Luckily, the waitress was soon standing next to me, check in hand, asking if I was going to wait for my friend in a tone of voice that made me think that she didn’t care if I was staying for a while longer but rather if my friend was coming, which in turn gave me the feeling that the waitress was hoping to see Mr. Rabbit — a man graced with a certain elegance whom I’d been drinking with the last time I’d sat at this same table and she’d waited on us — not Félix, who was swarthy and ugly. I answered that unfortunately I had another appointment, and could she please tell my friend, if he showed up, that I had waited until the agreed-upon time, without specifying which of my friends would come looking for me, I was in no mood to play matchmaker when my sole concern was to set myself in motion, get my mind moving in a different direction, and return to my immediate and mundane concerns, especially the issues I still had to resolve with Eva before leaving for my country — I had to stop, once and for all, scrounging around in my early memories, as it had now become crystal clear that this notion of writing the story of one’s own life was a bad business, even if Don Chente had recommended it, and it also became clear that memory is unreliable and can put one in rather a tight spot.
6
HOW SURPRISED I WAS that Tuesday afternoon when I returned home and listened to Don Chente’s message on the answering machine, a message informing me that he would have to cancel our appointment the following day because unfortunately he had to leave the country for an undetermined amount of time and would get in touch with me upon his return, if I was still in the city, to continue the hypnotherapy that was doing me so much good. There’s no question that the cancellation of my appointment completely threw me for a loop, I hadn’t expected such a turn of events, and my first reaction was bewilderment: the voice on the answering machine, identifying itself as Dr. Alvarado, did not match the timbre of the voice etched in my memory, a fact that momentarily shocked me but soon made way for anger — I have always taken sudden cancellations as personal insults — though above all for deep frustration, the truth being that my hopes were riding high that after the next hypnosis session, I would be completely cured, freed from the tangled cobwebs contorting my bowels, ready to leave and begin this new stage of my life; now it turned out that I would have to go without finishing the therapy and, even worse, without knowing what I had revealed about myself to Don Chente while I was in those hypnotic trances.
It sounds strange that I hadn’t, until that moment, been particularly concerned about what I’d told my doctor while under hypnosis, but this was my first experience lying on the divan of unconscious confessions, and I expected a subsequent consultation, a summation during which Don Chente would repeat back to me, methodically and with consummate wisdom, what had come out of my mouth during those trances, consequent to which he would illuminate those dark areas of my psyche that were irritating my intestines and were responsible for certain kinks in my character. But now that the old man had disappeared without a trace, I began to have concerns about what I might have told him, which he had undoubtedly written down meticulously in his notebook, concerns that were then aggravated by the anguished circumstances I found myself in the previous weekend, when I had no choice but to help Mr. Rabbit deal with an unusual and somewhat dangerous situation. What happened is that my friend called me on Thursday afternoon from a phone booth, as he always did, to tell me, with his typical verbal parsimony, that he urgently needed to see me, which, coming as it did from him, could only plunge me into my darkest fears, send me scurrying to get on the Metro and ride to the station near where Mr. Rabbit would pick me up at five o’clock on the dot, not one minute before or one minute after, for he strictly adhered to the protocols of clandestine life. While we were driving through the city in his pickup, he shared with me the cross he had to bear, which would soon become the cross I would bear: peace negotiations between the government and the guerrillas were progressing rapidly and showing great promise, so military operations had decreased and any moment now would stop altogether along various fronts, a situation that affected the logistical measures carried out by my friend, who was responsible for guaranteeing the safe passage of weapons through Mexico — from the U.S. border to the border with Guatemala; the negotiations were affecting his efforts to such an extent that he had recently received an order to stop a shipment already on its way and park it somewhere until he received further instructions. “So?” I asked as we waited for a green light on Avenida Revolución, and I had a hunch that I’d rather not hear the answer. Mr. Rabbit, without flinching, said that it had occurred to him that maybe we could store the shipment for a few days at my father-in-law’s country house in Tlayacapan, a town located about an hour south of Mexico City, where, it was true, the father of my daughter’s mother owned a country house that stood empty most of the time, a house Eva, Evita, and I, along with other relatives, sometimes went to on weekends. I told him he was completely crazy, how could he possibly have dreamt up such an outrageous plan— taking a van full of rifles and ammunition to the house of a man who would soon cease to be my father-in-law and where nobody would understand the presence of a load like that — and how the hell was I going to explain to Eva that now that we were in the process of breaking up for good, I’d had the bright idea of hiding a van full of weapons for the guerrillas at her father’s house. “It’s not a van,” Mr. Rabbit said just as he turned off at the Mixcoac crossing, it being that hour of the afternoon when traffic started backing up. “It’s a pickup truck, like this one. Nobody would even notice,” he explained. Then he added, “And it’s not carrying rifles and ammunition.” I told him I didn’t understand, so what was it carrying, would he please explain and tell me once and for all if this was another really bad joke like the one he’d played on me about Eva’s two-bit actor. “They’re telescopic sights,” Mr. Rabbit said, and he turned his inexpressive face toward me at the exact moment I felt a cramp in my guts that could only presage the return of that horrible colitis I thought I was free of. “Telescopic sights?” I cried out in disbelief. And then he explained that they were special sights for Dragunov rifles used by guerrilla snipers, sights that gave them accurate aim from up to 1,400 yards away, which allowed the snipers to immobilize an enemy column for an entire afternoon, a single sniper placed in a strategic building could hold off an entire company of soldiers for a whole afternoon, like in that Stanley Kubrick movie about Vietnam, remember? Full Metal Jacket, Mr. Rabbit pronounced the title with a certain amount of swagger — he’d been a film buff since he was a teenager, and he thought he had a superior accent in English. I told him I hadn’t seen that movie and I had no interest whatsoever in talking about movies, but he’d better look elsewhere to stash that pickup with its telescopic sights because there was always a caretaker at my father-in-law’s house, a sharp-eyed mestizo named Odilón, who, at the first whiff of anything suspicious would dig through the boxes, and when he found the famous sights he’d immediately turn us in, and the consequences would be dire. “There are no boxes,” Mr. Rabbit told me, with a suspicious frown, which immediately made me think that this really was just another joke that he was carrying to a fever pitch, with who knows what dark purpose, so I kept staring at him with a thoroughly disgruntled look on my face so he’d know it was time to cut the crap, but he remained focused on the road and at the intersection with Churubusco he had to make a daring maneuver to turn off toward Coyoacán. “The sights are expertly hidden in the truck’s chassis so that not even the best customs’ agents would find them,” he said in that victorious tone, his way of mocking my lack of discernment.