The Dream of My Return

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  “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.

  It was at that moment that I told myself it was time to leave—enough brandy was coursing through my bloodstream—and the most prudent thing for me to do was to call Muñecón the following day, early in the morning when he was in his right mind, to find out how to get in touch with Don Chente in San Salvador, because if I kept drinking, it would take an enormous effort for me to get myself out of that apartment at midnight, and then I’d suffer one hell of a hangover, a luxury I couldn’t afford given the number of things I still had to deal with before my departure. That’s what I told myself at that particular moment, but the next moment I was watching Iris sitting quietly on the sofa, listening to but not participating in the conversation; she had become Muñecón’s lover only a few months before—a chubby girl, who was studying political science and working as a secretary at the Ministry of the Interior and looked more like my uncle’s granddaughter than someone with whom he shared a bed and paroxysms of pleasure, a girl about twenty years old in love with an old man of sixty or so. Damn! I exclaimed to myself, trying to find some logical explanation for such madness. Then an idea flashed through my mind, not as a suspicion but as an absolute conviction: Iris was an informer for the Mexican intelligence services, hired to keep an eye on the plots being hatched in Muñecón’s apartment, the meeting place of Communists and one or another ultra-right-winger. Damn! That’s why she looked so fascinated, if maybe a little dopey, why she didn’t miss a word of what either Muñecón or Mario Varela said, because afterwards she would have to report everything that had happened in this room to her controller, I told myself as I contemplated the scene with a certain amount of horror, convinced that my uncle must have been aware of the situation or at least harbored suspicions, which led me to another even worse idea, that maybe the whole thing was a setup, and Muñecón himself reported to the Mexican intelligence services . . . It was to chase away this last idea, to put a stop to the paranoia that was spinning out of control, that I stood up and walked over to the table to pour myself another brandy, totally forgetting my previous decision to initiate my retreat; I poured myself the glass that would push me over a cliff I never would have even approached if, instead of pursuing my fears’ circuitous pathways, I had simply taken my leave.

  8

  I OPENED MY EYES, and for a few seconds I didn’t know where I
was, having laid myself low with a binge of such magnitude that when I now woke up to it, horrified and in dread, I didn’t recognize the ceiling I was looking at nor the piece of furniture I was stretched out on; my mind was a deep dark well from which I was struggling with enormous effort to extract a few basic images, struggling to comprehend that I was lying on the living room sofa and not in the bedroom with Eva, that I had returned so drunk the night before that I had not even managed to get past the living room or climb the stairs to the bedroom where I would have undoubtedly proceeded to wake Eva up to start a row, instead collapsing on the sofa with my clothes and even my shoes still on, snoring like a fiend, my mouth open and drooling. I assumed that’s what happened, as it had many times before, but I didn’t know anything for sure, my memory was a black hole, as I’ve already said, and the last thing I remembered was the moment around midnight when I got into a taxi on the corner of Insurgentes and Porfirio Díaz, a block from Muñecón’s apartment, but all images from then on had been erased—paying the driver, getting out of the taxi, opening the door to the house, and falling onto said sofa where I was now lying without budging, afraid that even the slightest movement would make my head explode. Jesus, how had I gotten out of the taxi? And my wallet? I brought my hand to the back left pocket of my pants and felt nothing, my leather wallet wasn’t there, I said to myself, terrified because the worst thing that could happen to me at that moment was to lose my wallet with my ID and all my credit cards, when all that was left for me to do before taking off for San Salvador was pick up my final paycheck and buy my airplane ticket, so the last straw would have been for the taxi driver to have taken advantage of my intoxication and stolen my wallet. I turned my head very carefully toward the coffee table, where I sometimes put my wallet, but I couldn’t make out what was on top of it because the curtains were closed, barely a ray of light was filtering through, and my already disastrous eyesight was suddenly completely blocked by a surge of pain that very nearly split open my skull; I took a deep breath, brought the palms of my hands to my temples to apply pressure and thereby reduce the pain, and told myself that I needed to get up, no matter what the cost, I urgently needed to sit myself up on that sofa in one single movement, because if I did it slowly, the pain would paralyze me. And that’s what I did, boom, the good news being that the first thing I saw was my wallet on the coffee table, hurray; the bad news, that I was in worse shape than I’d thought, as was clear from the way my stomach was churning and my sweat was reeking of brandy, and from the sensation I had that my mass of gray matter was about to explode. It was eleven twenty in the morning, damn it, with so many errands to run and me there prostrate and trembling; I hadn’t even heard Eva and Evita leave in the morning. With starts and stops and a few long strides, I stumbled into the kitchen to get a glass of water to douse the scorching heat in my esophagus, actually one glass of water after another, then I prepared coffee in the espresso maker and took a bottle of Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator; first of all, I had to get rehydrated, and I could already hear the footfalls of the moral hangover approaching, poised to attack with all its might, because even though I’d forgotten what happened after I’d gotten into the taxi, the events in Muñecón’s apartment began to take clear shape in my memory, a shape that without exaggeration could be described as sinister, because the havoc taking place in my body would soon be joined by remorse.

