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.”
THREE DAYS AFTER HER ARRIVAL, AMPARO HAD ALREADY DEVELOPED a routine that we shared and respected equally. So placid, so natural, that anyone not familiar with us might have believed we were happily married. At first glance, no one would have suspected that I was just playing along, that my fear hadn’t subsided in the least. Quite the opposite: it kept growing.
Amparo would wake up early, bathe, and, with her hair still wet, go downstairs to the kitchen to make coffee for me and tea for the Betrayed. When she returned upstairs to attend her patient, I’d go down to the dining room to find the newspaper next to the orange juice and an empty mug, which I’d calmly fill while trying to detect the morning murmur of the sea. Amparo would let me begin the day alone, which is the only way a day can begin, but she would appear with a notebook and pencil just as I finished reading the paper. Then she would mutter something consistently insipid about the Betrayed’s health and, with nothing more, would hunch over her notebook and begin to write.
“What are you writing about?” I asked her the first morning, glancing at the open notebook and thinking that, upon answering me, she would say that they were personal letters, things of little importance.
“My disappearance,” she said quietly but firmly, and then turned to look at the sun’s reflection on the sea outside. Then, without another word, she went back to concentrating on the pages of her notebook.
Her response sounded absurd to me, of course, but also plausible. And it helped explain everything. Only a disappeared person could have materialized on the coast as she had. If she had been Someone, for example, they would have arrested her at the entrance of the seaside gated community where the hospital I worked for had assigned me a large, austere house on the water. They would have already made phone calls for Someone. Someone with information and a history would have asked me if she could stay in my house, and would have informed me, at least, of the number of days and the conditions of her stay. Only a disappeared person like Amparo, I suddenly understood, could act as if she didn’t really exist because—and this is where the pieces came together—she really didn’t exist. The woman, now there was no doubt, was totally aware of her condition, to the extent that her conduct, her way of walking and seeing, of speaking and even falling silent, corresponded to rules that were completely foreign to me. She did not understand, for example, the order of things in the relationship between cause and effect. Not only did she ignore the fact that actions, all actions, have consequences, but also that consequences originate, and do not result, in causes. She seemed not to understand that you must first know the host in order to visit his house. Amparo, supported by the singular logic of the disappeared, acted in direct opposition: she arrived to visit the host with the objective of getting to know him. That was what she had told me that first night, just after saying good night to the Betrayed with a kiss on her forehead and closing the door to what was now her bedroom.
“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