Read Online The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya - Free Book Online Page B

down to write the story of my life, and the only thing I had so far achieved was to upend my serene state of mind, I’d do better to use my free time to put my affairs in order before I left for El Salvador. Instead, however, perhaps out of nostalgia for the serenity I’d lost, perhaps out of simple mental sloth, I turned my attention outward, let my gaze drift off and alight upon the passersby as I tried to imagine the world that afflicted them from looking at their faces, letting my restless mind play around at will, and from digression to digression I was soon remembering a dream I had had a few days before, really a kind of nightmare, vague in its development but blunt by the end, as a result of which I awoke, needless to say, and that was the only part I remembered, the end, when I killed someone but I couldn’t remember whom I’d killed nor the circumstances of the crime, just the sensation of having killed someone but without a specific memory of the act, the anguish produced by the guilt and the fear of having killed somebody without remembering the act or the victim, that was the end of the nightmare, from which I’d abruptly awoken, needless to say, but without experiencing any relief from the aforementioned anxiety; I spent a long time lying in bed, deeply shaken because something inside me was telling me that the dream was not a dream but rather a message from my unconscious, and that I had probably killed someone and now had no memory of it—my psyche had erased the fact, who knows when or how. Remembering that nightmare while drinking my vodka tonic on the terrace of La Veiga upset me again, just as it had upset me every time I’d remembered it; it gave me a kind of vertigo, as if I were at the edge of a black hole whose unknown strength might at any moment viciously suck me in and carry me off to a reality that I could not possibly imagine, the very possibility of which horrified me beyond all reason. It was at that moment, and thanks to a fortuitous association, that I asked myself with astonishment if I had had that nightmare the night after undergoing my first hypnosis session with Don Chente, if that nightmare had been a response to what my doctor had shaken up in my psyche while he had me in a hypnotic trance. Of course! I told myself with a certain amount of joy, sitting bolt upright in my chair and glancing rapidly around me, as if the people at the neighboring tables might have caught wind of my latest discovery; that was how to explain that nightmare: it was my dark side’s reaction to Don Chente’s efforts to penetrate it while I had no consciousness of him doing so.
    I took another sip of vodka, a bit excited because I was beginning to see some amazing consequences of the treatment I was undergoing, and I presumed that that night, after my second hypnosis session, another strange dream awaited me. I leaned back in my chair, contemplating the glass on the table, which contained barely one last sip of vodka, thinking by now that Félix had gotten bogged down with those last-minute complications we journalists always get bogged down with, and probably wouldn’t show up, and that if I had any chance of finding any solace on that terrace, it wouldn’t be a good idea at all to have another vodka, the proper course of action would be to pay and make my way to the trolley stop. It was at that instant, while I was enjoying the slow passage of time before taking that final sip, carried away by another association my mind had made with no help from my will, that I suddenly felt the impact, or rather, received the blow that pushed me into the black hole I so greatly feared: what if the crime I couldn’t remember was the murder of my little nursery school classmate whose head I had bashed in with the little wooden block? What if this was the death that was buried in my memory, the one I had wiped out through who knows what mechanisms and that now, because of the hypnosis sessions, was trying to come