30.

A sadness dream, without ambitions, that’s what it is: a dream with no ambitions. A recurring dream, then, strange, because it has continuity. In time. Like a kind of recurrence that nonetheless advances in time. At some point, in some other unconscious moment, I cut a boy into pieces, it didn’t matter that much who, some kid from school, from a lab, something along those lines. At some point in a previous dream, another—I remember neither how nor why at this point—I killed him and cut him up into pieces. Now and since that time—here we have the sense of continuity—I carry him in a bag. In a sack. Like a burlap sack, one like that. At this point it reeks, that’s the primary problem. I need urgently to get rid of it. I’m not worried about the death of the boy, I’m not upset about the crime in itself, there is no guilt. What does terrify me is having in my hands the element of the crime, the cadaver. In the dream, then, and constantly, I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of it. I do think the best option would be to burn it, but I can’t find a way to do that. So I think of sinking it somewhere, but I also can’t think where, and I also am afraid it will float back up again somehow. On this occasion I’m traveling by car with the bag, someone is driving me, it’s odd, my sense is that the driver is death itself. But they’re not. I’m afraid the smell will be noticed. I get dropped off at school, it’s a different building, of course, more rural, the dream one. I get dropped off. There are a lot of people around. All carrying things. I’m very upset. What deeply terrifies me is that I’ll get found out and taken to jail. That’s what scares me: losing my liberty, that above all, losing my liberty. Having perpetrated a crime doesn’t strike me as all that problematic, being found out and put in prison does. I deeply fear this; I fear that on the bag and on the pieces of the dead boy they’ll find my fingerprints. I leave the bag in the hallway along with others, other bags of other students, bags, things, and I move away. When I go back, later, the bag isn’t there. None of the others are, either. I’m afraid. I can’t figure out if the other students took it or if the trash people came by. I’m afraid. I think how if anyone came across the remains the path to me would be very direct.

I wake up.

Babasónicos are playing, it is what it is. I can’t connect much with that now, not as much as I’d like. Around here, a little ways up, there’s a place with a tree, a tree by itself, very odd. Let’s eat there, he says. I say okay, he asks if I’m okay. Are you okay? he asks, I lie and say I am. The sun is very intense over our heads, on the roof of the truck. I took off your jacket some time ago. I like this heat, the heat of the sun. I see, then, a few feet ahead of us, that tree. Julián points there, to our right. He slows down, and we get a few feet off the highway, on the side of the road, because there isn’t any shoulder. We roll up in the truck to the tree, which is, or at least at this moment, rather scrawny. But it’s also really quite pretty, quite nice to see, kind of curvy on one side and with strange foliage on the other, as though split in two. A little like the baobabs from The Little Prince. A little bit like that. I don’t know if the image I have in my head is from the book’s illustrations, from what I imagined, or from the movie, but what I know about baobabs, what I recollect of them, resembles this. Juli tells me he doesn’t remember at all. I say, did you not read The Little Prince? and he says yes, but I can’t remember everything, hon. Hon, he says, how sweet, how anachronistic. That nevertheless he does remember very well the elephant that gets inside the boa constrictor, that the rest, the adults, saw as a hat while in reality it was something else: a snake that had gobbled up an elephant, a boa constrictor with an elephant inside it. Oh, yeah, I loved that part too, but even more, the thing that I loved even more than that or anything was the part where the boy asks the aviator to draw him a little lamb, or a little sheep, and the aviator tried but kept failing, the Prince wasn’t satisfied until the guy sucked it up and drew him a box, a cardboard box, with holes in it and told him how inside that box was his sheep, and then the boy was happy because he could imagine it however he felt like. And this spot, our picnic spot, was something in between the baobabs and the aviator’s desert, that place with dunes, where the aviator drew the boy the little box. So we eat beside the truck/plane. It’s cold here, even though the sun is beating down. In the air there’s something cutting, a cold, in wind form, not that strong, because it’s noonish, but persistent, meaning I zip up your jacket and everything. And the sun is very welcome. I think that the dryness of our surroundings, the sharpness, the inclemency of the sun, and, of course, the sandwiches do away with my melancholy. The steppe, in a couple of seconds, dissipates my sadness, evaporates it, as though it had dried it out, like a raisin, me a raisin girl of sorts. We eat standing up next to the truck, we move around as we eat, standing still would be freezing. I like this place, I compliment my traveling companion on his choice. Good, he mutters at the end of a big bite of sandwich, I always saw it from the road, one time I stopped to take a picture, of the tree, but it was late, and I couldn’t take the wind. So really this is the first time I’ve stopped. How’d the picture turn out? I ask him. I don’t know, I haven’t developed it yet, he says, that’s right, I say, you never develop anything, what do you take them for, it’s amazing you still feel like taking pictures. These sandwiches are good, he says. Thanks, I say. There’s something déjà vu, he explains, about this place, it always gave me that impression, since I discovered the tree, since the first time I saw it: it gave me this sense that it was a place I had already been to, that I had already encountered. But do you always go by here? I interrupt him. Yeah, he says, but he’d never paid attention before, and then one day he saw it, as though for the first time, and he could have sworn he’d never seen it before, that this tree hadn’t been here. There. So it was that, that going by there, by here, ever since that time, had given him the strangest sensation, of belonging, in a strange way, of this being his. I say that maybe it’s what I’ve been saying, that it’s a place that resembles others, that makes you think back to other places and that perhaps because of that he thinks he recognizes something he doesn’t really. Because, besides, even if he thinks he hasn’t seen it before he always used to go by here, so he probably already had that tree in his retina, even if it hadn’t made it to his consciousness or if he hadn’t seen it voluntarily. I don’t know, that could be, is what he says to me, but that he prefers to think it’s something mystical, more his, more personal; that maybe that, this place, has a special energy or something, some significance. Yes, that could be, too. In fact it’s already quite odd that the two of us are here in this moment, no? Don’t you think? I guess so, he says, although I imagined it a thousand times. Are you for real? I ask him, as a figure of speech, and he says yes, and doesn’t look at me. He’s absorbed, he’s looking ahead and chewing another sandwich. That’s cool, I say, because I don’t know what to say and then right away I realize it isn’t clear whether I mean the fact that he imagined me in this place we’re calling mystical or just the sandwich, so I try to clarify a little bit: I like this place, I say, it brings to mind all good things; the things, the images it evokes are good, as desolate as it is, this place.