One of the things the so powerful and so deluded Mamagrandma did say to her—emerging from a corner of a room full of monitors, like a specter—on her last night in Abracadabra, after Penelope crossed the diamond desert, losing her mind, on a jade-green cow, and arrived to the clinic where the comatose Maxi lay, and climbed atop him, and ended up impregnated by him after suffocating him with a pillow in the moment of his orgasm, and fled from there to only ever return her in dreams, the way she returns to Wuthering Heights or Manderlay or Mount Karma, towering on the deep REM horizon.
And so—with eloquence heretofore unknown to Penelope—Mama-grandma spoke then, in that room in that clinic in Abracadabra, and Penelope remembers her and remembers her voice as if in a dream, like in a scene from a movie that might be called Depths of Evil:
“Ah, here you are … The fugitive bride going back not to the scene of the crime, but to that scene without a crime. Poor Penelope. Poor Maxi. But I suppose what you’ve just done was inevitable … The imminence of the ending—not of my work but of your participation in it—demands this kind of gesture, these kinds of actions, slight pushes at the edge of the abyss to precipitate events. Offerings and sacrifices and exchanges so everything stays the same, with the exception of those offered and sacrificed … Poor Maxi. And poor Hiriz. She reminds me of a fox I hunted once, when I was just a girl. That damn fox that was eating all my chickens. So I covered the blade of a knife with honey and left it like that, standing there, the handle buried, beside the chicken coop. The fox came one night and began to lick the honey and cut her tongue, and so greedy and insatiable was she that the fox continued to lick her own blood, down to the last drop, until she bled out entirely. The next morning I found her there, dead, but smiling. And that’s the key to surviving, Penelope: keep in mind that underneath the honey, a knife could always be lying in wait. Hiriz is not like that. Hiriz—like the fox—doesn’t know when to hold back, she doesn’t know how to stop. She loves the taste of herself. And I wonder if that might have been the reason for all those yoga classes: to make herself flexible enough to run her own tongue around down under. In the end … Hiriz can’t comprehend that the Karmas are a closed-circle, a movie with clear and fixed roles where no spectators are admitted but us. We love and hate among ourselves, we betray and steal and even kill among ourselves. Our crimes are only punished by our justice. There is no room for improvisations or departures from script. But Hiriz doesn’t think before she acts, and that’s how she’s always been, and at last she’s gone too far and has put us in danger. And it’s not even that Hiriz is an idiot. It’s much worse: she’s someone who thinks she’s very intelligent, though all the evidence indicates the opposite. And what do people who are not intelligent do to convince themselves that they are? Easy: they convince themselves that nobody, except them, is intelligent. So, the difference that actually makes them idiots makes itself, for them, into the difference that makes them very very smart. Once the idiots manage to convince themselves of something like this, there’s no going back. All that’s left is to put up with them with patience or with love, which is the same thing, because love always ends up being one of the many kinds of patience, Penelope … What’s going to be complicated indeed is how Hiriz will go on after that little scene at your wedding, after ordering your little lesbian friend killed. Now Hiriz is like one of those wild animals that grew up in captivity, supposedly domesticated and harmless, and one day draws blood and … There’s nothing to do but eliminate her. Or perhaps, better, as I already said, force her to lick her own blood, down to the last drop. Hiriz … Hiriz … Hiriz was an unresolved issue for me: Hiriz could not remain among us, because Hiriz is a starving time bomb with a thirst for vengeance. She’s not the first: there have been spoiled Karmas and crazy Karmas. But Hiriz is spoiled and crazy. The whole thing about how people can change is a lie, Penelope. People never change; they just get better or worse when it comes time to be who they always were and are and will be. And it’s quite clear that Hiriz is going to get worse. Her evil is no longer the banal and predictable evil of her relatives, so easy to anticipate, as is the case with almost everything arising from being convinced you are the center of the world. Her evil is banal and predictable but, also, different. Any one of these nights Hiriz would burn Mount Karma to the ground just to get us to listen to her sing. Hiriz, sooner or later, would end up disrupting the delicate balance that sustains and keeps the Karmas together. And you cannot imagine what it takes to maintain the balance of something that’s half tightrope half hangman’s noose. And, on their own, the Karmas are nothing—easy prey for the masses of non-Karmas. So bye-bye, Hiriz, I wish you well. With any luck, if it occurs to her—and I will make sure that there is luck and that it does, in fact, occur to her—tomorrow Hiriz will get it into her head, her crazy little head, the possibility of becoming a saint, of being beatified and