But on the fourth day, I have to admit it, my mind went out of control and I no longer had any moments of relief, the barbarities I read about again and again — while searching for the last misplaced comma, the astute slip of the tongue, or the slightly unclear sentence, because at this point it would have been insane to delve into revisions of the actual content — were sinking in so deeply that by then I was beside myself, and when my eyes were not following the text on the screen it was my mind that was transported to the theater of events and then it was no longer mine, if it ever had been, but rather wandered, of its own free will, like a journalist, around the village commons, where the soldiers, machetes in hand, chopped up the bound and kneeling residents; or it entered a hut where the brains of the baby were flying through the air; or it descended into the mass grave among the mutilated bodies — as if the bellyful I had read had not been enough; my mind had to wander through a vicious circle of images that by midnight were disturbing me so much that I just barely managed to slide open the glass door to step out onto the cold dark patio and howl like a sick animal under the star-studded sky, I opened the sliding-glass door and went outside to howl on the wind-blown patio without thinking that a poisonous snake could be lying in wait for me, without considering that General Octavio Pérez Mena with his posse of hired assassins could get hold of me, I let out three howls that were so loud the guard must have thought it was a coyote. But then, when I came back to my senses and collected myself after such excessive behavior, still standing in the middle of the patio in the dark and the buzzing wind, I perceived shadows discreetly approaching from both sides of the patio, four shadows that very soon would be silhouettes and would have me surrounded—damn it! — under the circumstances any move to return to my room would have been suicidal, so I quickly ran toward the deep darkness of the forest in such a sudden and unexpected flight that my pursuers had no time to react, thus I slipped away, espying the path through the pine trees and the undergrowth I had followed during my morning jogs, a path I followed now in the dark, my heart pounding as hard as it could, afraid that they would catch up to me, start shooting toward where I was running and out of breath, or that other henchmen were posted along the path to trap me; but at a particular moment my mind cleared, as if fear had opened the doors of perception, that’s how I felt, crossing the forest along that path amid the humid scents and the sounds of my own fear, finding my way as if I had always known it, without bumping up against a tree or suffering a fatal fall, just tripping slightly once or twice, always with the sensation of having escaped along that path before, as if I were living the same thing again and with the certainty that my pursuers had chosen to let me escape and then turned back to my room, where they would proceed to confiscate the report, or even destroy the computer and the diskettes, confident that thereby they would prevent its publication, as I continued along that path that would soon lead me to some pastures beyond which I would find the main highway to the city, if my sense of direction hadn’t failed me, because I amazed myself, how well I could see in the dark. I hadn’t erred: after following a fence line I came out on the highway and turned and ran along it, listening for the sound of a vehicle, for those men who had surrounded me on the patio would have to drive by this very spot, probably looking for me where there wouldn’t be any witnesses, so every time a vehicle approached I crouched down along the edge of the highway, behind a tree trunk or a stone wall, and then took off running again when I heard the motor fading away in the distance.
And to the cadence of my running footfalls my fickle memory kept me keep repeating between clenched teeth the last sentence I had chosen that night for my notebook, a sentence that at first glance didn’t appear to be anything extraordinary, but in the velocity of my flight took on the cadence of those tunes warriors chant to fire themselves up as they march, the sentence, Wounded, yes, is hard to be left, but dead is ever peaceful, became a war cry I sang as I jogged down the road, a sentence that came to my mind perhaps because it fit so perfectly with the cadence of a forced march, so that soon I found myself singing out loud, Wounded, yes, is hard to be left, but dead is ever peaceful, not caring that due to my fervor I would fail to hear the approach of a vehicle with my pursuers but rather on the contrary it didn’t take me long to find the right cause to infuse my song with belligerence and that could only have been the idea of returning to the spiritual retreat center to face the assault General Octavio Pérez Mena’s commandos were waging against the memories and work of so many people, an idea that lit the wick of my enthusiasm as I was jogging down the highway, but right away exposed itself for all its senselessness when I heard a powerful engine approaching and immediately leaped off the road, terrified at the possibility that those criminals had seen me and would proceed to eliminate me, as it was senseless also for me to fervently chant the sentence, Wounded, yes, is hard to be left, but dead is ever peaceful, for that belonged to the sorrow of an indigenous woman who had survived the massacre and not to a copyeditor who was jogging precisely to avoid being left either wounded or dead.
I approached the first houses in the Mixco neighborhood and reviewed my options for defensive action, which were few, truth be told, and to be honest was barely one, because not for anything in the world would I have returned to my apartment in the Engels Building nor to Pilarica’s, for those who wanted to destroy the report would have the lowdown on everybody working on it, not in vain did they call themselves the military intelligence service, and if they had dared to make an incursion into the church’s spiritual retreat center with total impunity they would strike me down at the Toledan’s house. The only thing left for me to do was call my buddy Toto, who would in alarm pick up the phone and hear my plea for help, that it was urgent for him to come and get me without delay at the coordinates I proceeded to give him, emphasizing that the hit men were on the prowl. Then I crouched down behind a garbage can near the public telephone booth to wait for my buddy to appear, for this was the only place I could hide where neither my pursuers nor a night watchman would find me, and while I was hiding and trembling I was racked by guilt for having abandoned my post, imagining what the bishop or my friend Erick might think about my disappearance and if they might not assume some collusion on my part, a thought I defended myself against by recalling the suspicious meeting between my friend Erick, General Octavio Pérez Mena, and Johnny the Jew, because this wasn’t an issue of someone pointing a finger, and my concern that they would lose the hundreds of testimonies of so many survivors didn’t make sense, for there would undoubtedly be copies of the report on the computers of my friend Erick, the gallant Joseba, and the little guy with the Mexican mustache, and as if this weren’t enough, I took out of my leather jacket my little notebook, for I never went anywhere without it and my passport, to look for fragments of the testimony I had copied down in the last few days, which in that pestilent shadow behind the garbage can I just barely managed to see so as to make my wait more tolerable, a text that said, May they wipe out the names of the dead to make them free, then no more problems we’ll have, which made it clear that even some of the indigenous survivors didn’t want to recover memories but rather perpetuate forgetting.