by Sarah Booker
2.To slowly roll from the right to the left side of the mattress, feeling each of its springs, every single wrinkle in the sheets.
3.To identify and suffer from the itchiness that attacks the most impossible parts of the body. For example, that spot on your back where your hand can never reach.
4.To imagine what you will do or cease doing once your illness disappears and you go home. You say, for example, if I get better and can go home, I will immediately evict my guest. I will do it without a moment’s hesitation, without a fuss. Unceremoniously, even. I will tell her, simply, in a firm and even voice: I would appreciate it if you left my house as soon as possible.
5.To immediately regret what you imagine doing or cease doing once the illness disappears and you can go home.
6.To count the number of inhalations and exhalations necessary to stay alive.
7.To repeatedly ask yourself, so self-aware, what the right words would be, if any, to describe the light that illuminates and hides and invades the ward.
8.To realize that the two nurses in charge of your care are named Moisés and Gaspar.
9.To strike up conversations with imaginary beings. You hear, for example, the masculine voice that slips through the tense air of the ward:
“So you already know what it feels like?” And then you slowly turn to discover the face that watches your dreams from an almost human distance.
“What happened to you is not going to happen to me,” you answer, knowing that you do, in fact, know exactly what it feels like. “I’m not going to jump out of the window,” you insist, speaking the words with a forced emphasis.
“That’s what they all say.” And then you descend into remorse, knowing what you know with no way of doing anything about it.
10.To fall asleep.
11.To pretend to be asleep.
12.To remember that the pleasure of reading words hidden in old documents is only comparable to the terror of reading words hidden in old documents.
13.To eat disgusting slop.
14.To smile at the window.
15.To see yourself advance through the tunnel leading to the door guarding documents that hide words provoking pleasure (by identifying them) and terror (by never knowing what they mean).
16.To approach the window in a romantic attitude: with slow, meditative steps, even slower still.
17.To touch the surface of the window.
18.To repeat the word trembling upon looking at your own fingers on the surface of the window until the word trembling no longer means anything at all.
19.To try to remember the lines of a face you thought unforgettable but nevertheless cannot recall.
20.To suddenly realize you are no longer on the hospital bed but before the transparency of the window, which fictitiously connects you to the outside.
21.To see the rhythmical flight of pelicans at the end of the afternoon.
22.To hear voices that don’t exist, voices that shatter everything in their wake:
“He’s going to kill himself,” I said.
“He’s going to kill himself,” I said again, because the man stood there without taking a step back, as if resolved to throw himself over.
23.To ask yourself insistently but subtly, hidden away, about the inevitability of fate. About the destruction of the inevitability of destiny.
24.To not find an answer to any of the questions you’d previously considered, either inside or outside of the hospital.
25.To speak a word aloud that refuses to be discovered in your presence.
26.To do it again. Unsuccessfully.
27.To turn your back to the window after having spent a long time in front of it.
28.To wait. Which is an art form. A true impossibility.
29.To receive, one fine day, the document certifying your good health.
ONCE I WAS RELEASED, THE GENERAL DIRECTOR WAS KIND enough to order Moisés and Gaspar to continue their responsibilities in my home. How could I let him know that the only things I wanted were to be alone and look at the ocean? I did it like that, in a plain and simple way. Tautological. I wrote a note with the following words:
I just want to be alone and look at the ocean.
But my note—apparently plain and simple, transparent, open, with nothing else on the front or back—led to misunderstanding and scandal. I don’t know if it was the General Director himself or one of his assistants who quickly responded:
If you insist on such a ridiculous plan, we will have to admit you again, sir.
And surely because of the weakness caused by my convalescence, I no longer had the strength or the will to keep fighting.
