Horacio Castellanos Moya - The Dream of My Return

I SAT NAKED ON THE EDGE OF THE BED, the towel draped over my lap, distraught, distrait, as if I’d just been punched and hadn’t been able to react, incapable of making any mental connections, my mind a blank, in a kind of limbo, perhaps the amount of alcohol still circulating in my bloodstream and the impact of the news of my doctor’s disappearance having created a short circuit that shut down my brain, causing in turn a massacre of neurons that plunged me into a cataleptic state for who knows how many minutes — time capriciously stretches out and shrinks back up under such circumstances — until finally the tape in my mind managed to get unstuck, and that’s when I began to react, moving from a state of shock to one of extreme anxiety, not only because of what Don Chente might have been suffering at the hands of the military torturers but also because I understood that the same fate awaited me — the moment I landed at Comalapa Airport, I, too, would disappear into the hands of the military, which apparently is what had just happened to my doctor. I fell back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling, as if in a trance, telling myself that if a prestigious doctor, married to a millionaire and with no truck with militancy or political passions, who had dared to return to his country only because his old mother had died, if he had disappeared into the hands of those military goons, how much more quickly would they pick me up, an unknown, half-starved journalist with friends in the ranks of the guerrilla armies who was returning with the suspicious intention of starting a political magazine. I kept curling up tighter and tighter into a ball until I was in a fetal position, and for the second time that morning I longed to disappear, to vanish into thin air — anxiety combined with a hangover easily skyrockets and turns into terror. Why, until that very moment, had I been so confident that nothing bad would happen to me if I returned before the civil war had ended? Where had I drummed up such naïve, even suicidal enthusiasm that allowed me to disguise the dream of my return not only as a stimulating adventure but also as my first step toward changing my life for the better? What made me think that the Salvadoran military would understand that I was not a guerrilla fighter but rather an independent journalist, that they would simply forget the stacks of articles I had written against them, the military, during my Mexican exile? Once these self-reproaches had rendered me contrite, memories of Albertico began to clobber me relentlessly, because it was all too obvious that eleven years later I was following in my cousin’s footsteps — returning to El Salvador to meet a certain death — but I was even stupider than Albertico because Albertico, a Communist militant, had been conscious of the risk he was taking, which is why when I asked him why he was returning in the middle of the carnage, he said, “Because I’m an ass,” whereas I was acting like an utter imbecile, even more unconscious and more naïve — how else to explain the excitement I had been flaunting up till that moment. And then I recalled that morning of January 3, 1980—it is so clear in my mind — when a gringo came to visit Albertico in the large living room of the family home in the Escalante neighborhood of San José, Costa Rica — where I was also staying for New Year’s, as I already said — a gringo who introduced himself as a journalist working for a newspaper in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, I don’t remember exactly, who interviewed my cousin supposedly for a feature article he was writing about the political violence in El Salvador, a gringo whom I barely glimpsed as I walked down the hallway but whom I immediately suspected of being an informer, a spy, or something even worse, because as I walked by I happened to hear him asking Albertico about his studies in Moscow, a question that could be answered with total honesty there in that Costa Rican city of lambs, but from the perspective of San Salvador, it could lead one directly to torture and death, which is exactly what happened to my cousin. From then on, I never had the least doubt that the interview with that gringo posing as a journalist was decisive in Albertico’s murder: with the information that gringo had gotten out of him, CIA butchers decided to target him for execution, but they would wait till he had returned to San Salvador, where they could sic on him those criminals in uniform, which is what they did two months later; from that moment on, I started suspecting all gringo journalists on principle, whatever their sympathies or the little calling cards they hoisted up their flagpoles — anything you revealed to them or confided in them could get you sent straight to the gallows. Still curled up fetus-like on the bed, wallowing in a pigsty of self-reproach, I remembered that my life was so bound up with the murder of my cousin that I had been forced into exile precisely because of that incident: a few days after Albertico had been kidnapped by police commandos, Fidelita, my mother’s maid, returned from the grocery story greatly alarmed because of a jeep parked in front of the house with some sinister-looking goons inside, insolently watching our house, which my mother attributed to the fact that my uncle Alberto — Muñecón — was using her car to drive around the country to search for the bodies of Albertico and his wife, because he didn’t have a car, having just returned from Costa Rica; Muñecón was using my mother’s car to visit the sites where the police and army death squads dumped the bodies of the activists they had kidnapped and tortured. It was the presence of that jeep with those sinister-looking goons in front of my mother’s house that made me decide that same afternoon to leave the country, to get the hell out of there; I had absolutely no desire to be a martyr, and, just in case, I spent the night at another relative’s house and went from there directly to the bus station at dawn. How could I, eleven years later, have possibly forgotten that traumatic experience and been so eager to return to the place I had left in so much fear? And what seemed even worse: how could I possibly have any illusions about my return, as if this were the first time I’d returned with the dream of “participating in History,” for god’s sake, when the fact was I’d returned exactly once before, a few days after Albertico, only to end up leaving in a hurry a few months later, as I’ve just explained?

