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

knowing what to do besides squirm in my seat for a few minutes that seemed to last forever. What would Mr. Rabbit do? Would he simply note the apartment number or would he also enter into contact with the subject? Why had he taken the initiative when I, supposedly, was the one who should have approached the two-bit actor? Soon, I saw my friend returning with slow but steady steps and that impenetrable expression on his face. “Done,” he said as he started the car, without me understanding at first exactly what he was talking about, though I assumed he meant he’d found out the subject’s apartment number, which is what I told him, but Mr. Rabbit was pokerfaced and withdrawn, not unusual for him, until a few blocks later when we stopped at the first red light and he took the opportunity to take a small pistol out of his jacket pocket and remove the silencer. “It’s still warm,” he said as he handed me the short tubular device that had muffled the sound of the shot; those fumes of gunpowder were proof that Mr. Rabbit had fired his weapon, I told myself in dismay, suddenly afraid to have the silencer in my hands and throwing it into his lap as if it were burning me. “What the fuck, what have you done!?” I exclaimed, beside myself, because then I fully understood that Mr. Rabbit had just liquidated Antolín. “The plan for today was just to follow him!” I shouted, in shock, truly choking on what had just occurred. “Don’t take it personally, but it really was for the best,” Mr. Rabbit mumbled, just as calmly, putting the silencer back into his jacket pocket, while I failed to recover from the shock. “Consider it a favor. It’s no problem for me to do something like that, I learned how to a long time ago, out of necessity, but you’ve never done it, and it’s better for you not to,” he said emphatically, as if thereby putting an end to the subject. And I sat there, speechless, in unfamiliar torment, as if suddenly a huge mass of guilt had slammed into my cerebellum, and instead of the joy that should have swept over me at the death of the person who’d cuckolded me, I experienced a sensation of drowning, suffocation, though it wasn’t air I was lacking but something else, because then I realized that it had never been anything but bluster, my true intention had never been to kill said two-bit actor but rather to prove who knows what to myself and Mr. Rabbit about how I could be as brave and resolute as he, about how nobody was going to make a mockery of me without paying with his life, a mockery of the magnitude this Antolín character had made of me could only be paid for with his life, as had now happened without me being able to do anything to fix it. Slunk down in the seat of the pickup next to Mr. Rabbit, who, with a serenity that was diametrically opposed to my all-consuming anguish, was driving toward La Veiga, where we were going to have a couple of drinks to celebrate the “decisive and impeccable” operation, as he defined it while maneuvering the car into a parking place, I understood that deep down I always knew that I would never have had the nerve to kill Antolín, that the whole so-called decision I had boasted about was simply the pretense of a person who knows that at the very last moment he will find the perfect justification to avoid taking action; but Mr. Rabbit’s initiative had thrust me into a situation I was not prepared for, because the moment I closed the door to the pickup—still with a modicum of control over myself, even if completely crushed by guilt—I knew that an extremely severe bout of paranoia was enveloping me and that I’d gotten myself into a hell I never thought I’d fall into and hadn’t the slightest idea how to get out of. “Don’t tell me now that you didn’t really want to do it, that you’re having regrets,” Mr. Rabbit said as we sat down at a table in front of a group of old Spaniards, pachyderms who could be found drinking coffee there at