The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  It’s a good position from which to watch Ella.

  A boy with robot airs studies him around the borders of a manga magazine. A kid with zits and tattoos * (or maybe it’s the quantity of zits that makes him think of one of those surfing, whaling Maori warriors) gives him the defiant face of the modern and psychotic Batman, and he has no doubt he’s there to get a better view of Ella too.

  He pretends they don’t exist (his grandfather always warned him that there are certain rare animals you should never stare at because it’s like an invitation to fight or for them to sink their teeth into you) and * (again, please, none of those compilations of “imaginary” and dreamed “adventures” of Superman where he marries Lois Lane or dies or goes out into the street without his Superman suit or falls from the sky having lost the ability to fly) picks up an album dedicated to one of the specimens of the genre: outlines of childish animated drawings devoted to performing brutal actions where everything has the rhythm of onomatopoetic nightmares. He opens it and there’s that little monster barely captured in the panels: sleeping with an open mouth that lets out a zzzzzzzzz and, above his head, inside a bubble, a saw sawing a tree trunk and … he closes it. The little monster from the comic could be a more or less close relative of Manga Boy or Freak Batman, he thinks.

  And, suddenly, over the bookstore sound system, a song comes on, that song that’s a series of dreams. And maybe that was a good way to make contact, he thinks. To approach Ella. To ask her if she knows the name of that song he can’t remember and maybe then, at the end, in a brand new and freshly added verse, the song will sing about a bookstore and a beautiful woman and …

  … then something happens. Something happens so it won’t happen again. Something happens so it won’t have the obligation or the right to happen.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted * (he doesn’t like how that phrase sounds, it sounds like a poorly-aged translation, but, he understands, there’s nothing he can do about it: after all, dreams are the translation of a translation; and his is a cursory translation, rushed out of fear they’ll start to disappear, that his dreams will start dreaming and will be forgotten by the one who dreams them thereby provoking their oblivion) because, now, she’s coming toward him. Walking, but in that way some women have that’s like running in slow motion. And Ella smiles at him; but there’s something terrible in that smile: it’s one of those forced smiles, like a happy death’s head. One of those open-mouthed and air-sucking smiles with which synchronized swimmers come up before diving back down to smile underwater, a hermetic smile where their clenched teeth keep them from filling up with water and drowning.

  And Ella opens her arms and her lips and it’s as if he could see, there, inside her throat, how those words he wanted so badly to hear but she shouldn’t say, here and now, were taking shape; because saying them, giving them sound and releasing them into the air, would mean bringing about the end of everything.

  So he shuts his eyes to keep from seeing them and opens his eyes here, far away, where he can no longer hear them.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted (again, the same phrase: the horror that writers, in addition to having recurrent dreams, have dreams with recurrent phrases and dislike how they’re written and dreamed) because he feels a terrible pain first in his left arm and then in his chest; but it doesn’t matter because it’s a pain that’ll make him collapse right there in front of Ella. He regains consciousness inside the ambulance and is so happy to discover that Ella is not traveling beside him, not holding his hand throughout the ambulance ride. And there’s something beautiful in the way cars and buses and even empty ambulances move aside to make way for the high-speed and wailing red light of his love for Ella, who, luckily, isn’t there. So, quite content, he keeps on dying, feeling more alive than ever.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted (ugh, he’s not going to mention this again) and now Manga Boy and Freak Batman have that final look—like an inverse sketch, the sketch you only arrive to after the finished work, the signed portrait—that distinguishes the terminally ill. Eyes tired with the awareness of everything they won’t ever see, youthful wrinkles that only appear on the faces of those who won’t have a chance to grow old, their hairless heads showing skin reddened more by the moon than the sun.

  He pauses in the used books section and opens an old compendium of advice for home gardeners and, from out of its pages falls what appears to be an ancient manuscript inked with numbers and cabalistic symbols. And somehow he understands it’s a formula capable of curing all the ills of this world. And Ella understands this too; because she comes running toward him, tears streaming down her face, overcome with the transcendence of his discovery, her eyes open so wide he can’t help opening his until he hears them groan from the effort. His eyes wide open like two mouths opening in a kiss.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted because Ella comes toward him and slaps him. And it’s the best slap of his life. * (A close-up and Golden-Age-of-Hollywood slap.) Ella is a mark tattooed on his cheek. And Ella is so strong his head jerks in a bad way and from then on he’ll, happily, spend the rest of his life with a terrible pain in the neck. And yet, he understands, there is a kind of passion in that slap. There are motives behind that slap that are not for him to know, so he leaves that place to enter in another. Into a bookstore where Ella works, for example.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted because Homero comes toward him from the bestseller section and accuses him of stealing books. He runs toward the door, leaving behind, falling from the secret pockets of his book-stealing jacket, multiple tomes of the complete works of an author he idolizes but whose books are unavailable, because they were never written. Because that author doesn’t exist on the side of life that’s not a dream.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted because they hear shouts and songs and, outside, everyone is kissing and hugging and, yes, at last, that dictatorial and dynastic government has fallen. The end of years and years under the banner and boots of a single surname. And he and Ella know the thing to do is hug and kiss the person closest to you, and neither he nor she is about to throw themselves into the arms of Manga Boy or Freak Batman, so he decides to run away, to get out of there as quickly as possible, making his way through the people who are kissing and hugging and toppling bronze statues in plazas and parks. They bring them down so that, in their place, nothing is perfect, new bronze statues inevitably grow with arms raised, all of them pointing nowhere, but so certain nowhere is in that precise direction.

