The Dream of My Return

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  2

  I MADE MY WAY to my next appointment with Don Chente Alvarado in a completely different frame of mind than the one I was in the second time I arrived at Pico Molins’s office eight years before, at that time ashamed that I had mistrusted his diagnosis and gone to see an expensive specialist, a fact that, to my surprise, Pico Molins discovered only seconds after I had sat down in front of his desk, just by looking at me, and which he mentioned with a certain glee—and not at all as if it had been a betrayal, which is how I interpreted my own behavior—saying that I mustn’t worry, people frequently don’t trust his little drops, which obviously put me at ease and opened the possibility for us to establish the cordial relationship that ended with his abrupt departure for Catalonia.

  “How are you doing? Are you feeling any better?” Don Chente asked point-blank as soon as I came out of the elevator—he was the one who greeted me, not the uniformed maid. So-so, I told him, though the truth was that nothing had changed, the pain was there in my side, and though it might very well be explained by the marvelous story he had told me two days before, the mere fact of being aware that I was about to undergo an acupuncture treatment had made it worse, because if there was anything I feared above all else, ever since childhood, it was needles, and this was my mother’s fault, she was the one who’d had the bright idea to learn how to give injections, practicing on my brother and me as if we were guinea pigs, using the excuse that shots of Vitamin B and cod liver oil would make us grow up stronger and healthier, when her true intention had been to amuse herself practicing the aforementioned torture on our aching buttocks every other day for at least three months, I told Don Chente as we made our way down the hallway to his library, without me hearing, on this occasion, any women murmuring, and without me confessing that the prospect of being penetrated by numerous painful needles was keeping me in an exacerbated state of doubt about whether it was worth subjecting myself to acupuncture, or if maybe I should find some medicine that would quickly relax my colon, that was the magnitude of my distress.

  “So, tell me, how are your preparations going for your trip? And your relationship with your wife, are things okay?” The old man shot these questions at me as soon as I sat down facing his desk, as if he had antennae that could detect the source of my ills. So-so, I said, adding that we were having some difficult moments, what with my imminent departure, but I refrained from mentioning that she wasn’t my wife because we weren’t married, a revelation that would have seemed a bagatelle compared to the fact that the relationship had fallen apart two nights before—coincidentally, hours after my first appointment with Don Chente—when Eva, no longer able to bear her guilt, confessed that for the past few weeks she had been carrying on a sexual relationship with a two-bit actor I didn’t know and had never heard anything about.

  The situation that I refrained from explaining to Don Chente came about in the following way: Eva and I were in bed—she, pretending to sleep, and I, reading a magazine—when I suddenly had an inexplicable sensation, some kind of precise intuition that Eva had something to reveal; so, without taking my eyes off the magazine, I asked her what was going on, assuring her that she could trust me and tell me what was tormenting her, though at no time had she mentioned that she was being tormented nor had I witnessed any such torment; she sat up in bed, arranged the pillows behind her, and started by asking me to forgive her, without saying what I should forgive her for; then she said that she hadn’t wanted to hurt me, but she’d gotten carried away like some stupid idiot, and now, consumed by remorse, she was suffering the consequences. “So . . . ?” I asked her, looking up from the magazine for the first time and seeing that she was on the verge of tears. She told me that two weeks earlier, she had gone to bed a couple of times with an actor named Antolín, someone she had apparently met at her job at the publicity agency, where she was the star of the production department, and they had done it in his apartment, in the early hours of the morning: after dropping Evita off at daycare, she had made her way to this Antolín fellow’s apartment, where he was undoubtedly waiting for her very eagerly—I could even picture him naked under his dressing gown, impatient to dig right into Eva’s dark and delicious flesh. But, she explained, now shaking with sobs, it had happened only twice—after that she’d felt too guilty and decided she’d never go to bed with that actor again—and would I forgive her and nothing like that would ever happen again. Her revelation was quite a blow to my self-esteem and could have led me to react in several different ways, but I opted for the role of the understanding and affectionate partner who was about to take off anyway and had suddenly happened upon the best justification for his departure, so I took her in my arms, patted her head and told her to calm down—her crying was copious and snotty—assuring her that I understood her, and that her infidelity was proof that our relationship had run its course, been eroded by time and the daily grind. A few moments later, however, I fell victim to a desire for revenge: I had also been unfaithful to her a few months earlier, I told her after we had turned off the bedside light, when a gringa translator named Miriam would come into my office at the news agency, close the frosted-glass door, unzip my pants, and—she, on her knees, and me, keeping my swivel chair from swiveling—suck my member until she had extracted the desired milk, and that she would do this in the late mornings, punctually, like a baby who can’t carry on with her day until she’s had her bottle, three days in a row until Saturday, when we went to her apartment and discovered that we were a disaster in bed.

