The Iliac Crest

by Sarah Booker

  “Beautiful view,” the Seducer said as soon as he saw the ocean through the picture windows, but because he immediately turned to look at the False One, it was difficult to decide what or whom his comment referenced. I suppose my apathetic smile and slight movement of my head indicated that, even though I would play along with his farce, I wasn’t going to put much energy into it. An intimate and familiar deception was taking its usual place within me with the feeble movements of an elderly woman.

  The Betrayed had a similar response. Cordial, of course, but innately surly. She greeted him with a handshake, even hugged him, but quickly tried to dominate our Amparo’s attention. She, however, seemed truly interested in the guest from the moment she saw him. While the False One watched the Director’s face, the Betrayed and I couldn’t help but stare at each other from the sidelines: yet again we were at the same crossroads that had marked our lives. It must have been this sudden realization that made her try something reckless. As the General Director sat down in front of the fireplace, in my chair, the Betrayed offered him a glass of his whiskey and, twisting her torso, spoke to the False One in their own language.

  “Glu nascenta frame ni glu kuji tyui, na pa glu?” she whispered in the sweetest and most desperate tone I’d ever heard. The three of us immediately turned to look at her. Alarm. Centuries of silence surrounded her. The False One did not answer. An internal alarm began to sound from some far-off place, and with no other choice in the matter I was also silent. A smile with no hint of strangeness played across the General Director’s lips.

  “Na pa glu?” insisted the Betrayed, now looking Amparo Dávila in the eyes, challenging her, in fact. I then turned to look out at the ocean because, as I’ve said repeatedly, its proximity calms me. This time, though, I couldn’t help but feel the slow descent of the seconds trickling over my body. An hourglass. Everything inside me hurt. For reasons unknown, the humiliation the False One was inflicting on the Betrayed burned in my esophagus, under my nails, in my joints. I had detested their mutual intimacy, it’s true. I had put up with it more out of terror than submission, but nothing prepared me for this. I did not feel joy upon seeing her torment the False One with such determination. It didn’t give me pleasure to think that their linguistic alliance could be coming to an end. On the contrary, with my heart on edge, I truthfully, faithfully waited with a prayer on my lips. Something was going to happen. A decision was about to come to light. I was afraid that the Betrayed wouldn’t stand for it again. I wouldn’t, either.

  “Na pa glu?” she repeated once more with a quivering voice and shining eyes.

  “Glu hiserfui glu trenji fredso glu, glu-glu,” the General Director murmured then, and the three immediately came together in a burst of warm and spontaneous laughter, giving our gathering the appearance of a party, of something happy and human.

  If one of them asked how that was possible, how he had learned their private language, where, and in how many classes, I did not know. Maybe they asked him quickly and then changed the subject. Perhaps the joy of meeting another speaker of their language was greater than their curiosity. It’s possible that they did not even ask for an explanation. Whatever the case, I was the only one left without any answers. And I had so many questions! I wondered, for example, whether only certain men with clearly sophisticated taste could access that private language. Had he learned my guests’ language through interactions with other, similar guests? Why him and not me? Their disdain for my presence was so immediate, so resolute, so definitive, that in the passage of one moment to the next I ceased to exist. Entertained by their new, peculiar conversation, they did not take care, or have the decency, to apologize or even bring me up to speed on what was happening. The wall they were erecting between themselves and me was both obvious and invisible.

  “Hiserfui trenj, da, glu kuji tuyi, glu pa,” the False One remarked with a tone of authority that left me feeling chilled and prompted two openly suspicious looks from the others. I assumed it had to do with some sort of official welcome, but even now I cannot be sure of that. What I do know was that the conversation that had begun so clumsily continued harmoniously and animatedly the rest of the evening. The sounds and complicated grammatical structures fell like distant echoes of water and soon convinced me that it was raining outside, that that first storm was coming down once again. But with a quick glance out the window, I saw that wasn’t the case.

  My guests, meanwhile, were having a good time. The False One placed cold sandwiches on the central table and the Betrayed never failed to pour more whiskey as soon as only half a glass remained. I suppose it took no more than two hours for the inebriation to come over us, taking the form of an amber haze under whose power nothing made sense or was as it seemed. I can’t lie: I fought against them at the beginning; I tried to interrupt them, to force them to give me at least the privilege of their gaze, the benefit of the doubt, but I soon gave up. In their eyes, I had truly ceased to exist. Before this exclusionary violence, I had two options: keep fighting or accept defeat, settle into its arms, even enjoy it, if necessary. I chose the latter, and I studied them.

  “Na pa glu, eh?” said the General Director with a trace of misunderstanding, like a badly delivered joke, looking at the Betrayed and then immediately at the False One with a twist of the head that I sensed was full of flirtation.

  “Da ja, hiserfui tase fra yuji, Juan Escutia, ulio molkiju fra, glu-glu,” mentioned the False One, changing the conversation’s tone without any warning. The name of my patient, my problematic patient, forced me to redouble my auditory efforts. I wanted to know. I desperately yearned to know, but I could do nothing more than sharpen my ears and guess what was being said. I tried to, at any rate.

