The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  To say them over and over with the techno-disco-voice of a rolling little robot and vocoder: the voice of Stephen Hawking, Oscar for Best Disease. (Will there be a film about Stella D’Or’s disease? Tricky, if not impossible: because it would have to be a film of total darkness in which not even the projector beam would light up.) Hawking, whom nobody would take seriously (does anyone really understand that stuff about black holes and temporal wormholes and alternate dimensions; things all directly responsible for the fact that increasingly incomprehensible yet successful television series are written all the time in whose plots anything can happen?) if he didn’t have and couldn’t count on that degenerative disorder that, if you think about it a little, might just be pure and hard dissimulation. The exact equation for a precise performance. An origami man. A contortionist act, long and difficult to memorize with all those digits entering his eyes; but an act in the end. Because, hey, statistically speaking, if he really were sick, Stephen Hawking would’ve died years ago if what ails him is actually that particular kind of motoneuronal disease. A disease originally categorized—again, more names named in the night—by the Frenchman Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893). A disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as ALS. A disease that, for reasons impossible to clarify (this is true, seriously), has impacted, among many, groups of people that tend to include, again, statistically speaking, a worryingly high number of Italian soccer players, veterans of the Gulf War, and inhabitants of the island of Guam (and she remembers, sounding so much like him, like her useless and complicator-of-all-things-in-this-world bad brother, once in love with someone whom he referred to as Ella, and whom with time and resentment, in public, he had nicknamed ELA—the Spanish acronym for ALS—because, another of his overabundant bad jokes, “She atrophies and paralyzes me and renders me speechless.” And she, not Ella, but the bad brother’s sister, has to make an effort to keep these intrusions of his from happening; and it’s not easy; and it’s something that upsets her and makes her dizzy with vertigo and fevers and …).

  Which, inevitably, because speaking of diseases is a bit contagious, brings us to another disease.

  Stella D’Or’s disease. To the grand mal exotic Stella D’Or referred to as if it were a work of art, a true miracle, an inheritance inherited, a gift given.

  Like this:

  “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet, sitting here stranded, though we all do our best to deny it, steam in the heating pipes and ‘Last Night I Dreamed of Heaven’ on the radio, tuned to a station that plays nothing but starry-skied country, the volume down low. If so, silence and say its name aloud. I say its name in the dead yet serpentine tongue used to classify incurable diseases. The language of a fallen but unforgettable empire, far more sonorous and poetic than those modern ailments, oh so nouveau riche and designated by the double surname of their ‘discoverer.’ My disease is old as time, the disease that led innocent men and women and children to be burned at the stake or have a stake driven through their hearts or to became oracular visionaries, capable of seeing in the dark and reading the stars. ‘The children of the night,’ they were called in true legends … For they existed … For I exist … I’m living proof of the evidence of their dying. My disease is that of superheroes entranced with their own power and, yes, getting marvelously Marvel Comics here, you can call me Eclipsa. Or Nocturna. Or Morphea. Or thorny and flowery and pointy and spiky and colorful soprana and sovereign Queen of the Night. Or, better yet, nom de guerre: Capitana Nyx (‘Nyx or Nicte being the name of the Greek goddess of the night; rival of Aether and feared even by Zeus, according to Homer; consort of Erebus and mother of Hypnos, the god of sleep, brother of Thanatos who kills you slowly while you sleep and husband of Pasithea, goddess of hallucination; all of them happily dwelling in the darkness of their cave/adyton, and as their divine skins touched, “they awake from their daydream and set all the peoples of Earth in motion,”’ writes Stella D’Or in her A Brief History of Darkness) … And here we go, all together now, the magic words: Xeroderma pigmentosum … Or XP, for addicts of top-secret resonance … If so, mine is an XL XP. The most chronic and extreme form of XP. For me, unlike those Mexicans, tanned by the glow of UFOs like in that one movie, the sun doesn’t come out and I don’t sing; because for me, the sun is just another actor: because I can only see its exits and entrances from the stage on large or small screens … And I don’t emerge for the sun … For me, emerging and being touched by the sunlight is an absolute impossibility, because, were I exposed to its rays, my skin, ravaged by the pincers of cancer, would fall from my bones. My pupils would turn white and blind. And as the days passed, my nervous system would be like a seism of irreconcilable-polarity electricity, until I turned into the madwoman in the attic singing the ultraviolet blues, there above, alongside that other woman who is writing me … And locking me up and throwing the key into a lake so nobody can find it … I, the one and only among two hundred and fifty thousand people and not even able to resort to blaming it on my parents being the children of consanguineous marriages … No, my parents had nothing at all to do with it, mine is a rare disease and it’s not hard to believe that it begins with me … I am the Patient Zero, I am Alpha, I am In the beginning … I am something and someone much closer to the folkloric than to the scientific and pathologic explanation, leaning on crutches of ‘damaged DNA,’ ‘nucleotides,’ ‘melanoma,’ ‘(6-4) pyrimidine photoproducts,’ ‘cellular mutations’ … XP-Men-Women don’t tend to live past twenty. And their bodies end up crisscrossed with marks and ulcers, as if they were brought up under invisible lashes tracing a map that doesn’t lead to any treasure. And I don’t have a single freckle or mole anywhere on my skin … Which doesn’t stop me, of course, from being the most impassioned of all racists. I believe and am convinced that black people are the superior race and chosen tribe. Why? Easy: because they’re black, black like the night. I’m black too. I’m the negative of a black woman. I am white like the moon in the blackest night.”

