The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  This kind of elastic almost trancelike speech—the idea, as he said, was to make a cleaning up/assembling of the interview as difficult as possible—had replaced his one-time much-remarked-upon one-liners.

  He’d ditched that kind of oh so characteristic boutade when he realized, maybe too late, the expansive toxic power they had. The way in which they were perpetuated and lost his original and fleeting and quickly expired intention when, living-dead, they were perpetuated in the mouths of epigones or fans or enemies looking for ways to trash him and trafficking in the uncontrolled substance for social-networks addicts with the insatiable need to share, repeat, and post until everything became not a bad but a mean joke.

  What a writer says—like what he or she writes—should be, by law, impossible for second and third and thousandth parties to reproduce, he thought. He also refused to obey the requests of photographers to adopt that pose as common as it was absurd: appearing with his face so concentrated on reading his own book. A pose that wasn’t just very sad, but where, besides, the writer invariably, upon opening the book randomly and pretending to read some passage, discovered, always, some improvable term, some adjective twice repeated, some typo in a name, some doubt (was it McNamara or Mc Namara or MacNamara?).

  And, true, yes, he was a really annoying guy.

  And being annoying for everyone else tends to be, many times, like patriotism for the rabble: the last refuge for someone who no longer really matters to almost anyone.

  A way of attracting attention without having to sob a “Why don’t they pay attention to me?” while simultaneously fantasizing about bombing and spraying them all with napalm and Agent Orange.

  And his was—OK, sure, yes—an annoying book: it didn’t contain military coups or brutal narcotraffickers or stoic republicans. No sadomasochistic sex, either.

  And it’s not that he hadn’t tried at some point.

  The whole, being hip thing.

  His first book—National Industry, his most successful book—had fed off a certain historical-situational potency.

  National Industry had been the perfect product: a book written by the son of a somewhat famous couple who’d been disappeared. Desaparecidos more freak than political. Desaparecidos who some people didn’t even consider desa-parecidos but, really, “snobs who didn’t know what they were getting into” and “weekend activists” (definitions and accusations also translatable, he thought, to many of the committed and venerated factions of the armed conflict).

  A book not laughing at itself, but yes (despite him being who he was and looking down on all long-suffering and opportunistic poses) refusing to turn itself into an epic elegy for the victims of a dictatorship. Which—refusing to cry, he didn’t know it then, he soon learned—was almost worse than laughing at the victims.

  Well, really, the book (and by extension and association he did, too) smiled to itself a little, but with one of those smiles. The kind of smile one sees at baptisms or funerals. The smile of knowing his parents’ death had signified (not for him, who’d felt he was a writer for so long, but yes for everyone else) his birth as a writer.

  He would never have been able to write National Industry, that book would never have appeared, without the prior disappearance of his parents. William S. Burroughs had referred to the “accident” of killing his wife, under the influence and possessed by an “Ugly Spirit,” in the same way. And yes, maybe, probably without knowing it or being all that clear on who Burroughs was, one of the most offended critics of National Industry (a kind of miserable Javert who would thereafter follow him throughout all his future books) accused it of being “something with an ugly spirit” that “mocks our most precious thing: our desaparecidos.”

  And in one of the stories in National Industry, “Children of the Revolution,” he told the story of a group of ten year olds—fed up with their transgressive and undisciplined and oh so childish parents—who plan to kidnap their adored arts and crafts teacher and hold her for ransom. The story ended very badly.

  In “Love Story,” a man who could no longer stand his wife, but doesn’t dare divorce her, joined a “clandestine Marxist liberation” cell so he could “get out of the house” and there he discovered an inconceivable talent for urban guerilla warfare and was transformed into “a mythic figure on the level of Lawrence of Arabia.”

  In “Seeking,” a casting agency for mediocre actors—with the slogan “We bring them back to life”—hired the children of desaparecidos to liven up parties and dinners.

  And in “My Unforgettable Night”—which was perhaps the best of all the stories, also the one least shaded with black humor—he created a portrait of a man who, one night, wakes up his young son get him to help burn, in their backyard, his entire library, because it contained too many “banned” books. As they were throwing the books into the fire, the boy tried to read them as fast as he could, to store them in his head in brief fragments, glimmers of plotlines and shots in the dark, and to invent, on the basis of those random pieces and in the act itself of destroying them, how they began and ended. And, right there and then, the boy began to be transformed into a writer when, really, “he was going to be a veterinarian or Formula 1 racer.”

