The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Night falls over that fallen city. He and Uncle Hey Walrus and Penelope try first to find a functioning payphone, which is no mean feat (the pay-phones almost never work and their main function is to be coin-stealing slot machines) and, when at last they do, nobody picks up on the other end. And they exit the immense waiting area at Confirmación—a lobby designed somewhere far away, to be graced by kings and aristocrats—and make their way through all the Santa Clauses, sweating out the absurdity of being dressed up like that in the summer. And they begin to make their way, on foot, up The Widest Avenue in the World, which flows into the train station. And, true, they could have taken a taxi. But hailing a vacant one at that time on that day isn’t easy. It’s sunset on Saturday, the 24th of December (and he always wondered if sunset shouldn’t take place starting just after midday, instead of during the last few imprecise minutes before nightfall begins), and the streets are bustling with people, like on a classic Hollywood movie set, and they were all extras, lugging packages around, propelled by an obligatory and collective happiness and with no lines of dialogue to distinguish them. Some are already a little drunk and well fed and are beginning to digest in their faces those twisted smiles that’ll turn into menacing sneers by the time the party starts. And he and Uncle Hey Walrus and Penelope leave their suitcases at the station luggage office and walk unencumbered but weighed down by not knowing where to go. They have no keys to the apartment and so all they can do is treat the whole thing like a treasure hunt, they decide. And Uncle Hey Walrus is very good at this: at making them believe, at least for the first few blocks, that they are playing at “the definitive and three-dimensional version of hide-and-seek.” “We have to find the hiding mommies and daddies,” he announced. And when they hear this, he laughs a little more and Penelope laughs a little less. And there they go and he, now, in his bed, watches them set off and sighs a long and drawn-out sigh. And walking down The Widest Avenue in the World isn’t easy. Walking there makes them even more tired. The perspective is exhausting: all that horizon in the distance and all that sky overhead and each footstep weighs more than it should. In the first few blocks of The Widest Avenue in the World there isn’t much: bruised and bitten apples with squat family houses and neighborhood bars and people sitting on the sidewalk fanning themselves, some bare chested, the smoke of buses rolling over them as if perfuming them for the most toxic of celebrations. And, at last, they begin to approach the city center, one of the multiple centers of that decentered city. And there, that obelisk he would have liked so much to swap out for a towering and black monolith, and they turn right and head down “The Street of the Movie Theaters.” One after another. Like neon giants. Signs announcing the big end-of-the-year premieres, and they find it impossible not to read all of them, wandering off and pausing every so often to check out the photographs of the movies on the doors. Movie theaters of every kind and shape. Colossal theaters with majestic names and small theaters where old movies, already too worn out and broken, with missing or misplaced scenes, wind up getting shown. Classic and artless movies that, because of their poor condition, become avant-garde. New and involuntary versions of The Time Machine or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Movies that, when seen again in fragments, end up revealing new meaning and utility: movies about a group of kids ritually devoured by subterranean monsters and about a divorced father who invents lies to amuse his children. And they come to the end of that street and turn left down another street, where there are no cars, just people and boutiques (a pedestrian walkway, and he and Penelope regain some of their energy, because they like this urban transgression, where their feet usurp the place of tires) and maybe, who knows, their parents are around there somewhere. There’s an “institute” where “performances” take place and, a little farther along, a bar where their parents took them many times: an artists’ bar where, beside a stairway, there’s a barrel brimming with walnuts that always reminded him of the barrel of apples where Jim hides to hear what the pirates are talking about. And, no, their parents are not there, and they head up another street and brush past a stadium where, on the weekends, a TV show of absurd yet irresistible masked wrestlers is filmed and broadcast (and where they also put on shows for everyone in the family and, no, please, can their grandparents not take them to another new version of Holiday on Ice this year). And there, next, is that huge abandoned factory (where, though nobody knows it yet, though everybody is talking about it, “subversive elements” are taken to be interrogated and tortured), that within a few years will be a discoteca called Coliseum and where he and Penelope will dance to Talking Heads until they bleed from the noses in their own heads, talking nonstop thanks to a powdery chemical. And they skirt the big department store that (he and Penelope look at each other and say nothing) their parents and their guerilla-chic cell were preparing to take by force in the next few minutes. And they pass by his school, looking more and more like a ruin surrounded by ruins. And they continue on past it and get back on The Widest Avenue in the World and turn up something that he’ll never be sure if it’s an avenue or a street. And there are all those bookstores and he already feels that thing he’ll keep feeling forever: a Pavlovian salivation and addict’s pupil dilation every time he passes by any accumulation of books. And the temptation to let go of Uncle Hey Walrus’s hand is so great. To lose himself so he can find himself there inside, amid everything yet to be read and everything he’ll never read. Someone told him once that those bookstores never close, that they stay open all night, and he has a hard time believing it; but it’s also true that some of the