PRAISE FOR RODRIGO FRESÁN
“Rodrigo Fresán is the new star of Latin American literature.… There is darkness in him, but it harbors light within it because his prose—aimed at bygone readers—is brilliant.”
—Enrique Vila-Matas
“I’ve read few novels this exciting in recent years. Mantra is the novel I’ve laughed with the most, the one that has seemed the most virtuosic and at the same time the most disruptive.”
—Roberto Bolaño
“A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“Rodrigo Fresán is a marvelous writer, a direct descendent of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, but with his own voice and of his own time, with a fertile imagination, daring and gifted with a vision as entertaining as it is profound.”
—John Banville
“With pop culture cornered by the forces of screen culture, says Fresán (knowing the risk to his profile of ‘pop writer,’ even coming out himself to discuss it), there’s nothing left but to be classic. That’s the only way to keep on writing.”
—Alan Pauls
ALSO IN ENGLISH
BY RODRIGO FRESÁN:
THE INVENTED PART
THE BOTTOM OF THE SKY
Copyright © Rodrigo Fresán, 2017
Translation copyright © Will Vanderhyden, 2019
First published in Argentina as La parte soñada
First edition, 2019
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-948830-05-8 | ISBN-10: 1-948830-05-1
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.
Text set in Caslon, a family of serif typefaces based on the designs of William Caslon (1692–1766).
Cover Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
For Ana and Daniel:
dreams made reality,
reality made dreams
Contents
I THAT NIGHT (FOOTNOTES FOR AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SLEEPWALKERS)
II THE OTHER NIGHT (IRRATIONAL CATALOG FOR AN EXHIBITION OF RESTLESS SHADOWS)
III TONIGHT (MANUAL OF LAST RITES FOR WAKING DREAMERS)
COUNTING SHEPHERDS: A Thank-You Note
What are dreams?
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Ada, or Ardor
The depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once.
—KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse-Five
Each man is given, in dreams, a little personal eternity which allows him to see the recent past and the near future. All of this the dreamer sees in a single glance, in the same way that God, from His vast eternity, sees the whole cosmic process.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
“Nightmares”
It’s only in dreams that things are inevitable; in the waking world there is nothing that cannot be avoided … Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.
—JOHN BANVILLE
The Blue Guitar and Time Pieces
And somebody spoke and I went into a dream.
—JOHN LENNON & PAUL MCCARTNEY
“A Day in the Life”
And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.
—DENIS JOHNSON
Train Dreams
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye.
—THE BIBLE
Corinthians 15:51-52
As night unites the viewer and the view.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Pale Fire
I
THAT NIGHT (FOOTNOTES FOR AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SLEEPWALKERS)
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE
“A Dream Within a Dream”
I have dreams of a density I would like to bring to fiction.
—JOHN CHEEVER
Journals
A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
—CHARLES DICKENS
A Tale of Two Cities
I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.
—A. A. MILNE
Winnie-the-Pooh
All men dream, but not equally.
—T. E. LAWRENCE
Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
Dreams are toys.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Winter’s Tale
The dream is, here, the body of the text.
There it is.
The body: in repose and asleep, yet always alert.
The text—in the most suspended of animations—opening its eyes when the book opens, every time it is read, as if upon entering that place a light turns on so the light can shine out. In shhhilence. Without a sound beyond an onomatopoetic and contagious opened-mouth yawn, and, every so often, stretching its arms out wide, until its bones creak.
And that’s all there is to say about the outside as this procession is headed inward, line by line, lining up into a litany.
That’s why, always, after centuries of reading aloud, we learned it was better to read soundlessly: lips moving just enough to let air escape between teeth, and little more. With that combination of devotion and fear that overcomes you, in the dark, watching a luminous and illuminating loved-one sleep. And, just then, acknowledging and being fully aware, inside a darkness all our own, that the person we love will never be entirely open, known, legible, and comprehensible to us.
When someone is sleeping, that person is a mystery and yet, at the same time, as they really are. Lacking the sophisticated and artificial poses of waking life, when all of us are so awake to how we’re being perceived.
Asleep, on the other hand, limited possibilities: face down or face up or on one side or sprawled out or contracted in fetal position, like when you floated in the shell of your mother, fantasizing, like Hamlet, about being “king of infinite space,” where there’s no room for bad dreams. Easy to perceive, and yet, in its deceptive simplicity, a body that, like the numbered verses of a poem, we could recite from memory, yes; but, again, without ever fully understanding it. Like what happens in and with many poems.
