To buy the ticket or not to buy the ticket, I repeated to myself over and over again while compulsively chucking peanuts into my mouth, the check I had picked up at the news agency burning a hole through my shirt pocket over my heart, waiting for me to deposit it in the bank, something I should have done before slipping into the bar in Sanborns, where I now was, but my thirst was stronger than my common sense, and the moment I said goodbye to Charlie Face, the director of the agency, a Chilean who was much too well behaved to understand the urgency of a hangover, I dashed headlong to the Bloody Caesar I was now drinking, though not without first stopping at a phone booth to call Muñecón, as I already said, without anybody answering as I’d hoped. And my dilemma was the following: to buy the ticket without knowing for sure if Don Chente had been captured was idiotic, but to delay meant running the risk of losing the reservation and of the price going up, as the girl at the travel agency warned me.
The next time I called Muñecón it was from the phone located at the entrance to the restrooms in Sanborns, after I had downed half the Bloody Caesar in one gulp; not finding him and knowing that it’s much too disconcerting to be all alone with one’s anxiety, I decided to call my buddy Félix, who fortunately was still at the office and also longing for a drink to cure his own hangover, because the night before he had been out partying and had gotten even more sauced than I had, according to what he told me. That’s why I was sitting on the stool and fidgeting as if I had ants in my pants, I repeat, because now along with my anxiety about Don Chente’s possible capture and disappearance was added another anxiety: Félix had long distinguished himself for his total lack of punctuality, and he was capable of arriving more than an hour late and acting as if nothing whatsoever was wrong. To make matters worse, I was the first customer of the day, and the bartender was busy getting the bottles and other ingredients ready, so after making my Bloody Caesar almost resentfully, he carried on with his preparations without paying any attention to my attempts to strike up a conversation.
That was when I realized that I suffered from a horrifying lack of control over my emotions, as if the serene state of mind brought about by the sessions of acupuncture and hypnosis had disappeared along with my doctor, along with all the positive energy that had suffused me at the prospect of returning to my native country, if you’ll excuse the expression, for although I was not born in El Salvador, it was as if my umbilical cord were attached to that place, so young was I when they took me there. I was utterly baffled — my eyes staring at the row of bottles — trying to figure out why and to what extent I had tied my emotional and psychic well-being to Don Chente: how was it possible that after a mere half-dozen appointments I had become so dependent on a doctor? What had I revealed to him? What secret part of my being had passed into his hands so that today I felt so lost at his disappearance? The bartender asked me if I wanted another Bloody Caesar. I indicated I did with a nod; I didn’t feel like talking anymore, distraction was the last thing I needed at that moment, because I felt as if a revelation was on the verge of rising out of the depths of my being, as if something dark and mysterious was making its way into my consciousness. And then, for a single instant, I perceived it with extreme clarity and in dismay, but then I immediately shook my head, wanting that memory not to be there but rather to return at once to the dark depths from which it never should have risen. I observed the bartender agitating the metal cocktail shaker and greeting two customers on their way to a table, and I also turned to greet them, as if they were old friends, knowing this was the only way to get out of myself, keep myself at a certain remove from a memory that I didn’t want to remember for anything in the world, and that I had never told anybody in my life, one that had now risen from the substratum, perhaps as a result of the anxiety I was experiencing at this crucial moment in my life or maybe because of how vulnerable the hangover had made me, which were one and the same thing when all was said and done, because the image of the Volkswagen bug riddled with machine-gun fire had already penetrated my conscious mind, exactly as I had seen it that horrible morning so many years before in the newspaper column, “Last Night’s News,” a photo with a caption I read in total shock that stated that the driver of the bug, Gordo Porky, had been shot sixty-four times before collapsing over the steering wheel after a Hollywood-style car chase through Colonia Layco: shaken to the core, I suffered a kind of breakdown at that moment, which could only be expected because Gordo Porky had driven me home in that very same bug just two hours before they ambushed him; we had stayed at the law school cafeteria, drinking beer and chatting, as we did fairly often after the language theory class we were taking together. And stuck to the image of Gordo Porky, as if to the other side of a coin, was a sinister scene, and now here it appeared again, right in the bar in Sanborns, against my will and dripping like sulfuric acid into my conscience: a few days before the ambush, I met two professors in a classroom in the Philosophy Department, two professors we later found out were informants for the army intelligence services and who wanted to talk to me about something academic, but the truth was they were conducting a kind of casual interrogation, during which they brought up, as if in passing, the adventures of Gordo Porky and me, the naïve one with the big mouth. . Shit! I exclaimed to myself, and the word might even have formed on my lips, because I slapped the palm of my hand against my forehead, like someone who’d suddenly discovered he’d misplaced the winning ticket of the big lottery prize — even the waiter coming toward me with my Bloody Caesar thought it best to ask me if I was okay. “No, it’s nothing, I just forgot something at the office,” I managed to mumble, just to get rid of him, then immediately raised the glass as if to offer a toast, trying to control the grimace of panic that was on the verge of disfiguring my face, because now I knew what I had revealed to Don Chente and that could surely be found in his notebook. I already suspected there was some trick with this hypnosis business: serenity is never free, you have to give something in exchange, and the clever old man had succeeded in extracting my secret.