I made myself even smaller on the bed, curling around myself in that fetal position until I was almost tied in a knot, clutching the corner of the towel with all my might, as if that towel were my last hope for salvation, the rope thrown to a drowning man in the middle of a stormy sea when there are no more life preservers, a large towel made in El Salvador at the Hilasal factory, as it turned out, its tag showing a painting of naïve, or primitive, art, painted in La Palma, a lovely mountain village in the north, a destination for artists and ex-hippies from the ’60s, which had been trapped in the theater of war. And in that particular way the mind has of making capricious associations, I immediately started remembering that the artist who had founded that school of naïve painting in La Palma had also been a member of Banda del Sol, a short-lived progressive rock band from the beginning of the ’70s, a band that attained epic status in El Salvador, especially for its songs “ El planeta de los cerdos ,” “The Planet of Pigs,” and “ El Perdedor ,” “The Loser,” both composed by a guitarist nicknamed Tamba, after the chimpanzee who costarred with Johnny Weissmuller in an old black-and-white movie called The Killer Ape —the famous Tamba, who years later would leave progressive rock to become Comandante Sebastián, a mythic figure among the guerrillas, someone who went from rock-and-roll to the armed struggle with the same sense of adventure and who would die precisely near La Palma in an ambush about which I had firsthand information. I sat up on the bed, as if energized by this memory, though I kept daydreaming, leaning my back against the wall, my private parts covered with the towel as if at any moment someone might enter the room, because the truth is, in that house you never knew, several of Eva’s relatives lived in the houses next door to ours and along the same short dead-end street, and it was not unusual for her mother or one of her sisters to suddenly appear in the living room or start up the stairs to the bedrooms without first knocking on the front door. Tamba’s story deserved to be written, I told myself, like so many other stories from the war, someone really should do it, though not I, I only had information about the ambush that cost him his life that day in January 1982, after he participated in the first guerrilla operation of any magnitude in Chalatenango — a devastating attack on the army outpost in San Fernando, a town located near La Palma, as I said. Soon I was trying to remember the details of that operation, which I had written a cable about the same day it took place, because at the time I was a reporter for a news agency secretly controlled by the guerrilla organization Tamba was fighting for, details that now, nine years later, had grown a bit hazy, though there was one that would always stick in my memory: after several hours of combat, the soldiers and paramilitary forces under siege at the base decided to surrender, as was confirmed in photographs I saw a few days later, photographs that showed a row of about three dozen prisoners face down on the ground, their hands clasped behind their necks, some of them looking right at the camera, frightened, their faces smeared with dirt, whereas the official dispatch released by the guerrilla organization that landed on my desk stated that no prisoners had been taken, that all the enemy combatants had died in battle. What happened to those prisoners? I asked Héctor, who had led the operation, a few months later. “They got malaria,” he answered calmly after recounting the battle in detail and pointing out that the raid Tamba would die in a few hours later, after the guerrilla troops had withdrawn in victory, was carried out by the military commander of San Fernando, who had managed to sneak out of the barracks with some of his soldiers during the early stages of the battle and was such a clever bastard that he evened the score by carrying out said ambush, first attacking the scout, or guide, of the guerrilla column, to whose aid Tamba came, crawling through the bushes and into the circle of enemy fire, though as fate would have it, failing to advance any farther before he was shot, a hero’s death, like that of hundreds of fighters over the ten years of war, but this was not what impressed me, I was sure of that now; the image of Tamba I most identified with was of the young guerrilla leader sitting to rest after a long day, his FAL across his lap, listening with earphones to music by Pink Floyd or Yes on his Walkman. It was, of course, that image — like a postcard and just as romantic — that impressed me because Tamba had been the two things I never could be: a composer of progressive rock music and a guerrilla, two ideals from my tender youth that he had managed to embody and I hadn’t at all, though perhaps fortunately, I reconsidered as I made myself more comfortable on the bed: thanks to the fact that I was not a rock musician turned guerrilla leader, I could now think about this, because if I had been those things, my fate would have been similar to that of the comrade with the nickname of the killer ape.