  None of that, of course, did I reveal to Don Chente Alvarado—I was not seeking marital advice but rather relief from the pain in my side—nor did I tell him about Eva’s reaction, when, despite being exhausted from confessing and crying, she turned on her bedside light and sat up, newly inspired to continue the fight, and began upbraiding me for having kept my infidelity a secret for so long, for being such a liar, that her infidelity, compared to mine, was a mere trifle, that’s what she said and with indignation, and I responded by saying that this proved that our relationship had no business continuing, she should turn off the light and let me sleep, in a few weeks I wouldn’t be there anymore, and she could think whatever she liked—a response that exasperated her even more and made her shout that I was a horrid wretch, completely unfair, a coward who wanted only to run away, this accompanied by a new bout of sobbing that accomplished nothing except waking up Evita and turning my night into a disaster.

  “Let’s go into the other room,” Don Chente said, perhaps aware that the sooner he stuck the needles in the better and that my vague answers about my relationship were evidence of the density of the shit I was not willing to stir up. And we walked down the quiet hallway then entered the room where I lay down on the table after taking off my shoes and socks and unbuttoning my shirt and pants so that my chest and whole abdomen were exposed. “Relax,” Don Chente said, because he knew that I was doing the exact opposite, that the closer the moment came when he’d start sticking me with needles, the more I was tensing up in terror, exactly as always happened whenever I was about to get a shot or have blood taken from my arm—my muscles would seize up and make inserting the needle more difficult and more painful, precisely what was happening to me the instant the old man reached the foot of my bed with his needles at the ready; I tried to think about something that would take me far away from the impending torture, so I started to picture in great detail the mornings Eva had spent making love with her two-bit actor, mornings when she would rush into the aforementioned’s apartment and immediately start kissing him as he’d put his arms around her and grab her splendid ass; then he’d open his robe so she could lick his chest, moaning with lust, then go down on her knees and take his penis into her mouth. But I couldn’t picture anything beyond that because at that very moment Don Chente stuck the first needle between my right big toe and the next one, which was horribly painful and drew from me a cry of protest. “That one’s for the liver,” the old man said, with what seemed to me like relish, and
then he stuck in the next one, and another, and another, until I could no longer distinguish which one was most painful, I never could have imagined anything like this martyrdom, needles sticking out of my limbs, my abdomen, my head, one particularly sinister needle stuck between my eyes, as if precisely in that third eye I had read about in a book by some charlatan when I was a teenager, until finally I felt like I was dying, though the fear was much greater than the pain, I realized as the minutes ticked by, because except for the three needles that really were stinging— including the first one Don Chente had inserted to cleanse my liver—I was getting used to it, and soon my desire to leap off the table like a madman and pull the needles out waned. “Try to relax,” Don Chente repeated, “try to feel the nervous energy flowing through your body and especially how it bounces around inside your abdomen, where all your knots of tension are.” Then he told me that he would leave me alone while the needles did their job; I listened to his quiet steps as he walked out, the door closing behind him.

