The Dream of My Return

For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.

—Romans 7:15 (King James Version)

You can’t spend your life returning, especially to that cesspool of a country of yours, that disaster they’ve turned your parents’ home into, just so you can say hi or bring us words of consolation.

Here, every act of pity is cruel if it doesn’t set something on fire.

Every sign of maturity must prove its capacity for destruction.

—Roque Dalton, “The Prodigal Son”

1

IT WAS ONLY AFTER ABSTAINING
for five days without any decrease in the pain in my liver that I finally decided to make an appointment with Don Chente Alvarado, a doctor Muñecón had recommended long before but whom I hadn’t yet called, still hoping that my favorite doctor would finally answer the many calls I’d made to him all week without anybody picking up, which made me assume that he and his secretary were both on vacation. It was only when a woman answered and told me that this was no longer Dr. Molins’s office, that in fact Dr. Molins no longer had an office because he had returned to his native Catalonia two months before—which made the pain in my liver go from bad to worse at the mere thought of being hospitalized—that I immediately called Muñecón to get Don Chente Alvarado’s phone number then dialed it to request an urgent appointment.

That afternoon, I made my way to the building where Don Chente lived on San Lorenzo Street in Colonia Del Valle, full of every possible prejudice because I assumed that he was an allopath who would use any pretext to poison me with chemicals and then charge me an arm and a leg for the consultation—according to what Muñecón told me, Don Chente had been one of the doctors most coveted by wealthy Salvadorans before the civil war but had been forced into exile after recklessly treating a wounded man who turned out to be a guerrilla fighter.

I lamented Pico Molins’s sudden departure, convinced that I would never find a doctor like him again: a homeopath who had opened my eyes to the scam of conventional medicine and who always saw me as his last patient of the day, when nobody else was there, not even his secretary, so that he could take all the time in the world to listen to my complaints and then change the subject to Mexican politics—about which he loved to speak with scathing disdain—taking advantage of the fact that I was a journalist to milk me for the latest newsroom gossip, all of which I enthusiastically shared with him, stoking his avid curiosity and satisfying his craving to analyze human stupidity. Pico Molins was delightful, and he never charged me for any of my visits, not even the first one, when I came recommended by a colleague who’d informed him of the extent of my penury, the consequence of my forced residence in a foreign country in order to prevent my compatriots from carving me up into little pieces, as they had so many others.

The fact that Don Chente had money to spare was evident from the very first moment the elevator door opened onto a foyer, which was in fact Don Chente’s private apartment and meant that the entire floor—the penthouse, I should say—was his, quite impressive given the size of the building and the fact that he was the first Salvadoran refuge I had ever met in Mexico who could afford such a luxury, nor was this just any old luxury, as I saw when a uniformed maid greeted me in said foyer and led me to a small sitting room, where, she said, I should wait for Don Chente. I must have spent about three minutes in that room, scrutinizing the décor and listening to the murmurs of a group of women who were probably drinking tea and playing canasta in a room surely less monastic than the one I found myself in, when a short, swarthy, gray-haired old man appeared, dressed in a guayabera and black pants and wearing tortoiseshell glasses that magnified his eyes; he greeted me with a certain formality, gently and very politely telling me what a pleasure it was to meet me and would I please follow him down a hallway, from which I could not catch even a glimpse of the prattling women, in spite of my curiosity-fueled efforts, that’s how big his place was, a hallway similarly decorated in the style of the very wealthy and at the end of which we came to Don Chente’s office, or rather, a spacious library that looked nothing at all like any doctor’s office I’d ever seen, except for the several framed degrees hanging on the wall behind the desk at which Don Chente sat after inviting me to take a seat.

“How can I help you?” Don Chente asked while I was still looking at the bookshelves and staring at the degrees that certified the man in front of me as a medical doctor, a psychologist, and an acupuncturist, a range of knowledge that made a very positive impression on me, allowing me to cherish the hope that I was in the presence of somebody who would soon afford me relief from my pain. But before I set out to describe my ailments, and perhaps upon noticing my amazement at the number of books on the shelves, Don Chente told me that he no longer officially practiced his profession, he was retired and that’s why he didn’t have a doctor’s office per se, this was his library, where once in a while he saw one or another patient, a friend or a friend of friends, in my case, he was seeing me because of his friendship with Muñecón and his fond memories of my father’s family.

“So, tell me . . .” he said in a gentle, almost timid, voice as he settled into his chair and placed the palms of his hands together in front of his lips, as if he were about to hear a confession.

