And he, he watches over her, he is intoxicated without getting dizzy from her fall or her ascent, like a bird clutching his prey in his claws for fear he might lose it before he reaches his nest where he can tear it to pieces at his leisure; he understands by her glance, that flashes and clouds, by the fog that comes upon it like a gentle mist in the splendor of the morning; he understands by her breath, by her mouth that seeks his own, by her little tongue, at once sensual and impertinent, licking his palate; he understands what stage she’s going through, so then, bending down, he plants landing kisses, hand grenades, with his teeth at the root of her neck, on the nerve of the “Song of Songs,” on her neck, necklaces of loving teeth marks, and higher up still, in her hair, on the electrified skin of her skull, and in this way he descends with her, he finds his own childhood memories that never hit their target, hitting the dark womb of the earth, the point of darkness from which life emerges, into which he disappears only to rediscover himself intact, and there’s something about this baptism very much like the ceremony of Epiphany, when the cross is thrown into the water, followed by the diver, and they become, for an instant, cross and man, one and the same, the symbol of the faith and the believer, while the bishops, standing on dry land, along with the ordinary people and the dignitaries, applaud this union taking place in the water, by singing beautiful hymns—in rooms that understand nothing, on beds that can’t feel, in countries that mean nothing—everywhere, they’re one and the same, the same submersion, the same anticipation, the same sweetness that will express itself afterwards, on her peaceful face.
Clocks make unbearable hands turn. Bells toll. Airplanes take off and land. It’s nice when the fruit becomes like honey. “The room becomes sweeter when you’re near me.”
Space, as an element necessary for a wider garment, when one’s clothes are tossed onto mentally deranged chairs, expands. Space as time of joy. The joy of space makes time a tenant. “And yet you have still not sung of love.” Time, which is money for others, does not count for them. Money is for those who know how to make a profit, who know how to use it. For them, money is the dream.
She would sing arias for him, which, in the past, she had sung on stage; now she sang them only for him, and he enjoyed them, sole audience of a voice that once moved so many people. “When will she move those people again? Why does she no longer sing for them?” he asks himself, while she, searching for her voice, finds it growing increasingly stronger under the veils that almost suffocated her. “What is a voice,” muses Don Pacifico, “as it passes under the guillotine? A guillotine can cut a throat, but it can’t stop a song. Her voice could be a gold mine, and yet here I sit, despairing, struggling with words, while at my side this Pacto-lus keeps flowing, untapped.”
But it is difficult to get a mechanism back in motion, Public relations count more than private ones. And that’s where things get complicated. The ancient canals would have to be rediscovered for the babbling water of Doña Rosita to flow through them again and irrigate the thirsty plains. Wherever they turned their gaze, they could see that the new irrigation was functioning perfectly, but that something was missing from the impetus of the water that carries off leaves and soil in its eddies. The new technology of the irrigation canals was definitely irreproachable. At no point was there a leak, at no point was there the slightest malfunction. Perfectly designed and constructed, all parts converged toward the final goal, without leaves or soil to impede the flow of the water, which was itself well protected in reservoirs. And yet something was lacking in this whole system: that which used to make the plain intoxicating. Technology had, to a certain extent, wiped out the art of irrigating, the art of singing, and television, which reproduces the irrigation of the plain on small screens, gave all the peasants the opportunity to participate in the process of irrigation, but deprived them of the unique joy of only a certain number of them—and not all of them, as was now the case in their homes—being earwitnesses to the musical event, in a small room perhaps, but stripped of the technology that will inevitably weaken the torrent of a voice, the explosive presence of a personality whose errors are also inseparable parts of its makeup.
“We live in a time,” reflected Don Pacifico, “where man is pitted against the perfection of his machines. And that turns him into a machine, depriving him of the possibility of remaining human. Since voices need microphones and transformers, since a computer will soon be able to produce an aria impeccably, where is that element that, owing to its particularities, humanizes great art?”
Henceforth everything obeyed an initial nucleus whose message was increasingly altered each time it was reproduced. From that moment on, no one much cared about the origin of all this: a human being, a cry, a pain, an effort. And even if they came to reproduce this singularity, so many other singularities would come long afterward to annihilate it that the average viewer, listener, or reader began more and more to resemble someone who, remote control in hand, jumps from one channel to another (among the fifty or so available), creating a new film of his own composition that impoverishes him instead of enriching him, because it is incoherent, shapeless, fragmented, a mosaic that won’t hold together, and it is only in his sleep that he can, by renouncing everything, find his own truth, which is the dream, if indeed he dreams.
Because dreaming is our self-defense against the bombardment of counterinformation and updating that accomplishes nothing except to make us aware of the tragedies of the world upon which we are incapable of having the slightest effect, except by putting our hands in our pockets.
Because there are dreams that torture, on racks, there are dreams that are altars to the Thermidors of sleep, endless dreams made longer by expectation, guillotine dreams...
