“You write poetry, don’t you?” Don Chente asked, point-blank, apparently to confirm a rumor he could only have heard from Muñecón. I answered that many years before, I did so frequently, but now journalism was taking up all my energy, and poetry had receded into the background, intolerant as it was to being snubbed. I asked about the relationship between poetry and my ailments, and Don Chente answered that neither of us could possibly know the answer at that moment, but if I agreed to undergo a more in-depth treatment, whatever emerged from it would not only heal my psychic and emotional wounds but also explain and undoubtedly enrich my poetic vocation.
“You refuse to remember almost anything, that’s the problem, but the fact that you don’t want to remember is eroding your personality from underneath,” the old man said, for the first time making an emphatic gesture; I watched him in awe — my thoughts now far away from delight at my cure — wondering how far he would go with this, afraid that the path he had started down would lead to him telling me that I should undergo psychoanalysis, which I would have categorically rejected, seeing as I’d always considered psychoanalysis to be the worst kind of charlatanism, surpassed in its hypocrisy only by Catholic confession, the difference being that the latter is free and the former for rich little boys and girls who don’t know what to do with their spare time. But Don Chente’s path did not lead there, as I soon discovered, though all his solemn obfuscation made me miss my sessions with Pico Molins, when he and I would deal frankly and effortlessly with all my most difficult crises.
“What I’d like to suggest,” Don Chente said, settling into his chair after mentioning the therapeutic virtues of memory, “is that we try hypnosis.” This was the last thing I expected — the degrees on his wall certified him as a medical doctor, a psychologist, and an acupuncturist, but now it turned out he was also a hypnotist. “We could try it once a week,” he continued in the face of my mute alarm, “starting next Wednesday, if this same time would be good for you.” I told him that the problem was that in a month at the very most I would be taking off for San Salvador. “That’s fine, you’ll see progress after three or four sessions,” he insisted. And how could I say no, even though I hadn’t yet recovered from my shock, if what we were talking about was a free and novel treatment, one that aroused my curiosity and soon stimulated my imagination, because the idea of being hypnotized made me think that I was about to enter the world of Asian monks and kung fu fighters. I asked him if I needed to prepare myself in any special way for hypnosis, thinking that perhaps he would ask me to go on some kind of diet, as Pico Molins had so that his little drops would work, but Don Chente told me that no preparation was necessary, only a readiness to discover things — some of which would perhaps be unpleasant, that’s how he qualified them — that were buried in my consciousness.
Very strange was my state of mind when I left Don Chente’s apartment after he accompanied me back to the elevator, always so polite and modest, a manner Muñecón said was like “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” though I then realized it was actually more like “killing them with kindness,” because the old man hid enormous stores of knowledge behind his somewhat retiring, grandfatherly demeanor; my state of mind was very strange when I emerged onto San Lorenzo Street, happy to be pain-free and excited at the prospect of beginning a process of self-knowledge through hypnosis, but at the same time I had the sensation that a red light had gone on far away, I didn’t know exactly where or why, a very small light that did not delay me for even a moment from going to the phone booth on the corner to call my buddy Félix, who worked at a magazine with offices just a few blocks away from Don Chente’s apartment and very close to our favorite spot for sharing news and drinking vodka tonics in the evening, the terrace of La Veiga Restaurant, where we could sit contemplating the commotion on Insurgentes as well as savoring with our eyes one or another solid piece of female flesh, and where we would meet in a half hour to celebrate my cure.
3
THE WEEK BEFORE I once again rang the doorbell on San Lorenzo Street was so disastrous that by the time I was finally standing in front of Don Chente’s building I was convinced that this hypnosis session was my only salvation, that things would change for the better after this treatment, and that I might as well tell the old man about my emotional turmoil, especially the tempest my relationship with Eva had become, in the hope that he would give me a helping hand, because the situation, to be honest, had spun out of control, and what had seemed before like a civilized separation had now degenerated into a painful rupture — to say the least — if not a swamp of reproaches, bitterness, and accusations that could only lead to mutual hatred — harmful for both of us and truly malignant for Evita.
Once again it was Don Chente who greeted me as I stepped out of the elevator, and this time the enormous apartment felt empty, silent, dimly lit, as if the old man were its sole inhabitant, a thought that undoubtedly found expression on my face, because right away, as if he’d read my mind, Don Chente told me that he was indeed alone in the apartment, his wife had gone to El Salvador, probably to check their bank accounts, I thought, because Muñecón had told me that Don Chente’s wife was extremely wealthy, she was from a family with an unpronounceable Basque surname, Aguirreurreta or something like that, owners of a number of coffee plantations in the western part of the country.
“You look a little worse. Has the pain come back?” he asked me even before we’d sat down in the library. No, I answered, fortunately the stabbing pain had not come back — that was all I needed — but I’d been beset by so many troubles all week that I hadn’t even remembered the pain, because my relationship with my partner, I told him, had collapsed, not because of my upcoming trip but because of the entrance on stage of a two-bit actor she’d had an affair with, I confessed, and I had the impression that he lifted his eyes slightly, as if to look for the horns on my head, though Don Chente would have been incapable of such a thing, he was much too discreet. He asked me, with as much tact as possible, if Eva had persisted in her lapse, using the word “lapse” as if she had simply taken a misstep and tripped and fallen on her back with her legs spread-eagle so he could penetrate her, hardly what had really happened, with her going off enthusiastically for her early morning fucks, but I refrained from making my accusation too specific and answered only, no, apparently the affair had ended, though when dealing with that kind of sleazy activity it was difficult to know for certain. He asked how I had reacted, perhaps fearing that violence had carried the day, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I had behaved in a more civilized way than usual, having reached the conclusion that we had no future as a couple. “What does she think?” he asked, a look of concern spreading across his face. I told him I still didn’t understand her, sometimes she’d assert with conviction that everything was over, but at other times she’d say the opposite, which to my mind meant that she was terribly confused, which had made it impossible for us to hold a calm and reasonable conversation, as was necessary under the circumstances. “Try not to make precipitous decisions; remember there is a young child involved,” Don Chente said, picking up his fountain pen to write something down in his notebook.