The Dream of My Return

by Horacio Castellanos Moya

  Again and suddenly, I felt thirsty, because even though the memory of Tamba’s story as Héctor had told it to me had managed to extricate me from the distress produced by the memory of that terror, my hangover was still there, pressing in on my temples and constricting my throat, extracting a high price for my binge the night before. I wrapped the towel around my waist and went down to the kitchen to drink some more water and make fried eggs and more coffee, lamenting the fact that there wasn’t even one goddamn beer in that fridge and that the Coca-Cola had already gone flat and telling myself that the best thing I could do was eat a good breakfast so as not to collapse in the street, then leave the house without further delay, even if I felt wretched, because my final paycheck was waiting for me at the news agency; right after picking it up, I could slip into the bar in Sanborns, on the corner of Insurgentes and San Antonio, where two Bloody Marys, or rather Bloody Caesars, would put an end to my malaise and, more important, to all those revolting fears that were threatening to paralyze me. And while I was making my eggs and coffee—my salivary glands stimulated by the image of the Bloody Caesar—I told myself that Héctor’s life also deserved to be written down, somebody should do it, not I, of course, I knew only what he told me during those two days together in the forest in the mountains of Hidalgo, around the middle of 1982, where we spent two long nights around a campfire, Héctor recounting his war adventures and me fascinated by what I was hearing: anecdotes from his life as a sergeant in the Argentine Navy, as a Montonero guerrilla, then years later as an officer in the Cuban army fighting in the wars of Angola and Ethiopia under the command of General Arnaldo Ochoa—this had been Héctor’s trajectory before he ended up in Central America as the leader of the assault troops on the Southern Front in the Sandinista insurrection. Héctor, who looked like a military man through and through, was an unforgettable character of medium height, swarthy and solidly built, with a furrowed brow and a thick mustache, an Argentinian who was too swarthy and too reserved to be Argentinian, a man who left Che in the dust as far as revolutionary adventures are concerned, having fought in war after war, only to end up in El Salvador after being run out of Nicaragua by the Sandinistas immediately after the triumph of that revolution, because while the comandantes were still singing the refrain “implacables en el combate y generosos en la victoria,” “implacable in battle and generous in victory,” he, on his own initiative, paid a visit to several prisons and expeditiously executed all the officers and noncommissioned officers in the dictator Somoza’s defeated National Guard—only by exterminating them immediately could a counterrevolution be prevented, he explained to me on one of those cold nights next to the campfire in the mountains of Hidalgo; the Sandinistas had gained hardly any war experience from their short war, whereas Héctor had already fought in many others, and he knew that those officers and noncommissioned officers would be the transmission belt of a future counterrevolutionary army, which is exactly what happened a few years later.

  The stories Héctor told me were legion, I said to myself with a certain nostalgia as I put the fried eggs on a plate and stood waiting in front of the stove for the espresso pot to boil, with nostalgia as well as another strange sensation, as if an idea were trying to percolate into my brain, an idea that was somehow separate from Héctor and the other memories I’d been entertaining, until I finally realized that there was no reason in the world for me to mention anything to Eva about my doctor’s disappearance, telling her would only start her ranting yet again against my return, give her more forceful arguments to use in her efforts to ruin my plans; I felt indignant just imagining her tirade, in which she’d accuse me of playing fast and easy not only with my own life but with the future of our daughter, whom I wanted to turn into an orphan, abandoned and without a single memory of her father. I poured the coffee and tried to calm myself down: eating breakfast under the influence of negative emotions interferes with digestion, and it wouldn’t be difficult, after all, to keep the news of Don Chente’s disappearance from Eva, because she almost never had any contact with Muñecón, she couldn’t tolerate that retinue of drunkards and blowhards that gathered around my uncle; in any case, it would be ill-advised to mention it to her, or to anybody else, I thought again, until I had more information about what had actually happened to my doctor. Luckily the yolks of my eggs were soft and runny enough to soak up with pieces of bread, just how I liked them, not hard and overcooked as Eva preferred, even in this we were incompatible, I told myself as I sipped the coffee and tried to remember those two nights in the forest in the mountains of Hidalgo, where Héctor, warmed by the campfire, confided to me a terrible story: on the eve of that military operation on the heels of which Tamba would die in an ambush, while the guerrilla band, on its way to its objective, was resting next to a ford in the Motochico River, Héctor received word in a coded message broadcast over the radio—as occurs in every war—that his wife had been captured at a checkpoint an hour earlier, a checkpoint on the highway leading to Chalatenango near the El Limón bridge, along the same river they were resting next to at that moment. Héctor’s wife was a Mexican named Juanita, a teacher by profession, who was riding the bus to the regional capital in Chalatenango, where she’d be met and taken to the guerrilla camp, a plan that was aborted when the military stopped the bus on the bridge, unloaded the passengers to check their IDs, then took said woman into captivity. Héctor was then faced with one of the biggest dilemmas of his life, a devastating predicament, he told me while we watched the leaping shadows and listened to the crackling of the dry branches being consumed by the fire, because he knew that it was possible for his guerrilla band to quickly traverse those approximately three miles separating them from the government roadblock and attempt to rescue his wife, which would of course have meant scrapping the operation he had been assigned—to attack the military outpost in San Fernando—which in the end he carried out.

