ELEVEN
AS IF FREE OF FEAR I AWOKE that first morning in my assigned room at the spiritual retreat center, where they had brought me the previous day, my friend Erick and a chauffeur from the archdiocese, so I could focus intensely for no longer than ten days on the final revisions of the one thousand one hundred pages so they could be sent as soon as possible to the printer, because I had been the one to tell my friend Erick of my need to shut myself away to work someplace far from worldly cares, someplace where I could focus twenty-four hours a day without any interruptions on the job I had been hired to do, for otherwise I would not be able to guarantee that the report had been revised with the necessary care, as I told Erick a few days before my removal to this spiritual retreat center located in a forested area on the outskirts of the city, a large modern building comprised of forty identical rooms in the shape of a cross and with a common space in the middle where the kitchen, the vast dining room, a library, and a small chapel were located.
As if free of nightmares I awoke that first morning in that austere room with white walls, lying in my bunk where I enjoyed contemplating, through the glass door that faced the large lawn and the pine forest beyond, the fog drifting by on the breeze, as if suddenly I had woken up in a different country where nature had made of man a less bloodthirsty creature, a feeling that evoked my old aspirations of living life in a different way with my mind and my emotions infused with fresh air and positive vibrations, so much so that I immediately got out of bed and donned my exercise outfit, my sweatpants and tennis shoes, for I had only to slide open the glass door to go out and jog and thus reinvent myself, which is what I did—gracious me! — the untamed and humid air impregnated my lungs with newfound enthusiasm as I ran across the lawn surrounding the building shaped like a cross, my mind focused on the occurrence of my breath and on my muscles, all of which were performing in a satisfactory way despite the fact that I had done no physical exercise for several months. By the time I finished my first lap around the spiritual retreat center I had verified that there were no other residents, as my friend Erick had anticipated, who told me that during the week I would be alone with the administrative and service staff, such as that gardener I could see near the forest, but that on Saturdays and Sundays the house would be swarming with catechists, a situation that pleased me on the one hand because there would be nothing to interrupt me during my work days, but on the other hand made me slightly uneasy, considering that if a determined enemy wanted to destroy me and the aforementioned report they would not have the least difficulty penetrating the forest surrounding us, arriving nonchalantly at the sliding-glass door of my room, and proceeding to destroy both of us, a thought that dampened the high spirits with which I began my second lap around the house of retreat and which resulted in my failing to enjoy the clean air and the landscape, I even lost the rhythm of my breathing I had so successfully achieved, burying me under old fears, the dense forest ceased to be a cause for celebration and became the sight of an ambush, and now there was no more jogging to cleanse my body and spirit but rather a wild dash to the room I would be shut up in for so many hours throughout the coming days, staring at the computer screen that we had brought from the bishop’s office and that sat on the small table next to the sliding-glass door, the table where I sat as it grew dark and where I began to watch with a good dose of fear the dense foliage of the forest, until I chose to rush down the deserted hallway to the dining room, where I would eat dinner alone, chewing over those parts of the report that had made an impact on me, like the testimony that said, At first I wished to have been a poisonous snake, but now what I ask for is their repenting, which impressed me particularly for the fact that someone would want to be a poisonous snake, that an indigenous person would believe that he could become a poisonous snake in order to take his revenge, and it impressed me so much that that night I abstained from opening the glass door for fear that a snake from the forest would come slithering across the grass and, taking advantage of my carelessness, swiftly infiltrate my room, a fear that made me remember General Octavio Pérez Mena’s mug, like that of a poisonous snake, when I saw him talking with Johnny the Jew and my friend Erick, whom, by the way, I never asked about what I had witnessed through the rear window, for my curiosity grew mute in the face of my fear, as could be seen from that night at the spiritual retreat center when I not only refrained from opening the sliding-glass door but also closed the blinds so as to completely separate myself from the dark lawn where I would have suddenly seen General Octavio Pérez Mena’s face like that of a poisonous snake, his sinister countenance pushing up against the glass door—shit! — I would flee in a panic, howling down the silent hallways in search of the guard’s hut, even though it would be an effort in vain, of course, for by the time the torturer’s countenance would have appeared at my glass door, the room would already be surrounded by a commando unit.
That solitude can break even the halest of spirits I was able to ascertain after my third day of seclusion at the spiritual retreat center, after spending hour upon hour saying not a word to anybody, exchanging greetings only at meal times with the staff, deeply immersed in copyediting the report, sleeping fitfully in that small bunk, lacking even the most minimum of pleasures, for I wasn’t even granted the relief of jacking off due to the disease afflicting me (though there were no longer any drops coming out of my penis), thus my mind began to become so perturbed that the same image kept asserting itself whenever I took a break, an image that recurred several times in the report and that little by little invaded me until it had taken complete possession of me, at which point I stood up and began to pace around the small space of my room, between the desk and the bunk, like one possessed, as if I were that lieutenant who had brutally burst into the hut of that indigenous family, grabbed in my iron hand by the heel that baby only a few months old, raised it over my head and begun to swing it around through the air, faster and faster, as if it were David’s sling from which a rock would be launched, swinging it around at a dizzying speed under the horrified gaze of the parents and siblings until the baby’s head suddenly crashed against a beam inside the hut, exploding, the brains spraying out everywhere, I swung it in the air by the heels until I came back to my senses and I noticed that I had been about to bash my arm, which I had been swinging violently over my head, against the headrest of my bunk because I wasn’t in a hut but rather in my small room at the spiritual retreat center, nor was I that lieutenant who busted the heads of newborn babies against beams in the middle of a massacre, but rather a copyeditor distressed by the perusal of this testimony several times repeated in the report. Then, in a sweat and with my nerves on edge, I sat back down in front of the computer, forcing myself to make progress on the text, for time was of the essence, I persevered at my work obsessively until a few hours later when my concentration languished and once more I became possessed by that same image, I stood up, I became Lieutenant Octavio Pérez Mena, the official in charge of the unit assigned to the massacre, I returned to the hut of those fucking Indians who would understand the hell that awaited them only when they saw flying through the air the baby I held by the ankles so I could smash its head of tender flesh against the wood beam. And it was the splattering of palpitating brains that brought me back to my senses: I found myself in the middle of the room, shaking, sweating, a little dizzy because of the vertiginous movements of swinging the baby over my head, but at the same time with a feeling of lightness, as if I had taken a load off my back, as if my transformation into the lieutenant who exploded the heads of newborn babies against beams had been a catharsis, freeing me from the pain accumulated over the one thousand one hundred pages, which I soon dug into again, in a repetitive cycle of prolonged concentration broken by intervals of the same macabre fantasy.