“You startled me,” I managed to say, sitting up straighter as she placed the vodka tonic down on the table.
And I told her, yes, my buddy Félix would soon show up, as long as no last-minute problems arose at the magazine, though I immediately asked myself if she had meant Mr. Rabbit, with whom I’d come to this terrace a couple of times. But why should I care whom the waitress had in mind, considering the scale of what had just happened to me: the simple act of attempting to establish my first childhood memory in order to decide where to start telling the story of my life had turned into an unanticipated labor that threatened to foment dangerous internal chaos, which made me suspect that Don Chente’s suggestion that I write my autobiography had not been fortuitous — there was a hidden motive behind the old man’s suggestion that was somehow related to the hypnosis sessions I had undergone. And to confirm this, I decided to persist in the task of scrounging around in my memory, for under certain conditions obstinacy can be a virtue; I then tried to establish my second memory, which would have come after the bombing — what a great title for the first chapter of an autobiography, if you’ll excuse the digression, “After the Bombing,” a splendid title, I repeated to myself enthusiastically, as if I were hard at work writing the story of my life. The second event from my childhood that had taken root in my memory occurred at the Montessori nursery school, where I was a distinguished student, a nursery school where one morning one of my classmates had the gall to take my blocks away from me, indeed, with the height of insolence he took my blocks and refused to give them back, despite my pleas, at which point I succumbed to a process of internal combustion and then reacted in an unexpected way, because the only thing that occurred to me to do was pick up in my right hand a wooden block that was still in my possession, and, at a moment when the bully was not paying attention, attack him with all my might, bashing him on the head again and again and again; I bashed that wooden block into the head of said child until his cries of pain caught the attention of our teacher, who quickly bent down and picked me up while other teachers rushed in to help the bully, who was lying on the ground, his head a bloody mess. According to my memory, the bully was taken to the emergency room and they locked me up in the office to wait for my mother, who was an English teacher at the same nursery school, and thanks to her intercession I was not expelled but only received a reprimand of which I have no memory at all, as I also have none of my little classmate who wanted to steal my blocks and ended up with his head bashed in, a boy who from that moment on would surely think long and hard before trying to take something that didn’t belong to him; it was at that moment long ago that I understood that the origin of violence is man’s desire to take what does not belong to him, forgive me the repetition and the pontificating tone.
Now that I was taking comfort in that second memory, and as I sipped my vodka tonic on the terrace of La Veiga and contemplated the pedestrians walking quickly along Insurgentes, I told myself that if they hadn’t expelled me from Montessori, if I had only received a mild reprimand, it was not because my mother worked there as a teacher but rather because my grandfather was, at the time, president of the powerful Partido Nacional, but above all because my grandmother was Doña Lena Mira Brossa, a woman with a tempestuous character and an explosive temper, whom the owner and director of the nursery school must have feared — as was only prudent — for I haven’t the slightest doubt that the instant she found out about the attempted robbery of my blocks and subsequent bloody developments, my grandmother Lena had taken my side, blaming my bully of a classmate in the harshest possible terms for not respecting private property — this was the mind-set she was famous for — and that she had threatened and berated the teacher in charge of playtime for not having paid due attention, not having stopped the young delinquent the moment he attempted to seize control of something that belonged to her little prince — that would be me — her only grandchild at the time. I savored the vodka, pleased that there was no fissure in this, my second childhood memory, and I also polished up my self-esteem a little, perhaps even puffing out my chest in that chair where I was sitting and drinking, because it was obvious that from a tender age I had been able to react decisively to injustice and take unexpected and devastating action against anyone who tried to take advantage of my apparent vulnerability.
