The Dream of My Return (6 page)

Luckily, the waitress was soon standing next to me, check in hand, asking if I was going to wait for my friend in a tone of voice that made me think that she didn’t care if I was staying for a while longer but rather if my friend was coming, which in turn gave me the feeling that the waitress was hoping to see Mr. Rabbit—a man graced with a certain elegance whom I’d been drinking with the last time I’d sat at this same table and she’d waited on us—not Félix, who was swarthy and ugly. I answered that unfortunately I had another appointment, and could she please tell my friend, if he showed up, that I had waited until the agreed-upon time, without specifying which of my friends would come looking for me, I was in no mood to play matchmaker when my sole concern was to set myself in motion, get my mind moving in a different direction, and return to my immediate and mundane concerns, especially the issues I still had to resolve with Eva before leaving for my country—I had to stop, once and for all, scrounging around in my early memories, as it had now become crystal clear that this notion of writing the story of one’s own life was a bad business, even if Don Chente had recommended it, and it also became clear that memory is unreliable and can put one in rather a tight spot.

6

HOW SURPRISED I WAS
that Tuesday afternoon when I returned home and listened to Don Chente’s message on the answering machine, a message informing me that he would have to cancel our appointment the following day because unfortunately he had to leave the country for an undetermined amount of time and would get in touch with me upon his return, if I was still in the city, to continue the hypnotherapy that was doing me so much good. There’s no question that the cancellation of my appointment completely threw me for a loop, I hadn’t expected such a turn of events, and my first reaction was bewilderment: the voice on the answering machine, identifying itself as Dr. Alvarado, did not match the timbre of the voice etched in my memory, a fact that momentarily shocked me but soon made way for anger—I have always taken sudden cancellations as personal insults—though above all for deep frustration, the truth being that my hopes were riding high that after the next hypnosis session, I would be completely cured, freed from the tangled cobwebs contorting my bowels, ready to leave and begin this new stage of my life; now it turned out that I would have to go without finishing the therapy and, even worse, without knowing what I had revealed about myself to Don Chente while I was in those hypnotic trances.

