Best European Fiction 2014

by Drago Jancar

  Dirty dreams, occasionally populated by strangers, occasionally by people she knew, sometimes women or beings endowed with science-fiction genitals. They were gratifying and orgasmic dreams, dreams that crept in to add spice to her waking life, revitalizing it. Luciana looked into Eureka’s eyes, hoping for validation.

  Eureka nodded and said she had recurring sexual dreams too, but usually about the same person. There were men who were hardwired into her neural circuitry, she said. About 8% of our dreams are known to be graphically erotic, she said. For men, 14% of these involved current or past lovers, whereas this was 20% for women. Generally speaking, our dream encounters are almost all with strangers, anonymous bodies conspiring with the honesty of our own. Men had a greater tendency for scenarios involving multiple partners or sex in public spaces, whereas women tended to pair off with celebrities, as from an evolutionary point of view, Eureka said, these would appear to be the best providers—at least, that was the theory. As if women could get pregnant from fucking oneiric men. All in all, our dreaming minds might be prone to make the occasional mistake, but there was no doubt that they wanted the body to have a good time.

  Luciana listened, occasionally getting distracted looking at men in the bar, looking for something in her bag, playing with her black purse, or calling the waiter over. Her attention was intermittent, she needed breaks, pauses. Eureka had to get back to the lab. She could drop Luciana at home on the way back. It was no trouble. They got in the Capri and, once they had set off, Luciana told Eureka that every one of her dreams was about the same thing. That since her divorce, the number of her oneiric indiscretions had risen considerably, but so too had her waking sexual fantasies and now every night she found herself in an orgy of dreams that left her completely worn out. She added that if there was one thing she’d learned from her dreams, it was to laugh at herself. And she also told Eureka that when she’d finally divorced her husband, it was because her dreams had been crying out for it. Her marriage had been one of the most nefarious agents of habit in her life. A farce, she said.

  They said good-bye with laughter and a hug. But Luciana had left a strange trace in her wake, a trace of doubt. Eureka returned to work. The traffic lights’ insistent colors took on a strange intensity by night. Desire makes everything look sharper and Eureka had recently had a series of recurring dreams about a man from Colorado who’d published several papers on the alarming stateside epidemic of narcoleptic dogs, and whenever she dreamed about someone, she would spend some of the following day thinking about that person, considering them, what particular meaning they might have for her, and so they would come to take on even greater significance in her conscious mind, until finally they had won themselves a permanent and privileged spot in her memory. Emissaries of mystery, her dream gatecrashers sometimes ended up feeling more important to her than people she knew very well in daily life, but who had never made it into her dreams.

  The grotesque moans of invisible foxes could be heard as they copulated around the Institute. Eureka went into the lab, passed by the wrecked red car belonging to the drowsiness and driving studies, and went into her office. She called Toshi and they spoke for an hour about Dublin and nothing in particular, groceries they needed to buy, the dinner with their friends they’d planned for the weekend. Then she turned to analyzing the correlation between oestrogen levels and erotic dreams by age, social status, and diurnal experience.

  The man from Colorado. If her desire usually manifested itself in a fairly explicit way in her dreams, as far as strangers went, or even men she knew glancingly, when the man from Colorado was involved, things were always fairly veiled. She dreamed about work meetings, about talking shop with him. It was a very long series of dreams. An empty desk in an office. The man from Colorado dressed in casual clothes. She would wake up recalling scenarios so dull that they scarcely seemed worth the effort. But on one occasion, she woke up during a particularly dull dream and was surprised to find her body writhing, the intense smell of sex surrounding her, accusing her, her conscience giving her a wink and whispering: Ah, so this is the real subtext of these nightly conversations. And it occurred to her that if all those dull conversations about work were really about desire, it was more than likely that her graphic erotic dreams were themselves about something else—that they weren’t about sex at all.