Glancing down the side street past Sanborns, expecting to see Félix on his way, I told myself that the half hour we had agreed upon had already passed, and I wouldn’t wait for him any longer than it took me to finish my vodka, it was almost nightfall, and I had no intention of getting drunk on an evening when I much preferred to maintain the lucidity I’d enjoyed since leaving Don Chente’s penthouse apartment. And I also told myself that it was enough already, this scrounging around in my memory, such efforts served no purpose other than the concrete one of sitting down to write the story of my life, and the only thing I had so far achieved was to upend my serene state of mind, I’d do better to use my free time to put my affairs in order before I left for El Salvador. Instead, however, perhaps out of nostalgia for the serenity I’d lost, perhaps out of simple mental sloth, I turned my attention outward, let my gaze drift off and alight upon the passersby as I tried to imagine the world that afflicted them from looking at their faces, letting my restless mind play around at will, and from digression to digression I was soon remembering a dream I had had a few days before, really a kind of nightmare, vague in its development but blunt by the end, as a result of which I awoke, needless to say, and that was the only part I remembered, the end, when I killed someone but I couldn’t remember whom I’d killed nor the circumstances of the crime, just the sensation of having killed someone but without a specific memory of the act, the anguish produced by the guilt and the fear of having killed somebody without remembering the act or the victim, that was the end of the nightmare, from which I’d abruptly awoken, needless to say, but without experiencing any relief from the aforementioned anxiety; I spent a long time lying in bed, deeply shaken because something inside me was telling me that the dream was not a dream but rather a message from my unconscious, and that I had probably killed someone and now had no memory of it — my psyche had erased the fact, who knows when or how. Remembering that nightmare while drinking my vodka tonic on the terrace of La Veiga upset me again, just as it had upset me every time I’d remembered it; it gave me a kind of vertigo, as if I were at the edge of a black hole whose unknown strength might at any moment viciously suck me in and carry me off to a reality that I could not possibly imagine, the very possibility of which horrified me beyond all reason. It was at that moment, and thanks to a fortuitous association, that I asked myself with astonishment if I had had that nightmare the night after undergoing my first hypnosis session with Don Chente, if that nightmare had been a response to what my doctor had shaken up in my psyche while he had me in a hypnotic trance. Of course! I told myself with a certain amount of joy, sitting bolt upright in my chair and glancing rapidly around me, as if the people at the neighboring tables might have caught wind of my latest discovery; that was how to explain that nightmare: it was my dark side’s reaction to Don Chente’s efforts to penetrate it while I had no consciousness of him doing so.
I took another sip of vodka, a bit excited because I was beginning to see some amazing consequences of the treatment I was undergoing, and I presumed that that night, after my second hypnosis session, another strange dream awaited me. I leaned back in my chair, contemplating the glass on the table, which contained barely one last sip of vodka, thinking by now that Félix had gotten bogged down with those last-minute complications we journalists always get bogged down with, and probably wouldn’t show up, and that if I had any chance of finding any solace on that terrace, it wouldn’t be a good idea at all to have another vodka, the proper course of action would be to pay and make my way to the trolley stop. It was at that instant, while I was enjoying the slow passage of time before taking that final sip, carried away by another association my mind had made with no help from my will, that I suddenly felt the impact, or rather, received the blow that pushed me into the black hole I so greatly feared: what if the crime I couldn’t remember was the murder of my little nursery school classmate whose head I had bashed in with the little wooden block? What if this was the death that was buried in my memory, the one I had wiped out through who knows what mechanisms and that now, because of the hypnosis sessions, was trying to come out into the open? Oh my God! I almost blacked out. I closed my eyes. It was impossible, I countered, I would have found out somehow, I would have sensed some hint of having committed an act of such magnitude in my childhood, no matter how hard my grandparents, my mother, and the people in her entourage would have tried to hide the fact, no matter how much they manipulated me until I’d erased it from my consciousness, no matter how they’d moved me to another country, some detail would have had to filter through, a glimpse, an insinuation, something, because otherwise it would have been a perfect crime, I told myself, trying to calm down. But the black hole in my mind was already spreading to my chest — the black hole that terrified me and in the face of which I wanted to flee as quickly as possible — so I compulsively downed the last sip of vodka, hoping it would reduce my anxiety, then looked around for the waitress to bring me the check, hoping to shake off that morbid dynamic of self-reproach I had fallen prey to by setting myself in motion, when it was evident that I didn’t have the slightest memory of having killed anybody in my life, because I had never committed such a barbaric act, and only a blithering idiot would pay attention to an absurd dream and agonize over it.