  And then, having said that—as the zombies and devils and muzhik ghosts, hanging from trees like Christmas decorations or burned beside burning crosses, dance atop the crossroads of their own tombs—Stella D’Or untied the one or two or three ties that keep her black diamond-studded top up.

  And, naked and white, she revealed herself to those who watched with kaleidoscopic eyes and telescopic sexes, repeating her name and the name of her disease. Tattooing the verses of future ballads across the skin of her legend. Swearing to her, swearing they’re ready to do anything in the name of her face and her bones where the ghost of electricity and the radiation she’s been submitted to howls. Proclaiming themselves ready for her glory, leaping from the ledges of her cheekbones and coming down singing, like prisoners enchanted to be free from enchantment.

  Falling just there.

  The place Stella D’Or is from is the same place as always; but, like her, here and now, its name and situation are delicately yet definitively manipulated.

  It’s enough to brush a chromosome with your fingertips to make a Y into an X and everything changes and nothing will be how it once was: Somber Hymns is the name of that place, not where Stella D’Or was born, but where she was taken as a newborn.

  A small city—really barely a villa that once was barely a castle surrounded by the dwellings of its serfs as caramel-colored as Oompa Loompas, as garish as Munchkins—now on the outskirts of another city and barely separated by a forest and a sea and a bridge and high walls.

  There, and hence its name, for centuries a noble insomniac had convened musicians to compose soporific music. Arias and variations so, when their fingers hammered away at the clavichord, they dreamed of the secret melody the wings of the tsetse fly sing as they rub together.

  Now, since not that long ago, all of that—though the scene hasn’t lost a certain ferocity, like that of a Britannia recently abandoned by the Romans and their gods and ready to embrace the sleeping dragons a
nd wizards and swords in stones and Knights-errant on horseback—was acquired by a foundation. And it functions as a top-secret-campus for advanced researchers in all the sciences, in numbers and letters, and in those ever so interesting blank spaces that separate the ones from the others.

  In that South where Stella D’Or’s father is born (more details coming up), which is the North for the one who dreams.

  Stella D’Or’s father is a linguist of international fame. Someone who believes in the power of words with the same intensity with which others believe in the fragile power of weapons or in the cowardly valor and value of money. Stella D’Or’s father is, in his own way, a warrior. His face has the patrician nobility that’s found in some frescos or mosaics or amphoras. His air and figure are the same that, one night in Casablanca, made Captain Louis Renault laugh, that “Rick is the kind of man that … well, if I were a woman, and I were not around, I should be in love with Rick.” Stella D’Or’s father isn’t named Rick and his name doesn’t matter here; but it’s clear women fall in love when he comes by without even thinking twice: all it takes is seeing him. And they are not to blame and he is not to blame. And even other men understand him and comprehend women’s reactions to him. All of them, compared to the aerodynamic and speedy father of Stella D’Or, are small Renaults more than ready to move out of his way and even sneak him complicit winks. The men fall in love a little bit with Stella D’Or’s father without having to imagine themselves as women: because Stella D’Or’s father is how they want all women to see them; and how, if you’re a real man, can you not fall authentically in love with such a vision?

  And so, Stella D’Or’s father is a unisex fantasy, international, multilingual, addictive. His books and lectures are always successes that transcend the merely academic. His name is known and uttered with a “There he is, here he comes” at vertiginous jet-setter parties. And Stella D’Or’s father often appears on TV shows and participates in documentaries and, miraculously, his profile has never crashed head-on into the frivolous, the banal, the ridiculous. His most transgressive and risqué move was having, on one occasion, hosted Saturday Night Live. And his monologue was masterful and his surprising sense of comedic timing got big laughs from the live studio audience and from the audience at home when he assumed the personality of the forever-foiled Dr. Wong X. Periment, explaining his “methods” with quotes from George Bernard Shaw (“Science never solves a problem without creating ten more”) and of the compulsive, illuminated illuminator Thomas Alva Edison who, as mentioned, would become one of the historical figures that Stella D’Or hated most (“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”). And, of course, Stella D’Or’s father had the wherewithal, despite the requests of Lorne Michaels and cast, to not go back for an encore performance of the character who (prophetic glimmer foretelling the coming of his photon-allergic daughter?) brought about, at the end of the sketch, when he tried to fix a flashlight, the definitive blackout and end of electricity in the world.

  And so, Stella D’Or’s father had achieved with linguistic studies what Carl Sagan had achieved with the cosmos. Something cool. Someone described him in the press as “a Marlboro Man who smokes a pipe.” Someone on TV dubbed him “the Indiana Jones of languages.” And the nickname infiltrated public opinion and that’s how they introduced him, here and there. And he put up with the humor with resignation and gratitude. It’s a small price to pay if it helped him secure funds for his research. And in that way popularize a strange art and a preoccupation few had and, it never gets old to repeat, everyone should; joking seriously that “if because we understand don’t trouble we are in each other, right?”

