DREAMS

Dreams and nightmares have been an important part of my life. I always went to bed like someone getting ready for a long trip: books, pills, glasses of water, clocks, a light, pencils, notebooks. To go to bed and switch off the light has been for me to submit to a totally unknown world, full of delicious as well as sinister promises. Dreams have always had a great influence on me; the first image I remember from my childhood is a dream, a terrible dream. I was on a reddish esplanade and huge teeth were approaching from both sides; it was an enormous mouth that made a strange sound. The closer the teeth came, the more high pitched their sound would become; at the point they were ready to devour me, I would wake up. In other dreams I would find myself playing on the eaves of our house in the country and all of a sudden, due to a wrong move, I would feel the most extraordinary shivers, my hands would sweat, and I would start to slide, falling into an immense dark void; the fall would become an endless agony and I would wake up right before smashing into the ground.

At other times my dreams were in full color and extraordinary people would approach me offering me their friendship, which I accepted gladly; they were gigantic creatures with smiling faces.

Later I often dreamed of Lezama, who was at a gathering in an enormous hall; music could be heard in the distance and Lezama pulled out a large pocket watch; facing him was his wife, María Luisa. I was a boy, and when I went up to him, he would open his legs and receive me smiling, while saying to María Luisa: “Look how well he is doing.” But by then Lezama was already dead.

Occasionally I dreamed that although I had been in the United States, I was back in Cuba, I do not know why, perhaps because my plane was hijacked or because someone had deceived me by telling me I could return without any problem. I was in my hot room again, but now I could never leave; I was condemned to stay there forever. I needed to receive a special notification to go to the airport, someone had to pick me up in a car that never came; I knew I could never leave that place, and that the police would come any moment and arrest me. I had already traveled around the world and learned what freedom was, but due to some strange circumstance I was back in Cuba and could not escape. I would wake up and, seeing the deteriorating walls of my room in New York, feel an indescribable joy.

I had another dream. I want to get into my mother’s house and there is a chicken-wire fence in front of the door. I repeatedly call for someone to open the door; my mother and my aunt are on the other side of the fence and I signal them. I move my hand toward my chest and birds start coming out, parrots of all colors, bigger and bigger insects and birds; I start yelling for them to open the gate, and they stare at me through the chicken wire; I continue to scream and all kinds of animals keep coming out of me, but I cannot get through the door.

In some dreams I am a painter; I have a huge loft, and create enormous paintings; I think the paintings I produce have to do with people dear to me; the color blue is predominant and people dissolve in it. Suddenly, Lázaro enters, young, slender; he greets me dejectedly, walks toward the large window facing the street, and jumps out. I scream and run down the stairs of my New York apartment, but as I am going down, I am back in Holguín; my grandmother is there, as well as several of my aunts. I tell them Lázaro has jumped out the window and they all run into the street; it is Tenth of October Street, where my mother lives. There, facedown in the mud, lies Lázaro, dead. I lift his head and look at his beautiful, muddy face; my grandmother comes, looks first at his face and then up at the heavens, saying: “My God, why?” I later tried to interpret this dream in various ways: it was not Lázaro who died but me; he is my double; the person I love most is the symbol of my destruction. For that reason it made sense that those rushing to see the body were my relatives, not Lázaro’s.

I have dreamed that when I was a kid the sea came right up to my house; it came rushing over dozens of miles, and the whole yard would be flooded. It was great to let myself float on the water; I swam for a long time in my flooded house, looking at the ceiling, taking in the briny smell of the sea that continued rushing in a torrent.

In New York I once dreamed I could fly, a privilege not granted to humans, even though we gays are called pájaros [birds]. But I was in Cuba, flying over the palm trees; it was easy, you only had to believe you could do it. Soon I was flying over Fifth Avenue in Miramar, over the royal palms that line the street; the scenery was beautiful to behold while I, joyful and radiant, flew above it, over the crowns of the palm trees. I woke up here in New York still feeling that I was high in the air.

