Dreams and Stones

by Magdalena Tulli

  The disillusioned, who have already tried everything, have too little time to dream of America or the tropics and too little strength to search far and wide. They walk into the first bank they come across and cast a tired glance at the teller; in a split second he understands their demand, backed up by the glint of oxidized steel. A bag is filled with banknotes and no unnecessary words are spoken; no one will trouble their head about a receipt. And so some dreams resound with the wail of police sirens and the squeal of tires. They are filled with hair-raising chases and interminable breakneck escapes. The dreamers hold on to the steering wheel for dear life and stare fixedly ahead, while bridges, trees and banknotes whistle past in the wind. They come to a stop in a blind alley where escapes and chases turn out to be a matter of life and death. A hand reaches for a gun, an eye looks down the barrel and a shot rings out: hit or miss. No one can predict which it will be.

  Choking from the tension, the city of dreams could not exist without its cellars, the heart of which is the percussion. Its rhythm thrills the hearts of the audience, tormented by sorrow, longing and fury. In the deafening noise fury erupts in red, longing in green and sorrow in blue. Anyone who buys a ticket has a right to expect enlightenment. But the moment people enter they are plunged in shadow. There are as many of those seeking enlightenment as could fit in, and each has brought their own darkness. It spills out through the pupils of their eyes and floods the entire place, including the bottles behind the bar, the gaudy makeup and the hundreds of outfits belonging to desperately grasping gazes. The lights flash on and off, summoning from the gloom isolated grimaces and gestures and for a moment revealing their strangeness to the world. In reality there is not even any percussion here. It had to be replaced with a record spinning on the mechanical turntable of a gramophone; everyone knows this and no one cares. The true heart of this place is the sound of the percussion alone. It does not subdue the pulsing of blood in the temples and does not alleviate true fury, longing or sorrow, but it smoothes grimaces and softens gestures. Burdens vanish; those dancing acquire a lightness that outside of this place they could not even dream of. The love that takes refuge in the sound of the percussion is so devoid of weight that it can only be a shadow of love, something that takes up no room whatsoever in the heart; something as impermanent as sound and, like sound, incapable of being taken outside or kept for later. For this reason couples leaving for any of the neighboring rooms – the barroom, the delivery room or the courtroom – have to get by without love.

  Yet without love those dreaming lack the strength to dream on, and even more to wake up. They manage as best they can. They buy neckties on elastic bands that are easier to take off when one’s collar digs into one’s neck and one’s head is splitting with pain. They buy headache tablets that bring them relief but harm their stomach. So they buy pills for stomachache that cause pains in their liver. Everything goes for nought. They renounce their heart, stomach and liver as superfluous ballast that drags them to the ground; they pawn them for credit and, shuffling their feet, they return to where they were looking at automobiles. It is not clear how the fleets of cars leave the showrooms. The doorways are too narrow and the display windows too high. There is no avoiding scratches on the gleaming paintwork. The luster of newness disappears at once. The farther they drive the worse they look. They can be seen later, mud-spattered and rusty, driving from one suburb to another and back, the clutch snapped off, without wheels or engine, smashing into one another. The inhabitants of the city of dreams curse the cars and curse the misleading promises on the billboards. In other posters they seek new more reliable promises and dream with their remaining strength, choosing the worst solutions like a drowning man, who as everyone knows will grasp at a straw.

  In the hospitals of the city of dreams there are trays filled with surgical instruments with the aid of which rib cages are opened and closed as easily as boxes. But people who live for years without heart or liver eventually become embittered misanthropes whose organisms develop increasing numbers of special requirements because of which an operation has no chance of success. At visiting times individuals with shifty eyes loiter in the hallways; they hide from the white-aproned medical personnel and, whispering to the patients’ families, offer to buy what is needed, under the counter, without involving scalpels or operating theaters. The patients receive cash for hearts in which a little love is still left or livers that are not entirely used up, convinced that they just got the best deal of their lives. Then they open brokerage agencies and wholesale warehouses. Some of them die happily in the warehouse accounting room; others collapse suddenly in their own office, telephone receiver in hand. They too cannot be helped by the operating theaters of the city of dreams. The forceps, generally so useful in closing vessels cut open by the scalpel, do not possess the necessary teeth for seizing and holding life as it fades away.

  There is no solution in the world so bad that no one will chose it. Even the worst way out may prove the best for someone. There exist higher purposes: for example, never under any circumstances to leave the city of dreams. And for this its inhabitants are prepared to pay any price since between one dream and the next an abyss opens up beneath them that they are more afraid of than anything else in the world: the black chasm of sleep without dreams. Not for an instant do they tear their gaze away from the flickering lights that otherwise would have to be extinguished in the twinkling of an eye. Colors, shapes and sounds change from one moment to the next, but the city of dreams does not force anyone to choose between them. Its inhabitants believe that given propitious circumstances, they can have everything at once: love, American cigars, the gold of the banks and the heat of the tropics. They do not however want the stillness of waking hours, the tedium of which destroys any pleasure that may arise from being one thing or another, from trying on outfits, choosing one’s words, employing irony or pathos. Yet are dreaming and being awake not merely two different ways of living in this city? Two ways of living that alternate twice a day? This is what some believe. They imagine that sleeping and waking are like obverse and reverse of a coin or, better, like the two hemispheres of the moon, the light and the dark. They forget that the moon always shows them the same hemisphere: the brightly lit hemisphere of dreams.

