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

in disbelief. And then he explained that they were special sights for Dragunov rifles used by guerrilla snipers, sights that gave them accurate aim from up to 1,400 yards away, which allowed the snipers to immobilize an enemy column for an entire afternoon, a single sniper placed in a strategic building could hold off an entire company of soldiers for a whole afternoon, like in that Stanley Kubrick movie about Vietnam, remember?
Full Metal Jacket
, Mr. Rabbit pronounced the title with a certain amount of swagger—he’d been a film buff since he was a teenager, and he thought he had a superior accent in English. I told him I hadn’t seen that movie and I had no interest whatsoever in talking about movies, but he’d better look elsewhere to stash that pickup with its telescopic sights because there was always a caretaker at my father-in-law’s house, a sharp-eyed mestizo named Odilón, who, at the first whiff of anything suspicious would dig through the boxes, and when he found the famous sights he’d immediately turn us in, and the consequences would be dire. “There are no boxes,” Mr. Rabbit told me, with a suspicious frown, which immediately made me think that this really was just another joke that he was carrying to a fever pitch, with who knows what dark purpose, so I kept staring at him with a thoroughly disgruntled look on my face so he’d know it was time to cut the crap, but he remained focused on the road and at the intersection with Churubusco he had to make a daring maneuver to turn off toward Coyoacán. “The sights are expertly hidden in the truck’s chassis so that not even the best customs’ agents would find them,” he said in that victorious tone, his way of mocking my lack of discernment.
    It didn’t take Mr. Rabbit much effort to convince me to carry out the plan that he’d already concocted, replete with a significant amount of detail: on Friday afternoon Eva, Evita, and I would go to the house in Tlayacapan to spend a final weekend together as a family, a kind of agreeable farewell weekend (with sun, fresh air, and a swimming pool) so that Evita, especially, would be left with positive memories of her father now that I was planning to be gone for such a long stretch, my friend said, as if he really cared about the image of her father my daughter would carry around in her head; that same Friday night, Mr. Rabbit would arrive with the pickup packed with telescopic sights, stay over as our guest, share our meals, and lend a touch of lightheartedness to my interactions with Eva, who had a particular fondness for my “weird Salvadoran friend,” as she called him. “And if your wife invites other relatives, all the better,” Mr. Rabbit said while he explained his plan at a table in a taco place in Coyoacán, as if he knew that Eva and her sisters were afflicted with that tribal disease whereby either everybody or nobody went anywhere. “A family atmosphere is the perfect cover,” he pronounced, green salsa dripping out of the taco and through his fingers.
    The ease with which I fell into the trap Mr. Rabbit set can be attributed to the guilt or disgrace I’d suffered after that incident with the two-bit actor, but the fact that a mere few hours later Eva fell just as easily into the same trap could only point to something much more pernicious—for me, needless to say, Mr. Rabbit being wholly indifferent to my conjugal drama—something to do with her having hope that a weekend trip could lead to a reconciliation, hope I was determined to parry the very moment it became obvious to me, when Eva expressed her enthusiastic support for the proposal, which I’d sold to her as if it had been my initiative and not that of the person who had, in fact, concocted it, by explaining without beating around the bush that the goal of the trip was to give Evita one last good memory of our family life, and of her father, repeating in this way my friend’s words, and for this reason we should avoid any