The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  The past like the predictable surprise, slow yet incessant, of a jungle swallowing cities we once knew how to build.

  The past climbing green up the sides of abandoned and ruined buildings, returning the civilized remnants of parks and plazas to wilderness, reminding us on our sleepless nights that every city is really an island. A desert island. There, the past and its roots strangling and ripping down the solitary palm tree of a present that lacks a treasure map and where—surrounded by all those people—we’re always alone: standing atop the X that marks the spot where everything that happened and won’t happen again is buried.

  The past not passing away but twisting and turning through its own limbless leaves. The past like the hoot of plucked and hopeless owls; like a cat that smiles overhead, inviting us to eat and drink it; like the fruit of a wisdom that many prefer never to taste at all, not even a little nibble, for fear that the knowledge will do them harm and be too heavy, grave and gravitational, like a divine condemnation from the voices in their heads to the mouths of their stomachs.

  The past like that dawning realization in their minds and that taste on their tongues (a taste like the taste of figurative words or abstract thoughts breaking down, which, as someone once said in a letter, is the taste of moldy mushrooms) that forces them to reconsider each and every law of their increasingly contracted and opaque universes.

  The past that—as the Arabic or Chinese proverb warns—no god can change. So the gods get even, orchestrating increasingly unharmonious and terrible things. Present and future things and, thus, mosques aflame, cathedrals collapsing, pyramids devoured by waters or swallowed by the desert. Divine punishments for those who, in the past, had the audacity to invent them and put them in writing with clauses as immoveable and unchangeable as the above. Clauses that teach us the past is the religion nobody can help but believe in, on their knees and begging forgiveness for sins committed, always, some unforgivable yesterday. Because, yes, when it comes not to the History of all people but the histories of each individual person, the web of the present shrinks and compresses and fades away, and becomes impossible to bear. The future is modern and ephemeral and, suddenly, unattainable. The future is no longer science fiction and dreaming of marvels yet to come in our lifetime, but, merely, not risking going beyond the unknown of what tomorrow’s or, at most, next week’s, weather will bring. While the past is classic and never goes out of style and is always returned to. And, going around all feline and fierce (as if across a catwalk decorated like a forest in whose center shines the bright window of a dark house), the past files by again; amid haute couture and prêt-à-porter, reminding us, unforgettable, what we’ll never be, what we wished we could’ve been. The past walks all over us, stabbing us with high heels and voodoo pins and vampire fangs, draining us of ourselves through those small holes and filling us back up with itself.

  And suddenly, when we take it into account, the past is the only thing that counts, all we’ve got left: things pass and keep passing all the time in the past. “I am the past and I passed by in order to stay,” exhales the past, in ecstasy, vapor roiling out of its mouth, a smoke with an ancient scent. The wintery past, cloaked in furs and doffing in greeting, with the most irreverent of reverence, a hat that, regardless of any wind, never flies off and always tops its unimaginable head of uncontrollable hair, like braids whipping about in a gale, ensnaring everything. Knots tied when the past makes memory and corrects and changes something that happened or never happened; but that happens now, altered and altering the one who remembers, so long after, like someone recounting a dreamless dream, a dream with nobody to dream it.

  The past revising, passing through again to clean up or mess up what can never be fully expurgated.

  The past that’s always returning from exile only to, straight away, exile itself again.

  The past—nothing to be done, nothing to do about it—that never asks permission to come in, because you already inhabit it; because it’s you who enters it never to escape and to watch, impotent, as rooms and corridors and staircases are added to its impossible-to-trace blueprint.

  The past that’s full of windows that you don’t know if they open in or out, but from which you can always perceive your arrival or your departure.

  The past that is heavy air in the light air. “Here I am and I am not going to leave,” exhales that wind, spiraling in from so far away. Changing dates, rearranging furniture, driving curtains wild, forcing you to cling to banisters, to tie yourself to masts, to blow out candles of ever-fewer birthdays, to go down and take refuge in basements out of which, after the tornado doesn’t stop but takes a break to recharge its energies, you come up to discover that nothing—in B&W or in Technicolor—is as you remembered it; that it no longer resembles the past Kansas of our lives where, invariably, after so much adventure and misadventure, we all wish to return.