  THIS CITY WAS BUILT AT THE MEETING POINT OF THREE ELEMENTS in a place where they mingled with one another. It was constructed on the clay of memories, on the sands of dreams and on the ground waters of oblivion, cold and black, whose flow never ceases for a moment, washing away the foundations day after day. In their swirling depths the coins of distinctions vanish. The sunken coins apparently have power over oblivion; lying on the bottom, they preserve the memory of events and places. But it is not known how they can protect, since they themselves perish in the miry ooze beneath which obverse and reverse look the same. There the stillness of waking hours does not prevent the agitation of dreams, or vice versa. The waters of oblivion are not ruled by any rational principle and for this reason they reconcile all inconsistencies.

  Differentiations! Life and death, tree and machine, beginning and end! Every name like a coin has its obverse and reverse. When paying with a coin it is not possible to spend half of it, keeping either the heads or the tails for oneself. All that is large is small and vice versa. Ambiguity is a consequence of calling things by their names. Every name teeters on a knife edge, in desperation, and makes differentiations necessary. Every adjective that is juxtaposed with it will bring along a counteradjective, every conjecture a counterconjecture. good will create evil, warmth will create cold, end will create beginning. Whoever maintains that the world resembles a tree is the enemy and brother of him who insists that it resembles a machine. Both know what a tree is and what a machine is. In attempting to touch the essence of things they keep using the same names as if they were arguing about some precious plunder, torn apart by the desire to keep the whole lot but in agreement about the amount and the name of the currency; at the same time they will hear nothing about counterfei
t banknotes. But whoever describes the city in a hundred thousand words will nourish a hundred thousand words of the countercity and each of them will return to the city like a bad penny.

  No one asks where nouns come from or who they belong to. The inhabitants of the city carry them with complete confidence, just as in its beginning they carried bricks, convinced that they were laboring for themselves and their children and that whoever bears the burden is its owner. At one time they cheered as records were beaten on scaffolding and believed that the hand lifts the brick, not the opposite. They have always yielded easily to illusions. In their own opinion they are the masters of words, yet words do not obey them. They do not stick to objects; they suddenly change meaning or disappear, replaced by other words. They move, now here now there, dragging thoughts, questions and desires behind them.

  Though people here burden themselves with anything the eye can see, they have no possessions. The objects they have bought or received as presents always eventually vanish or are destroyed. Their clothes, though they were new, end up being old, their children turn into adults. In recollections there remain only nouns, verbs and adjectives, like deposit slips, but the things listed on them have long since gone from any warehouse. The inhabitants of the city clutch their slips and believe themselves the owners of countless possessions; they have no intention of giving up a single thing, even the snows of yesteryear. Like travelers who, depositing their suitcases at the left-luggage office, walk about the city, they are certain that their belongings are at their disposal at every moment. Where is that vast left-luggage office containing plush teddy bears that belonged to soldiers, the happy moments of abandoned women, the fortunes of bankrupts, the kisses of those run over by trams, the reflections of sunsets in windowpanes, finished melodies and eaten tarts? Here it is: It is great and small; without any difficulty it contains all this, though it itself fits easily on a shelf, in a hard cover, with an alphabetical list of entries. In it tart is next to tartan, and like it has the black color of printer’s ink.

  The naming of things never brought anyone happiness. Yet despite this, names circulate without ceasing, ever more densely and feverishly. For what has not been named drifts away on the waves of the river. Everything takes flight. Events do not attach to words and do not need them in order to flow. They roll through the city, stirring up shoals of glittering definitions, describing every moment in various ways. What is supposed to flow, flows, while definitions remain in place, rocking on the waves, tied down with ropes, round and brightly colored, like buoys on the river. The inhabitants of the city use them to mark the course of events in order to understand them better. This is a necessity: Events by their nature are incomprehensible, with a tendency to overflow in all directions and efface their borders. Love requires white veils, black tuxedos and beribboned limousines, but at times it must make do with a grille in the visiting room. Sleep requires a room and a bed but in extremity it can manage with a bench in a station waiting room or even a corner of the sidewalk, thus becoming something that can be confused with fainting, drunkenness or death. It is precisely because of this that navigational signs – the buoys of words – are so essential. It is they that make it possible to differentiate, to separate out that which would be jumbled up. One beside the other, they bob up and down on the waves of events, obscuring them entirely. It is not surprising that in the end their movement is taken for the waves themselves, and that descriptions conceal objects.