  “Juan Escutia?” asked the General Director, his skepticism evident. I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to ask with even more exasperation: Juan Escutia? My Juan Escutia? If I didn’t do so it was because, by then, it was clear to me there was little point. They would not hear me. No one would notice me.

  “Da,” continued the False One, lowering her gaze, “oliuj tuji fra glu-glu-glu.” She was silent for a moment and turned to the sea with darkened eyes. “Fra juik olneder Amparo Dávila.

  ” Silence invaded the room in that moment. It felt familiar, but it was truly, absolutely new. There was something like terror in it, a dead end in her breath. I imagined the False One had accomplished her task, which was doubtlessly to gain the General Director’s support for her organization of Emissaries from the Past. She perhaps wouldn’t go so far as to accept him into their ranks (as far as I knew, they only accepted women), but she would solicit his help. After all, the False One had insinuated as much to me on more than one occasion. She needed to get into the archives to prove the True One’s manuscript was in the files. As I hadn’t helped her at all in this respect, now, visibly victorious, she took advantage of the Seducer’s visit perfectly. I watched him for a long time. I observed him with the attention to detail sometimes unleashed by the romantic imagination. I deciphered tics and classified certain patterns of conduct. By the end of the evening I knew the Seducer had a habit of smiling before saying the word hiserfui, as if this could somehow erase the echo of its threat, a certain sharp note of danger and curse. I knew, too, that he regularly touched his right ear lobe with the fingertips of his left hand before succumbing to the pleasure of another sip of whiskey or after directing another subtle glance at the False One’s hip bone. I knew that he wanted her as I had but, unlike me, the Seducer was not yet afraid.

  I was aware of the False One’s intentions but didn’t understand them. I knew she was after the True One’s manuscript but had no idea why. Did she hope to return it like I had done only a few weeks ago? Did she want to read, transcribe, and keep it? Did she intend to blackmail the True One with it? To force her to write again? In any case, I felt tremendous pity for the General Director. Surely he believed he would soon have the opportunity to touch that unidentified bone. Perhaps he was even convinced the False
One would end up enjoying his music or cigars or body. Between their smiles, I deduced that the Seducer wasn’t prepared for anything and that, if it were possible, he knew even less than I did. I decided then that he understood absolutely nothing.

  “Crafok na blopi juter bremino, pa? Glu-glu,” said the False One at one point. Then she planted a kiss on the Seducer’s cheek and turned around. While she climbed the stairs, I hoped she would twist to look at her own shadow lengthening down the steps, as I had imagined on that first stormy night. I waited with bated breath. When she did it, the False One paused on the penultimate step and twisted her torso with an elegance even greater than I had imagined, and I was able to exhale with pleasure, with incomparable satisfaction. That was my only moment of triumph the entire night.

  Without the False One among them, the Betrayed and the Seducer quickly lost interest in the conversation. Hardly a few minutes had passed since Amparo’s disappearance when the General Director stood up from the chair and said goodbye.

  “Juter Bremino Amparo Dávila,” he said with utmost care as he placed the palm of his right hand on the Betrayed’s shoulder. “Da. Hiserfui glu. Glu-glu,” he added before taking the series of steps that would carry him through the door and out of my house.

  When the Betrayed closed the door behind him, she surprised me by humming a children’s song, and seemed happy and light. She was about to climb the stairs but changed her mind at the last moment, returning to the room and walking directly to the window. She looked out at the ocean with an attitude that was rare for her. If it weren’t her, I would’ve thought it reflected a sense of compassion. But it was her, and it surely was not compassion. Then, as if she had just realized I was there, sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, she smiled at me.

  “Na pa glu?” she asked me. “Hiserfui bremino juty gluricol. Glu-glu!”

  She bent over me and kissed me on the cheek, and, still surrounded by lightness and elation, she took the bottle of whiskey and walked to the stairs. She seemed to have lost weight and years over the course of the evening; all signs seemed to indicate now that she was an adolescent, almost a girl. And, if only for a few seconds, I was happy for her.

  Once I was alone, I began to analyze the night’s events. Fortunately, taking advantage of my imposed invisibility, I had taken copious notes. I tried to make some sort of sense out of them by combining my writings with my memories of their gestures, their tones of voice, the movement of their bodies, certain grimaces. It took me a long time to come to the following conclusion: the False One had succeeded in creating a new alliance with the General Director and he, willing to help her in any way, would soon go to the archive, talk with the Magpies, and realize the manuscript that so obsessed the object of his desire wasn’t there. End of story. Nothing more. I stood up from my place at the foot of the fireplace and placed my right hand between my forehead and the window to try and catch the marine animal in its nocturnal bed. When I was finally able to see it, I convinced myself that everything was pointless. Ridiculous, really. And completely insignificant.

  It wasn’t until hours later that I decided to transcribe the conversation between my three guests. The task took me four full days and several more nights. When I had finished, I read it just as I had read my notes before: with the utmost attention, carefully, between the lines.

  “It’s something like this,” I whispered to myself through clenched teeth. “Or something similar.”

  What can you do in situations like these but laugh?

  “YOU NEVER UNDERSTAND ANYTHING, DO YOU?” AMPARO DÁVILA, the True One, spat as soon as she opened her apartment door.

