Horacio Castellanos Moya - The Dream of My Return

I carried my dirty dishes to the sink, told myself that enough was enough with the memories, it would be best to simply forget what Héctor had told me, as well as what he had taught me, during those two days we spent in fatigues in the forest in the mountains of Hidalgo, where we had gone from Mexico City, where the Argentinian went to recover from a gastric ulcer that had forced him to leave the front, and where he remained for several weeks while being treated for his ulcer — caused by the tensions of war and also, I think, by the repressed torment of having abandoned Juanita — a tumultuous period of repose for the guerrilla fighter, after which he’d return to the battlefield, where he’d die a few months later, blown to pieces by an enemy grenade that fell into the trench where he’d taken shelter during a battle in the foothills of the Guazapa Volcano. I really should change the tape playing in my head, I kept telling myself, because if I didn’t, I’d run the risk of another panic attack, especially if I started wondering what I knew that the military might be interested in, what information they would try to extract from me after they captured me upon my arrival at the Comalapa Airport, a panic attack I could prevent only if at that very moment I started to move toward the stairs, knowing that the intelligent thing to do was get dressed and go pick up my check before anything else could happen.

TO BUY THE TICKET or not to buy the ticket, that was the question I kept asking myself again and again while sitting on the bar stool and fidgeting, as if there were ants in my pants, having almost finished my first Bloody Caesar and firmly intending to order another, for although my physical discomfort had decreased, the same could not be said of my anxiety, mostly because I had called Muñecón several times to ask if he’d heard any news of Don Chente, two hours having already passed since he announced to me that Don Chente’s relatives had been waiting for him in vain at Comalapa Airport; but nobody was picking up at Muñecón’s apartment, which made me fear the worst — rather than consider that he had simply gone out to run an errand, as under any other circumstances I would have — and suspect that bad news about my doctor had forced him to go out in the middle of the day, when my uncle customarily stayed put at home.

To buy the ticket or not to buy the ticket, I repeated to myself over and over again while compulsively chucking peanuts into my mouth, the check I had picked up at the news agency burning a hole through my shirt pocket over my heart, waiting for me to deposit it in the bank, something I should have done before slipping into the bar in Sanborns, where I now was, but my thirst was stronger than my common sense, and the moment I said goodbye to Charlie Face, the director of the agency, a Chilean who was much too well behaved to understand the urgency of a hangover, I dashed headlong to the Bloody Caesar I was now drinking, though not without first stopping at a phone booth to call Muñecón, as I already said, without anybody answering as I’d hoped. And my dilemma was the following: to buy the ticket without knowing for sure if Don Chente had been captured was idiotic, but to delay meant running the risk of losing the reservation and of the price going up, as the girl at the travel agency warned me.

The next time I called Muñecón it was from the phone located at the entrance to the restrooms in Sanborns, after I had downed half the Bloody Caesar in one gulp; not finding him and knowing that it’s much too disconcerting to be all alone with one’s anxiety, I decided to call my buddy Félix, who fortunately was still at the office and also longing for a drink to cure his own hangover, because the night before he had been out partying and had gotten even more sauced than I had, according to what he told me. That’s why I was sitting on the stool and fidgeting as if I had ants in my pants, I repeat, because now along with my anxiety about Don Chente’s possible capture and disappearance was added another anxiety: Félix had long distinguished himself for his total lack of punctuality, and he was capable of arriving more than an hour late and acting as if nothing whatsoever was wrong. To make matters worse, I was the first customer of the day, and the bartender was busy getting the bottles and other ingredients ready, so after making my Bloody Caesar almost resentfully, he carried on with his preparations without paying any attention to my attempts to strike up a conversation.

That was when I realized that I suffered from a horrifying lack of control over my emotions, as if the serene state of mind brought about by the sessions of acupuncture and hypnosis had disappeared along with my doctor, along with all the positive energy that had suffused me at the prospect of returning to my native country, if you’ll excuse the expression, for although I was not born in El Salvador, it was as if my umbilical cord were attached to that place, so young was I when they took me there. I was utterly baffled — my eyes staring at the row of bottles — trying to figure out why and to what extent I had tied my emotional and psychic well-being to Don Chente: how was it possible that after a mere half-dozen appointments I had become so dependent on a doctor? What had I revealed to him? What secret part of my being had passed into his hands so that today I felt so lost at his disappearance? The bartender asked me if I wanted another Bloody Caesar. I indicated I did with a nod; I didn’t feel like talking anymore, distraction was the last thing I needed at that moment, because I felt as if a revelation was on the verge of rising out of the depths of my being, as if something dark and mysterious was making its way into my consciousness. And then, for a single instant, I perceived it with extreme clarity and in dismay, but then I immediately shook my head, wanting that memory not to be there but rather to return at once to the dark depths from which it never should have risen. I observed the bartender agitating the metal cocktail shaker and greeting two customers on their way to a table, and I also turned to greet them, as if they were old friends, knowing this was the only way to get out of myself, keep myself at a certain remove from a memory that I didn’t want to remember for anything in the world, and that I had never told anybody in my life, one that had now risen from the substratum, perhaps as a result of the anxiety I was experiencing at this crucial moment in my life or maybe because of how vulnerable the hangover had made me, which were one and the same thing when all was said and done, because the image of the Volkswagen bug riddled with machine-gun fire had already penetrated my conscious mind, exactly as I had seen it that horrible morning so many years before in the newspaper column, “Last Night’s News,” a photo with a caption I read in total shock that stated that the driver of the bug, Gordo Porky, had been shot sixty-four times before collapsing over the steering wheel after a Hollywood-style car chase through Colonia Layco: shaken to the core, I suffered a kind of breakdown at that moment, which could only be expected because Gordo Porky had driven me home in that very same bug just two hours before they ambushed him; we had stayed at the law school cafeteria, drinking beer and chatting, as we did fairly often after the language theory class we were taking together. And stuck to the image of Gordo Porky, as if to the other side of a coin, was a sinister scene, and now here it appeared again, right in the bar in Sanborns, against my will and dripping like sulfuric acid into my conscience: a few days before the ambush, I met two professors in a classroom in the Philosophy Department, two professors we later found out were informants for the army intelligence services and who wanted to talk to me about something academic, but the truth was they were conducting a kind of casual interrogation, during which they brought up, as if in passing, the adventures of Gordo Porky and me, the naïve one with the big mouth. . Shit! I exclaimed to myself, and the word might even have formed on my lips, because I slapped the palm of my hand against my forehead, like someone who’d suddenly discovered he’d misplaced the winning ticket of the big lottery prize — even the waiter coming toward me with my Bloody Caesar thought it best to ask me if I was okay. “No, it’s nothing, I just forgot something at the office,” I managed to mumble, just to get rid of him, then immediately raised the glass as if to offer a toast, trying to control the grimace of panic that was on the verge of disfiguring my face, because now I knew what I had revealed to Don Chente and that could surely be found in his notebook. I already suspected there was some trick with this hypnosis business: serenity is never free, you have to give something in exchange, and the clever old man had succeeded in extracting my secret.