The Dream of My Return Read Online Free PDF

when the test came back positive, and thus began the bitter discussion about how to proceed; an abortion seemed to me to be the preferred course of action from every possible point of view, whereas Eva, due to her natural feminine protective instinct, declared somewhat tentatively that she was in favor of keeping the child, though she wavered between that position and mine, constantly bursting out in tears so as to stoke my feelings of guilt, even though she was the only possible guilty party, no matter what, whether the child was mine because she had lied to me about her supposed infertility or, more likely, that due to the excitement and urgency of her initiation into adultery, she’d failed to take the necessary precautions and now the spawn of that circus performer was growing in her belly. But the question of culpability wasn’t really the issue, because I was about to leave the country and end my relationship with her, a forceful enough argument in itself against the advisability of any pregnancy, a pregnancy she would have to go through alone and without any support from me, unless she was in cahoots with her two-bit actor, which I asked her about more than once, in which case they might as well leave me out of their soap opera; but Eva stuck to her guns, repeating that there was nothing between her and Antolín, and that the baby was mine, she had no doubt about it, the two times they’d slept together they’d used condoms, and she repeated this with so much conviction that I was on the verge of believing how many times she had lapsed, as Don Chente called it, but not that they’d used a condom, as I told her in no uncertain terms, and for that very reason I’d take no responsibility for the baby and the appropriate course of action was an immediate abortion. By the next day, she’d already made an appointment with a doctor who carried out that kind of extraction clandestinely in a house in Colonia Portales—it was incumbent upon me to go with her because I didn’t want to behave like a lout and also because I wanted to be absolutely certain that the fetus would be done away with—a house that, truth be told, nobody could guess was a doctor’s office and which I was not allowed to enter—the butcher forbade entry to any third parties, according to Eva—so I waited in the car for a couple of hours, very anxious and with my mind churning a million miles an hour, the situation so tense and anomalous that at first I was afraid there would be neither doctor nor office and that we’d fallen into the clutches of a gang of thieves who would steal our money; then I thought, to calm myself down, that Eva had heard about that doctor through two of her colleagues who had already paid visits to the house that I was now keeping under surveillance. At a certain moment during my wait, I got paranoid that the police would suddenly burst into the house and arrest the doctor and his spread-eagle patients; I watched carefully through the rearview mirror to see if any suspicious characters were hanging around, and I despised living in a country that was so primitive that abortion was against the law, where I couldn’t turn to people like Don Chente or Pico Molins to extricate me from this problem. Eva walked out of the house and to the car as if everything were normal, as if she had not just undergone any kind of procedure, which made me fear that they hadn’t attended to her, but the moment she got in the car, she collapsed, broke down in horrible sobs—before saying “It’s over”—sobs that made me feel as if I’d done something wrong, when by rights we should have been pleased that it had all turned out for the best, which is what I told her, but all she could say was “It was horrible,” a statement that proved that she’d inherited from her father, a progressive former priest, a culture of guilt, and that this stood above and beyond her secular education, it was in her genes, I told myself in order to put a