The Dream of My Return Read Free

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.”
    So captivated was I by Don Chente’s story that for a moment I forgot the stabbing pain in my liver, thinking that it had been a long time since anybody had illustrated in such a simple yet profound way a problem that concerns everybody, so captivated that at that very moment I knew this story would go on to become part and parcel of my repertoire of anecdotes, and that at the slightest provocation I would repeat it to whomever wanted to listen, until suddenly I woke up to the fact that it was not my colon but my liver that was hurting, and I said as much to Don Chente and asked him for an explanation. “Your colon is so constricted that it’s rubbing up against your liver membrane—that’s what’s causing the pain,” Don Chente explained, then warned me that the best thing for Irritable Bowel Syndrome was not allopathic medicine but rather acupuncture, which treated the nervous system directly, and that if I was willing, he would treat me with needles two days later, to which I answered, yes, yes, of course, though I’d never had acupuncture in my life.
    Don Chente stood up, thereby putting an end to the visit, and told me that he would accompany me to the elevator, whereby I hurriedly asked him how much I owed him, my hopes riding high because I’d gotten used to not paying for treatment, so imagine my delight when Don Chente answered that it was nothing, as he’d already explained, he was retired, and if he saw me it was only out of friendship for my uncle, Muñecón, and the affection he felt for my father’s family, especially my grandparents Pericles and Haydée, he repeated as we walked down the hallway, where I did not hear the murmurs of the women who surely had finished drinking their tea and playing canasta.

2
     
    I MADE MY WAY to my next appointment with Don Chente Alvarado in a completely different frame of mind than the one I was in the second time I arrived at Pico Molins’s office eight years before, at that time ashamed that I had mistrusted his diagnosis and gone to see an expensive specialist, a fact that, to my surprise, Pico Molins discovered only seconds after I had sat down in front of his desk, just by looking at me, and which he mentioned with a certain glee—and not at all as if it had been a betrayal, which is how I interpreted my own behavior—saying that I mustn’t worry, people frequently don’t trust his little drops, which obviously put me at ease and opened the possibility for us to establish the cordial relationship that ended with his abrupt departure for Catalonia.
    “How are you doing? Are you feeling any better?” Don Chente asked point-blank as soon as I came out of the elevator—he was the one who greeted me, not the uniformed maid. So-so, I told him, though the truth was that nothing had changed, the pain was there in my side, and though it might very well be explained by the marvelous story he had told me two days before, the mere fact of being aware that I was about to