The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  † Catherine Linton Heathcliff Earnshaw / Or “Young Catherine” or “Cathy.” Her mother’s daughter and born of her death. Capricious as the original yet, consciously or unconsciously, resolved not to repeat her mistakes. Penelope, to tell the truth, was never that interested in her and second parts are never good. The same thing happens to her with the Karma daughters: they’re just like their mothers and the only revenge they get is that their daughters will be just like them. For thus it is said and written.

  † Hareton Earnshaw / More or less the same. But à la Heathcliff though in a docile way.

  † Hindley Earnshaw / Wicked like Heathcliff, but banal and nothing epic about him. Dies a drunk. Thirty-seven years old. There’ve been and are and will be so many like him on Mount Karma, thinks Penelope. For centuries and centuries. They all think they’re a big deal and can only feel secure when they’re taking somebody else down, because their strength and well-being depend on the debilities of others, on things going badly for others. Timeless. Boat shoes and Lacoste polos and hair slicked back with gel and their glasses always full. Glasses that, miraculously, are never empty and there they go, obese and flushed and eyes always moist, saying incomprehensible things and sometimes breaking into song for no reason at all, while their wives (trained at religious schools in the mornings, stuffed into spandex for the gym in the afternoon, electrifying themselves with online geisha-porno forums at night; so much like their husbands but with a malevolence that’s more sinuous yet equally banal and predictable) watch them with a smile on their lips, calculating how much longer it will be before they fall down to never get up again. And, oh, the evolutionary cycle of the Karma wives is decidedly insectivorous, Penelope catalogues and sticks in pins: they all begin as enticing dead mosquitos, develop into striking butterflies, transform into devouring praying mantises, and end up sated black widows, poisoning and weaving suffocating webs for all their daughters, all those dead mosquitos.

  And the circle of life continues.

  Hakuna matata to the death.

  † Edgar Linton / A good guy surrounded by psychopaths, his wife included. A little boring, sure. And a bit hypersensitive. And putting on certain airs. But, in the end, a good person. Which, in the eyes of his wife and compared to Heathcliff, turns him into something like one of those elegant pieces of furniture that, as time passes, you stop seeing even though you sit on it every day. Dead weight under living weight. Ricky, Hiriz’s husband, was a little Edgar Linton, with the addition of being a repressed homosexual, thinks Penelope. A gay man who’ll never be happy because on Mount Karma such things are never admitted. On Mount Karma, if you’re gay, what you do instead of coming out of the closet is build yourself a dressing room with enough space for a resigned and permissive wife and four or five kids who, over the years, realize something strange happens to Dad at the country club when he has one too many drinks and his voice changes and he starts to dance differently and better to take him home and undress him in his closet. There inside, a limbo replete with drawers and mirrors, with dark corners and secret niches, like in those convent catacombs where the bones of fetuses or newly-dead newborns bloom. And there he remains and there they remain, forever: until death do them part but never do them divorce. Dead.

