Free The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya Page A

been particularly concerned about what I’d told my doctor while under hypnosis, but this was my first experience lying on the divan of unconscious confessions, and I expected a subsequent consultation, a summation during which Don Chente would repeat back to me, methodically and with consummate wisdom, what had come out of my mouth during those trances, consequent to which he would illuminate those dark areas of my psyche that were irritating my intestines and were responsible for certain kinks in my character. But now that the old man had disappeared without a trace, I began to have concerns about what I might have told him, which he had undoubtedly written down meticulously in his notebook, concerns that were then aggravated by the anguished circumstances I found myself in the previous weekend, when I had no choice but to help Mr. Rabbit deal with an unusual and somewhat dangerous situation. What happened is that my friend called me on Thursday afternoon from a phone booth, as he always did, to tell me, with his typical verbal parsimony, that he urgently needed to see me, which, coming as it did from him, could only plunge me into my darkest fears, send me scurrying to get on the Metro and ride to the station near where Mr. Rabbit would pick me up at five o’clock on the dot, not one minute before or one minute after, for he strictly adhered to the protocols of clandestine life. While we were driving through the city in his pickup, he shared with me the cross he had to bear, which would soon become the cross I would bear: peace negotiations between the government and the guerrillas were progressing rapidly and showing great promise, so military operations had decreased and any moment now would stop altogether along various fronts, a situation that affected the logistical measures carried out by my friend, who was responsible for guaranteeing the safe passage of weapons through Mexico—from the U.S. border to the border with Guatemala; the negotiations were affecting his efforts to such an extent that he had recently received an order to stop a shipment already on its way and park it somewhere until he received further instructions. “So?” I asked as we waited for a green light on Avenida Revolución, and I had a hunch that I’d rather not hear the answer. Mr. Rabbit, without flinching, said that it had occurred to him that maybe we could store the shipment for a few days at my father-in-law’s country house in Tlayacapan, a town located about an hour south of Mexico City, where, it was true, the father of my daughter’s mother owned a country house that stood empty most of the time, a house Eva, Evita, and I, along with other relatives, sometimes went to on weekends. I told him he was completely crazy, how could he possibly have dreamt up such an outrageous plan— taking a van full of rifles and ammunition to the house of a man who would soon cease to be my father-in-law and where nobody would understand the presence of a load like that—and how the hell was I going to explain to Eva that now that we were in the process of breaking up for good, I’d had the bright idea of hiding a van full of weapons for the guerrillas at her father’s house. “It’s not a van,” Mr. Rabbit said just as he turned off at the Mixcoac crossing, it being that hour of the afternoon when traffic started backing up. “It’s a pickup truck, like this one. Nobody would even notice,” he explained. Then he added, “And it’s not carrying rifles and ammunition.” I told him I didn’t understand, so what was it carrying, would he please explain and tell me once and for all if this was another really bad joke like the one he’d played on me about Eva’s two-bit actor. “They’re telescopic sights,” Mr. Rabbit said, and he turned his inexpressive face toward me at the exact moment I felt a cramp in my guts that could only presage the return of that horrible colitis I thought I was free of. “Telescopic sights?” I cried out