  The past like time and timepest. Yes, as the years pass (more and more all the time, it’s easier to remember better what’s remote while what’s close appears as if enveloped in fog), the present seems to barely sustain the vertigo of that circular cyclone circling in reverse, coming from everywhere and moving in all directions, constant and consonant and chorusing and “ZZZZZ,” the cavorting current of electric air sounding comical and comedic, as if mocking the wakeful, drifting those empty and blank bubbles over their heads in which they neither saws nor logs are depicted.

  The past like a giant wave crashing against the highest cliff or someone quietly waving hello from on top of it. A sudden shift of atmospheric pressure and the past laughing at your surfboard, your umbrella, your dock or your jetty, your always-soaked raincoat, your sandcastle or your lightning rod, your boat and your lifejacket and your lifeboat, your meteorological oracle who trembles, under the sun, delivering a “deteriorating toward nightfall” or a “the fury of the titans is drawing nigh” or a “producing powerful precipitation.” So, events that once precipitated begin to precipitate again. Yes, tonight’s wind is a tormenting wind that brings down the circus tent of your life, scattering its three rings, where, without a net, a trapezing tempest swings. Lightning bolts that frighten the animals in their cages. Rolling thunder drawing ever nearer, like the drumroll anticipating the magician’s trick or the clown’s tumble or écuyère’s smile or the tamer’s whip.

  The past that’s a domesticated but never-entirely domestic animal (not to be trusted, don’t lower your guard: no feeding the animals through the bars) that, suddenly, remembers its wild yesterday and bares its claws and fangs and rips your hand off instead of shaking it. And then the night is filled with screams and people run through the streets shouting, “Take cover! The past has been unleashed and it’s hungry for justice and thirsty for vengeance!” And, in the stampede, the clown seizes the moment to rape the écuyère, and to steal the whip from the tamer to whip the magician, while the audience, hypnotized, discovers that the present is a flaming circus with neither future nor safety net.

  The past that destroys everything, but that, at the same time, does so by constructing, clarifying or correcting, making memory or unmaking history while everything flies through the air, hanging in suspense. And there, the suspended loose pieces of the past’s scattered rooms, making up the whole that he assembles now, remembering one of the few poems he ever memorized. A poem in one of those pale and slender collections of poetry that look so fragile compared to those thick novels with broad backs and dangerous smiles. Poetry was never his thing, poetry always frightened him in the same way—now, after everything with Penelope, more than ever—that nuns or riding horses frightened him: he never understood how someone could wed themselves to a god or entrust their body to that of an animal or arrive at the certainty that a poem was bad or good or perfect. Poets—sometimes washed up, sometimes fucked up, always clever—were, for him, writers wired in a different way, writers who were able, in just a few lines, to illuminate the mystery of how your parents had screwed you up or the irrational reasons behind the suicides of y
our wives or daughters or the way in which your kids would end up screwing you up, and that leads him to fantasize about the idea of reinventing himself as a poet: he said once that writing long was like reading and writing short was like writing and, yes, maybe composing those marginal and irregular lines … But no. It wasn’t for him. Or, better, he wasn’t for it. He could appreciate but not apprehend it. That poem in its craft or sullen art and when only the moon rages and ha ha ha, while everything is falling apparently out of place but, in the end, right where it belongs. The false order of all these years submitted now to a new perspective. Almost out the door, a new way of looking at that which, from the outset and after so much seeing, was almost invisible, and that now makes sense in a new way and takes on new meaning.

  The past that never lets us leave it.

  The past that always includes us on the guest list for a party we’re not allowed to miss. Though we neither dance nor drink nor flirt, though we limit ourselves just to watching and following the rhythm with a foot and an empty cup. There we are and there we’ll be because there we were.

  The past that does what it wants with us and—though we might think we mount and master it, drawing on its reins—takes us where it wants and to its own beat, to the most unexpected places, down wide and well-lit avenues or along shadowy shortcuts and byways. In the past we are always and forever. We are even in the past that precedes our own past. In the past of our past that we can consider and learn from and visit in books and films and paintings and songs.

