That’s why I say that the anxiety-ridden experience of that weekend — my constant vigilance of that vehicle loaded with telescopic sights — had made me realize how worrisome it was for Don Chente to disappear with all my secrets when I didn’t have the slightest idea what I had revealed to him. Though I tried to reassure myself that the old guy didn’t seem like some kind of vulgar informant but rather a decent and even wise person, and that at the end of the day the secrets about my life I’d shared with him were not enough to get me incarcerated, at the most they would make me blush in front of anyone who knew them, and surely at first I could deny that any of it had anything to do with me because the charm of hypnosis is that it reveals the dark zones in our psyches that we ourselves don’t even know exist, as Don Chente warned me. Just in case, though, I rushed to call Muñecón to ask him what he knew about our doctor’s sudden disappearance and complain that he had taken off when I needed him most, and since my plan was to move to San Salvador in one week at the most, it was unlikely that I’d be able to see him again, and my treatment would remain inconclusive.
“Chente is flying right this minute to San Salvador,” Muñecón told me over the phone. Damn, I thought, so the old guy beat me to it, without ever mentioning he was planning to go back himself, so much for any trust he had in me. “His mother died,” Muñecón added, so I would understand the urgency of Don Chente’s departure, and then he invited me over to his apartment later that same night for a drink, an invitation I accepted right away, even though I was still stunned by the news that my doctor was already on his way to San Salvador while I still had to wait a few days for the news agency to pay me before I’d know the exact date of my trip; and stunned also, though a bit less so, by the death of Don Chente’s mother or, rather, by the fact that he still had a mother, something I never would have imagined, given his age. Once I hung up on Muñecón, an idea came to me, the idea that not all was lost: I could see my doctor in San Salvador to continue the treatment if, that is, Muñecón would give me his contact information, needless to say, an idea that even excited me, because nothing would be more healing for my spirit than to finish the hypnotherapy at my new destination, where I was hoping to jumpstart my life and set it on a better path.