  She thought about the man from Colorado, about the worrying trace of dirty dreams that couldn’t help but make her wonder whether her sexual curiosity for strangers, acquaintances, or the man from Colorado had become more powerful than her desire for Toshi. It was another kind of intensity, the thrill and exhilaration of the unknown. Undoubtedly, she went through spells of varying lengths when the erotic charge in her dreams was something she no longer knew with Toshi. Her first taste of it had been with him, but it was rare that she felt it with him nowadays. Sometimes it wasn’t there at all anymore, as if she were somehow dead. The desire she now experienced for Toshi was a washed out version of the desire she experienced in those early years. It had become pale. Diluted. Toshi equalled everyday tenderness, marital, paternal, fraternal, maternal love, kisses, caresses, nibbling, incredibly orgasmic sex, as well as normal, average, awful, and apathetic sex. He equalled attentive ears and words, shared flavours daily at the table, playfulness, joking, the same bed for so many years, a thousand intimations as well as the eternal struggle to get by . . . But, no, the proper lust she’d once experienced with Toshi, that deserted her at times. Sometimes it did come back, shooting through her like a spasm, but even then, it wasn’t quite the same. Perhaps it was just a phase. She knew that desire is by nature a changeable beast, an effervescent liquid that sometimes bubbles over, and other times goes flat. Was she exaggerating things? Had that early desire of hers taken on an ideal and fictive quality in her memories? Perhaps it did still exist with Toshi, but just lacked the element of surprise, the novelty of those first encounters?

  She tidied away some saliva test results from her desk as she thought about the men from her dreams. They didn’t give her what Toshi gave her, she didn’t share a whole experience with them. Their allure came down to the enigma of the unknown. They offered her the intrigue of a first encounter, but it was an excitement she’d only truly experienced with Toshi, as if her dreams were a way of disguising that spark as something new. The effervescence she had known with Toshi was abstracted now by familiarity. It had lost its zing but gained in tenderness, become something else. And yet, Toshi always managed to surprise her in some way or another. It wasn’t quite that he’d lost his allure. It was just a different sort of allure, a different kind of enigma: the mystery of the inexhaustible familiar.

  She went back to the wrecked red car from the drowsiness and driving studies. The bodywork on the left front panel was destroyed. The front windscreen had become a spider’s web of cracked glass. Yet the interior was still like new. She sat down inside. A pair of fuzzy dice hung from the rearview mirror. She’d always told Toshi everything. But not about her dreams. She’d broken into laughter the one time she’d tried. She might as well have been living some secret life that she only shared with those mystery men. There was something about monogamy that never did sit right with her, anyway—it was an impossible concept, full of contradictions. Of course, she did understand the need to trust somebody, to have a lasting relationship, to comfort and be comforted—but she also understood her limitations, her weaknesses, her infinite capacity for obsession. That’s why her dream life seemed a happy solution, a private territory in which she could indulge the promiscuity she would shrink from in waking life, then savor it when she was awake. But: solution? Solution implied that there was a problem, and maybe there wasn’t a problem, unless it was precisely there that the problem lay, the fact that there wasn’t a problem at all, no hay problema, the fact that she lived a contented domestic life by day, and a promiscuous erotic existence by night, free from the headaches that promiscuous behavior tended to cause in the real world. At least that’s how it seemed to
her: Promiscuity was a sort of trap; you’re lured in thinking only of the reward, and then find yourself mired in paranoia and guilt. Sure, there were people who didn’t seem to have much of a conscience about their affairs, but she couldn’t be like that—or, at least, she wasn’t there yet.

  As she stared at the petrol gauge, she wondered if those unknown men, the intimate strangers and the man from Colorado, if those men dreamed about her too, and if it was at the same time as she dreamed about them, or on other nights. The man from Colorado probably dreamed about her all the time. Though she knew that it was likely that he didn’t remember his dreams, that for him she existed only in the realm of sleep, never as a waking concern. Perhaps he might have remembered part of one dream, on some morning, but he wouldn’t be aware of the whole series of them. His recurring dreams were, paradoxically, the most easily forgotten.