  † Isabella Linton / Poor thing, the product of having read too many novels of the kind the Brontë sisters read, but, unlike the Brontës, Isabella Linton doesn’t do anything with them apart from thinking they can be lived. The non-protagonist version of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary. And, yes, the grave error of falling in love with Heathcliff, taking him for the primitive archetype of the “boy on the motorcycle” or the proverbial tall dark and handsome man. More than one Karma girl succumbs, for a while, to that temptation. Some even lose their virginity to him and to them and, later, have it gynecologically reconstructed, so as not to disappoint come their wedding night. But in general it doesn’t go that far and they get over it and get engaged and married to men who’re a combination of who their fathers are and who their sons will be. Or of who their mothers are and who their daughters will be. People nobody would marry in real life. And even better if they’re cousins or more or less close/distant relatives so that, in the face of any conflict, everything is resolved or carried out within the family, behind closed doors. There they go, down the aisle toward the alter of sacramental sacrifices: the women with hairstyles based on blonde appliques in the style of Helen of Troy-Lady Godiva-Rapunzel (as the years pass, they’ll be able, courtesy of Photoshop, to correct and modernize the photographs of that day); the men like a somewhat zigzagging version of that little man atop the wedding cake; the women and the men both with the disconcerting detail of dressing up their eyes in blue contact lenses. And there they are, dancing to the childish songs of their childhoods (the same childhood and the same songs, Anorexia y sus Flaquitas, yes) as if not wanting to let go of something that has let go of them in order to attach itself more powerfully than ever. The honeymoon already on the wane in Las Vegas: the Karmas preferred destination whenever—only in the controlled and group environment of cruises and excursions—they leave Mount Karma. And if they travel to Europe, they go to the Louvre and stand in front of the Mona Lisa and say and think “What a mysterious smile” and then leave right away and head over to the Champs-Élysées. In Rome, stopping off for a spell at the Vatican, because they’ve paid a small fortune for an audience with the Pope that includes a photograph and certificate. And in Spain, dedicating themselves to eating and drinking and to bulls and horses. That’s why, for them, Las Vegas is the perfect place to go and to come back from: boutiques for the women, tits and asses for the men, shows for both—Celine Dion is the great Karmatic crooner—and most important of all: all those scale replicas of landmarks from around the world that now you never have to visit. Everything shrunk down and all close together and within claws’ reach, and, oh, the joy of vacationing amid falsifications for those who live amid falseness. To look at all that and—satisfactorily unsatisfied—to say: “I thought it was bigger.” They arrive as newlyweds, with hangovers and jetlag and no idea how to go on with the rest of their lives, in sickness and in health, till death do them part. Yes, the Karmas get married thinking it’s going to be like playing house and before long find themselves lost in a haunted house. Wuthering Heights, indeed, and better to come back from the honeymoon already knocked up in order to gain a little time with breathing classes and gynecological checkups and baby showers and baptisms. And then, the rest of their lives. So, the best way to hide the vertigo of all the days is to deny it all and get together often with friends (always the men separate from the women) and to sing and to weep and to swallow pills as blue as those contact lenses and to try to ask themselves as infrequently as possible how they ended up there and where they parked the car, and to not be surprised that that isn’t their beautiful wife or husband or their beautiful house, and letting the days go by, and here comes the twister. When it comes to Isabella Linton succumbing to Heathcliff, in her defense, you have to say that, where she lives, there aren’t many options, but it’s still a mistake. And yet who can undo what’s already been done, thinks Penelope. And so Heathcliff confides in Catherine Earnshaw that: “I like her too ill to attempt it, except in a very ghoulish fashion. You’d hear of odd things if I lived alone with that mawkish, waxen face: the most ordinary would be painting on its white the colours of the rainbow, and turning the blue eyes black, every day or two: they detestably resemble Linton’s.” Another death. At thirty-one.

  † Linton Heathcliff / The son of Heathcliff and Isabella, briefly husband—as ordered by Heathcliff—to Catherine Linton Heathcliff Earnshaw. Totally worthless. He lasts but a sigh. Or, better, a pant. Dead at eighteen.

  † Frances Earnshaw / Little to nothing is known of her past and she arrives to Wuthering Heights and contributes to Heathcliff’s abuse, and her main achievement is conceiving and giving birth to Hareton. She coughs a lot and, as tends to happen to everyone who passes through Wuthering Heigh
ts, soon dies, also at eighteen.

  † Joseph / Servant who speaks the Yorkshire dialect with a marked accent and a lot of exclamation points. He makes Penelope really nervous and puts her in a really bad mood. Not Hiriz, definitely not; because for Hiriz and women like Hiriz, servants are silent and invisible. And they don’t speak. They just listen to orders and assent and walk backward out of rooms. Joseph—noisy—is like an impotent and deflated and onomatopoeic version of Nelly Dean and it wouldn’t take him long to be let go/ejected from Mount Karma or confined to the stables. Joseph is always in the vicinity, but all he does is release creaks and groans. He doesn’t count and doesn’t like to recount. Charlotte Brontë took the liberty of rewriting him a little for the rerelease of the book, slightly softening his provincial and local speech so all readers could understand it or because to her it seemed a bit extreme or disrespectful, or something like that. Which leads Penelope to think about the Karmas’ speech. About that strange and personal idiom in which they communicate among themselves rarely hearing each other. Fixed phrases. Pretentious sayings. Constant repetition of their own names (Penelope has heard long sentences composed exclusively of surnames), always the same, generation after generation and death after death to keep their lives from getting complicated. Automatic and easy nicknames (if your name is José, you’ll be Pepe or, in a fit of audacity, Pepé; if your name is Rosario, you’ll be Charo; if you were a boy born in France or a girl in the United States, you can only be El Francés or La Gringa). Insignificant monosyllables that signify nothing more than a “Here I am” (the Karmas make sounds; they have no qualms when it comes to squandering small fortunes on enormous trifles, but it seems like each word cost them its letters in gold). Constant and automatic fits of laughter like the sound of the dentures of those mechanical skeletons (the Karmas laugh incessantly with that type of laugh that seems to ask itself what it’s laughing at, but laughing all the same, just in case). Occasional torrential and compulsive and cathartic sobbing (at funerals and during mass). Exclamations of the religious variety to fill uncomfortable silences (because nothing discomfits and disturbs a Karma more than silence; silence is a result of bad manners and means that someone might be thinking of something related to you and thinking is dangerous and so “Glory to God on high” making all of that explode in the heavens). The micro-nuclear and macro-expansive and multifunctional particle of “posí” (contraction of “pues sí,” meaning “yes” or “well yes,” which, Penelope thinks, is the root of a philosophical-familial movement known as “posí-tivism”: to say “posí” isn’t to say “yes” or “no,” it’s not to choose between this and that, it’s not to commit to anyone or anything). And the very particular use they make of diminutives, thinking in the reduction resides the inoffensive, the comprehensible, the forgivable, the affectionate.

