The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  THE OTHER NIGHT (IRRATIONAL CATALOG FOR AN EXHIBITION OF RESTLESS SHADOWS)

  I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.

  —EMILY BRONTË

  Wuthering Heights

  A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.

  —CHARLOTTE BRONTË

  The Professor

  I love the silent hour of the night,

  For blissful dreams may then arise,

  Revealing to my charmed sight

  What may not bless my waking eyes.

  —ANNE BRONTË

  “Poem 14 / Night”

  The night is cold and loud the blast.

  —PATRICK BRANWELL BRONTË

  “Winter-Night Meditations”

  I have no objection whatever to your representing me as a little eccentric, since you and your learned friends would have it so … Had I been numbered among the calm, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I now am, and I should in all probability never have had such children as mine have been … Their fun knew no bounds.

  —REVEREND PATRICK BRONTË

  Letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, July 30th, 1857

  More than anything else, however, they had each other.

  —JULIET BARKER

  The Brontës

  I

  Let there be light, yes; but only so, in the next instant, the light can be snuffed out by the darkness.

  Here it comes again.

  What?

  “The darkness!” exclaims the auditorium, ecstatic.

  The darkness arrives ready to drown it.

  What?

  “The light!” everyone celebrates together in the auditorium of this melancholic and toxic “sanatorium.”

  There, mad with pure joy and the fury of sleepless nights; healthy patients jumping and invoking, invocatio musarum, exalted and wuthering, atop their seats, not one free or empty, fists aloft holding fists aloft holding fists. So ready (here, only the red fire of raised torches is authorized to splash across the dark night) for the thrill of burning with the spontaneous combustion of speaking in tongues. You can’t understand anything they say, but nothing is easier to comprehend than the sound and noise of unbridled joy, escaping their mouths, like teeth gnashing the air.

  The light made now unmade by the darkness, oh, yes.

  The light leveled like a sand castle, lovingly and patiently begun and built by small hands throughout the suntanned day; that castle that ends up taken by storm and dissolved in the grips of the crashing and rising tide of the night.

  Or the light silenced with the kiss of a soft wind slipping between lips to extinguish the gleaming ruby of the candle flame.

  Or the light turned off with the click of the little lever of the light switch being lowered. And, oh, that intimate triumphal march (“Soldiers are dreamers,” wrote a poet of the trenches while all around him shells fell and gases rose) the unknown and secret soldier imagines, alone, as he advances along the battlefront as if it were the rearguard of the hallways of a house; turning off the lights in room after room, one to the next, as if he were counting down the chapters of a novel until he comes to the darkness of a beginning where nothing is known and anything is possible.

  Or the light surging through and pulling on a cable until it rips it out of the two sparking holes, like the electric bite mark of the most energized vampire on the lower neck of the wall.

  Or the light throwing a stone that was once the point of an arrow to strike the glowing target of the last lamp of winter.

  Or the light projecting the softness of the fade to black of darkness falling across the seats of a movie theater so the show can begin: always noir films where the night is an American night; films with titles like Nightfall or Twilight Rendezvous or A Sleepwalker Sleeps, Finally or Soursweet Dreams: all with an untrustworthy femme fatal heroine singing expressively expressionistically on the stage of a chiaroscuro nightclub that could well be called Bad Country.

  Or, after all the foregoing, she finally sets aside that recurrent and oh so fraternal (her bad brother’s bad influence) mania of turning everything into part of an enumerative list, when there’s nothing left to stain black; and so the light resorts to the most time-honored and easy and personal and primitive way of unmaking the light to let there be darkness: closing its eyes.

  And thereby learning to see the invisible.

  Close your eyes.

  See.

  Here comes the darkness; here overhead, falling, the night.

  And with the darkness and with the night, she lights up.