  There.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted by a great noise coming from the street. The murmur of a cataclysm descending from the heights. He and Ella go out into the street bound together by fear and curiosity * (curiosity and fear are powerful accelerants of human relationships and, suddenly, she and he are strangers who know each other perfectly) and they see people running and cars crashing and, in the sky, what at first looks like a metal cloud and subsequently turns out to be a spaceship of interplanetary fabrication. The grace of its curves, the elegance of its lights, cannot be things of this world, he thinks. Human beings are not yet ready to imagine or create such things.

  The spaceship delicately alights—like an insect on a flower—and from inside it emerge two transparent creatures. They approach him and Ella with wise smiles and, with the silent and telepathic flow of their thoughts, explain to them they’ve come to save humanity, to do away with all the evil and evil people on this planet. And the only thing they ask in return—after having studied earthlings for years—is that he and Ella go with them, that they climb aboard the spaceship and accompany them back to their world. They say the two of them are the most perfect humans they’ve ever seen; he and Ella were made to be together and take the best of their species to the farthest reaches of the universe. “You’re the new founders of a new history,” they say. “You’re the first two names in the first chapter
and it’ll be your children who will follow the example of our love on a new Earth where there will be no war and no sickness. That’s the price you’ll have to pay for us to prevent the millions of inhabitants of this damned old Earth from continuing down the path toward self-destruction.”

  He and Ella look at each other and smile and then, before it’s too late * (saying to himself that aspects of the plot of one of his favorite novels whose title he doesn’t remember have been combined with one of his favorite songs whose title he doesn’t remember) he forces himself, once more, to open his eyes, to remember.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted because Ella is walking toward him and they stop in front of each other, without a word, looking at each other in a strange silence like fire that freezes or snow that burns. And here the question is and will forever be which of them will dare to break that strange silence—that ever so eloquent silence—to say the thing that can only be said once. Those slumbering words that, once awakened, will never be able to close their eyes again. Those invisible words in a silence that—unlike what’s falsely claimed concerning the visibility of the Great Wall of China from space—can be seen from the moon. Because that silence is the greatest structure ever constructed by man and woman, by a man and a woman.

  See it.

  Open your eyes.

  There it is.

  It’s not easy to open his eyes, to interrupt the trajectory of his dreams in that exact moment, just when he and Ella are about to be bound together forever.

  It has required a difficult training, an arduous programming.

  It hasn’t been easy, but it had to happen.

  The possibility that Ella might someday come to love him in waking life depends on him waking up just before Ella begins to love him in his dreams, he tells himself.

  He said it before, but maybe he wasn’t entirely clear.

  Or maybe it was so clear it wasn’t understood.

  This tends to happen with simple pronouncements and complex dreams: people distrust their simplicity and discard them without taking into account that they’re complex entities, and that’s when all the trouble begins.

  So, better, just in case, it bears repeating:

  He has the power to make his dreams not come true.

  And, of course, this is the part and the moment when, he thinks, many will smile with that pity, born more of scorn than commiseration, and will say: “What’s so special about that? I have the power to make my dreams not come true too.”

  To which he will insist:

  He has the power to make his dreams not come true.

  And he’ll add the following, something difficult to say and put in writing; because certain things are not easy to confess:

  When he says he has the power to make his dreams not come true, he means nothing he dreams will ever take place. His dreams are always too fast asleep to wake up and come true. Everything he dreams is automatically eliminated from the plot of his story and the waking story of humanity. It’s an absurd power and impossible to show to second and third parties.

  Once—after multiple drinks—he said to an acquaintance: “I have the power to make my dreams not come true.” And his friend looked at him the way you look at an idiot and said: “Me too.”

  So he explained better: he’ll never have a heart attack or find himself naked in the bookstore where Ella works or be chased for stealing books or have Ella slap him.

  And he’ll never discover the formula to cure all the ills of the world and this world won’t be saved by the cosmic fondness of lyrical or invasive aliens, the ones who wait until you’re asleep to steal your body and replicate and replace you while you dream. He’ll never be defeated by the dictatorship that sinks and buries his country.

