I felt more confident when I sat down in front of Don Chente’s desk after the exam because his behavior so far had been more in keeping with what one expects from a doctor, who first tests the flesh and then engages with the metaphysical, which is precisely what he now did, insisting that I tell him about my current concerns and still not offering any diagnosis for the pain, even though he had taken notes of his findings after pressing my abdomen in a variety of spots; I told him that I was just about to quit my job at a news agency, in fact, I was going to work there for only a few more weeks, my plan being to radically change my life, return to El Salvador to take part in a journalism project I had been invited to join, and which I was very excited about, because the negotiations between the government and the guerrillas were making steady progress, and peace could be glimpsed on the not-too-distant horizon.
“Are you taking your family?” Don Chente asked, leaning back in his chair and pressing his hands together in front of his mouth, his brow somewhat furrowed, which made me think that he considered my decision a mistake. I told him that my wife and young daughter would remain in Mexico, it wasn’t as if I wanted to convert my adventure into a tragedy, but once the civil war was over, they would join me. “What does your wife think?” he asked, still with extreme tact and not taking his eyes off me, to which I responded, still staring at the bookshelves, that she had finally accepted the idea, without mentioning that my relationship with my wife had had the stuffing beaten out of it, not because of my trip, but because five years of cohabitation was enough to destroy anybody’s nerves, and my departure was to a large extent the result of my need to place enough distance between us to assess whether it was worthwhile to ever light that particular hellfire again.
Then, behaving like an older incarnation of Pico Molins instead of informing me about the condition of my liver, which was causing me so much anxiety, Don Chente started asking me the same childish questions I had had to answer that first time, after which I had walked out of Pico Molins’s office — totally incredulous and carrying my little bottle of sulfur drops — onto the main plaza of Coyoacán, telling myself that it had been a waste of time, though fortunately not also of money, to go see a homeopath who had not even examined me, and that I had to immediately find another doctor, an allopathic doctor, which is what I proceeded to do right away, spending a pretty penny on a top specialist, laboratory tests included, so that in the end he could tell me that I suffered from gastritis and colitis due to widespread irritation of the digestive system, exactly what Pico Molins had diagnosed for free after having looked only at my iris and my tongue — what a way to throw away the little bit of money I had! — which is why I decided to take the sulfur drops exactly as he had prescribed rather than the list of expensive medicines the specialist had so solemnly included in his prescriptions.
And the moment I thought that Don Chente had finished asking questions, such as if I liked hot or cold drinks, I took the opportunity to tell him that I had been subjected to the same line of interrogation many years earlier by a homeopath, but that according to the degrees I saw on his wall, he was a medical doctor, an acupuncturist, and a psychologist, but not a homeopath, whereby Don Chente explained that at the age of nearly seventy, he was a student in his last year of homeopathic medicine at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, the only place that offered such a program, and he thought it a marvelous body of knowledge on a par with all the others he had delved into, a disclosure that made me think this little old man was a true Pandora’s box and that he’d probably end up being as good a doctor for me as the disappeared Pico Molins. But I was unable to carry on with my musings because, without giving me a chance to catch my breath and without beating around the bush, Don Chente began a new line of interrogation about my parents, my grandparents, and the circumstances under which I’d spent the first few years of my life, which Pico Molins had not asked me about, as far as I could recall, an interrogation carried out with the utmost tact but one that soon had me telling him that I had spent the first few years of my life with my maternal grandparents, and that my grandmother was a strict woman, to say the least, who loved order and old-school tradition, and that she had raised me those first few years according to that criteria — a woman, moreover, who hated my father more than anything in the world and never ceased to speak scornfully of him even after he’d been murdered. “How old were you then?” Don Chente asked, continuing to take notes. I told him eleven years old, which is why I barely had any memories of him, because he had been killed before the 1972 coup in an incident that remains obscure. “I remember it,” Don Chente mumbled, for as Muñecón’s friend he had to have known about that crime, which spared me from going into detail — as he put it, he was interested in what had remained in my psychic and emotional memory about my relationship with my father, and not what had appeared in the newspapers.
I am a very anxious person — even though this isn’t readily apparent — so I found it intolerable to talk about my family life before Don Chente had revealed to me the cause of the pain in my liver, before he had told me either that the organ was irreparably inflamed and damaged by alcohol and my past illness or that he could prescribe some remedy that would soon cure me. Don Chente met my question with an extended silence, leaned back in his chair, and with a long face that led me to fear the worst, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with your liver,” an assertion that left me dumbstruck — the pain was right there in that organ — and unable to respond in time to ask him what, in that case, was causing the stabbing pain in my ribs, because before I could do so Don Chente said, “Let me tell you a story that will help you understand.” And the old man started telling a story that I didn’t pay much attention to at first, so consumed was I by fear, but he soon drew me in, despite his quiet and monotonous voice, and his modest demeanor:
“The different stages mankind has gone through during its millennia of evolution are experienced by each human being over the course of his lifetime on a vastly reduced scale. Before the Ice Age, man, like other mammals, couldn’t control his bladder and bowels: he wandered through the mountains emptying them whenever they filled up no matter where he was. The Ice Age led to a great change in civilization. When humans took shelter in caves and were forced to live a sedentary life, they discovered that they did not like to defecate or urinate where they slept, so they learned to control their bladder and bowels and demand that others do the same — which is why the best way to toilet train a puppy is to place his bed where he does his business. . This was also the first time a human being experienced the emotion we now call anxiety, which consists of having to choose between two options: either he satisfies his instinct to empty himself wherever he happens to be, which means he’d have excrement next to his bed, as we call it now, or he controls his bowels and bladder and empties himself elsewhere. In the first two or three years of his life, every human being goes through this entire process that humanity underwent over the course of thousands of years. Do you understand? When a child is being toilet trained, he confronts anxiety for the first time: either he follows his instinct and does his business whenever he feels pressure on his sphincters, or he pleases his parents and controls his bowels and bladder as they’ve demanded he do. Anxiety and bowel control are closely related. If a child is raised strictly and is thereby strongly repressed, he will have anxiety throughout his life about his bowel control and, hence, his colon. And when, as an adult, he needs to decide between two options, he will feel anxiety, and that anxiety will make him tense up his sphincter and his colon. This is the cause of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, an ailment most human beings suffer from at some point, even if they’re not aware of it. This is your ailment.”