I FINALLY LEFT THE HOSPITAL ONE CLOUDY, IF MILD, AFTERNOON. Knowing their presence was hardly appropriate or appreciated, Moisés and Gaspar were silent on the drive home, and, after parking the truck assigned to us by the General Director, they were careful to always walk one or two steps behind me. From then on, much to my dismay, the two became my personal shadows. So it was, with their suspicious gazes on my shoulders, that I inserted my key into the door lock, feigning normalcy. The movement, at one time automatic, felt incredibly awkward. As I turned the key to the right, finding myself unable to open the door, I couldn’t help but wonder how many days I’d spent in the elite ward. No one, not even my private nurses, had informed me. Then I asked myself the inevitable: Could she still be here? Would I see her once again? The mere possibility filled me with terror, but this had long ceased to disconcert me. Giving the key another turn, I began to long for her face. I had tried to remember it so many times as I lay in the hospital bed, but in each and every attempt I failed. I could easily articulate some of the nouns and adjectives I had used to describe her face: the arched eyebrow, the immense eyes, the high cheekbones. None of these words, however, helped me picture the exact image of my Amparo Dávila.
My.
I suppose that, for those who understand, there is no need for me to explain the italics. For those who do not understand, I simply advise you to pretend they do not exist. Squint your left eye, turn your gaze to the sky, dance a waltz, have a beer. When denying reality, anything works. I have done it on innumerable occasions and it has always worked. On that afternoon, for example, my Amparo did not exist. There wasn’t a single Amparo Dávila in the world; I was simply opening the door to my house after an ostensibly long absence.
As soon as I looked inside, I was forced to accept that my absence had doubtlessly been longer than I had suspected. There was, in the space whose familiarity had once rendered it transparent, a mild untidiness, a faint but notable change in the way it reflected my inhabitance. The way it felt distanced from me. The furniture was in the same place, as was the opening of the fireplace that had helped me combat the coastal cold so many times, and also the curtainless windows that allowed all of the ocean’s potential to enter. The decorations were the same. There wasn’t a single change in the number or size of the lamps, paintings, or bookcases. I mean to say there was nothing physical that could explain the transformation I was experiencing. The change wasn’t there, outside of myself, but in the relationship I was establishing with the space. In other words, I did not recognize my own home. If I were talking about its structure, the sensation I felt could be described, perhaps, as discord. It made me feel out of place. The discreet but threatening presence of Moisés and Gaspar didn’t help in the slightest. On the contrary, their ragged breaths on the back of my shoulders provoked nothing but anxiety. For a few seconds, I came to believe I was in danger.
“You’re finally here!” exclaimed Amparo Dávila, the False Woman. And she ran toward me, catching me in the entrance hall, my eyes closing in her warm, if slightly aggressive, embrace. I didn’t let myself be deceived: in her sudden happiness upon greeting me, a touch explicit, she also hid a buried reproach, a kind of resentment. It was obvious she had been anxiously waiting for me, like those unused to waiting: her nails had been gnawed to the quick and her hair was greasy. She was even thinner than I remembered her that one stormy night
.
“But what are you doing here?” I asked her once I’d extricated myself from her arms.
“There’s no one else,” she said, answering a question I hadn’t even asked. “You and I are the only ones left.”
Under the expansive effect of her gaze, we both became smaller and smaller as the empty space around us continued to grow. The vertigo hit me soon after and I closed my eyes. I immediately thought she was wrong. That neither she nor I could become the Only One Left. She had forgotten to take the eternal presence of the ocean into account. It must have been because of this that I opened my eyes, because I really had no desire to do so. I moved straight to the window. There it was. I was right. She and I remained, with an ocean in between.
I took her by the hand and led her through the back door. Together we went slowly down the steps and continued toward the beach. I felt like we were an elderly couple fearlessly setting out for the airport of an unknown city. While gray and low, the clouds let just enough of the sun’s light filter through to leave a mercurial tint on the crests of the waves. Without saying a word, we sat down on the sand and turned our gaze to the reefs and, later, the seagulls and the pelicans.
