“I was dreaming,” I say placidly.
I do not tell her that I was dreaming again of Yelena, standing in a closet, or that I had written an alternate ending to the dream on paper before falling asleep, in order to put an end to it. “What are you doing here?” I asked Yelena in the dream. “You know,” Yelena’s voice replied. But the sounds of conversation awakened me, and the dream terminated too early. I had awoken to the sound of people in Karen’s hallway upstairs.
“It has been said before,” I say, “that the body can do better without sleep—”
“—than the mind can do without dreams. I’ve heard that too. So, you were dreaming. Trying to shed what your waking mind can’t accept. What’s so bad about this place that you can’t endure? I’m surprised you could even sleep, let alone dream, with a party going on above your head. You must be a very sound sleeper.”
“Most of the time, yes.”
Karen sits down beside me. For a moment, we both watch the dancers moving to the music’s rhythm. The dancing stops as the guitar is passed to a man with long hair grown past his waist, who immediately begins playing.
“I’ve seen it at every party I’ve been to since I’ve lived here,” Karen says. “The ritual passing of the guitar. I can’t play, but it doesn’t matter because they never pass the guitar to women anyway … here, take a drink.”
She hands me a small glass flask.
“I don’t drink.”
“Everyone drinks.”
“I don’t. It causes problems for me.”
There is silence. She continues watching the dancers as she shifts her weight in the sand. She lights a cigarette.
“Have you been here long?” I ask.
“Two years,” she says, exhaling. “It’s a long time for me to have stayed in one place. And what about you? How long are you going to be here?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “A month, maybe longer.”
“Are you a teacher?” she asks. “Are you looking for work?”
“I’m a psychologist. And I’m not looking for work, particularly.”
“A psychologist? What do you do for money, here?” She pauses and then, after a moment, acquiescing to my silence, adds: “If I can ask, of course.”
“I’ve brought enough, but I’m going to be teaching English to Inés and Yolanda,” I say. “In exchange for one or two meals a day.”
“How resourceful of you. The Señora is a very good cook. She’s asked me to tutor her daughters in the past, and I did, months ago, but not since. I’ve taught enough English to last a lifetime.” She draws from her cigarette, pauses, and then continues.
“They both want to go to New York, the sisters. The Señora doesn’t want to move, even though her husband and her daughters’ father is there. He works in construction in Brooklyn. Have they told you that?”
“No.”
“They will.”
She pauses for a while as we listen to the music, and we watch as a pair of dancers falls down in the sand, laughing.
“I had a man,” she continues, “a friend of the sisters, offer to marry me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Don’t sound so surprised. All of my students want to go to either Miami or New York. It’s not easy to get there if you were born here. If they have relatives living in the US, which Inés and Yolanda do, then they can get a visa. But it takes time; years, sometimes a decade or even more. But as I was saying, the man who offered to marry me, I dated him for a while and I explained to him that I lived in Winnipeg, not in Miami or New York, but he didn’t seem to care or to even know the difference. To him it was all the same. I told him I wasn’t planning to go back to Winnipeg anyway, and I talked him into going to school instead of marrying me. So he moved to an island off the coast of Venezuela, where his family is from, and he is studying business at a technical university there. Even though he writes to me often, I almost never reply.…” She pauses, and then rubs her forehead. “Sorry, I’m rambling. I’ve had too much to drink.”
Karen raises the cigarette to her lips. A woman in a skirt falls while dancing, and is promptly collected and returned to an upright position by the throng of dancers. There is almost no disruption of the flow of movement, as if she was a piece of debris unfettered and swept along by the current at the bottom of the sea.
“You know,” Karen continues, “I teach down at the university. I can get you a job there. It wouldn’t be a problem. Really. I’m the only native English-speaking teacher there, and I may not be there for long.”
“Why, where are you going?”
“Let’s not talk of that tonight,” she says, extinguishing her cigarette in the sand. Then, taking my hand, she leads me into the mass of dancers.
8
The Señora has left my father’s possessions, which she promised me, on the kitchen table in my apartment. After making a cup of instant coffee, I sit down in the early morning and sort through them. I find they are comprised of a few photographs of him hiking through the jungle, a handwritten letter of sale for a group of huts there, and a collection of clothing and other miscellaneous items, all from the vacant apartment next to Karen’s upstairs. There is also a letter from Yelena here, and I sit down at the table and tear the envelope apart, reading through parts of it quickly.