  She became absorbed by the little icons on the dashboard. Icons. Symbols. People too can turn into symbols. The man from Colorado was very likely a symbol of the impossible, a symbol of what was, precisely, destined not to be. But she liked his company. She liked the fact that he was there, in her dreams, to remind her that it was worthwhile, on occasion, to settle for what one had already found, as opposed to dying still searching for the impossible. And she met this man only in dreams—their paths never crossed in waking life. Conditions were always unfavorable and hostile in reality, there was always a certain asymmetry in day-to-day existence. Whenever the American phoned the office, she was always on her way out and had to hang up straight away. On those occasions he was in town, and visited the lab during the day, she would be on the night shift, and they would pass each other in the corridor heading in different directions with no time to talk. And this asymmetry no doubt extended to their dream lives as well: after all, when it was daytime for Eureka, it was nighttime in Colorado. It wasn’t just that they lived in different locations and time zones, but perhaps the whole business relied on this very asymmetry—the unlikelihood of meeting each other by happenstance.

  She put her foot on the clutch. It worked. And the gears did too. Maybe it was necessary to keep the boundaries between waking and dreaming in sight because they were forever leaking into one another, eroding each other, the two zones were always merging and cancelling each other out. Was the woman who dreamed about the same man again and again really Eureka? Or some sort of double? And were the men really themselves, or their own doppelgangers? It would certainly explain her fascination with those twins—each of us has a double, by night.

  And yet, wasn’t it all down to little more than a surge in her oestrogen levels? Observing those three groups of women in their different biological phases—group A in the preovulatory phase, group B in premenstrual phase, and group C in neither phase—Eureka had been surprised to see how closely erotic dreams were connected with biological cycles, with one’s biorhythms; that hormonal fluctuations determined sex drive in sleep as well as when awake. Perhaps her secret, parallel erotic reality was just a chemical joke being played upon her by her body—a gag gift from her preovulatory and premenstrual phases, a gift from that word that sounds so much like an obscure insult in some forgotten language: oestrogen.

  She went back into the office. Yes, her erotic parallel life was nothing but a strange conjunction of boredom, the unknown, and oestrogen. And she found herself doodling an oestrogen molecule on an unopened letter as if it were the emblem of this mystery that had been stamped onto her body:

  Underneath it she wrote slowly and neatly: The dreaming mind secretes the erotic body.

  One day, the man from Colorado had vanished from her dreams precisely as he’d arrived: gently. And while the brothers Gin were the latest to sing the song of Eros in her subconscious, they too would soon vanish, since these days even fantasies have a shelf life.

  Eureka soon disappeared from the lab and reappeared in her bed. The bed was waiting for her, dutiful and empty, the sheets impregnated with the scent of her and Toshi. Sharing a bed with someone night after night is a blessing. But when that person goes away, or your sleeping times just don’t line up, having the bed to yourself can be an orgasmic sort of experience. The only thing better than sharing a bed was not sharing it when you’d become used to never having it to yourself. For a few days at least, until you started to feel your partner’s absence skulk around the room, and the double bed began to feel oversized.

  She undressed quickly, pulled back the duvet, snuggled down into her soft bed, turned out the light, and it was then that the room became the nightly sanctuary that harbored the most orgasmic workings of the mind. To sleep for a million hours, that was what she needed. Her bed. So strange, and yet so familiar. There it was, indifferent in the middle of the room, with its mahogany headboard and its slats, co-conspirators in her erotic games, a fantasy of smooth and cottoned intimacy that was now the shelter for her tired, naked body. She usually collapsed into bed exhausted, took it for granted, didn’t even give it the slightest thought, though that night she considered it an absurd piece of furniture and mused that while there was a chance we were conceived on a sofa, against a washing machine, in a wood, in an empty aisle at a twenty-four hour supermarket, or in a car parked in a deserted street, in all likelihood we were all conceived on a bed.

