The Dream of My Return (7 page)

That’s why I say that the anxiety-ridden experience of that weekend—my constant vigilance of that vehicle loaded with telescopic sights—had made me realize how worrisome it was for Don Chente to disappear with all my secrets when I didn’t have the slightest idea what I had revealed to him. Though I tried to reassure myself that the old guy didn’t seem like some kind of vulgar informant but rather a decent and even wise person, and that at the end of the day the secrets about my life I’d shared with him were not enough to get me incarcerated, at the most they would make me blush in front of anyone who knew them, and surely at first I could deny that any of it had anything to do with me because the charm of hypnosis is that it reveals the dark zones in our psyches that we ourselves don’t even know exist, as Don Chente warned me. Just in case, though, I rushed to call Muñecón to ask him what he knew about our doctor’s sudden disappearance and complain that he had taken off when I needed him most, and since my plan was to move to San Salvador in one week at the most, it was unlikely that I’d be able to see him again, and my treatment would remain inconclusive.

“Chente is flying right this minute to San Salvador,” Muñecón told me over the phone. Damn, I thought, so the old guy beat me to it, without ever mentioning he was planning to go back himself, so much for any trust he had in me. “His mother died,” Muñecón added, so I would understand the urgency of Don Chente’s departure, and then he invited me over to his apartment later that same night for a drink, an invitation I accepted right away, even though I was still stunned by the news that my doctor was already on his way to San Salvador while I still had to wait a few days for the news agency to pay me before I’d know the exact date of my trip; and stunned also, though a bit less so, by the death of Don Chente’s mother or, rather, by the fact that he still had a mother, something I never would have imagined, given his age. Once I hung up on Muñecón, an idea came to me, the idea that not all was lost: I could see my doctor in San Salvador to continue the treatment if, that is, Muñecón would give me his contact information, needless to say, an idea that even excited me, because nothing would be more healing for my spirit than to finish the hypnotherapy at my new destination, where I was hoping to jumpstart my life and set it on a better path.

Before leaving for Muñecón’s place, I decided to rest a little, having spent the morning at the administrative offices of the news agency playing the nice guy so they’d hurry up and issue my check; it’s exhausting to deal with any bureaucracy, which embitters the spirit and kicks the bottom out of the meaning of life, so a little shut-eye was just the thing to recuperate my energy and allow me to arrive in better shape at Muñecón’s apartment, where the sluices were open and the alcohol flowed freely and whoever couldn’t keep his balance would fall down and drown, as had happened to me several times. But instead of lying down on the couch in the living room, as I usually did, I went to the queen-size bed in our bedroom— which soon would cease to be ours and would become only Eva’s—in the hope of being comfortable enough to go through the process of relaxation I felt like doing at that moment—the same exercise Don Chente used to put me in a trance—whereby I hoped to recharge my batteries and keep my sights trained on my eventual encounter with my doctor in the city from which we had both fled and to which we were both now returning, though for different reasons. Once lying down, I began to focus my attention on my toes, until I felt the characteristic tingling of relaxation, then I continued along the soles of my feet and up to my ankles, and I proceeded with this familiar method as the tingling spread from one part of my body to the next until it reached the muscles in my face, which is when I began to doze off before falling into a deep sleep. Luckily, I woke up before Eva and Evita arrived home and so was able to remain in bed peacefully for a few minutes in that state of extreme calm, reconciled with myself and the world, a state in which I could assess my own thoughts and feelings about the difficulty I had accepting the life I had been given, and in particular I recalled certain things Don Chente had said about my relationship with the father figure in my life, that black hole of sorts into which he surely wanted to shine a light with the hypnosis sessions, making me aware of the fissures so I could go about repairing them; then the calm turned into profound sadness because little by little I became aware of the very deep disdain that dwelled in my heart, not only for my father and my father’s family, but also for my mother, and that all this poison had been injected into my entrails by my maternal grandmother, Lena, who had appointed herself sole custodian of my affection and admiration.

