So captivated was I by Don Chente’s story that for a moment I forgot the stabbing pain in my liver, thinking that it had been a long time since anybody had illustrated in such a simple yet profound way a problem that concerns everybody, so captivated that at that very moment I knew this story would go on to become part and parcel of my repertoire of anecdotes, and that at the slightest provocation I would repeat it to whomever wanted to listen, until suddenly I woke up to the fact that it was not my colon but my liver that was hurting, and I said as much to Don Chente and asked him for an explanation. “Your colon is so constricted that it’s rubbing up against your liver membrane — that’s what’s causing the pain,” Don Chente explained, then warned me that the best thing for Irritable Bowel Syndrome was not allopathic medicine but rather acupuncture, which treated the nervous system directly, and that if I was willing, he would treat me with needles two days later, to which I answered, yes, yes, of course, though I’d never had acupuncture in my life.
Don Chente stood up, thereby putting an end to the visit, and told me that he would accompany me to the elevator, whereby I hurriedly asked him how much I owed him, my hopes riding high because I’d gotten used to not paying for treatment, so imagine my delight when Don Chente answered that it was nothing, as he’d already explained, he was retired, and if he saw me it was only out of friendship for my uncle, Muñecón, and the affection he felt for my father’s family, especially my grandparents Pericles and Haydée, he repeated as we walked down the hallway, where I did not hear the murmurs of the women who surely had finished drinking their tea and playing canasta.
2
I MADE MY WAY to my next appointment with Don Chente Alvarado in a completely different frame of mind than the one I was in the second time I arrived at Pico Molins’s office eight years before, at that time ashamed that I had mistrusted his diagnosis and gone to see an expensive specialist, a fact that, to my surprise, Pico Molins discovered only seconds after I had sat down in front of his desk, just by looking at me, and which he mentioned with a certain glee — and not at all as if it had been a betrayal, which is how I interpreted my own behavior — saying that I mustn’t worry, people frequently don’t trust his little drops, which obviously put me at ease and opened the possibility for us to establish the cordial relationship that ended with his abrupt departure for Catalonia.
“How are you doing? Are you feeling any better?” Don Chente asked point-blank as soon as I came out of the elevator — he was the one who greeted me, not the uniformed maid. So-so, I told him, though the truth was that nothing had changed, the pain was there in my side, and though it might very well be explained by the marvelous story he had told me two days before, the mere fact of being aware that I was about to undergo an acupuncture treatment had made it worse, because if there was anything I feared above all else, ever since childhood, it was needles, and this was my mother’s fault, she was the one who’d had the bright idea to learn how to give injections, practicing on my brother and me as if we were guinea pigs, using the excuse that shots of Vitamin B and cod liver oil would make us grow up stronger and healthier, when her true intention had been to amuse herself practicing the aforementioned torture on our aching buttocks every other day for at least three months, I told Don Chente as we made our way down the hallway to his library, without me hearing, on this occasion, any women murmuring, and without me confessing that the prospect of being penetrated by numerous painful needles was keeping me in an exacerbated state of doubt about whether it was worth subjecting myself to acupuncture, or if maybe I should find some medicine that would quickly relax my colon, that was the magnitude of my distress.
“So, tell me, how are your preparations going for your trip? And your relationship with your wife, are things okay?” The old man shot these questions at me as soon as I sat down facing his desk, as if he had antennae that could detect the source of my ills. So-so, I said, adding that we were having some difficult moments, what with my imminent departure, but I refrained from mentioning that she wasn’t my wife because we weren’t married, a revelation that would have seemed a bagatelle compared to the fact that the relationship had fallen apart two nights before — coincidentally, hours after my first appointment with Don Chente — when Eva, no longer able to bear her guilt, confessed that for the past few weeks she had been carrying on a sexual relationship with a two-bit actor I didn’t know and had never heard anything about.
The situation that I refrained from explaining to Don Chente came about in the following way: Eva and I were in bed — she, pretending to sleep, and I, reading a magazine — when I suddenly had an inexplicable sensation, some kind of precise intuition that Eva had something to reveal; so, without taking my eyes off the magazine, I asked her what was going on, assuring her that she could trust me and tell me what was tormenting her, though at no time had she mentioned that she was being tormented nor had I witnessed any such torment; she sat up in bed, arranged the pillows behind her, and started by asking me to forgive her, without saying what I should forgive her for; then she said that she hadn’t wanted to hurt me, but she’d gotten carried away like some stupid idiot, and now, consumed by remorse, she was suffering the consequences. “So. .?” I asked her, looking up from the magazine for the first time and seeing that she was on the verge of tears. She told me that two weeks earlier, she had gone to bed a couple of times with an actor named Antolín, someone she had apparently met at her job at the publicity agency, where she was the star of the production department, and they had done it in his apartment, in the early hours of the morning: after dropping Evita off at daycare, she had made her way to this Antolín fellow’s apartment, where he was undoubtedly waiting for her very eagerly — I could even picture him naked under his dressing gown, impatient to dig right into Eva’s dark and delicious flesh. But, she explained, now shaking with sobs, it had happened only twice — after that she’d felt too guilty and decided she’d never go to bed with that actor again — and would I forgive her and nothing like that would ever happen again. Her revelation was quite a blow to my self-esteem and could have led me to react in several different ways, but I opted for the role of the understanding and affectionate partner who was about to take off anyway and had suddenly happened upon the best justification for his departure, so I took her in my arms, patted her head and told her to calm down — her crying was copious and snotty — assuring her that I understood her, and that her infidelity was proof that our relationship had run its course, been eroded by time and the daily grind. A few moments later, however, I fell victim to a desire for revenge: I had also been unfaithful to her a few months earlier, I told her after we had turned off the bedside light, when a gringa translator named Miriam would come into my office at the news agency, close the frosted-glass door, unzip my pants, and — she, on her knees, and me, keeping my swivel chair from swiveling — suck my member until she had extracted the desired milk, and that she would do this in the late mornings, punctually, like a baby who can’t carry on with her day until she’s had her bottle, three days in a row until Saturday, when we went to her apartment and discovered that we were a disaster in bed.