The Return by Roberto Bolaño Page B

could say that by then,
knowing we were there at the station, he had no reason to get hysterical. Anyway, he did what he needed to do in the bathroom, quietly, thinking about the
person he’d seen, thinking it over, but not making a big deal of it. And when
they went back to the gym, he looked in the mirror again, and sure enough, he
said, it wasn’t him, it was someone else, and I said to him, What are you
saying, asshole? What do you mean someone else?”
    “That’s what I would have said, too. What
did
he mean?”
    “He said, Someone else. And I said, Explain it to me. And he said, A
different person, that’s all.”
    “And then you thought he’d gone crazy.”
    “I don’t know what I thought, but to be honest, I was scared.”
    “A Chilean? Scared?”
    “You think that’s so unusual?”
    “Well, I wouldn’t say it’s usual for you.”
    “Whatever you say. I realized straightaway that he wasn’t trying to
kid me. I’d taken him to the little room beside the gym, and he started talking
about the mirror and the way they had to file past it every morning, and
suddenly I realized that all of it was true: him, me, our conversation. And
since we weren’t in the gym, and since he’d been a student at our grand old alma
mater, it occurred to me that I could take him to the corridor where the mirror
was and say, Take another look, with me here beside you this time, take a good
calm look, and tell me if it isn’t the same old crazy Belano you see.”
    “And did you say that?”
    “Of course I did, but to be honest, the thought came a long time
before the words. As if an eternity had passed between the idea popping into my
head and coming out in a comprehensible form. A little eternity, to make things
worse. Because if it had been a big or just a regular eternity, I wouldn’t have
realized, if you follow me, but as it was, I did realize, and that intensified
my fear.”
    “But you went ahead anyway.”
    “Of course I did; by then it was too late to turn back. I said, We’re
going to do a test; let’s see if the same thing happens with me beside you, and
he looked at me warily, but he said, All right, if you insist, like he was doing
me a favor, when in fact I was the one doing him a favor, as usual.”
    “So you went to the mirror?”
    “We went to the mirror. I was taking a big risk because you know what
would have happened if they’d caught me walking around the station with a
political prisoner at midnight. And to help him calm down and be as objective as
possible, I offered him a smoke, so we stood there puffing away and it was only
when we’d crushed the butts on the ground that we headed off toward the
bathroom, and he was relaxed, I guess he was thinking it couldn’t get any worse
(which was bullshit, it could have been much, much worse), and I was kind of on
edge, listening for the slightest noise, the sound of a door shutting, but I was
careful not to let it show, and when we got to the mirror I said, Look at
yourself, and he looked at himself, he stood in front of the mirror and looked
at his face, he even ran a hand through his hair, which was really long, you
know, the way people wore it in ‘73,
and then he glanced aside, stepped away from the mirror and looked at the ground
for a while.”
    “And?”
    “That’s what I said, And? Is it you or isn’t it? And he looked into my
eyes and said: It’s someone else, compadre, that’s all there is to it. I could
feel something inside me like a muscle or a nerve, I don’t know what it was, I
swear, but it was saying: Smile, asshole, smile, and yet however much the muscle
strained, I couldn’t smile, the best I could do was twitch, a spasm jerked my
cheek up, anyway, he noticed and stood there looking at me, and I ran a hand
over my face and gulped, because I was afraid again.”
    “We’re almost there.”
    “And then I had this idea. I said to him: Listen, I’m going to look in
the mirror, and when I look at myself, you’re going to