The Dream of My Return (9 page)

I’ve often wondered why men always want sex when they wake up with a hangover, whereas for women it’s just the opposite, the hangover inhibits carnal desire, or at least that’s what I’ve been told by the women I’ve lived with, and I’ve often wondered about it, even though Eva claimed that there was no mystery, masculine desire arises from the stimulation of the prostate by alcohol and by the bladder swollen with urine. But that morning I felt so bad standing there under the shower that instead of an erection and the subsequent customary impulse to jerk off, I had only enough energy to lean against the tile wall—almost nodding off, utterly exhausted—and let the hot water cleanse my body, relax it, hoping that at least a little of its warmth would reach my so badly beleaguered spirit; under the lull of the steamy water I began to feel enormous pity for myself, a bout of self-commiseration that bordered on tears, as if the universe had been plotting against me, a sensation of helplessness and vulnerability that made me slide slowly down, my back pressed against the wall, until I was sitting on the floor under the stream of water. And in this position, I remembered something that hadn’t come to mind for a very long time, but after such a night in Muñecón’s apartment it was only natural that it would: the memory of the expression on Albertico’s face when he answered, “Because I’m an ass,” after I asked him why he was returning to San Salvador when the Communist Party had just publically announced that it was joining the armed struggle and going underground, why not just stay in San José, Costa Rica—where we were talking after the New Year’s Eve party of 1980—why risk his life returning to San Salvador in the middle of all that slaughter and repression to work openly for the Party when it looked a whole lot like suicide, that’s what I asked him, why return under those circumstances, a question that Albertico answered with “Because I’m an ass,” without for a moment invoking heroism or the demands of the struggle, with a gesture of resignation that I’d never seen before; he said only, “Because I’m an ass,” a fool, an idiot, as if tragedy were his inevitable destiny, as if he already knew that two months later he would be murdered and that it would be a futile murder, just one of the thousands of murders carried out by the military during that period. And his response, which at the time seemed sad and very close to a cliché employed to avoid giving explanations, that cut-and-dried “Because I’m an ass” acquired, after Albertico’s murder, a dimension of fatality that would overwhelm me every time I remembered it and that struck me again now as I sat there under the shower, making me realize that I hadn’t appreciated in its true dimensions the effect of Albertico’s murder on my psyche, having thought that my father’s murder and my grandfather’s suicide were the only causes of those twisted features my personality sometimes exhibited; the murder of my cousin was there, crouching, without me perceiving how deeply it had penetrated my psyche, and as I stood up under the shower feeling slightly revived, I told myself that I would definitely have shared this discovery with Don Chente if he’d stayed in Mexico City and I’d gone to that afternoon appointment, the appointment he canceled so abruptly and that at that moment I so sorely missed.

I was on my way out of the bathroom when the telephone started ringing with such urgency that I jumped, and my first thought was that it was Eva calling to accuse me of some other outrage or Muñecón calling to upbraid me for the events of the night before, that’s why I waited a few seconds, to prepare myself for the worst before picking up the phone; but what was my surprise when I recognized the voice of the secretary at the news agency, calling to tell me that my check was ready and I could come by to pick it up at my convenience. I was so happy I threw the towel into the air, and with it, my remorse and my hangover, life was finally smiling at me, damn right, then I clapped my hands, let out several shouts of joy, and opened the curtains to let in the sun, I would soon be leaving for San Salvador, where I would start a new life, where I would see my doctor again and continue my treatment. It was in this mood, optimistic and elated, that I decided to call Muñecón to apologize for the scene the night before, tell him that I was buying my ticket that very afternoon and would be flying to San Salvador on Sunday, yes, finally the dream of my return would be fulfilled, and for that very reason I needed him to tell me how to get in touch with Don Chente back home. Once I’d concluded my speech, my uncle told me not to worry about the incident with Mario Varela, he had also called early, contrite, to apologize, occupational hazards, Muñecón declared understandingly, and after a brief silence and in a laconic tone of voice, he muttered, “Chente hasn’t shown up.” What? “He hasn’t shown up. They were waiting for him at the airport and nobody knows where he is.”

