The Iliac Crest

by Sarah Booker

  I am sure that it was the combination of my feeling disoriented, exhausted, and weary that obliged me to stop at a phone booth around three in the morning. I turned up my coat collar, trying to shield myself from the gales of icy wind, and, without really thinking, grabbed the phone book that hung from a chain. I flipped through it aimlessly, not knowing what I hoped to find. Then, when I found it, I understood it all in a way that was immediately clear. DÁVILA, AMPARO, STREET 4-545. TOWER D. SOUTH CITY. 555-66-77.

  A swift, pleasant sensation ran down my esophagus to my stomach and, finally, through the veins at the tips of my toes. For a moment, I thought it could be happiness. The chemical imbalance was so strong that, out of nowhere, I was hit with an incredible urge to smoke. I hadn’t in a long time, but now the instinct seemed automatic and inevitable. I returned to the bright restaurant and bought a pack of cigarettes. Smoking the first in big, sweet drags, I knew I would look for her and that she wouldn’t take long to find. I knew with certainty that this was the only way I could exact my revenge on the Disappeared Liar living in my house.

  I DID NOT LOOK FOR HER IMMEDIATELY. IN THIS, MY FAMILIARITY with Amparo Dávila, the False One, helped me a great deal. I already knew that an immediate reaction was as good as none. Against my better instincts, I waited. I studied the case. Meanwhile, I confirmed that my suspicions were not new but had been germinating since the first day I spoke with my strange guest. For example, she referred to herself as a great writer, but her hip bone (whose name still eluded me) clearly indicated she couldn’t be older than twenty-five. At that age no man, much less any woman, could claim to be a great anything. Obviously they could say it, but no one in their right mind would take them seriously. There were further inconsistencies, such as how she claimed her disappearance was part of a conspiracy orchestrated by a man who had died in the hospital’s elite ward some twenty-three years ago. As I said, she didn’t look much older than that. My brain registered all of these incongruities, but, terrorized by living with two women who shared a language totally alien to me and the rest of the world, I had let them pass, like you let so many things pass. In addition to the indifference and gratification I felt, the sexual activities with the Magpies alerted my subconscious, which had doubtlessly been responsible for my keen and otherwise inexplicable interest in the phone book. From there, it hadn’t been a stretch to pause before the name of Amparo Dávila, the True One. I took it in immediately, without blinking.

  In terms of my investigation of Amparo Dávila, the True One, I advanced quickly. My research skills, my discipline, and the large quantity of free time at my disposal, among other things, helped me connect the dots. Soon the unknown woman began to acquire an outline, certain aspirations of form.

  I bought maps of South City, and amid all its neighborhoods I located Blue-Blue, where I could find the true Amparo Dávila’s two-room, one-bath apartment among the towering fifteen-story condominiums. I examined newspapers from bygone eras, trying to unearth information about her books and her life, and, though I didn’t find much, I read some reviews of her short story collections and others of her poetry with pleasure. There was mention of several atypical volumes that, judging by the commentary, caused more confusion than delight among the public. Critics found her prose opaque and even doubted the authenticity of her writing. There was talk of wickedness, the fantastical, the inescapable. Regarding those writings, she was treated with ambivalent respect, with distanced and mysterious admiration. It seemed that, at the very least concerning her status as a great writer, the false Amparo Dávila had spoken the truth. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but notice that the absence of information about her person coincided with the exact dates Juan Escutia had been with us. This only made me more suspicious of the truthfulness of the false Amparo Dávila.

