“On July 28, 1976, Sandoval went on a monumental bender that saved my life.”
Chaparro rereads the opening sentence of his new chapter and hesitates. Is that a good way to start this part of the story? he wonders. He’s not convinced, but he can’t come up with anything better. Of the various objections to the sentence, the strongest concerns precisely the idea he’s trying to convey. Can a single human action—in this case, a monumental drinking binge—be the cause that changes another’s destiny, assuming that such a thing as destiny exists? Besides, what does “saved my life” mean? Chaparro doesn’t like the phrase, which sounds trite to him. And something else: What guarantee is there that what prevented him from returning home on that June night was Sandoval’s drunken rampage and not some other indiscernible series of circumstances?
Be that as it may, the sentence makes a plausible opening and will likely remain. Sandoval was one of the best guys Chaparro ever knew, and he’s pleased to think he didn’t wind up at the bottom of a ditch with two bullet holes in the back of his neck that night because of Sandoval, even if only because of Sandoval’s weaknesses. And since Chaparro didn’t want to die then, nor does he now, he’ll permit himself to declare unequivocally that Sandoval’s titanic booze-up “saved his life.”
Chaparro finds himself in a predicament similar to the one he was in at the beginning of his novel, when he didn’t know how to start telling his story; now he doesn’t know how to go on. Various images assail him all at once: the spectacle of his trashed apartment; Báez seated across from him in a dive in Rafael Castillo; a shed with a big sliding door standing in the middle of a field; a solitary road at night, illuminated by powerful headlights and seen through the windows of a bus; Sandoval thoroughly destroying a bar on Venezuela Street.
However, he figures his current narrative standstill will be less difficult to resolve than his initial paralysis. After all, he personally lived through the chaos his life turned into, so he doesn’t have to imagine what it might have been like for someone else. And besides, those things didn’t happen to him simultaneously, but successively. They were stunning, in some cases even heartbreaking, but they occurred in a chronological sequence he can hold on to. The best way to continue telling his story, he concludes, is to respect that sequence.
First Sandoval wrecks a bar on Venezuela Street. Then Chaparro finds his apartment in shambles. After that, he talks to Báez in a foul-smelling joint in Rafael Castillo. Then he takes a front seat on a night bus. And later, many years later, he stands before the big sliding door of a shed, in the middle of a field.