The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya Page A

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