  Here, her dream is life, Stella D’Or shines: splendid terrorist, immortal dead star. Her black light reaching us so many years after being snuffed out. Her resplendent voice still audible, like an echo reverberating across galaxies, saying things like:

  “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one, I hope one day you’ll join us and, oh, imagine: once upon a time the night was full of stars. And so many falling stars, seen so clearly, that people didn’t have enough wishes to justify that level of cosmic exaltation and to honor their kamikaze trajectory with impossible waking dreams. Wishing on a star for things like happiness and health and money. Attributing to the stars the pale pulse of the dead, raised up into the heavens. And they’re up there still, of course. The living stars and the dead. They haven’t gone anywhere. They come and go. But it’s impossible to see them now. The color of the night, once an oceanic blue—ultrasky, not ultramarine—is now a dirty gray, electrified by the static of all those artificial lights down on Earth that make it restless, into a kind of insomniac sleepwalker. The faithful and virtuoso night, with eyes shut tight, yet unable to sleep. The night like a vaguely darker part of the day … Stop already! … Enough! … No more! … Never again! … We’ll go back to when the nights were nocturnal. Nights that struck fear into mortals, falling over them like a curtain not to end a show, but to begin a new one: the best and most entertaining of all. The night when things forbidden by day are permitted. The night without all that light containing it. The ‘dark and stormy night’ that opens that purple and Victorian novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton—who also postulated that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’—in its first line that so many people mock because they actually admire and envy it … And I want to be like that opening line. I want to be like the black hole that swallows all that light and spits out its bones. I want to be the voice singing that lullaby beside the cradle shaped like a coffin—a coffin like a music box; because coffins always seem much smaller than the person who rests inside them—in which to put to bed that false and tiring day, tired of working all those extra but never extraordinary hours. I want the night that no longer is what it once was and now has so little to tell and to be again what it once was: a bottomless sky, a deep pool from which to extract stories and in which to weave the plot of the constellations, a house of extraterrestrial gods and alien divinities. I want for the night to be the novel that follows the bedtime story your parents read to you and, after, you live throughout the long night—though your eyes are shut, so far yet so near—reading it, though you don’t know how to read yet. I want for the night not to be just another hour on the clock but another time altogether, elsewhere. The location of the night like that place where we are how we really are and, at the same time, where it is much harder to see ourselves, snugly tucked into the sheets of our dreams … Thus all notes of an obscurist noctographer (of a biographer of the night and student of the many things that happen there and the kinds of shadows that fall then) should, to have anything to offer in terms of story, by obligation and strategy, go way back. To the beginning of time, to the first darkness from which light originates … And I have a dream … I also have a dream … And it’s a waking dream. A dream made reality. A dream in which night will fall so day never rises and the words of that monastic and almost-black-as-midnight pianist
come true: ‘It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need the light’ … But in order for that to be possible, for that to occur, first we need to reinvent the night … Reestablish it … Return the darkness to the night, return the night to the darkness. Dark matter! … To be done with easy and automatic superstitions like God is Lux Mundi and the Devil, Lucifer, the most brilliant angel fallen and transformed into the obscurantist Prince of Darkness, governing from a ‘visible obscurity.’ All that nonsense to dazzle the dupes, like ‘3—Then God said: Let there be light. And there was light. 4—And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5—And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day’ … Nah … Nacht … Nonsense, not to mention the small but definitive problem of editing and narrative logic in the Bible where it’s never explained how there’s light in the first instant of Creation when God only creates the Sun on the fourth day … And don’t give me that absurdity of God himself being pure and shadowless light, please … Because then what need would there be to make it when those shadows already existed, created previously by Him and where He, supposedly, resided, tripping over all the furniture in the darkness … The light is not good and the dark is not bad. Enough of these easy and half-baked beliefs. Wars have been fought and pacifists imprisoned by the light of day too … And don’t ever forget that the Quran is revealed during the Night of Power, the most significant night according to Islam, for it’s the night when Mohammad makes his journey from Jerusalem to Mecca, and from there, to Heaven, under cover of the most sacred darkness … And it’s by night and not during the day that Abraham becomes aware of the existence of a supreme and absolute being, the one who commands, let there be light … And we all spring from the darkness of our fathers to be conceived in the darkness of our mothers … How’d it go? What was the line? Ah, yes … But now, changing one key word, to give it a new meaning … How’s it go now? … It goes like this: ‘Rage, rage, against the dying of the dark.’ Here comes the night. The Night.”

