Читать книгу The Iliac Crest - Cristina Rivera Garza - Страница 10

I WOULD’VE LIKED FOR THE WHOLE THING TO HAVE HAPPENED like this, but that’s not how it went. It’s true that she arrived one stormy night, interrupting my reading and rest. It’s true, too, that I opened the door and that, upon entering, she moved toward the window overlooking the sea. And she said her name. And I heard its echo. But when I noticed her hip bone—the one peeking out from under the unfinished hem of her T-shirt and just above the elastic of her flowered skirt, the name of which I could not recall but whose search I undertook immediately—I did not feel desire, but fear.

I suppose this is something that men will understand and that I don’t need to expand upon. To the women, I’ll just say that this happens more often than you might think: fear. You provoke fear. Sometimes we confuse this collapse, this immobility, this disarticulation, with desire. But underneath it all—among the roots through which water and oxygen filter, in the most fundamental substrata of being—we are always prepared for the appearance of fear. We lie in wait for it. We invoke and reject it with equal stubbornness, with incomparable conviction. And we give it names and, with them, put implausible stories into motion. We say, for example, that when I met Amparo Dávila, I felt desire. And we say with utmost certainty that this is a lie. But we say it anyway, so as to save ourselves from shame and humiliation. And we reaffirm it later as if it had to do with the most urgent of defense strategies against how, at the end of the day, we feel useless and defeated before we even begin. But we need at least a couple of minutes, a breath, a parenthesis, to put the pieces back together, the secret machinery, the battle plan, the stratagem. We hope that the woman believes it and that, upon doing so, leaves, satisfied, going anywhere else with her own horror in tow.

That is what I wanted from Amparo Dávila that winter night. And that was the only thing she denied me.

It was obvious she was aware of the horror she caused. There was something about the way she slid toward the window that immediately indicated such a conviction. It was clear she understood the ripple effect she created around her. She knew, I mean, that I was uncomfortable and that my discomfort would not dissipate with time. But I did nothing to fix it. The woman showed no pity and didn’t allow me to utter the word desire, or any of its more common synonyms, nor did she even grant me the breath needed to assert such a desire before her. She directed no seductive glances my way, nor did she act with the fragility of a girl in search of “comfort.” She asked me no personal questions. She gave me no information. Perhaps, if I had not been so terrified, I could have opened that door again and showed her through it. But here is my confession, with all of its vowels and consonants: I was afraid of her. I will repeat it. I will reiterate it. When I finally knew without a doubt that this was the case, I saw a pod of pelicans fly by the window. Their flight filled me with uncertainty. Where could they be going at this time of night in the storm? Why were they flying together? What were they fleeing?

“I didn’t come here by chance,” she murmured, not looking at me, her hand still pressed against the window. “I know you from before.”

When she turned to look at me, the space around my body expanded again. I was almost deaf from being so alone. I was lost.

“I know you from when you were a tree,” she said. “From those times.”