  She got up, drew the curtains, slipped back into bed, and started to blend into that absurd item of furniture. She wondered what her dreams would bring. She might dream about the Gin twins, in keeping with her latest ongoing serial. Or maybe she’d dream about Toshi. Sometimes she dreamed about him when they hadn’t seen each other for a week or two, although dreams with Toshi never formed part of a series. Her eyelids started to close and a host of chaotic images flashed quickly across her mind which lay resting on that absurd piece of furniture which has always been part of our existence, as if it were a nocturnal appendage, the limb closest to our unconscious, a limb that gathered in the most intimate parts of our selves, night by night, and when everything was still, kept these secrets safe in the amniotic fluid of the mattress. Ssssshhhh. Ssssshhhhh. Sssssshhhh. Silence. She was going deep into the unknown, into her horizontal existence, where she stopped being one Eureka and became many different Eurekas. Sssssshhhh. Sssshhh. Ssssshhhh.

  TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY ROSIE MARTEAU

  [SPAIN: GALICIAN]

  XURXO BORRAZÁS

  Pena de Ancares

  I came to A Pena because they told me there wouldn’t be anyone here. I’ve always been solitary, without friends, or girlfriends. Since I was a kid, I’ve never cared about anything except books, books . . . and now the Internet. I rented this house on one condition, that it have a decent connection, no matter the price.

  This village is made up of a couple dozen buildings. Besides mine, they’re all basically uninhabited ruins taken over by vegetation. It seems that the guy who rented me the place is trying to buy the whole village off the owners, who have moved away to Barcelona. According to him, with the amount I’m paying him for the month, he can buy a corncrib and a shed off a guy named Liberto. At this rate, soon everything will be his, he’ll have to figure out what to do next. Probably renovate with the help of government subsidies and fill the place with tourists in SUVs carrying shotguns. When that happens, I’m never coming back.

  I want the Internet for porn. The rest is crap for people with too much time on their hands. I love books like I love life itself, which is why, beyond just reading them, I also wrote one. One, that is, as of now. I entered the novel in a contest, just to be mortified by defeat and the indifference of the public. But it turns out that I won, so I came here to write another one, to flee from the zealots who accuse me of writing in the language of the oppressor and who disappointed me by ignoring my provocations, talking like politicians instead of insulting and threatening me. I also came here to avoid the press, who, even before reading the novel, praised me for not writing in Galician. Maybe that’s why they gave me the prize. In the end, I also came here because of the animals.

&nb
sp; I brought some serious provisions along. If I need anything, I’d need to go up to Navia de Suarna, twenty-plus kilometers up the road from hell. I spent the first two days unpacking, checking out the rooms, the furniture, turning one of the rooms into an office, setting up my equipment, and getting the lay of the land by staring out the window. From there I can see chestnut trees, heath thickets, streambeds, hollows, sharp stone outcroppings. The way to A Pena is a trail along the bottom of the valley, all ruts and overgrown grass, which ends at the village. They had to bring me here in a Land Rover.

  On the third day, I explored the rocks and paths strewn with rotten chestnuts. It was mid-September, and I picked blackberries along the stone walls that followed the road. I’ve always believed in ghosts, and I felt that a group of spirits was following me, stopping whenever I stopped, smiling innocently or in surprise with their rosy faces and their curly hair. As night was falling, I even thought I saw a thread of smoke rising from one of the farthest houses. I haven’t written anything. I tried to read, but in the darkness, the village fills with the sounds of animals nudging at doors and scrambling among the crumbling walls.

  The thing with the animals was cruel, it’s the only thing like that I can ever remember doing. A Sunday magazine from Madrid wanted to interview me, the usual deal, the writer at home or whatever. What would they say if they saw the snails, the salamander, the shrew, the frogs and tadpoles in the murky water? I emptied two cans of peaches, trapped them inside with adhesive tape, and waited for them to die. When I finished eating the peaches, the creatures lay lifeless in their syrupy resting place. The next day, the paper called to say they were sorry but they were canceling the interview.