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.