What I didn’t reveal to Don Chente, because I didn’t see the point, was that Eva had come home one evening after our last appointment unusually agitated, which made me suspect that she had returned to her adventures with said two-bit actor, so I told her off, sarcastically suggesting that she had traded her libidinous morning escapades for afternoon ones, to which she reacted with a rather disproportional expression of indignation, according to my standards, thereby increasing my suspicions and prompting me to remind her that there was no need to get violent, as far as I was concerned she could do with her ass whatever the hell she wanted and with whomever she wanted. I was afraid this would make her even more belligerent, but the opposite occurred: she went and sat down in the armchair facing the sofa where I was sitting and began to cry, quietly at first and then uncontrollably, so pitifully that I soon cast off my suspicions that she was employing a typical feminine strategy and asked her what was going on, because by now I was a bit alarmed, my intuition having warned me that so much crying could not possibly bode well for me. Sniffling, her hands covering her face, she said: her period was a week late and she was afraid she was pregnant. Flabbergasted, I sat bolt upright, and long seconds passed before I could muster my voice; my insides were being buffeted about by contradictory emotions, and although her sorrowful cries had awoken my compassion, the idea that she was pregnant with the other man’s child filled me with so much rage that I thought I was going to explode — I had the urge to kick the hell out of her that very moment — after all, a roll in the hay was one thing and getting pregnant quite another. I asked her if she’d done a test. She said, no, she would the next day, and she explained that she should have gotten her period exactly eight days before, but because of her symptoms she was almost positive — and I understood that “almost” as a final line of defense that not even she believed — she was pregnant. “When was the last time you fucked your actor?” I asked with consummate scorn. She stopped crying, lowered her hands, and looked at me with hatred. “We always used a condom,” she mumbled. “So, whose is it?” I asked, my mind stuck on the word always that she had uttered so naturally and which led me to infer that those two lewd mornings she had sold me on were nothing but cheap consolation for a poor cuckold and that I’d never know how many times she had actually given herself to that two-bit actor. “What do you mean, whose?!” she shouted, furious, but at that point it really was an act, because as far as I could remember, the times we had fornicated in the last few months had been few and far between — busy as she was frolicking in someone else’s bed — and on those few occasions, Eva had assured me that she was not in the fertile part of her cycle. “Idiot!” she snarled, then started sobbing again.
Nor would I tell Don Chente about my via crucis over the following days, when the test came back positive, and thus began the bitter discussion about how to proceed; an abortion seemed to me to be the preferred course of action from every possible point of view, whereas Eva, due to her natural feminine protective instinct, declared somewhat tentatively that she was in favor of keeping the child, though she wavered between that position and mine, constantly bursting out in tears so as to stoke my feelings of guilt, even though she was the only possible guilty party, no matter what, whether the child was mine because she had lied to me about her supposed infertility or, more likely, that due to the excitement and urgency of her initiation into adultery, she’d failed to take the necessary precautions and now the spawn of that circus performer was growing in her belly. But the question of culpability wasn’t really the issue, because I was about to leave the country and end my relationship with her, a forceful enough argument in itself against the advisability of any pregnancy, a pregnancy she would have to go through alone and without any support from me, unless she was in cahoots with her two-bit actor, which I asked her about more than once, in which case they might as well leave me out of their soap opera; but Eva stuck to her guns, repeating that there was nothing between her and Antolín, and that the baby was mine, she had no doubt about it, the two times they’d slept together they’d used condoms, and she repeated this with so much conviction that I was on the verge of believing how many times she had lapsed, as Don Chente called it, but not that they’d used a condom, as I told her in no uncertain terms, and for that very reason I’d take no responsibility for the baby and the appropriate course of action was an immediate abortion. By the next day, she’d already made an appointment with a doctor who carried out that kind of extraction clandestinely in a house in Colonia Portales — it was incumbent upon me to go with her because I didn’t want to behave like a lout and also because I wanted to be absolutely certain that the fetus would be done away with — a house that, truth be told, nobody could guess was a doctor’s office and which I was not allowed to enter — the butcher forbade entry to any third parties, according to Eva — so I waited in the car for a couple of hours, very anxious and with my mind churning a million miles an hour, the situation so tense and anomalous that at first I was afraid there would be neither doctor nor office and that we’d fallen into the clutches of a gang of thieves who would steal our money; then I thought, to calm myself down, that Eva had heard about that doctor through two of her colleagues who had already paid visits to the house that I was now keeping under surveillance. At a certain moment during my wait, I got paranoid that the police would suddenly burst into the house and arrest the doctor and his spread-eagle patients; I watched carefully through the rearview mirror to see if any suspicious characters were hanging around, and I despised living in a country that was so primitive that abortion was against the law, where I couldn’t turn to people like Don Chente or Pico Molins to extricate me from this problem. Eva walked out of the house and to the car as if everything were normal, as if she had not just undergone any kind of procedure, which made me fear that they hadn’t attended to her, but the moment she got in the car, she collapsed, broke down in horrible sobs — before saying “It’s over”—sobs that made me feel as if I’d done something wrong, when by rights we should have been pleased that it had all turned out for the best, which is what I told her, but all she could say was “It was horrible,” a statement that proved that she’d inherited from her father, a progressive former priest, a culture of guilt, and that this stood above and beyond her secular education, it was in her genes, I told myself in order to put a little distance between me and the drama, though suddenly I remembered the novel about Evita Peron that I was reading at the time, which claimed that the cancer that killed her had had its origins in a botched abortion.
“It’s not surprising that being raised by a domineering mother and grandmother would affect your own couple relationships,” Don Chente said, and then asked me to tell him any memories of my father that I did have, even though I’d already told him that I had almost no memories of my progenitor, but I soon found myself talking about my father’s passion for fireworks, for lighting firecrackers on Christmas and New Year’s, how he would buy bags of rockets, fountains, mortars, whistles, and any other kind of fireworks, which he would then set off with the greatest delight, like a little boy, how he’d spend a good part of those nights with my brother and me and the rest of the neighborhood gang, lighting firecrackers nonstop; he loved them so much that on our birthdays he’d sneak into our room early in the morning while we were still asleep and wake us up with explosions, cheers, laughter, and singing the happy birthday song, Las mañanitas. Don Chente listened to me, ensconced in his chair, the palms of his hands joined at his chin, and, even though he periodically leaned over his desk and jotted something down in his notebook, I couldn’t tell which details interested him, because I was suddenly remembering about how my father’s siesta was sacred, the house converted into a tomb under the midday heat, and my brother and I had to scratch his head, pet his head really, until his loud snores resounded — he didn’t smoke sixty cigarettes a day in vain. “Did he ever punish you harshly?” Don Chente asked, in a tone of voice that made me think that I was remembering only stupid things and that nothing essential was coming to mind. I answered that my father had never laid a hand on me, that when he got angry he punished me by making me stay in my room while my friends played in the street or in the backyard, and that it was my mother who shouted and made a fuss, though she dared hit me only once, when I was four years old, and never ran the risk of raising a hand against me again, so great was the fear my grandmother Lena — my protector, whose heir I was — inspired in all of them, I thought, but didn’t say to Don Chente, who really didn’t need to hear that from me to reach the same conclusion.