The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  IKEA was succeeding again—a now automatic success, no matter what he offered up—with a collection of superegotistical stories where, in each and every one of them, he claimed to recall what, swathed in his naked-emperor suit, he thought during the brief trajectory from seat and/or table to stage/lectern. The podium where he accepted each and every one of his international awards, in memory of his maestros, in general, titans of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.

  The book had one of those superb titles that IKEA was so good at coming up with and that so pleased his medium-rare readers, prostrate and kneeling before his writing by letters, the equivalent of drawing by numbers: Gifts Received. To which IKEA had already announced—awards and speeches and reflections would surely not be lacking—the follow-ups Gifts Returned and Gifts Lost, because he was interested in “the broad concept of the panoramic trilogy.”

  Another of his novels/museums that’d convinced itself—and was so convincing to simple souls—it was the Louvre or the Hermitage, but really was nothing more than a provincial museum in the hands of a guide with a memorized but never memorable speech, so anxious to be reclassified from servile employee to serviceable work of art.

  Even IKEA’s book he liked best—or felt the most affection for, no need to exaggerate—had been a product of that ambition of wanting everything for himself and nothing for anyone else. Indignant at not having an exploitable ancestor who’d suffered the torments of a concentration camp, amid a burst of successful Nazi-themed nonfiction novels at the beginning of the millennium by writers of his generation, IKEA had delivered a masterstroke: to write a Nazi novel set in a concentration camp, telling of the misery of his hypothetical descendent. Lacking a grandfather, a great-grandson would do; and what’d been denied him yesterday, IKEA would uproot tomorrow. In the novel, everything took place in a future world that—as a result of a never-entirely-explained entropic cataclysm—had gone back, from a technological perspective, to the middle of the twentieth century. Ergo, Renaizzance (for once an austere and even somewhat ingenious title) was a “historical novel of anticipation.” A book that—to his astonishment and horror, as a firsthand and incredulous witness; it was clear that IKEA was a blessed being for whom everything he did so badly turned out so well—had gained IKEA the theretofore inconceivable affection of the fans of Philip K. Dick and the acquisition of the film rights by a disciple of Steven Spielberg.

  And at one of those parties where he always operated in the modality of Birdie Num Num, the far more functional and impeccable IKEA, for once having had a few too many, had given him advice and he’d listened with that courtesy that’s nothing but a kind of masochism: “Why don’t you write something with the SS? It never goes out of style, man … Their uniforms are perfect. The Nazi thing shelters you. And the critics love it. They have to. If you feel like you’re missing something, add a Jew, if possible a Cabbalist, weeping in the snow. And a young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jewish girl; if she’s a librarian, all the better. It helps if the Nazi officer is sensitive and a lover of art and knows how to play the piano that he always finds, intact, in a bombed-out house. And that solves everything, man. Though I am already imagining that you wouldn’t be able to control yourself, obviously; and that you would end up devoting pages and pages to musing about the difference between the Nazi salute with the whole arm straight and extended and that other Nazi salute, as if less formal and in passing and slightly apathetic and brief and flexing the arm and …”

  And in this—at the moment of truth and above and beyond any talent or nonsense, plot over style, for IKEA writing was the craft of telling, whereas he thought writing was what he was telling—he was right.

  Nights before, in a hotel bed, a random sentence had occurred to him. A few lines where he began talking about the nature of secrets; he compared them to skeletons in the closet, and from there, they mutated into fur coats nobody used for climatic reasons, but, all the same, you had to show off and sweat in in order to be somebody. He didn’t know what to do with that, he wasn’t even sure he would ever use it. But he’d been happy thinking about it. He’d experienced a kind of happiness that IKEA would never experience and that, if he did, for IKEA would be something like the saddest of horrors. In IKEA’s novels, secrets were kept or told and coats were worn and skeletons were the bones of History’s martyrs to be unearthed and done right by. In IKEA’s novels, closets only served to store jackets that a hero “pulled on in a flash” to then “turned on his heel” and went out into the street to confront “reality.”