Once while I was on vacation at Miami Beach, I had a terrible dream. I was in a very large bathroom full of excrement and had to sleep there. Surrounding me were hundreds of rare birds that moved about with great difficulty. More and more of those awful birds kept coming, gradually closing all possibility of escape; the entire horizon was full of birds; they had something metallic about them, and made a dull noise; they sounded like buzzing alarms. Suddenly I realized that all those birds had managed to get into my head, and that my brain was swelling to accommodate them. As they entered my head, I grew old. This same nightmare occurred for several nights in a row while I was in Miami and I would wake up drenched in sweat. When I flew back to New York, I was getting ready as usual for my dream, taking with me all my things and a big glass of water. I always read for at least an hour or two before going to sleep, and I was finishing A Thousand and One Nights. This was already in 1986. I had been talking with Lázaro for a while and he had just left; he was still in the building when I heard a tremendous blast in the room; it sounded like a real explosion. I thought one of my jealous lovers or a burglar had broken the window facing the street; the sound was so loud that it seemed someone must have taken an iron bar and thrown it against the window. But the windowpane was undamaged. Something very strange had occurred in the room: the glass of water on my nightstand had exploded without my touching it; it was shattered. I ran to call Lázaro back before he left the building, and we carefully searched the whole apartment. I thought that someone had taken a shot at me and had hit the glass instead. On several occasions I had received death threats from the Cuban State Security; once in a while a person had broken into my apartment and gone through my papers; at times the window that I had left closed was open but nothing had been taken, so it could not have been a burglar. What really happened that night is still shrouded in mystery for me. How could a glass of water explode with such an infernal sound? A week later I understood that this was an omen, a premonition, a message from the gods of the underworld, a new and terrible message announcing that something truly different was about to happen to me, or was already happening. The glass full of water was perhaps a sort of guardian angel, a talisman; something had penetrated the glass that for years had protected me and shielded me from all dangers: terrible illnesses, falls from trees, persecutions, prison, shots in the middle of the night, being lost at sea, or attacked by gangs of armed delinquents in New York City on various occasions. Once I was attacked in the middle of Central Park; some young men searched my pockets, pointing a gun at my head, but they found only five dollars. They fondled me so much while they searched me that we ended up making love. Afterward I asked them for a dollar to get back home and they gave it to me.

Now, the state of grace that had saved me from so many misfortunes had come to an end. On another occasion, I had found an enormous black man inside my apartment in New York when I returned home. After breaking my window and stealing all my clothes, he was approaching me, threatening me with a gun. I was able to escape and yell that there was a thief in the building; several people came out into the hallway, among them a Puerto Rican neighbor with a double-barreled shotgun, which made the black man run away leaving all my belongings behind, and me unharmed.

One day I had asked a hoodlum who was carrying an umbrella what time it was and he gave me a rude reply. I think I said a few stupid things to him and finally gave him a shove. Clearly enraged, he removed a sort of ice pick or metallic tip from his umbrella and lunged at me with its sharp point. He cut my forehead several times, aiming his attacks at my eyes; evidently he wanted to blind me and failed. I returned to my apartment all bloody, and a week later I was completely healed. My guardian angel had again protected me.

But now, something much more powerful, more mysterious, more sinister than anything I had ever experienced seemed to be controlling my fate; I had fallen out of grace. The bursting of the glass was a symbol of my final destruction. Destruction: that was my interpretation a few weeks later and it seems that, unfortunately, I was right.

Lázaro and I were once in Puerto Rico at a secluded beach where I had taken him because it reminded me of our Cuban beaches. He had opened a book, and was starting to read when a gang of muggers came, more than six of them. One pointed a gun at us that he had hidden under a handkerchief. Another one said, “Lie down on the ground and give us all you have or we will kill you right now.” I was ready to grab a stick and go after one of them, but Lázaro warned me not to; they were dangerous. We lay down on the ground while they searched us and took what little we had: swim fins, a diving mask. As the muggers were leaving I asked them to return the diving mask; one did not want to, but another decided they really had no use for it. They could have killed us, but my guardian angel had protected us: the same one who helped me survive El Morro, the one who warned me of the land mines as I was getting close to the Guantánamo naval base. Once again I had been saved.

But now the glass had burst, nothing could save me.

What was that glass that burst? It was the deity that protected me; it was the goddess that had always accompanied me, it was the Moon herself, my mother had turned into the Moon.

O Moon! You have always been at my side, offering your light in my most dreadful moments; since I was a child you were the mystery that watched over my terrors, you were the comfort of my most desperate nights, you were my very own mother, bathing me in a warmth that perhaps she never knew how to give me. In the midst of the forest, in the darkest places, in the sea, you were there with me, you were my comfort, you have always guided me in my most difficult moments. My great goddess, my true goddess, you who have protected me through so many calamities; I used to look up toward you and behold you; up to you rising above the sea, toward you at the shore, toward you among the rocks of my desolate Island, I would lift my gaze and behold you, always the same; in your face I saw an expression of pain, of suffering, of compassion for me, your son. And now, Moon, you suddenly burst into pieces right next to my bed. I am alone. It is night.