The Boomerang

By Germán Espinosa

Because of the agitation during the river strike and, years later, because of his efforts as
zapa1 in the overthrow of Rojas Pinilla 2 (whom he’d admire later), he had acquired certain
notoriety in his youth. Now, comrade Julio Braga, although faithful to his political ideals,
was but a mere habitué of the Pasaje coffeeshop, to whom his nocturnal fantasy, which I
regarded as harmless, seemed to have plunged, for some time now, in a sentiment of
depression. It was one of those recurring dreams: He saw before him a woman getting
undressed for the carnal act; he suddenly discovered, with disappointment and rage, that in
spite of the graceful breast and the inciting hips, between her legs hanged a small but
convincing male member.
I advised him to see a psychiatrist, although quite frankly I didn’t understand the excessive
preoccupation the situation inspired on him. He told me that, because he used to read Freud
(which, by the way, explained his abnormal concern), he’d prefer being treated by a
psychoanalyst. I didn’t refrain myself from reminding him of the animosity that
psychoanalysis still aroused in Moscow, being considered depraved and bourgeois by the
leaders of his party. Braga argued that, to be a good militant, sometimes a man had to
disagree with the pure doctrine. And thus he initiated a treatment with Ramón Goyzueta, a
psychoanalyst better known for his public drunkenness than for certain sporadic lectures he
used to dictate in any of the fifty universities that, inexplicably, function in Bogotá.
As usual, the formerly fiery comrade had, as they say, to lay down for hours, two or three
times per week, in Goyzueta’s couch, and from that easy discomfort he opened widely the
misty or illuminated distances of his past, without omitting his adolescent frustration with
prostitutes, his failures as a premature ejaculator nor his (very occasional) repressed
propensions towards his own sex, which if discovered by his fellow party members would
have earned him a dishonorable excommunion. While the professional scribbled some
notes and, to his confessions, drew smiles of superiority on his lips, in Braga started to
function that thing that psychologists call transference, which consisted, in this case, in an
unrestrained intellectual admiration towards Goyzueta.

To sum up the situation: Goyzueta had the custom of getting drunk every night in a Spanish
tavern of 18th street, where he was surrounded by a small group of admirers, almost always
old patients, before which he ranted about everything holy or unholy. For years, those
stupefied customers had recorded in tapes, which were then carefully archived, any and all
extravagance or absurdity that came out of the lips of the arrogant doctor, whom today

1
Zapa: Chieftain of certain pre-Columbian indigenous communities.
2
Military dictator of Colombia from 1953 to 1957
meditated on the perversity of kids, tomorrow on the unconscious creations of the Tupí
natives, and then on the psychoanalytical implications in the works of Thomas Mann.
Comrade Braga started to frequent those esoteric meetings and soon acquired (or so he
thought) the condition of disciple.
Precisely because he wasn’t in the age (he was almost sixty-five years old) to be a disciple
anymore, he became the most ardent and docile of them all. On his morning hours, he
consecrated himself with determination (and forgetting his duties with the cell of Las
Cruces) to transcribe on his old Silver-Reed the recordings of Goyzueta’s most recent
ramblings. Soon he became interested, as well, in everything on which the psychoanalyst,
in the nocturnal gathering, had pontified upon in previous years. The archives provided
hundreds of tapes that the comrade transcribed with the same candid faith of a medieval
copyist. The result were about three thousand typewritten pages, that barely constituted a
tight summary of the postulates and preachings of Ramón Goyzueta. When he had them
ready, Braga revealed in the Spanish tavern his purpose of investing his life-savings in
scrupulously publishing the Complete Works of the master. The announcement was
received with a unanimous ovation, while Goyzueta, with narrowed eyes, feigned a liberal
indifference towards such an act of adherence and love.

The books of the defrauder came out with synthetic leather covers and a prologue by a
certain surrealist poet, of epagogic and epistemic pretensions, who once was among his
patients. His commercial success was assured by university students, who usually are the
most helpless of the readers among us. Nevertheless, the poor Julio Braga didn’t earn much
appreciation by the master. With time, the party managed to absorb once again his
attention, specially because of the abuses his comrades endured during the regime of Julio
César Turbay3. Around the time of his death, he was again, in spite of his years, an active
militant and respectable. I questioned him once about whatever may have happened to that
recurrent dream that plunged him into shame and depression. Blushing, but always
consequent with the truth, he agreed to answer me. The new situation greatly outraged him.
Now he distrusted, armed with a rich variety of reasons, psychological therapies. The truth
was that the dream still presented itself, but with an insidious variant. The woman -the
splendid woman- undressed before his eyes and, indeed, besides the graceful breasts and
the inciting hips, she was now in possession of a sex as feminine as that of any of Poussin’s
opulent nymphs. However, when he dropped down his pants to attend her demand, the poor
Braga looked for his own male member and, with horror and shame, discovered between
his hairy legs a sex just as feminine as that of the nymph.
1984

3
President of Colombia from 1978 to 1982.