The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And no, he didn’t discuss it.

  And what was the name of that little childhood friend who went, so many times, with him and Penelope to see 2001: A Space Odyssey; the one with whom they listened to that other Floyd, the Pink one.

  And no, it hadn’t been all bad, remembering and asking himself questions like that, revisiting those vital constants of his inconstant occupation, back for a few days in the place where he was born dead.

  In hotels that for a couple days let him feel Nabokovian and monolithic. In elevators with the music of saxophones and clarinets, the typical instruments of hotel ambience. In rooms like those of the rocker Pink or the astronaut Dave. With those TVs that, when turned on, automatically tuned in that really disturbing channel devoted to that very hotel where you were staying, but that there, on the screen, looked so different, like an ideal and perfected version of that place where you were. Like a heavenly alternative to the hotel that, on this side of the screen, was more of a more or less comfortable purgatory. There, on the other side, minibars on the accounts of others and time suspended, to float, stretched out across meticulously made beds with heavy space-breathing where, sometimes, you were startled by those bright white towels twisted into the shape of a swan coming into the room. And to dive into that inviting pond of sheets to recover from the harsh savannah of airports. From those small supposedly comfortable republics that were actually tyrannical and where the worst of capitalism and communism were in communion, with absurdly high prices, overcrowding, and nobody giving you any explanation or respecting your rights, where everything could be lost or blown up and your horror is only mildly attenuated by those ghost zones, with closed shops, like secret havens where the PA system and Wi-Fi didn’t reach and you could read in peace.

  Outside the hotel, surrounding that safe zone, that no-place, lurked the real world of fiction. The little literary community that, for many of his colleagues, was an exciting place, but that, for him, was the closest thing to submitting yourself to drastic and invasive medical checkups of the kind that leave you impotent and trembling for days.

  Various and sundry risks and discomforts.

  Discovering already in the skies that you’ve chosen the wrong book for the flight. Encounters with once-close writers who now resemble worn-out mannequins always crammed into hideous shrunken sweaters of a grade-school sky-blue. Presentations featuring some flammable girl whose heat he got just close enough to before running away with the more-than-justified fear of getting burned. Or the unexpected—but stylistically and anecdotally appropriate—incursion into the room of his nonagenarian first grade teacher, “Señorita Margarita,” who’d thrown herself on him, releasing shrieks of “I taught him to write! I taught him to write!” The woman was recently escaped from an old-folks home and was quickly subdued by a couple nurses (and all of this to the great pleasure of a number of his followers who nudged each other, so satisfied to have come and to confirm there wasn’t much difference between what happened in his life and in his books). And even some readers who demonstrated they really understood his work with a presentation that was disturbing for him (readers he’d de/formed and who, in the end, frightened him a little bit, always asking super complicated questions about characters they seemed to know better than he did), who’d adopted his last monolithic and odysseic book as if it were a long-lost child, or the girlfriend they never had. And they honored it as a “living posthumous book,” or something like that, and regarded him the way you regard a dead man, not knowing this dead man is also looking back at them and thinking, please, could they just stop looking at him already and let him rest in peace, right? Back from his tour, even his wilted journalistic side experienced a slight new blossoming. And he was asked—by the same massive and prestigious publications, the same ones where he’d been published in his early “flavor-of-the-week” days—for short essays about the condition of the writer in hard times. Editorial directors with the voices of children called him on the phone (they were so much younger than he was, younger in every sense) and gave him instructions and scope (set not by them but by the art directors, based on the illustrations they were planning to use) and specified due dates and length, but (he always found himself forced to ask, almost apologizing) rarely specifying how much they were going to pay him.

  And he said yes to all of it. He was an easy yes. His yes was a yeah yeah yeah.

  And he complied with the request to insert some or other occasional and mischievous dart/stinger for the hypersensitive and allergic communities of online writers/performers and aspirants to everything and that whole milieu into whatever he wrote.

  Articles of the kind that always received a disproportionate number of quick and irascible and accusatory comments online from people who seemed to always be desperately alert and more than ready to willfully belittle anything he’d written (nobody owned what he said or wrote anymore; everything was passed from one keyboard to the next and, with each step of remove, it became degraded by successive commentators and masticators until, like with chewing gum, it got blown up until it exploded with a plop and lost all its original flavor and wound up an annoyance stuck to the soles of shoes). Everything was always analyzed vis-à-vis a display of a rather diffuse capacity for reflection, always and forever conditioned by personal issues.

  Years before, those were the people who talked to themselves on the street or whose relatives opted not to invite them over for Christmas dinner or who, when flights were delayed, assumed leadership of the rest of the passengers and started in with the shouting in front of the counters, feeling themselves something like Lenin in the Finlyandsky station.

