Taking advantage of the opportunity, I gathered my confidence to speak to him about the notebook he had given me six months before, that it didn’t contain descriptions of dreams and hadn’t been written by his son but by someone named Luis Maidana. My news didn’t surprise Heredia, or even interest him very much. He looked at me incredulously. He assured me that his son didn’t have any friend with that name.
We studied the handwriting of the notebook; we compared school binders and letters that we assumed were written by him during the same period: the handwriting was the same. We asked Armando’s friends if they had ever met a Luis Maidana. Nobody had ever heard of him. The caretakers at the Swans affirmed that nobody had visited Armando at the ranch house. I finally had to accept the incredible: the tales contained in the notebook with the title “My Dreams” had been written by Armando Heredia, not by Luis Maidana.
Even if those tales really were dreams, why had Armando pretended to be someone else? Was he pretending or was he really dreaming that he was someone else, seeing himself from the outside? Was he obsessed by the idea that he didn’t dream, as he writes on one page of the notebook? Did he feel like a ghost, like a blank page? Was the obsession so strong that Armando had ended up inventing his dreams?
When he was thinking, perhaps Heredia believed he was dreaming. That was how the strange, hallucinatory links came to figure in his dreams: Armando Heredia suffered from doubling. He saw himself from the outside as Luis Maidana would see him, someone at once his friend and his enemy. “When we are awake, we live in a shared world, but when we sleep, each of us is hurled into a world of our own.” I’ve been able to show that certain people, certain objects and events in these tales actually existed; others, like Luis Maidana or Dr. Tarcisio Fernández, do not exist and never have.
By committing suicide, did Armando Heredia think he was killing Luis Maidana? As during his childhood when he thought he had killed an imaginary person? Instead of red ink, had he used his own blood to play with his enemy? Did he love, hate, and kill an imaginary being?
Heredia asked me to manage the sale of the ranch. I returned to the Swans for one last time. I saw some objects mentioned in the notebook; I recognized them with unpleasant surprise. I saw the porcelain basket, the dizzying rocking chair, the landscape painting hanging above the bed, the tiger and jaguar painting attributed to Delacroix. In Cacharí, I met María Gismondi (whom I questioned in vain). Nobody had ever heard of Luis Maidana.
I still feel a deep unease when I think about the notebook. The secret contained in its pages will never be solved, since death forever sealed the lips of the author and actor, of the victim and the murderer, in this inconceivable story.
If I had arrived at the Swans on February 26th or 27th instead of the 28th, as I had originally intended, I—through the ghost of Maidana—could have saved Armando Heredia. But I may have ended up losing my own life. And if this were a mystery story, I most likely would have had an argument with Armando, and he (as it happened in reality) would have committed suicide, accusing me of being criminally responsible for his death. The consequences of any act are, in some sense, infinite.
Sometimes I think that only in dreams have I read the notebook, reflecting on its pages. Sometimes I think that Heredia’s madness isn’t alien to me.
On the surface, there is no distinction between our experiences—some are vivid, others opaque; some are pleasant, others cause agony upon recollection—but there is no way of knowing which are dreams and which are reality.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF IRENE
I NEVER felt so passionately eager to see Buenos Aires lit up on Independence Day, for sales at department stores festooned with green streamers, or for my birthday, as I was to arrive at this moment of supernatural joy.
Ever since I was a girl I’ve been as pale as I am now, “perhaps a little anemic,” the doctor would say, “but healthy, like the whole Andrade family.” On several occasions I imagined my death, while sitting before mirrors and holding a paper rose. Now that rose is in my hand (it was in a vase by my bed). A rose, a vain ornament smelling like a rag, with a name written on one of its petals. I don’t need to smell it, to look at it: I know it’s the very same one. Today I am dying, and my face is the very one I saw in the mirrors of my childhood. (I have hardly changed. Accumulated weariness, crying, and laughter have made my face more mature, forming and deforming it.) Every dwelling place seems old and familiar to me.
