What I also didn’t tell the old man, and maybe should have, is that the most intense memory I have of my father has nothing to do with his life but with his death, because the night he was shot in the back as he was leaving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Colonia Centroamérica, my brother and I were in bed, and the moment my mother came into our bedroom, a nervous wreck after receiving the phone call, to tell us that Papa had had an “accident” and that she was going to the hospital to be with him, and that we would stay with Fidelita, our trusted maid, and that if they weren’t home by morning, which they weren’t, we should get up, shower, eat breakfast, and take the bus to school like we did every day. . at that very moment, as I was saying, when my mother came into our room, out of control, I had an intuition that something very important was about to change in my life, that I was about to enter unknown and dangerous territory, an intuition that produced a sensation of fear and helplessness that prevented me from sleeping peacefully that night and stayed with me the following morning, when Father Pedro, the principal of my school, came into my classroom, asked the teacher to excuse me, and instructed me to pack all my binders and books into my knapsack, then started walking by my side, his protective hand on my shoulder as he talked to me about God — I assume, though I was like a zombie so I don’t remember his words — until just before we entered the main office, when he told me that my father had died; waiting for me there was my mother’s best friend, who stood up to give me a hug, then burst into tears, though she soon pulled herself together and told me that my brother Alfredito would be joining us soon, the principal was going to get him from his classroom, but he mustn’t find out yet about our father’s death, because he was only seven years old, too young to understand, they would tell him later, after they’d prepared him, whereas I was already a young man, at eleven I should be able to control myself, not say anything or cry while we were in the car on our way to drop Alfredito off at the house of some relatives, who would look after him. And that is what happened: with a knot in my throat, I held back my tears on the way to drop off my brother, and I kept holding back my tears while my mother’s friend drove me home, even when we passed the Hospital del Seguro Social, where they’d taken my father after the “accident,” as my mother had called it the night before, after receiving the phone call; and I continued to hold back my tears the rest of the morning, at the house, where swirls of people were coming and going, and at the funeral home, where they took me at noon, where I spent the rest of the day and the whole night and the following day, still like a zombie and with a knot in my throat, holding back my tears, even when I went up to the coffin they brought in, and I could see through the little glass window the waxen face of my father, his moustache finally trimmed, and two pieces of cotton wool sticking out of his nostrils, the first dead body I’d ever seen in my life, which completely fascinated me and I went up to stare at several times, holding back my tears, still like a zombie; and when I milled around with relatives and acquaintances, surprised to see the long line of friends from Alcoholics Anonymous who filed sorrowfully past my father’s coffin, and still that afternoon when we lined our cars up to drive in a procession to the cemetery; it was then and there, when the gravediggers lowered the coffin then threw the first shovelfuls of dirt on top of it, that the knot in my throat suddenly came undone, and I rushed away from the crowd that had gathered around the gravesite and hid behind an old Kapok tree, where I finally let go of the tears I had been holding on to for so long. And I didn’t tell any of this to Don Chente because my whole life, every time I’d wanted to talk about it, the knot would again tighten in my throat, my eyes would again start burning, and I would turn back into a zombie, and now was not the time to make a scene.
“Let’s go into the other room,” said the doctor. And that’s when I became aware of my fear at the imminent prospect of being hypnotized, a fear that took turns in my mind with the idea that the whole thing was a sham, that Don Chente wouldn’t be able to hypnotize me, but my fear as well as my incredulity stepped aside to make room for my curiosity about what method the old man would use to try to hypnotize me, which I discovered once I lay down on the exam table, anxious, my eyes glued to the ceiling, awaiting instructions, with that familiar tingly feeling, as if I were about to take my first trip on hallucinogenic mushrooms, which was the first thing that came to mind, that time we climbed the San Salvador volcano to collect the mushrooms that we then put in a jar with honey so they would lose their flavor of dirt and cow shit and that I ate with that same tingling curiosity I felt now, waiting for the psilocybin to kick in, to dismantle my psychic apparatus in order to give me access to new perceptions, surprisingly enough without any extraordinary visions or sounds but rather with a simple opening into a world beyond the senses, where I split off from my self and was able to perceive myself in all my squalor and absurdity, an experience that marked the end of my adolescence and turned out disastrously for one of us, my friend Chino’s cousin, who was “left behind,” as they used to say, having experienced so much fear at seeing himself as he was that soon thereafter he became an acolyte in a Christian sect.
To my surprise, Don Chente didn’t use any newfangled wizardry on me, on the contrary, I had learned the same relaxation technique we now began to practice a dozen years earlier, the technique of focusing all your attention on your toes, then on the soles of your feet, then on your ankles, and likewise along every part of your body, going from your feet to your head and making each part relax through the strength of the mental energy focused on it, which is then experienced as a diaphanous feeling of levity in those relaxed parts. I had done this exercise once or twice alone before falling asleep without attributing much meaning to it, but now Don Chente’s voice was guiding me with precision and in a tone I hadn’t heard him use before — imperative, profound — a voice that not only indicated which part of my body I should focus on but also wove in sentences that encouraged me to apply more mental energy, so that by the time we reached my head I felt very light, almost as if I were levitating, to tell the truth, and I barely understood Don Chente’s whispers because I began to doze off and soon lost consciousness, though deep down, very deep down, there was a constant, indecipherable whispering, like a tiny blinking light in a dark, empty room.