The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And it’s then—after opening their arms and bending their knees and breathing deeply and taking their mark and leaping from on high—that events really precipitate. And when everything ceases to have the robust texture of a serialized novel, where too many things are happening so, suddenly, the plot fills up with ellipses, with avant-garde tics, with experimental poses.

  All of a sudden, for Penelope everything happens suddenly, as if she’d landed in the middle of a party where everyone is talking about the same thing at the same time but telling different parts of the story: her bad brother has a kind a psychotic break in a particle accelerator near Montreux, she burns down a house and flees and later—still reeking of smoke—is detained at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for “attempted robbery of public and private property, and for disturbing the peace.” And Penelope is dragged out of there the way her brother is dragged out of the Swiss hadron collider (now a family tradition, it seems; this thing of being removed by force from sensible buildings for inappropriate behavior). And the lawyers at her publishing house pull strings (though the whole episode is still a great publicity stunt; our misanthropic star author, adored by children and young adults and adults, victim of a “literary crisis from which, we’re certain, great things will emerge”). And they agree to make a generous donation to the museum in honor of the Brontës’ memory and they plan and announce her stay at Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of …

  And above and beyond all of that, the one thing that happened but never stops happening. The lightning bolt that never ceases to split the sky. The expansive wave that keeps expanding and perhaps someday, after washing over everything, will return to the point of departure to explain everything. Meanwhile and in the meantime, that inexplicable and unforgivable thing, that thing Penelope cannot comprehend, because Penelope can’t remember almost anything of what happened.

  Penelope remembers her feet in the sand, the moon in the sky, the trees in the forest, and the water where the river mouth opened into the sea. And, later, the beams of flashlights and that, for her, unnamable name in the mouths of everyone searching for and not finding that name’s small yet immense owner. Penelope remembers all of that, but doesn’t remember the most important thing, the most important part.

  Oft-recapped recap of the event: one night, at her house on the beach, Penelope went out on a walk with her little son and Penelope returned to the beach house alone, without him.

  And Penelope doesn’t want to think about that, Penelope doesn’t think she wants to think about that ever again and, yes, that’s the reason for not giving interviews; because there’s always somebody who connects the loss of her son with the discovery of one of her more celebrated creations: dAlien, the extraterrestrial boy who, unlike so many other sidereal travelers, never wants to return home, because he can’t stand his parents. dAlien would rather get lost in space. No “phone home” for dAlien. And no: no easy symbolism there. No fictional boy more solid now than that real boy, standing in for that real boy who seems ever more invented; because before you saw him and now you don’t, but, nevertheless, he’s still there. What’s never found is always in view, everywhere. It’s enough and more than enough to think you see it to see it. It’s so much easier to see what is not there than to stop seeing what is there …

  The problem—if you are a writer, if you devote yourself to recounting something that doesn’t exist so it will exist for others—is that’s where the lines get a little blurred.

  For Penelope it’s clear there are millions of people out there who believe more in Stella D’Or or in dAlien or in the Tulpa sisters than in Penelope herself, their creator. Which to her, doesn’t seem like a bad thing; because for Penelope, the Tulpa sisters and dAlien and Stella D’Or are steel-plated doors, soldered locks, deep firewalls to keep her from ever being reached unless it is she—for whom there are no limitations—who is chasing herself. Hermetic compartments, but, at the same time, communicating vessels. Inevitable cracks and leaks between one wall and another, this house and that one, as if in the reflexive and absorbing structure of Wuthering Heights.

  And now she’s here.

  Alone.

  Penelope. Not the most epic name, as her parents had given it to her not in honor of the original Odyssian wife, but as a derivative stemming from that popular song with, yes, more than a little Catalan perfume in it.

  Penelope, all alone and nobody asking her that whole “Tell me, Muse, of the woman of many ways …”

  Penelope, unable to see herself in her mirror-less cell/study, but staring at herself all the time.

  Penelope, surrounded by all those who hold the always-unsteady beam of her past over her head. All it takes is one of them to let their arms drop for events, once again, to precipitate.

  Down on top of her. All of them.

  Their names clear, their faces out of focus, like the illustrations in a book that never coincide with the idea you make of them reading the adjoining page; and so Penelope has always avoided editions of Wuthering Heights with supposed portraits of Heathcliff or Catherine on their covers, opting instead for editions that favor desolate landscapes. Covers with painted or photographed postcards of Yorkshire that, if you bring them close to your ear, you can almost hear the embowered conversation between a limited number of trees and innumerable rocks.

  And no: Penelope doesn’t have a copy of Wuthering Heights with her now, in her cell/study of Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of …

  Neither in English nor in Spanish.

  Not one of the many editions she’d gone around buying over the years (she’d get a new one every time she reread the novel, and she’d reread it so many times) including that treasured first edition, bought at an auction with her first, but already quite substantial, royalties payment, payments which have just kept on increasing. An antique in a perfect state of conservation that, when she touched and worshiped it, Penelope put on gloves and knelt down: one of the first editions in three volumes of Wuthering Heights. Written by Emily Brontë between October 1845 and June of 1846; written at that speed of days when there was little to do but read and write. Published when she was twenty-nine years old, just before she died. Signed by her androgynous nom de plume Ellis Bell and edited in a trio of small volumes riddled with errors and sloppiness by Thomas Newby along with, in the last of the three little books, Agnes Grey by Anne “Acton Bell” Brontë.

