The Dream of My Return Read Free Page B

down—her crying was copious and snotty—assuring her that I understood her, and that her infidelity was proof that our relationship had run its course, been eroded by time and the daily grind. A few moments later, however, I fell victim to a desire for revenge: I had also been unfaithful to her a few months earlier, I told her after we had turned off the bedside light, when a gringa translator named Miriam would come into my office at the news agency, close the frosted-glass door, unzip my pants, and—she, on her knees, and me, keeping my swivel chair from swiveling—suck my member until she had extracted the desired milk, and that she would do this in the late mornings, punctually, like a baby who can’t carry on with her day until she’s had her bottle, three days in a row until Saturday, when we went to her apartment and discovered that we were a disaster in bed.
    None of that, of course, did I reveal to Don Chente Alvarado—I was not seeking marital advice but rather relief from the pain in my side—nor did I tell him about Eva’s reaction, when, despite being exhausted from confessing and crying, she turned on her bedside light and sat up, newly inspired to continue the fight, and began upbraiding me for having kept my infidelity a secret for so long, for being such a liar, that her infidelity, compared to mine, was a mere trifle, that’s what she said and with indignation, and I responded by saying that this proved that our relationship had no business continuing, she should turn off the light and let me sleep, in a few weeks I wouldn’t be there anymore, and she could think whatever she liked—a response that exasperated her even more and made her shout that I was a horrid wretch, completely unfair, a coward who wanted only to run away, this accompanied by a new bout of sobbing that accomplished nothing except waking up Evita and turning my night into a disaster.
    “Let’s go into the other room,” Don Chente said, perhaps aware that the sooner he stuck the needles in the better and that my vague answers about my relationship were evidence of the density of the shit I was not willing to stir up. And we walked down the quiet hallway then entered the room where I lay down on the table after taking off my shoes and socks and unbuttoning my shirt and pants so that my chest and whole abdomen were exposed. “Relax,” Don Chente said, because he knew that I was doing the exact opposite, that the closer the moment came when he’d start sticking me with needles, the more I was tensing up in terror, exactly as always happened whenever I was about to get a shot or have blood taken from my arm—my muscles would seize up and make inserting the needle more difficult and more painful, precisely what was happening to me the instant the old man reached the foot of my bed with his needles at the ready; I tried to think about something that would take me far away from the impending torture, so I started to picture in great detail the mornings Eva had spent making love with her two-bit actor, mornings when she would rush into the aforementioned’s apartment and immediately start kissing him as he’d put his arms around her and grab her splendid ass; then he’d open his robe so she could lick his chest, moaning with lust, then go down on her knees and take his penis into her mouth. But I couldn’t picture anything beyond that because at that very moment Don Chente stuck the first needle between my right big toe and the next one, which was horribly painful and drew from me a cry of protest. “That one’s for the liver,” the old man said, with what seemed to me like relish, and then he stuck in the next one, and another, and another, until I could no longer distinguish which one was most painful, I never could have imagined anything like this martyrdom, needles sticking out of my limbs, my abdomen, my head, one particularly sinister needle stuck between my eyes, as if precisely in that third eye I had read about in