  Yes, reality—what was real—had turned into a per se currency he couldn’t trade in; because he’d always understood that, in literature, it didn’t matter what was real and what was not and that it did matter what was well written and what was not. And, for him, that went beyond all formats and styles and subjects.

  But, oh, not only did he know IKEA.

  IKEA also knew him perfectly, he had to admit it.

  IKEA—by opposition—was aware of each and every one of his flaws. And so he let out an almost-admiring little laugh as IKEA continued: “For a while now, there’s also the whole Muslim and fundamentalist thing. But better, just in case, to wait a while: it’s still somewhat dangerous and better for others to risk themselves first. And, if they get killed, then yes, something very you, very much your style: to write about them, about the martyrs. Something choral, symphonic, and polyphonic, with the voices of the victims of an attack intermingling, one of those voices like that of a boy who goes to an expensive school, and another that of a Latin American immigrant, and another that of a countercultural film director nobody ever contradicts, things like that. And have it all be one very long sentence without periods or capital letters. I’m sure it would go well—I leave it to you … And, if all that fails, you could always say the magic word: ‘soccer.’ Nothing pleases readers of one book per year more than when writers talk and write and theorize about soccer. It brings them closer, makes you feel closer to them. And I know: you’re not interested in soccer, of course. But you should get interested in something besides literature if you want to be a well-known and successful writer, man. Writing is not the most important thing. The important thing is to be a writer … Or put better: to play a writer … There you have the case of your little sister … But enough sermons, let’s talk about important things, and, ha, I forgot to warn you: in my next book, I’m going to use all those lists of yours about the past, okay? … And since we’re talking about my books: what did you think of my latest?”

  What did he think of it? Good question. But a better and more intriguing question was, why couldn’t he stop reading them? Could it be because it seemed to him, yes, that they were a monstrous and far better-known appendix of his own increasingly secret body of work? The supposedly presentable and popular part of that gelatinous thing in the attic with tentacles and many eyes that was his body of work. Because it was clear that, in a way, he felt responsible and guilty for and about IKEA. After all, he’d acted as his introducer, he’d brought him into the world, he’d dropped him like a blessed curse into bookstores.

  There were nights when—back when he still slept—he dreamed that he killed him. That he put an end to his life and his work and that—this was the sweetest part of that sleeping fantasy—IKEA didn’t leave behind any unpublished or unfinished manuscripts. Nothing. IKEA was finished. IKEA did not continue. The surprises and constants were done. Because Renaizzance—and the possibility that IKEA would be transformed into a guru of alternate history—had been an unforeseen hiatus in what’d subsequently returned to normality.

  And so, ritornello karaoke-clon-bim-bam-boom of the always ravishing and prize-winnable and ready-for-export latinolympic novel with the family saga of political convulsions and sensitive protagonist narrator, tortured by the spasms of his homeland. “My mission as a writer is to explore the most unfrequented folds of the evanescent history of my country and how they come together in my own painful personal experience,” I
KEA often repeated in articles and presentations, pupils rolled to the heavens like a saint. Never clarifying what it was that was “painful” about his life, but evoking all of it, if possible, from the distance of some comfortable hôtel particulier (adjective that reflects and automatically makes him think of that particular accelerator he wanted to make particularly his) in some comfortable European town, between literary festivals.

  And, yes, that was the heart of the matter for him: IKEA wrote for several hours every day without rest. IKEA was a perpetual motion motor, a machine fine-tuned to produce atrocious novels, in days when quantity was part of quality and a continuous presence in the media (if possible photographing yourself in the company of authorities of varying nature and polarity) guaranteed you the respect and admiration of those who didn’t read but did buy books and had your name always on the tips of their tongues in case someone were to ask them what the most unforgettable read on their last vacation had been.

  And maybe, who knows, IKEA had been a great narrator before being a great writer: someone who didn’t know how to write but did know how to narrate, who knows, who was he—someone with books that narrated less and less—to say.