  And while I sat at the kitchen table and drank down the quart of cola, waiting for the espresso pot to boil, the dreaded tape began to play in my head, the scene in which I leapt out of my chair and stampeded across Muñecón’s living room to the front door, which I swung open and didn’t close behind me, because the only thing I cared about was reaching the staircase and flying down it in leaps and bounds, with Mario Varela at my heels in hot pursuit so that he could smash in my face; this was the scene that would play in a loop in my head, over and over again all through the day, each time making me feel ashamed for my starring role and sending spasms of distress coursing through my spirit, distress I would be liberated from only after I called my uncle to apologize, an act of contrition I was not yet in any condition to carry out; I would let minutes, even hours, pass before I faced the consequences of that fateful brandy, which I never should have drunk, because everything started at that moment when I turned with glass in hand and heard Mario Varela say that Don Chente was suspected of having collaborated with the CIA at the end of the ’60s and then recount a putative episode on the shores of Lake Ilopango, where my doctor was signaling with lights at midnight to an imperialist agent who’d spent the night on a boat in the lake, all slander without a leg to stand on, the sort so typically used by the Communists against anybody who didn’t submit to their plans, and to which I responded with a clever strategy, that is, using flattery as a tactic, asking him—as if I were really fascinated by his story—about the kinds of signals the doctor was making to the CIA agent, what the goal of said signals was, and how they had found out about it, all the time delighting in the Communist’s stupidity because he didn’t realize that I was seething with rage and had no intention of letting him scheme against my doctor and get away with it. Then I told him, with feigned enthusiasm, that this was undoubtedly at a time when the country’s foremost minds were devoting themselves to establishing a Trotskyite party, and perhaps the incident on the lakeshore had been part of this effort rather than a confabulation with the CIA, to which Mario Varela reacted indignantly, as if I had now insulted him personally, shouting that nobody in El Salvador had ever tried to establish a Trotskyite party, that plague had always stayed far from our shores, and who, he asked, had poisoned me with that nonsense, a somewhat disproportionate reaction, to say the least, if we take into account that both young Iris and Muñecón were staring at him, the color drained from their faces, never imagining that I had pulled that out of my bag of tricks in a flash of inspiration, which I was not yet ready to let go of and which led me to say next that of course somebody had, my assertion was well documented in books and magazines, but each time the Trotskyites had tried to get organized, a well-aimed tip-off to the police had aborted their efforts. “You’re talking bullshit and defaming the Party,” Mario Varela snapped, flying into a rage. “You’re a goddamn fucking Trotskyite yourself.” Without losing my composure, remaining quiet yet inspired, I explained that this was not the case, that unfortunately I had been rendered incapable of being a Trotskyite due to an episode in my childhood that had marked me for life, and that I would now recount to them: from the age of ten to twelve, my best friend in our neighborhood in San Salvador was a dark-skinned boy named Eduardo, the son of a lawyer who lived next door and had a vicious and untamed boxer, whose name was none other than Trotsky, a dog they had to lock up in the servants’ quarters every time Eduardo’s friends came over; and I would never forget how I’d stand out in front of the house and call out for Eduardo through the window, and instead of my friend’s voice, I would be answered by Trotsky’s terrifying barks, behind which I could hear his mother ordering a maid, “Lock up Trotsky, Erasmito’s here!” My story worked wonders at