  The past is a museum where we always have a room reserved and a key that allows us to open it and not to touch it, that’s forbidden, but to look as long as we like—even with our eyes shut, when we sleep—until closing time, the time to close ourselves in and, sometimes, to stay shut away, there inside, flipping through the most irrational catalogue raisonné. Goodbye to all of that and hello to what the past tells him so he can note it down according to time and place and position it in the right room in the retrospective exhibition of his life. Minor sketches and great canvases. Title or no title. And dimensions and technique and, sometimes, the doubt of whether or not he actually painted something in all of that. “That Night, Tonight (1977), mixed technique, varying dimensions.” Surrounded by a red rope that forces you to keep a certain distance, and gives a “no touching” order he—who after all is the author, its author—will disobey. He killed time in the bathroom, waited until everyone left and all the doors were locked. And so, now, alone with his own past. Face to face. Facing the profile of that past that tends to turn its back on you, but that, in his case, always looks him dead in the eye as it recedes.

  The past as epigraph/footnote taking up more and more space than the dead body of the text it detaches from as if it were its soul. Everything that already was, but now coming after that *, sometimes between parenthesis. Like this: (*). As if inserted between two taught springs that have just been set, compressed for instant distension, given all the strangling length they need, with the touch of a minute mechanism within the immense clockwork. And, then, the movement; like that toy from his childhood, a childhood when most toys were still so primitive: unplugged and corporeal, without clicks or spaces where the heat of a fingertip sliding across the black ice of a screen sets things in motion. His favorite toy from that time. A little man made of tin with a jacket and hat, carrying a suitcase covered with stickers from the places he’d visited. A toy like that one that appears in line 143 of the poem “Pale Fire,” and that John Shade shows to Charles Kinbote in the book by Vladimir Nabokov, explaining to him that “he kept it as a kind of memento mori—he’d had a strange fainting fit one day in his childhood while playing with that toy.” A toy that (his parents offered to exchange it for another, but he decided to keep as it was, strange, different, unique) only moved backward, because of a defect/improvement in its manufacturing. A broken toy is a toy with a story. A toy that stands out from all other toys. A seasoned toy. Mr. Trip, he called and named him. And Mr. Trip obeyed by disobeying: he moved, backward, watching him watch him. Mr. Trip, who at the time was already anticipating for him the retro idea that the past never ceases to spin and to expand and to take up space until the past is everything and everything passes through it.

  And, ah, how to forget that first movement—that succession of instants—when the flashbacks in movies began to take place no longer in prehistoric caves or ancient Roman temples or in the trenches of First and Second World Wars, but in places and times in which you’d lived and remembered living: in pasts where you’d been and that remained in your mind to be discovered, without warning, as something that, for so many young people, was part of a distant age. Suddenly you were “of a period”: the past, there, in the darkness of movie theaters, was no longer something foreign and immemorial but, merely, a prior stop along the way. A landscape out a window that, though blurry and fleeting, was remembered with ever more clarity. A landscape that could already be studied and evoked in documentaries (documentaries no longer like they once were; documentaries full of tricks where every so often they inserted colorful sequences of animation to keep the infantilized viewer alert and to distract him from the idea that his own life being filmed and packaged and broadcast didn’t turn him into a documentarian, at least not until he learned how to draw and animate his photographs). A starting line that was, suddenly, the finish line. Moving backward like a disoriented toy, yes, until the past not only has been but also is and will be.

  And there he was again, sleepless, enumerating possible present definitions of the past.

  The past like the indispensible foundations of what is happening and what will happen.