  And Stella D’Or’s words always glowed. Whenever Stella D’Or spoke, whoever was listening saw her words. As if, fluorescent and synesthetic, in strange neon colors. First their straight lines and curves, but, then, what those written words were describing. As if written in flames on a stone wall as old as stone itself. ןיסרפו ,לקת ,אנמ ,אנמ or Porpozec ciebie nie prosze dorzanin albo zylopocz ciwego. Her words and deeds following, as Stella D’Or told it, “the system developed by Charles Barbier de la Serre, captain of the French army, at the request of Napoleon Bonaparte: a secret code dubbed ecriture nocturne. A cardboard grid with six by six squares and a series of points in relief that correspond to letters and sounds and can be read in the dark, with the fingertips. And, of course, it wasn’t easy to use amid the trembling and the shock of the battlefield; which is why it wasn’t put into practice until Barbier de la Serre was invited by the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, in whose classrooms studied a precocious and blind student named Louis Braille and …”

  Or when Stella D’Or referred to other wars, to terrible and luminous wars: to the reflectors of “artificial moonlight that the Nazi army used to drive crazy the sleepless and dreamless nights of American soldiers, daydreaming they were back on their parents’ farm in Iowa, on a tractor setting the course of the crops, and not inside a blind and armored tank, blindly wandering aimlessly through the forests of Schnee Eifel, in the Ardennes, being massacred and taken prisoner and driven all the way to Dresden which, blazing, would burn for two whole nights, in a storm of bombs and fire ascending into the heavens.”

  Or when she invoked “the already ancient night of those ancient people who then, thinking themselves so modern, stacked up pyramids or erected columns or learned to fly or split the atom.”

  But did Stella D’Or say all those things?

  And did she say them with those exact words?

  Does it matter?

  Who can be sure that the things supposedly said by Yahweh or his son Yeshua of Nazareth actually came out of their mouths? Words that, among other things, supposedly created the entire universe, proved that a second part can be better or at least as good as the first, and proposed the idea that if you suffer now while you’re alive, don’t worry: because you’ll have a great time after you die if you prayed to the Masters, to the Holy Ghost and his ever growing family (that reminds her, the historian of Stella D’Or, so much of that family with whom she spent part of her past life). Holy words their disciples later preached and rewrote with the automatic obedience of ecstatic ventriloquist dolls. It doesn’t matter … Does it make any difference that at some point we stopped believing in those terrifying stories that, supposedly, help you sleep well and that, with loving sadism, your parents repeated to you over and over, so you had sweet nightmares? The same phrases, hypnotic with their “Once upon a time …” and their “ever after.” Does it change anything whether or not there is any truth to the parchment-scrolled or bronze-cast speeches of the founding fathers of the nation, memorized by children in schools bearing their names or in parks where their statues are always pointing somewhere else, far away, farther still? Does it alter the landscape in any way that it’s acceptable to pledge and repeat—on the surface of parties, to break the ice—all those immortal and famous last words or last breaths (yes, she’s also writing, a writer)? Is there anybody out there or in here who doesn’t write?

  And, yes, again (another of her bad brother’s bad influences), quoted phrases that Stella D’Or is compiling for her in-progress A Brief History of Darkness. Pronouncements like “I see a light” or that one “Light! More light!” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, conveniently and transcendently edited by his biographers from the by comparison far more banal “Open the second shutter so that more light may come in.” Or in the case of Victor Hugo, “I see black light.” To recount the last and always-dubious and unforgettable and in-memoriam living words of an almost-forthwith dead man (though probably, in more than one case, well thought-out and rehearsed in front of the mirror for years). Words spilling out like vapor from the depths of a body already beginning to cool, to be breathed in by and to inspire an always-nearby and -providential listener, notebook in hand, whom posterity never manages to clearly identify. Are we really to take Thomas Alva Edison (so hated by Stella D’Or, who considers him responsible for the phenomenon where children, frightened by the warm and inspiring darkness, suddenly start asking to sleep with a lame and predictable and expensive night light that never gets turned off) seriously, saying goodbye with an “It’s very beautiful over there.” Or should we just write it off as the last words of a man who wanted to be annoying to the last second of his biography? Or the “Mozart!” of Gustav Mahler? Or the impossible “Get my swan costume ready” of prima ballerina Anna Pavlova.

