A noted French neurologist, a full-time researcher, told me the other night that he had discovered a function of the human brain that seemed to be of great importance. He only had one problem: he hadn’t been able to establish what it was for. I asked him, with a certain hopefulness, if there wasn’t any possibility that it might be the function that regulates premonitions, portentous dreams, and the transmission of thoughts. His only response was a pitying look.
I had seen that same look eighteen years earlier, when I asked a similar question of a very dear friend, who was also investigating the human brain, at the University of Mexico. My opinion, already by then, was that telepathy and its diverse means are not the stuff of sorcerers, as some incredulous people seem to believe, but simple organic faculties that science repudiates, because it does not know them, just as it repudiated the theory that the Earth is round when they believed it to be flat. My friend admitted, if I remember correctly, that the area of the brain whose functions are fully verified is very small, but he refused to admit that in the rest of those shadows there might be a place to anticipate the future.
I made telepathic jokes that he disqualified as pure coincidences, in spite of some of them seeming too obvious. One night I phoned him to invite him to our house for dinner, and only afterward did I realize there wasn’t enough food in the kitchen. I called him back to ask him to bring a particular and unusual bottle of wine, and a piece of Iberian sausage. Mercedes shouted from the kitchen to ask him to pick up some dish soap as well. But he’d already left his house. However, at the moment of hanging up the phone, I had the clear impression that, by an impossible to explain marvel, my friend had received the message. Then I wrote it down on a piece of paper, so he wouldn’t doubt my version, and out of pure poetic virtuosity I added that he would also bring a rose. A little while later, he and his wife arrived with the things we’d requested, including the same brand of dish soap we used. “The supermarket happened to be open, and we decided to bring you these things,” they said, almost apologizing. Only the rose was missing. That day my friend and I began a different dialogue that still hasn’t finished. The last time I saw him, six months ago, was entirely devoted to establishing in which part of the brain the conscience is found.
Life, more than one believes, is embellished by this mystery. The night before the assassination of Julius Caesar, his wife Calpurnia saw with terror all the windows of the house suddenly opened at the same time, with no wind and no noise. Centuries later, the novelist Thornton Wilder attributed to Julius Caesar a phrase that is not in his war memoirs or in the fascinating chronicles of Plutarch and Suetonius, but defines better than anything the human condition of the emperor: “I govern innumerable men, but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps.” The history of humanity—since young Joseph deciphered dreams in Egypt—is full of these fabulous flashes. I know identical twins who had pain in the same molar at the same time in different cities, and who when they’re together have the sensation that the thoughts of one interfere with those of the other. Many years ago, in a tiny village on the Caribbean coast, I knew a healer who prided himself on curing animals from a distance if he was given a precise description and the place where it was. I saw it with my own eyes: an infected cow, whose live maggots were falling out of ulcers, while the healer was reciting a secret prayer several leagues away. However, I only remember one experiment that had taken these faculties seriously in current history. The U.S. Navy, which didn’t have a means to communicate with the nuclear submarines navigating beneath the polar ice cap, decided to try telepathy. Two compatible people, one in Washington and another on board a submarine, tried to establish a system for exchanging thought messages. It was a failure, of course, for telepathy is unpredictable and spontaneous, and does not allow for any kind of systemization. That’s its defense. Every prediction, from a morning’s foreboding to the prophecies of Nostradamus, comes coded from its conception and is only comprehended when it comes true. If it were not like that, it would defeat itself in advance.
I speak of this with such propriety because my maternal grandmother was the most lucid adept I ever knew in the science of portents. She was an old-school Catholic, so she repudiated as artifices of the black arts anything that pretended to be a methodical divination of the future. Whether they were cards, the lines in a palm, or the evocation of spirits. But she was a master of her omens. I remember her in the kitchen in our big house in Aracataca, watching over the secret signs of the fragrant breads she was taking out of the oven.
Once she saw 09 written in the leftover flour, and she moved heaven and earth until she found a lottery ticket with that number. She lost. However, the following week she won an Italian coffeepot in a raffle, with a ticket my grandfather had bought and forgotten in the pocket of his jacket the week before. It was number 09. My grandfather had seventeen children of the kind they then called “natural”—as if the ones from marriage were artificial—and my grandmother treated them as her own. They were spread out all over the coast, but she talked to all of them at breakfast time, and found out about the health of each one and how their businesses were going as if she kept up an immediate and secret correspondence. It was the tremendous era of telegrams that arrived when they were least expected and entered the house like a gust of panic. A telegram would be passed from one hand to the next with nobody daring to open it, until the providential idea occurred to someone to get a small child to open it, as if innocence had the virtue of changing the evil of bad news.
This happened once in our house, and the bewildered adults decided to leave the telegram without opening it until later, when my grandfather arrived. My grandmother didn’t bat an eyelid. “It’s from Prudencia Iguarán to let us know she’s on her way,” she said. “Last night I dreamed she was coming to visit.” When my grandfather came home he didn’t even have to open the telegram. He came home with Prudencia Iguarán, whom he’d met by chance at the train station, in a dress covered in painted birds and with a massive bouquet of flowers, and convinced that my grandfather was there due to the infallible magic of her telegram.
My grandmother died when she was almost a hundred years old without ever having won the lottery. She had gone blind, and in her final years she raved in a way that made it impossible to follow the thread of her reason. She refused to get undressed to go to sleep while the radio was on, in spite of our explanations every night that the announcer was not inside the house. She thought we were tricking her, because she could never believe in a diabolical machine that allowed us to hear someone who was talking in another faraway city.
November 25, 1980, El País, Madrid