The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Penelope thinks “soul” is one of the words that appears most and is uttered most in Wuthering Heights, almost always shouted, with fury and passion and desire and with a fist held aloft or a stroke of loftiness.

  Penelope thinks the Karmas are the most soulless people she’s ever known (not because they’re malevolent, but because they lack soul, because they’re automatic and robotic and as if in a trance and following not the orders they’re told but the orders of what they’ll tell); and, maybe for that reason, the Karmas believe like nobody else in the idea of that soul, not the one they were born with, but the one—they pray and pray and pray for it—they’ll be reborn with beyond death, improved so as to be even worse. The soul not as something you sell, but yes as something you buy and the more expensive the better.

  † Dr. Kenneth / Penelope imagines him, in his youth, saying to himself: “I’ll be a rural doctor, far from the big city, and I will live a peaceful life without too much work.” Wrong. On Mount Karma, yes, many hypochondriacs: when one of them gets bored, when one of them has nothing to do, an illness is an almost sporting distraction and even a gift and a privilege. The Karmas compare illnesses the way others compare automobiles (the Karmas also compare automobiles). And, oh, it’s such a delight to be admitted to the suites in those clinics/high-tech body shops where everyone visits you and are at your service and gets together to play cards and place bets, unconfessable, on how long it’ll be before the next and never-ending sequence of funeral masses and who they’ll be praying for.

  † Zillah / “Stout housewife” and Nelly Dean’s forewoman. Now you see her, now you don’t.

  † Various dogs / The “hairy monsters” that guard Heathcliff (Gnasher and Wolf) and that leap for Lockwood’s throat; the dog that bites Catherine and forces her to stay at Thrushcross Grange (the bulldog Skulker); Isabella’s springer spaniel (Fanny, the only one with a docile and inoffensive name), strangled with a handkerchief by Heathcliff. And there are so many dogs on Mount Karma. Purebred. Contestants competing against each other (like illnesses, like automobiles, like wives and husbands and boyfriends and girlfriends) by edict of their ever-competitive masters. Every so often, they manage to break their chains and flee and are never found, winding up far away, mating with anything that gets near them, and remembering their past on Mount Karma as if it were something that happened to some other dog, to dogs that bark but do not bite.

  Penelope remembers that she met Lina Liberman in Abracadabra, on one of her few successful escapes from Mount Karma. Getting out of there on her own (without some Karma hanging around her neck, without the ever-vigilant Hiriz, without the Sauronic eye of Mamagrandma controlling everything) was no mean feat, and Penelope went into a jewelry store called The Lady of the Rings, specializing in rings with runic and druidic symbols.

  And there was Lina behind the counter. Lina smiling a smile that, for Penelope, is a weapon of mass reconstruction. And they become friends right away, with that speed with which certain women become friends when they meet and, upon meeting each other, are fully aware they’ve been always been looking for each other, though they never knew or suspected it.

  Lina has taken over running the store from her adoptive mother (it used to be called La Señora de los Anillos and specialized in the always fertile selling of wedding rings; because in Abracadabra, you’re nobody until you get married and hunt down a new surname); but her primary occupation seems to be that of laughing and laughing and to not stop laughing. An animal and contagious laugh that, really, is the funniest thing in her monologues as a stand-up comedian at a bar (a “bohemian bar,” the Karmas would say, wrinkling their noses like someone smelling something odd) called Carpe Noctem. A bar where Lina, when its owners (two Argentines: one skinny and sad and one immense and ferocious) allow or are distracted fighting among themselves, has been mutating into a sit-down tragedian, starring in the dead yet lively monologue of Joan Vollmer, that wife of William S. Burroughs. The wife of the writer who put a bullet in her temple and soon thereafter, he recalled years later, became a writer, pasting and cutting and pasting again.

  But when Lina isn’t Joan and is Lina … And Lina can’t stop laughing and making people laugh. And Penelope laughs so much with her. And Penelope falls in love with that laugh, which is a tremendous laugh. A laugh of the “Huahuahua” variety that would embarrass anyone else who released it, who would cover it up with a hand and turn down the volume. But not Lina. Lina laughs that laugh as if it were the first and last time. And Penelope, who hasn’t laughed in so long, who never laughed like that, wants that laugh so badly and knows it’ll never be hers, but, maybe, she can possess it a little bit if she kisses that mouth and then that body. And Penelope falls in love with that laugh (with that happiness) and with Lina and they make love, the one laughing and the other hearing that laugh and smiling like she never smiled before.