It sounds strange that I hadn’t, until that moment, been particularly concerned about what I’d told my doctor while under hypnosis, but this was my first experience lying on the divan of unconscious confessions, and I expected a subsequent consultation, a summation during which Don Chente would repeat back to me, methodically and with consummate wisdom, what had come out of my mouth during those trances, consequent to which he would illuminate those dark areas of my psyche that were irritating my intestines and were responsible for certain kinks in my character. But now that the old man had disappeared without a trace, I began to have concerns about what I might have told him, which he had undoubtedly written down meticulously in his notebook, concerns that were then aggravated by the anguished circumstances I found myself in the previous weekend, when I had no choice but to help Mr. Rabbit deal with an unusual and somewhat dangerous situation. What happened is that my friend called me on Thursday afternoon from a phone booth, as he always did, to tell me, with his typical verbal parsimony, that he urgently needed to see me, which, coming as it did from him, could only plunge me into my darkest fears, send me scurrying to get on the Metro and ride to the station near where Mr. Rabbit would pick me up at five o’clock on the dot, not one minute before or one minute after, for he strictly adhered to the protocols of clandestine life. While we were driving through the city in his pickup, he shared with me the cross he had to bear, which would soon become the cross I would bear: peace negotiations between the government and the guerrillas were progressing rapidly and showing great promise, so military operations had decreased and any moment now would stop altogether along various fronts, a situation that affected the logistical measures carried out by my friend, who was responsible for guaranteeing the safe passage of weapons through Mexico—from the U.S. border to the border with Guatemala; the negotiations were affecting his efforts to such an extent that he had recently received an order to stop a shipment already on its way and park it somewhere until he received further instructions. “So?” I asked as we waited for a green light on Avenida Revolución, and I had a hunch that I’d rather not hear the answer. Mr. Rabbit, without flinching, said that it had occurred to him that maybe we could store the shipment for a few days at my father-in-law’s country house in Tlayacapan, a town located about an hour south of Mexico City, where, it was true, the father of my daughter’s mother owned a country house that stood empty most of the time, a house Eva, Evita, and I, along with other relatives, sometimes went to on weekends. I told him he was completely crazy, how could he possibly have dreamt up such an outrageous plan— taking a van full of rifles and ammunition to the house of a man who would soon cease to be my father-in-law and where nobody would understand the presence of a load like that—and how the hell was I going to explain to Eva that now that we were in the process of breaking up for good, I’d had the bright idea of hiding a van full of weapons for the guerrillas at her father’s house. “It’s not a van,” Mr. Rabbit said just as he turned off at the Mixcoac crossing, it being that hour of the afternoon when traffic started backing up. “It’s a pickup truck, like this one. Nobody would even notice,” he explained. Then he added, “And it’s not carrying rifles and ammunition.” I told him I didn’t understand, so what was it carrying, would he please explain and tell me once and for all if this was another really bad joke like the one he’d played on me about Eva’s two-bit actor. “They’re telescopic sights,” Mr. Rabbit said, and he turned his inexpressive face toward me at the exact moment I felt a cramp in my guts that could only presage the return of that horrible colitis I thought I was free of. “Telescopic sights?” I cried out in disbelief. And then he explained that they were special sights for Dragunov rifles used by guerrilla snipers, sights that gave them accurate aim from up to 1,400 yards away, which allowed the snipers to immobilize an enemy column for an entire afternoon, a single sniper placed in a strategic building could hold off an entire company of soldiers for a whole afternoon, like in that Stanley Kubrick movie about Vietnam, remember?
Full Metal Jacket
, Mr. Rabbit pronounced the title with a certain amount of swagger—he’d been a film buff since he was a teenager, and he thought he had a superior accent in English. I told him I hadn’t seen that movie and I had no interest whatsoever in talking about movies, but he’d better look elsewhere to stash that pickup with its telescopic sights because there was always a caretaker at my father-in-law’s house, a sharp-eyed mestizo named Odilón, who, at the first whiff of anything suspicious would dig through the boxes, and when he found the famous sights he’d immediately turn us in, and the consequences would be dire. “There are no boxes,” Mr. Rabbit told me, with a suspicious frown, which immediately made me think that this really was just another joke that he was carrying to a fever pitch, with who knows what dark purpose, so I kept staring at him with a thoroughly disgruntled look on my face so he’d know it was time to cut the crap, but he remained focused on the road and at the intersection with Churubusco he had to make a daring maneuver to turn off toward Coyoacán. “The sights are expertly hidden in the truck’s chassis so that not even the best customs’ agents would find them,” he said in that victorious tone, his way of mocking my lack of discernment.

It didn’t take Mr. Rabbit much effort to convince me to carry out the plan that he’d already concocted, replete with a significant amount of detail: on Friday afternoon Eva, Evita, and I would go to the house in Tlayacapan to spend a final weekend together as a family, a kind of agreeable farewell weekend (with sun, fresh air, and a swimming pool) so that Evita, especially, would be left with positive memories of her father now that I was planning to be gone for such a long stretch, my friend said, as if he really cared about the image of her father my daughter would carry around in her head; that same Friday night, Mr. Rabbit would arrive with the pickup packed with telescopic sights, stay over as our guest, share our meals, and lend a touch of lightheartedness to my interactions with Eva, who had a particular fondness for my “weird Salvadoran friend,” as she called him. “And if your wife invites other relatives, all the better,” Mr. Rabbit said while he explained his plan at a table in a taco place in Coyoacán, as if he knew that Eva and her sisters were afflicted with that tribal disease whereby either everybody or nobody went anywhere. “A family atmosphere is the perfect cover,” he pronounced, green salsa dripping out of the taco and through his fingers.