  And the ones he remembers here are just a handful of the dreams he’s had. A small sample of variations—hundreds, thousands, there are nights when he dreams up to five of them—where the good news is, again and again, aborted and dead, by the power and volition of a possible new love in a permanent state of gestation and, as far as he knows, with no clear due date.

  Then they’ll ask him what he dreamed before he met Ella and he’ll say he never remembered his dreams before and didn’t care to remember them. He’s not responsible for everything that could’ve happened or stopped happening before he started dreaming of Ella. Or he is. But he cares even less about that than he cares about what happened or about what happened in the dreams he does remember, his dreams of Ella.

  And he’ll add that not a night goes by when the pleasure of dreaming of Ella hasn’t signified the death of some good news. Dreams like the one about the heart attack, about stealing books, about finding himself naked, about the slap, are not the most abundant; they are of the more transcendent variety.

  And yesterday he dreamed that, while he was in the bookstore, the newspaper vendors hawked bonus issues with information regarding the capture of that serial killer who, he’s sorry, because of him, will never be captured.

  They’ll tell him he’s a miserable bastard * (to say he’s just a miserable bastard doesn’t seem sufficient / find more powerful synonyms) and he’ll say, agreed, that’s possible. But it’s not something he asked for. This power incubated during nine months floating inside his mother, swinging in the hammock of a coma isn’t something he’s dreamed. He never wanted to be a hero and, much less, a secret hero. It’s too great a responsibility (that would force on him the terrible and constant exercise of not dreaming certain good things and thereby aborting the possibility that they happen or the imposition of dreaming terrible things so they never take place) and not something he asked for. Not even in his dreams. Besides, he’s certain—were he able to master such discipline—he wouldn’t last long. His neurons would resist those chains and before long the blooming party of rebellious and inoperable tumors would take place.

  So he opted for something more humble and intimate: to not let Ella love him in his dreams so that, who knows, her love might reach him some waking day while, there outside, everywhere, the world keeps committing suicide in slow motion, unhurriedly yet unceasingly, as his insomniac nightmares come true.

  There it is.

  He already said it

  He already confessed it.

  He has the power to make his dreams not come true.

  And, yes, all of you do, too.

  But no.

  It’s not the same, not the same thing.

  And all that—his dream made of dreams—is what he’s on his way to sell, right now, up in the Onirium.

  Here it comes, here it is, as if in a dream; passing from one stage to the next, from one sleep stage to the next less-asleep sleep stage, coming up toward the surface and oh so difficult to interpret.

  And to him, the interpretation of dreams always seemed as absurd as attempting to weave sheets and blankets out of spider webs. He supposes—it occurs to him now—that one of the most important secret moments in the history of humanity took place when an ancient man proclaimed and convinced his contemporaries that dreams were not another life as real as waking life, but, simply, a delirious catharsis and a necessary shut-eyed purge. But maybe, in attaining such certainty something else was lost, something important, something simultaneously lively and tranquil.

  And in the past he laughed at and made fun of those dream dictionaries and books of dreams. And that doesn’t mean he hasn’t read and studied them in depth, the same way—atheist and agnostic—he has always been interested in religions and sacred texts, as repositories of ideas, as (des)instruction manuals, as places to pause and look up at the stars, head tilted back, reading and not praying. Were sacred texts realistic or fantastic depending on who was reading them and believing or not believing in them? Did that matter? What mattered was that the gods were practical as well as theoretical.

  The gods have always used dreams as a direct line for communicating desires, mandates, and omens. Dreams like a telephone ringing in the night; and few things are as frightening a
s a telephone ringing in the dead of night. Especially when it startles us from our sleep, disguised as an alarm clock, as a machine with a will and disturbing plans of its own * (the invention of, probably, one of the most hated yet unknown men in History: the American clockmaker Levi Hutchins, in 1787, to help wake himself up at four in the morning; though they say Plato already had a clock with a mechanism similar to the water organ, to mark the beginning of the hour of his lectures; and that the Buddhist monk Yi Xing had already designed a device governed by the music of the stars; and that Dante Alighieri, along with his Beatrice is already contemplating, in Paradiso, canto 14, verses 10-18, inexplicably enraptured, a kind of infernal cosmic alarm clock made of spheres and wheels and lights).

  So, better, dreams like the rungs on the ladder Jacob dreamed, or like the ripe bovine dreams of the Pharaoh Joseph interprets, or the dreamed conversations between Solomon and his Maker, or the Three Kings dreaming it would be best to avoid running into Herod, while another Joseph, unsatisfied, dreams of angels who advise him to flee to Egypt after his, supposedly virginal and immaculate, wife tells him she has something unbelievable yet true to tell him.