Even though I don’t know why you’ve left—other than you need no one but yourself, and maybe you’re out to prove it—here’s something to keep you company. I’ve been doing a story for the library newsletter about Malcolm Forsyth. He won Canadian Composer of the year back in ’89. He is from South Africa and brings diversity to Canada. I listened to an interview with him on the radio. He is the embodiment of what makes Canada so rich. Everyone brings a piece of their past with them, a part of their culture, and of course their own reminiscences. This is what you brought with you when you went away to Ecuador. You’ll never lose your memory or your experience. No matter how much you try to forget, or to run, you can never be far enough away to escape your own mind.…
A while later I settle back into bed, my body still exhausted from the evening before but my mind alert from the effects of the coffee, and I eventually fall asleep after reading the letter over and over again. I fall into dreams of singing and dancing Zulus, half naked with dark skin, their arms immobile at their sides as they dance, shields in their hands shaped to appear as if they are the overgrown leaves of the giant baobab trees, and covered with decorative fur and leopard skin. Their staves and torches and heads are held high in the air in front of fires and beehive huts, these men somehow becoming ingrained into the pages of orchestral compositions—D-flat major for trumpets and horns, and E major for violas and basses. They sit on the pages like dormant spirits waiting to be played into life.
Theirs is a smooth transition from the pages, once they’re brought forth, through the conduit of the overture and my father’s bagpipes, into the ears of the listeners—shifting melodies of Canadian, Scottish and African harmonization.…
9
In the few times that I see Karen in the weeks that follow, in between receiving a few letters from Yelena, I discover some details about Karen’s past. She has not been back to Winnipeg in almost twelve years. She has been traveling from country to country, securing work mainly teaching English, sweeping floors, and waitressing. She worked on a Kibbutz in Israel and picked grapes in Greece, earning enough to travel from Spain to Portugal, through France and over to England and north to Norway. She ended her European tour in St. Petersburg, Russia but she couldn’t find work there as she spoke very little Russian, and all the jobs seemed to require fluency. She dated a man in the Russian military who left in order to engage in training exercises on the sea of Japan for what she said was far too long, and as he was travelling the sixteen days it took to get back across northern Mongolia, through parts of Kazakhstan and Siberia and back to St.
Petersburg, she was making the necessary arrangements to return to a place where she once lived and worked—Ecuador.
“I’ve told you everything about myself,” Karen says to me one afternoon as we are sitting in plastic chairs on a bar patio, drinking Pilsners beside a busy street. “So, tell me: what leads you to stay in this country? And in Manta, of all places? Are you running away from something? Someone?”
Even though she professes to have apprised me of all of the details of her life, I sense that she has only intimated at them and is deliberately withholding the sentiments and motivations I demand of both patients and friends. At the same time, I have a desire to share her same experiences; not only to know more about them, but to know for myself the places to which she has travelled. I don’t feel as though I want to disclose any of this to her now, though, and so I try to think of an obscure answer which she might be able to correlate to her own situation.
“I’m running toward something,” I reply, unsure of how I might continue this.
“What’s that?” she asks.
I pause. I have begun her line of questioning, and I comprehend that because of Karen’s constant travelling, she has a frequent need to understand, and to be understood, by strangers. I suddenly experience a tinge of this same urge myself.
“I took Thoreau’s advice,” I say, incredulous at my own words, “to live the life I’ve always imagined.”
“And this is it, living here in Manta? Really? The life you’ve always imagined?”
“It is,” I reply emphatically, sitting up in my chair.
“You’re crazy,” she says, smiling.
“So how well did you know my father?” I ask.
She pauses and takes a deep breath just before a taxi kicks up dust and billows exhaust fumes beside us. She coughs before answering.
“I knew him a little, saw him around at parties. He taught English at the university whenever he needed money. He kept to himself most of the time. The Señora talked as though she loved him. They went out together one night, and she said it was the most enjoyable night of her life. They went from bar to bar, discoteca to discoteca, and he played the bagpipes as she entered each place. He ‘piped her in’, as she put it. And when she asked him when they were going to get married, your father simply said that she was too young for him, when they both knew she was actually twenty years older and separated from, but still legally married to a man who lived thousands of miles away in New York, while he was still legally married to your mother.”
She pauses to take a drink.
“So, are you married?” she asks.
I touch the ring in my pocket.
“Yes,” I reply, to which she appears surprised.
“Children?”
“Sort of.”
I hand her a copy of the ultrasound picture, and she scoffs.
“Oh.”
“My wife is much older than I am. The baby has Down syndrome, and it isn’t developing properly. The doctor says the fetus has clubbed feet and a head that is too small for her body, and she’ll have heart defects and mental problems. I’m giving my wife time, and writing her letters, to prevent her from making the worst mistake of her life. She wants to have her pregnancy terminated.”
Karen doesn’t ask me any more questions and, as we sit there in silence, quickly finishing our beers before leaving, I suddenly realize that I have never said those words to anyone else.
10
Although months seem to have passed since I’ve been here, it has only been weeks. I am able to understand the Señora and her daughters now from my limited Spanish, providing they speak clearly and not too fast. I am at the stage of language learning where I’m too busy mentally dissecting verbs and categorizing social interactions into statements or questions, to engage in a true conversation. Inés and Yolanda have learned enough from my lessons to have simple conversations in English, and the Señora seems pleased with their progress.