  And so, on Mount Karma, nobody is a bad person, rather that “we’ve noticed lately he’s having a little problem, un problemita.” The diminutive deactivates, but, also, underlines and allows you to comment on something that’s making, the way certain automobiles do at some point in their lives, “an irritating or little noise, un ruidito.” Yes: Penelope has never encountered a higher concentration of people “con problemitas” in a space that’s so teeny-tiny, so pequeñito. The negation or distortion of the symptom resulting in the transmission and expansion of the syndrome. The Karmas and Mount Karma like the home of an environmental catastrophe or of an atomic accident of the kind whose importance corporations and governments tend to downplay and, yes, diminish its size and intensity. Contamination and toxicity of small and numerous miseries punctuated every so often by a devastating plague that always leaves someone by the wayside. Most horrifying and fascinating of all: all of them, the Karmas, are convinced they’re excellent people, great human beings, the best of the best. Chosen and, above all, deserving of that choice no matter their level of academic preparation or natural ability. And, of course, they’re never put to the test outside Mount Karma. Why bother? Why do they need to be compared with outsiders? They’re all great for each other and among themselves and so they only need one another to verify all their benevolences and talents. Thus, regardless of committing the most reproachable and incomprehensible of atrocities, a Karma—Hiriz, for exemplary example—will never be entirely bad in the mind of another Karma. The bad people are the people who are not Karmas. Outsiders. People who have big and wide and deep and acute problems. People who are, and will always be, bad because they’re not Karmas and who help the Karmas live in a sort of ecstatic certainty: because if they do something bad or are bad it’s because they’re not like them; or if they do something good and are good, though they don’t bear that surname, it’s by virtue of proximity, of having been improved by their mere presence and treatment and unquestionable benevolence, which leads the Karmas to sign up for any kind of philanthropic activity and thereby paper and carpet over and mask the fact that they don’t work or produce anything beyond a certain dynastic inertia in and with which they’re always “oh so very busy.”

  And, yes, Penelope—who isn’t exactly a Karma, who has many problems, who is very bad—was always fascinated by that lack of generosity of well-to-do clans toward the bad. The Bad like a relative and fleeting form of bad upbringing and not what it actually is: a vital and important and, yes, ever so valiant decision. You have to be very good to be very bad. Penelope always maintained that choosing to be bad is like reaching a sainthood of inverse, negative polarity; it’s like being touched not by God’s palm but by the back of His hand, by the part used to deliver a slap. That’s why, sometimes, Penelope thinks Hiriz was so unbalanced, because nobody acknowledged the achievements and advances of her vileness. Nothing could be more frustrating than having better bad people not recognizing the goodness of your badness, so superior to their own, that they don’t admit the transcendence of such a premeditated life choice like that of being bad. Nothing more disconcerting and, immediately thereafter, disorienting. Hiriz like a misunderstood artist who, of course, had thus committed that oh so common error among bad people: believing she was good because nobody—to avoid sounding rude—ever told her she was perfectly cretinous. And thus renouncing her greatness and destiny. Penelope always thought if Adolf Hitler hadn’t gotten distracted with that nonsense of bringing justice to Germany and reinstating his honor by setting up an Aryan nation and, from the get-go, accepted responsibility as a straight-up, hard and fast psychopath, nothing would’ve stopped him from winning World War Two. Penelope, on the other hand, has never had that problem, those problemitas: it’s perfectly clear to Penelope that she became an un-attenuated bad person when she was about eight years old, shortly after reading Wuthering Heights for the ninth or tenth time.

