Before leaving for Muñecón’s place, I decided to rest a little, having spent the morning at the administrative offices of the news agency playing the nice guy so they’d hurry up and issue my check; it’s exhausting to deal with any bureaucracy, which embitters the spirit and kicks the bottom out of the meaning of life, so a little shut-eye was just the thing to recuperate my energy and allow me to arrive in better shape at Muñecón’s apartment, where the sluices were open and the alcohol flowed freely and whoever couldn’t keep his balance would fall down and drown, as had happened to me several times. But instead of lying down on the couch in the living room, as I usually did, I went to the queen-size bed in our bedroom— which soon would cease to be ours and would become only Eva’s — in the hope of being comfortable enough to go through the process of relaxation I felt like doing at that moment — the same exercise Don Chente used to put me in a trance — whereby I hoped to recharge my batteries and keep my sights trained on my eventual encounter with my doctor in the city from which we had both fled and to which we were both now returning, though for different reasons. Once lying down, I began to focus my attention on my toes, until I felt the characteristic tingling of relaxation, then I continued along the soles of my feet and up to my ankles, and I proceeded with this familiar method as the tingling spread from one part of my body to the next until it reached the muscles in my face, which is when I began to doze off before falling into a deep sleep. Luckily, I woke up before Eva and Evita arrived home and so was able to remain in bed peacefully for a few minutes in that state of extreme calm, reconciled with myself and the world, a state in which I could assess my own thoughts and feelings about the difficulty I had accepting the life I had been given, and in particular I recalled certain things Don Chente had said about my relationship with the father figure in my life, that black hole of sorts into which he surely wanted to shine a light with the hypnosis sessions, making me aware of the fissures so I could go about repairing them; then the calm turned into profound sadness because little by little I became aware of the very deep disdain that dwelled in my heart, not only for my father and my father’s family, but also for my mother, and that all this poison had been injected into my entrails by my maternal grandmother, Lena, who had appointed herself sole custodian of my affection and admiration.
7
I WAS IN RATHER A STRANGE FRAME OF MIND when I left for Muñecón’s apartment, convinced that my friendship with the man who was expecting me was grounded in our common affinity for drinks and political gossip, and not in the fact that he was my uncle; I had never related to him as my uncle because when I was young enough to learn to relate to someone as an uncle, he didn’t visit my house, his relationship with my father, his older brother, having been characterized by conflict; moreover, a few weeks after my father’s murder, Muñecón was forced into exile because of his participation in the failed coup d’état of March 1972, so it wasn’t till ten years later that I would get to know him, when I ran into him in Mexico City among a small group of journalists who were attending a news conference called by the guerrillas to announce the launch of their military offensive, a conference I was assigned to cover as a reporter, and Muñecón recognized me as we were leaving and suggested we go have a drink at his place. Since then, I had gotten into the habit of visiting him at least once every couple of weeks, to drink the brandy he generously poured and exchange gossip about the ups and downs of the civil war and its political intrigues with him and his buddies, fellow Salvadorans who were always in his living room, mooching brandy and offering loads of bluster.
I walked down Porfirio Díaz to Muñecón’s apartment, which was actually just a few blocks away from Don Chente’s penthouse, my twofold purpose being to get a telephone number or other contact information for our doctor in San Salvador and to ask Muñecón a few questions about my father, if the conditions were propitious, because I now realized that in the eight years that I had been visiting him, we had almost never been alone, as I explained above, and we were both probably somewhat phobic about discussing family issues, probably for different reasons, I told myself while I was standing in front of the building, not yet venturing to ring the doorbell, because the fact is I hadn’t thought about what it was I wanted to know about my father, or if I was only trying to compensate for the appointment Don Chente had canceled so unexpectedly. Iris, Muñecón’s current lover and, though this was a minor detail, forty years his junior, came to open the door; she was a nice girl with generous curves and rosy cheeks, and I couldn’t understand for the life of me what she was doing with that old relative of mine. In the living room I found my host and his friend, Mario Varela, a Communist apparatchik who did not inspire me with confidence — so much for my luck, on top of which they’d already gotten a head start on the brandy and the conversation — and in whose presence I saw no point in pursuing any topic other than political gossip, nor would I have dreamed of mentioning my father under those circumstances because the Communists despised him, they considered him an informer for the military regime, as I had read in a history book that accused my father of having informed on a clandestine Communist radio station around 1960, a book written by none other than that clever poet Roque Dalton, so clever that he didn’t have the foggiest idea that his own comrades were stringing up the rope they’d soon hang him with; and I suspected that this accusation had been the direct cause of the discord that had ruined the relationship between my father and my grandfather, on the one hand, and my father and Muñecón, on the other, a subject I had never brought up with the latter because there had always been a guest like Mario Varela in the living room and because neither one of us wanted to delve into thorny family issues, as I’ve already mentioned. So I proceeded to pour myself a glass of brandy with mineral water and sit down to listen to the story Muñecón was starting to tell once again, a story I had already heard at least twice before while sitting in that armchair, because with his incipient senility and the systematic massacre of neurons occasioned by his compulsive consumption of alcohol, my uncle ended up repeating the same stories over and over again, unaware that his guests were bored and listened to him only out of the politeness due from those who are mooching his brandy. The oft-told adventure, which Muñecón dramatized as he paced around the living room with glass in hand, consisted of a surreptitious trip he had taken to San Salvador a few months earlier on a mission to serve as a mediator between his old Communist comrades and his old ultra-right-wing friends — if such people could be called “friends”—to promote secret and parallel negotiations to the ones being carried out officially between the government and the guerrilla leadership, a mission whose culmination had been Muñecón’s meeting with Major le Chevalier, the psychopathic founder of the death squads and strongman of the party in power, who had evidently seduced my uncle because there was no other way I could understand how meeting with that infamous torturer could have been for him an occasion of pride and boasting.