  Even events themselves are not needed to set flowing that which is meant to flow. In fact only words are essential. Thus on a rainy day an incautious pedestrian dies at a busy intersection and a drunk driver causes a fatal accident, from one moment to another becoming a criminal. The family, plunged into sorrow, bids farewell forever to a father and grandfather, a teacher of many years, while children carry their ink-stained backpacks to school and rejoice at the fact that their test has been canceled. The police escort the culprit from the lockup to the courtroom; at the same time a taxicab is taking a woman in labor in the opposite direction to the maternity clinic. If someone should desire a telephone connection between the courthouse and the delivery room it is technically feasible, but the gaudy, hollow buoys of words that mark roles and the course of matters render such a telephone a needless waste of time, a caprice and even a suspicious subterfuge, a trick employed in bad faith. The words criminal and escort fix figures in their roles, in freeze frame. Names delimit the boundaries of what is possible. On a different day, another person dies at the same intersection; in the courtroom, another trial begins (the escort and the arrestee have the same journey to make, though the section numbers from the criminal code cited in the charge sheet are different). A woman in labor rides to the maternity clinic in a taxicab; perhaps rain is falling again; the same children carry their backpacks to school and, on the way, are gradually imbued with the mournfulness of grammar and of exercises involving trains. The victims of accidents, the police officers, criminals, schoolchildren, the women in labor and the cab drivers have no choice: They have to make their way in the direction laid out by the street, to enter and exit through doors, and to do so during the hours they are open. They never come into the world or die, except in connection with the circumstances that precede these events and then follow them; they are utterly bound by rules determined by the relations between words. Nothing will occur that cannot be named, and everything that can be named will sooner or later occur.

  Events do not stop even for a minute in their course. They carve out bends and uncover islands. The flowing water sculpts the banks – the only memento it leaves behind. Where the greatest number of accidents occurred an underground passageway has been constructed. Where things were bought and sold marketplaces have sprung up; where thieves gathered a police station has been built. Even soccer matches and loud concerts leave behind colored marks on the walls. Everywhere there is a multitude of signs aiding memory, and telling gaps where the signs have been removed or destroyed.

  Calling things by their names helps only briefly. Everything named also falls into oblivion, because tomorrow each word will be needed again for something else. Events for which words escape everyone will fall into oblivion first. Faded definitions are like lost deposit slips – the recollections to which they refer can no longer be retrieved. Oblivion wipes away gestures and grimaces; it wipes away chased clouds, raindrops on windows, gusts of wind. Inhabitants of the city try to create new words that will be more convenient than the old ones – but they try in vain. The new words are no improvement, and just like the old ones they obey no one’s will. The city of changes was created by memory in search of needles in haystacks. It is utterly dependent on recollections, those castles in the sand washed away by tidewaters. Harried by the waves of oblivion, it requires inhabitants that bear within themselves thoughts, questions and desires in which city landscapes are embedded – so that the city might remember itself.

  The eyes of passersby gaze every day upon underground passageways, marketplaces and police stations. They gaze upon inscriptions on walls and in stairwells. The hand resting on the banister feels beneath its fingers the old chipped enamel. It is in this way that everyday thoughts are recovered. These are for the most part small and hard morning thoughts that contain the tiniest possible questions or no questions whatsoever. They hide in clothing, in objects, in furniture, differently from evening thoughts, whose sharp little needles are stuck beneath skulls for memory’s sake. The walls of stairwells are marked by streaks and stains, each one from something different, some already very old. Certain thoughts for which there was no room elsewhere can be so completely absorbed into the shape of a stain that one encounters them every time one climbs or descends the stairs. Thanks to this they endure, saved for some time yet from oblivion. Later it transpires that the same stain has come to mean something else. The language of stains is impoverished and slipshod. The same shapes have to convey contradictory meanings. But these meanings themselves are so slipshod and impoverished that the
shapes of the stains seem only too good for them.

  Though this is not a rule, more significant thoughts may take on the shape of a large object, for instance a tram standing at a stop. At such times they drive off with the tram, leaving memory with the impossible task of searching for them. And it is only this task that keeps together the round billion of dark red bricks. The city of changes, constructed by memory and destroyed by oblivion, is a city of death.

  The tide of death spares only the stone bricklayers and foundrymen in their stone clothing, gazing at the traffic with stone eyes from their alcoves. For the kind of life they have within themselves is not subject to destruction even in floods, fires or the demolition of buildings. A broken-off stone head can continue to exist; it is no more motionless than when it was attached to a neck. An isolated hand remains as inactive as when fastened to a forearm. An index finger remains the same even at the bottom of the river, half-buried in mud and entwined with algae. Even crushed stone spread on roads has its weight and volume and its position in space.