  My doubts, ambivalent and trivial, soon transformed into pure, unmitigated terror when I saw a photograph of the true writer for the first time. I opened and closed my eyes as the incredulous often do. I took the newspaper outside in order to see it better in the natural light. Nothing changed. It was the same person. There was the wiry arch of her right eyebrow, the cat eyes, the gaze capable of creating miles of distance around her, the wild mane of hair, the vulnerable attitude. The writer’s body did not appear in any of the photographs, but I was sure if it had, there, too, would have been the singular hip bone only prominently visible in women under twenty-five who have not had children. There were also secret tattoos embedded in her gaze: not the undulation of sensuality, but a disarming cry of urgency I could not help but describe as sexual. She was entirely a woman. A beautiful woman. A tragic woman. I was going to continue, but the tail of the g in that word made me pause and wince. I was referring to an utterly unknown woman as if she were a lifelong friend. In my quarter century of isolation on the coast, I had never done anything of the sort. I understood that I needed to rest, but my enzymes, the molecules of my body, the chemical detonators that gave it a reason to live and get up in the morning, had already taken off on their own. There was little, practically nothing, I could have done to stop the process.

  There were days in which my self-absorption was such that I thought about the possibility of asking my enigmatic guest for more information. I even tried a couple of times, but had to abstain because there was no way of seeing her without the Betrayed.

  “Ma glu nemrique pa, glu?” asked the false Amparo, laughing at the kitchen table.

  “Oh, glu hiserfui glu trenji fredso glu, glu-glu,” responded the other, watching me out of the corner of her eye, as was her custom, while she held a glass of orange juice.

  “Glu casenta,” she said, watching the sea again. “Meli you glu brumino glu trejí cla etri glu, glu?”

  Their gestures, their words, their incessant closeness, mortified me to no end. Chained to Amparo’s established routine, and knowing that I didn’t understand anything they said to each other, the two behaved not as guests but as disrespectful and vulgar landladies. The only thing missing was for them to stop me at the door and ask for the rent. Perhaps because I could do so little to fight the constant humiliation they inflicted, my dedication to finding the true Amparo Dávila soon developed into an obsession. It was no longer a researcher’s interest but, rather, one of vital urgency. I had stopped asking what really happened in order to explore the foundation of reality itself. I was in pursuit of something new, something that, in one way or another, would change the way I experienced the ocean. That was the magnitude of my task. That was how I understood it. And that was why I went after her.

  THE DREAM MUST HAVE TRANSPIRED AT SOME POINT DURING that time. I had gone to bed early, as was my habit, with that heavy and graceless exhaustion that accompanies a day full of work and little imagination. It took a while for sleep to come, but when it did it bound me and didn’t release me until the dream had ended. It was all happening in my mother’s house, an old two-floor wooden construction that seemed to be close to the sea. Finding myself on the first floor, I kept hearing shots coming through the big windows of the bedroom upstairs. The smell of recently detonated gunpowder and fresh blood spread throughout the house. Instead of going upstairs to find out who had died, I found myself heading out to the back patio, confirming that high-caliber bullets had indeed shattered the windows. Upon reentering, the house smelled like bleach and soap. My mother, unaware of what had transpired, had taken it upon herself to clean the whole place. I was so preoccupied with the legal implications of such a cleaning that my fear and panic disappeared. I was beginning to feel better when another noise filtered through the back door. I opened it, and both my mother and I saw a couple of giant black wild boars dragging two dying horses across the patio. The stench of death and the savage howls coming from the four animals’ mouths frightened me so much that I awoke with a start.

  Breathing heavily, with fat drops of sweat sliding down my face and chest, I thought of how you are never more authentic than when inside your own nightmares. I immediately went to the phone book a
nd dialed the number of Amparo Dávila, the True One. Her quick response gave me the impression that, not only had I not woken her, but that the woman had been waiting, somewhat anxiously, for another, surely important call. Her energetic voice with its light, almost aromatic intonations made me picture someone jovial and calm, one of those rare women who are happy despite world events. Still somewhat bleary-eyed and not totally able to distance myself from my nightmare, I asked her for a meeting.

  “Why?” the woman asked, more out of sincere interest than irony.

