by Sarah Booker
“I came to meet you,” she had said, and the next morning she began to run my house.
Thanks to my work in the municipal hospital, I spent little time with her. I say thanks now, which would seem to indicate that I liked my work. The reality is quite the contrary. For years I had intensely despised the tall walls of that fortification, which some bureaucrat with a malevolent imagination had decided to place right on the edge of the sea, on one of the most beautiful points of the coast, where tall reefs with complicated, angular features gave refuge to seagulls and migrants, pelicans and outcasts. Whenever I walked through the main door, gradually entering that wasteland of nauseating smells and excessive screaming, I couldn’t do anything but hate myself. I would walk slowly, my gaze fixed on the tips of my shoes as I advanced down the straight path that took me to the administrative offices. Meanwhile, I would loathe my lack of ambition, my almost bovine predisposition toward conformity, my obsessive fascination with the ocean, which was, without a doubt, a contributing factor in my decision to accept this job. When I would finally open the door to the cold, humid, windowless room that they had the gall to call my exam room, my hatred was such that all I could think about was poisoning my patients. I was not interested in curing them. I acted with the firm conviction that the best I could do was expedite their deaths, thereby sparing them the inhumane stupor brought on by a long-term stay in this place. And I was not the only one. The nurses seemed to share my secret resentment: they manipulated their patients with that calm, tense aggression that only hatred is capable of producing. The administrators, for their part, manifested it through indifference. They spent hours doing nothing but yawning in front of their almost unusable computer screens. The cooks channeled it into the foul stews, either flavorless or overseasoned, that other dazed employees would then serve on metal plates. In the guards, it could be seen not only in their eyes but also in the weapons they slung arrogantly across their chests. When I say thanks to my work I didn’t see Amparo much at home, in reality I am saying that her domestic routine filled me with a deeper, more shameful, and paralyzing terror. The Disappeared, of course, did not seem to notice.
“I was a great writer,” she confessed, unprompted, the second morning. She had lifted her gaze toward me and then abruptly shifted it back to the window. Without looking at me, she began to tell me what she knew about her own disappearance.
“I didn’t know they hated me so much,” she murmured and then fell silent, as if breath alone would give her the strength or the energy to continue. “But little by little I was forced to realize. The typewriters I used began to fall apart. Pencils disappeared from my desk. And then there was that tiresome ordeal of the power outages only affecting my house. If you only knew the number of times I complained to the Department of Electrical Resources, and nothing came of it. For a long time, the only thing they told me was that they were investigating my case, that soon they would be able to identify the cause. Pure lies!” Her voice shook and, as if this bothered her, as if she were revealing too much too soon, she got up from the table, lit a cigarette, and concentrated on the blue waters of the ocean.
It took her quite a while to compose herself. Once she felt safe again, able to speak in complete sentences, she sat down and took the pen in her right hand. I thought she was going directly back to her writing, but she hesitated.
“And the suspicions of the critics,” she said in an injured voice, “sowing discord and mistrust everywhere, constantly. Was I really able to write this or that? Was I who I said I was? Was I an imposter? How unbearable it all became!”
I thought she had ended her rant. I expected her to close her notebook and rise again, to drift toward the windowpanes. But she continued, her low voice a faded painting in an abandoned house.
“And the mobs afterward, always out for blood, always ready to strike. Mean little people. Mean and lonely people.” She looked at me but saw something else, a void she filled with hatred and resentment. “Their teeth. Their knives. Look, look at this.” She lifted her bare arms and pointed to something near her right elbow that I couldn’t quite make out.
For a moment I felt sorry for her. But once again, I remembered who she was and how she had taken over my home, and my frustration returned. And my rage. I did not know her well—I did not know her at all—but I instinctively knew she would not break her silence. Regardless, I wasn’t really interested in the story of her disappearance. And I believed her even less. Without saying goodbye, almost without looking back at her, I left the house, and, upon opening my car door, I began to think of the public hospital as a refuge. Nothing of this sort had ever occurred to me before. I drove quickly that morning. I turned on the radio, and I was pleased to hear a violin sonata, which surprisingly helped calm me. For the entire journey to the institution, I entertained myself by watching out of the corners of my eyes the ash-colored shrubs running along the right side of the road and the ocean waters on the left. With peeling paint, the arch of the entrance read MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL: SERENITY SHORES SANATORIUM—even though barely any medicine was administered there and nothing about the site could be called serene. It was really, I must confess, an establishment for the terminally ill—the incurables, the migrants, the dregs—only operational thanks to nominal funding from the central government. The hospital was nothing more than a cemetery with open tombs. A strange sort of limbo where those with fatal wounds arrived and, nevertheless, could not die. Well, at least not yet. My hatred, you must understand, could do no more harm than that which already lived inside those beings, destined to live out the rest of their meager lives in that far-flung corner of the world, that last border.
That morning, then, because of work, I was able to escape the routine that Amparo had imposed on my household. And though my achievement only lasted eight hours a day, five days a week, I celebrated it with a secret and silent pride. Amparo Dávila, I had decided, would not make me disappear. She would never be able to.