So she would have to start singing again. But how? How does one catch hold of threads that have been cut? Which one of all these threads that lie jumbled in your palm leads to the big hook? She worked alone, she prepared herself, she didn’t seem hurried.
It was he who was in a hurry. He didn’t know how difficult it is to sing. How the throat, this channel, this canal of the voice that brings forth the melody, can very easily become blocked and cancel itself out. He didn’t know about the thousand and one threads that make up the embroidery of the voice on an ethereal canvas that then ceases to exist. With the exception of recordings, which immortalize it in its temporary and changeable eternity. He did not know that everything hangs upon one instant, is born and dies in this instant, in this instant where everything flows, where everything is but an instant. But for this instant to arrive the human being does not need the calm found in the eye of the cyclone, but the tranquillity of the ocean that is never disturbed by cyclones.
Because there are floating dreams, suspended, where everything walks on air, with no other prospect than to continue as such; dreams in which the present, the future, and the past all live in the imperfect and the present tenses, being imperfect, in the dream, becomes horrifying, nightmarish; dreams that torture, on racks, in Thermidors of sleep, endless dreams made longer by expectation.
Doña Rosita is a vast woman. At last, we rediscover the breadth of Doña Rosita’s soul. She has just returned from the audition, tired, but not exhausted as she had feared. Doña Rosita is deeply in love with Don Pacifico. All day long on days she doesn’t see him, she makes him live in her mind. In her mind, his picture is indelible. Doña Rosita’s hands communicate with a source of energy that lies outside herself. With these hands she kneads his body, she besieges it, she overwhelms it. He sleeps in her arms, almost against his will.
He feels that time is limited. There isn’t enough of it for him. “The time it takes to eat, to sleep, to watch the news, to fall in love, to go out, to finish work, and, the most time-consuming of all, to write. How can one get all that done? It’s raining. I like the rain. Rain is a blessing from God. The sun is a curse.”
“It was four o’clock,” she says, lying next to him with a turban on her head. Across from them, embracing dolls hang from
the ceiling. “It was four o’clock and I had finished the housework; I was happy to have gotten through it quickly, and it was quiet inside the house and out. The construction next door had finished, and they had taken down the cranes, when it started to rain again. My relaxed state of mind and my bodily exhaustion predisposed me to receive the message of the rain, inside the empty shell of the house. It was against the large bay window, the one with no shutters, that the rain was making the greatest racket. The rain was supernatural. It was the first time I had experienced it this way in this country.
“I would like to be able to describe how I felt. I would like to speak the language that the rain used to speak to me. Because she told me many things. She came from somewhere else and acquired a voice as soon as she touched the glass. A polyphonic voice that I began to pay attention to, in order to catch her meaning. I knew there was something she wanted to tell me. And coming out of myself, I heard her. As she fell and spoke to me with her watery keys, little by little I grasped her secret melody. She spoke to me of elsewhere. There, beyond our bodies, exists energy, God, the almighty eternal cycle. Since I was alone, perhaps it was easier for me to understand what she was trying to tell me. She spoke to me of the impossibility of composing her substance into a form or a face. Indeed, I could see, as I watched her, an image, a body, trying to form itself on the windowpane but failing. The drops wouldn’t stay on its vertical, slippery surface. They fell into the drainpipe; from there, following their own course outside the gutters, they would surely end up on the sidewalk, where the gaping mouths of the sewers would be unable to swallow them all up at once.
“Had I opened the window for her to come in, she would have formed puddles on the floor, and perhaps there I could have better studied her meaning, but this way, she was like a man speaking to me from behind the closed window of a departing train, while I, standing on the platform and unable to hear, can only see the desperate opening and closing of his mouth as it forms words I cannot interpret, being in a confused emotional state. I don’t know if his absence will be long, short, or eternal. He could be saying, ‘I love you, I’ll always remember you, I’ll miss you,’ or perhaps something much more mundane, like, ‘Don’t forget to pay the bill,’ or, ‘I forgot to turn off the switch.’ It is only by his worried expression (since I can’t hear his voice) that I can assume he is saying the opposite of what I fear. I can assume he’s saying that he is coming back tomorrow or in a few days.
“And so it was with the rain, speaking to me in her own language, underlining key phrases with claps of thunder, as if to tell me that all this was of no importance, because, beyond our feelings there exists another reality, that of the higher world, home of the clouds that send us the rain and watch us all as if from an airplane, tiny lost insects, caught in the web of a spider city, with our small, insignificant problems that we make immense. It is only the torrent of the water that is immense, the pelting rain that accentuates our solitude.
“‘Which isn’t solitude, my dear rain,’ I replied, ‘when love is burning its logs in the fireplace. Nothing matters compared to the power of love that springs from within me and obliterates everything else. I exist to await his return, or to go and meet him, to touch him and he to touch me; I exist solely for the moments when we’ll be together. Suddenly, nothing else matters. I am happy to love. I feel complete, fulfilled.’
