Читать книгу The Iliac Crest - Cristina Rivera Garza - Страница 11

I AM A MAN WHO IS FREQUENTLY MISUNDERSTOOD. I SUPPOSE this could be attributed to my verbal disorder: the almost pathological way I forget to mention something essential at the beginning of my stories. I often narrate while assuming my interlocutor knows something that I eventually realize he does not understand at all. I’ve yet to mention, for example, that on that stormy night I was waiting for another woman. And that the anticipation, my nervousness, was the real reason I reluctantly left my book on the table, stood up, and moved toward the door. I forgot to mention that the surprise of encountering an unexpected face was such that it impeded me from any sort of normal rationale. Without this explanation, you might believe that I was bored, but at the same time, and precisely because of this, ready for something new. In reality, yes, I was bored, but by life in general and by winter in particular. I was really only prepared to welcome, and this with utmost unease, the Betrayed.

I will avoid stating her name out of consideration—out of chivalry. I will avoid it, too, because our history surely fills her with shame. My decision to call her the Betrayed is not an effort at ridicule or indifference. I do it because this is an epithet that she herself has used to refer to her relationship with me. I am, of course, the Traitor.

That is what we were going to talk about that night. That is why we had planned to meet: we were going to talk about the past, to look back on everything, and then, finally, we would end by accepting that life had led us down different paths. The usual. What couples go through when they decide to leave it all behind for good.

I suppose we were in pursuit of a reconciliation with the universe, at an age when it’s certain the universe, as much as reconciliation, will never amount to anything more than empty ambitions, virtual maps, animals gone extinct. Dreams. But we were both stubborn. We both had that absurd, almost religious need to transcend our own situation. Perhaps we were in search of forgiveness. The Betrayed, I knew, would not grant it, and for that reason neither would I. Our reunion was destined to fail, but even knowing this we insisted on meeting. The agitation with which I awaited her that stormy night was due, above all, to this crushing feeling of resignation. But when she finally arrived two hours later than the agreed-upon time, when she knocked on the door and stepped across the threshold with two leather suitcases and her wet gabardine coat, the Betrayed fainted on the spot. She hadn’t even realized that another woman had beaten her there. Amparo Dávila helped me carry her to a room upstairs, and, once we laid the Betrayed on the bed, she took it upon herself to undress her, while I avoided gazing again upon the body I had once seen something in, something I no longer remembered.

“She has a fever,” she said without needing to use a thermometer. “We’ll give her penicillin.”

“But you don’t even know what she has!” In response, the Wet Girl went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet as if she were in her own house, as if she, not I, specialized in the illnesses of the human body.

“There isn’t any penicillin,” I informed her in my usual calm manner.

“It must be the epidemic,” she said as she placed a cold compress on the patient’s forehead.

The Betrayed fluttered her eyelids and mumbled a few words before falling into a deep sleep. Amparo Dávila took her pulse. She looked at her with a mixture of sweetness and disgust.

“Get away from her,” I said from the doorframe. “She could infect you.”

She smiled, arched her right eyebrow. She slowly and pitilessly looked me up and down. Then she went downstairs and came back up with the leather suitcases. She opened them, carefully took out the Betrayed’s clothing, making sure not to unfold anything, and placed each item in the dresser drawer without turning to look at me.

“Her convalescence will be long,” she assured me when she finished. “If she survives.”