  At Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of … Penelope has been forbidden to get anywhere near Wuthering Heights. They have forbidden it “for her own good,” they explained. And she tries, wants to understand the value of such treatment, really; but she can’t wrap her head around how someone could come to the conclusion that, therapeutically, the thing that makes you happiest could end up causing you harm.

  And, true, Wuthering Heights is a toxic book with a highly contagious power. A book that transcends borders and languages because what it sets out and carries along and pushes through to end of the road is a universal feeling: to have once felt a love like that, to feel a love like that, to know you’ll never feel a love like that. But don’t get confused, she explains it like this: for Penelope, Wuthering Heights was never a recreational drug of the kind that distracts you from the woes of the world. No, for her, Wuthering Heights was always her reality, clouded by the fog and wind of everyone else’s reality, so much less entertaining and passionate, so much more poorly written, and so plagued with orthographical errors.

  But it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t miss it, she doesn’t need it.

  She doesn’t need the object.

  She knows the novel by heart.

  And now Penelope is like one of those human-books wandering the woods like in that other novel in which all ink-marked paper was burned for fun. Penelope can recite Wuthering Heights from beginning to end. From that opening where Lockwood enters the scene and stage with an “1801.—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly, a beautiful country!
In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven—and Mr Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us”; to that closing, when all of them are already in their graves and Lockwood departs with a “My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls, I perceived decay had made progress, even in seven months—many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and the slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms. I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor—the middle one, grey, and half buried in heath—Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot—Heathcliff’s still bare. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

  Yes.

  Word for word.

  Line for line.

  All off the cuff and with no respect for paragraph breaks or page order. Penelope pushing paragraphs together, mixing voices, blending views and landscapes and times and, every so often, inserting herself; as if piercing a membrane, as if lifting a veil to see better and closer up. As if the text of the novel were like that informational ticker at the bottom of the screen on the evening news. Live extras and the latest breaking news, which Penelope knew and anticipated to perfection, and yet never failing to surprise and move her. Wuthering Heights rising in the chasms of her brain, changing from the language she read it in for the first time to the language she read it in later and forever (with the help of a dictionary, that’s how Penelope learned English) leaping from the heights to the cumbres and back from the borrascoso to the wuthering; running through the fog and the wind and the rain of those pages and discovering that the rain and the wind and the fog always speak the same language. A language everyone understands. And there, in the middle of the storm, all those words. Arranging and disarranging themselves like spiraling gyres of fog that, sometimes, slip away from Penelope like smoke between her fingers. But she chases them down and traps them and wraps them around her again, there, where she always wanted to be and will never want to leave. Lines she returns to again and again when she feels everything is falling apart, immovable feelings that transcend time and death and to which she clings with the same tenacity others cling to psalms and verses; despite the fact that, in the moment of its publication, various horrified critics might have described Wuthering Heights as “a Bible of the infernos” and would’ve wondered how it was possible its author hadn’t succumbed to the consoling temptation of suicide, after birthing such a somber aberration.

  What do they all know, what does anybody know.

  And the only thing Penelope knows for sure—when she feels a black wind lashing her or the sun of injustice shining in the sky; when others resort to reciting a long credo or repeating a brief mantra—is that she sits down in a corner and in a low voice, lips moving, repeats, with variations, more or less this:

  “Winter 1801 and a man named Lockwood arrives to Wuthering Heights to arrange with the owner, one Heathcliff, to rent a neighboring house, Thrushcross Grange, and, yes, here we go with these oh so strange yet unforgettable names, and Heathcliff is likely the meanest man that Lockwood has ever met, but provokes in him certain curiosity, and then a snowstorm, and Lockwood finds himself obliged to spend the night at Wuthering Heights, and his room comes with a ghost who asks to be let in because she is lost on the moor, the ghost of Catherine Linton or whatever surname she prefers among her various surnames, and Lockwood screams and everyone screams and when that awful night is over, Lockwood sits down to talk with a full-service housekeeper Ellen ‘Nelly’ Dean, a woman whose raison d’être and purpose in life is that of awaiting the arrival of some stranger to whom she can tell everything that happened in that house with the same precision we never entirely trust in tourism guides, and what she has to tell is the bellicose and shadowy saga of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and Nelly, war correspondent always moving from one battlefront to another, from one house to another, has spent years reporting the hostilities, ever since Mr. Earnshaw brought home the seven-year-old orphan, Heathcliff, who is immediately hated by the young Hindley and adored by the young six-year-old Catherine, and soon the girl and the boy are inseparable and go running around together across the wuthering heights, but years later, when Mr. Earnshaw dies, Hindley returns from college with his brand-new wife, Frances, and turns Heathcliff into a servant to be tortured, but Heathcliff doesn’t mind the humiliation and mistreatment so long as he can keep running off with Catherine, wearing boots or barefoot, races without starting or finish line, up and down, between rock and heath, and one night they arrive to Thrushcross Grange and, through the window, they spy on the precious and far-better-dressed-and-combed young Lintons, Edgar and Isabella, and the guard dog bites Catherine, and Catherine finds herself obliged to convalesce there for some five weeks, a little too long, if you ask me, more than enough time for the young Catherine to fascinate the young Linton while, alone, Heathcliff is having a harder time than ever at Wuthering Heights where Frances dies giving birth to Hareton, and Hindley, turning to drink, behaves more and more despotically with Heathcliff and Catherine who confesses to Nelly that, though the love of her life is Heathcliff, better that she marry Edgar, which sometimes happens, and a destroyed Heathcliff departs Wuthering Heights forever, but, as also sometimes happens, he returns stronger and transformed into a rich man of eighteen years, an adolescent magnate, and offers no explanation regarding where his fortune comes from, but soon reveals where it’s all going and what he’ll devote it to with enthusiasm and Hamlet-esque calculations, (Heathcliff, revenge!), in order to take over Wuthering Heights, winning it in a game of cards against Hindley, who is castaway with too many bottles and no message, and then Thrushcross Grange by marrying Isabella, Edgar’s sister, and thereby found a sort of Heathcliffland he’ll reign over with Catherine when she realizes once and for all they were born apart only to die together, but, after intense arguments—because here, unlike in other novels of the period, people argue and don’t dance and definitely don’t drop hints with word games and veiled comments—Catherine falls ill, and never really gets better, though just before dying and accusing Heathcliff of killing her, she gives birth to a daughter whom, to complicate already exceedingly complicated matters, she names Catherine, and the crying of the newborn mingle with the living-dead wailing of Heathcliff, calling out to the ghost of Catherine who haunts and curses and torments him, just as she did when she was alive, behavior which ends up being too much for the already excessively punished Isabella who flees to London and there gives birth to Linton Heathcliff and, suddenly, it’s as if everything is starting over again and, through the next thirteen years, Nelly Dean becomes the tutor of the young and happy Catherine II at Thrushcross Grange where her father takes very special care to make sure the young girl knows little or nothing about Wuthering Heights and about the ogre residing there, but, her mother’s daughter, Catherine II escapes on expeditions up the cliffs and arrives to Wuthering Heights just as her mother once arrived to Thrushcross Grange, and there she meets Hareton, the son of Hindley, but, really, a kind of weathered and half-wild Heathcliff II, and in London Isabella dies and the young and mentally and physically ill Linton is brought to Thrushcross Grange by his uncle Edgar, but Heathcliff demands his son live with him, perhaps so he can detest him from closer range the way he already detests Hareton and, on one of her wild rambles, Catherine II encounters Heathcliff and later Linton with whom, using the complicit milkman as messenger, she initiates an amorous correspondence and, when Edgar and Nelly go to bed, Catherine II escapes to Wuthering Heights to visit Linton whom Heathcliff wants to marry to Catherine II and thus make him the owner of Thrushcross Grange, a
pparently convinced that everyone will die before him and he’ll survive even the extinction of the sun and the stars, master of the universe, and Heathcliff convinces Nelly and Catherine to move to Wuthering Heights where he keeps them prisoner and forces Catherine II to marry Linton in a marriage that, though its author doesn’t care, is completely illegal and without any validity in terms of property, but those details don’t apply in the entirely extralegal environment of Wuthering Heights, and soon Edgar dies and Linton dies, and Heathcliff now has everything he wanted, including his daughter-in-law as a slave and now Lockwood has arrived to rent Thrushcross Grange, but, after hearing everything Nelly has told him, he decides having a landlord like Heathcliff might not be the ideal and maybe it would be best to move along and he returns to London, though everything seems to indicate he too has become an addict of wutheringheightina, and six months later he’s back to visit Nelly who catches him up on everything that happened in the episodes he missed, she tells Lockwood what he has missed and, yes, Catherine II has taught Hareton to read, like Jane taught Tarzan, while Heathcliff, last man standing, as often happens, now can only think of the dead, of those who, he realizes, beat him by setting the trap of having ended their lives before him, and they are many and so many and, above all the others, the hysterical Catherine I, whose ghost has even rejected him, and Heathcliff dies, and it’s hard to say if he dies happy or if he’s happy to die, and Catherine II and Hareton inherit both houses and plan a wedding for New Years Day and, before leaving, Lockwood takes a stroll through the cemetery and visits three tombs, in order of appearance, Catherine I, dead at eighteen, and Edgar, dead at thirty-nine, and Heathcliff, dead at thirty-seven, and maybe amid such epiphanic-farewell thinking, he says to himself that there’s something strange in all that Nelly has told him, that there’s something in her story that doesn’t entirely come together, that it’s all very imprecise, and that, if he were up to him, the first thing he would do is convince Hareton to dismiss her and then tell him to go see the world before getting married and, with the young man far away, court Catherine II and live happily with her until Hareton returns and here we go again, amen and ommm and hare hare and a great peace descends from Heaven, life, abundance, salvation, comfort, liberation, health, surrender, redemption, forgiveness, atonement, openness, and freedom, shalom.”