And possible meanings and interpretations are but footnotes. Notes in smaller font—the secret and definitive clauses. Under or at the foot of the bed. Feet reaching out and seeking the heat and company of other feet. Or, at least, of that hot water bottle resembling an organic prosthesis of a mollusk-like consistency, there, in the lower reaches of the bed, under a blanket of aquamarine blue. Feet moving to the somnambulant rhythm of a song sung in its sleep, rocking back and forth. One of those cradle lullabies that, when they grow up, awaken transformed into bedtime songs and, in the end, stop dreaming of little angels, dreaming instead of their increasingly certain nonexistence, and waiting to perform and dream the funeral march. They dream of the bluesy beat being played beside that supine body, just there, in the bed of a coffin, resting, supposedly, in peace.
And—aaaaah ah-ah-AH ah-ah-AH AH-aaaaaah aaaaah aaaaah aaaah ah-ah-AH aaaaaaah—somebody spoke and I went into a dream, singing, one night in the life, “A Day in the Life,” in the language of dreams which is the language of all time, all times, at the s
ame time. The free words, the present; the ones between quotation marks, the past; the ones between parentheses, the future.
But all of them being told right now.
“Tell a dream and lose a reader,” someone told us.
Who said that and who sang that thing about going into a dream?
What did they do? Did they have some personal problem with the act of dreaming, some nightmare trauma, some unfulfilled longing?
What authority could somebody possibly have to chisel such an irrefutable maxim or to sing that symphonic and floating sigh?
What does it matter?
Because, oh, he’s now—again, as is already custom—prepared to lose multiple, many, maybe all his readers.
He’s going to tell them a dream.
Luckily, he’s not a writer.
Or better: he’s no longer a writer; which is more or less the same thing.
He’s an exwriter.
To be an exwriter isn’t only to no longer be a writer, it is, in a way, to never have been one: when a writer stops writing, unlike any other profession where what’s done remains, the condition and race and species and not-necessarily-super power are lost. The books remain, the work, yes. But in the past, and ever further from life itself, and as if they were no longer yours. Because if that mysterious mechanism that turns on during (in the most private and ineffable moment of the profession, in the act of writing itself) isn’t cyclically rereleased, everything written in the past begins to reject its author. To cross over to the other side of the street when they see their writer coming, rambling to himself and wandering in spaced-out esses when he should be doing hallucinogenic zees. Not acknowledging him the way kids don’t acknowledge their awkward parents who show up at their parties to drink and dance and shout. Going off alone and on their own and not returning his greeting or helping him up when he stumbles and trips and falls. Something that happens more and more: exwriters—like the elderly; and he’s an exwriter and someone who he feels so old—stumble and trip and fall at the slightest obstacle or over the same stone. Few things are more fragile than someone who has been left without words and whose infrequent handwriting, always, seems to spring forth from the private earthquake of that atrophied claw, once a flexible hand of movements both harmonious and forceful, like a conductor.
Not anymore.
Now, the emperor’s thumb forever pointing down, making it impossible to even sustain the weight of a pen and its ink.
For a while now—a long while; because his old age has turned out to be far longer than his childhood and youth and middle age put together—all his events precipitate. And he with them; almost letting himself fall, free but a prisoner of the gravity of the moment. With the almost-secret hope and fantasy of, maybe, never having to get up again and the comfort of resigning himself to staying down, wounded.
But no such luck (good or bad) and something forces him to find a wall to lean on (though he doesn’t seek any type of special assistance) like he once leaned on a blank page or screen.
And there he goes, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” and “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate”: the same quotes as always, functioning in the way of ארבדכ ארבא (the abracadabra that means “I create like the word”) or مسمس اي حتف↱ (that thing you say to open the door to the cave housing stolen treasures or the body to be resurrected in whose name so many will steal).
So there he stays, noteworthy for nobody, but standing all the same and with all these notes at his feet.
Footnotes that scrambled up from the bottom of the page, like in a Wonderland dream, and were integrated into the main text, indistinguishable but never refusing to be turned into his other voice. An accelerated and particular and messianic voice, when he imagined combining the end of his world with the end of everyone’s world, typed in the belly of an apocalyptic Swiss particle accelerator. A voice that speaks in the clacking but incessant clickety-clack of an American Typewriter, in a landscape, ever more uniform and obedient and digital and without fingerprints and always bowing down in prayer to Sans-Serif. Skipping entire paragraphs when the descent, from the top to the bottom of the page, zigzagging left to right, grows more difficult. A font that at one time so many people found so hard to read (and that they complained about so much, though they never complained about spending their lives reading tiny text on tiny screens), that fluid font he always liked so much to write in, first on acoustic and later electric typewriters.*
Footnotes growing like plants that wrap around and ensnare him. Footnotes you can do several things to: kick them, pick them up, leave them lying out in the rain so they’re swept away by the water as it drains or so—accumulating remains—they germinate and turn into footnotes that ascend into the heights.