  “Because I have something of yours,” I said without thinking it through. Then I reconsidered: while what had first popped into my head was the image of the False Double, what I really had at home was the manuscript I had been able to rescue from Juan Escutia’s file. Even without mentioning it, this reminder made me feel a little more relaxed. I was not, after all, lying to her or tricking her.

  “I’ll meet with you tomorrow, sir,” she whispered. “At six o’clock.”

  And she hung up without saying goodbye. I guessed she had figured that if I had her phone number, I also had her address. Regardless, she didn’t bother to give it to me.

  FROM MY FIRST VISIT WITH AMPARO DÁVILA, THE TRUE ONE, what I remember most are her penetrating eyes. Leaving the coast, I had given myself two hours of travel time because, though I did not frequently go to South City, I knew how slow and sometimes oppressive it was to enter the city. You had to put up with the crawling traffic at checkpoints; you had to show identification cards and smile regardless of the circumstances; you had to demonstrate that you were a sensible and productive individual and not another terminally ill patient in search of cheap medicine and easy women. You had to prove that you belonged to the state. To my surprise, the process lasted no more than fifteen minutes, allowing me ample time to drive around the outskirts of the city and become despondent upon seeing its state of disrepair.

  It was not hard to find the building where the woman I was looking for lived. I parked my jeep a couple blocks away in the hopes of wasting a few more minutes and to avoid, as much as possible, the embarrassment of arriving too early to a meeting with a stranger. I went back to the car once purely out of fear and once more because I had left the manuscript, which I would deposit in the hands of its legitimate owner, on the seat. That was, after all, the excuse I had given myself for why I was going through with this nonsense. The third time I returned, I did so with every intention of fleeing. In fact, the impulse brought me as far as turning on the machine and putting it in reverse. Then, while looking in the rearview mirror, I reconsidered: I was already there, the issue interested me, and I had nothing to lose. These three factors told me in their own way that I had already come too far—at this point, there was no turning back.

  The housing complex was composed of five towers, each with some fifteen floors, all of them arranged around a pool of provocatively blue water surrounded by palm trees and other pleasing dark green foliage, as clearly unsuitable for the landscape as the South City climate. Two young girls wearing dark sunglasses were lying on plastic deck chairs. The bronzing lotion that shone on their skin gave them the appearance of something surreal. Under one of the palm trees sat an older woman covered with a violet silk caftan in a wooden rocking chair. Her dark glasses made it impossible to see whether she was reading the book she held open on her thighs or sleeping, and I did not linger long enough to find out. I crossed the courtyard and headed to tower D at an entirely involuntary speed. There I took the elevator to the fifth floor. When the door opened, I veered to the right in search of number forty-five and knocked on the door.

  “You’re on time,” the True One said as she opened the door. But then, in a flash, but still without focus, images of my life as a tree appeared from some remote place in my brain. The woman’s eyes created a vast steppe around me: a space of ocher colors where, gradually, in the slow-motion camera of the past, a seed appeared, and from it emerged an umbilical cord whose sap would later feed my tiny limbs. The gestation process took place underground, but then, without any prior notice, without any warning, something upset the consistency of the earth. My head, my neck, my torso, my legs. My half-buried, half-liberated body. In my memory, the immobility of my condition filled me with sorrow and, at the same time, jubilation. Ultimately, I had an excuse, a justification. No one need know the textures of my fear. My leaves grew, my trunk coarsened over time, and clouds and dew clung to my branches. There were birds around me and other imitations of living, warm, sonorous beings. The canvas of my melancholy. And thus, on the doorstep where the True One was half-appeared and half-hidden, my life as a tree filled me with an immense sadness. I was ashamed of my solitude. I didn’t know what to do with the remnants of my body, my silence, the tongue that crowded behind my teeth. My own ruins. What I mean to say is that I began to cry, unceremoniously, before her.