9

I SAT NAKED ON THE EDGE OF THE BED
, the towel draped over my lap, distraught, distrait, as if I’d just been punched and hadn’t been able to react, incapable of making any mental connections, my mind a blank, in a kind of limbo, perhaps the amount of alcohol still circulating in my bloodstream and the impact of the news of my doctor’s disappearance having created a short circuit that shut down my brain, causing in turn a massacre of neurons that plunged me into a cataleptic state for who knows how many minutes—time capriciously stretches out and shrinks back up under such circumstances—until finally the tape in my mind managed to get unstuck, and that’s when I began to react, moving from a state of shock to one of extreme anxiety, not only because of what Don Chente might have been suffering at the hands of the military torturers but also because I understood that the same fate awaited me—the moment I landed at Comalapa Airport, I, too, would disappear into the hands of the military, which apparently is what had just happened to my doctor. I fell back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling, as if in a trance, telling myself that if a prestigious doctor, married to a millionaire and with no truck with militancy or political passions, who had dared to return to his country only because his old mother had died, if he had disappeared into the hands of those military goons, how much more quickly would they pick me up, an unknown, half-starved journalist with friends in the ranks of the guerrilla armies who was returning with the suspicious intention of starting a political magazine. I kept curling up tighter and tighter into a ball until I was in a fetal position, and for the second time that morning I longed to disappear, to vanish into thin air—anxiety combined with a hangover easily skyrockets and turns into terror. Why, until that very moment, had I been so confident that nothing bad would happen to me if I returned before the civil war had ended? Where had I drummed up such naïve, even suicidal enthusiasm that allowed me to disguise the dream of my return not only as a stimulating adventure but also as my first step toward changing my life for the better? What made me think that the Salvadoran military would understand that I was not a guerrilla fighter but rather an independent journalist, that they would simply forget the stacks of articles I had written against them, the military, during my Mexican exile? Once these self-reproaches had rendered me contrite, memories of Albertico began to clobber me relentlessly, because it was all too obvious that eleven years later I was following in my cousin’s footsteps—returning to El Salvador to meet a certain death—but I was even stupider than Albertico because Albertico, a Communist militant, had been conscious of the risk he was taking, which is why when I asked him why he was returning in the middle of the carnage, he said, “Because I’m an ass,” whereas I was acting like an utter imbecile, even more unconscious and more naïve—how else to explain the excitement I had been flaunting up till that moment. And then I recalled that morning of January 3, 1980—it is so clear in my mind—when a gringo came to visit Albertico in the large living room of the family home in the Escalante neighborhood of San José, Costa Rica—where I was also staying for New Year’s, as I already said—a gringo who introduced himself as a journalist working for a newspaper in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, I don’t remember exactly, who interviewed my cousin supposedly for a feature article he was writing about the political violence in El Salvador, a gringo whom I barely glimpsed as I walked down the hallway but whom I immediately suspected of being an informer, a spy, or something even worse, because as I walked by I happened to hear him asking Albertico about his studies in Moscow, a question that could be answered with total honesty there in that Costa Rican city of lambs, but from the perspective of San Salvador, it could lead one directly to torture and death, which is exactly what happened to my cousin. From then on, I never had the least doubt that the interview with that gringo posing as a journalist was decisive in Albertico’s murder: with the information that gringo had gotten out of him, CIA butchers decided to target him for execution, but they would wait till he had returned to San Salvador, where they could sic on him those criminals in uniform, which is what they did two months later; from that moment on, I started suspecting all gringo journalists on principle, whatever their sympathies or the little calling cards they hoisted up their flagpoles—anything you revealed to them or confided in them could get you sent straight to the gallows. Still curled up fetus-like on the bed, wallowing in a pigsty of self-reproach, I remembered that my life was so bound up with the murder of my cousin that I had been forced into exile precisely because of that incident: a few days after Albertico had been kidnapped by police commandos, Fidelita, my mother’s maid, returned from the grocery story greatly alarmed because of a jeep parked in front of the house with some sinister-looking goons inside, insolently watching our house, which my mother attributed to the fact that my uncle Alberto—Muñecón—was using her car to drive around the country to search for the bodies of Albertico and his wife, because he didn’t have a car, having just returned from Costa Rica; Muñecón was using my mother’s car to visit the sites where the police and army death squads dumped the bodies of the activists they had kidnapped and tortured. It was the presence of that jeep with those sinister-looking goons in front of my mother’s house that made me decide that same afternoon to leave the country, to get the hell out of there; I had absolutely no desire to be a martyr, and, just in case, I spent the night at another relative’s house and went from there directly to the bus station at dawn. How could I, eleven years later, have possibly forgotten that traumatic experience and been so eager to return to the place I had left in so much fear? And what seemed even worse: how could I possibly have any illusions about my return, as if this were the first time I’d returned with the dream of “participating in History,” for god’s sake, when the fact was I’d returned exactly once before, a few days after Albertico, only to end up leaving in a hurry a few months later, as I’ve just explained?

