The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Author:Horacio Castellanos Moya [Moya, Horacio Castellanos]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-03-09T21:00:00+00:00

7

I WAS IN RATHER A STRANGE FRAME OF MIND when I left for Muñecón’s apartment, convinced that my friendship with the man who was expecting me was grounded in our common affinity for drinks and political gossip, and not in the fact that he was my uncle; I had never related to him as my uncle because when I was young enough to learn to relate to someone as an uncle, he didn’t visit my house, his relationship with my father, his older brother, having been characterized by conflict; moreover, a few weeks after my father’s murder, Muñecón was forced into exile because of his participation in the failed coup d’état of March 1972, so it wasn’t till ten years later that I would get to know him, when I ran into him in Mexico City among a small group of journalists who were attending a news conference called by the guerrillas to announce the launch of their military offensive, a conference I was assigned to cover as a reporter, and Muñecón recognized me as we were leaving and suggested we go have a drink at his place. Since then, I had gotten into the habit of visiting him at least once every couple of weeks, to drink the brandy he generously poured and exchange gossip about the ups and downs of the civil war and its political intrigues with him and his buddies, fellow Salvadorans who were always in his living room, mooching brandy and offering loads of bluster.

I walked down Porfirio Díaz to Muñecón’s apartment, which was actually just a few blocks away from Don Chente’s penthouse, my twofold purpose being to get a telephone number or other contact information for our doctor in San Salvador and to ask Muñecón a few questions about my father, if the conditions were propitious, because I now realized that in the eight years that I had been visiting him, we had almost never been alone, as I explained above, and we were both probably somewhat phobic about discussing family issues, probably for different reasons, I told myself while I was standing in front of the building, not yet venturing to ring the doorbell, because the fact is I hadn’t thought about what it was I wanted to know about my father, or if I was only trying to compensate for the appointment Don Chente had canceled so unexpectedly. Iris, Muñecón’s current lover and, though this was a minor detail, forty years his junior, came to open the door; she was a nice girl with generous curves and rosy cheeks, and I couldn’t understand for the life of me what she was doing with that old relative of mine. In the living room I found my host and his friend, Mario Varela, a Communist apparatchik who did not inspire me with confidence—so much for my luck, on top of which they’d already gotten a head start on the brandy and the conversation—and in whose presence I saw no point in pursuing any

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