7

I WAS IN RATHER A STRANGE FRAME OF MIND
when I left for Muñecón’s apartment, convinced that my friendship with the man who was expecting me was grounded in our common affinity for drinks and political gossip, and not in the fact that he was my uncle; I had never related to him as my uncle because when I was young enough to learn to relate to someone as an uncle, he didn’t visit my house, his relationship with my father, his older brother, having been characterized by conflict; moreover, a few weeks after my father’s murder, Muñecón was forced into exile because of his participation in the failed coup d’état of March 1972, so it wasn’t till ten years later that I would get to know him, when I ran into him in Mexico City among a small group of journalists who were attending a news conference called by the guerrillas to announce the launch of their military offensive, a conference I was assigned to cover as a reporter, and Muñecón recognized me as we were leaving and suggested we go have a drink at his place. Since then, I had gotten into the habit of visiting him at least once every couple of weeks, to drink the brandy he generously poured and exchange gossip about the ups and downs of the civil war and its political intrigues with him and his buddies, fellow Salvadorans who were always in his living room, mooching brandy and offering loads of bluster.

I walked down Porfirio Díaz to Muñecón’s apartment, which was actually just a few blocks away from Don Chente’s penthouse, my twofold purpose being to get a telephone number or other contact information for our doctor in San Salvador and to ask Muñecón a few questions about my father, if the conditions were propitious, because I now realized that in the eight years that I had been visiting him, we had almost never been alone, as I explained above, and we were both probably somewhat phobic about discussing family issues, probably for different reasons, I told myself while I was standing in front of the building, not yet venturing to ring the doorbell, because the fact is I hadn’t thought about what it was I wanted to know about my father, or if I was only trying to compensate for the appointment Don Chente had canceled so unexpectedly. Iris, Muñecón’s current lover and, though this was a minor detail, forty years his junior, came to open the door; she was a nice girl with generous curves and rosy cheeks, and I couldn’t understand for the life of me what she was doing with that old relative of mine. In the living room I found my host and his friend, Mario Varela, a Communist apparatchik who did not inspire me with confidence—so much for my luck, on top of which they’d already gotten a head start on the brandy and the conversation—and in whose presence I saw no point in pursuing any topic other than political gossip, nor would I have dreamed of mentioning my father under those circumstances because the Communists despised him, they considered him an informer for the military regime, as I had read in a history book that accused my father of having informed on a clandestine Communist radio station around 1960, a book written by none other than that clever poet Roque Dalton, so clever that he didn’t have the foggiest idea that his own comrades were stringing up the rope they’d soon hang him with; and I suspected that this accusation had been the direct cause of the discord that had ruined the relationship between my father and my grandfather, on the one hand, and my father and Muñecón, on the other, a subject I had never brought up with the latter because there had always been a guest like Mario Varela in the living room and because neither one of us wanted to delve into thorny family issues, as I’ve already mentioned. So I proceeded to pour myself a glass of brandy with mineral water and sit down to listen to the story Muñecón was starting to tell once again, a story I had already heard at least twice before while sitting in that armchair, because with his incipient senility and the systematic massacre of neurons occasioned by his compulsive consumption of alcohol, my uncle ended up repeating the same stories over and over again, unaware that his guests were bored and listened to him only out of the politeness due from those who are mooching his brandy. The oft-told adventure, which Muñecón dramatized as he paced around the living room with glass in hand, consisted of a surreptitious trip he had taken to San Salvador a few months earlier on a mission to serve as a mediator between his old Communist comrades and his old ultra-right-wing friends—if such people could be called “friends”—to promote secret and parallel negotiations to the ones being carried out officially between the government and the guerrilla leadership, a mission whose culmination had been Muñecón’s meeting with Major le Chevalier, the psychopathic founder of the death squads and strongman of the party in power, who had evidently seduced my uncle because there was no other way I could understand how meeting with that infamous torturer could have been for him an occasion of pride and boasting.

For one brief moment, I tuned out, as Mr. Rabbit, aficionado of clichés, would have said; in other words, I took a mental leave of absence from the scene in which Muñecón was repeating the story while Iris, Mario Varela, and I were supposedly listening with rapt attention, allowing myself to be distracted by a voice that I had begun to hear more frequently since the first hypnosis session with Don Chente, a voice expressing its discomfort with what had been until then my routine, a voice that at the moment was making fun of me, mocking the ridiculous lie I’d told myself in order to make myself believe that I went to Muñecón’s for something other than the free brandy and the opportunity to show off in that vaudeville of political gossip-mongering; also mocking the ridiculousness of my being there, in that living room, feeling somehow special when the truth was, I was no different from my uncle—in spite of my youth, I also wasted my time repeating the choicest gossip about the so-called political situation to whomever would listen; moreover, I was also allowing myself to slip into the morose state of mind that accompanied that voice, a kind of distancing whereby I could contemplate the scene in slow motion, as if I were standing behind myself, with myself included in the picture, which made me not feel fully part of what was going on even though I knew I was part of it.