  Things like that.

  And it sold well and was read even more via hearsay (National Industry had attained that curious literary category of “topic of conversation” where you don’t need to have read it first to subsequently offer an opinion about it).

  And the “intellectual sphere” developed complex theories to discredit it as “writing for the market.”

  And more than one almost-desaparecido (curious category that included those who had been saved by miracle or coincidence or because, actually, they were never that dangerous for or in danger from their repressors though they insisted just the opposite) took issue with him and called him a “literary torturer” and said his parents would be ashamed of him.

  Though, to tell the truth, his parents weren’t held in high regard either (his disappeared parents were, also, politically and ideologically troublesome: a subversive aberration as much for the far right as for the far left).

  And so the book, suddenly polemical, sold even more (and he never reread it or those that followed; because his past books were like past lovers, seen from the remove of new love: curious and often inexplicable phenomena exhibited in the display cases of a kind of museum of sentiments that, just in case, he was better off not visiting that often for fear one of them would distract him and, ignoring closing time, he’d stay there, locked inside, not knowing how to get out).

  And he was named person of the year and posed on that magazine cover where his disappeared parents had once appeared. A cover that assembled all the people of the year (him there, in that freshly inaugurated democracy de rigueur, with a bad TV comedian and an average tennis player and a superb starlet, holding a sign that read “Do you know where your parents are tonight?”).

  And many people, of course, hated him automatically; because his now nonexistent country of origin was characterized by being a place where anyone for whom things went more or less well had to explain themselves to hundreds of people for whom things went more or less poorly.

  And he went to many parties of the kind where you knew what time they started but not what day they ended.

  And at one of those parties—something that did nothing to help his profile, the profile of an increasingly more- and better-powdered nose—he met Pétalo: artistic name of Anita Soldán, the sexy director of one of the first music-video TV shows and the supposed daughter (though not really) of one of the most rabid and flamboyant and messianic repressors of the Dictatorship. A colonel considered directly responsible for the final assault on the department store his parents had taken over. The department store that years before—still working for an ad agency and not yet having met his mother at a casting call—his father had gift-wrapped, like a giant package, for Christmas. (When somebody reminded his father that Christo, a Bulgarian plastics artist,
had already, on numerous occasions, done something similar with famous buildings and monuments, his father responded: “True, but he didn’t do it as advertising. And that’s what advertising is: the refined and more precise translation into the language of commerce of something that theretofore has only been done for the love of art and without any logic. That’s why a good slogan or good headline on the cover of a magazine is better than a good novel.”)

  Before long, the coronel in question would be assassinated at a discoteca by a schizoid rock musician, or something like that. Gunned down for the love of art. “Big Bang-Bang” read the headline of a more or less countercultural monthly of the day. And his father would’ve loved it. His father and mother were mentioned in the article several times and it even included a photo of his whole family in which he and Penelope appeared posing aboard the deck of the Diver, holding a sign that read: “Special Offer: Kids Included.”

  Parents and children and children and parents, yes: together in that place where some go in so others come out.

  Everything seemed to depart from there in order to return there.

  And at some point, a number of books later, he lost track of so many things.

  And what disappeared was the desire to keep telling the tale.

  That tale.

  Let others tell it, he told himself.

  And it didn’t take long for them to do so, claiming they were doing it like this, with reverent irreverence, for the first time; not as if National Industry had disappeared (because it was still there and was even reissued every so often), but as if it’d never existed.

  And every so often he did go back and write about what happened in his now nonexistent country of origin, yes. But he did so as if the whole country were actually his childhood, the territory of his childhood: a combination of enchanted castle and mad-scientist laboratory that wasn’t even acknowledged by its name (that of the country) but by his name (that of the boy who, looking back at it from the future, put it together and took it apart like a Meccano model made up of hazardous and rusted pieces, that could cut you and cause an infection).