  “Crazy old fart,” I thought, then repented the next moment, just in case the needles would punish me with a renewed and vicious attack for having cursed him. And then I told myself that the only way to control my discomfort was to focus all my attention on the air entering and exiting my lungs, as if I were in a meditation class, my entire mind focused only on the fact that I was breathing in and breathing out; but suddenly I felt a charge from the needle in my calf and my concentration was shattered, and then another from one of the needles he had stuck into my abdomen made me curse the moment I had agreed to undergo such a treatment, but then a few moments later I felt a kind of tingling all through my body that turned into a wholly new sensation, an almost pleasant one, as if I were gaining an awareness of my body that I hadn’t had for a very long time. And then I began to fantasize about what I would do when I got to San Salvador, about the exercise regime I would follow to get my abused body back into shape, about the possibility of not drinking for a while so I could devote all my energy to getting the new magazine off the ground, thanks to which I might realistically hope to find the girl I’d always wanted, but these fantasies didn’t last long because then my mind got bogged down in pecuniary concerns, specifically that the director of the agency had promised to do everything possible to make sure I received my final paycheck on time, but I knew all too well about bureaucratic red tape and was afraid that the day of my departure would arrive without my having received my money, which would ruin my plans, or at least my schedule, because without the money I couldn’t leave, much less so now that Eva would try to get as big a slice of the pie as possible. And that’s as much as I remember because at that point I fell into a deep sleep, for maybe half an hour, until I heard the creak of the door hinges, Don Chente’s steps, and his gentle voice asking how I felt, if I had been aware of my nervous energy, and I answered, so-so. “Try to focus all your attention on the spot where you feel the pain,” he told me, and then announced that he was going to insert one last needle into my belly, but he said that just as he was inserting it so I felt neither pain nor fear but instead, a few seconds later, I began to clearly perceive the current of nervous energy coursing through my body, just as Don Chente had said I would, and I also perceived a knot in my abdomen where the energy flow was backed up, a kind of roadblock that prevented its circulation: these sensations seemed utterly marvelous to me, incredible, especially when I perceived the exact instant the knot began to loosen and the current of energy suddenly burst through and started to flow. I enjoyed this amazing sensation for a few minutes before I told Don Chente that the knot had come undone and the energy was flowing freely, surely my colon had returned to its natural healthy state and I would no longer have any pain.

  With the exhilaration of a person who has, finally, been cured, I returned to Don Chente’s library while still tucking my shirt into my pants, wanting only to thank him and get the hell out of there, good health is so precious I didn’t want to waste a second of it, but Don Chente invited me to sit down, there were still a few things he wanted to explain to me, the first of which was that although my colon had relaxed, this did not mean that it would stay like that forever, at any moment it could seize up, become irritated, and again form that knot that had troubled me for so long. The second issue, he said, stemmed from the first: only an in-depth treatment that would allow me to shed light on the dark regions of my psyche—that’s how he put it—could guarantee a long-term cure, and shedding such a light consisted of bringing to the surface the deepest and murkiest aspects of my relationship with my maternal grandmother and my father, because, according to Don Chente, she had devoted her life to crushing my image of my father with the greatest possible cruelty, and it was precisely this damage to my father figure that was undoubtedly the main cause of my ailments.

  “You write poetry, don’t you?” Don Chente asked, point-blank, apparently to confirm a rumor he could only have heard from Muñecón. I answered that many years before, I did so frequently, but now journalism was taking up all my energy, and poetry had receded into the background, intolerant as it was to being snubbed. I asked about the relationship between poetry and my ailments, and Don Chente answered that neither of us could possibly know the answer at that moment, but if I agreed to undergo a more in-depth treatment, whatever emerged from it would not only heal my psychic and emotional wounds but also explain and undoubtedly enrich my poetic vocation.

