Free The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya

out into the open? Oh my God! I almost blacked out. I closed my eyes. It was impossible, I countered, I would have found out somehow, I would have sensed some hint of having committed an act of such magnitude in my childhood, no matter how hard my grandparents, my mother, and the people in her entourage would have tried to hide the fact, no matter how much they manipulated me until I’d erased it from my consciousness, no matter how they’d moved me to another country, some detail would have had to filter through, a glimpse, an insinuation, something, because otherwise it would have been a perfect crime, I told myself, trying to calm down. But the black hole in my mind was already spreading to my chest—the black hole that terrified me and in the face of which I wanted to flee as quickly as possible—so I compulsively downed the last sip of vodka, hoping it would reduce my anxiety, then looked around for the waitress to bring me the check, hoping to shake off that morbid dynamic of self-reproach I had fallen prey to by setting myself in motion, when it was evident that I didn’t have the slightest memory of having killed anybody in my life, because I had never committed such a barbaric act, and only a blithering idiot would pay attention to an absurd dream and agonize over it.
    Luckily, the waitress was soon standing next to me, check in hand, asking if I was going to wait for my friend in a tone of voice that made me think that she didn’t care if I was staying for a while longer but rather if my friend was coming, which in turn gave me the feeling that the waitress was hoping to see Mr. Rabbit—a man graced with a certain elegance whom I’d been drinking with the last time I’d sat at this same table and she’d waited on us—not Félix, who was swarthy and ugly. I answered that unfortunately I had another appointment, and could she please tell my friend, if he showed up, that I had waited until the agreed-upon time, without specifying which of my friends would come looking for me, I was in no mood to play matchmaker when my sole concern was to set myself in motion, get my mind moving in a different direction, and return to my immediate and mundane concerns, especially the issues I still had to resolve with Eva before leaving for my country—I had to stop, once and for all, scrounging around in my early memories, as it had now become crystal clear that this notion of writing the story of one’s own life was a bad business, even if Don Chente had recommended it, and it also became clear that memory is unreliable and can put one in rather a tight spot.
     

6
     
    HOW SURPRISED I WAS that Tuesday afternoon when I returned home and listened to Don Chente’s message on the answering machine, a message informing me that he would have to cancel our appointment the following day because unfortunately he had to leave the country for an undetermined amount of time and would get in touch with me upon his return, if I was still in the city, to continue the hypnotherapy that was doing me so much good. There’s no question that the cancellation of my appointment completely threw me for a loop, I hadn’t expected such a turn of events, and my first reaction was bewilderment: the voice on the answering machine, identifying itself as Dr. Alvarado, did not match the timbre of the voice etched in my memory, a fact that momentarily shocked me but soon made way for anger—I have always taken sudden cancellations as personal insults—though above all for deep frustration, the truth being that my hopes were riding high that after the next hypnosis session, I would be completely cured, freed from the tangled cobwebs contorting my bowels, ready to leave and begin this new stage of my life; now it turned out that I would have to go without finishing the therapy and, even worse, without knowing what I had revealed about myself to Don Chente while I was in those hypnotic trances.
    It sounds strange that I hadn’t, until that moment,