Horacio Castellanos Moya - The Dream of My Return

“What I’d like to suggest,” Don Chente said, settling into his chair after mentioning the therapeutic virtues of memory, “is that we try hypnosis.” This was the last thing I expected — the degrees on his wall certified him as a medical doctor, a psychologist, and an acupuncturist, but now it turned out he was also a hypnotist. “We could try it once a week,” he continued in the face of my mute alarm, “starting next Wednesday, if this same time would be good for you.” I told him that the problem was that in a month at the very most I would be taking off for San Salvador. “That’s fine, you’ll see progress after three or four sessions,” he insisted. And how could I say no, even though I hadn’t yet recovered from my shock, if what we were talking about was a free and novel treatment, one that aroused my curiosity and soon stimulated my imagination, because the idea of being hypnotized made me think that I was about to enter the world of Asian monks and kung fu fighters. I asked him if I needed to prepare myself in any special way for hypnosis, thinking that perhaps he would ask me to go on some kind of diet, as Pico Molins had so that his little drops would work, but Don Chente told me that no preparation was necessary, only a readiness to discover things — some of which would perhaps be unpleasant, that’s how he qualified them — that were buried in my consciousness.

Very strange was my state of mind when I left Don Chente’s apartment after he accompanied me back to the elevator, always so polite and modest, a manner Muñecón said was like “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” though I then realized it was actually more like “killing them with kindness,” because the old man hid enormous stores of knowledge behind his somewhat retiring, grandfatherly demeanor; my state of mind was very strange when I emerged onto San Lorenzo Street, happy to be pain-free and excited at the prospect of beginning a process of self-knowledge through hypnosis, but at the same time I had the sensation that a red light had gone on far away, I didn’t know exactly where or why, a very small light that did not delay me for even a moment from going to the phone booth on the corner to call my buddy Félix, who worked at a magazine with offices just a few blocks away from Don Chente’s apartment and very close to our favorite spot for sharing news and drinking vodka tonics in the evening, the terrace of La Veiga Restaurant, where we could sit contemplating the commotion on Insurgentes as well as savoring with our eyes one or another solid piece of female flesh, and where we would meet in a half hour to celebrate my cure.

THE WEEK BEFORE I once again rang the doorbell on San Lorenzo Street was so disastrous that by the time I was finally standing in front of Don Chente’s building I was convinced that this hypnosis session was my only salvation, that things would change for the better after this treatment, and that I might as well tell the old man about my emotional turmoil, especially the tempest my relationship with Eva had become, in the hope that he would give me a helping hand, because the situation, to be honest, had spun out of control, and what had seemed before like a civilized separation had now degenerated into a painful rupture — to say the least — if not a swamp of reproaches, bitterness, and accusations that could only lead to mutual hatred — harmful for both of us and truly malignant for Evita.

Once again it was Don Chente who greeted me as I stepped out of the elevator, and this time the enormous apartment felt empty, silent, dimly lit, as if the old man were its sole inhabitant, a thought that undoubtedly found expression on my face, because right away, as if he’d read my mind, Don Chente told me that he was indeed alone in the apartment, his wife had gone to El Salvador, probably to check their bank accounts, I thought, because Muñecón had told me that Don Chente’s wife was extremely wealthy, she was from a family with an unpronounceable Basque surname, Aguirreurreta or something like that, owners of a number of coffee plantations in the western part of the country.

“You look a little worse. Has the pain come back?” he asked me even before we’d sat down in the library. No, I answered, fortunately the stabbing pain had not come back — that was all I needed — but I’d been beset by so many troubles all week that I hadn’t even remembered the pain, because my relationship with my partner, I told him, had collapsed, not because of my upcoming trip but because of the entrance on stage of a two-bit actor she’d had an affair with, I confessed, and I had the impression that he lifted his eyes slightly, as if to look for the horns on my head, though Don Chente would have been incapable of such a thing, he was much too discreet. He asked me, with as much tact as possible, if Eva had persisted in her lapse, using the word “lapse” as if she had simply taken a misstep and tripped and fallen on her back with her legs spread-eagle so he could penetrate her, hardly what had really happened, with her going off enthusiastically for her early morning fucks, but I refrained from making my accusation too specific and answered only, no, apparently the affair had ended, though when dealing with that kind of sleazy activity it was difficult to know for certain. He asked how I had reacted, perhaps fearing that violence had carried the day, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I had behaved in a more civilized way than usual, having reached the conclusion that we had no future as a couple. “What does she think?” he asked, a look of concern spreading across his face. I told him I still didn’t understand her, sometimes she’d assert with conviction that everything was over, but at other times she’d say the opposite, which to my mind meant that she was terribly confused, which had made it impossible for us to hold a calm and reasonable conversation, as was necessary under the circumstances. “Try not to make precipitous decisions; remember there is a young child involved,” Don Chente said, picking up his fountain pen to write something down in his notebook.

What I didn’t reveal to Don Chente, because I didn’t see the point, was that Eva had come home one evening after our last appointment unusually agitated, which made me suspect that she had returned to her adventures with said two-bit actor, so I told her off, sarcastically suggesting that she had traded her libidinous morning escapades for afternoon ones, to which she reacted with a rather disproportional expression of indignation, according to my standards, thereby increasing my suspicions and prompting me to remind her that there was no need to get violent, as far as I was concerned she could do with her ass whatever the hell she wanted and with whomever she wanted. I was afraid this would make her even more belligerent, but the opposite occurred: she went and sat down in the armchair facing the sofa where I was sitting and began to cry, quietly at first and then uncontrollably, so pitifully that I soon cast off my suspicions that she was employing a typical feminine strategy and asked her what was going on, because by now I was a bit alarmed, my intuition having warned me that so much crying could not possibly bode well for me. Sniffling, her hands covering her face, she said: her period was a week late and she was afraid she was pregnant. Flabbergasted, I sat bolt upright, and long seconds passed before I could muster my voice; my insides were being buffeted about by contradictory emotions, and although her sorrowful cries had awoken my compassion, the idea that she was pregnant with the other man’s child filled me with so much rage that I thought I was going to explode — I had the urge to kick the hell out of her that very moment — after all, a roll in the hay was one thing and getting pregnant quite another. I asked her if she’d done a test. She said, no, she would the next day, and she explained that she should have gotten her period exactly eight days before, but because of her symptoms she was almost positive — and I understood that “almost” as a final line of defense that not even she believed — she was pregnant. “When was the last time you fucked your actor?” I asked with consummate scorn. She stopped crying, lowered her hands, and looked at me with hatred. “We always used a condom,” she mumbled. “So, whose is it?” I asked, my mind stuck on the word always that she had uttered so naturally and which led me to infer that those two lewd mornings she had sold me on were nothing but cheap consolation for a poor cuckold and that I’d never know how many times she had actually given herself to that two-bit actor. “What do you mean, whose?!” she shouted, furious, but at that point it really was an act, because as far as I could remember, the times we had fornicated in the last few months had been few and far between — busy as she was frolicking in someone else’s bed — and on those few occasions, Eva had assured me that she was not in the fertile part of her cycle. “Idiot!” she snarled, then started sobbing again.