  Thus, IKEA, shipping express and certified. The Benefits of Evil, The Law of the Stage (collected plays), Sedentary Movement, Charon’s Bribe, Substantive Verbs (compilation of his “interventions” in the press), Configuration of Lives, Stadiums of Rage (his inevitable soccer novel) and the, for him, undisputed favorite when it came to marbled-bronzed nonsense: Crepuscular Pendulum.

  And yes, once—bowled over by IKEA’s commercial success and critical acclaim—he’d even tried to write a novel like that.

  To write from memory and making memory.

  To cling to the warmth of an up-and-running and assimilated tradition.

  To be an authentically traditional writer and to amble along atop all the clichés. To be the equivalent of those first black actors in white people’s films: a black man in blackface, all the time chewing fried chicken and spitting watermelon seeds and all the time saying mistah mistah and hooting with goofy laughs and dancing with curly-haired girls, while the plantation mistresses look on with feverish and sinful eyes. To be a slave, happy to be exploited and to give thanks to your masters.

  To write a book that—as Henry James had written in a disconsolate letter—set out to put the intentions of someone pure and starving for the love of art in their marble tower in communion with what the villagers—so hardy, their pantries overflowing with food to share—needed. And to produce that, according to James, nourishing “friction with the market” that pleased and sated the artist and his audience. Something that everyone liked and that was what everyone expected of him, based on his geographical origin and historical situation. To be good in the most amiable sense of the word, with an immense and baroque continental and political novel brimming with Lonely Planet exoticism. With many bizarre fruits and dishes like limón de verga and chumuchuque ganso and budín volador served up on flying saucers, implacable yet patriotic brothel madams with names like Pantaleta de Bombacha, local dances like El Terremoto Florido or La Pingüina Acalorada, sweet and complacent cousins with nicknames like La Renguita Coloradita Bizquita Culoncita, and stuff like that. All to delight the readers of a First World where none of those hideous things, which, out of delicacy and piety, were called “magic” though they were sordidly “realistic,” ever happened.

  He even had a title he considered Machiavellianly perfect, regional and international at the same time. A title that, no doubt, IKEA would’ve envied: Minotaur Rumba. (He’d even considered making it stronger by calling it Minotaur Rumbita, since diminutives added a certain tropical flavor to the cover: but he didn’t want to complicate the lives of his hypothetical yet inevitable translators either, he thought.)

  There, in Minotaur Rumba, the perfect fusion of the mythic and the salacious. And the barely subliminal idea—always so enticing to Europeans and Americans—that Latin America is the most winding and perhaps redeeming and adventurous of labyrinths in which to rumba. But, of course (like Henry James in his day, so many times, too many times), he’d failed. Because then, in Minotaur Rumba, his dictator was overcome by some irresistible urge to leave it all behind. And he gave up his bloody throne to make his real dream come true: to go to Barcelona to become a writer of the Boom and to succeed. “Is there anything better than a novel with a dictator? Of course there is: a novelist dictator!” the enlightened and delusional despot asked and answered himself. And, of course, events precipitated when he initiated a fiery relationship with a fluorescent beauty of the gauche divine who’d been Kurt Vonnegut’s lover and John Cheever’s student in Iowa. And there were also appearances by Francis Bacon and the voluntarily auto-insomniac Warren Zevon, during his stint in Spain, refusing to sleep until he died, raising his glass, and saying that thing about “We love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them” back in days when people still read a lot and read slowly, and time expanded with a book in your hand instead of shrinking on a screen, because writers wrote books to give the gift of different lives and distinct deaths. And bars opened never to close serving drinks named after novelists and the color of ink. And you could hear a tribe of exiled coya assassins, playing protest songs with quenas and charangos in the metro. Yes, everything fit in there (though he’d forgotten to include a Nazi). Baroque rococo. And one chapter in the book would reveal, at last, the impassioned and mysterious reason why Marito punched Gabo in Mexico; it hadn’t been over a woman or anything like that, but, rather, over reams of blank pages: an idea for a fucking story both considered their own but couldn’t write.