DISAPPEARANCE IS CONTAGIOUS. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS. IN the past it was believed to be caused by something external, something that a much more powerful agent imposed on an innocent victim, often brutally. But with scientific and technological advances, we now know that to become a disappeared person, previous contact with another such person is necessary. Mechanisms triggering the disease vary quite a bit—a greater or lesser degree of violence, more or less isolation, a little or a lot of silence—but the common element among all of them is contact. Physical contact. Skin. Saliva. Touch. This is why so few people confess their condition or admit how horrid the nature of disappearance truly is. This is why my fear of Amparo increased exponentially when, as if it were nothing, as if it were of little to no importance, she confessed she was writing about her own disappearance. For a few days I thought about the possibility of asking for a vacation, so that I could get away from her during this critical phase, in the early stages of infection, but I quickly reconsidered. I remembered the Betrayed was also in my house, at the mercy of the Ex-Writer, and I was filled with a sense of dread. I feared for my ex-lover. I felt an absurd compassion for her, but in the end that was not the reason why I decided to stay. I had known for a long time—I could not leave the sea.
The ocean soothes me. Its massive presence makes me think, believe even, that the world is quite small. Dull. Insignificant. Without it, the weight of existence proves fatal to me. I had lived in a solitude that the hospital-provided house helped me preserve for so long, and the ocean stretching out before me had saved my life. But all that, all those years of sacrifice, all those long minutes of discipline and deaf unease around the people I had abandoned in order to be next to the sea, began to collapse.
I would like to blame Amparo Dávila for this, but I could not do so without betraying my sense of honesty. I suppose everything came to a head when, irrationally, I agreed to meet with the Betrayed. When I irresponsibly accepted a collect call on my office phone and when, completely delirious, I gave her directions to my place on the coast. Mayb
e Amparo had tapped the line. Maybe she had been spying on my ex-lover and, while pretending to be waiting to use the pay phone, positioned herself as close as possible behind her so as to hear the information. Maybe the Betrayed, who was always so negligent when it came to papers, wrote the information down on note cards that she then left out for anyone to see. Anything was possible and, whatever it was, it had worked perfectly. Amparo Dávila arrived only a few hours early to write the story of a disappearance that she, without any evidence, associated in a truly disturbing way with the Serenity Shores Sanatorium. That is what she told me the third morning.
“You know you could help me with this, right?” she asked, but really it was just an order thrown in my face. I laughed because I was nervous, because I knew exactly what she wanted. An accomplice. An assistant. A confessor.
“How?” I asked, unable to stop the question from leaving my lips, as much as I tried.
Instead of answering immediately, Amparo was silent. Her tactics were always quite sophisticated. I am certain that she knew a quick response would result in outright refusal or, worse, mockery. Her silence, accompanied with a raised right eyebrow, had the hoped-for effect: she compelled me to ask. I needed her response. But, again, instead of giving in, she hid, and her silence made her even stronger. She didn’t speak of it again for days.
Meanwhile, she acted as if nothing had happened. In this, her routine saved and protected her. She continued to wake up early to prepare tea and coffee, bringing the hot liquid upstairs to the Betrayed, who had begun to show signs of slight improvement. Notebook in hand, she’d return downstairs and, with increasingly curt and monosyllabic interactions, prepare to continue writing the story of her disappearance just as I’d leave for the hospital. This is how those nervous days passed, full of expectation as the winter continued to roll in.
“How long have you been working at the hospital?” she asked me casually one day. Outside, the rain was altering the color of the ocean waters.
“Twenty-five years,” I told her, not realizing the risk I was taking.
“And do you have records for the whole time?”
Her question made me turn and face her expansive eyes. I was alone, absolutely alone, and without a voice. At that moment I realized my suspicions were correct. Amparo Dávila wanted access to my institution’s records for reasons unbeknownst to me and that, surely, she would not share.
“I don’t know,” I said calmly, as if I hadn’t caught on to her game. “You would have to ask the Director.”
She smiled as if she really believed what I was saying. Then she went back upstairs and, to my surprise, shut herself in the Betrayed’s room. That was how I learned that they had begun to sleep in the same quarters. And again, irrationally, I feared for my ex-lover’s well-being. She would disappear, too—at that moment, I was as sure as a man could be. Then, almost immediately, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. I remembered the place where I lived: its wild isolation, how our supplies arrived every week in cardboard boxes from either North or South City, the absence of the post, the limited number of telephones. I became aware, perhaps like never before, that this community formed around a handful of failing souls was, in fact, disappeared. And disappeared were our voices, our smells, our desires. We lived, if you will, in the in-between. Or rather, we lived with one foot in the grave and the other on terrain that held only a remote resemblance to life. Very few knew about us and even fewer worried about our fate. I was almost melancholic, but instead I looked out to the sea, her nocturnal silence, her immense mass. I served myself, from all the available liquors, a glass of anisette and reconsidered: our irreality and our lack of evidence not only constituted a prison but also a radical form of freedom. How many people from neighboring cities had the luxury of continuously feasting their eyes on this marine animal? How many could enjoy this relaxation, this tremendous rest made possible by the scarcity of a local history, by the absence of records? How many among them could live their own death day after day, hour after hour, punctually? How many of them knew the ocean so intimately, savoring her without resentment, gradually learning not to fear her? I was almost euphoric, but 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.