In a strange way, this whole series of movements seemed natural: arriving at home, taking a woman whose face you cannot remember by the hand, sitting with her on the sand to watch the iridescent gray waters of your private ocean. I suppose the silent state we both sank into could be called sadness. Although, to tell you the truth, it could have been anything.
“I missed you,” she murmured without turning her head, as if she were talking to the sky.
“Me too,” I said as I turned to look at her. She did indeed have enormous eyes, finely arched eyebrows, and high cheekbones. I smiled to myself as my words finally reunited with her face, making it recognizable. I had the impression that her face, as much as the moment, would remain imprinted in my memory—that, as tends to happen with the few things imprinted in memory, I would spend the rest of my life trying to grasp her face as much as the moment. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to; I knew that the more I tried, her face as much as the moment would end up receding even further away from me. I suspected then that this had been my reason, and no other, for opening the door that stormy night at the beginning of this winter that refused to end. After all, you always need a place to retreat to.
“He’s going to kill himself,” she said, watching something motionless in the sky.
I waited a moment before asking her to repeat her comment, as if I hadn’t heard it.
“He’s going to kill himself,” she repeated. I thought it strange that, after so much time had passed, yet within that time, and after all the moments and information had accumulated and come to pass, the necessary phrase had inevitably arrived. The False Amparo couldn’t have had the slightest idea what had just happened, but she pointed out the irregular flight of a pelican. The bird flew like the others, with the splendor of its enormous open wings, but the speed of its plunge wasn’t normal. The pelican did this several times: it rose elegantly just to dive back down, gracelessly, quickly, in a straight line. The False Amparo captured my attention when she turned to look at me because I could then observe the sculpted contours of her face with pleasure. I imagined her, just as I had that first day, eating blackberries, climbing the stairs, talking without rhyme or reason. I imagined a bright day, a long walk through South City preceded by an incredible desire to be alive. I imagined each word in the phrase and surely you will have children that won’t be mine and the hand I tossed outward, taking flight, without any hesitation. Truthfully. I pictured the time that she molded her body’s angles to my own. And I could have continued like this, imagining each of the scenes of my life like leaves on a petrified tree, but the False One’s immobile face made me fear the worst. Fear what was happening. In the blink of an eye, I witnessed the moment the pelican crashed into the mercurial surface of the winter ocean.
“Poor thing,” she said impassively a few minutes later. Then, as if suicidal pelicans were commonplace for her, she stood up. She brushed the sand off her behind and held her hand out to me.
Five fingers, phalanges, fingernails.
The weightlessness of flesh in the air.
An invitation.
The purest moment of attention.
An infinite act of definition.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I smiled, unsure of the source of my good mood, of my cynicism. The confidence to say what I did. She shrugged her shoulders. Poor thing. With her back to me, she marched off into the drizzle that had begun to fall.
As she disappeared into the distance once again, I watched her and started to drift backward, step by step, on the sand. I knew, as I insisted on looking at her shoulders, her mane of hair, that a path was closing right before my eyes. The possibility of being with her, of being her. I continued moving backward until my heels touched the water. And then I heard her:
We are two castaways on the same beach, with as much urgency, or none at all, as someone who knows they have all of eternity to look at themselves . . . We have stolen apples and they are after us . . . I know we are fleeing from this moment or from direct words, from an emotion . . . moments that we have lived so deeply and dizzily . . . I do not know how to express the things that I feel. Perhaps one day I will write them in front of another window . . . the only survivors of the winter . . . Keep the coin, your face and mine, for rainy afternoons when the boredom weighs heavily on us . . . Not a single soul travels anywhere . . .
I suppose Moisés and Gaspar retrieved my body from the beach and placed it in bed, underneath the blankets. I suppose they both still watch over my sleep, with its yellowish haze where you can’t see a thing.
LATER I COULD NOT REMEMBER HER FACE. I REMEMBERED, instead, the name of the bone that had simultaneously awoken both my desire and my fear. The ilium, one of three regions that make up the hip bone. Wide and curved, its wings extend from either side of the dorsal spine. At the uppermost point of the ilium’s wings is the iliac crest. From there, from Ilion, from her crest, Odysseus departed on his return to Ithaca after the war.