  One night, Lina takes Penelope to a movie theater in Abracadabra. Penelope has succeeded in escaping Mount Karma without being seen, without anybody offering to go with her, not even asking where she’s going first because it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that she not be alone, because to be alone is to be sad and to be with anybody not a Karma, they think, is a sadness. The important thing for them is to be all together and to go everywhere all together and for nobody to do anything without everybody else. But Penelope succeeds. At dinner, she excuses herself on the pretext of a headache and slips out a window and there goes Penelope and there is Lina, waiting for her. At the door to one of those huge movie theaters that no longer exist or that have been wrecked by the developer voracity of the multiplex concept, chewing them up into multiple smaller theaters. Into the architectural-cinema equivalent of tweets, showing movies that are sequels or prequels or adaptations or remakes, where the only thing that has improved—and sometimes not even this—is the technical quality of the special effects of Superman flying or Spider-Man swinging. All of them with ever-spiffier uniforms and fluctuating faces and ages (ever younger actors to win over the young audience with ever greater consumptive capacity, financed as they are by their parents) exhibiting the true superpower everybody dreams of. A superpower that’s far more useful than running at the speed of light or being able to breathe under water or to pass through interdimensional portals or to change color and grow considerably larger: the ability to start over. Over and over again. However many times is necessary until the thing comes out right or better or even worse; but it doesn’t matter, because you can always start over and try again and the mistakes of the last time will be corrected in the next screenplay with a new yet minimal twist to a plot you already know by heart in the same way you know all the open-secret personalities.

  And now, years after going to that movie theater, Penelope thinks about all of this. And she feels a little guilt and a little shame, because, after all, her Tulpa sisters are a fine-tuned version of the Brontë sisters. A sci-fi remake in which they appear transformed into something they never were, but without ceasing to be and to conjure their phantasmal figures in 3D and Dolby Atmos surround sound.

  But the movie Lina invited her to isn’t one of those.

  It’s an old movie in black and white and spoken and acted in Spanish. And, right, it’s another version—but very different from all the ones Penelope has previously seen—of Wuthering Heights. In fact, Penelope didn’t even know it existed and maybe it’d escaped her because its title wasn’t Cumbres borrascosas but Abismos de pasión. In any case, Penelope gave up on any movie based on Wuthering Heights a long time ago. It can’t be done, impossible, doesn’t work. And all of them always stray into an irredeemable and unconsciously machista error: in the films, Heathcliff is always the dominant figure, while in the book Heathcliff is dominated by Catherine; and, yes, in more than one, though never described, S&M reigns supreme.

  Penelope remembers, yes, that telenovela adaptation with a great deal of affection and infinite gratitude for opening the door to let her come out to play; but, disappointed so m
any times, she prefers not to accept new invitations. And so she hasn’t seen the supposedly faithful or respectful or innovative (the constant redos by the BBC & Co. or the novelty of Heathcliff being black) versions; not the Indian or Philippine or French or Japanese (a country where, with so many suicides and self-destructives of varying caliber and voltage, Wuthering Heights is considered a seminal text) versions either; and definitely not that MTV-produced version or the one taking place at a high school in Malibu Beach and that other one in a web series format set at a college and everyone talking to the cameras on their computers and, no doubt, sending SMS with furious or sobbing or shocked emoticons. She hasn’t risked the operas or ballets or comics either (though she always liked the studies to illustrate it by Balthus—studies Penelope bought—who said, “I’m a very emotional man, perhaps too much so … My youth was an absolute whirlwind of Feelings, exactly like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which I illustrated. I was completely at home in this novel. It described my youth perfectly. I was in love with Antoinette de Watteville—what a Brontësque name, thought Penelope—and I was determined to win her. But Antionette, on top of being a difficult girl, was already engaged to someone else. I reread her letters every evening. I think that, like Heathcliff, I didn’t want to leave adolescence”). Or the biopics of the Brontës with languid actresses of the kind who later lead wuthering lives in heights from which to throw themselves (Isabelle Adjani and Sinead O’Connor were Emily Brontë and there they are; Ida Lupino, with a very gondalian surname, did better and, as her bad brother told her once with a reverent voice, was the only woman who ever directed an episode of The Twilight Zone). And Penelope never understood that appearance, as sudden as it was gratuitous, of Emily Brontë in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. And nothing unnerves her more than the name Wuthering Heights being taken in vain elsewhere; like how the sales of the novel quadrupled after it was mentioned as the favorite book of the girlfriend of a vampire, condemned to attend high school for all eternity in a YA romance series. (Penelope can’t stand that franchise; but she also knows she has inherited a good chunk of its addict readers, who—when the saga concluded, listless and in need of a new passion, perhaps not to consume them, but, most important of all, that could be consumed—leapt ravenously on the Tulpas and their environs.) Or when a British prime minister described himself as “an older Heathcliff, a wiser Heathcliff” (achieving, immediately, that his rivals in Parliament asked him whether someone given to domestic violence and kidnapping and torturing and possibly digging up the body of his beloved, not to mention going around in a bad mood all the time, was a good role model as a ruler). Though Penelope has to admit she got a kick out of the Monty Python sketch with Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff communicating with flags and standing atop rocks; that comic strip of Tom Gauld’s proposing a Brontë sisters videogame was funny too (Level 2: The Moors); and that “Wuthering Heights,” the great hit-single of the debuting Kate Bush bothered her for all the wrong reasons: the song was really good and the oh so gyratory and, yes, adolescent Kate Bush (the little harlot had also been born the same day as Emily Brontë: July 30th) resembled Catherine Earnshaw more than Penelope ever would.