  And so, Stella D’Or’s father like a cross between a babelic and esperantic evangelist transporting the solidity of the exact sciences to the fluid territory of sounds and to the construction and structure of sentences.

  Stella D’Or’s father speaks twenty languages perfectly and can more than hold his own in another ten. And, after so many trips on which he has collected vocables and inflexions—in Amazon jungles, racing and stumbling over Celtic roots, and revivals where the spinning enraptured speak in tongues—Stella D’Or’s father attains something akin to an ultimate destiny, a precise goal, an irrefutable certainty.

  Stella D’Or’s father (who isn’t yet Stella D’Or’s father; who has yet to meet Stella D’Or’s mother; and to whom it hasn’t even occurred, in the first place, the possibility of loving a woman and, in the second place, another woman who would come out of that woman; because his love is for words and, always, for the way in which the names of absolutely all the women far and wide across the world are written and rewritten; and to love only the names of two women above all others, there being so many and such lovely ones, would be as unjust as it is senseless) discovers something.

  Stella D’Or’s father reaches a zenith.

  He comes to the certain conclusion—though he’d already been theorizing about it—that the conjunction of the words cellar and door is, from a semantic and sonic perspective, the most beautiful phrase in the English language. The, yes, door in the cellar that leads to the loftiest of rooftops. A place that leads—more names, more information, more sleepless lists—to a place of linguistic dreams that could be called Wonderland or Narnia or the alternate reality dreamed by the nocturnal walker Donnie Darko, who reads “Cellar Door” on a chalkboard in his low-intensity high school. Cellar Door were the letters of Edgar Allan Poe’s favorite words, which he paid homage to, in a distorted yet recognizable echo, with the “The Raven”’s repetitive Nevermore. J. R. R Tolkien, Dorothy Parker, and Norman Mailer also defended that intuition and sentiment. But Stella D’Or’s father proves and verifies it with the help of a latest-generation computer, elevating the hypothesis into a law that, in addition, now encompasses all the living languages and dead tongues of this world. And amid the applause, the man—who has never thought of becoming a husband much less a father—thinks: “If I were ever to have a daughter, I would name her Stella D’Or. Estrella de oro. Star of Gold. Light in the darkness.”

  And few moments are of greater transcendence than the moments when, for the first time, a mortal names something divine. Giving a name to an ancient and forgotten god on the basis of a broken statue’s arm (or, in this case, a goddess yet to be born, and who will be unforgettable and indestructible) might be the gesture closest to immortality. So, the man who will be Stella D’Or’s father creates a secret story (the name of his yet-to-be-born daughter) beneath the folds of a public story (Cellar Door). And the idea makes him debut a different and faraway smile for the flashing cameras that his feminine fans find “irresistible.” His masculine fans devote themselves to practicing it, in vain, in front of bathroom mirrors, behind doors locked so as not to be surprised there, doing that.

  And the next (and tragically last) mission of the future yet ever-nearer present father of Stella D’Or is to strike out for the North Pole: rumors have reached him that in an Inuit village a new word that, also, means “snow” has been born. Another word. A new word that surpasses the fifty other proverbial and celebrated and melted-from-overhandling words (some people say there are as many as one hundred; others consider the whole thing nothing more and nothing less than a lurid academic farce of the kind that sound good to uninformed laymen, but are never entirely accepted by serious scholars) the Inuit have for “snow” based on the tiny yet decisive differences in quality and density and texture and shape. Brief words to differentiate the immensity of the falling snow from the immensity of the fallen snow. Words more or less the same in appearance, but, as with snowflakes, no two are identical. This word, this new-yet-always-there word—they tell the man who is not yet, but is now closer than ever to becoming, Stella D’Or’s father—will be the definitive word. The sound of snow falling never to rise again, the sound that will elevate and make the linguist able to capture it ascend to the greatest heights, opening his mouth, sticking out his tongue to catch it the way you catch the snow
flakes the sky brushes off its shoulders.

  The expedition party of one man in search of a solitary word regains—according to the newspapers and news broadcasts of the time—the enthusiasm for adventure that once drove Jules Verne’s explorers in a world whose maps were still being traced in the half light.

  But also, inevitable, data of the moment and sign of the times: the voyage of Stella D’Or’s future-father is sponsored not by a club of aristocrats or a society of scientists, but by a brand of ice cream whose flavors are ever so complex linguistically (combining typography of multiple alphabets); and there goes our hero, amid the satisfied moans of women and the frustrated sighs of men. And, in retrospect, Stella D’Or will always look down on her father’s gift for self-promotion; for demonstrating that even the most cryptic science can be transformed into a product desired by the simplest and most manipulable minds. The immemorial phrase and piece of history repurposed as hysterical and irresistible slogan. “Eureka!” and all of that. But it’s well known—myths abound across all cultures repeating this story for millennia—the person for whom things always go well, sooner or later, tumbles from the heights of their triumphs into the underworld of a single yet definitive failure.