people there inside have acquired the soft and transparent hue of creatures who haven’t seen the sun in millennia; and he says to himself he wouldn’t mind staying there forever, and being like them. To be able to step out of his own story (of what he knows is going to happen, something he knows will be terrible) to slip away into the stories of so many others who he knows nothing about. But Uncle Hey Walrus has been asking questions along the way, of people they run into, crossing them off one by one (before they’re completely erased, not long now, by the erasers of History), and he throws up his hands. And they stop and go into one of the various pizzerias of similar names and eat a few slices, thick and suffocated in cheese, alongside other young men and old children and, yes, they’re divorced fathers with their children, sampling the menu, at the time, typical of their new condition, before, within the next few years, the imported chain hamburger joints will disembark to nourish the loneliness of shared and alternating weekends. And now, they’re in front of that “cultural building” with a movie theater up on the ninth floor. He and Penelope have gone up there many times (the excitement of going to the movies by way of an elevator) and have seen, sitting in uncomfortable seats on a tragic and worn-out carpet, many strange and different movies. And, among them, for the first of many times, 2001: A Space Odyssey. They went in one way and came out different; but now there isn’t even time to stop and look at the posters and see what was showing, on those programs covered in letters that he collects and that’re so different from the programs of “normal” movie theaters, which contain nothing but ads and schedules and that you have to pay a few coins to obtain, because if not, the usher might take you to a little room in the back, behind the screen, and chop you up, so they say. And heading up that avenue or street or whatever it is, they come to an intersection with that other avenue and, on the corner, the stately building where they live. With many balconies and an old carriage entrance and the whisper of being haunted. And Uncle Hey Walrus and the two of them go up to their apartment door and knock and there’s no answer (it’s Saturday, no Rosalita there inside) but the echo of their knocking. And, out of the corner of his eye, he glances down the hall and sees a man in a top hat and frock coat who smiles at him and lifts a finger to his lips. And then the three of them continue up the avenue. And pass stalls densely laden with flowers like small jungles and newspaper and magazine stands like paper temples and kiosks selling candies like chewable cathedrals (among which the
recent arrival of a foreign chocolate in prism-shaped packaging has resulted in an aesthetic-gustatory cataclysm among him and his friends, theretofore committed to a local brand that included little dolls of those masked wrestlers who they watch leap and fall on Sunday nights) and ice cream shops with a multitude of flavors and an amusement park that is closing its doors but still giving off light. And Uncle Hey Walrus points up at a tower with a spiraling slide winding around it and he says, “That attraction is called Helter Skelter.” And they enter the zone of parks and statues. Generals on horseback pointing in different directions, old patriots in armchairs, a cemetery of elegant chalets with a fair of hippy folk art spreading out around it, stalls manned by kids with a romantic and Raphaelite air. More of the soon-to-die dead among them. And their parents are nowhere to be found; but a man, sitting at a table at a bar near the tombs, under the trunk-sized branches of a rubber tree, tells Uncle Hey Walrus that he’d heard something about a “Christmas celebration-happening” at the rose park in the Palermo forest, and he points in that direction, like another statue. And Uncle Hey Walrus swallows a couple more pills and there they go and there they keep going and they pass by the Botanical Garden and the Zoo (and the smell that both give off is like that smell he’ll breathe in not long thereafter when he opens closets and removes the dead clothes of his father and mother) and regiments of soldiers and they cross over and under bridges. And they’re tired of so many broken sidewalks and nonfunctioning stoplights and Penelope can’t go on anymore and so he picks her up and puts her on his shoulders until he can’t go on anymore, and Uncle Hey Walrus is speaking more strangely all the time (his vowels sounding more and more like consonants) and finally they find the site of the party. Where everyone is playing in the forest while the wolves are away. Dancing in slow motion and drinking as if in fast motion and smoking with the parsimonious speed of that green smoke that rises and rises along other streets and avenues into the map-less air. “They must be here,” says Uncle Hey Walrus. And he and Penelope know they won’t be. But, again, they look at each other and say nothing (a look that premieres that night, but that they’ll give each other again so many times over the years) and he’s the first to start crying and then Penelope cries and then Uncle Hey Walrus cries too. And, all around them, everyone is dancing in colorful dresses and the perfumed scent of the roses mixes with the scents of other plants. And there they stay, as if in the final scene of a movie that is really just beginning, with the camera pulling back and slowly but inexorably drifting away, while elsewhere, in more and more places, the TVs and radios begin to interrupt their scheduled programming to broadcast live from that department store where “an authentic battle royale is unfolding between the forces of order and a communist-terrorist cell.” And a voice addresses the auditorium. The voice of a child, another child, neither he nor Penelope. A child in the performance of a play. A role for which he has been rehearsing. A voice that, almost apologizing and addressing the assembled audience, says: “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended, that you have slumber’d here while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream, gentles, do not reprehend: if you pardon we will mend.”

