The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  It’s the voice of Uncle Hey Walrus that he remembers.

  A voice that manages—across the wide and long years—to reach him, as if crossing an avenue of absurd physiognomy.

  There it was, there it goes, there it goes again.

  † Uncle Hey Walrus runs into a friend in the very center of “The Widest Avenue in the World,” on one of those “islands” between one lane and the next where cars fly by like arrows with no memory of the archer who fired them. In those days—before social media—everyone ran into everyone on the street, all the time. In person. Flesh and bone. Live and direct. In bars or in bookstores or at movie theaters or on corners or, like now, in the middle of the avenue. There they are, on a platform covered with grass, with an obelisk in the background and, beyond, the silhouette of his school rising solitary amid rubble and bulldozers. His school, which soon will disappear as if by the art of magic. And, yes, that was the Age of Disappearances. Uncle Hey Walrus and his friend exchange bills and small envelopes. Uncle Hey Walrus gives the bills. His friend passes him the small envelopes. They contain pills of far brighter colors than those Sugus chewy candies. Uncle Hey Walrus’s friend—with a slow voice and spinning pupils—says: “I just saw the craziest movie I’ve ever seen. The hero lives in all times at the same time. As a young and fairly useless soldier in a firebombed city during WWII, in a house in the United States when he’s older, and on another planet and under observation by some extraterrestrials who keep him inside a kind of geodesic cage, where they make him mate with a porn star and …” Uncle Hey Walrus interrupts his friend and says: “Say no more. Nothing new for me. I’ve always felt just like that, without even needing to take any of your pills.” And Uncle Hey Walrus removes two pills from one of the envelopes and tosses them up in the air and opens his mouth and catches them as they fall. As if Uncle Hey Walrus were a dog being thrown a bone or a walrus being thrown a fish.

  And, yes, he, here and now, also feels exactly like that. The way his Uncle Hey Walrus felt and the way the space-time traveler Billy Pilgrim, hero of that novel and that movie called Slaughterhouse-Five, lived. Like this. Neither now nor then but both at the same time. Neither what was nor what is but a mix of both: seeing yourself there with the eyes of here. In that place but from this spot. Rereading yourself as if reading something for the first time, but knowing perfectly what’s going to happen; but noticing things that, then, when he was someone much shorter, went right over his head.

  And before long—he was growing and not, like now, shrinking—he saw that movie. And later he read the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five.

  Many times.

  And he liked it every time and he keeps liking it more and more, like he likes the act of rereading more and more. Something you do a lot during childhood (until you know those first stories and latest comics by heart) and do again when you start getting older: when, tired of so many risky undertakings and increasing frustrations, you return to particular classics like someone returning home and asking for forgiveness. With a combination of conclusive sadness and the fantasy that you’re starting over again with an enthusiasm like you’ve never felt before or that left you long ago. (Recently he’d returned full-on to Vladimir Nabokov, who postulated on various occasions that “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”) When you reread, you don’t just read again—and like new—something you already read, rather that new reading includes a new character in the plot: the reader. And who we were, and perhaps no longer are, when we first read it so long ago. When we reread we already know what’s going to happen, but we’re not entirely clear what’s happened to us in the intervening years. And rereading other people’s work we become aware of our own. What the radiation of Tender Is the Night—to bring close a book even closer to him—produces is very different when you’re single or married or divorced or broken from having already passed through all those states. It’s not the same to read The Catcher in the Rye when you’re ten years old (pre Holden Caulfield) as it is when you’re seventeen (during Holden Caulfield) or to reread it when you’re fifty (so long after Holden Caulfield).

  What’s the sound of one hand clapping? Easy: the sound one hand makes while clapping is the imperceptible yet deafening sound we make when we read. And that sound is even more powerful and intimidating when you reread, when with one hand you hold up the book and with the other you clap. Rereading something unalterable shows us how we change, like a mirror. Rereading is one of the manifestations of what physicists know as “ambidextrous universe.” Thus, we begin reading as children to get to know the world down to the slightest detail (and by heart, without exchanging even a word) and we end up rereading as adults to check whether that world still recognizes us and to understand what, in the end, we prefer or find ourselves obliged not to know (to cross out, skip over, forget) about it. When we reread, we regress only to what made us happy and to what made us feel eternal and, yes, in all parts and ages at the same time and place.

  Rereading is like seeing real ghosts.

  Generous ghosts who believe in us.

  † Perfectly clever answer to the question what’s the sound of one hand clapping: “I’ll show you,” Ella said. And Ella raised her hand. And Ella slapped him. “That’s the sound one hand clapping,” Ella smiled.

  And then Ella let herself fall, fully clothed, into the swimming pool.

  † Perfect excuse while you lift your hand to your smarting cheek: “Don’t bother me with that again: I’m rereading.”

  As far as the ducks in Central Park: who cares where they go in the winter? The important thing is whether one shows up alive in the spring.