  The past slipping in through windows of today that we forgot to shut before going to sleep and running through the straight corridors of a tomorrow through which we’ll no longer be able to circulate. And, ah, that terrible moment when you discover all your wishes are no longer in the future but in the past. That burning icy instant when it dawns on you—a phrase in three times, all times in one line—that what will be is no longer what you thought it would be. And where, you realize, that supposed looking to the future is nothing but trying not to look at the past but being unable to avoid it. There, then, a melancholic futurism in which all we have left is remembering how we imagined everything to come would be when we had everything before and not behind us. The same way you try to ignore an accident on the side of the road (the twisted metal, that arm poking out of a window in an impossible position) that, nevertheless, is impossible not to register down to the last detail, thinking, “Poor people,” thinking “How lucky that it wasn’t me.” But the past always touches you, strikes you, runs you over, crashes into you. And so, you say to yourself, looking, better not to look. And you make an effort to think of any other thing while focusing on the voice of the bus driver suggesting and commanding and instructing that “There’s more space behind you … Let’s see … Everyone move back.”

  Behind you.

  Move back.

  Everything is there now.

  In the darkness.

  In the night.

  Back in the dark night.

  Even—and this is disturbing—sexual fantasies. Suddenly—like a blow to the jaw—you fantasize about what could’ve been and not about what will be. Those names, those eyes, those voices forming always-improvable conversations underlined with intention and a bit affected in the italics memory gives them. And those bodies, those body parts, your body how it once was and, broken, no longer is. Situations are revisited, invited home, caressed, and improved until they come true. Unmaking memory in order to remake it.

  The past—its most muscular musculature, its most agile agility—that moves better all the time, yes. The future no longer serves, doesn’t work, it tripped and fell and was broken. Now the future is that too-near yet unreachable workday on a calendar where all days are marked not in holiday-red but in danger-red. Danger. Warning. Alert. Any day now could be the last or the beginning of the end. Everything comes so
clear (though you see less and less of what you want to see) that from there, so close, you can easily glimpse life’s farewell looking you right in the eyes. That’s why, reaching a certain point, you look back, and never glimpse the border or horizon.

  The past that might be a foreign country where things are done in a different way, yes; but it’s a foreign country that’s always at war. Without truce or peace. And it proceeds to invade the whole map, covering all the colors one by one (those colors on maps that help distinguish one country from another) with its own. It’s one uniform color, a grayish-blue mixed with sepia. An attacking color with shades of take-no-prisoners and that leaves him alive only so he can keep asking and answering himself what shade and color they might be; and then to appreciate the devastation of the conquered landscape and—surrendered and color coordinated—to offer testimony and tell the tale.

  And he, there, who can do nothing to stop it. He can’t look elsewhere. He can’t even close his eyes and, much less, sleep, stay asleep, sending to bed without dessert everything that knocks on the door of his eyelids, kicking them open.

  The past that’s a mirror, but a rearview mirror. One of those mirrors that warns you “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” just before you crash into what’s yet to come, but what, right away, has already passed by.

  The past that’s always making you think of the past and is like a Peanuts comic strip (where the kids are nothing but old people dressed up as kids) in which (panel 1) Linus asked Charlie Brown: “Charlie Brown, you know that there’s one day in your life that will always be the best compared to all the other days?”; And Charlie Brown (panel 2) answers asking: “Of course, why do you ask?”; so that Linus (panel 3) answers: “Well … And what happens if that day already passed?” And what happens if that night already passed too?

  The past that’s like one of those children with the illness that makes them age rapidly and ceaselessly, but without that preventing them from still being children. The past like a childish creaking of bones and gurgling stomachs that sound like onomatopoetic conversations between roadrunners and coyotes. Long and wailing sounds. Sounds that are only made when you fall as if shot from the highest heights of a canyon/cannon and, once you’ve crashed, into the deep target of a returnless abyss that you only climb out of so you can fall again, when you think you’re poking your head over the edge, a rock falls on you, and clouds and dark spots on the mental X-ray of everything you thought you’d memorized and had under control. Lesson well learned, yes. And, suddenly, it’s the past that pushes you back, from behind, as if the past were that XL-bodied and Medium-brained boy who waits for you at recess to settle scores and exact tribute. There, the past, in the middle of the playground, with crossed arms and clenched fists and saying, “Where do you think you’re going?” and then making you remember with a beating everything that wanted to not be remembered: everything that wanted to be but in the end never was and never will be because there’s not enough time or strength left. There, on the ground, the present that fears the past with all its future, but that—as in the perverse and pathological playground hierarchies—only wants to please it and be recognized and enslaved.