Horacio Castellanos Moya - The Dream of My Return

Fortunately, at that very moment, the door at Gate 19 opened for the passengers who had just arrived on the flight from San Salvador, according to the announcement over the loudspeaker made by an airline employee, who requested that we remain alert, we would begin boarding in about fifteen minutes. I looked up to see if I recognized any of the arriving passengers and observed the agitated expressions on their faces, some of whom were confused about which way to go for immigration and customs, but I didn’t recognize anybody, and a few minutes later I saw the brunette stand up, exclaim in delight, and walk over to a woman who had just disembarked, a woman she embraced effusively right next to me, allowing me to contemplate — enthralled — her thighs and ass, within reach of my hand, which I didn’t dare move, just to be clear, because I sat absolutely still in my privileged position, like a chameleon invisibly perched on his branch, because I did not want them to be aware of my presence, not for anything in the world, not while I was furtively and ecstatically contemplating the edges of her olive-skinned glutes, also covered in delicate golden fuzz — damn, a spasm of desire was shaking me to the core — until the boy mentioned earlier appeared and positioned himself defiantly and with furrowed brow between my gaze and his mother’s backside at the very moment she turned to tell him to say hello to the woman she had been embracing. That was when I turned and looked in the opposite direction, where the recently arrived passengers were moving toward customs and immigration, and I even stood up, turning my back on her, afraid that the kid would snitch on me, tell her I was ogling her, but also seized with a certain uneasiness, because now I knew that the brunette would be on my flight and the contemplation of her silky flesh had befuddled my senses, to the extent that I was not even paying attention to the arriving passengers, as if my entire being had remained glued to the skin on the backs of her thighs leading up to her glutes. And because my mind had been rendered much too vulnerable by all those impressions and emotions, I suddenly found myself wondering where it came from, all that anxiety that overwhelmed me whenever I spotted a pair of beautiful legs under a miniskirt, anxiety that obliged me to look at those legs compulsively, like a voyeur, no matter what the circumstances, a kind of vice or obsession that had accompanied me since my early adolescence, since the awakening of my sexuality, and that had always driven crazy the women who had shared their lives with me. And then an image rose out of my memory: during my first years of high school at the all-boys school run by Marist priests where I was a student, a group of boys would gather every afternoon on a kind of embankment under which passed cars driven by young mothers taking their children to school or picking them up and from which we could catch a clear glimpse, under the steering wheels, of the naked thighs of the drivers who were wearing miniskirts, thighs that excited us, made us shout out in delight, and supplied us with images for our masturbations. Needless to say, not one of the mothers of the members of that group drove under that embankment where we stood to get a peek into those cars, and even if one had, she would not have been an object of interest, our mothers belonged to an older generation, one that didn’t wear miniskirts, and the women who awoke our incipient lechery were younger women who were taking their children to nursery school or primary school. And while I stared distractedly at the crowd in the opposite direction from the brunette with the spectacular legs, I told myself that even if my mother had worn a miniskirt, she never would have awoken my interest, that I had never felt the least bit attracted to her, on the contrary, my grandmother Lena had taken it upon herself to revile her so much that she’d made mincemeat of my Oedipus complex from a very tender age. .

It was then that I thought I saw someone I knew among the crowd that was making its way into customs, not a face, because I was seeing their backs, but rather a way of walking, of moving down the corridor, but at that instant I couldn’t make out who it might be, so I picked up my duty-free bag and grabbed the handle of my carry-on suitcase so that I could walk around a little to quell the agitation the sight of the brunette and the thoughts derived thereof had caused me, and also to get another glimpse at the person whose way of walking had seemed so familiar. And that was when it came to me in a flash: Holy shit! It was Don Chente, my doctor! I walked quickly toward customs, where the recent arrivals were lining up to have their passports checked and where two health officials were questioning them about the countries they had visited, and I made my way with some difficulty through the crowd of passengers bunching up together in that corridor, apologizing because my carry-on suitcase and my duty-free bag kept banging into people, but by the time I reached the counter, Don Chente had already passed through, and those who were still waiting were shouting at me, thinking that I wanted to cut the line and sneak in ahead of them, and one of the officials stopped me and ordered me to get to the end of the line, to show some respect, to which I responded that I hadn’t just arrived, I was waiting to depart but had seen my doctor disembark, and I urgently needed to talk to him, would he please let me pass, but I begged in vain, because the official told me that only arriving passengers could go past that point, nobody else, that was the regulation, while I was straining my neck, trying to get a glimpse of Don Chente, whom I thought I saw next to a posh woman about to have her passport checked, but then I lost him in the crowd, and the health officer repeated, now even more rudely, that I needed to leave, I was in the way. Aghast and dumbstruck, I stood to one side of the entryway, holding on to my duty-free bag and my carry-on suitcase, looking at the anxious faces surrounding me, some apparently angry and with a curse on the tips of their tongues, until finally, at the other end of Gate 19, I saw the brunette saying goodbye to her friend who had just arrived, and I hastily turned my steps in that direction, lurching against the strong current of passengers streaming the other way, knowing that she alone would listen intently to all my woes.