  And thus comes the end of the Age of Marvelous Moments.

  Así son las cosas.

  So it goes.

  † Those who devote themselves to such matters—to telling stories—claim that one of the most oft-repeated words in the writing of William Shakespeare is “dreams.”

  Something gleaned from the work of someone about whose life little is known.

  Dreams.

  Everyone dreams there inside and on the stage.

  Everyone asking all the time for night to fall so the curtain can rise.

  Everyone insisting on the motif that the line—just a chalked indication on the floor of where to stand to recite the trance-like monologue—that separates the real from the fantasy, wakefulness from dream, is very thin.

  Everyone dreams in Shakespeare and of Shakespeare.

  There, the dream as a narrative device, but, also, as a way to make all the irrational things that’re done while awake more or less comprehensible. In Shakespeare, dreams are for learning, learning more about what we call reality.

  Gloucester dreams “troublous dreams” that make him sad.

  Romeo and Mercutio dream that dreamers often lie, but in bed asleep while they do dream things true.

  Shylock dreams of moneybags and Richard III dreams of the spilled blood of all his many victims and Macbeth dreams of the “three weird sisters” and of murdering sleep, “the innocent sleep. Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

  Julius Caesar mistrusts dreamers and Toby Belch warns of their lunacies.

  Calban falls asleep weeping for his dreams and the daughter of Leontes wakes up laughing from hers and Sebastian asks not to be awoken if that which he is living is a dream.

  Hamlet dreams a great deal, more than anyone; he dreams all the time, he waking-dreams dreams that make the world keep on moving while everyone else is sleeping, he dreams dreams that are “but a shadow” and of “the very substance of the ambitious” capable of making it possible for dreams to come true on the other side of death, while the angels sing so you have sweet dreams and good nights.

  And Shakespeare dreams up all of them, rhyming “When most I wink, then do mine eyes see, / For all the day they view things unrespected; / But when I sleep, in dreams they look on three, / And darkly bright are bright in dark directed … How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made / By looking on thee in the living day, / When in the dead night they fair imperfect shade / Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay? / All days are nights to see till I see thee, / And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.”