I first touched brush to what passes for canvas here a week ago. The oil colours mix on the page before me at noon to form the outline of a boat, the stilts beneath it gleaming in the sun. That was a difficult effect to achieve, and I have a dozen ruined pages to prove it. The colours blend on the page to produce the background which surrounds fishing boats in the distance, a man splashing in the water nearby beside umbrellas and lemonade vendors. The clouds are simply brushstrokes, dotted first and then rotated. In my dreams these brushstrokes, even before I produced them on paper, turned from dragons to butterflies to the portrait of an elderly man, my father, holding onto his bagpipes, with his kilt and all of his associated accoutrements.
I put my paintbrush down and examine a letter Yelena has just sent:
You know that Van Gogh was once a preacher? His first sermon, it was said, could only have been written by an artist. It was too descriptive for anyone else. He lived with evangelicals, sleeping on straw mats and wearing rags. His only reflection later, about being a preacher, was that he missed shapes and pictures.
You might say he was insane. Everyone believed that his mind had gone, and not without reason. Others say he was just epileptic.
He lived on absinthe, bread and coffee, and he also consumed paint as he licked his brush so frequently. He lived in constant malnutrition and poverty and was institutionalized not because he tried to swallow his paints as a form of suicide, and not because he wore a hat full of candles when he painted at night, but because of an incident with Gauguin. He knew Gauguin, and might have lived with him in Paris. The incident involved a brothel, Gauguin, and a severed ear.
You can say that Van Gogh was an insane man among the sane, or maybe you would say the reverse. His last painting went for eighty-four million dollars—
I begin another painting, one of Annabelle, after setting up her ultrasound picture on the edge of the desk. I add swirls and flecks of grey skin to the page and, growing suddenly tired, I close my door and fall through the mosquito netting, now shimmering in the midday sun, and into my lumpy bed, away from the absurdity of the world that is now awake outside, and into the world of dreams.…
11
Freud speaks: “In dream censorship, the unconscious mind struggles to express those desires which are too difficult for the waking mind to accept … they are encoded messages, knowing they are subject to interpretation by the waking mind. You, and only you, will determine their true meaning when you are conscious. But only if you so desire … and beware of what you might find.…”
Jung retorts: “How do you explain that, as per my contention, we continually dream even when awake, and according to your belief, distressing thoughts are subdued and overpowered by the unconscious mind? We are receiving encoded messages, then, all the time? How do you explain reality? Is our unconscious mind constantly struggling to suppress anything which is difficult to accept, even in real life? Is our own supposed reality, then, just what we want to see, and nothing more?”
I interject: “I’m trying to sleep, and here you are filling my head with nonsense. Jung, you’re assuming both contentions to be true, and making a deduction from that. You can’t—”
Plato, inexplicably, utilizing his own exact words: “The good are those who content themselves with dreaming of what others, the wicked, actually do.”
I begin again: “You’re saying, Freud, that the unconscious mind disguises things too painful for the conscious mind to experience. You, Jung, are saying that even our reality can be nothing other than what we want to see, because we’re constantly dreaming—if we accept both your premises, that is. And Plato, you are saying that something too painful for us to experience is not as painful for the wicked, if they have a suppressed and distorted view of reality or not.…”
They shake their heads. No, no, no. You are no philosopher, and not much of a psychologist. You are no painter, either.
Kerouac, inexplicably: “U
nrequited love. It’s such a bore....”
12
I am sitting in the Señora’s apartment, consuming rice and beans with Ecuadorian soft cheese and orange juice. Her daughters are busy cleaning some dishes, and I ask if they’ve already eaten.
“They have,” the Señora says in a hushed Spanish. She is sitting in a chair close to mine. She looks over at her daughters, and raises her voice: “Inés, go to Karen’s apartment. Bring her back here. You invite her here, to eat with us.”
Inés immediately drops the towel she’s using to dry the dishes, and slips quietly through the heavy front door. This rouses the dog at the back of the house, who barks as if to show he is still on guard. The Señora yells something at the dog in a Spanish I don’t understand.
As Yolanda places a plate of steaming food in front of the empty chair beside me, her fragrance of a floral vanilla briefly overpowering the scent of the food, the Señora asks me if I’m dating Karen. I say that I am not.
“I wonder at times about Karen,” she says, eyeing the painted figures around her. “Why does she travel so much? Why does she never see her home? Do you wonder this, too?”
“I don’t know,” I say, shrugging my shoulders as I eat.
The Señora looks confused.
When I am nearly finished my lunch, Inés returns with Karen, who finds a seat beside me. Inés returns to her duties and the dog begins barking again.
“Eat,” the Señora says, rising from her seat to address Karen, and indicating the plate of hot food in front of her. “Rice and beans with cheese.”
Karen greets everyone in the room with a nod of her head, thanks the Señora, and begins eating.
The Señora reclaims her seat while maintaining her focus on Karen. “Why do you never see your home and your mother?” she asks.
The Abundance of the Infinite Page 4