But I tuned out for only a moment, immediately silencing the voice resounding in my head, which wasn’t
my
voice, and leaving that morose state of mind to rejoin the fray of reactions to Muñecón’s story, which ended with the moral that the psychotic torturer had shown more courage and daring than the Communists, who had rejected his proposal to hold parallel and secret negotiations, a moral that immediately lit a fire under Mario Varela’s passion to defend his comrades and opened the way for an exchange of conflicting opinions—these being the juiciest moments of those get-togethers in my uncle’s living room. A second glass of brandy having infused me with a certain intensity of conviction, and determined not to let the opportunity pass me by, I declared that moral goodness and political efficiency are two very different things, a concept certain leftists—who believe that evil and stupidity go hand in hand when sometimes the exact opposite is true—find difficult to understand: “One thing is to be evil, and another, a fool,” I pontificated exultantly. My assertion aroused Muñecón’s zeal and Mario Varela’s anger, inasmuch as the latter assumed I was indirectly calling him a fool, which was not my intention at all, as I proceeded to explain; nonetheless, I sensed that the atmosphere had gotten somewhat murky and was continuing to get more so when my uncle started talking about how nice the torturer had seemed, courtesy of a bottle of Black Label they finished off while the torturer gave Muñecón details of the proposal he should transmit to the Communists, even if they would surely reject it. Mario Varela’s face had been contracting into an expression of disgust as our host elaborated on the comedic talents of the psychopath, so I was not surprised when he leapt up and—on his way to the table to pour himself another glass of brandy—blurted out: “Don’t you ever forget, Alberto, that those sonsabitches killed Albertico!” Mario Varela’s blow, dealt cruelly and forcefully, created an ugly silence in the room, as well as contortions of pain on Muñecón’s face and probably in his spirit, because Albertico had been his only son, and he had indeed been arrested, tortured, and assassinated by a National Police death squad in 1980, when Major le Chevalier was the leader of the death squads that operated within the police force. Iris and I turned toward him in alarm, not because we were afraid that Muñecón would be felled by that well-aimed blow, but because we knew that if we didn’t act quickly he would slip into telling the story of Albertico’s death, the long and sinuous story about how his son and his son’s wife, a lovely Danish girl, were captured, the desperate efforts that were made to have them released, the uncertainty, the growing terror as the days passed, the anonymous call that informed him of their murder, the bloodcurdling trips to dumping sites around the country to try to find their bodies; Iris and I knew that if my uncle started slipping down the slope of telling that story, we’d all be doomed for the rest of the night, forced to listen to him for no less than an hour, because once I had timed him—once out of the maybe fifteen times I’d had the pleasure of being present for that particular show—and it had taken him exactly one hour and seventeen minutes to stage the tragedy without interruptions, because there was no way to interrupt him, considering the intensity of his pain and guilt, his tearful eyes, his heavy breathing, and finally his inconsolable sobs. That’s why, before the ugly silence produced by Mario Varela’s blow had come to an end, I hurried to ask Muñecón if he’d had any news of Don Chente, if he had a phone number in San Salvador where I could reach him after I arrived, eager as I was to continue the treatments in order to finish once and for all with my irritable bowel problems.

“Chente’s in San Salvador?” Mario Varela asked hastily, also apparently eager to change the subject—he did not have the leisure to feel proud of the blow he’d dealt, knowing instead only the wingbeat of furtive guilt, followed by the fear that Muñecón would launch into his tale of woe, which Mario Varela had surely heard even more times than I had, and had even helped construct, I told myself at that moment, because if, as I suspected, the Communist apparatchik had been Albertico’s boss at the time of his murder in San Salvador, it was only logical that Muñecón’s moving story would have been based on Mario Varela’s version, at least in part.