  † Mr. Green / Edgar Linton’s lawyer, but—you never fully trust his kind—who actually manages to turn Heathcliff into a sort of Charles Foster Kane of the moors. There are few lawyers on Mount Karma; because Mamagrandma is the one who resolves all legal-familial problems. Her word is law and punishment and the first and last unbreakable commandment is “Though you hate that you seem to love each other; openly hating is for all those outsiders who don’t bear the name Karma.” And, in the end, Karmatic conflicts are easy to understand and correct: all problems and their solution (it’s enough to go up and down; to get extra by taking away and redistributing) pass through the selling and buying and inheritance and addition and subtraction of the shares of that family company/factory. All the Karmas, even of the “in-law” married-in/second class variety, work there. Though Penelope has never heard anybody say, “I’m going to work” or “I’m coming from work” or “I’m working.” Any undertaking—always fleeting—outside the company/factory setting tends to have the lightness of a pastime and is forever destined for failure or more or less direct or indirect sabotage by relatives urged on silently (silence spells consent) by Mamagrandma. Ventures such as sailing schools for Karma kids on a lake that’s dry a good part of the year or volatile thematic restaurants. Cas
ual workers, indeed. The important thing is to fail successfully and to be sure you won’t be the last one to fail and, Penelope thinks, to wind up understanding that less money is wasted by investing in doing nothing or concocting unfeasible slow-motion plans. Through all those ventures, if losing money were a profession, the Karmas would be millionaires. But no: sooner or later they return to the fold, blaming their setbacks, always, on “the political situation in the country” or some other convenient fantasy like that. And Penelope never was able to figure out what it is the Karma factory produces. Clothespins? Toothpicks? Shoeshine? Those little bathroom mats where you put your bare and sleepless feet, sitting on the toilet in the predawn hours, thinking privately of all the things the Karmas don’t dare think in public or, better, among Karmas? Of one thing Penelope is almost certain: the Karmas do not fabricate—cannot fabricate—little wooden soldiers.

  Maybe, who knows, sacred and bleeding and weeping images of the most gore-slasher-splatter variety with nails and arrows and thorns of the kind that, supposedly, it’s a sin to worship through your tears and on your knees. There abound on Mount Karma, in place of lawyers, a staggering number of salaried priests. The bulk of the Karmas’ social activity is taken up with baptisms and weddings and funerals and memorial masses, and saints’ days (the ephemeris like a scheduleable form of automatic affection), where they all rotate from Saturday to Saturday and Sunday to Sunday. There isn’t much else to do. And so it is that the Karmas spend their time getting hitched and giving birth and dying. Like rabbits and like rabbits and like rabbits. Sudden loves and rapid impregnation and—most disturbing of all—lighting up sudden and fatal tumors at very young ages. When none of this is happening—during the rare dry spell—somebody will make the sacrifice of killing himself or herself in a car or horse or private jet accident or as an extra in some international cataclysm. Suicide—though, in a way, a good part of the Catholic faith is built atop the suicide of Jesus, king of the passive aggressives, and passive aggression is one of the most common Karma attitudes of all—is frowned on. Out of place. It’s taken as “a misunderstanding” and “an inconvenience” and they never mention the possible suicide notes left by the one “who had a serious accident.” And thus all the “family” priests. To be there with them for all of this, but whose primordial labor is that of guaranteeing perpetual divine forgiveness, charging by the kilo of sins to be absolved without delay and vaya usted con Dios. Aha!: Jesus Christ—who said that thing about “Let the little children come to me”—washing away your sins via an intermediary you’ve known since you were a little girl, an intermediary who, probably, fancies children a fair bit more than is appropriate. The understanding of faith and of the divine by the Karmas is as if it were a contracted service combining the best/worst of Catholicism with the Hebrew: the inquisitional with victimism. Divine functionality, prayers answered, cleansable sins. Like that app on their phones with the triangular logo with an open eye inside it (that one that allows them to confess in gusts of one hundred and forty characters and endure the penitence of not being able to send selfies for fifteen minutes if the sin is very grave). God like something that confirms for them that God believes in them: that’s the only way they can understand living with such absolute focus on themselves. To be Alpha and Omega. To, in the beginning, be the Verb and, at the end, the principal Subjects. Penelope doesn’t remember having ever heard the Karmas talk about anything but themselves, saying things like “I swear on my soul” before dishing out a lie or insult or rumor about another Karma. And Penelope wonders if, when they fill out forms, the Karmas put “judging others” or “lying about others” in the box for occupation or hobby. Because she’s sure they must mention or acknowledge it; but she doesn’t know if that reflex is vocation or pastime. Or both at the same time and with the whole soul. Their own.