  Amparo Dávila, the True One, for her part, seemed accustomed to such an occurrence. She waited. She remained silent without daring to approach me, looking at me like someone trying to make sense of a hallucination. When I finally recovered, she took me by the arm and in the slowest of rhythms led me inside her small apartment. It was clear the woman wasn’t used to showing compassion.

  “I’m sorry,” I was able to stutter.

  She turned to look at me, and once again her eyes made me aware of the distance that surrounded me.

  “Don’t worry. One gets like this at times, I know,” she said. She was an ancient woman with fragile arms and a morose way about her. She was, like the copy I had at home, a woman with eyes so large it was easy to imagine her hidden away from herself somewhere inside of them. “Sit down,” she invited with a slight, friendly voice when she saw me standing in front of the sofa, unsure of how to proceed.

  I had imagined a dwelling more crowded with things, more populated with history, more marked by time. But I don’t believe I was disappointed to see the apartment only had the furniture necessary for an austere existence, and that within the property, bordered by walls in neutral colors and lacking any kind of ornamentation, what was truly noteworthy were the currents of light and air. There was a sensation of impasse, of something held, not within time but somewhere outside of it, far from its shore, foreign to its imperial power. There, at her side, in her home, I felt as if I were inside a parenthesis in a sentence written in an unknown language.

  “I hope you like lemonade,” she said, turning her back to me. “Because I don’t have anything else at the moment. With age, you’ll come to realize, it’s increasingly difficult to go shopping, to drive, to go out. It’s a pain, a real pain,” she blustered, interrupting herself with labored breathing. She seemed nervous, but it also seemed that nervousness was her natural state. This was clear from her slightly syncopated movements, from the way she elongated her speech in order to hold on to it, as if she could thus avoid an eventual fall, a stumble, a fatal accident. At her age, any fracture could easily lead to her death.

  “Here you are,” she said, placing a glass on my lap. Then she slowly returned to the kitchen for another and, with it in her hand, sat down before me. This took an eternity. The effort left her exhausted, pale, almost breathless. She was an old woman. A truly old woman. Fragile. Crumbling, like a sheet of paper stored for years in a poorly maintained archive. It seemed impossible that she was even alive.

  “And what do we have here?” she asked, immediately perking up as I placed the manuscript on the table.

  “This is yours,” I said, clearing my throat slightly, feeling despicable. What right did I have, after everything, to bring her these old pages to try and spark her memory? Would she remember any of this? Or any of that? Would it be important? Questions rose up through my feet, ascending my calves like the light but relentless passage of an army of ants. I sunk into my seat and awaited her response like a man who fears a slap after having proffered a slightly too risky catcall. The True One, nevertheless, looked at the pages from afar, not moving a muscle in her body.

>   “How did you get this?”

  I realized her suspicions had quickly multiplied. In the blink of an eye, I had become a potential enemy, a threat, a spy from either the past or the future—in this case it didn’t really matter. I wanted to correct the misunderstanding right away, but I didn’t know how. I closed my eyes. I drank almost the entire glass of lemonade in a single gulp. When I opened my eyes, she was still awaiting my response with a hostile attitude of mistrust. I had no other option but to try to tell her what I knew, which was not necessarily the truth.

  “Some time ago a woman arrived at my house,” I began, clearing my throat again, “who said that she was Amparo Dávila.” At that moment, to my utmost surprise, I heard her exhale a sigh of relief. The shift in her expression was equally abrupt.

  “Ah,” she said, “she must be one of the emissaries,” as if that explained everything. The tables turned quickly as she gained control of our conversation: now I was the one filled with suspicion. This seemed not to matter to her. She smiled to herself, bent her torso, and took a sip of lemonade. The golden light of the afternoon shone on her face and she turned into it. A spiderweb of miniscule wrinkles crisscrossed every inch of her body.

  “You’ll see,” she continued. “They’re quite charming, those young ladies.” She sighed again with a mix of melancholy and unease. “A little crazy, a little out there, but they are lovely.”