  “You refuse to remember almost anything, that’s the problem, but the fact that you don’t want to remember is eroding your personality from underneath,” the old man said, for the first time making an emphatic gesture; I watched him in awe—my thoughts now far away from delight at my cure—wondering how far he would go with this, afraid that the path he had started down would lead to him telling me that I should undergo psychoanalysis, which I would have categorically rejected, seeing as I’d always considered psychoanalysis to be the worst kind of charlatanism, surpassed in its hypocrisy only by Catholic confession, the difference being that the latter is free and the former for rich little boys and girls who don’t know what to do with their spare time. But Don Chente’s path did not lead there, as I soon discovered, though all his solemn obfuscation made me miss my sessions with Pico Molins, when he and I would deal frankly and effortlessly with all my most difficult crises.

  “What I’d like to suggest,” Don Chente said, settling into his chair after mentioning the therapeutic virtues of memory, “is that we try hypnosis.” This was the last thing I expected—the degrees on his wall certified him as a medical doctor, a psychologist, and an acupuncturist, but now it turned out he was also a hypnotist. “We could try it once a week,” he continued in the face of my mute alarm, “starting next Wednesday, if this same time would be good for you.” I told him that the problem was that in a month at the very most I would be taking off for San Salvador. “That’s fine, you’ll see progress after three or four sessions,” he insisted. And how could I say no, even though I hadn’t yet recovered from my shock, if what we were talking about was a free and novel treatment, one that aroused my curiosity and soon stimulated my imagination, because the idea of being hypnotized made me think that I was about to enter the world of Asian monks and kung fu fighters. I asked him if I needed to prepare myself in any special way for hypnosis, thinking that perhaps he would ask me to go on some kind of diet, as Pico Molins had so that his little drops would work, but Don Chente told me that no preparation was necessary, only a readiness to discover things—some of which would perhaps be unpleasant, that’s how he qualified them—that were buried in my consciousness.

  Very strange was my state of mind when I left Don Chente’s apartment after he accompanied me back to the elevator, always so polite and modest, a manner Muñecón said was like “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” though I then realized it was actually more like “killing them with kindness,” because the old man hid enormous stores of knowledge behind his somewhat retiring, grandfatherly demeanor; my state of mind was very strange w
hen I emerged onto San Lorenzo Street, happy to be pain-free and excited at the prospect of beginning a process of self-knowledge through hypnosis, but at the same time I had the sensation that a red light had gone on far away, I didn’t know exactly where or why, a very small light that did not delay me for even a moment from going to the phone booth on the corner to call my buddy Félix, who worked at a magazine with offices just a few blocks away from Don Chente’s apartment and very close to our favorite spot for sharing news and drinking vodka tonics in the evening, the terrace of La Veiga Restaurant, where we could sit contemplating the commotion on Insurgentes as well as savoring with our eyes one or another solid piece of female flesh, and where we would meet in a half hour to celebrate my cure.

  3

  THE WEEK BEFORE I once again rang the doorbell on San Lorenzo Street was so disastrous that by the time I was finally standing in front of Don Chente’s building I was convinced that this hypnosis session was my only salvation, that things would change for the better after this treatment, and that I might as well tell the old man about my emotional turmoil, especially the tempest my relationship with Eva had become, in the hope that he would give me a helping hand, because the situation, to be honest, had spun out of control, and what had seemed before like a civilized separation had now degenerated into a painful rupture—to say the least—if not a swamp of reproaches, bitterness, and accusations that could only lead to mutual hatred—harmful for both of us and truly malignant for Evita.

  Once again it was Don Chente who greeted me as I stepped out of the elevator, and this time the enormous apartment felt empty, silent, dimly lit, as if the old man were its sole inhabitant, a thought that undoubtedly found expression on my face, because right away, as if he’d read my mind, Don Chente told me that he was indeed alone in the apartment, his wife had gone to El Salvador, probably to check their bank accounts, I thought, because Muñecón had told me that Don Chente’s wife was extremely wealthy, she was from a family with an unpronounceable Basque surname, Aguirreurreta or something like that, owners of a number of coffee plantations in the western part of the country.