For one brief moment, I tuned out, as Mr. Rabbit, aficionado of clichés, would have said; in other words, I took a mental leave of absence from the scene in which Muñecón was repeating the story while Iris, Mario Varela, and I were supposedly listening with rapt attention, allowing myself to be distracted by a voice that I had begun to hear more frequently since the first hypnosis session with Don Chente, a voice expressing its discomfort with what had been until then my routine, a voice that at the moment was making fun of me, mocking the ridiculous lie I’d told myself in order to make myself believe that I went to Muñecón’s for something other than the free brandy and the opportunity to show off in that vaudeville of political gossip-mongering; also mocking the ridiculousness of my being there, in that living room, feeling somehow special when the truth was, I was no different from my uncle — in spite of my youth, I also wasted my time repeating the choicest gossip about the so-called political situation to whomever would listen; moreover, I was also allowing myself to slip into the morose state of mind that accompanied that voice, a kind of distancing whereby I could contemplate the scene in slow motion, as if I were standing behind myself, with myself included in the picture, which made me not feel fully part of what was going on even though I knew I was part of it.
But I tuned out for only a moment, immediately silencing the voice resounding in my head, which wasn’t my voice, and leaving that morose state of mind to rejoin the fray of reactions to Muñecón’s story, which ended with the moral that the psychotic torturer had shown more courage and daring than the Communists, who had rejected his proposal to hold parallel and secret negotiations, a moral that immediately lit a fire under Mario Varela’s passion to defend his comrades and opened the way for an exchange of conflicting opinions — these being the juiciest moments of those get-togethers in my uncle’s living room. A second glass of brandy having infused me with a certain intensity of conviction, and determined not to let the opportunity pass me by, I declared that moral goodness and political efficiency are two very different things, a concept certain leftists — who believe that evil and stupidity go hand in hand when sometimes the exact opposite is true — find difficult to understand: “One thing is to be evil, and another, a fool,” I pontificated exultantly. My assertion aroused Muñecón’s zeal and Mario Varela’s anger, inasmuch as the latter assumed I was indirectly calling him a fool, which was not my intention at all, as I proceeded to explain; nonetheless, I sensed that the atmosphere had gotten somewhat murky and was continuing to get more so when my uncle started talking about how nice the torturer had seemed, courtesy of a bottle of Black Label they finished off while the torturer gave Muñecón details of the proposal he should transmit to the Communists, even if they would surely reject it. Mario Varela’s face had been contracting into an expression of disgust as our host elaborated on the comedic talents of the psychopath, so I was not surprised when he leapt up and — on his way to the table to pour himself another glass of brandy — blurted out: “Don’t you ever forget, Alberto, that those sonsabitches killed Albertico!” Mario Varela’s blow, dealt cruelly and forcefully, created an ugly silence in the room, as well as contortions of pain on Muñecón’s face and probably in his spirit, because Albertico had been his only son, and he had indeed been arrested, tortured, and assassinated by a National Police death squad in 1980, when Major le Chevalier was the leader of the death squads that operated within the police force. Iris and I turned toward him in alarm, not because we were afraid that Muñecón would be felled by that well-aimed blow, but because we knew that if we didn’t act quickly he would slip into telling the story of Albertico’s death, the long and sinuous story about how his son and his son’s wife, a lovely Danish girl, were captured, the desperate efforts that were made to have them released, the uncertainty, the growing terror as the days passed, the anonymous call that informed him of their murder, the bloodcurdling trips to dumping sites around the country to try to find their bodies; Iris and I knew that if my uncle started slipping down the slope of telling that story, we’d all be doomed for the rest of the night, forced to listen to him for no less than an hour, because once I had timed him — once out of the maybe fifteen times I’d had the pleasure of being present for that particular show — and it had taken him exactly one hour and seventeen minutes to stage the tragedy without interruptions, because there was no way to interrupt him, considering the intensity of his pain and guilt, his tearful eyes, his heavy breathing, and finally his inconsolable sobs. That’s why, before the ugly silence produced by Mario Varela’s blow had come to an end, I hurried to ask Muñecón if he’d had any news of Don Chente, if he had a phone number in San Salvador where I could reach him after I arrived, eager as I was to continue the treatments in order to finish once and for all with my irritable bowel problems.
“Chente’s in San Salvador?” Mario Varela asked hastily, also apparently eager to change the subject — he did not have the leisure to feel proud of the blow he’d dealt, knowing instead only the wingbeat of furtive guilt, followed by the fear that Muñecón would launch into his tale of woe, which Mario Varela had surely heard even more times than I had, and had even helped construct, I told myself at that moment, because if, as I suspected, the Communist apparatchik had been Albertico’s boss at the time of his murder in San Salvador, it was only logical that Muñecón’s moving story would have been based on Mario Varela’s version, at least in part.
“Doña Rosita died,” Muñecón mumbled after another gulp of brandy, still resenting the blow and collapsing onto the sofa. The use of Don Chente’s mother’s given name gave me reason to believe that my uncle and Mario Varela knew her well, which seemed a fortunate coincidence that would make it possible for me to insist on the subject, thereby moving us resolutely away from the story of Albertico’s death and allowing me to obtain more information about my doctor now that I was planning to see him in San Salvador.
“How long have you known Don Chente’s family?” I asked Muñecón, hoping he would recover his exuberance, his narrative élan: it was obvious that he had still not recuperated from the upset the memory of Albertico’s murder had occasioned, and he needed one last push to return to the present. “Since 1944, at least,” Mario Varela piped in as he savored his brandy, during the so-called general strike to oust the dictatorship of Martínez, when the committee of medical students Chente belonged to was leading the struggle, when many of its members, including my doctor, were arrested. The expression on Muñecón’s face indicated that he was slowly beginning to recall something, but soon his features relaxed, and then he began to be who he’d been before the blow had been dealt, immediately correcting Mario Varela: it had been two years earlier, in 1942, during one of his parents’—my grandparents’—many changes of abode, when the Aragóns moved in next door to the Alvarados, he said, and they became friends despite the difference in age between Chente and Muñecón — Chente was five years older than Muñecón, and at that stage in one’s adolescence, five years is an abyss — establishing a friendship that had lasted till now and that had, in fact, started when they became accomplices in the art of matchmaking, because Chente had fallen in love at first sight with Muñecón’s sister, my aunt Pati, an utterly futile passion because she was already engaged to the Costa Rican who would become her husband and with whom she would live in Costa Rica forever. Damn: till that moment I hadn’t realized how close my father’s family and my doctor’s family were, a realization that led me to think that when Don Chente wanted me to remember my relationship with my father, he was maybe playing cat and mouse with me, encouraging me to shed light on aspects of my life he already knew a lot about. It isn’t so surprising, then, that I would interrupt my uncle to ask him if my father and my doctor had been good friends at that time, to which Muñecón hastened to respond that, no, at that time my father was already married and living with his first wife and small children in another part of the city, and surely they had met but never gotten to know each other, I mustn’t forget that my father was twelve years older than the man who now stood up, his spirits rekindled, ready to tell the story of how he and María Elena, the family servant, had acted as Chente’s matchmakers, their objective being to prevent Pati from going to live in Costa Rica, a story that would not succeed in garnering my attention, which was focused instead on the fact that my uncle was getting drunker and drunker and would soon fall into the incoherent state he fell into every night, which would make it impossible for me to extract any information about how to get in touch with my doctor in San Salvador.