  Now, on the other hand, they were sure the whole world listened to them and read them. The internet was their garden where they could go around defecating among the bushes or ripping up flowers. Not the paradisiac Garden of Earthly Delights but the purgative more than purgatory Garden of Earthly Deceits. They were, yes, strange people: people with a great capacity to hate everyone else and love themselves. Narcissuses staring into the liquid mirrors of their screens, looking out for any possible allusion to their personas or methods. And their fury at what he wrote on commission was considerable, and that reaction, for his bosses, made his piece “a complete success.” Because “success” was measured by the number of comments received and they didn’t have to be positive and it didn’t matter if they were unintelligible or unnecessary (suddenly, relying automatically on the technological format, everyone felt technically and automatically insightful and that they had the right and obligation to say something about everything). Or to denounce errors of orthography (once, because he didn’t subscribe to the specifications of Real Academia Española of the kind where “blue jeans” is turned into “bluyín,” he’d committed the outrage of refusing to use “en boga” [meaning en vogue] opting instead for “en voga” and he’d been stoned online for foreignizing and Frenchifying). Or to complain that “I didn’t understanded anythings” for the simple fact that what he wrote made some sense and used proper grammar. And, yes, the thing with his writing was you had to read it. Which is to say: you had to concentrate and devote your attention to what you were reading, something that didn’t contain abbreviations or little faces or little hearts, something with sentences that sometimes exceeded three lines in length. The disturbing thing for him was, in many cases, the late-night hour when those comments were posted: didn’t anybody work? didn’t anybody sleep?

  In any case, he had fleetingly been consecrated a kind of nemesis to all of them. With indifference and resignation and for the money. That was the dumb and lightweight enemy luck had dealt him, bad luck, oh-so-lazy luck. Devices, little devices? Batteries Not Included? Who was laughing at whom? Who would laugh last when there was no longer any reception? Had that become his subject? Why not, on the other hand, choose a rival/accomplice instead of an enemy? Take on the admirable lushness of the nineteenth-century novel not to vanquish it, but to transform it, to bring it back to the wastelands of the twenty-fir
st century so it could germinate again, with equal power and modernized forms? (Thinking of what a challenge it would be gave him vertigo, dizziness, sighs more arrhythmic than romantic.) Or was it maybe that you got the enemy you deserved, one on your level; and he’d gotten the flatlands of screens and tablets? Was he really that worried about that whole electrified world? Was he seriously going to comment again about how the new and insensate phones had done away with the need to check the time on the faces of watches, normal watches, not watches bursting with functions like tracking your heartbeats and the calories you consumed at breakfast? to evoke the lost pleasure of hanging up the phone like someone delivering a slap or leaving it off the hook like someone turning their back? to laugh at that religious app that lets you confess via multiple choice thumb swipes? to compare letters on blank pages with photographs of chromosomes? to fire off a wink more silly than nervous mentioning the selfie of Dorian Gray? to lament the picture of families no longer gathered around the warm light of a fire but attached to the cool glow of their respective little screens? to call attention to the not at all random fact that they call those tools for tracking down information “search engines” and not “find engines”? and to the fact that he and those of his caste have always been surfing on waves of cerebral electricity, that there’s nothing new in the idea of thinking of everything and nothing? to top it all off with something like “For the first time in history, writing is the enemy of writing”? Nah: the truth is that in the dark and stormy nights of his soul, at his three in the morning, he thought that he thought about all of that because someone still thought it was worthwhile to pay him for the fact that he thought like that, aloud, he thought.

  When it came to the editors of his journalism (his other readers), he took it upon himself to include, at the beginning, some obviously out of place paragraph, like a silly little decoy, so his bosses would detect it immediately. And they could edit/cut it. And they would be content and satisfied at/for having edited, having cut, having altered something that was not and never would he his. And so, subsequently, he could do whatever he wanted and turn in a definitive version (the first one, the one he’d not sent), lying that “I have followed your instructions down to the last detail and you’re right, it’s much better like this.”

  And everybody happy.

  And it surprised him—and it didn’t surprise him, it pained him a little—to discover that those more or less clever texts composed in a single morning had a great impact and were taken seriously as “frenzied diatribes” or “apocalyptic preoccupations” about the plugged-in evolution of humanity. And they earned more esteem than any of his books. Or than his last book, which was about precisely that, about the end of reading (and, as such, also about the end of writing) as it’d been experienced up until that point.

  It didn’t take him long to realize that people—even people who read—no longer wanted or were able to handle the concussive shock of reading long books, book-books. And—instead and in their stead—they preferred to be moved by reading a few pages about the growing difficulty of reading deep and devotedly. And with that, their part was done. It was like going to church once a week to confess so you could go on sinning by/through omission.

  He was also frequently asked to present books of others, due to his ingenuity when it came to overblown praise (the ingenuity ran through making the praise sound sharp and funny and plausible) with an immediate expiration date and implicit ban on subsequently reproducing what he said in written or visual media (he said that, when it came to the so-called “cultural life,” book presentations were like Las Vegas in terms of that unquestionable dictum: “What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas”).

  There was also an attempt to incorporate him as a more or less stable/rotating judge on the racetrack of literary prizes where the role assumed was, in reality, far from that of judge and far too close to that of accomplice. Quickly—very quickly—he’d discovered how those things worked. You were given an amount of money in exchange for the silence of showing your face and offering justifications like “A fine and unflinching prose, perfect for capturing the iniquities of our time” and, maybe most important of all: “A novel that seems to be ripped right out of our cruel reality, something we could read in the newspapers of today and yesterday and tomorrow.”