“And as the rain tried to compose the face of the unknown God on my windowpane, talking to me in a solemn language, consumed by her passion, and at the same time angry that her liquid whips couldn’t touch me, she was like a woman trying to tell me to protect myself from pain, from suffering. But love does not know what will dissolve it. Within love, the antibodies that would destroy it cannot develop, for, if they did, then love would cease to be what I call nourishing, or liberating, or capable of rais-ing you to other heights, and would become anxiety, lamentation, pain. The inability of the rain to articulate its speech, to compose itself into an image, was due to its falling against the window I had opened inside me, protected by the crystal glass of my faith in love, which is a window open to the world that lets in the exultant light, the first sun, and turns out the rain’s bogeyman with his claps of thunder. ‘You’re wasting your breath, my dear rain,’ I said. ‘As soon as you stop I’ll hear the key to my door turn inside me, and it’ll be him. You’ll see, rain, you’ll see. As long as you stop.’ In fact, the rain stopped soon after. The greatest of silences fell over the city and the house.”
Lying down, Doña Rosita was beginning to get groggy. (Her hair, covered in an oil that she would later wash out, was still wrapped in a turban.) She heard the key in the door, as if it were turning inside her, unlocking her own deepest, seven-times-sealed door. She heard his steps, then felt him lying down next to her, with his soaking head and cold feet: he had in fact come to meet her as soon as the rain stopped. She wept, so as to join her tears with the raindrops that still covered him. All of her became a trembling tree of tears. Then, having calmed down, she washed her hair with a dream shampoo, filling the bathtub with dream bubbles.
Obeying Doña Rosita’s call, Don Pacifico had rushed, as soon as the rain stopped, to carry out his duty, which was to provide water for her mill, so that it might open its beautiful wings and the wind might rejoice in its blowing. “A fine, virtuow mill, made by angels”(Rilke). But the wind is diabolical. It blows furiously on Mykonos in the summer, just as it blew on his own island when the fires started, at the time when he was accused, indirectly, of arson. Which he had not committed. Only in his mind. But suspicion regarding the Jew caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders. So, as things were going from bad to worse and no decisions were being made concerning matters of import, the horses wallowed, destined never to race.
Because there are tum-of-the-century dream that face the great changes, like vultures beaten by Visigoth winds; syndicated and Unionized dreams, condemned to be put into practice, and other, aphasic, unenlisted, internationalist dream, like hymns with a musical refrain; leitmotiv dream that recur; Saint Simonic, routine, railroad dreams, idle, centripetal, hard of hearing vengeful dreams; centennial dream, constructivist, domesticated or wild, with interest, interest-free, usurious, CIA, and KGB dream, dream that have escaped from prison guards; productive dream that multiply for you, or dream that, like governments that have lost their base and cadres, dissent from sleep; and others, hypnotic ones, that are outlined by the Grand Interpreter of Dream; dream of the Central Committee, of the Executive Office, of sections, of cells; dream of extreme clandestinity and dreams that are reinstated at Party Conferences long after the dreamers have died; ivory dream, aphrodisiac dream that overflow like the froth on glasses of Bavarian beer; dream without ornaments and others from Susa, made of heavy gold, of Darius and Parisatis; dreams that set fire to the aprons of young girls like magnifying glasses gathering the rays of the sun into one; outdated dream, narrow dreams that limit the economy of the bed and dream with sesame seeds that are sold, like jasmine, fora penny; dream that are tear drenched, teargassed, tearjerkers.
His heart, torn in two this way, was unable to achieve balance. Outside, the rain completed his inner misery. “Since I have nothing left other than this light well through which I receive the tenants’ garbage, in order to acquire a plot of land to build on I have to burn the land I inherited. I have to set fire to the forest to make a dreamport where flying words (my grandfather’s pheasants and my aphasia) will finally be able to land.”
With a mind as sharp as a razor, he shaves the beards off his dreams, and finds himself with naked cheek, scarred, face to face with the grooves of his pain. They both sink into a gigantic sleep. And while prudent people cook before they get hungry, they, lost in a hunger that sometimes reached its peak, gnawed, for lack of anything else to eat, at their very flesh. The brain, that great invalid, was not programming the questions correctly. Thus, they were called upon to give answers to erroneous questions, and the words of the oracle kept coming out wrong. Meanwhile
the money was running out.
In any case, a writer’s job is difficult. But her job was even more difficult. “Human beings can live without the word, but not without music. Music is the most profound form of human expression.” And as he watched her, she seemed like a huge, beautiful bird whose wing had once been broken. It would be difficult for the bird to rise again, to take to the sky. And yet it would. Every door has its nail, but every nail opens a hole when you pull it out, what the Christians call the eye of Judas, through which you can see who’s knocking at your door. If it’s not the north wind. And so, climbing up high, he saw down below his beloved city with its irregular development and violated town planning. “This city is without a heart,” he thought to himself. “Somebody ought to give it a transplant.”
... and Dreams Are Dreams Page 14