And there I was, leaning on my elbows on the small bar in a corner of the waiting area, listening carefully for announcements about Gate 19 over the loudspeakers, drinking my second beer of the day, my duty-free bag at my feet next to my carry-on suitcase, watching the other passengers, looking to see if I recognized anybody, because most of the flights to Central America left from this gate, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to see a familiar face: a journalist colleague, a politician anxious to talk to the press, or a guerrilla fighter dressed up as a businessman. But at that moment, fortune pointed elsewhere, in the direction of a thoroughbred filly who made me shake my head and gulp down my beer — and what a woman she was — a brunette with long legs scantily covered by a miniskirt, and a round upturned ass that at that very moment was settling delicately down into a chair while she gave instructions to a couple of kids, who appeared to be hers and who were struggling with carry-on bags of their own. A vision of such splendor produced a blast of desire so powerful that my throat immediately got parched, whereby I turned to the bartender and asked him to make me a vodka tonic, but he failed to respond, also dazzled by the sight of the brunette, until I tapped on the bar and winked at him; the guy responded with a whistle of admiration, and while he was mixing my drink, I turned to look again at the bombshell, who was now browsing a fashion magazine, indifferent to all the eyes browsing her, and then probably because of all the last day’s ups and downs, I found myself comparing the woman I was looking at there in front of me to the woman I had just abandoned, because Eva was also a brunette and also had the kind of body that soaked up men’s libidinous stares, but she was about four inches shorter than this filly, which made her legs, though beautiful, less conspicuous, and along this same route of comparative analysis I remembered a sentence Eva had dumped on me the night before and had then whispered again in my ear as we were saying goodbye in front of security: “Stop running away from your paternity; your daughter is waiting for you,” or something like that, as if she were some hotshot psychoanalyst and had just reinvented the wheel, as if it hadn’t been me who had explained to her that the contempt that my grandmother Lena had inculcated in me for my father was what made difficult not only my own paternity but who knows what other aspects of my life. But I had also explained to her several times that seeing clearly the source of an illness didn’t mean that the illness would cease to exist, one also needed to repair what had been destroyed; I had even given her some examples: ultimately we are like a machine, I told her, and seeing in the bright light of high noon that the carburetor is broken doesn’t solve anything, you need a mechanic who knows how to take out the bad carburetor and install a new one. That, I told her, was why it was so important for me to continue undergoing treatment with Don Chente, because he alone knew the convolutions of the dark side of my being and could help me find clues that would allow me to shed light on it, because that was what it was all about, shedding light on the dark side, as the old man himself had explained to me in more than one session; that, I told her, was why it was a happy coincidence that my doctor was now in San Salvador, because I would have the possibility of continuing the treatment even if only for a short time, because Muñecón had reassured me that Don Chente was planning to stay there for a couple of weeks and had given me a telephone number where I could reach him, I remembered, patting my chest over the inside pocket of my jacket, where I kept my datebook.