“Doña Rosita died,” Muñecón mumbled after another gulp of brandy, still resenting the blow and collapsing onto the sofa. The use of Don Chente’s mother’s given name gave me reason to believe that my uncle and Mario Varela knew her well, which seemed a fortunate coincidence that would make it possible for me to insist on the subject, thereby moving us resolutely away from the story of Albertico’s death and allowing me to obtain more information about my doctor now that I was planning to see him in San Salvador.

“How long have you known Don Chente’s family?” I asked Muñecón, hoping he would recover his exuberance, his narrative élan: it was obvious that he had still not recuperated from the upset the memory of Albertico’s murder had occasioned, and he needed one last push to return to the present. “Since 1944, at least,” Mario Varela piped in as he savored his brandy, during the so-called general strike to oust the dictatorship of Martínez, when the committee of medical students Chente belonged to was leading the struggle, when many of its members, including my doctor, were arrested. The expression on Muñecón’s face indicated that he was slowly beginning to recall something, but soon his features relaxed, and then he began to be who he’d been before the blow had been dealt, immediately correcting Mario Varela: it had been two years earlier, in 1942, during one of his parents’—my grandparents’—many changes of abode, when the Aragóns moved in next door to the Alvarados, he said, and they became friends despite the difference in age between Chente and Muñecón—Chente was five years older than Muñecón, and at that stage in one’s adolescence, five years is an abyss—establishing a friendship that had lasted till now and that had, in fact, started when they became accomplices in the art of matchmaking, because Chente had fallen in love at first sight with Muñecón’s sister, my aunt Pati, an utterly futile passion because she was already engaged to the Costa Rican who would become her husband and with whom she would live in Costa Rica forever. Damn: till that moment I hadn’t realized how close my father’s family and my doctor’s family were, a realization that led me to think that when Don Chente wanted me to remember my relationship with my father, he was maybe playing cat and mouse with me, encouraging me to shed light on aspects of my life he already knew a lot about. It isn’t so surprising, then, that I would interrupt my uncle to ask him if my father and my doctor had been good friends at that time, to which Muñecón hastened to respond that, no, at that time my father was already married and living with his first wife and small children in another part of the city, and surely they had met but never gotten to know each other, I mustn’t forget that my father was twelve years older than the man who now stood up, his spirits rekindled, ready to tell the story of how he and María Elena, the family servant, had acted as Chente’s matchmakers, their objective being to prevent Pati from going to live in Costa Rica, a story that would not succeed in garnering my attention, which was focused instead on the fact that my uncle was getting drunker and drunker and would soon fall into the incoherent state he fell into every night, which would make it impossible for me to extract any information about how to get in touch with my doctor in San Salvador.

“I met him in the Young Communist League,” Mario Varela said, wanting to keep talking about my doctor and not Muñecón’s matchmaking prowess, without realizing that the sentence he’d just uttered so casually was for me a huge revelation, which enhanced Don Chente’s stature in my mind: the old man wasn’t only a medical doctor, a psychologist, an acupuncturist, a hypnotist, and a student of homeopathy, he’d also been a Communist—a kind of modern Paracelsus! I told myself excitedly, for a few months earlier I’d read a biography of this enigmatic Renaissance character, who knew about the inner life and also the outer one—and undoubtedly he would cure my bodily as well as my spiritual maladies. I assumed that it was this Communist activism that had led to his capture for having treated a wounded guerrilla fighter in 1980, and then his exile, as Muñecón had told me when I asked for some information about the doctor before putting myself in his hands, but Mario Varela soon disabused me of these notions by saying that Don Chente had been a good cadre in the Young Communist League “until he married that oligarch and deserted,” spoken with such scorn that Muñecón himself set aside his matchmaking memories to turn his verbal sputum to the defense of our doctor, perhaps because he perceived an indirect allusion, the glance of a new blow—he himself had also been a member of the party in his youth, then had left and was now a fellow traveler, as they were called. “Chente has always been a man with left-wing sensibilities,” my uncle stated categorically and with a frown. “Why did they put him in jail? Who was he treating when they arrested him?” I asked, throwing in my two cents and still not understanding the whole muddle. “Who knows what organization that bastard belonged to, and I bet Chente had no idea, either,” Mario Varela said, with even more scorn, as if my doctor, instead of being a fellow traveler, had been some stupid pawn of the non-Communist guerrillas, because at that time there were so many groups with so many acronyms, and the only thing uniting them was the sectarianism they all fought with.