canonized, and she’ll enter a cloistered convent. Forever. After all, our family lacks a saint just like it lacks a writer. Yes, yes, in that way and to that end, Hiriz will go—cloistered order and vow of silence. Poor little nuns. But, after all, who told them to call themselves Humble Sisters of the Pricked and Suffering Martyr Heart of Our Poor Little Abandoned Jesus Bleeding Out Slowly on the Cross with No Right to Resurrection. With a name like that, they deserve Hiriz. And Hiriz deserves them too. So ugly. Nuns are so ugly, Penelope … Maybe that’s why they are always so pretty and delicate and high-voiced and ballerina-bodied in movies: to compensate a little for so much facial and anatomical deformity, right? Hiriz will be happy among them, because at last she’ll be the most beautiful beast. End of her projects, end of her journey. But first things first. And the saint doesn’t come first … Which brings me to the sinner. And the sinner is you, Penelope. Mortal sinner. But even so, as if blessed. The kind of sinner who can end up being an object of adoration. A threat to the established order. And I am the established order. Which doesn’t keep me from knowing how to recognize someone powerful when I see them. And you are powerful. Like I am, but in a different way. A free spirit who could end up becoming a leader. There’s no space for both of us here, Penelope. So I’m going to let you go. Nothing to see here. You killed Maximiliano the way I killed Papa-grandpa. You and I are different yet the same. We operate on our own. Papagrandpa—who was raised in the macho patriarchy without ever figuring out that it’s the woman behind him who pulls the strings and draws the reins—couldn’t understand it. And I made him understand. And there he is: stuck inside a wall in Mount Karma, behind his portrait, may he rest in peace. And your thing with Maxi, killing him—I don’t get it. Was it out of love or pity, out of interest or strategy? I don’t understand the first one, the second one either; because you won’t get any inheritance. You signed documents of separation of assets and the religious ceremony never concluded. I thank you for it: Maxi, always and forever in a coma, he would’ve turned into a, into another, short-term complication in the financial-familial hierarchy, in terms of shares and allotments. And we, for religious reasons, so convenient on other occasions, could never unplug him. And because of the thing with Papagrandpa, my dance card is already full in that area. I’ll confess my mortal sin on my deathbed (which, as its name indicates, is where and when you have to confess your mortal sins) and I’ll be forgiven, yes; but best not to exaggerate too much, right? So, better this way, thank you for everything, Penelope, and may Maxi sleep with the angels. And getting back to the religious stuff … I really liked that thing you said once about the foolishness of wasting time praying for God to change his designs. You said it was … a contradiction, right? Because you can’t ask God, in his infinite wisdom, to alter his actions. Even less if you’re one of God’s little creatures. And you’re right. That’s why, when I go to mass, I never ask for anything and I always give thanks. I thank God that He’s allowed me to have my way, that my will be done and that my will, always, be His. I thank God, as I told you once, for the fact that He’s helped me understand that though life is, in fact, very short, life is a
lso very wide. And God says to me you’re welcome, and what’s more, Mamagrandma, I’m the grateful one. What’s the voice of God like? The voice of God is the silence of God. And ye who are silent shall receive. And it’s of my will and my will alone that I let you go now, Penelope, that I won’t say anything about what I just saw, that I leave you free to do anything except come back here, where it’s not that you’re not understood, but it’s impossible for you to understand our kind of happiness. It might be true that it’s a hard happiness to assimilate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a happiness that makes us happy. What you have, on the other hand, is pure and absolute sadness and dissatisfaction. A profound sadness that you give such importance to that you laugh at our superficial happiness. You like to think that the problem is our family, when the problem is the family that you never had and will never have. Here I could get really annoying and witch-like and tell you that I curse you so you’ll never know the joy of family. But there’s no need. You’ve cursed yourself. You’ve condemned yourself to wander, lost. Safe travels, yours shall be a very long trip. And lonely. We don’t love you, we can’t love you, because you don’t love you—you consider yourself cursed by everyone else, but actually you’ve cursed yourself. Nobody would tell your story because it’s sad and boring. Only the part that overlaps with ours will be somewhat amusing. And that part, so entertaining that many will say it must be the invented part, ends here. Good luck, Penelope. You’re going to need it. I won’t ask you to go with God because you don’t believe in Him and because not even He would be able to accompany you. Because He’d get bored after five minutes in your company and would start in with the floods and the plagues. Goodnight, sweet princess.”