  Again, as Karl Marx had it: “Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.” Last words are like a tweet that reveals nothing but the brevity of the act of dying relative to a long life or to the immensity of life. Last words are like wanting to resolve everything quickly and at the last moment.

  Again: does it matter whether she, Stella D’Or, said this or that? Does it make sense to put down here that the best last words Stella D’Or never read are the most prosaic and etched in marble or cast in bronze—she finds it consoling that at the hour of death one thinks of little things and not great matters—“Put on your white dress. I like it,” which prince Nikolai Bolkonski says to his mistreated daughter Marya Bolkonskaya in War and Peace at a pause in their flight before the advance of Napoleon and his troops? (And Stella D’Or’s biographer tells herself she gets it, in that book and based on her own experience in the hard and immense heart of a vintage family, the inexorable need for all the men to run to the battlefront, far more terrified of the battles being fought in the rearguard of the family, without truce or possibility of surrender, among all those parents and fiancés and lovers and future spinsters.) And is it wor
thwhile to dwell on the fact that, in the realm of non-fiction, the goodbye Stella D’Or admires most is that of the almost-pleading Pancho Villa, concerned with his place in History, begging, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something”?

  But no.

  No.

  No no no.

  That isn’t the tone she wants for this.

  That tone is already known, already been heard, this sister tells her three other sisters with, yes, an accusatory tone. A tone that reminds her, the chronicler of the comings and goings of Stella D’Or, of the grim and grating tone of her grim and grating bad older brother. The tone of one who sees his style and rhythm altered according to the medication of Mondays or the medication of Fridays. A tone at turns depressed and exalted. A tone that is accelerated by the electricity that enters your head or decelerated by bathing in cold water. A tone like that of a telephone of bygone days. Telephones with operators to whom you had to recite a number so they could weave it in for you as if on a loom of plugs and cables.

  Thus, a tone transmitted, in a low voice, crackling with static and white noise, as if piped-in through the microphones and speakers of another book already read and written. With another strange girl. That of her bad brother. Falling into a swimming pool or ascending into the skies. And, true, maybe it’s always the same girl, but isn’t there another language, a different phrasing and tune, to tell and sing her in? Isn’t night the time and aren’t dreams the vehicle that allow us to change and to be other people?

  Every story can be rewritten in the dark.

  Thus, the desired tone for all of this is not like that. The abandoned speech—a call to arms that isn’t answered, that nobody answers—of a landowner dispossessed of his soul and with words as the only inoffensive ammunition he has left. Nobody listens to him. Firing blanks, bleating sheep that refuse to jump over the fence of insomnia. A rant to be delivered, if possible, in a kind of aristocratic and decadent and swampy lingua with bourbon or vodka or chewing tobacco or snuff on the breath. And the buzz of mosquitos and the green kudzu covering gravestones in a gothic and vegetal shroud, yet, also, with a counterpoint replicating a lysergic seism and a jam session for attracting hurricanes named for an accursed and cursing woman, and here she comes again. And, oh, the juvenile desire to set the world spinning so, along the way, you attain the maturity of understanding you wanted to go so far away just so you could return to the point of departure. To the veranda of that swamp dacha; so the comprehension and compression of the universe wind up making us ever so regional. And once there (wrinkled suit of white linen, that skeletal washed-out white, gray moustaches, red eyes, yellow livers, black of soul and enslaved and bound by the loving chains by our mistress and madam and drinking and downing shots to the health of Stella D’Or) discovering that, after all, it doesn’t matter if what you say was said was indeed said. It’s not what is left behind that matters but what is yet to come: the nearly ritual repetition of those sayings, though they seem improbable and riddled with errors not orthographical but chronological and geographical. To believe in them like fixed mottos. To perfect their modulation and phrasing. To enunciate them ceaselessly until the words stick to each other and turn into one long and ommminous sound that we hear inside ourselves, like a mantra of gut and muscle, until the end of time, for centuries and centuries, etcetera.