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

and with Evita as the only bond between us; but instead of listening to common sense, which was telling me that she had to clean up her own mess, I started spewing out death threats at the two-bit actor and demanding that Eva give me all and any information she had about my future victim, which she refused to do, obviously, seeing me in such a state of bestiality, she said, a refusal that managed to rile me up even more, until I stomped out of the house, shouting insults and slamming the door behind me. A few hours later I was at La Veiga drinking vodka tonics compulsively, like a fiend, and telling my old and trusted friend, Mr. Rabbit, about Eva’s betrayal and how that two-bit actor was pursuing her. “Let’s break the sonofabitch’s neck,” Mr. Rabbit said in a flat voice and without flinching, in that style so typical of him, and he said it as if he could read my thoughts, because the only thing I wanted to do was break that obnoxious Romeo’s neck, for even though I’d never killed anybody and lacked the necessary experience to carry out such an act, at that moment I felt elated at the prospect of killing the man who had cuckolded me, my elation increasing by leaps and bounds as Mr. Rabbit displayed so much indignation and willingness to be my accomplice in the execution of Eva’s ex-lover; and we aren’t talking here about any old accomplice but rather a man who, during his long tenure as a militant revolutionary, had liquidated a number of subjects, and who therefore knew how to pull the trigger without his hand shaking. I immediately gave him all the information I had on the subject and proposed a plan that we set in motion the following day, a plan Mr. Rabbit approved of with keen resolve. When I got home that night, I was transformed, as if I had discovered my mission in life, the one on which I would focus my best resources and all my energy, so I behaved shrewdly toward Eva, conciliatorily, as if the homicidal plans she had written off as mere bluster earlier that evening had been nothing more than that, bluster that wouldn’t be repeated, whereby I asked her calmly and with all the virtues of a compassionate man, whether she had persuaded her Romeo to stop harassing her, to which she responded sincerely that she hoped he would now stop calling though she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure of it; when we were in bed, I asked her—as if none of it had anything to do with me—if Antolín was at least a good actor, if she had seen the play he was in or had heard anything about it from others, this for the sole purpose of verifying information that would help me carry out my plan the following night. I spent that Saturday in a bizarre, almost jubilant, state of mind, like a naughty child about to get up to some mischief he’d always longed to do, that’s what I thought momentarily, even though I had never been a naughty child, and this was something more, something serious, an initiation, as if finally I was going to be capable of carrying out an act that would consolidate my masculinity on many different levels; as if by liquidating the person who had dared offend me in the gravest possible way, I would be fulfilling a manifest destiny that would give me access to a different level of consciousness and personal realization, because from then on I would have a more rigorous understanding of life, a better sense of justice, and I would never forget that everyone must pay what they owe. Mr. Rabbit called me at three in the afternoon, as we agreed, to confirm that we were going to go through with the operation. And at a few minutes before eight o’clock that night, we met in the lobby of the theater behind the National Auditorium but acted like total strangers, each buying his own ticket and entering the hall, where Mr. Rabbit sat a few rows in front of me—he had bought his ticket a few moments before me—which would allow him a better view of the subject, who was also within my field of vision, as