  † The reading of the different sections of newspapers like an alternative form of life cycle: as children, we read the comics; as adolescents, the horoscopes (in tandem with equally imprecise political prognostications); as young adults, the schedules in the event section and the cultural supplements; in middle age, the weather forecast as if it were some fascinating and vital thing; in old age, the curiosity and relief of not yet appearing in obituaries.

  The reading of dreadful and almost violent manuscripts in their lack of talent and quality when you’re a judge for a literary prize is, a little, like sadomasochistically reading the crime section: deaths, murders, absurd accidents, horrifying photographs of dismembered bodies and babies thrown out of windows by parents during a fight, and someone always explaining, with wide eyes and an empty gaze, that “I don’t know why I did it.” But they did do it. They wrote it. And presenting those prizes is a form of confession that seeks absolution and recognition and that—in many cases, another form of the crime and offense—is agreed on beforehand.

  The system of prizes never reported in the cultural pages of newspapers—to keep you from feeling too bad and too guilty, to keep the organizers from undergoing the discomfort of directly asking/telling the jury the direction their vote should go—was that of placing the manuscript they wanted to win among a handful of monstrosities, facilitating its rapid selection.

  And everybody happy.

  But he—and his “out of place” comments during deliberations, discomfiting the consciences of his colleagues and irritating the organizers—had proven to be, right from the get-go, a not especially … flexible judge.

  And soon he stopped being “summoned.”

  And he ceased to appear on the systematic listicles of the “Heirs of the Boom” (as far as he knew, he hadn’t actually inherited anything from all of that beyond the implicit obligation to speak well of and honor all those statues; and he was so bad at admiring—or at least pretending to—marble and bronze idols) that periodically filled the pages of cultural supplements. More than an heir, he was disinherited.

  And again, little by little, those offers were drying up. Those trips in exchange for a ticket and lodging and “symbolic payment” (to which he responded that he’d left his symbolic stage behind, and now, please, take into account that he was in his realist or, at least, impressionist, period); always aboard airplanes that seemed to have something called writer’s class: increasingly narrow seats that kept you from minimally extending your arms to half-open a book, less leg room, and apparently specially designed for the torture and execution of those people who, after all, spent a good part of the day sitting down anyway, so best not to complain, eh.

  And that popular writer-photographer—famous for submitting his subjects to implausible and arbitrary poses—who called to coordinate a time and place for a shoot kept postponing over and over again. He couldn’t decide—he’d told him with a voice, half hypnotist and half pediatrician, a convincing voice—whether to “photograph you naked and being chased by a pack of wild dogs or naked and chasing a flock of chickens … There’s also the possibility of crucifying you upside down, naked, of course.” And the encounter, in the end, never took place (he suspected he would’ve ended up with rabid Argentinian guard dogs barking at his inverted body on a cross, covered in chicken shit, or something like that).

  Soon, he was only asked to offer remembrances on the successive unhappy deathiversaries of that film director/painter he referred to as The Living Dead Man (of a brief and fragile life and an invulnerable death and a wide-ranging and powerful body of work, and who was his friend toward the end, making him a kind of appendix to his legend) or to contribute words to the lat
est obituaries of more-or-less proximal colleagues where he always responded by (this was the not-so-secret formula for obituaries) saying something about them he would’ve wanted them to say about him. And sometimes—and some nights—he wondered if The Living Dead Man or IKEAS or all his other brothers in arms might not actually be creatures caught in the remnants of the original and primary ectoplasm of Pertusato, Nicolasito, pursuing him throughout all the years, one after another, calling him.

  And then his phone stopped ringing all together.

  And there’s nothing louder and more deafening than a telephone that never rings, there, not looking at you while you look at it all the time. A telephone that doesn’t ring is like a volatile loved one who no longer speaks to you (call that a “loved one” with great care, like someone handling something both delicate and covered with sharp edges) and a time bomb that never blows up (but that you think might make your head explode at any moment with the last and worst of all the bad news); but even still … even still … And he, who’d always hated the voice of telephones, now longed for it. Somewhat. A little bit. It tends to happen: you end up missing even what you hate.

  And emails stopped arriving to his inbox (and he stopped getting responses to his own from the same people who were incessantly tweeting their lives every five minutes, even to share the news that he’d just written them though they didn’t think to answer him; because it was so much more important to write in public than in private), with the exception of health insurance promotions and newsletters from the advertising departments of publishing houses. Promises of good care in terrible moments and announcements composed as if to relate cosmic events no observer could possibly miss. Lists of coverage for unprecedented and novel illnesses and information about the fortunes paid for post-mortem manuscripts of soon-to-touch-down-in-the-city unknown geniuses (a dead star is born) or brief and steamy and orgasmic opuscules (very SHE-IKEA) or first novels of a thousand pages (big bangs that almost always proved to be little pfffs) more like those of HE-IKEA than like his own, which were compared, always, not to nineteenth-century classics but to millennial TV series.