  But, returning to death and the close or distant dead, in another novel called Galápagos—one he also liked a lot, but hadn’t read as many times as Slaughterhouse-Five—Kurt Vonnegut proposed the following maneuver: put an asterisk—“time is an asterisk,” spinning like a twister—before the name of the character who is going to die next, to warn the reader that something dreadful is about to happen to that man or woman. The really dreadful thing that happened in that novel (in several novels by that author, this being his specialty) was nothing more and nothing less than the end of the world. Over and over again. Ends of the world that combine the catastrophism of special effects with the profound melancholy of the survivor.

  He thinks now that, when it comes to the representation of the end of the world, as the years pass by, you go along changing tastes and appetites. When you’re little, you might enjoy the movies of Irwin Allen or Roland Emmerich or anything from Marvel Comics: those movies that, when they were over, you had to stay there and wait for the names and numbers and the final technical credits to scroll by to receive the last homeopathic dose of one brief scene minimally previewing what was to come in the next Marvel release, and so on over and over until Galactus devours us all. Bang. Crash. Kaboom. The end of the world increasingly accomplished and spectacular on a technical level. The apocalypse as spectacular choreography. But, as you grow up and move forward, you begin prefer the more deliberate and thoughtful ends of the world.

  The end of the world like in “The Great Seraphim,” by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Or the end of the world like a long and drawn-out entropy in the novels of J. G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick.

  Or the end of the world almost like something intimist and domestic in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.

  Maybe, now that he thinks of it, those are ends of the world he hopes his own singular end will resemble: to die very old and in good physical condition, lucid and, if possible, while we sleep. That the end of the world and of your world finds you and takes you when your eyes are closed, so you don’t see it, being elsewhere, maybe, dreaming about the end of the world. The end of the world like a sleeping dream and not a waking nightmare and, if you’re lucky, winding up like that sleeper on Pompeii’s Via Stabiana, covered and molded by volcanic ash, antiquity with futurity, preserved forever and sun
k in a sleep so deep not even the snoring of Vesuvius could interrupt it.

  But now the end of the world takes up a mere one hundred and forty ephemeral characters. An end of the world written quickly and read even more quickly. And lasting until the next idiotic SMS arrives, while awaiting the creation of an emoticon that signifies “end of the world.”

  Which would be very Vonnegutian. Vonnegut, also, often drew an asterisk and inserted it between paragraphs in his novels, explaining that it was the drawing of an asshole, his anal orifice, the ass of his world.

  Now, that world has come to an end.

  And that world no longer exists except in his thoughts.

  Now, the dead appear before him.

  His dead.

  The dead you possess so they possess you.

  The dead like mirrors.

  The dead like open books.

  So he rereads them and is reflected in them.

  And it’s the dead who bear not the fatal asterisk of that writer but the asterisk of footnotes. Asterisks like the keyholes. Asterisks marking the expanse of their lives reexamined from the end, with the exhaustive and almost unblinking gaze of a boy who wants to miss nothing and take everything in with his eyes.

  And remembering it from here and now, he thinks—in his way and without The Boy he was then suspecting it though probably intuiting it—that night would mark the end of a world.

  The end of the world as that boy had hitherto known it.

  The end of the world in a night full of asterisks, like stars, like those stars—they try to convince children—that the dead become.

  The dead who remember everything in silence and strangely depressed and almost ashamed for having died and for shining there above, with the most hubristic discretion.

  The dead who now live in the sky like dead stars. Stars that—then, that night, in the middle of The Widest Avenue in the World—The Boy looks up at and wonders which of them would correspond to the little poet and his rival and friend from school (see: † Nicolasito Pertusato) who died in front of his eyes, in an accident, weeks before. There and then, a few meters away, his first dead contemporary. Pertusato, Nicolasito as the first dead person he saw in his life and, in addition, the first living person he saw die (he saw him transform into a dead person, to mortify), in front of him and on the ground, at his feet. Could Pertusato, Nicolasito be that star? Or that other one? Or did it take longer to climb up there and starify? The Boy wonders. The Boy who at that point is a little—not much—bigger than The Boy he was when he almost drowned one summer, on vacation with his parents. But with a decisive difference from his previous incarnation: now, then, he could read and, though he doesn’t yet write professionally, he does describe and reread and compose (the verb used for the compositions he composes in class).

  So The Boy knows, when he grows up, he wants to be a writer, because he already feels he is a writer. Because he’d already written about that school (he doesn’t know it then, when he goes there every morning, but that school will be the closest thing to an alma mater he’ll ever have, in his brief and diffuse academic trajectory).

  He wrote about that school, in one of his books, which he reads select paragraphs of now, and which, while transcribing it into his biji notebook, inevitably, he rewrites, corrects, maybe improves, maybe not.

