The Dream of My Return (5 page)

That’s why I said that when I entered Don Chente’s apartment to undergo the second hypnosis session I was bewildered and my willpower was quashed, the events of Saturday night having plunged me into a morbid state of disquietude for several days, because without wanting to, I had had to face certain repulsive parts of myself that I refused to accept but whose existence panicked me, giving me the feeling that something very powerful had disintegrated inside me. This time, fortunately, Don Chente led me from the elevator directly to the small room, where I immediately lay down on the exam table, ready to begin the process of relaxation, just as we had done the first time, hoping that as a result of this session I would be able to sort out the muddle inside me, but Don Chente told me to try to relax on my own, to use all my powers of concentration, and he would return in a few minutes, then he left. So I focused my attention on my toes, sending them instructions to relax, without ceasing to think about them for a single instant, until I soon felt the typical tingle of relaxation, then moved to the soles of my feet, then to my ankles, and thereby I ascended along my lower limbs, feeling lighter and lighter, and soon I was nodding off: I was a child wandering through the orange groves on a finca in the Planes de Renderos, a five-year-old child, fully aware of my father’s instructions not to pick a single orange even though what I wanted more than anything else was, precisely, to pick one of the oranges I was walking past on that old finca adjacent to the house where we were living, a finca of orange groves where I later came across two people huddled under a tree whose faces looked familiar, but I didn’t quite recognize them, two people discreetly enjoying the oranges they had recently and surreptitiously picked and who invited me to join their feast. Then I was awoken by the sound of the door opening and Don Chente entering, though I remained in that state of levity even when he instructed me to open my eyes, which I immediately did, and it took me only a few seconds to recognize the shining object that was moving back and forth in front of my face, it was a silver pocket watch dangling from Don Chente’s hand and upon which he asked me to focus my attention, which I did with ease while he talked to me in a way I had seen in some movie or other when the circus magician speaks to a volunteer, who then suddenly begins to follow the magician’s instructions without any consciousness of how ridiculous . . .

“Wake up!” Don Chente ordered, but I was returning from so far away that it felt like a lot of time had passed between when I heard his voice and when I opened my eyes; and even once my eyes were open, I remained on the table, not moving, as if waiting to return to full consciousness, in a state so serene I didn’t want to leave it for anything in the world. “I’ll wait for you in my office,” Don Chente said, giving me time alone, for I refused to budge, knowing that the tiniest movement would bring me back, this time fully aware that I might have spent the whole day on that table, that’s how far away I felt I’d been—but I soon lifted my arm to look at the time.

When I entered his library, Don Chente was writing down in his notebook what he had extracted from me during the two hours I had been at his mercy, that was how long the session had lasted, I now realized, also realizing that the old man was not going to tell me anything about what I had told him, which didn’t really matter to me, unlike the first time, because I was enjoying a harmonious state of levity, of detachment, as if I had been cured of all the anxieties and self-recriminations that had tormented me for the last few days. “You, who are a poet and a journalist, you should take advantage of your facility with words to sit down and write the story of your life,” Don Chente told me, lifting his eyes to meet mine. I told him that my life had not been interesting enough to make into a book, though I told myself that my life was in fact interesting enough to make into the very best of books, but there wasn’t time, what with my job as a journalist, my wife and daughter—everything was plotting against me. “I don’t mean you should write it to get it published, but for yourself, as therapy, to remember and reflect; it would help you enormously,” he said before standing up to accompany me to the elevator. And I went outside, where a splendid sun was shining, still enjoying the traces of levity in my soul, thinking that one day I would do as Don Chente said and write the story of my life.

