The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya Page B
Authors: Horacio Castellanos Moya
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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
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