  † Nicolasito Pertusato / 1. First rival in the alternative sport (for those who “are no good” at soccer) that takes place not on the playground but in the hallways and classrooms of their school. Competitive writing. Fixed- or open-subject composition. Today the assignment is something about a hero and tomorrow we’ll let you write something about Martians or dinosaurs. A public but particular school. That glorious and legendary school christened with the name of a patriotic foreigner, a Mexican who, perhaps disoriented, ended up fighting in the independence wars of the southern continent: the post-mortem general and independentist Gervasio Vicario Cabrera, immortal and befuddled, hero of the Battle of Sad Songs. In the beginning, a back-of-the-line solider nicknamed “The Mad Aztec,” Cabrera—result of an explosion of gunpowder—flew, astride his horse, over enemy lines, landing right next to the tent housing the high command, whom he subdued without difficulty (they were unarmed and drinking wine in the midst of their maps) and, upon returning to his troops, seeing him return from the front suspiciously intact, he was immediately deemed a traitor and summarily shot by a firing squad. And so, by the time they learned of his bizarre feat, it was already too late, but there’s always time for posthumous laurels and for your face to ascend to grace stamps and currency. The interpretation of Cabrera’s story offers up—for students at the educational institution honoring his memory—multiple possibilities: you can ascend pretty high and not be recognized or resign yourself already to the idea of a world where exceedingly bizarre things happen and idiots, who don’t know how to interpret and honor them appropriately, abound.

  The n.°1 school of the First School District (so many number 1s produce in the school’s students, of course, a kind of stupid pride) was famous for its advanced and progressive education. Which didn’t keep—being an establishment subject to state rules—the students from having to attend dressed in a shirt and tie and white pinafore and with a haircut whose length was never to exceed that of The Beatles from the beginning. A school where the more or less illustrious names of the intelligentsia of the day sent—from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, lunch at noon—their male children, with inclinations that could be nothing but artistic, though, it also offered refuge and sanctuary to those who preferred sports, provided that they knew how to pick out and appreciate the narrative threads that also ran through any activity more physical than mental. And so, there, soccer teams with names like The Little Tigers of Mompracem or The Invisible Men or The Bats of Krypton or—direct allusion to the school, and the team that the cracks who traveled to interschool tournaments played on—The Flying Patriots.

  Gervasio Vicario Cabrera, n.°1 school of the First School District. The French-style building was situated amid the ruins of other French-style buildings. A window that opened to nowhere, a stairway climbing toward the bottomless void of the sky, like the paintings by the then very popular painter of posters, René Magritte, an artist who coincides with the acidic psychedelia of Peter Max and with the visions of Bosch and with the Brueghels that, on their bedroom walls, children sense in the darkness, feeling their figures move around and merge together, the ones with the others. But Magritte surpassed all of them with his paintings of diurnal nights and shadowy sombrero-wearing men and his certainty that it’s dreams that dream life: La nuit de Pise, La belle de nuit, Les chasseurs de la nuit, Gaspard de la nuit, and Les figures de nuit and Le sens de la nuit and L’heureux donateur and L’empire des lumières and La clef des songes and the last one Magritte paints before dying: La page blanche. And it can’t be a coincidence that all those children seek (irresponsibly overfed on surrealism at an age when everything is surreal), when they grow up, to hang on their adult walls the clear and melancholic realism of Edward Hopper and thereby conjure the memory of those childhood rooms in houses where everything hovered in the air and came crashing down. Like, again, his old school, surreal under the light of the moon. Like in a Magritte painting. Or a Pink Floyd album cover. Sometimes its students pass by—coming or going like sleepwalkers from one of those hallucinogenic all-night parties their very young parents drag them to, feeling oh so innovative—and see it as something impossible but real. There’s nothing more unsettling than a school by night and that school is doubly or triply unsettling. The children see it there, their pupils shrunken with sleepiness, wondering what they’re doing out there at that time, awake, when they should be in bed, dreaming, perhaps, that it’s the middle of the wide-open night and they’re sleepwalking past their shuttered school. There it is, like a funereal monument where what’s dead and monumentalized is the monument itself. A patient, terminally ill and in suspended animation, waiting for the plug to be pulled. A sc
hool already ready to be demolished by the municipal authorities, insistent on extending the trajectory of what, they repeated over and over with a kind of primitive pride, again, once more, was “The Widest Avenue in the World,” so they could thus make it, also, “The Longest Avenue in the World.” And it’s not true that it’s the widest; it’s a trick, the width of the multi-lane avenue actually incorporates and phagocytes (a verb that the cabrerista kids have recently learned in biology class and use whenever they can) other older streets along it’s periphery that at first glance appear to be lanes, but no. (And yet one thing is true for him: ever since that night when he crossed that avenue with Uncle Hey Walrus and heard him recount the plot of that movie based on that novel, good ideas for stories and novels always come to him whenever he crosses wide avenues. Once he heard a writer say, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” He’d never learned to drive; and so, for him, writing a novel was like crossing a street without being entirely certain the stoplights were in your favor, your shoelaces were snugly tied, or the puddle in front of you wasn’t really a pothole several meters deep.) Yes: the municipal authorities had consented to respect the educational nature of the building and hold off its inevitable end until after the 1977 school year. And meanwhile, during that year, the students played amid the rubble and bulldozers, pretending it was planet Earth after an atomic blast, after so many atomic blasts, like in those B movies, like The Planet of the Apes, like in the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.