tossed an imaginary coin in the air and, upon holding it in my hands, revealed the correct response.
“I’ll pick you up at seven; wait for me on the patio behind your house,” I said, realizing then that I knew more about them than I had previously thought. For example, I knew that they lived together in one of the thirteen apartments the hospital assigned to administrative workers. I knew they were prone to spreading gossip and rumors and, because of this, I decided to avoid a public place for our meeting. The idea didn’t bother them. Bathed in their sickly smiles, I opened the half door of their office and ventured into the dark room, full of shelves, where the records of the dying were housed. It took me four days to find it.
It was, indeed, a very old document. The date on the upper right-hand corner of the cover sheet clearly indicated that it came from the early years of the institution, when those of us who worked there believed we were making an important and humanitarian contribution to the community. I was never an idealist, but I must confess that in those years—and I really am talking about many years ago—I still maintained the illusion that my work helped others confront the transition to death in ways that were less mechanical, less painful. If even elephants had their own graveyards, it was easy for me to believe that the disinherited, the pariahs, the orphans, the migrants who crossed the fortified border to sell their arms and legs and lungs, deserved a better chance, a less solitary transition. I quickly learned that this wasn’t possible, at least not in this particular institution. The lost causes came here and, instead of making them comfortable, we forgot about them. We injected them, we administered serum, we gave them morphine—occasionally some creative nurse would take the time to clean up feces—but seldom did we look them in the eyes and rarer still did we dare touch them. I remembered the Impetuous Man precisely because he was one of the few residents I had dared to look in the face.
He was a muscular man with big brown eyes and a scruffy beard. When he arrived, I was impressed by his apparent state of health. I was afraid that it was a mental case, which were usually the longest and most difficult to endure. It was only a few days later that I came to understand his condition to be political. They couldn’t keep him in prison for fear of some humanitarian organization finding him and manipulating the system in his favor. They avoided sending him to a mental institution, not only because it was obvious that his mind was highly functional, but also because they feared what he could incite in an environment of unstable minds and infirm bodies. They had tried to admit him to a general hospital in the center of South City, but the negligence of the authorities, their obliviousness, quickly gave him several opportunities to escape. It finally dawned on some haggard bureaucrat to send him to the end of the world, to this threshold where one state ended and the next was unable to begin. That is why they transported him to the ocean’s shore in a special car protected by four bodyguards.
His name was Juan Escutia. For many years he had lived in a central neighborhood in South City. He worked various jobs, from baker to policeman, but the official profession noted in his file was journalist. His family members died off one by one over the two years prior to his admittance, which made it possible for him to be classified as an orphan, admitted as free and indigent. He was assigned one of the fifty cots in the only ward with a
window overlooking the sea. Eventually, through fights and blackmail, Juan Escutia won the right to sleep in the cot closest to the window, without knowing that, months later, the position would aid his enemies and facilitate his death. I remembered him clearly at that moment: Juan Escutia had broken the windowpanes with a mallet and, once the shattered glass fell, leaped into the void. No one in the hospital had ever heard the dying laugh like that: wholeheartedly, cruelly, as if they were still fully alive. It seemed that, just like Juan Escutia on the reef below, the terminally ill were trying to cling to the threads of their lives just a bit longer. However, their collective laughter did not last. It ended long before Juan Escutia managed to die. The modern Prometheus. The new Prometheus.
I read his story with interest and something like melancholy. It all happened so long ago! Just like him, I had arrived at the institution with a desire to change it, and maybe, just like him, I had broken the window and jumped into the abyss. The only difference was that I was still dying. Was I wearing my own bones? This realization nauseated me and awoke a deeply repressed rage so violent I was forced to leave the room. I did so abruptly, losing myself among shelves that stank of mold and lost time. Soon, my confusion and fury caused a chaos to erupt within me. I must have fainted.
I don’t know who found me on the floor, though, at the time, I suspected it was one of the Magpies who had coerced me. When I awoke, I was lying in one of the institution’s beds—indeed, the best one, the one closest to the only window looking out over the sea. This filled me with terror and misgivings. I was sure that it couldn’t be a coincidence, and I was certain one of the Magpies, or maybe both, had reported me to the chief administrator. After all, it was well known that digging through the archives was prohibited without official authorization. We were all aware of the penalties: complete isolation in one of the cells designed for those whose deaths turned violent. I reconsidered. If I’d found myself in the best cot in the institution, this meant I hadn’t been discovered. The only thing left to figure out was how I had gotten there. Everyone was silent about this, though. Instead of answering me, they administered morphine and left me in peace, just like the rest of the patients in the elite ward.