And then Penelope tells herself she must flee and the fear helps keep her from weeping for Lina and that pain from paralyzing her. Penelope thinks if Mamagrandma found out she’d been impregnated by Maxi and was going to have a boy (because Penelope is sure she has, even though her ovum was fertilized barely five minutes before), she wouldn’t rest until she reclaimed that little Karma boy and took him back to Mount Karma.
And now Penelope wakes up in Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of … —from that replay and that rewind and that “Previously on …”—and realizes she’s not alone. Sitting in a chair, staring at her, the scars on her face giving off a phosphorescence like those toys that glow in the dark, is that nun who inspires such fear in her and who now says: “I heard you scream and came to see if you were okay. It looks like you were having a nightmare. But, relax, it’s over, it’s over …” The nun leaves the room with a smile of the kind that’s only smiled because smiling is the only more or less socially acceptable way of baring your teeth.
And—nothing happened, everything keeps happening—then Penelope thinks nobody lies more than nuns and priests; because the only thing they talk about is a God with whom they claim to have more or less direct communication. A God who answers them and listens to them and visits them in their dreams, after they say that prayer that goes if I die before I wake.
And it’s been said and written many times and Penelope is not going to contradict it: the world where Wuthering Heights takes place is constructed of the stuff of dreams.
Everything there seems to happen at the same time and in all places.
Everything—beds, windows, ghosts, animals, and houses—is allegorical and symbolic and worthy of being interpreted.
And everyone dreams there and Penelope wonders what the suspensive dreams of the comatose and profoundly yet so superficially suspended Maxi might have been.
Are the dreams of those whose dreaming has no clear expiration date different? Are they clear and linear dreams that seek the comfort of imitating waking life as best as possible? Or are they more experimental than ever: pure colors and sounds, like, they say, the dreams of newborns and those about to be born? Are they perfectly memorable dreams or are they a bit like the reading of Wuthering Heights? Something imprecise and vague yet impressive and unforgettable (again: did Heathcliff dance with the dead Catherine Earnshaw? Did he pull her out of her grave? Or did he dive headfirst into the coffin to love her, possessive and wanting to possess her?) that encourages successive rereading to discover new and decisive details.
In any case, everyone dreams in Wuthering Heights.
Lockwood dreams (or hallucinates or sees) he is visited by Catherine Earnshaw and dreams he’s in a chapel.
Catherine Earnshaw dreams she chooses the site of her tomb and dreams dreams that have altered “the colour of my mind” and she dreams she’s already in Heaven and that, to her great sorrow, it bears no resemblance to Wuthering Heights; and, luckily, her prayers are answered and a squadron of angels returns her to her Eden on Earth, buried in the earth.
Heathcliff dreams of Catherine Earnshaw every time he shuts or opens his eyes.