I made myself even smaller on the bed, curling around myself in that fetal position until I was almost tied in a knot, clutching the corner of the towel with all my might, as if that towel were my last hope for salvation, the rope thrown to a drowning man in the middle of a stormy sea when there are no more life preservers, a large towel made in El Salvador at the Hilasal factory, as it turned out, its tag showing a painting of naïve, or primitive, art, painted in La Palma, a lovely mountain village in the north, a destination for artists and ex-hippies from the ’60s, which had been trapped in the theater of war. And in that particular way the mind has of making capricious associations, I immediately started remembering that the artist who had founded that school of naïve painting in La Palma had also been a member of Banda del Sol, a short-lived progressive rock band from the beginning of the ’70s, a band that attained epic status in El Salvador, especially for its songs “
El planeta de los cerdos
,” “The Planet of Pigs,” and “
El Perdedor
,” “The Loser,” both composed by a guitarist nicknamed Tamba, after the chimpanzee who costarred with Johnny Weissmuller in an old black-and-white movie called
Th
e Killer Ape
—the famous Tamba, who years later would leave progressive rock to become Comandante Sebastián, a mythic figure among the guerrillas, someone who went from rock-and-roll to the armed struggle with the same sense of adventure and who would die precisely near La Palma in an ambush about which I had firsthand information. I sat up on the bed, as if energized by this memory, though I kept daydreaming, leaning my back against the wall, my private parts covered with the towel as if at any moment someone might enter the room, because the truth is, in that house you never knew, several of Eva’s relatives lived in the houses next door to ours and along the same short dead-end street, and it was not unusual for her mother or one of her sisters to suddenly appear in the living room or start up the stairs to the bedrooms without first knocking on the front door. Tamba’s story deserved to be written, I told myself, like so many other stories from the war, someone really should do it, though not I, I only had information about the ambush that cost him his life that day in January 1982, after he participated in the first guerrilla operation of any magnitude in Chalatenango—a devastating attack on the army outpost in San Fernando, a town located near La Palma, as I said. Soon I was trying to remember the details of that operation, which I had written a cable about the same day it took place, because at the time I was a reporter for a news agency secretly controlled by the guerrilla organization Tamba was fighting for, details that now, nine years later, had grown a bit hazy, though there was one that would always stick in my memory: after several hours of combat, the soldiers and paramilitary forces under siege at the base decided to surrender, as was confirmed in photographs I saw a few days later, photographs that showed a row of about three dozen prisoners face down on the ground, their hands clasped behind their necks, some of them looking right at the camera, frightened, their faces smeared with dirt, whereas the official dispatch released by the guerrilla organization that landed on my desk stated that no prisoners had been taken, that all the enemy combatants had died in battle. What happened to those prisoners? I asked Héctor, who had led the operation, a few months later. “They got malaria,” he answered calmly after recounting the battle in detail and pointing out that the raid Tamba would die in a few hours later, after the guerrilla troops had withdrawn in victory, was carried out by the military commander of San Fernando, who had managed to sneak out of the barracks with some of his soldiers during the early stages of the battle and was such a clever bastard that he evened the score by carrying out said ambush, first attacking the scout, or guide, of the guerrilla column, to whose aid Tamba came, crawling through the bushes and into the circle of enemy fire, though as fate would have it, failing to advance any farther before he was shot, a hero’s death, like that of hundreds of fighters over the ten years of war, but this was not what impressed me, I was sure of that now; the image of Tamba I most identified with was of the young guerrilla leader sitting to rest after a long day, his FAL across his lap, listening with earphones to music by Pink Floyd or Yes on his Walkman. It was, of course, that image—like a postcard and just as romantic—that impressed me because Tamba had been the two things I never could be: a composer of progressive rock music and a guerrilla, two ideals from my tender youth that he had managed to embody and I hadn’t at all, though perhaps fortunately, I reconsidered as I made myself more comfortable on the bed: thanks to the fact that I was not a rock musician turned guerrilla leader, I could now think about this, because if I had been those things, my fate would have been similar to that of the comrade with the nickname of the killer ape.

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.