The stories Héctor told me were legion, I said to myself with a certain nostalgia as I put the fried eggs on a plate and stood waiting in front of the stove for the espresso pot to boil, with nostalgia as well as another strange sensation, as if an idea were trying to percolate into my brain, an idea that was somehow separate from Héctor and the other memories I’d been entertaining, until I finally realized that there was no reason in the world for me to mention anything to Eva about my doctor’s disappearance, telling her would only start her ranting yet again against my return, give her more forceful arguments to use in her efforts to ruin my plans; I felt indignant just imagining her tirade, in which she’d accuse me of playing fast and easy not only with my own life but with the future of our daughter, whom I wanted to turn into an orphan, abandoned and without a single memory of her father. I poured the coffee and tried to calm myself down: eating breakfast under the influence of negative emotions interferes with digestion, and it wouldn’t be difficult, after all, to keep the news of Don Chente’s disappearance from Eva, because she almost never had any contact with Muñecón, she couldn’t tolerate that retinue of drunkards and blowhards that gathered around my uncle; in any case, it would be ill-advised to mention it to her, or to anybody else, I thought again, until I had more information about what had actually happened to my doctor. Luckily the yolks of my eggs were soft and runny enough to soak up with pieces of bread, just how I liked them, not hard and overcooked as Eva preferred, even in this we were incompatible, I told myself as I sipped the coffee and tried to remember those two nights in the forest in the mountains of Hidalgo, where Héctor, warmed by the campfire, confided to me a terrible story: on the eve of that military operation on the heels of which Tamba would die in an ambush, while the guerrilla band, on its way to its objective, was resting next to a ford in the Motochico River, Héctor received word in a coded message broadcast over the radio — as occurs in every war — that his wife had been captured at a checkpoint an hour earlier, a checkpoint on the highway leading to Chalatenango near the El Limón bridge, along the same river they were resting next to at that moment. Héctor’s wife was a Mexican named Juanita, a teacher by profession, who was riding the bus to the regional capital in Chalatenango, where she’d be met and taken to the guerrilla camp, a plan that was aborted when the military stopped the bus on the bridge, unloaded the passengers to check their IDs, then took said woman into captivity. Héctor was then faced with one of the biggest dilemmas of his life, a devastating predicament, he told me while we watched the leaping shadows and listened to the crackling of the dry branches being consumed by the fire, because he knew that it was possible for his guerrilla band to quickly traverse those approximately three miles separating them from the government roadblock and attempt to rescue his wife, which would of course have meant scrapping the operation he had been assigned — to attack the military outpost in San Fernando — which in the end he carried out.
And while I was pouring ketchup on the whites of my eggs, deeply moved by the memory of Héctor’s story, I came to the verge of shedding tears — it’s a well-known fact that we wear our feelings on our sleeve when we’re hungover — imagining what it must have been like for that warrior to have to choose between making an attempt to rescue his wife and carrying out his assigned mission, a mission that would be crucial to the progress of the war — the conflict between a lover’s passion and a warrior’s discipline, a true Greek tragedy, I thought as I sipped my coffee, because in the end Juanita disappeared forever, the soldiers tortured her until she was dead and then got rid of her body who knows how. What would I have done in that situation? How would I have behaved? Would I have set off with my troops to free Eva or persevered in my assigned mission and then learned to live with the guilt, as Héctor had done? But that’s all nonsense, I thought all of a sudden, emerging from my daydreams, it’s easy to identify with someone else in order to indulge in self-pity, but all it takes is a split second of lucidity to realize the ridiculous nature of one’s afflictions: my plan was to end my relationship with Eva, that’s why I was leaving. And I would never be in a situation like the one Héctor had faced because I wasn’t a guerrilla fighter and never would be, given my antipathy to following orders, my total aversion to the demands of life as a combatant, especially the discomfort of carrying a backpack from camp to camp and shitting in the open air, none of which suited me at all — I found that out when I made a futile attempt to be a boy scout and it was confirmed once again during those two days I spent with my Argentinian comrade.
I carried my dirty dishes to the sink, told myself that enough was enough with the memories, it would be best to simply forget what Héctor had told me, as well as what he had taught me, during those two days we spent in fatigues in the forest in the mountains of Hidalgo, where we had gone from Mexico City, where the Argentinian went to recover from a gastric ulcer that had forced him to leave the front, and where he remained for several weeks while being treated for his ulcer — caused by the tensions of war and also, I think, by the repressed torment of having abandoned Juanita — a tumultuous period of repose for the guerrilla fighter, after which he’d return to the battlefield, where he’d die a few months later, blown to pieces by an enemy grenade that fell into the trench where he’d taken shelter during a battle in the foothills of the Guazapa Volcano. I really should change the tape playing in my head, I kept telling myself, because if I didn’t, I’d run the risk of another panic attack, especially if I started wondering what I knew that the military might be interested in, what information they would try to extract from me after they captured me upon my arrival at the Comalapa Airport, a panic attack I could prevent only if at that very moment I started to move toward the stairs, knowing that the intelligent thing to do was get dressed and go pick up my check before anything else could happen.
10
TO BUY THE TICKET or not to buy the ticket, that was the question I kept asking myself again and again while sitting on the bar stool and fidgeting, as if there were ants in my pants, having almost finished my first Bloody Caesar and firmly intending to order another, for although my physical discomfort had decreased, the same could not be said of my anxiety, mostly because I had called Muñecón several times to ask if he’d heard any news of Don Chente, two hours having already passed since he announced to me that Don Chente’s relatives had been waiting for him in vain at Comalapa Airport; but nobody was picking up at Muñecón’s apartment, which made me fear the worst — rather than consider that he had simply gone out to run an errand, as under any other circumstances I would have — and suspect that bad news about my doctor had forced him to go out in the middle of the day, when my uncle customarily stayed put at home.