The Dream of My Return Read Online Free PDF Page B

little distance between me and the drama, though suddenly I remembered the novel about Evita Peron that I was reading at the time, which claimed that the cancer that killed her had had its origins in a botched abortion.
    “It’s not surprising that being raised by a domineering mother and grandmother would affect your own couple relationships,” Don Chente said, and then asked me to tell him any memories of my father that I did have, even though I’d already told him that I had almost no memories of my progenitor, but I soon found myself talking about my father’s passion for fireworks, for lighting firecrackers on Christmas and New Year’s, how he would buy bags of rockets, fountains, mortars, whistles, and any other kind of fireworks, which he would then set off with the greatest delight, like a little boy, how he’d spend a good part of those nights with my brother and me and the rest of the neighborhood gang, lighting firecrackers nonstop; he loved them so much that on our birthdays he’d sneak into our room early in the morning while we were still asleep and wake us up with explosions, cheers, laughter, and singing the happy birthday song,
Las mañanitas
. Don Chente listened to me, ensconced in his chair, the palms of his hands joined at his chin, and, even though he periodically leaned over his desk and jotted something down in his notebook, I couldn’t tell which details interested him, because I was suddenly remembering about how my father’s siesta was sacred, the house converted into a tomb under the midday heat, and my brother and I had to scratch his head, pet his head really, until his loud snores resounded—he didn’t smoke sixty cigarettes a day in vain. “Did he ever punish you harshly?” Don Chente asked, in a tone of voice that made me think that I was remembering only stupid things and that nothing essential was coming to mind. I answered that my father had never laid a hand on me, that when he got angry he punished me by making me stay in my room while my friends played in the street or in the backyard, and that it was my mother who shouted and made a fuss, though she dared hit me only once, when I was four years old, and never ran the risk of raising a hand against me again, so great was the fear my grandmother Lena—my protector, whose heir I was—inspired in all of them, I thought, but didn’t say to Don Chente, who really didn’t need to hear that from me to reach the same conclusion.
    What I also didn’t tell the old man, and maybe should have, is that the most intense memory I have of my father has nothing to do with his life but with his death, because the night he was shot in the back as he was leaving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Colonia Centroamérica, my brother and I were in bed, and the moment my mother came into our bedroom, a nervous wreck after receiving the phone call, to tell us that Papa had had an “accident” and that she was going to the hospital to be with him, and that we would stay with Fidelita, our trusted maid, and that if they weren’t home by morning, which they weren’t, we should get up, shower, eat breakfast, and take the bus to school like we did every day . . . at that very moment, as I was saying, when my mother came into our room, out of control, I had an intuition that something very important was about to change in my life, that I was about to enter unknown and dangerous territory, an intuition that produced a sensation of fear and helplessness that prevented me from sleeping peacefully that night and stayed with me the following morning, when Father Pedro, the principal of my school, came into my classroom, asked the teacher to excuse me, and instructed me to pack all my binders and books into my knapsack, then started walking by my side, his protective hand on my shoulder as he talked to me about God—I assume, though I was like a zombie so I don’t remember his words—until just before we entered the main office, when he told me that