5

I DISCOVERED THAT MEMORY IS UNRELIABLE
when I began to digress about how I would start the story of my life if I wrote it down as Don Chente had suggested, a digression I pursued while enjoying a vodka tonic on the terrace of La Veiga the evening after that second time my doctor hypnotized me, a hypnosis session that had left me in a rather peculiar frame of mind, propitious for levity and contemplation. Until then I had been certain that my first childhood memory, the farthest back I could go, the point at which I would have to begin to tell the story of my life, was of the bomb that destroyed the façade of my maternal grandparents’ house on Primera Avenida in Comayagüela, a warning bomb detonated at dawn by the colonels who supported the liberal government against which my grandfather and his nationalist cohorts were conspiring. I would have been about three years old at the time, and my memory consists of one precise image: my grandmother Lena carrying me in her arms across the dark courtyard through the whitish dust from the destroyed wall that permeated the air. That was the image I returned to with a certain amount of pride whenever I was called upon to explain how violence had taken root in me at the very beginning of my life, though I would have to add “of my conscious life,” because violence takes root at the very first instant of each and every person’s life: it’s not for nothing that we enter this world crying and making our mothers writhe in pain, I told myself as I took another sip of my vodka tonic and asked myself when my buddy Félix, who’d promised to meet me on the terrace of La Veiga in a half hour at the most, would show up. The truth is, I suddenly found myself wondering, perhaps as a result of my peculiar and persistent mood, how this almost cinematic image had lodged itself in my memory, considering the fact that if I was in my grandmother Lena’s arms, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to see myself from the outside, to be the person standing in the hallway and watching a woman in her fifties rushing across a dark courtyard carrying a child in her arms, for that was the image that had lodged in my memory; it wouldn’t have been possible to be in my grandmother Lena’s arms and at the same time in the hallway watching the scene, I told myself with increasing stupefaction, because if I was doubting the veracity of my first memory, how unimaginably difficult it would be to slog through every incident I’d experienced in my life. The only way to confirm what my memory was telling me was to travel to Honduras to ask my grandmother Lena, I thought as I observed the bustle of pedestrians and the tumult of buses and cars on Insurgentes, but I soon thought better of it, it would be utterly senseless to go visit my grandmother Lena, who, at eighty years old, was suffering small strokes that would soon leave her in a state of limbo, and perhaps my memory had been shaped precisely by what she had repeated to me over and over again, whenever her buttons got pressed and she’d begin to rant against the Liberals, whom she never distinguished from the Communists, blaming all of them for whatever was wrong with her country; moreover, I had absolutely no interest in traveling to Honduras for the sole purpose of underpinning my first memory so that I could collect material for an autobiography I would never write—El Salvador was my upcoming destination, I told myself then signaled to the waitress, who had just come out onto the terrace, to bring me another vodka tonic, for I was craving a little more alcohol so I could maintain that peculiar mood Don Chente had left me in.

But my mind had already started down the wrong path: by shaking the foundations of my first memory, I had set in motion the pendulum that was now carrying me at enormous speed from tranquillity to disquietude, because the memory of the bombing was not encapsulated outside of time but rather served as the foundation for important images of myself that were now beginning to falter, like the image of myself as a child who cried with fear every time I heard a siren, whether it was the police or a fire truck or an ambulance, how I would be gripped by dread just hearing the shriek of a siren, precisely as a result of the trauma caused by the aforementioned bombing, for the first thing I must have heard when I crossed the courtyard in my grandmother Lena’s arms was the shriek of the sirens as they were approaching, and I can still see myself as a child with my grandparents on a balcony on Comayagüela’s Avenida Central watching a parade, perhaps celebrating the coup d’état that allowed my grandfather and his cohorts to finally get rid of the liberal government that had bombed us; when the parade sirens went off, I flew into a panic and began to cry uncontrollably. A traumatized child who broke out in tears of dread at the shriek of a siren: that was me, until who knows how or at what age—I have no memory of the precise moment—I turned into a normal child who could hear the shriek of a siren without crying or getting upset, which is rather unusual if one considers that I achieved this without therapy or any other help, and I have no awareness of having done so, as I said, for I lost my fear without making any particular effort, in the same way one loses one’s baby teeth. Then, to my surprise, I discovered that I had no memory of those sirens approaching my grandparents’ house immediately after the bombing, the ones that would have caused the aforementioned trauma, no matter how much I closed my eyes on the terrace of La Veiga and attempted to recall the shriek of those sirens that prompted my childhood fear; there was no trace in my auditory memory, only silence, which led me to wonder where I had gotten the idea that my childhood cries were the result of that bombing, if that had been my idea at all, if it wasn’t something else that my grandmother Lena had planted in my head and that I had then turned into a memory . . .

