None of that, of course, did I reveal to Don Chente Alvarado — I was not seeking marital advice but rather relief from the pain in my side — nor did I tell him about Eva’s reaction, when, despite being exhausted from confessing and crying, she turned on her bedside light and sat up, newly inspired to continue the fight, and began upbraiding me for having kept my infidelity a secret for so long, for being such a liar, that her infidelity, compared to mine, was a mere trifle, that’s what she said and with indignation, and I responded by saying that this proved that our relationship had no business continuing, she should turn off the light and let me sleep, in a few weeks I wouldn’t be there anymore, and she could think whatever she liked — a response that exasperated her even more and made her shout that I was a horrid wretch, completely unfair, a coward who wanted only to run away, this accompanied by a new bout of sobbing that accomplished nothing except waking up Evita and turning my night into a disaster.
“Let’s go into the other room,” Don Chente said, perhaps aware that the sooner he stuck the needles in the better and that my vague answers about my relationship were evidence of the density of the shit I was not willing to stir up. And we walked down the quiet hallway then entered the room where I lay down on the table after taking off my shoes and socks and unbuttoning my shirt and pants so that my chest and whole abdomen were exposed. “Relax,” Don Chente said, because he knew that I was doing the exact opposite, that the closer the moment came when he’d start sticking me with needles, the more I was tensing up in terror, exactly as always happened whenever I was about to get a shot or have blood taken from my arm — my muscles would seize up and make inserting the needle more difficult and more painful, precisely what was happening to me the instant the old man reached the foot of my bed with his needles at the ready; I tried to think about something that would take me far away from the impending torture, so I started to picture in great detail the mornings Eva had spent making love with her two-bit actor, mornings when she would rush into the aforementioned’s apartment and immediately start kissing him as he’d put his arms around her and grab her splendid ass; then he’d open his robe so she could lick his chest, moaning with lust, then go down on her knees and take his penis into her mouth. But I couldn’t picture anything beyond that because at that very moment Don Chente stuck the first needle between my right big toe and the next one, which was horribly painful and drew from me a cry of protest. “That one’s for the liver,” the old man said, with what seemed to me like relish, and then he stuck in the next one, and another, and another, until I could no longer distinguish which one was most painful, I never could have imagined anything like this martyrdom, needles sticking out of my limbs, my abdomen, my head, one particularly sinister needle stuck between my eyes, as if precisely in that third eye I had read about in a book by some charlatan when I was a teenager, until finally I felt like I was dying, though the fear was much greater than the pain, I realized as the minutes ticked by, because except for the three needles that really were stinging— including the first one Don Chente had inserted to cleanse my liver — I was getting used to it, and soon my desire to leap off the table like a madman and pull the needles out waned. “Try to relax,” Don Chente repeated, “try to feel the nervous energy flowing through your body and especially how it bounces around inside your abdomen, where all your knots of tension are.” Then he told me that he would leave me alone while the needles did their job; I listened to his quiet steps as he walked out, the door closing behind him.
“Crazy old fart,” I thought, then repented the next moment, just in case the needles would punish me with a renewed and vicious attack for having cursed him. And then I told myself that the only way to control my discomfort was to focus all my attention on the air entering and exiting my lungs, as if I were in a meditation class, my entire mind focused only on the fact that I was breathing in and breathing out; but suddenly I felt a charge from the needle in my calf and my concentration was shattered, and then another from one of the needles he had stuck into my abdomen made me curse the moment I had agreed to undergo such a treatment, but then a few moments later I felt a kind of tingling all through my body that turned into a wholly new sensation, an almost pleasant one, as if I were gaining an awareness of my body that I hadn’t had for a very long time. And then I began to fantasize about what I would do when I got to San Salvador, about the exercise regime I would follow to get my abused body back into shape, about the possibility of not drinking for a while so I could devote all my energy to getting the new magazine off the ground, thanks to which I might realistically hope to find the girl I’d always wanted, but these fantasies didn’t last long because then my mind got bogged down in pecuniary concerns, specifically that the director of the agency had promised to do everything possible to make sure I received my final paycheck on time, but I knew all too well about bureaucratic red tape and was afraid that the day of my departure would arrive without my having received my money, which would ruin my plans, or at least my schedule, because without the money I couldn’t leave, much less so now that Eva would try to get as big a slice of the pie as possible. And that’s as much as I remember because at that point I fell into a deep sleep, for maybe half an hour, until I heard the creak of the door hinges, Don Chente’s steps, and his gentle voice asking how I felt, if I had been aware of my nervous energy, and I answered, so-so. “Try to focus all your attention on the spot where you feel the pain,” he told me, and then announced that he was going to insert one last needle into my belly, but he said that just as he was inserting it so I felt neither pain nor fear but instead, a few seconds later, I began to clearly perceive the current of nervous energy coursing through my body, just as Don Chente had said I would, and I also perceived a knot in my abdomen where the energy flow was backed up, a kind of roadblock that prevented its circulation: these sensations seemed utterly marvelous to me, incredible, especially when I perceived the exact instant the knot began to loosen and the current of energy suddenly burst through and started to flow. I enjoyed this amazing sensation for a few minutes before I told Don Chente that the knot had come undone and the energy was flowing freely, surely my colon had returned to its natural healthy state and I would no longer have any pain.
With the exhilaration of a person who has, finally, been cured, I returned to Don Chente’s library while still tucking my shirt into my pants, wanting only to thank him and get the hell out of there, good health is so precious I didn’t want to waste a second of it, but Don Chente invited me to sit down, there were still a few things he wanted to explain to me, the first of which was that although my colon had relaxed, this did not mean that it would stay like that forever, at any moment it could seize up, become irritated, and again form that knot that had troubled me for so long. The second issue, he said, stemmed from the first: only an in-depth treatment that would allow me to shed light on the dark regions of my psyche — that’s how he put it — could guarantee a long-term cure, and shedding such a light consisted of bringing to the surface the deepest and murkiest aspects of my relationship with my maternal grandmother and my father, because, according to Don Chente, she had devoted her life to crushing my image of my father with the greatest possible cruelty, and it was precisely this damage to my father figure that was undoubtedly the main cause of my ailments.