I smiled upon remembering, too, that the pelvis is the most definitive area to determine the sex of an individual. The Emissaries should have known this to be able to discover my secret.
Afterword
Is Cristina Rivera Garza a cultural phenomenon, Wonder Woman, or a hardworking young writer? Born in 1964, her talent is fresh and springs forth from a space equally contemporary and innovative. She takes on José Revueltas after having revived Amparo Dávila, after having inserted readers in La Castañeda to make us see the imprisonment and madness of a psychiatric hospital in twentieth-century Mexico. Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry) and La cresta de Ilión (The Iliac Crest), whose first English publication you now hold in your hands, are key works of Mexican literature. With the arts being increasingly undercut and undervalued, Cristina’s presence in Houston opens a door for young poets, budding storywriters, and future novelists to create and have faith in themselves as creative agents. Because, for Cristina Rivera Garza, there is no wall capable of silencing these voices. I am not talking about politics but the creation of a Rivera Garzian literary tradition—the strongest, the most capable of tearing down walls and breaking barriers. There is nothing better in this moment, nothing more timely, than recognizing an important young Mexican writer for her contributions.
Cristina Rivera Garza runs far ahead of her predecessors; she surpasses us. Cristina wrote the avant-garde The Iliac Crest about Amparo Dávila, helping return her to the forefront of our literature. In Iliac, the short story writer Amparo appears as a ghost; true and false Amparos appear to us with a turn of the page. For Cristina, reviving Amparo Dávila was also a way of searching for herself, because no Mexican writer before her had explored the unimaginable and even dangerous worlds of Amparo Dávila’s stories, stories unlike anything else in Mexican literature. Cristina was captivated by Dávila’s themes,
her ghosts, her dismissal of the conventional world in favor of creating her own.
Cristina Rivera Garza runs; it’s impossible to catch her among the terminally ill and those about to disappear, the suicidal and the mad. Even more terrible are the guards with their straitjackets, their threats of moral authority.
Born in Tamaulipas, on the border with Texas, Cristina moves along the borders of language and tradition with ease. No one would dare write like her or force their reader to cross that line that she has long been accustomed to navigating since her childhood.
Cristina communicates her tremendous passion for life so that we might follow her lead. She challenges us to touch that spot on our backs lying just out of reach; if we fail, we’ll be chased out of her literary domain. She urges us on with complete understanding of the consequences, and because of that, I, for one, am left with a smile on my face, and I ask her for one more minute, just one, before my own bones break.
Cristina Rivera Garza runs; there is no way to catch her. She frees us from our routines, leads us through forking paths, and tells us where we’re headed: “It isn’t there, María, turn around.” At first, we rebel. It’s much easier to resign ourselves to the familiar, to embrace the status quo, but she pushes us and we follow her, reluctantly. We women writers—“already that which we forget”—follow Cristina with uncertainty and astonishment, and we take her in our arms, holding her close to the heart of great literature.
—ELENA PONIATOWSKA
Mexico City, 2017
Translator’s Note
Upon completing The Iliac Crest, a novel replete with stolen objects, disputed bodies, and Mexican literary history, it should come as no surprise that Cristina Rivera Garza is known for her literary ambiguity and the transgressive nature of her writing. I was drawn to translating The Iliac Crest precisely because of this, particularly compelled by the way Rivera Garza acknowledges borders in their many forms, using her writing to question and subvert them. Perhaps a consequence of the author’s personal experience living along the US-Mexico border, The Iliac Crest is indeed a novel of borders: between the living and the dying, North and South City, fiction and reality, past and present, male and female, lucidity and madness. The elusory ways the novel blurs these boundaries invite readers to reimagine their perceptions of the world, replacing such strict divisions with a better sense for the fluid nature of identity.