“Are you waiting for your friend?” the waitress asked, taking me by surprise; I had not seen her approach, perhaps because I’d closed my eyes while searching my mind for a memory that didn’t exist.

“You startled me,” I managed to say, sitting up straighter as she placed the vodka tonic down on the table.

And I told her, yes, my buddy Félix would soon show up, as long as no last-minute problems arose at the magazine, though I immediately asked myself if she had meant Mr. Rabbit, with whom I’d come to this terrace a couple of times. But why should I care whom the waitress had in mind, considering the scale of what had just happened to me: the simple act of attempting to establish my first childhood memory in order to decide where to start telling the story of my life had turned into an unanticipated labor that threatened to foment dangerous internal chaos, which made me suspect that Don Chente’s suggestion that I write my autobiography had not been fortuitous—there was a hidden motive behind the old man’s suggestion that was somehow related to the hypnosis sessions I had undergone. And to confirm this, I decided to persist in the task of scrounging around in my memory, for under certain conditions obstinacy can be a virtue; I then tried to establish my second memory, which would have come after the bombing—what a great title for the first chapter of an autobiography, if you’ll excuse the digression, “After the Bombing,” a splendid title, I repeated to myself enthusiastically, as if I were hard at work writing the story of my life. The second event from my childhood that had taken root in my memory occurred at the Montessori nursery school, where I was a distinguished student, a nursery school where one morning one of my classmates had the gall to take my blocks away from me, indeed, with the height of insolence he took my blocks and refused to give them back, despite my pleas, at which point I succumbed to a process of internal combustion and then reacted in an unexpected way, because the only thing that occurred to me to do was pick up in my right hand a wooden block that was still in my possession, and, at a moment when the bully was not paying attention, attack him with all my might, bashing him on the head again and again and again; I bashed that wooden block into the head of said child until his cries of pain caught the attention of our teacher, who quickly bent down and picked me up while other teachers rushed in to help the bully, who was lying on the ground, his head a bloody mess. According to my memory, the bully was taken to the emergency room and they locked me up in the office to wait for my mother, who was an English teacher at the same nursery school, and thanks to her intercession I was not expelled but only received a reprimand of which I have no memory at all, as I also have none of my little classmate who wanted to steal my blocks and ended up with his head bashed in, a boy who from that moment on would surely think long and hard before trying to take something that didn’t belong to him; it was at that moment long ago that I understood that the origin of violence is man’s desire to take what does not belong to him, forgive me the repetition and the pontificating tone.

Now that I was taking comfort in that second memory, and as I sipped my vodka tonic on the terrace of La Veiga and contemplated the pedestrians walking quickly along Insurgentes, I told myself that if they hadn’t expelled me from Montessori, if I had only received a mild reprimand, it was not because my mother worked there as a teacher but rather because my grandfather was, at the time, president of the powerful Partido Nacional, but above all because my grandmother was Doña Lena Mira Brossa, a woman with a tempestuous character and an explosive temper, whom the owner and director of the nursery school must have feared—as was only prudent—for I haven’t the slightest doubt that the instant she found out about the attempted robbery of my blocks and subsequent bloody developments, my grandmother Lena had taken my side, blaming my bully of a classmate in the harshest possible terms for not respecting private property—this was the mind-set she was famous for—and that she had threatened and berated the teacher in charge of playtime for not having paid due attention, not having stopped the young delinquent the moment he attempted to seize control of something that belonged to her little prince—that would be me—her only grandchild at the time. I savored the vodka, pleased that there was no fissure in this, my second childhood memory, and I also polished up my self-esteem a little, perhaps even puffing out my chest in that chair where I was sitting and drinking, because it was obvious that from a tender age I had been able to react decisively to injustice and take unexpected and devastating action against anyone who tried to take advantage of my apparent vulnerability.

