The Dream of My Return Read Free Page A

undergo an acupuncture treatment had made it worse, because if there was anything I feared above all else, ever since childhood, it was needles, and this was my mother’s fault, she was the one who’d had the bright idea to learn how to give injections, practicing on my brother and me as if we were guinea pigs, using the excuse that shots of Vitamin B and cod liver oil would make us grow up stronger and healthier, when her true intention had been to amuse herself practicing the aforementioned torture on our aching buttocks every other day for at least three months, I told Don Chente as we made our way down the hallway to his library, without me hearing, on this occasion, any women murmuring, and without me confessing that the prospect of being penetrated by numerous painful needles was keeping me in an exacerbated state of doubt about whether it was worth subjecting myself to acupuncture, or if maybe I should find some medicine that would quickly relax my colon, that was the magnitude of my distress.
    “So, tell me, how are your preparations going for your trip? And your relationship with your wife, are things okay?” The old man shot these questions at me as soon as I sat down facing his desk, as if he had antennae that could detect the source of my ills. So-so, I said, adding that we were having some difficult moments, what with my imminent departure, but I refrained from mentioning that she wasn’t my wife because we weren’t married, a revelation that would have seemed a bagatelle compared to the fact that the relationship had fallen apart two nights before—coincidentally, hours after my first appointment with Don Chente—when Eva, no longer able to bear her guilt, confessed that for the past few weeks she had been carrying on a sexual relationship with a two-bit actor I didn’t know and had never heard anything about.
    The situation that I refrained from explaining to Don Chente came about in the following way: Eva and I were in bed—she, pretending to sleep, and I, reading a magazine—when I suddenly had an inexplicable sensation, some kind of precise intuition that Eva had something to reveal; so, without taking my eyes off the magazine, I asked her what was going on, assuring her that she could trust me and tell me what was tormenting her, though at no time had she mentioned that she was being tormented nor had I witnessed any such torment; she sat up in bed, arranged the pillows behind her, and started by asking me to forgive her, without saying what I should forgive her for; then she said that she hadn’t wanted to hurt me, but she’d gotten carried away like some stupid idiot, and now, consumed by remorse, she was suffering the consequences. “So . . . ?” I asked her, looking up from the magazine for the first time and seeing that she was on the verge of tears. She told me that two weeks earlier, she had gone to bed a couple of times with an actor named Antolín, someone she had apparently met at her job at the publicity agency, where she was the star of the production department, and they had done it in his apartment, in the early hours of the morning: after dropping Evita off at daycare, she had made her way to this Antolín fellow’s apartment, where he was undoubtedly waiting for her very eagerly—I could even picture him naked under his dressing gown, impatient to dig right into Eva’s dark and delicious flesh. But, she explained, now shaking with sobs, it had happened only twice—after that she’d felt too guilty and decided she’d never go to bed with that actor again—and would I forgive her and nothing like that would ever happen again. Her revelation was quite a blow to my self-esteem and could have led me to react in several different ways, but I opted for the role of the understanding and affectionate partner who was about to take off anyway and had suddenly happened upon the best justification for his departure, so I took her in my arms, patted her head and told her to calm