  He even wrote a novel about it, as a kind of farewell, in a single week. A kind of national and commercial thriller. Samizdat, it was called (the title was the last name of its protagonist) and it came to him as if fallen from the sky, in the wake of a dream. A dream whose beginning was the only thing he remembered clearly, two men, aboard a sailboat, one fat and one skinny, conversing. He had that dream while on vacation, at a Mime Union hotel (yes, really, such place did exist), where, in a mountainous region barely connected with noisy civilizations, the guests were banned from pretending to be swept away by the wind or from pressing their hands against the glass of an invisible window pane. And there was pure silence, at a time when telephones didn’t yet go on vacation with their owners, because telephones couldn’t leave home. And that’s where he typed up the novel as if it were being dictated to him, in seven days, thinking it would make him rich. It was an easy and clever book. And commercial and smart (the first impulse of setting it in the Paris of Russian émigrés had been aborted by setting it all in the here and now of militares and desaparecidos). A lot happened in that book and it even included dialogue (for once, his characters displayed an ease in talking at length among themselves and thinking very little). It was sure to be made into a movie. Or a seven-episode miniseries, one episode for each chapter of the novel, which, in turn, unfolded between one Sunday and the next. It was perfect, everything fit. But perfection in private frequently fails to translate to perfection in public and the book faded embarrassingly away without glory.

  And so, after it was published, from there, from that twilight zone, he attempted to change subject, change style.

  To be less gratuitously funny and more graceful. Besides, before long, all of that went out of style and became something like the legends of lost second-rate civilizations. Not the Incas or the Egyptians. More like the Muiscas or the Akkadians. Military dictatorships and their victims couldn’t compete with the history of (dixit IKEA, more details coming up) Nazis and Jews.

  And what came into style was, in any case, being a writer left widowed and childless by an Islamic bomb (IKEA often traveled giving talks in Arabic countries and in Paris, no doubt toying with the possibility that something might blow up somewhere not too close so he could then exploit it by recounting it as if it’d happened centimeters away from him).

  Another possibility had been to somehow make a name for yourself doing something that wasn’t strictly literary (to become a champion skateboarder, for example) and to write a memoir where, in addition to your spins and flips, you reveal that your parents had prostituted you out, between the ages of six and thirteen, to their bourgeoisie friends who, in that way, were able to avoid those trips to Indonesia, which had become too risky and too terroristic. Compared to parents like that, his parents were, now, reevaluated as, merely, confused victims of confused times and little more. Amateurs who put their foot in it and let things get out of hand. Little more and nothing less than that. And so he knew too soon that the distance between a de moda, or hip, pop writer and a démodé plop writer wasn’t great. And that there’s nothing more treacherous and boomeranging than a first and precocious success. The reckless and terrifying Orson Welles syndrome. All the lucky novices his weighty shadow, half sultan and half buffoon. But nobody was as immense as he was; because Welles had been like the Oedipus of the complex: the original. And all those who’d followed his bad example were nothing more than early successes who’d subsequently experienced a drawn out loss, only resuscitated, terrible ultimate paradox, as more or less revealing details when the time came for obituaries and epitaphs and revising decades of leftovers and remnants and ill-fated opportunities and failed projects.

  He, of course, had never been compared to the director of Citizen Kane; but he had experienced his own meager yet indigestible serving of the same thing: the ambiguous sensation that something he’d done a long time ago always came back, again and again, to bite the hand that wrote it. Debut as coda. To leave by way of the entrance, passing right through the closed door. Exit Ghost.

  And like what (ah, again, the dumb comfort of taking shelter behind the names of titans) Ernest Hemingway moaned between one round of electroshock and the next. Hemingway after trying to throw himself into the moving blades of an airplane turbine (an airplane that could suddenly be seen from an airplane in flight, yes). Hemingway days before what might have been his last photograph, walking alone and kicking a can high into the air, as if that can were everything that was and would no longer be and that now could only be kicked skyward. Hemingway on that last morning putting on his “Emperor’s robe” and resting his forehead on the barrel of a shotgun and endeavoring to hunt himself and hitting the target. There and then, Hemingway came to the conclusion that everything concluded when he did. “Nothing comes anymore,” he’d sobbed.

  He limited himself to sobbing.

  It wasn’t like him to off himself in the middle of life to get to the end of life. He had neither the lion-hearted grace under pressure nor rifle at hand nor trigger at finger. He wouldn’t know what to do with a rifle anyway; except look at it or let it drop from his hands and go off when it hit the ground and kill some passerby (if he had to imagine an end with bullets, his would have been something closer to the “Let me finish my work” of Isaac Babel in front of the firing squad, but, he thinks, in his case, adding in a low voice an unconfessable and not-at-all heroic “What work?”).