  And while I was pouring ketchup on the whites of my eggs, deeply moved by the memory of Héctor’s story, I came to the verge of shedding tears—it’s a well-known fact that we wear our feelings on our sleeve when we’re hungover—imagining what it must have been like for that warrior to have to choose between making an attempt to rescue his wife and carrying out his assigned mission, a mission that would be crucial to the progress of the war—the conflict between a lover’s passion and a warrior’s discipline, a true Greek tragedy, I thought as I sipped my coffee, because in the end Juanita disappeared forever, the soldiers tortured her until she was dead and then got rid of her body who knows how. What would I have done in that situation? How would I have behaved? Would I have set off with my troops to free Eva or persevered in my assigned mission and then learned to live with the guilt, as Héctor had done? But that’s all nonsense, I thought all of a sudden, emerging from my daydreams, it’s easy to identify with someone else in order to indulge in self-pity, but all it takes is a split second of lucidity to realize the ridiculous nature of one’s afflictions: my plan was to end my relationship with Eva, that’s why I was leaving. And I would never be in a situation like the one Héctor had faced because I wasn’t a guerrilla fighter and never would be, given my antipathy to following orders, my total aversion to the demands of life as a combatant, especially the discomfort of carrying a backpack from camp to camp and shitting in the open air, none of which suited me at all—I found that out when I made a futile attempt to be a boy scout and it was confirmed once again during those two days I spent with my Argentinian comrade.

  I carried my dirty dishes to the sink, told myself that enough was enough with the memories, it would be best to simply forget what Héctor had told me, as well as what he had taught me, during those two days we spent in fatigues in the forest in the mountains of Hidalgo, where we had gone from Mexico City, where the Argentinian went to recover from a gastric ulcer that had forced him to leave the front, and where he remained for several weeks while being treated for his ulcer—caused by the tensions of war and also, I think, by the repressed torment o
f having abandoned Juanita—a tumultuous period of repose for the guerrilla fighter, after which he’d return to the battlefield, where he’d die a few months later, blown to pieces by an enemy grenade that fell into the trench where he’d taken shelter during a battle in the foothills of the Guazapa Volcano. I really should change the tape playing in my head, I kept telling myself, because if I didn’t, I’d run the risk of another panic attack, especially if I started wondering what I knew that the military might be interested in, what information they would try to extract from me after they captured me upon my arrival at the Comalapa Airport, a panic attack I could prevent only if at that very moment I started to move toward the stairs, knowing that the intelligent thing to do was get dressed and go pick up my check before anything else could happen.

  10

  TO BUY THE TICKET or not to buy the ticket, that was the question I kept asking myself again and again while sitting on the bar stool and fidgeting, as if there were ants in my pants, having almost finished my first Bloody Caesar and firmly intending to order another, for although my physical discomfort had decreased, the same could not be said of my anxiety, mostly because I had called Muñecón several times to ask if he’d heard any news of Don Chente, two hours having already passed since he announced to me that Don Chente’s relatives had been waiting for him in vain at Comalapa Airport; but nobody was picking up at Muñecón’s apartment, which made me fear the worst—rather than consider that he had simply gone out to run an errand, as under any other circumstances I would have—and suspect that bad news about my doctor had forced him to go out in the middle of the day, when my uncle customarily stayed put at home.

  To buy the ticket or not to buy the ticket, I repeated to myself over and over again while compulsively chucking peanuts into my mouth, the check I had picked up at the news agency burning a hole through my shirt pocket over my heart, waiting for me to deposit it in the bank, something I should have done before slipping into the bar in Sanborns, where I now was, but my thirst was stronger than my common sense, and the moment I said goodbye to Charlie Face, the director of the agency, a Chilean who was much too well behaved to understand the urgency of a hangover, I dashed headlong to the Bloody Caesar I was now drinking, though not without first stopping at a phone booth to call Muñecón, as I already said, without anybody answering as I’d hoped. And my dilemma was the following: to buy the ticket without knowing for sure if Don Chente had been captured was idiotic, but to delay meant running the risk of losing the reservation and of the price going up, as the girl at the travel agency warned me.