  But, this film, now, is different, because she’s going to see it with Lina. And, right away, entering the foyer, as magnificent as it was dilapidated, of that theater (one of those theaters with all-powerful names like Olympia or Atlas or Majestic or Alhambra or Rex), she liked that title, Abismos de pasión, that switched polarity and flipped circuit, making the heights descend into the abyss so the wuthering would become impassioned.

  Lina tells her that a friend of hers inherited that theater, and that he has turned it into a film club, and that the film is directed by the Spaniard, Luis Buñuel, and that it was filmed not far from Abracadabra, just across the border in a neighboring country. Penelope reads the program, its text typewritten and photocopied, and remembers those movie theaters in the heights where she went with her bad brother when she was a kid. And she reads there that “Emily Brontë’s book always fascinated the surrealists as they loved amour fou above all things in this world” (then Penelope makes the connection and, of course, this is the same Buñuel of The Exterminating Angel, that film where everyone is mysteriously shut inside a house and unable to leave, which reminds her so much of the Karmas). And at first, Penelope struggles with the fact that Heathcliff is named Alejandro and Catherine is Catalina and Isabella is Isabel and Hindley is Ricardo. And she is unsettled by the transformation of the English moorland to a Mexican paramo, of cold and damp to dry and hot, of farmhouse to ramshackle country mansion, of Wuthering Heights to El Robledal.

  But the truth is it’s not bad at all.

  Above all him: the leading man, Jorge Mistral, is a much more powerful and savage Heathcliff than the one from the telenovela or the one played by Laurence Olivier who, for Penelope, is insufferable in Wuthering Heights and in Manderley and in Elsinore and everywhere. And, true, Buñuel made a lot of changes from the novel, but he did so with a curious form of disrespectful respect. And Penelope liked that—“due to the censorship of the time,” the program explained—the cursed lovers couldn’t kiss on the mouth but only on the neck, as if Alejandro were giving vampire bites to Catalina and Isabel. And that’s really well done, thinks Penelope, they have turned a negative into a positive: because Wuthering Heights is not a novel of vampires. No. It’s something far more interesting. Wuthering Heights is a novel of the vampirized. A novel where the vampire has already come and gone, already moved on, already bitten all of them—they’re all victims, even the victimizers—and left them alone to bleed and drink each others’ blood, to fix themselves the best and worst they can. And, in the end—when Alejandro is gunned down, oh so Mexicanly, in a hail of bullets, because nobody can bear that son of a bitch, that hijo de la chingada, who doesn’t care about anything and to whom all of them le valen madre, mean nothing—when the music of the final credits (so quick and expeditious if you compare them with those eternities of rolling lines of present-day films, with million-dollar budgets and that multitudinous volume of technical titles, which you have to sit there and watch and read, because there could always be a brief and revealing coda after that avalanche of letters leaves you wondering what a gaffer or a key grip is), swells, Penelope doesn’t feel betrayed at all, despite the fact that with Abismos de pasión, Buñuel has inserted more of a meddling hand into her book than Lina is inserting into her right now, in the abyssal yet impassioned darkness of the movie theater. That darkness where, in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, though surrounded by people, is always talking to himself.

  The monologue, it’s well known, is a gift and privilege of the powerful and the mad, of the madly powerful, and of the powerfully mad.

  One of the things Heathcliff might say if Heathcliff were one who theorized and not just one who practiced, if Heathcliff had some capacity for reflection beyond his impure pure action. Or one of the things Nelly Dean might say if Nelly Dean were to finally assume her role as manipulative cerebral schemer.