  Minotaur Rumba would include that story as a kind of appendix, written, in the end, by the ex-tyrant, disoriented by mystical visions, like a quasi-castaway on the beaches of the Costa Brava, who ends up dying in the arms of a recently arrived young Chilean or Mexican writer to whom he bequeathed the legacy of the revelations of his exegesis and whom he obliged to continue his mission. But in the next chapter it would be discovered that the entire preceding episode was nothing more than the dream of the protagonist (yes, at one time his characters had the capacity to dream, which he no longer has, and he clung to the remnants of those dreams with fingernails and eyelids, eyelids being the fingernails of the eyes), who then woke up, disenchanted, in his charming Eixample flat. And, tired of being rejected by the local gauche divine, he understood that his thing would always be the far right. And so he returned, resentful and furious, to his homeland. And there accepted his fate as dictator and gave everyone a new kind of boom. And his first step was to build a bonfire and burn all the manuscripts of local writers, many of them, it must be said, so bad.

  And, of course, soon, almost immediately, alas, that book had already become another of his books, another book like all his previous books. A book that, nevertheless, he’d opted not to publish and to store in his file of potential posthumous materials that was turned to smoke in a possibly purifying fire (or so he’d convinced himself), the work and action of his sister. Penelope, the madwoman from the mad family, burning it all down in a gothic frenzy just before she was committed for life and who, in the end, years after that fire, burned too.

  A crazy nun who’d known Penelope in another life, Maxi’s sister, had followed and pursued her for years with a Les Miserables plan. And had caught her at last at that “wellness monastery” where Penelope had been committed. And the crazy nun, crazier than his sister, had set fire to all of it. And there, Penelope had died and been reincarnated as a literary legend. The theretofore bestselling author had ascended, living dead and beneficially malleable, to a subject of academic study, on the basis of, inevitably, “the real story behind her imagined stories.” And, paradoxically and ironically, Penelope had become his benefactor, transforming him—by blood and inheritance—into her literary executor.

  And so, his life was now solved and his body of work had no solution. At last, and in the most unexpected way,
Penelope had become, for him, a kind of ambiguous and fraternal Medici. A strange Medici whose intentions weren’t entirely about the love of art, but a Medici all the same. A patron for him, someone who—throughout his spasmodic career, in the sharing out of possible favors and assistance for his work—had previously always ended up with Borgias: freaks like ScreaMime calling on him for a demented project whose only purpose was to legitimize them as artistic personalities and who always ended up disappearing or killing each other without ever paying him his due; always knowing that nothing would come of it, that nobody would take his complaints all that seriously, because in the end he was the most unstable element of all.

  So it’d gone for him: his establishment elders and his contemporaries fighting and hunting for their spot in the safari had always approached him with caution.

  And so, better, just in case, to reject him, to remove him from the picture; because he always came out of focus, making noise.

  The successive and ever younger litters of supposed avant-gardists respected him, yes, but always at a safe distance, on the other side of the iron bars and obeying that sign that instructed them not to feed the beast that, it warned, if you’re not careful, could rip open your chest and eat your heart raw. Yes, he was, always, like an organ rejected when the time came for the transplant or like one of those cysts it’s better to excise quickly for fear of metastasis. He was toxic. He had a great sense of humor. And his gifts (or dones in Spanish, which he sometimes referred to as his “ding-dones,” because they had something ringing and annoying about them) turned out to be impossible to ever take full advantage of. His impact had been his influence, but it was an influence that went unacknowledged. No: he was not an influencer. And his virtues made apparent the flaws of others and his social ability was comparable to his physical clumsiness. “You’re a genius, but you’re not especially flexible,” he’d once been told, somewhere between compliment and insult, by a powerful and superb literary agent. And, ever since, he pronounces that word “flexible” silently to himself, as if it were a singing insect, its brittle body lodged in his tone-deaf throat.