With my steaming cup of coffee in hand, I made my way back to the sofa where I’d spent the night, not understanding which of my psychic mechanisms had gotten me into such a scrape, which had given me nothing but the remorse that was now eating me alive, self-recrimination for having behaved so badly, for having hearkened back to old patterns of behavior that I thought I’d long since left behind, especially after my hypnosis sessions with Don Chente, which I thought had allowed me to achieve a new equilibrium between my emotions and my thoughts; but no, here I was once again, kicking and screaming in the quagmire of a moral hangover, mortified for having accused Mario Varela of facilitating Albertico’s murder eleven years earlier — when the truth was I had no precise information about it, only suppositions — and of having blurted that accusation out in front of Albertico’s father. Curled up in a fetal position, my hands covering my face, my stomach churning, and my spirit in great distress, I longed to sink into the sofa until I had vanished completely, then return after being transformed into somebody else; I longed for a passageway to open up above me, which I could scramble through and away, but then I managed to shake my head and tell myself, no, it was Mario Varela’s fault for defaming my doctor, I had merely reacted to his slanderous accusations, and since I had no other way to hurt him, I used the same recourse he had used to deal that blow against Muñecón, dredging up the case of Albertico. I should take a shower and then call my uncle to apologize and explain the sequence of events, I told myself as I got up and drank down my coffee, feeling more than ready to escape this overwhelming and morose mood and move forward in whatever way possible, but before anything else I had to call the news agency to ask if my final paycheck had been issued, as they’d promised it would be. I struggled to climb the stairs to the bathroom, where another surprise awaited me: a sheet of paper stuck to the mirror over the sink with a piece of chewing gum on which Eva had written in black marker: “If it’s inevitable that you keep coming home drunk, at least don’t shout so shamelessly. You woke Evita up.” Shout shamelessly? I searched for some memory that would put flesh on the bones of my guilty conscience, but all I found was the same black hole, and I stood there for a few seconds in a trance — the sheet of paper in one hand and the green chewing gum in the other — looking at my haggard face in the mirror, trying to stanch the anxiety that was overwhelming me, telling myself that I’d probably shouted from the living room because otherwise Eva’s message would have been more detailed; and while I was fingering that green gum like one of those bothersome pieces of snot that are so difficult to get rid of, I remembered that I had put that chewing gum in my mouth while waiting for a taxi at the corner of Insurgentes and Porfirio Díaz, while hatred toward Mario Varela was still seething inside me even as I rejoiced in the fact that the fat old sonofabitch would never be able to catch me. Next, I plopped down on the toilet, the time having finally come for me to empty my bowels and my bladder, which I did for a long time as I stared at the paper Eva had written, reading the text over and over again, preoccupied and not eager to be consumed by remorse for something I had no memory of doing, until I discovered what didn’t fit, the reason for the dissonance, and it was the repetition of the syllables “e-vi-ta,” once meaning “to avoid” in the word “inevitable,” and the other as the diminutive of my daughter’s name, a repetition that showed how little care Eva had taken while composing her warning, and also the mood she was in when she wrote it, I said to myself as I crumpled up the sheet and threw it into the wastepaper basket.
I’ve often wondered why men always want sex when they wake up with a hangover, whereas for women it’s just the opposite, the hangover inhibits carnal desire, or at least that’s what I’ve been told by the women I’ve lived with, and I’ve often wondered about it, even though Eva claimed that there was no mystery, masculine desire arises from the stimulation of the prostate by alcohol and by the bladder swollen with urine. But that morning I felt so bad standing there under the shower that instead of an erection and the subsequent customary impulse to jerk off, I had only enough energy to lean against the tile wall — almost nodding off, utterly exhausted — and let the hot water cleanse my body, relax it, hoping that at least a little of its warmth would reach my so badly beleaguered spirit; under the lull of the steamy water I began to feel enormous pity for myself, a bout of self-commiseration that bordered on tears, as if the universe had been plotting against me, a sensation of helplessness and vulnerability that made me slide slowly down, my back pressed against the wall, until I was sitting on the floor under the stream of water. And in this position, I remembered something that hadn’t come to mind for a very long time, but after such a night in Muñecón’s apartment it was only natural that it would: the memory of the expression on Albertico’s face when he answered, “Because I’m an ass,” after I asked him why he was returning to San Salvador when the Communist Party had just publically announced that it was joining the armed struggle and going underground, why not just stay in San José, Costa Rica — where we were talking after the New Year’s Eve party of 1980—why risk his life returning to San Salvador in the middle of all that slaughter and repression to work openly for the Party when it looked a whole lot like suicide, that’s what I asked him, why return under those circumstances, a question that Albertico answered with “Because I’m an ass,” without for a moment invoking heroism or the demands of the struggle, with a gesture of resignation that I’d never seen before; he said only, “Because I’m an ass,” a fool, an idiot, as if tragedy were his inevitable destiny, as if he already knew that two months later he would be murdered and that it would be a futile murder, just one of the thousands of murders carried out by the military during that period. And his response, which at the time seemed sad and very close to a cliché employed to avoid giving explanations, that cut-and-dried “Because I’m an ass” acquired, after Albertico’s murder, a dimension of fatality that would overwhelm me every time I remembered it and that struck me again now as I sat there under the shower, making me realize that I hadn’t appreciated in its true dimensions the effect of Albertico’s murder on my psyche, having thought that my father’s murder and my grandfather’s suicide were the only causes of those twisted features my personality sometimes exhibited; the murder of my cousin was there, crouching, without me perceiving how deeply it had penetrated my psyche, and as I stood up under the shower feeling slightly revived, I told myself that I would definitely have shared this discovery with Don Chente if he’d stayed in Mexico City and I’d gone to that afternoon appointment, the appointment he canceled so abruptly and that at that moment I so sorely missed.