The Dream of My Return Read Online Free PDF Page A

though when dealing with that kind of sleazy activity it was difficult to know for certain. He asked how I had reacted, perhaps fearing that violence had carried the day, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I had behaved in a more civilized way than usual, having reached the conclusion that we had no future as a couple. “What does she think?” he asked, a look of concern spreading across his face. I told him I still didn’t understand her, sometimes she’d assert with conviction that everything was over, but at other times she’d say the opposite, which to my mind meant that she was terribly confused, which had made it impossible for us to hold a calm and reasonable conversation, as was necessary under the circumstances. “Try not to make precipitous decisions; remember there is a young child involved,” Don Chente said, picking up his fountain pen to write something down in his notebook.
    What I didn’t reveal to Don Chente, because I didn’t see the point, was that Eva had come home one evening after our last appointment unusually agitated, which made me suspect that she had returned to her adventures with said two-bit actor, so I told her off, sarcastically suggesting that she had traded her libidinous morning escapades for afternoon ones, to which she reacted with a rather disproportional expression of indignation, according to my standards, thereby increasing my suspicions and prompting me to remind her that there was no need to get violent, as far as I was concerned she could do with her ass whatever the hell she wanted and with whomever she wanted. I was afraid this would make her even more belligerent, but the opposite occurred: she went and sat down in the armchair facing the sofa where I was sitting and began to cry, quietly at first and then uncontrollably, so pitifully that I soon cast off my suspicions that she was employing a typical feminine strategy and asked her what was going on, because by now I was a bit alarmed, my intuition having warned me that so much crying could not possibly bode well for me. Sniffling, her hands covering her face, she said: her period was a week late and she was afraid she was pregnant. Flabbergasted, I sat bolt upright, and long seconds passed before I could muster my voice; my insides were being buffeted about by contradictory emotions, and although her sorrowful cries had awoken my compassion, the idea that she was pregnant with the other man’s child filled me with so much rage that I thought I was going to explode—I had the urge to kick the hell out of her that very moment—after all, a roll in the hay was one thing and getting pregnant quite another. I asked her if she’d done a test. She said, no, she would the next day, and she explained that she should have gotten her period exactly eight days before, but because of her symptoms she was almost positive—and I understood that “almost” as a final line of defense that not even she believed—she was pregnant. “When was the last time you fucked your actor?” I asked with consummate scorn. She stopped crying, lowered her hands, and looked at me with hatred. “We always used a condom,” she mumbled. “So, whose is it?” I asked, my mind stuck on the word
always
that she had uttered so naturally and which led me to infer that those two lewd mornings she had sold me on were nothing but cheap consolation for a poor cuckold and that I’d never know how many times she had actually given herself to that two-bit actor. “What do you mean, whose?!” she shouted, furious, but at that point it really was an act, because as far as I could remember, the times we had fornicated in the last few months had been few and far between—busy as she was frolicking in someone else’s bed—and on those few occasions, Eva had assured me that she was not in the fertile part of her cycle. “Idiot!” she snarled, then started sobbing again.
    Nor would I tell Don Chente about my via crucis over the following days,