And then I told him that I’d been having pain precisely here—pressing on my liver—for about a week, that the pain was constant, which made me fear a serious liver disorder, if not something worse, because a decade earlier some cursed amoebas had infested that organ, which was then further weakened by all the poison I ingested to eradicate them, and, moreover, in the last few weeks, I had to confess, I’d been overdoing it with the vodka tonics, anxious as I was about all kinds of problems that were swarming in on me left, right, and center.

“Are your problems that serious?” Don Chente asked, leaning over his desk to pick up a pen and a notebook, then slowly and deliberately beginning to take notes.

At that very moment, before I started to reveal my misfortunes, I remembered my first appointment with Pico Molins about eight years before, when I anxiously described the pain I was having throughout my abdomen, how an ulcer was about to burst, that’s what I was complaining about when Pico stood up and looked at my iris, then asked me to stick out my tongue, instead of giving me a thorough physical examination, instead of sending me to have tests done, he simply looked at my iris and my tongue, which, needless to say, made me terribly suspicious, above all when he then proceeded to ask me a series of questions that sounded like some kind of children’s game, such as, did I prefer cold or heat, meat or fish, the color red or the color blue—utter nonsense, I thought at the time—and as if that wasn’t enough, he then told me he was going to prescribe some sulfur drops, which I would then have to mix with distilled water in a pewter receptacle and take three teaspoons a day—hell, as if drops were what I needed with all that pain . . .

“If you like, we can talk afterwards,” Don Chente said, standing up and indicating that I should follow him into the room where he would examine me, a small room with an exam table, on which I soon lay down after unbuttoning my shirt and pants—I couldn’t hear the murmurs of the tea-drinking women who were playing canasta—and waited for the doctor to pick up his stethoscope to listen to my abdomen, my lungs, check my throat and my reflexes and my blood pressure, all standard practice, not as Pico Molins had done that first time I saw him, when all he did was look at my iris and my tongue, ask me those suspicious questions, give me a medicine bottle with sulfur drops, and tell me that was all, that I didn’t owe him anything, without explaining a thing about the ailment afflicting me, and in the face of which I stood without flinching for a few seconds, grateful of course that the consultation had been free but disconcerted by the absence of any explanation about my disease, until I did react, begging him to please tell me the cause of the pain, a normal thing to ask a doctor, but Pico Molins was a little odd, to tell the truth, and all he said was that I suffered from gastritis and colitis due to widespread irritation of the digestive system, and considering the quantity of rum I was drinking at the time and the stress I was under, it was the least I could expect, that I should find a pool and go swimming or some other way to relax if I didn’t want to end up with my intestines in shreds.

I felt more confident when I sat down in front of Don Chente’s desk after the exam because his behavior so far had been more in keeping with what one expects from a doctor, who first tests the flesh and then engages with the metaphysical, which is precisely what he now did, insisting that I tell him about my current concerns and still not offering any diagnosis for the pain, even though he had taken notes of his findings after pressing my abdomen in a variety of spots; I told him that I was just about to quit my job at a news agency, in fact, I was going to work there for only a few more weeks, my plan being to radically change my life, return to El Salvador to take part in a journalism project I had been invited to join, and which I was very excited about, because the negotiations between the government and the guerrillas were making steady progress, and peace could be glimpsed on the not-too-distant horizon.

“Are you taking your family?” Don Chente asked, leaning back in his chair and pressing his hands together in front of his mouth, his brow somewhat furrowed, which made me think that he considered my decision a mistake. I told him that my wife and young daughter would remain in Mexico, it wasn’t as if I wanted to convert my adventure into a tragedy, but once the civil war was over, they would join me. “What does your wife think?” he asked, still with extreme tact and not taking his eyes off me, to which I responded, still staring at the bookshelves, that she had finally accepted the idea, without mentioning that my relationship with my wife had had the stuffing beaten out of it, not because of my trip, but because five years of cohabitation was enough to destroy anybody’s nerves, and my departure was to a large extent the result of my need to place enough distance between us to assess whether it was worthwhile to ever light that particular hellfire again.