The ease with which I fell into the trap Mr. Rabbit set can be attributed to the guilt or disgrace I’d suffered after that incident with the two-bit actor, but the fact that a mere few hours later Eva fell just as easily into the same trap could only point to something much more pernicious—for me, needless to say, Mr. Rabbit being wholly indifferent to my conjugal drama—something to do with her having hope that a weekend trip could lead to a reconciliation, hope I was determined to parry the very moment it became obvious to me, when Eva expressed her enthusiastic support for the proposal, which I’d sold to her as if it had been my initiative and not that of the person who had, in fact, concocted it, by explaining without beating around the bush that the goal of the trip was to give Evita one last good memory of our family life, and of her father, repeating in this way my friend’s words, and for this reason we should avoid any futile arguments or conversations that would strain the atmosphere during our stay in Tlayacapan. Nothing out of the ordinary happened during the two days Eva and her tribe served as cover for Mr. Rabbit’s pickup truck sitting inoffensively in the parking area alongside all the other cars, because nobody there would have ever imagined that the vehicle belonging to “Erasmo’s Salvadoran friend” was loaded with telescopic sights; a guy as laid back and polite as Mr. Rabbit usually makes a good impression and doesn’t appear suspicious, especially not to Eva and her sisters, but also not to their husbands, who were already used to me inviting a friend from my country to spend the weekend at the house from time to time. Nobody would have perceived anything out of the ordinary if they had observed my seemingly relaxed demeanor as I lay next to the pool in my bathing suit under the sun and the palm trees, a vodka tonic in my hand and more often than not chatting amicably with Mr. Rabbit about a variety of topics; but anybody who was paying closer attention would have been surprised by the state of my nerves, for I was terrified that a special police unit was about to burst onto the scene, acting on a tip about the hidden contents of the pickup truck and brutally arresting all of us, though this would be merely the beginning of a nightmare filled with torture sessions and scandalous press coverage. The fear I was keeping so well hidden made me jump every time I heard any vehicle drive past the house, made me see suspicious characters on every dusty street corner in the town, where we wandered around in search of an ice cream parlor on Saturday afternoon with Evita and her cousins, and gave me not a moment’s peace while I floated placidly, belly up and eyes closed, in the pool, enjoying the water and the sun while my pernicious fantasy conjured up a scene in which I was swearing to the police that I didn’t know anything about Mr. Rabbit’s activities, we were old friends, since adolescence, but I’d lost track of him for many years, and I never dreamed he could be involved in such dangerous criminal activities.