  She had called me the morning before at my barely functional exam room at the hospital. I was so surprised to hear her voice that I didn’t bother to ask how she had gotten my number, and, at any rate, the woman began to speak immediately.

  “I need to see you as soon as possible, miss,” she informed me in a saddened voice. “Come to my apartment tomorrow at 6:30 p.m., please.”

  I was silent.

  “It’s important,” she insisted upon realizing that this time I wasn’t going to obey her right away. “It’s just as important for me as it is for you.”

  I remembered the blue eyes in the pool, and even though I wanted to, I couldn’t open my mouth.

  I turned inward. In reality, I did nothing more than that. And then something happened in the world.

  “Your lack of faith will be your undoing,” she said, frustrated, casually shifting to the tú form of address. Then she sounded the alarm. I had a little over twenty-four hours to make a decision.

  Unlike the last time I visited the True One, things in my home were no longer as unbearable for me. Since the conversation with the Seducer, my two guests had become passive, almost to the point of invisibility. They no longer acted as the Invaders perpetually struggling to gain a certain amount of legitimacy in a situation that was, from any way you looked at it, illegal and unjust, but as visitors attempting to bother their host as little as possible. I took pleasure in this change of behavior. I had also already met the True One. I mean to say that not a shred of the halo of intrigue and beauty I had imagined around her old photographs still existed. Without these two factors, it was incredibly difficult to persuade me to go to a place from which I had left horrified, literally propelled by terror. Despite this, surely out of habit, I entertained the idea for a couple of hours, as if I hadn’t already made my decision.

  The next morning, while I ate the breakfast the False One had accustomed me to, I knew with an unusual certainty that I would not go. I didn’t have the time or the desire or the energy to waste on an old woman who, genius or not, was definitely unhinged. My life among the dead was boring, to be sure, but at least it had the merit of being routine. At this age I did not need surprises from strange worlds. I repeated this to myself while continuing to chew, but then, out of the void surely interconnecting all those strange worlds, the False One appeared at the kitchen table with deep circles around her eyes and her notebook under her right arm.

  “You don’t look so good,” I said, just to bother her.

  “No,” she agreed without any sense of resistance or irony. Her attitude made me uncomfortable. It distracted me.

  “How is the story of your friend’s disappearance going?” I asked simply to ask her something. Perhaps solely because I was in a good mood and she really looked quite disheveled.

  Amparo Dávila—the False One, the Emissary, the guest who had terrorized me with her routines and her secret language—flopped into the chair next to me. A rag doll.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” she confessed in the faintest voice I’d heard from her. “Sometimes I ask myself if all this is really worth it.” She was quiet, and I didn’t dare break the silence.

  “To remember, I mean,” she continued. “To turn back.” The mention of that verb caused a chill to shoot up from the base of my spine to the back of my neck at tremendous speed.

  To turn back. Something undeniably happens in the world when you turn back.

  “Without Amparo . . .” she stammered. “Without Amparo’s words . . .” She was trying to finish her sentence but seemed incapable of doing so. “Without Amparo’s words, nothing is the same,” she said finally. Then she laid her head on the table and began to cry.

  There are few things as intolerable to me as a woman crying. Perhaps because, due to instinct and gender, any hint of emotional expression irritates me, especially when it indicates weakness. Or maybe because, in spite of any evidence, I tend to consider myself the cause of any shed tears, which immediately puts the fault back on me. Perhaps it was because of other things. Regardless, as expected, I couldn’t stand to watch the False One cry anymore. I found myself forced to approach her, to offer my hands, to give her refuge in my embrace.

  “You don’t understand it,” Amparo whispered between sobs, which were slowly starting to subside.

  “No, no, I don’t,” I said, feeling, at least in th
at moment, that I was speaking the most absolute of truths in the world. Indeed, I had no idea what was happening, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what it referred to.

  “Without her words, all that we do, all that we are, can’t be known or shared. We won’t be able to touch the world otherwise—being in it, don’t you see? People would think we’d gone mad without them!” She sighed, and paused. “You get tired sometimes, you know?”

  Because the False One seemed to be waiting for a response, I nodded, letting her know I agreed with her.

  “You get like this, vulnerable, and need something, a refuge, some sort of protection, something like that,” she murmured. “Whatever . . .” she said at last, completely lost inside her own head.

  “Perhaps she can help you more than I can,” I whispered in her ear, directing my gaze to the floor upstairs. I didn’t want to say the Betrayed’s full name because I would embarrass her, and myself. The False One began to cry again.

  “You haven’t noticed, have you?” she asked, lifting her face and looking at me with a combination of alarm and suppressed laughter. “She spends almost all of her time at the hospital”—she hesitated a moment before gathering her strength—“with the General Director.”

  I laughed not only because I had obviously misunderstood everything that had happened in my living room some days before, but fundamentally because betrayal seemed to pursue my ex-lover everywhere she went. Sometimes she was the victim, other times the perpetrator, but the woman I had once loved every Thursday of my life seemed destined to wage a war on loyalty in all its forms. It became very clear to me that she was winning the game.