Horacio Castellanos Moya - The Dream of My Return

That’s why I said that when I entered Don Chente’s apartment to undergo the second hypnosis session I was bewildered and my willpower was quashed, the events of Saturday night having plunged me into a morbid state of disquietude for several days, because without wanting to, I had had to face certain repulsive parts of myself that I refused to accept but whose existence panicked me, giving me the feeling that something very powerful had disintegrated inside me. This time, fortunately, Don Chente led me from the elevator directly to the small room, where I immediately lay down on the exam table, ready to begin the process of relaxation, just as we had done the first time, hoping that as a result of this session I would be able to sort out the muddle inside me, but Don Chente told me to try to relax on my own, to use all my powers of concentration, and he would return in a few minutes, then he left. So I focused my attention on my toes, sending them instructions to relax, without ceasing to think about them for a single instant, until I soon felt the typical tingle of relaxation, then moved to the soles of my feet, then to my ankles, and thereby I ascended along my lower limbs, feeling lighter and lighter, and soon I was nodding off: I was a child wandering through the orange groves on a finca in the Planes de Renderos, a five-year-old child, fully aware of my father’s instructions not to pick a single orange even though what I wanted more than anything else was, precisely, to pick one of the oranges I was walking past on that old finca adjacent to the house where we were living, a finca of orange groves where I later came across two people huddled under a tree whose faces looked familiar, but I didn’t quite recognize them, two people discreetly enjoying the oranges they had recently and surreptitiously picked and who invited me to join their feast. Then I was awoken by the sound of the door opening and Don Chente entering, though I remained in that state of levity even when he instructed me to open my eyes, which I immediately did, and it took me only a few seconds to recognize the shining object that was moving back and forth in front of my face, it was a silver pocket watch dangling from Don Chente’s hand and upon which he asked me to focus my attention, which I did with ease while he talked to me in a way I had seen in some movie or other when the circus magician speaks to a volunteer, who then suddenly begins to follow the magician’s instructions without any consciousness of how ridiculous. .

“Wake up!” Don Chente ordered, but I was returning from so far away that it felt like a lot of time had passed between when I heard his voice and when I opened my eyes; and even once my eyes were open, I remained on the table, not moving, as if waiting to return to full consciousness, in a state so serene I didn’t want to leave it for anything in the world. “I’ll wait for you in my office,” Don Chente said, giving me time alone, for I refused to budge, knowing that the tiniest movement would bring me back, this time fully aware that I might have spent the whole day on that table, that’s how far away I felt I’d been — but I soon lifted my arm to look at the time.

When I entered his library, Don Chente was writing down in his notebook what he had extracted from me during the two hours I had been at his mercy, that was how long the session had lasted, I now realized, also realizing that the old man was not going to tell me anything about what I had told him, which didn’t really matter to me, unlike the first time, because I was enjoying a harmonious state of levity, of detachment, as if I had been cured of all the anxieties and self-recriminations that had tormented me for the last few days. “You, who are a poet and a journalist, you should take advantage of your facility with words to sit down and write the story of your life,” Don Chente told me, lifting his eyes to meet mine. I told him that my life had not been interesting enough to make into a book, though I told myself that my life was in fact interesting enough to make into the very best of books, but there wasn’t time, what with my job as a journalist, my wife and daughter — everything was plotting against me. “I don’t mean you should write it to get it published, but for yourself, as therapy, to remember and reflect; it would help you enormously,” he said before standing up to accompany me to the elevator. And I went outside, where a splendid sun was shining, still enjoying the traces of levity in my soul, thinking that one day I would do as Don Chente said and write the story of my life.

I DISCOVERED THAT MEMORY IS UNRELIABLE when I began to digress about how I would start the story of my life if I wrote it down as Don Chente had suggested, a digression I pursued while enjoying a vodka tonic on the terrace of La Veiga the evening after that second time my doctor hypnotized me, a hypnosis session that had left me in a rather peculiar frame of mind, propitious for levity and contemplation. Until then I had been certain that my first childhood memory, the farthest back I could go, the point at which I would have to begin to tell the story of my life, was of the bomb that destroyed the façade of my maternal grandparents’ house on Primera Avenida in Comayagüela, a warning bomb detonated at dawn by the colonels who supported the liberal government against which my grandfather and his nationalist cohorts were conspiring. I would have been about three years old at the time, and my memory consists of one precise image: my grandmother Lena carrying me in her arms across the dark courtyard through the whitish dust from the destroyed wall that permeated the air. That was the image I returned to with a certain amount of pride whenever I was called upon to explain how violence had taken root in me at the very beginning of my life, though I would have to add “of my conscious life,” because violence takes root at the very first instant of each and every person’s life: it’s not for nothing that we enter this world crying and making our mothers writhe in pain, I told myself as I took another sip of my vodka tonic and asked myself when my buddy Félix, who’d promised to meet me on the terrace of La Veiga in a half hour at the most, would show up. The truth is, I suddenly found myself wondering, perhaps as a result of my peculiar and persistent mood, how this almost cinematic image had lodged itself in my memory, considering the fact that if I was in my grandmother Lena’s arms, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to see myself from the outside, to be the person standing in the hallway and watching a woman in her fifties rushing across a dark courtyard carrying a child in her arms, for that was the image that had lodged in my memory; it wouldn’t have been possible to be in my grandmother Lena’s arms and at the same time in the hallway watching the scene, I told myself with increasing stupefaction, because if I was doubting the veracity of my first memory, how unimaginably difficult it would be to slog through every incident I’d experienced in my life. The only way to confirm what my memory was telling me was to travel to Honduras to ask my grandmother Lena, I thought as I observed the bustle of pedestrians and the tumult of buses and cars on Insurgentes, but I soon thought better of it, it would be utterly senseless to go visit my grandmother Lena, who, at eighty years old, was suffering small strokes that would soon leave her in a state of limbo, and perhaps my memory had been shaped precisely by what she had repeated to me over and over again, whenever her buttons got pressed and she’d begin to rant against the Liberals, whom she never distinguished from the Communists, blaming all of them for whatever was wrong with her country; moreover, I had absolutely no interest in traveling to Honduras for the sole purpose of underpinning my first memory so that I could collect material for an autobiography I would never write — El Salvador was my upcoming destination, I told myself then signaled to the waitress, who had just come out onto the terrace, to bring me another vodka tonic, for I was craving a little more alcohol so I could maintain that peculiar mood Don Chente had left me in.