And, when Heathcliff dies, all the inhabitants of the surrounding area begin to dream of the two of them, reunited beyond the grave, strolling like lovers through the final paragraphs of a happy ending, while Lock-wood—who, without a doubt, dreamed of them for the rest of his days and nights—stopped by on his way out and bade farewell to all of it and all of them and “watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; 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.”
That, of course, is not Penelope’s case.
Lockwood would never admit his quietude (though Penelope’s cell/study is always, yes, like that so-oft invoked Victorian simile, “quiet as a grave”); because Penelope’s quietude is that of a dormant though never entirely dead volcano.
And Penelope knows well you can choose your dreams, but your nightmares choose you.
Penelope knows ghosts don’t exist, but the dead do exist.
Penelope knows writing yes-fictions is the best way to keep from thinking of your own non-fiction.
But that approach doesn’t always work and the trick isn’t always pulled off and now neither Stella D’Or nor dAlien nor the Tulpa sisters are there to help her.
And the Brontë sisters betray her, they tell her to come by and visit and, when she does, Penelope discovers other phantasmagoric dead there waiting for her.
Last night Penelope dreamed she went back to Haworth Parsonage, to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
And Penelope dreams it—like the reverse of a prophetic dream—not exactly as if it were going to happen but as if it already happened. Not a divinatory dream, but a dream that, though unresolved, already came true on this side of things.
Penelope returns to the place she didn’t want to go that night. To the goal. To the moment in the adventure when the adventure finally makes sense and embraces its final destination.
Penelope arrives to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
To the place where the Brontës lived and wrote. To the scene of the crimes solved in books. To Haworth, in West Yorkshire.
Penelope is neither the first nor the last visitor to that place because this—according to the sponsors of the Brontë Society, one of the oldest literary societies in the world, operating and charging admission here since 1893—is the most visited “literary destination” in the world.
This is where the first great literary family industry was created (promoted by the Brontës’ father, by Charlotte’s widower, and by the great success of the Elizabeth Gaskell biography) along with marketing and merchandising that included the sale of lines Patrick Brontë cut out of the letters of his evermore-alive dead daughters.
Then, in the beginning of the trend that never ends, with the three sisters gone, hundreds of young girls were already coming, week after week, and throwing themselves on the old and blind and terrorized pastor, in order to touch the man who fathered those daughters. Some shriek that Emily has possessed them or that Emily is alive and lives in their homes. And the truth is they all have present-day incarnations, shut away in their houses, in front of the pale glow of bulimic s
creens and blogs with titles like Wuthering High or The Heat Cliff, suggesting candidates past and present for the starring role, giving him the faces of Brad Pitt or Vigo Mortensen or Clive Owen, without comprehending that Heathcliff was so much younger than all of them, though—Penelope thinks—Owen, who knows … Brontëmania, indeed. They were here, almost from the start of the myth, already in 1860, all the readers of the sisters Brontë.
G. K. Chesterton passes through and rightly thinks that “It would not matter a single straw if a Brontë story were a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than Jane Eyre or a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than Wuthering Heights … The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions, emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the springtide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and panic of Wuthering Heights. Every one of us has had a day-dream of our own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than Jane Eyre … Yet, despite this vast nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, those are perhaps the truest books that were ever written. Their essential truth to life sometimes makes one catch one’s breath. For it is not true to the manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ.”
A very young Virginia Woolf came here—she admired the Brontës the way she admired everything: at a safe distance and without demonstrating great enthusiasm—to report on the phenomenon in her first article (unsigned) in The Guardian and where it says that “Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell” and where she recounts how she paused in front of their graves, which “seem to start out of the ground at you in tall, upright lines, like an army of silent soldiers,” maybe already anticipating her own oh so Brontëian end: stones in jacket pockets, sinking below, and down the river, hearing voices even underwater.
The Dreamed Part Page 27