Horacio Castellanos Moya - The Dream of My Return

Nor would I tell Don Chente about my via crucis over the following days, when the test came back positive, and thus began the bitter discussion about how to proceed; an abortion seemed to me to be the preferred course of action from every possible point of view, whereas Eva, due to her natural feminine protective instinct, declared somewhat tentatively that she was in favor of keeping the child, though she wavered between that position and mine, constantly bursting out in tears so as to stoke my feelings of guilt, even though she was the only possible guilty party, no matter what, whether the child was mine because she had lied to me about her supposed infertility or, more likely, that due to the excitement and urgency of her initiation into adultery, she’d failed to take the necessary precautions and now the spawn of that circus performer was growing in her belly. But the question of culpability wasn’t really the issue, because I was about to leave the country and end my relationship with her, a forceful enough argument in itself against the advisability of any pregnancy, a pregnancy she would have to go through alone and without any support from me, unless she was in cahoots with her two-bit actor, which I asked her about more than once, in which case they might as well leave me out of their soap opera; but Eva stuck to her guns, repeating that there was nothing between her and Antolín, and that the baby was mine, she had no doubt about it, the two times they’d slept together they’d used condoms, and she repeated this with so much conviction that I was on the verge of believing how many times she had lapsed, as Don Chente called it, but not that they’d used a condom, as I told her in no uncertain terms, and for that very reason I’d take no responsibility for the baby and the appropriate course of action was an immediate abortion. By the next day, she’d already made an appointment with a doctor who carried out that kind of extraction clandestinely in a house in Colonia Portales — it was incumbent upon me to go with her because I didn’t want to behave like a lout and also because I wanted to be absolutely certain that the fetus would be done away with — a house that, truth be told, nobody could guess was a doctor’s office and which I was not allowed to enter — the butcher forbade entry to any third parties, according to Eva — so I waited in the car for a couple of hours, very anxious and with my mind churning a million miles an hour, the situation so tense and anomalous that at first I was afraid there would be neither doctor nor office and that we’d fallen into the clutches of a gang of thieves who would steal our money; then I thought, to calm myself down, that Eva had heard about that doctor through two of her colleagues who had already paid visits to the house that I was now keeping under surveillance. At a certain moment during my wait, I got paranoid that the police would suddenly burst into the house and arrest the doctor and his spread-eagle patients; I watched carefully through the rearview mirror to see if any suspicious characters were hanging around, and I despised living in a country that was so primitive that abortion was against the law, where I couldn’t turn to people like Don Chente or Pico Molins to extricate me from this problem. Eva walked out of the house and to the car as if everything were normal, as if she had not just undergone any kind of procedure, which made me fear that they hadn’t attended to her, but the moment she got in the car, she collapsed, broke down in horrible sobs — before saying “It’s over”—sobs that made me feel as if I’d done something wrong, when by rights we should have been pleased that it had all turned out for the best, which is what I told her, but all she could say was “It was horrible,” a statement that proved that she’d inherited from her father, a progressive former priest, a culture of guilt, and that this stood above and beyond her secular education, it was in her genes, I told myself in order to put a little distance between me and the drama, though suddenly I remembered the novel about Evita Peron that I was reading at the time, which claimed that the cancer that killed her had had its origins in a botched abortion.