  The next time I called Muñecón it was from the phone located at the entrance to the restrooms in Sanborns, after I had downed half the Bloody Caesar in one gulp; not finding him and knowing that it’s much too disconcerting to be all alone with one’s anxiety, I decided to call my buddy Félix, who fortunately was still at the office and also longing for a drink to cure his own hangover, because the night before he had been out partying and had gotten even more sauced than I had, according to what he told me. That’s why I was sitting on the stool and fidgeting as if I had ants in my pants, I repeat, because now along with my anxiety about Don Chente’s possible capture and disappearance was added another anxiety: Félix had long distinguished himself for his total lack of punctuality, and he was capable of arriving more than an hour late and acting as if nothing whatsoever was wrong. To make matters worse, I was the first customer of the day, and the bartender was busy getting the bottles and other ingredients ready, so after making my Bloody Caesar almost resentfully, he carried on with his preparations without paying any attention to my attempts to strike up a conversation.

  That was when I realized that I suffered from a horrifying lack of control over my emotions, as if the serene state of mind brought about by the sessions of acupuncture and hypnosis had disappeared along with my doctor, along with all the positive energy that had suffused me at the prospect of returning to my native country, if you’ll excuse the expression, for although I was not born in El Salvador, it was as if my umbilical cord were attached to that place, so young was I when they took me there. I was utterly baffled—my eyes staring at the row of bottles—trying to figure out why and to what extent I had tied my emotional and psychic well-being to Don Chente: how was it possible that after a mere half-dozen appointments I had become so dependent on a doctor? What had I revealed to him? What secret part of my being had passed into his hands so that today I felt so lost at his disappearance? The bartender asked me if I wanted another Bloody Caesar. I indicated I did with a nod; I didn’t feel like talking anymore, distraction was the last thing I needed at that moment, because I felt as if a revelation was on the verge of rising out of the depths of my being, as if something dark and mysterious was making its way into my consciousness. And then, for a single instant, I perceived it with extreme clarity and in dismay, but then I immediately shook my head, wanting that memory not to be there but rather to return at once to the dark depths from which it never should have risen. I observed the bartender agitating the metal cocktail shaker and greeting two customers on their way to a table, and I also turned to greet them, as if they were old friends, knowing this was the only way to get out of myself, keep myself at a certain remove from a memory that I didn’t want to remember for anything in the world, and that I had never told anybody in my life, one that had now risen from the substratum, perhaps as a result of the anxiety I was experiencing at this crucial moment in my life or maybe because of how vulnerable the hangover had made me, which were one and the same thing when all was said and done, because the image of the Volkswagen bug riddled with machine-gun fire had already penetrated my conscious mind, exactly as I had seen it that horrible morning so many years before in the newspaper column, “Last Night’s News,” a photo with a caption I read in total shock that stated that the driver of the bug, Gordo Porky, had been shot sixty-four times before collapsing over the steering wheel after a Hollywood-style car chase through Colonia Layco: shaken to the core, I suffered a kind of breakdown at that moment, which could only be expected because Gordo Porky had driven me home in that very same bug just two hours before they ambushed him; we had stayed at the law school cafeteria, drinking beer and chatting, as we did fairly often after the language theory class we were taking together. And stuck to the image of Gordo Porky, as if to the other side of a coin, was a sinister scene, and now here it appeared again, right in the bar in Sanborns, against my will and dripping like sulfuric acid into my conscience: a few days before the ambush, I met two professors in a classroom in the Philosophy Department, two professors we later found out were informants for the army intelligence services and who wanted to talk to me about something academic, but the truth was they were conducting a kind of casual interrogation, during which they brought up, as if in passing, the adventures of Gordo Porky and me, the naïve one with the big mouth . . . Shit! I exclaimed to myself, and the word might even have formed on my lips, because I slapped the palm of my hand against my forehead, like someone who’d suddenly discovered he’d misplaced the winning ticket of the big lottery prize—even the waiter coming toward me with my Bloody Caesar thought it best to ask me if I was okay. “No, it’s nothing, I just forgot something at the office,” I managed to mumble, just to get rid of him, then immediately raised the glass as if to offer a toast, trying to control the grimace of panic that was on the verge of disfiguring my face, because now I knew what I had revealed to Don Chente and that could surely be found in his notebook. I already suspected there was some trick with this hypnosis business: serenity is never free, you have to give something in exchange, and the clever old man had succeeded in extracting my secret.