Glancing down the side street past Sanborns, expecting to see Félix on his way, I told myself that the half hour we had agreed upon had already passed, and I wouldn’t wait for him any longer than it took me to finish my vodka, it was almost nightfall, and I had no intention of getting drunk on an evening when I much preferred to maintain the lucidity I’d enjoyed since leaving Don Chente’s penthouse apartment. And I also told myself that it was enough already, this scrounging around in my memory, such efforts served no purpose other than the concrete one of sitting down to write the story of my life, and the only thing I had so far achieved was to upend my serene state of mind, I’d do better to use my free time to put my affairs in order before I left for El Salvador. Instead, however, perhaps out of nostalgia for the serenity I’d lost, perhaps out of simple mental sloth, I turned my attention outward, let my gaze drift off and alight upon the passersby as I tried to imagine the world that afflicted them from looking at their faces, letting my restless mind play around at will, and from digression to digression I was soon remembering a dream I had had a few days before, really a kind of nightmare, vague in its development but blunt by the end, as a result of which I awoke, needless to say, and that was the only part I remembered, the end, when I killed someone but I couldn’t remember whom I’d killed nor the circumstances of the crime, just the sensation of having killed someone but without a specific memory of the act, the anguish produced by the guilt and the fear of having killed somebody without remembering the act or the victim, that was the end of the nightmare, from which I’d abruptly awoken, needless to say, but without experiencing any relief from the aforementioned anxiety; I spent a long time lying in bed, deeply shaken because something inside me was telling me that the dream was not a dream but rather a message from my unconscious, and that I had probably killed someone and now had no memory of it—my psyche had erased the fact, who knows when or how. Remembering that nightmare while drinking my vodka tonic on the terrace of La Veiga upset me again, just as it had upset me every time I’d remembered it; it gave me a kind of vertigo, as if I were at the edge of a black hole whose unknown strength might at any moment viciously suck me in and carry me off to a reality that I could not possibly imagine, the very possibility of which horrified me beyond all reason. It was at that moment, and thanks to a fortuitous association, that I asked myself with astonishment if I had had that nightmare the night after undergoing my first hypnosis session with Don Chente, if that nightmare had been a response to what my doctor had shaken up in my psyche while he had me in a hypnotic trance. Of course! I told myself with a certain amount of joy, sitting bolt upright in my chair and glancing rapidly around me, as if the people at the neighboring tables might have caught wind of my latest discovery; that was how to explain that nightmare: it was my dark side’s reaction to Don Chente’s efforts to penetrate it while I had no consciousness of him doing so.

I took another sip of vodka, a bit excited because I was beginning to see some amazing consequences of the treatment I was undergoing, and I presumed that that night, after my second hypnosis session, another strange dream awaited me. I leaned back in my chair, contemplating the glass on the table, which contained barely one last sip of vodka, thinking by now that Félix had gotten bogged down with those last-minute complications we journalists always get bogged down with, and probably wouldn’t show up, and that if I had any chance of finding any solace on that terrace, it wouldn’t be a good idea at all to have another vodka, the proper course of action would be to pay and make my way to the trolley stop. It was at that instant, while I was enjoying the slow passage of time before taking that final sip, carried away by another association my mind had made with no help from my will, that I suddenly felt the impact, or rather, received the blow that pushed me into the black hole I so greatly feared: what if the crime I couldn’t remember was the murder of my little nursery school classmate whose head I had bashed in with the little wooden block? What if this was the death that was buried in my memory, the one I had wiped out through who knows what mechanisms and that now, because of the hypnosis sessions, was trying to come out into the open? Oh my God! I almost blacked out. I closed my eyes. It was impossible, I countered, I would have found out somehow, I would have sensed some hint of having committed an act of such magnitude in my childhood, no matter how hard my grandparents, my mother, and the people in her entourage would have tried to hide the fact, no matter how much they manipulated me until I’d erased it from my consciousness, no matter how they’d moved me to another country, some detail would have had to filter through, a glimpse, an insinuation, something, because otherwise it would have been a perfect crime, I told myself, trying to calm down. But the black hole in my mind was already spreading to my chest—the black hole that terrified me and in the face of which I wanted to flee as quickly as possible—so I compulsively downed the last sip of vodka, hoping it would reduce my anxiety, then looked around for the waitress to bring me the check, hoping to shake off that morbid dynamic of self-reproach I had fallen prey to by setting myself in motion, when it was evident that I didn’t have the slightest memory of having killed anybody in my life, because I had never committed such a barbaric act, and only a blithering idiot would pay attention to an absurd dream and agonize over it.