Then, behaving like an older incarnation of Pico Molins instead of informing me about the condition of my liver, which was causing me so much anxiety, Don Chente started asking me the same childish questions I had had to answer that first time, after which I had walked out of Pico Molins’s office—totally incredulous and carrying my little bottle of sulfur drops—onto the main plaza of Coyoacán, telling myself that it had been a waste of time, though fortunately not also of money, to go see a homeopath who had not even examined me, and that I had to immediately find another doctor, an allopathic doctor, which is what I proceeded to do right away, spending a pretty penny on a top specialist, laboratory tests included, so that in the end he could tell me that I suffered from gastritis and colitis due to widespread irritation of the digestive system, exactly what Pico Molins had diagnosed for free after having looked only at my iris and my tongue—what a way to throw away the little bit of money I had!—which is why I decided to take the sulfur drops exactly as he had prescribed rather than the list of expensive medicines the specialist had so solemnly included in his prescriptions.

And the moment I thought that Don Chente had finished asking questions, such as if I liked hot or cold drinks, I took the opportunity to tell him that I had been subjected to the same line of interrogation many years earlier by a homeopath, but that according to the degrees I saw on his wall, he was a medical doctor, an acupuncturist, and a psychologist, but not a homeopath, whereby Don Chente explained that at the age of nearly seventy, he was a student in his last year of homeopathic medicine at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, the only place that offered such a program, and he thought it a marvelous body of knowledge on a par with all the others he had delved into, a disclosure that made me think this little old man was a true Pandora’s box and that he’d probably end up being as good a doctor for me as the disappeared Pico Molins. But I was unable to carry on with my musings because, without giving me a chance to catch my breath and without beating around the bush, Don Chente began a new line of interrogation about my parents, my grandparents, and the circumstances under which I’d spent the first few years of my life, which Pico Molins had not asked me about, as far as I could recall, an interrogation carried out with the utmost tact but one that soon had me telling him that I had spent the first few years of my life with my maternal grandparents, and that my grandmother was a strict woman, to say the least, who loved order and old-school tradition, and that she had raised me those first few years according to that criteria—a woman, moreover, who hated my father more than anything in the world and never ceased to speak scornfully of him even after he’d been murdered. “How old were you then?” Don Chente asked, continuing to take notes. I told him eleven years old, which is why I barely had any memories of him, because he had been killed before the 1972 coup in an incident that remains obscure. “I remember it,” Don Chente mumbled, for as Muñecón’s friend he had to have known about that crime, which spared me from going into detail—as he put it, he was interested in what had remained in my psychic and emotional memory about my relationship with my father, and not what had appeared in the newspapers.

I am a very anxious person—even though this isn’t readily apparent—so I found it intolerable to talk about my family life before Don Chente had revealed to me the cause of the pain in my liver, before he had told me either that the organ was irreparably inflamed and damaged by alcohol and my past illness or that he could prescribe some remedy that would soon cure me. Don Chente met my question with an extended silence, leaned back in his chair, and with a long face that led me to fear the worst, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with your liver,” an assertion that left me dumbstruck—the pain was right there in that organ—and unable to respond in time to ask him what, in that case, was causing the stabbing pain in my ribs, because before I could do so Don Chente said, “Let me tell you a story that will help you understand.” And the old man started telling a story that I didn’t pay much attention to at first, so consumed was I by fear, but he soon drew me in, despite his quiet and monotonous voice, and his modest demeanor:

“The different stages mankind has gone through during its millennia of evolution are experienced by each human being over the course of his lifetime on a vastly reduced scale. Before the Ice Age, man, like other mammals, couldn’t control his bladder and bowels: he wandered through the mountains emptying them whenever they filled up no matter where he was. The Ice Age led to a great change in civilization. When humans took shelter in caves and were forced to live a sedentary life, they discovered that they did not like to defecate or urinate where they slept, so they learned to control their bladder and bowels and demand that others do the same—which is why the best way to toilet train a puppy is to place his bed where he does his business . . . This was also the first time a human being experienced the emotion we now call anxiety, which consists of having to choose between two options: either he satisfies his instinct to empty himself wherever he happens to be, which means he’d have excrement next to his bed, as we call it now, or he controls his bowels and bladder and empties himself elsewhere. In the first two or three years of his life, every human being goes through this entire process that humanity underwent over the course of thousands of years. Do you understand? When a child is being toilet trained, he confronts anxiety for the first time: either he follows his instinct and does his business whenever he feels pressure on his sphincters, or he pleases his parents and controls his bowels and bladder as they’ve demanded he do. Anxiety and bowel control are closely related. If a child is raised strictly and is thereby strongly repressed, he will have anxiety throughout his life about his bowel control and, hence, his colon. And when, as an adult, he needs to decide between two options, he will feel anxiety, and that anxiety will make him tense up his sphincter and his colon. This is the cause of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, an ailment most human beings suffer from at some point, even if they’re not aware of it. This is your ailment.”