But I am lying when I say that nothing out of the ordinary happened those two days when everything, to tell the truth, was out of the ordinary, at least for me, because Mr. Rabbit’s everyday life was always out of the ordinary, considering his profession, his nerves tempered in the fire of permanent danger, and his ability to disguise himself and take on different identities, which never ceased to amaze me. That Saturday night, when the two of us were finally alone and on our chaise longues next to the pool under the star-studded sky, drinking our last vodkas of the day after all my in-laws—who believed my friend was a Salvadoran journalist based in San Diego on his way through Mexico—had left, I told him the story of the most intense experience I had ever had at that house four years earlier, an experience that had changed my life and my understanding of reality, if there was such a thing that could be called that, reality, because experience had taught me the contrary, that many realities overlap in the same time and space, which we don’t necessarily perceive, realities revealed to me during the peyote trip I took at that country house courtesy of Eva’s best friend, Policarpo Unzueta, an ex-poet who once belonged to a tiny group of self-proclaimed Infrarealist provocateurs, and who was now making films and promoting cultural events. As it turned out, Unzueta, which is what he liked to be called—Policarpo, his given name, was so ugly he tried to avoid it—showed up at the house one day with the news that a friend was about to bring him a bunch of peyote heads from the desert, and he asked me if I was interested in taking a hallucinogenic trip; when I answered enthusiastically that I would definitely be interested, he suggested we go to Eva’s house in Tlayacapan, the best place to trip, far away from the commotion of the city and surrounded by majestic mountains. That was during a period, I told Mr. Rabbit—sometimes glancing out of the corner of my eye at the pickup loaded with telescopic sights in the driveway—when Eva’s pregnancy lent luster to our relationship, when we spent long weekends at that house so that she and the child growing in her womb would be nurtured by the clean air and the peaceful life, so we agreed that Unzueta would arrive on a Friday afternoon and we would take our trip all that night before Eva’s tribe showed up the following day. Unzueta, who’d had several experiences with peyote whereas I’d had none, suggested that I abstain from eating meat or processed foods, limiting my diet to fruits and vegetables, because the cleaner the body, the stronger the effects of the peyote, advice that I not only followed to a tee but also with the zeal of a novice preparing for a rite of initiation, because the truth is, that’s what it was, a journey of initiation similar to those recounted by Carlos Castaneda in his books about the Yaqui shaman, Don Juan, which I had read with fascination many years before. “So what happened next? How did it go? What did you see?” Mr. Rabbit asked, very curious, because I already knew that he was attracted to certain aspects of the occult and that during his adolescence in El Salvador he had partaken of the same hallucinogenic mushrooms I had feasted on so many times on the slopes of the volcano and at the beach. I told him that at dinnertime Unzueta made tea with some of the dried peyote buttons and that we then sat down in the same place on the patio where we were now sitting, in those same chaises longues, to drink tea while chewing on fresh peyote, one at a time, button by button, that’s the process—chew on each button as if it were chewing gum until you extract its deepest essence. Before we started drinking and chewing, Unzueta warned me that I should also cleanse my spirit of any and all bad vibes, especially any negative feelings I had toward him, such feelings could give me a “bad trip,” which would cause harm and ruin it for both of us; he said it as if he’d read my mind, because sometimes I was jealous of his relationship with Eva: it was difficult for me to understand how they could be just friends, for I had been educated in a Marist Catholic school, where there weren’t any girls, and my only friends who were girls had first been my lovers, a deformation that rendered it almost impossible for me to understand friendship between a man and a woman without there having been sex in there somewhere. I told Mr. Rabbit that while we were drinking tea and chewing on the buttons, Unzueta explained to me that the spirit of the mescaline, which is what the hallucinogenic substance of peyote is called, would take us each on simultaneous trips by working through different plants, one for each of us, the plant with which we each had the most empathy, in my case that avocado tree, which at that time was sick, I told Mr. Rabbit, pointing to a tree that was now healthier; though before that happened, I added, before that avocado tree ushered me into a different reality, but after we had been ingesting peyote for about an hour, I suddenly had a powerful urge to puke, a horrible wave of nausea sweeping over me, the sensation that the vomit was inexorably rising into my pharynx, where I could barely hold it back, and I was frightened because I had read in Castaneda’s book that if you vomited, all was lost, and I asked Unzueta what I should do about that disgusting feeling I had in my mouth, and my fellow traveler responded by telling me to chew another button and drink more tea, not to give up, this was the spirit of the mescaline putting me to the test, these were the dues I had to pay; I should just keep chewing, and the vomit would slowly descend, which is what happened about twenty minutes later, when my stomach relaxed, and the avocado tree went into action. It was at that moment in my story, just as I was getting ready to describe in detail the marvels of my trip, the way my psychic apparatus had broken down and allowed me to observe myself as one observes a stranger, when the doorbell rang loudly, a ringing that made us both jump—it was almost ten at night and we weren’t expecting anybody. “Who could that be at this time of night?” Eva said from the porch, while I, in a state of panic, looked at Mr. Rabbit and then at the pickup truck loaded with telescopic sights. Odilón, that sharp-eyed mestizo watchman, came out of his bungalow and started toward the gate, which he proceeded without the slightest hesitation to open for the nocturnal visitor, who was none other than Policarpo Unzueta, as if I had conjured him up, which made me shout in delight, “Unzueta!” as I walked jubilantly toward him, as if he were a gift from the gods, for I had been expecting the police. “We’re on our way to Cuernavaca, and I thought we’d stop by for a drink if you were here,” Unzueta said—unannounced appearances being his style—before he introduced me to his companion, his older brother, Iván, he specified, pointing to the shorter man with similar features who looked like a civil servant or a cop, which immediately put me on my guard; if there’s something I can brag about it’s how accurately I can detect policemen and informants, which I again proved that night, when Unzueta’s brother said that he was a lawyer and worked at the Ministry of Justice, which in other words meant that he was a policeman
and
an informer, a circumstance that wouldn’t have mattered much if the aforementioned hadn’t suddenly started showing interest in Mr. Rabbit’s pickup, according to him precisely the kind of pickup he wanted to buy—whose was it, where had he bought it, how much had he paid for it. Only Mr. Rabbit’s coolheadedness prevented me from having a nervous breakdown (I was that alarmed), true coolheadedness that led him to invite Iván to go ahead and check out the truck, turn it on, listen to the engine, without my knowing what my friend thought of the intruder, if he feared as I did that he was the advance guard of a police unit or just a sinister coincidence. Luckily, Eva told them that they shouldn’t even think of turning on that monstrosity with its noisy engine and waking up Evita and her cousins, who had given her a hard time going to sleep, and luckily one of my brothers-in-law, the ineffable Pepe Mata, a first-rate sleazebag of a politician, came to check out the new visitors and changed the subject to gossip about the goings-on at the attorney general’s office, where Iván the Curious worked.