“I met him in the Young Communist League,” Mario Varela said, wanting to keep talking about my doctor and not Muñecón’s matchmaking prowess, without realizing that the sentence he’d just uttered so casually was for me a huge revelation, which enhanced Don Chente’s stature in my mind: the old man wasn’t only a medical doctor, a psychologist, an acupuncturist, a hypnotist, and a student of homeopathy, he’d also been a Communist — a kind of modern Paracelsus! I told myself excitedly, for a few months earlier I’d read a biography of this enigmatic Renaissance character, who knew about the inner life and also the outer one — and undoubtedly he would cure my bodily as well as my spiritual maladies. I assumed that it was this Communist activism that had led to his capture for having treated a wounded guerrilla fighter in 1980, and then his exile, as Muñecón had told me when I asked for some information about the doctor before putting myself in his hands, but Mario Varela soon disabused me of these notions by saying that Don Chente had been a good cadre in the Young Communist League “until he married that oligarch and deserted,” spoken with such scorn that Muñecón himself set aside his matchmaking memories to turn his verbal sputum to the defense of our doctor, perhaps because he perceived an indirect allusion, the glance of a new blow — he himself had also been a member of the party in his youth, then had left and was now a fellow traveler, as they were called. “Chente has always been a man with left-wing sensibilities,” my uncle stated categorically and with a frown. “Why did they put him in jail? Who was he treating when they arrested him?” I asked, throwing in my two cents and still not understanding the whole muddle. “Who knows what organization that bastard belonged to, and I bet Chente had no idea, either,” Mario Varela said, with even more scorn, as if my doctor, instead of being a fellow traveler, had been some stupid pawn of the non-Communist guerrillas, because at that time there were so many groups with so many acronyms, and the only thing uniting them was the sectarianism they all fought with.
It was at that moment that I told myself it was time to leave — enough brandy was coursing through my bloodstream — and the most prudent thing for me to do was to call Muñecón the following day, early in the morning when he was in his right mind, to find out how to get in touch with Don Chente in San Salvador, because if I kept drinking, it would take an enormous effort for me to get myself out of that apartment at midnight, and then I’d suffer one hell of a hangover, a luxury I couldn’t afford given the number of things I still had to deal with before my departure. That’s what I told myself at that particular moment, but the next moment I was watching Iris sitting quietly on the sofa, listening to but not participating in the conversation; she had become Muñecón’s lover only a few months before — a chubby girl, who was studying political science and working as a secretary at the Ministry of the Interior and looked more like my uncle’s granddaughter than someone with whom he shared a bed and paroxysms of pleasure, a girl about twenty years old in love with an old man of sixty or so. Damn! I exclaimed to myself, trying to find some logical explanation for such madness. Then an idea flashed through my mind, not as a suspicion but as an absolute conviction: Iris was an informer for the Mexican intelligence services, hired to keep an eye on the plots being hatched in Muñecón’s apartment, the meeting place of Communists and one or another ultra-right-winger. Damn! That’s why she looked so fascinated, if maybe a little dopey, why she didn’t miss a word of what either Muñecón or Mario Varela said, because afterwards she would have to report everything that had happened in this room to her controller, I told myself as I contemplated the scene with a certain amount of horror, convinced that my uncle must have been aware of the situation or at least harbored suspicions, which led me to another even worse idea, that maybe the whole thing was a setup, and Muñecón himself reported to the Mexican intelligence services. . It was to chase away this last idea, to put a stop to the paranoia that was spinning out of control, that I stood up and walked over to the table to pour myself another brandy, totally forgetting my previous decision to initiate my retreat; I poured myself the glass that would push me over a cliff I never would have even approached if, instead of pursuing my fears’ circuitous pathways, I had simply taken my leave.
8
I OPENED MY EYES, and for a few seconds I didn’t know where I was, having laid myself low with a binge of such magnitude that when I now woke up to it, horrified and in dread, I didn’t recognize the ceiling I was looking at nor the piece of furniture I was stretched out on; my mind was a deep dark well from which I was struggling with enormous effort to extract a few basic images, struggling to comprehend that I was lying on the living room sofa and not in the bedroom with Eva, that I had returned so drunk the night before that I had not even managed to get past the living room or climb the stairs to the bedroom where I would have undoubtedly proceeded to wake Eva up to start a row, instead collapsing on the sofa with my clothes and even my shoes still on, snoring like a fiend, my mouth open and drooling. I assumed that’s what happened, as it had many times before, but I didn’t know anything for sure, my memory was a black hole, as I’ve already said, and the last thing I remembered was the moment around midnight when I got into a taxi on the corner of Insurgentes and Porfirio Díaz, a block from Muñecón’s apartment, but all images from then on had been erased — paying the driver, getting out of the taxi, opening the door to the house, and falling onto said sofa where I was now lying without budging, afraid that even the slightest movement would make my head explode. Jesus, how had I gotten out of the taxi? And my wallet? I brought my hand to the back left pocket of my pants and felt nothing, my leather wallet wasn’t there, I said to myself, terrified because the worst thing that could happen to me at that moment was to lose my wallet with my ID and all my credit cards, when all that was left for me to do before taking off for San Salvador was pick up my final paycheck and buy my airplane ticket, so the last straw would have been for the taxi driver to have taken advantage of my intoxication and stolen my wallet. I turned my head very carefully toward the coffee table, where I sometimes put my wallet, but I couldn’t make out what was on top of it because the curtains were closed, barely a ray of light was filtering through, and my already disastrous eyesight was suddenly completely blocked by a surge of pain that very nearly split open my skull; I took a deep breath, brought the palms of my hands to my temples to apply pressure and thereby reduce the pain, and told myself that I needed to get up, no matter what the cost, I urgently needed to sit myself up on that sofa in one single movement, because if I did it slowly, the pain would paralyze me. And that’s what I did, boom, the good news being that the first thing I saw was my wallet on the coffee table, hurray; the bad news, that I was in worse shape than I’d thought, as was clear from the way my stomach was churning and my sweat was reeking of brandy, and from the sensation I had that my mass of gray matter was about to explode. It was eleven twenty in the morning, damn it, with so many errands to run and me there prostrate and trembling; I hadn’t even heard Eva and Evita leave in the morning. With starts and stops and a few long strides, I stumbled into the kitchen to get a glass of water to douse the scorching heat in my esophagus, actually one glass of water after another, then I prepared coffee in the espresso maker and took a bottle of Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator; first of all, I had to get rehydrated, and I could already hear the footfalls of the moral hangover approaching, poised to attack with all its might, because even though I’d forgotten what happened after I’d gotten into the taxi, the events in Muñecón’s apartment began to take clear shape in my memory, a shape that without exaggeration could be described as sinister, because the havoc taking place in my body would soon be joined by remorse.