Foot-tapping footnotes that lose more readers than telling dreams. And that make you lose more listeners—like reading with the ears—than speeches. And that here are part of the problem, of what went wrong when a reasonable and maximal utilization of the time of men was sought. Even of the time that passed while they were dreaming.
And, yes, what it ended up producing was something monstrous.
Nothing too very scientific, but even still, now, a direct consequence of the experimentation.
Of experiments gone awry.
Dreams that—scholars of the matter insist in interviews and documentaries, with faces like those of lying children—are nothing more than electrochemical reactions. Small gusts of energy leaping from cell to cell. Imprecise stimuli nobody really totally believes in. Nobody really knows where dreams come from, and where they’re going, and what they’re for. You could say—with equal certainty—that dreams are, actually, the thoughts of guardian angels. And nobody could dispute it; because if dreams exist, why can’t angels who dream them also exist. Series of dreams like accelerated particles where nothing comes up to the top, but even still, falling from on high like hard and heavy rain; and he folds his umbrella to let himself be drenched, not thinking of anything specific or making use of any intricate scheme or looking for an exit in any direction. Dreams where—in the moment of dreaming them, as if he were writing them down as someone else dictated—you don’t make any great connection, or think all this would pass inspection or the cards you’re holding (dreams like Tarot cards or one of the other many and enthusiastic and optimistic methods people buy into when it comes to interpreting something) will be any good for you, unless they come from another world.
Dreams like irrefutable evidence that you have a nocturnal life, that at night and in the night and through the night and with the night you’re more alive and awake and alert than ever.
Enough of this.
Better to stop here, before everyone falls asleep.
That’s where we’re headed.
Come in and dream.
When he longer had anything to sell, he sold what one should never sell: dreams.
His dreams.
He didn’t like the idea of doing it, of course.
Nothing was more disturbing to him than selling with eyes open something made with eyes closed. Something only you see and whose description or recreation will always be partial, imperfect, nontransferable. The memory of a memory of a memory. The most faithful portrait of the wind, when you know what gives stature and profile and shape to the wind are nothing more and nothing less than the things the wind sweeps along. All the things the wind suspends in the air, as if they were letters to be arranged, scattering them across the solid ground and ready and set and aim and fire at some obscure moving target. All of that, there, blowing in a wind that doesn’t sound like wind but like wind sounds in the movies. Or, closer, dreams like a movie that (“I saw it, but I don’t remember which one it is!” we exclaim) we only catch a few minutes of, drifting in the ether of a midnight TV channel, back in days when it was impossible to instantly know what was being broadcast, because you didn’t have the remotest control over all of that, over pausing or rewinding or fast-forwarding what
was happening on not-flat-but-cubic screens. Or, finally, dreams like a song we catch already underway, on the radio, and whose performer and name we don’t know; just that chorus that’s been stuck in our ears and is fading away to then hammock all day, until all we’ve got left are stray verses and notes. And more details about dreams and movies and songs coming up, if and when, by then, he hasn’t forgotten all of this, all of that, and all of that other one too.
But yes: nothing is more unsettling than selling—to part with something invisible, yet so intimate and personal and private and unique—dreams. Something with neither body nor weight. Though nothing is as solid as something that appears to be nowhere but is actually in all places. Here and there and everywhere: like what was said about some old gods nobody believes in anymore because it was definitively proven they do not believe in us; they no longer believed in the people they had first dreamed to make a reality later. Yes, the gods departed of their own volition or never existed. And nobody took seriously anymore that ploy whereby man first created the gods in order to, maybe, later, be able to create a story where the gods create mankind. After the curtain of faith and of myths dropped—when nobody any longer dreamed that sacred dream of which nothing remained—all that was left were dreams.
Our divine and ferocious dreams.
And later not even that.
And so the few dreams that were still alive, “awake,” became very valuable and people paid a great deal of money for them.
And more details about all the foregoing forthcoming.
And—again with the recurrence of dreams, with that persistent insistence that also belongs to memory, just not asleep but in a trance—nothing is more disturbing than selling something you know to be yours and only yours and not resembling that of anyone else. * (“Of all memory only the illustrious gift / of recalling dreams is worth anything,” Antonio Machado.)
Dreams—like the pupils of our eyes and the fingerprints of our fingers and the lobes of our ears—are unique and nontransferable.
The Dreamed Part Page 1