“It’s not surprising that being raised by a domineering mother and grandmother would affect your own couple relationships,” Don Chente said, and then asked me to tell him any memories of my father that I did have, even though I’d already told him that I had almost no memories of my progenitor, but I soon found myself talking about my father’s passion for fireworks, for lighting firecrackers on Christmas and New Year’s, how he would buy bags of rockets, fountains, mortars, whistles, and any other kind of fireworks, which he would then set off with the greatest delight, like a little boy, how he’d spend a good part of those nights with my brother and me and the rest of the neighborhood gang, lighting firecrackers nonstop; he loved them so much that on our birthdays he’d sneak into our room early in the morning while we were still asleep and wake us up with explosions, cheers, laughter, and singing the happy birthday song, Las mañanitas . Don Chente listened to me, ensconced in his chair, the palms of his hands joined at his chin, and, even though he periodically leaned over his desk and jotted something down in his notebook, I couldn’t tell which details interested him, because I was suddenly remembering about how my father’s siesta was sacred, the house converted into a tomb under the midday heat, and my brother and I had to scratch his head, pet his head really, until his loud snores resounded — he didn’t smoke sixty cigarettes a day in vain. “Did he ever punish you harshly?” Don Chente asked, in a tone of voice that made me think that I was remembering only stupid things and that nothing essential was coming to mind. I answered that my father had never laid a hand on me, that when he got angry he punished me by making me stay in my room while my friends played in the street or in the backyard, and that it was my mother who shouted and made a fuss, though she dared hit me only once, when I was four years old, and never ran the risk of raising a hand against me again, so great was the fear my grandmother Lena — my protector, whose heir I was — inspired in all of them, I thought, but didn’t say to Don Chente, who really didn’t need to hear that from me to reach the same conclusion.

What I also didn’t tell the old man, and maybe should have, is that the most intense memory I have of my father has nothing to do with his life but with his death, because the night he was shot in the back as he was leaving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Colonia Centroamérica, my brother and I were in bed, and the moment my mother came into our bedroom, a nervous wreck after receiving the phone call, to tell us that Papa had had an “accident” and that she was going to the hospital to be with him, and that we would stay with Fidelita, our trusted maid, and that if they weren’t home by morning, which they weren’t, we should get up, shower, eat breakfast, and take the bus to school like we did every day. . at that very moment, as I was saying, when my mother came into our room, out of control, I had an intuition that something very important was about to change in my life, that I was about to enter unknown and dangerous territory, an intuition that produced a sensation of fear and helplessness that prevented me from sleeping peacefully that night and stayed with me the following morning, when Father Pedro, the principal of my school, came into my classroom, asked the teacher to excuse me, and instructed me to pack all my binders and books into my knapsack, then started walking by my side, his protective hand on my shoulder as he talked to me about God — I assume, though I was like a zombie so I don’t remember his words — until just before we entered the main office, when he told me that my father had died; waiting for me there was my mother’s best friend, who stood up to give me a hug, then burst into tears, though she soon pulled herself together and told me that my brother Alfredito would be joining us soon, the principal was going to get him from his classroom, but he mustn’t find out yet about our father’s death, because he was only seven years old, too young to understand, they would tell him later, after they’d prepared him, whereas I was already a young man, at eleven I should be able to control myself, not say anything or cry while we were in the car on our way to drop Alfredito off at the house of some relatives, who would look after him. And that is what happened: with a knot in my throat, I held back my tears on the way to drop off my brother, and I kept holding back my tears while my mother’s friend drove me home, even when we passed the Hospital del Seguro Social, where they’d taken my father after the “accident,” as my mother had called it the night before, after receiving the phone call; and I continued to hold back my tears the rest of the morning, at the house, where swirls of people were coming and going, and at the funeral home, where they took me at noon, where I spent the rest of the day and the whole night and the following day, still like a zombie and with a knot in my throat, holding back my tears, even when I went up to the coffin they brought in, and I could see through the little glass window the waxen face of my father, his moustache finally trimmed, and two pieces of cotton wool sticking out of his nostrils, the first dead body I’d ever seen in my life, which completely fascinated me and I went up to stare at several times, holding back my tears, still like a zombie; and when I milled around with relatives and acquaintances, surprised to see the long line of friends from Alcoholics Anonymous who filed sorrowfully past my father’s coffin, and still that afternoon when we lined our cars up to drive in a procession to the cemetery; it was then and there, when the gravediggers lowered the coffin then threw the first shovelfuls of dirt on top of it, that the knot in my throat suddenly came undone, and I rushed away from the crowd that had gathered around the gravesite and hid behind an old Kapok tree, where I finally let go of the tears I had been holding on to for so long. And I didn’t tell any of this to Don Chente because my whole life, every time I’d wanted to talk about it, the knot would again tighten in my throat, my eyes would again start burning, and I would turn back into a zombie, and now was not the time to make a scene.