I flung open the door, terrified, as if there were no air in that closed room and I was about to pass out in a frenzied fit of paranoia; I stood in the doorway, probably with my eyes popping out of my head if the way the two secretaries turned and looked at me was any indication, determined to leave the door open while I got used to that place and my new job even though the open door would undoubtedly affect my ability to concentrate on what I was reading. I didn’t care, I preferred any distraction, even if it interfered with my reading of those one thousand one hundred pages, to suffering new fits of paranoia provoked by such close quarters and my sick imagination set off by one not even very ingenuous sentence — just one among hundreds I would have to read in the coming weeks — which had sent me into a tizzy that could only paralyze me, as I confirmed now when I returned from the threshold to the chair, where I soon sat down and stared at the aforementioned sentence, I am not complete in the mind, and which I intended to skip over immediately in order to get to the one that followed without stopping to digress as I just had, in order to avoid the risk of getting dangerously bogged down in the job I was only just beginning, but my intention was thwarted a few seconds later by the appearance in my office of a little guy with glasses and a Mexican mustache, the guy whose office was right next to mine and whom my friend Erick had introduced me to about an hour earlier as he was leading me to my place of work, a little guy who was nothing less than the director of that entire complex of offices devoted to monitoring human rights, the second in command under the bishop, Erick explained to me as I was offering him my hand and peering at the framed and very prominently placed photographs of him standing with Pope John Paul II in one and with the president of the United States, William Clinton, in another, which immediately alerted me to the fact that I wasn’t shaking hands with any old little guy but one who had given that same hand to the pope and President Clinton, an idea that almost managed to intimidate me, given the fact that the pope and the president of the United States were the two most powerful men on the planet, and the little guy who was now entering my office had had his picture taken with both dignitaries, no minor accomplishment, so I immediately stood up and asked him solicitously what I could do for him, to which the little guy responded just as kindly as possible, asking me to please excuse the interruption, he was aware that I was facing an arduous task, he said, as he pointed to the one thousand one hundred pages that lay on the desk, but wanting to take advantage of my having opened the door to enjoy what was surely my first break, he had taken the liberty of coming to invite me on a tour of the whole building so that I could meet the rest of the staff, a tour my friend Erick, always in a rush, had omitted when he led me directly from the reception area to what would be my office, stopping only at the little guy’s office as I already mentioned, an invitation I immediately accepted and that carried me to each and every office in that building, which, truth be told, wasn’t a building so much as a colonial structure attached to the back of the cathedral with the typical layout of an archbishop’s palace: two stories of solid stone with wide corridors surrounding a square central courtyard, where we found several employees enjoying their morning break, and who, seeing me with Mynor, for this was the name of the little lay director of that institution, greeted me effusively and with some fawning, as if I were a new seminarian, while the little guy extolled my professional virtues thanks to which the report about the massacres would end up being a first-rate text, and I told myself that the good-looking girls had to be hiding somewhere, because the ones the little guy had introduced me to were not only not complete in their minds but also in their bodies, devoid of even one attractive feature, an observation I did not share with my guide and, as the days passed, I discovered to be intrinsic to that institution and not only to the extreme left, as I had always thought — that ugly women were an exclusive attribute of extreme left-wing organizations — no, now I understood that they also were intrinsic to Catholic organizations dedicated to monitoring human rights, a conclusion I reached later, as I said, and at no time did I share this with the guy who had posed for photographs with John Paul II and Bill Clinton, the little guy who took me all around, from one office to another, until finally he left me alone again in front of the one thousand one hundred pages awaiting me in my office, not before asking me if I’d like him to close the door, to which I responded that it would be better to leave it open as we were in the quietest corner of the palace and there wouldn’t be any annoying interferences to distract me.
TWO
IN ORDER TO CELEBRATE my first day of work as God intended I arranged to meet my buddy Toto at noon at El Portalito, the city’s most legendary cantina, fortunately located a mere two hundred yards from my office, close enough to prevent the onset of anxiety in someone who is afraid, above all else, of failing to be punctual, as is the case with me; someone who requires a drink to calm the nerves at the strangest moments, as is also the case with me, which made me consider the proximity of the archbishop’s palace to El Portalito well-nigh miraculous, like a wink from the heavens that would enable me to do my work without faltering, as I explained to my buddy Toto once we were sitting down at a table in the cantina awaiting the voluminous mugs of beer, looking over the faces of the other clientele: the certainty of having a cantina so close by, right at hand, no matter what kind of office I am stuck in, lays the groundwork for a certain degree of spiritual peace, I was explaining to him at the very moment we picked up our mugs to make a toast, which Toto took advantage of to show off his peculiar sense of humor: “May you come out of this shit alive,” the wiseguy pronounced in solemn tones, a joke that immediately made me suspicious of the men sitting at a nearby table, knowing as I did that all kinds of thugs hung out at that dark and squalid cantina, including informers and torturers who belonged to the so-called Presidential High Command, torturers who usually drank alone, almost never looking up from the table, their eyes bloodshot and their grimace sinister, who could be recognized by the scent of the dense, ghastly aura surrounding them. “Don’t worry, take it easy,” my buddy Toto told me, unsheathing his equine teeth from under his Pancho Villa mustache, then right away asking me about my impressions after my first morning of work, how had the priests treated me, I should tell him all about it, but at the precise moment my story was about to begin, a marimba thundered deafeningly from a raised dais next to the door, a marimba played by two very old men, the notes sweeping all conversation away from the tables, especially those closest to the door, like ours, and we would have had to shout in order to hear each other, which my buddy Toto then did to tell me that this music was a kind of welcome march, that he had no doubt it was dedicated to me, he shouted with a mocking grin, knowing that if there is anything I despise with particular intensity it is folk music, and especially the sad, mournful music of the marimba, an instrument only a sad and mournful people can idolize, as I have said many times. “Cut the shit, man, and tell me all about it,” he said, laughing at my expense, because I didn’t have much choice, given the fact that the marimba was just beginning its serenade, and I would have to shout to be heard over that sad and mournful music, something that truth be told wouldn’t be difficult for me, much less now that we had ordered a second round of beers, but also I had to forget about the marimba and its irritating music in order to concentrate on telling him my impressions after my first morning of work, a story that I could begin only by describing the strange sensation I’d had when I knocked on that enormous wooden door located behind the cathedral, as if I were asking them to open the doors to catacombs I had long feared and abhorred but whose bowels I was now destined to penetrate, that strange sensation of being about to enter a forbidden and undesirable world I’d had early that morning while I waited for them to open the enormous wooden doors on that stinking filthy street already infested with street vendors and suspicious-looking characters, like the ones who also hung out at this cantina, where the marimba finally finished its first song and the waitress brought us our second round of beer. Once I’d made my way past the enormous wooden door following a porter who looked like an old sexton, I hastened to tell my buddy Toto, taking advantage of the interregnum of silence between one song and the next, I was led into a cold and intimidating waiting room, like the anteroom of a convent, where I remained alone for too many minutes while the porter went to find my friend Erick, sitting on a bench where only the prie-dieu was missing and where I could appreciate in all its dimensions the fact that I was entering a world ruled by the laws of Catholicism, which had always produced in me the greatest revulsion, which made me consider the possibility of rushing out of there at that instant, although I was immediately overwhelmed by an even stranger sensation, as if I had been there before and now had come back to relive the same experience all over again, and that it would affect my life in some definitive way, I told my buddy Toto at the very moment the marimba started playing a new song, a chilling sensation, by the way, as if I were about to live out a destiny in which my will barely counted and whose principal feature was danger.