The unlikely reader of these pages will ask for whom I am telling this story. Perhaps the fear of not dying forces me to do so. Perhaps I write for myself: to read it over if by some curse I should keep on living. I need evidence that I am distressed only by the fear of not dying. I truly think that the only sad part about death, about the idea of death, is knowing that it cannot be remembered by the person who has died but solely, and sadly, by those who watched that person die.
My name is Irene Andrade. I was born twenty-five years ago in this yellow house, with balconies of black wrought iron and bronze plates bright as gold, six blocks from the church and square of Las Flores. I am the oldest of four rambunctious children in whose childhood games I took a passionate part. My maternal grandfather was French; he died in a shipwreck that rendered the eyes of his portrait, venerated by guests in the shadows of the living room, misty and mysterious. My maternal grandmother was born in this town, a few hours after the first church burned down. Her mother, my great-grandmother, told her all the details of the fire that had hastened her birth. She passed those stories on to us. No one was better acquainted with that fire, with her own birth, with the main square sowed with alfalfa, with the death of Serapio Rosas, with the execution of two prisoners in 1860 near the atrium of the old church. I know my paternal grandparents only through two yellowing photographs, obscured in a kind of respectful haze. They look more like brother and sister than husband and wife; more like twins than mere siblings. They had the same thin lips, the same curly hair, the same detached hands resting idly on their laps, the same doting reserve. My father, who revered the education he had received from them, raised plants: he was as gentle with them as he was with his children, giving them remedies and water, covering them with canvas on cold nights, giving them the names of angels, and finally, “when they had grown,” selling them with the utmost regret. He would caress the leaves as if caressing the hair of a child; I think that in his later years he talked to them, or at least that was my impression. All of this secretly annoyed my mother. She never told me as much, but in the tone of her voice, when she told her friends—“Leonardo is in there with his plants! He loves them more than his children!”—I guessed a perpetual mute impatience, the impatience of a jealous woman. My father was a man of average height, with beautiful, regular features, dark complexion and chestnut hair, and an almost blond beard. No doubt it is from him that I have inherited my seriousness, the admirable suppleness of my hair, the natural goodness of my heart, and my patience, a patience that might almost seem a fault, a sort of deafness, a bad habit. My mother, when she was younger, embroidered for a living: that sedentary life had filled her as if with still water, somewhat cloudy yet at the same time tranquil. No one rocked so elegantly in the rocking chair, no one handled fabric so eagerly. Now, she has that perfect kind of affectation that old age provides. In her I see only maternal whiteness, the severity of her gestures and voice: there are voices that you can see, that keep on revealing the expression of a face even after its beauty is gone. Thanks to that voice I can still recall her blue eyes and her high forehead. From her I must have inherited the whiteness of my skin, my fondness for reading or needlework, and a certain proud, disdainful shyness toward those who, even when they are shy, might be or at least seem to be modest.
Without bragging I can say that until I was fifteen, at the very least, I was the favorite at home because I was older and was a girl: circumstances most parents, who prefer boys and the younger siblings, would not have found so appealing.
Among the most vivid memories o
f my childhood I shall mention: a shaggy white dog named Jasmine; a Virgin four inches tall; the oil painting of my maternal grandfather which I have already mentioned; and a vine with trumpet-shaped orange flowers, called bignonia or war trumpet.
I saw the white dog in a kind of dream and later, more insistently, in my waking hours. I would tie him to the chairs with a rope, would give him food and water, would pet and punish him, would make him bark and bite. My loyalty to an imaginary dog, at the very time I scorned other more modest but more real toys, made my parents happy. I remember they would point at me proudly, telling the guests, “Look how she can entertain herself with nothing.” They would frequently ask me about the dog, asking me to bring him into the living room or, at mealtimes, into the dining room; I obeyed enthusiastically. They pretended to see a dog that only I could see; they praised or teased him, to please or distress me.