  And he dreams of the excessively restless and creative teacher of “artistic activities” at Gervasio Vicario Cabrera, colegio n.°1 del Distrito Escolar Primero.

  She came to the capital from the provinces. Full of good ideas. Too many ideas that, for a lot of people, are not wholly good. She has already been warned by the school headmaster (a man with the grumpy physiognomy of a bulldog who, paradoxically, likes to smoke the longest and finest and slenderest cigarettes, just then appearing on the market under the oh-so-feminine Virginia Slims brand name) that her “curriculum is under observation and surveillance.”

  A few too many parents were a little disturbed—or didn’t find it at all amusing—that she taught their children a song she’d written, openly defying the bulldozers that would soon topple their school building, for the lengthening and widening of “The Widest and Soon-to-Be Longest Avenue in the World” and had them howl it at their year-end performance. “Too much protest,” some of them paled; “anarcho-communist hymn,” others reddened.

  The next thing—the next “artistic activity” to be carried out by the students—seems less offensive or less offensive on its surface. A “loose adaptation” (this teacher can’t bear the idea of leaving something unmodified, even an undisputed classic) of a play by William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which she hasn’t hesitated to rechristen A Summer Night’s Daydream. And she presents her project with great care and passion. She explains that, over the years, one ceases to be interested in the youthful ardors of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, growing up with the fury of Macbeth and Richard II, and, at last, attaining the twilight wisdom of King Lear and The Tempest. But that, on the other hand, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an ageless enigma without expiration date: a strange artifact that fascinates all ages.

  The headmaster and the representatives of the parents’ association have gone to the effort of reading it.

  And, at first, everything seems in and to abide by the established order.

  And the other male teachers eye her top to bottom and front to back in the faculty lounge and mock her in low
voices and secretly but obviously desire her and, without knowing it, turn into bumbling fools, into “rude mechanicals,” like those in the play: seduced and enchanted by the magical powers of that divine girl.

  There, in those pages, an ancient Merovingian legend irradiated by Greek motifs and fundamentally Shakespearized, understanding Shakespeare as the first great master of the mash-up (his only non-genius trait is his inability to come up with his own storylines) and of honest, Dylanite-Nabokovian thievery. Taking some banal borrowed material and turning it into something incandescent. A forest comedy, humans controlled by the caprices of supernatural beings, playful jealousy and spite, fleeting and indestructible romances without explicit details and popular and aristocratic weddings under the light of the moon between an Athenian duke and an Amazonian queen, magic and an ass’s head and a mischievous sprite and love nectar from a magical flower and storylines within storylines and plays within the play and spatiotemporal ruptures and, ah, a magical and lost boy, an “Indian changeling,” who ends up living among the gods.

  There are a lot of minor roles as little fairies to be given out to students of lesser histrionic talent or ability to memorize their lines (the most sought-after role is that of Puck, “the merry wanderer of the night,” and Pertusato, Nicolasito is the ideal and undisputed candidate, but …).

  There are, also, in that play, personality disorders and, if you look carefully, with squinted eyes, feminist and homoerotic and zoophilic winks, and even metafictional gusts where, near the end, the audience is informed that everything they have seen has been nothing more and nothing less than a dream, a collective and shared dream.

  But nobody—headmaster, teachers, parents—says anything; because better Shakespeare than some “leftist writer.”

  And, besides, who knows how “that (other) village lunatic” (and, yes, Uncle Hey Walrus did meet her one afternoon, at the exit to the school, and something like sparks flew between them, like specimens of the same race finding each other, far from home) is going to pull off producing all of that. Though it was known she’d accomplished more complex feats: she’d already found a way—astonishing the authorities and thereby securing the position months before—to stage the patriotic flight of the soldier/general Gervasio Vicario Cabrera over the heads of the audience without breaking any of the boys’ necks.