relaxing Mario Varela, moving him from rage to bemusement, there he was laughing his head off about something that had not been very funny when I was a child, because, I continued, due to Eduardo’s sister’s or the maid’s carelessness, there were several times when we’d be playing soccer in the street in front of Eduardo’s house and said boxer would come tearing out of the house looking to sink his teeth into somebody’s flesh, so at the precise moment we’d hear the warning cry, “Trotsky’s out!” every single one of us would scramble up the nearest tree to get out of reach of the mad dog. It was because of this childhood experience that I had been rendered incapable for life of being a Trotskyite—as would be evidenced years later, whenever anybody talked about the great Soviet revolutionary leader and I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about the short rabid snout of my neighbor’s boxer—I explained to my listeners, because by now all three were laughing at my story, though I wondered
if young Iris even knew who Trotsky was, which at that point didn’t really matter, because once Mario Varela had lowered his guard, and while I was pouring myself another brandy, I told them that even though I had been rendered incapable of being a Trotskyite, this did not invalidate the fact that El Salvador could use a Trotskyite party to capitalize on the energies of the intellectuals and, above all, to offer an ethical example that the Communists had been incapable of offering. Mario Varela sprang out of his chair and started telling me off, shaking his fat index finger in front of my face, daring me to give him one single instance when the Communists hadn’t risen to the demands of the historical moment, as if history and rising had anything to do with each other, I managed to think before his shouting and his accusatory index finger produced a fatal short circuit, blowing my last fuse, which I now rued as I was drinking my Coca-Cola and listening to the bubbling of the espresso maker in the kitchen. Because it was at that moment that I told him that I didn’t give a damn if the Communists had risen to the historical moment or not, that I didn’t know if history was a dwarf or a giant, but one thing I did know for sure was that the Communists abandoned their own people to the worst possible fates, as had been the case with Albertico, my cousin and the son of Muñecón—who looked at me now in dismay—whom the death squads had captured the very same day they had captured leaders of other revolutionary organizations, all part of the same raid, but only the Communists had been incapable of immediately denouncing Albertico’s capture or carrying out violent street protests that would have forced them to release him, whereas the other organizations had done precisely those things and their leaders had been released. “You’re accusing me of something, you sonofabitch . . .” Mario Varela snapped, as a challenge not a question—we were now standing up, though face-to-face would be just a figure of speech because the guy was at least a head taller and twice as fat as me. “Settle down,” my uncle said in a conciliatory tone, perhaps fearing the first blow. “Things were much more complicated than that,” he added, patting me on the shoulder and leading me to the armchair where I sat down reluctantly, my nerves already frayed, and then he led Mario Varela to the sofa at the other end of the room, as if this were a ring and we were wrestlers who had just been separated from a clinch. “You’ve got a bad conscience, don’t you, you asshole!” I shouted at Mario Varela in my nastiest voice, my middle finger raised in a challenging gesture, to which he responded with fury, pushing Muñecón aside and hurtling toward my armchair, which I leapt out of, as I already said, rushing to the door that led to the staircase of the building and then out into the street, for although it is true that said Communist was tall and heavy enough to have smashed my face in with one blow, it is also true that I was twenty years younger, and he would have been hard put to catch up with me.