The day my parents received a shaggy white dog from my uncle in Neuquén, nobody doubted that the dog’s name was Jasmine or that my uncle had been a partner in my games. However, my uncle had been away for more than five years. I didn’t write to him (I barely knew how to write). “Your uncle is a seer,” I remember my parents saying at the moment they showed me the dog, “Here is Jasmine!” Jasmine recognized me without surprise; I kissed him.
Like a sky-blue triangle with golden borders, the Virgin began taking shape, acquiring density in the remoteness of a June sky. It was cold that year and the windows were dirty. I wiped them with my handkerchief, opening up little rectangles on the windowpanes. In one of those rectangles the sun lit up a cloak and a formless tiny, round red face that seemed sacrilegious to me at first. Beauty and saintliness were for me two inseparable virtues. I lamented the fact that her face wasn’t beautiful. I cried for many nights, trying to alter it. I remember that this apparition impressed me more than the dog itself, because at the time I had a tendency toward mysticism. Churches and saints exerted a fascination on my spirit. I prayed secretly to the Virgin, offering her flowers and gleaming candies in little liqueur glasses, tiny mirrors, perfumes. I found a cardboard box about her size, and with ribbons and curtains I turned it into an altar. At first, when she watched me pray, my mother smiled with satisfaction; later, she was disturbed by the intensity of my fervor. One night by my bed, I heard her tell my father when they thought I was asleep, “Let’s hope she doesn’t turn into a saint! Poor thing, she doesn’t bother anyone! She’s so good!” She was also disturbed to see the empty box in front of a pile of wildflowers and votive candles, thinking that my fervor was leading to some sort of sacrilege. She tried to give me a Saint Anthony and a Saint Rose of Lima, relics that had belonged to her mother. I did not accept them; I told her that my Virgin was dressed in blue and gold. I showed her the size of the Virgin with my hands, explaining timidly that her face was small and red, sunburned, without any sweetness of expression, like the face of a doll, but shining like an angel’s.
That same summer, at the market where my mother did her shopping, the Virgin appeared in a shopwindow: it was the Virgin of Luján. I didn’t doubt that my mother had ordered it for me, nor was I surprised that she had guessed the shape and color of the Virgin exactly, even the form of her mouth. I remember she complained of the price because it was damaged. She brought it home wrapped in newspaper.
My grandfather’s painting, that majestic ornament of the living room, caught my attention when I was nine years old. Behind a red curtain, which made the image stand out even more, I discovered a frightening, dark world. Children sometimes find pleasure in such worlds. Deep, dark, vast expanses like green marble were trembling there, broken, icy, furious, tall, with scattered forms like mountains. Next to that painting I felt cold and tasted tears on my lips. Along wooden hallways, women with long hair and men in distress were fleeing, standing motionless. There was a woman covered with an enormous cape and a man whose face I never saw who walked, holding hands with a child carrying a rocking horse. It was raining somewhere; a tall flag was waving in the wind. That treeless landscape, so similar to the one I could see at dusk from the streets at the edge of town—so similar and at the same time so different—disturbed me. One summer day, sitting in an armchair, alone in front of the painting, I fainted. My mother said that when she woke me up I asked for water with my eyes closed. Thanks to the water she gave me, which she also used to cool my brow, I was saved from an unexpected, premature death.
One day at the end of spring, in the courtyard of our house, I saw the vine with orange flowers for the first time. When my mother sat knitting or embroidering, I would push off the boughs (which only I could see) so that they would not get in her way. I loved the orange color of the petals, the warlike name (confused with the history lessons I was studying at that time), and the light scent, like rain, given off by the leaves. One day, my brothers heard me utter its name and began speaking of San Martín and his grenadiers. In the endless afternoons, the gestures I made to pull the boughs from my mother’s face, so they would not bother her, seemed intended to scare off the flies that sit aggressively still in certain points in space. Nobody foresaw the future vine. An inexplicable apprehensiveness prevented me from speaking of it before it arrived.