“What’s up, maestro?” Félix’s loud greeting gave me a start just before I felt a slap on my back — why, I asked myself, did that runt have to show up precisely at that moment, just when I needed to be alone to sort out the consequences of my discovery? I had no choice but to maintain my composure, the worst thing would have been to expose my underbelly to my friend, a newsmonger of the first degree, who would broadcast any secret he heard through a megaphone. I told him they’d just given me my final check, and I was about to go buy my ticket, an excellent reason to be celebrating, and Félix quickly ordered a Bull, that sweet and explosive cocktail he was so wild about, and he ordered it loudly and accompanied by large gesticulations, because if there was anything Félix enjoyed, it was calling attention to himself, creating a brouhaha, especially when he’d had a little too much to drink, or when he was excited at the imminent prospect of treating his hangover, which was the case at that moment, because once he sat down on the stool it seemed like there were fire ants biting his butt, not just regular ones, like mine, that’s how intensely agitated he was, his gestures so disproportional, his laughter so booming, that the bartender seemed nervous as he made his Bull, and the other two customers even whispered to each other and turned around to have a look. “Salud!” he shouted, banging his glass into mine then turning to the waiter and the other customers, as if he were the owner of the bar greeting his customers. He told me that the night before, he had been drinking till very late at the College, his favorite cantina on Amsterdam in Colonia Condesa, together with Aniceto, an old buddy from his days as a guerrilla commander, someone I’d had a few drinks with on a couple of occasions, enough for me to realize that this Aniceto guy was dangerous, or at least had been, proof of which was his guarded and circumspect demeanor, as if he didn’t want anybody to discover he was there, exactly the opposite of my buddy Félix, who got people in trouble only by putting them in dubious situations with his temerity or his big mouth. I told him that the night before, I’d gotten plastered at my uncle’s place — where I had taken him on more than one occasion — but I didn’t mention the chase scene that fat-ass, Mario Varela, and I had acted out, not because I was ashamed but rather because of the risk that he would follow it up with a big song and dance, just to impress his audience, yelling about the stupidity of the Communists, appealing to the opinions of the bartender and the other customers, that was his style, and my nerves simply wouldn’t be able to handle it. I also told him — lowering my voice to a whisper, like a conspirator asking for secrecy — the bad news about the disappearance of my doctor upon his arrival at the Comalapa Airport, a doctor I had already talked to Félix about during our get-togethers at La Veiga, but I had told him only that he was treating me for colitis, without mentioning then or now anything about acupuncture or hypnosis, because my friend would have pilloried me for believing in such practices, and he also would have wanted to get into an argument about it. “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?” he asked, as if he could read in my face the dilemma I was in, whether I should take off right now to buy the ticket or wait till I heard news of Don Chente; and then he added, in a jocular tone, perhaps to quell fears also rising inside him, that most likely the old man had been drinking at the airport bar and the plane had left without him, an explanation that was so incongruent that I didn’t even bother to refute it. He offered to accompany me to the travel agency after we’d gotten rid of our hangovers, because together we could more easily silence my consuming doubts, according to him, as if I were an imbecile and wholly unaware that his own fears stemmed from his own plans to return to our country and participate in the same magazine project, but it was in his interest that I go first, like the advance guard, or more like the slab of meat you throw to the stray dog to see if it still has teeth. I told him I had to go take a piss, which I proceeded to do, but before entering the restroom I stopped at the public telephone to call Muñecón, who again didn’t answer, which further heightened my concerns, so after peeing I stood for a long time in front of the mirror over the sink with the tap running and asked myself, in a flash of lucidity, what the hell I was doing at that time of day getting drunk again with Félix, when I should have been focusing all my energy on dealing with issues related to my trip that were still pending; the check again started to burn a hole in my shirt, and what with the number of thieves in that city, it was bad luck to walk around with a check, I warned myself, then immediately, my gaze lost in the stream of water, I again began to experience that strange state of mind that had come over me the night before at my uncle’s apartment, a morose state of mind that put me at one remove from myself and was accompanied by a voice that resounded in my head and expressed uneasiness at my behavior, that told me that I should feel the same disdain for myself that I felt for Félix, because I was no stranger to the temerity I criticized so harshly in him. Fortunately, at that moment another customer came into the restroom, whereby the voice went silent and the morose mood broke, which frightened me, to be honest, because that same voice had preceded the catastrophe that had forced me to flee for my life from my uncle’s apartment, so I quickly turned off the tap, dried my hands, and made my way back to the bar and the business at hand.