I was on my way out of the bathroom when the telephone started ringing with such urgency that I jumped, and my first thought was that it was Eva calling to accuse me of some other outrage or Muñecón calling to upbraid me for the events of the night before, that’s why I waited a few seconds, to prepare myself for the worst before picking up the phone; but what was my surprise when I recognized the voice of the secretary at the news agency, calling to tell me that my check was ready and I could come by to pick it up at my convenience. I was so happy I threw the towel into the air, and with it, my remorse and my hangover, life was finally smiling at me, damn right, then I clapped my hands, let out several shouts of joy, and opened the curtains to let in the sun, I would soon be leaving for San Salvador, where I would start a new life, where I would see my doctor again and continue my treatment. It was in this mood, optimistic and elated, that I decided to call Muñecón to apologize for the scene the night before, tell him that I was buying my ticket that very afternoon and would be flying to San Salvador on Sunday, yes, finally the dream of my return would be fulfilled, and for that very reason I needed him to tell me how to get in touch with Don Chente back home. Once I’d concluded my speech, my uncle told me not to worry about the incident with Mario Varela, he had also called early, contrite, to apologize, occupational hazards, Muñecón declared understandingly, and after a brief silence and in a laconic tone of voice, he muttered, “Chente hasn’t shown up.” What? “He hasn’t shown up. They were waiting for him at the airport and nobody knows where he is.”
9
I SAT NAKED ON THE EDGE OF THE BED, the towel draped over my lap, distraught, distrait, as if I’d just been punched and hadn’t been able to react, incapable of making any mental connections, my mind a blank, in a kind of limbo, perhaps the amount of alcohol still circulating in my bloodstream and the impact of the news of my doctor’s disappearance having created a short circuit that shut down my brain, causing in turn a massacre of neurons that plunged me into a cataleptic state for who knows how many minutes — time capriciously stretches out and shrinks back up under such circumstances — until finally the tape in my mind managed to get unstuck, and that’s when I began to react, moving from a state of shock to one of extreme anxiety, not only because of what Don Chente might have been suffering at the hands of the military torturers but also because I understood that the same fate awaited me — the moment I landed at Comalapa Airport, I, too, would disappear into the hands of the military, which apparently is what had just happened to my doctor. I fell back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling, as if in a trance, telling myself that if a prestigious doctor, married to a millionaire and with no truck with militancy or political passions, who had dared to return to his country only because his old mother had died, if he had disappeared into the hands of those military goons, how much more quickly would they pick me up, an unknown, half-starved journalist with friends in the ranks of the guerrilla armies who was returning with the suspicious intention of starting a political magazine. I kept curling up tighter and tighter into a ball until I was in a fetal position, and for the second time that morning I longed to disappear, to vanish into thin air — anxiety combined with a hangover easily skyrockets and turns into terror. Why, until that very moment, had I been so confident that nothing bad would happen to me if I returned before the civil war had ended? Where had I drummed up such naïve, even suicidal enthusiasm that allowed me to disguise the dream of my return not only as a stimulating adventure but also as my first step toward changing my life for the better? What made me think that the Salvadoran military would understand that I was not a guerrilla fighter but rather an independent journalist, that they would simply forget the stacks of articles I had written against them, the military, during my Mexican exile? Once these self-reproaches had rendered me contrite, memories of Albertico began to clobber me relentlessly, because it was all too obvious that eleven years later I was following in my cousin’s footsteps — returning to El Salvador to meet a certain death — but I was even stupider than Albertico because Albertico, a Communist militant, had been conscious of the risk he was taking, which is why when I asked him why he was returning in the middle of the carnage, he said, “Because I’m an ass,” whereas I was acting like an utter imbecile, even more unconscious and more naïve — how else to explain the excitement I had been flaunting up till that moment. And then I recalled that morning of January 3, 1980—it is so clear in my mind — when a gringo came to visit Albertico in the large living room of the family home in the Escalante neighborhood of San José, Costa Rica — where I was also staying for New Year’s, as I already said — a gringo who introduced himself as a journalist working for a newspaper in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, I don’t remember exactly, who interviewed my cousin supposedly for a feature article he was writing about the political violence in El Salvador, a gringo whom I barely glimpsed as I walked down the hallway but whom I immediately suspected of being an informer, a spy, or something even worse, because as I walked by I happened to hear him asking Albertico about his studies in Moscow, a question that could be answered with total honesty there in that Costa Rican city of lambs, but from the perspective of San Salvador, it could lead one directly to torture and death, which is exactly what happened to my cousin. From then on, I never had the least doubt that the interview with that gringo posing as a journalist was decisive in Albertico’s murder: with the information that gringo had gotten out of him, CIA butchers decided to target him for execution, but they would wait till he had returned to San Salvador, where they could sic on him those criminals in uniform, which is what they did two months later; from that moment on, I started suspecting all gringo journalists on principle, whatever their sympathies or the little calling cards they hoisted up their flagpoles — anything you revealed to them or confided in them could get you sent straight to the gallows. Still curled up fetus-like on the bed, wallowing in a pigsty of self-reproach, I remembered that my life was so bound up with the murder of my cousin that I had been forced into exile precisely because of that incident: a few days after Albertico had been kidnapped by police commandos, Fidelita, my mother’s maid, returned from the grocery story greatly alarmed because of a jeep parked in front of the house with some sinister-looking goons inside, insolently watching our house, which my mother attributed to the fact that my uncle Alberto — Muñecón — was using her car to drive around the country to search for the bodies of Albertico and his wife, because he didn’t have a car, having just returned from Costa Rica; Muñecón was using my mother’s car to visit the sites where the police and army death squads dumped the bodies of the activists they had kidnapped and tortured. It was the presence of that jeep with those sinister-looking goons in front of my mother’s house that made me decide that same afternoon to leave the country, to get the hell out of there; I had absolutely no desire to be a martyr, and, just in case, I spent the night at another relative’s house and went from there directly to the bus station at dawn. How could I, eleven years later, have possibly forgotten that traumatic experience and been so eager to return to the place I had left in so much fear? And what seemed even worse: how could I possibly have any illusions about my return, as if this were the first time I’d returned with the dream of “participating in History,” for god’s sake, when the fact was I’d returned exactly once before, a few days after Albertico, only to end up leaving in a hurry a few months later, as I’ve just explained?