My father planted the vine in the very spot in the courtyard where I had anticipated its opulent form and color. It was in the very place where my mother would sit. (For some reason, perhaps because of the sun, my mother could not sit in any other corner of the courtyard; for some reason, perhaps for the very same reason, the vine could not be planted anywhere else.)
I was judicious and reserved. I’m not praising myself: these secondary virtues sometimes give rise to grave faults. Because of vanity or a lack of physical strength, I was more studious than my brothers. No lesson seemed new to me. I enjoyed the quiet that books afford. I enjoyed, above all else, the astonishment caused by my extraordinary facility for all kinds of study. Not all of my girlfriends liked me, and my favorite companion was solitude, which smiled on me during recess. I read at night, by candlelight. (My mother had forbidden me to read “because it was bad, not only for the eyes but also for the brain.”) For a time I took piano lessons. The teacher called me “Irene the euphonious,” and this nickname, which I did not understand and which other students repeated with sarcasm, offended me. I thought that my stillness, my seeming melancholy, and my pale face had inspired the cruel nickname “the cadaverous.” For a teacher to make jokes about death seemed to me to be in poor taste; and one day, crying because I already knew how mistaken and how unfair I could be, I made up a slander against that young lady, who had only wanted to praise me. Nobody believed me, but one afternoon when we were alone in her living room, she took me by the hand and said, “How can you repeat such intimate, such awful things?” It was not a reproach: it was the beginning of a friendship.
I may have been happy, at least until I was fifteen. The sudden death of my father brought about a change in my life. My childhood was ending. I tried using lipstick and high heels. Men looked at me at the train station, and I had a boyfriend who waited for me on Sundays at the door of the church. I was happy, if happiness exists. I enjoyed being an adult, being beautiful, with a beauty criticized by some of my relatives.
I was happy, but the sudden death of my father, as I said before, brought about a change in my life. Three months before he died, I had already prepared my mourning dress and the black crepe; I had already cried for him, leaning majestically on the balcony railing. I had already written the date of his death on an etching; I had already visited the cemetery. All of that was made worse by the indifference I showed after the funeral. To tell the truth, after his death I never remembered him at all. My mother, a good soul, couldn’t forgive me. Even now she looks at me with the same expression of rancor that, for the first time, had awoken in me the desire for death. Even now, after so many years, she cannot forget the mourning dress worn in advance, the date and name written on the etching, the unexpected visit to the cemetery, my indifference to his death at the
very moment of our large family’s greatest sorrow. Some people looked at me with suspicion. I couldn’t hold back my tears when I heard certain bitter, ironic phrases, usually accompanied by a wink. (Only then did oblivion seem like bliss to me.) They said I was possessed by the devil; that I had wished for my father’s death so that I could wear mourning and a jet-black clasp; that I had poisoned him so as to be able to spend my time at dances and at the train station without worrying about his prohibitions. I felt guilty at having unleashed such hatred around me. I spent long sleepless nights. I managed to get sick but was unable to die, as I had desired.
It had not occurred to me that I might have a supernatural gift, but when beings stopped seeming miraculous for me, I felt miraculous toward them. Neither Jasmine nor the Virgin (now broken and forgotten) existed. An austere future awaited me; my childhood grew more distant.
I felt guilty for the death of my father. I had killed him when I imagined him dead. Other people did not have this power.
Guilty and unlucky, I felt capable of infinite future joys, which only I could invent. I had projects for my happiness: my visions should be pleasant, I should be careful with my thoughts and try avoiding sad ideas, try inventing a happy world. I was responsible for everything that happened. I tried avoiding images of drought, floods, poverty, and illness when thinking about my family or acquaintances.
For a time this method seemed effective. But very soon I understood that my intentions were as vain as they were childish. At the entrance to a store I was forced to watch two men fight. I refused to see the concealed knife; I refused to see the blood. The struggle looked like a desperate embrace. It occurred to me that the death agony of one of them and the gasping terror of the other were a final sign of reconciliation. Without being able to erase the horrible image even for a moment, I was forced to witness the death in all its sharpness, the blood mixed with the dirt of the street, a few days later.
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