This is the dream. A dark figure approaches in the night, blacker than the inky blackness. The man is wearing an overcoat and his face cannot be seen, even if he turns toward me. He moves to the center of the scene, slips a hand into his black pocket, shades of darkness, takes out a black key, slots it into the black car door, slides into the driver’s seat, and adjusts the black ribbon of the seat belt. He grips the steering wheel and spends a few seconds warming up the engine, which must be purring; I say “must be” because there is no sound. Then the car pulls away. I cannot make out the driver’s features. I glance in every mirror, but nothing. He is a mystery, his appearance is closed to me. Blackness against blackness and speed.
The journey begins along a hard, smooth road, the never-ending journey along the lonely avenue of dreams, first at sixty, then at eighty, within the applicable speed limit, but then at a hundred, a hundred twenty, a hundred forty, even a hundred eighty, and at some point along the way, I become the driver, who is and is not me, because it is as though we are still two things, both of them at the wheel, the driver and me, superposed.
My heart beats faster, my stomach lurches into my mouth. We pass trees and fields and electric pylons, until the road narrows to become a single point. Length becomes compressed, the horizon is tangled, and the frayed tatters of the landscape whistle past. One of the windows cracks; the car is like a knife slicing through the darkness. Despite the speed, I begin to make out figures by the roadside, familiar faces. What is this road on which I am traveling? What two places does it connect? Over what ground does it run? Some of the people are riding donkeys, others are on foot. I see Marx and Engels standing in a traffic booth. I see Rosa Luxemburg with a China rose in her hair, with her hand out, hitching a lift. Lenin is pushing a wheelbarrow filled with hardened cement, as though he had been about to build something but ran out of time, and the cement dried out. I see Che Guevara, his beard sparse, trudging silently, wheeling his punctured bicycle.
I want to overtake this long line of people, but the speed of the car and of the dream will not let me. Nor will the driver. There is a struggle. I want to leave my people far behind, but the car continues to crawl along, and in the rearview mirror, I see them staring at me, stoic, imperturbable, their faces saying: Save us, comrade. Take us with you, comrade. And then the nightmare becomes disturbing.
I do not want to, but I arrive at the future alone. The car stops, I get out, the car rounds a bend and disappears. The black figure of the driver does not explain. And yet I know that he has more important things to do now. In the future, there is nothing. This is the most pleasant moment of the nightmare. It is not troubling that there is nothing. I discover this now, at the eleventh hour, and I wait to see what happens. And this is the tale told to me by the future, a respectable, garrulous gentleman.
A European tourist has arrived at my hotel; it is his first day. Sitting in the lobby, he smokes a cigarette, watching the whorls of smoke. On his head, he is wearing a black bowler hat. A sweater, also black, with the white question mark over the breast, and over this, a suit—the jacket and pants in a mustard-and-gray striped fabric. Very elegant, our tourist. On his face, drawn in pencil, a faint smile is about to break. The tourist is reading a magazine he brought from Europe, with a special supplement about our country that explains our customs—without stereotyping, that goes without saying. A double-page spread tells the story of a prostitute. The tourist looks at the photograph. He finds her beautiful, a little battered by fate, but attractive nonetheless.
It is an unspecified day of an unspecified year of an unspecified decade. The tourist walks out of the hotel, heads up the avenue, and stops three streets later, on a crowded corner, outside a cinema with no films scheduled. From among the crowd, as though put there by the hand of God, emerges a slim, very sensual figure. A woman with chestnut hair, svelte, tender eyes, high cheekbones. Ample hips. Ample buttocks.
The woman asks for a cigarette. The tourist gives her one. The woman asks what he is smiling at. At nothing, says the tourist, this is how my face is. She says something like, What a strange face. The tourist touches his lips, tries to form an expression of wonder, but it immediately turns into an expression of happiness. You’re the woman in the magazine, the tourist says. The woman, who is now smoking, does not know what the tourist is talking about and looks at him in surprise. A little shamefaced, he takes the magazine from his pocket, finds the article. The woman takes the magazine, glances at it, recognizes herself and confirms, yes, that’s her. Then the woman reads the article, not out of curiosity, since she knows her own life by heart, but for the pleasure of seeing herself acknowledged, a little alien to herself. The tourist invites her for a drink, and they walk off and end up in an isolated, unrecognizable café. They sit on plastic seats at a small table.
The woman elaborates on her story, and the tourist listens to her, spellbound. The woman says that, some months ago, one night, she was on a train. She was traveling from a city to the country, to the place where she was born and where her son still lives in the care of her neighbors. It had been months, many months, since she last saw him and she was bringing him presents. Clothes, toys, the woman says, and a little money, you know. The woman speaks in short sentences, but not without self-assurance. She pauses, is silent, then takes a deep breath. It seems as though she does not want to carry on. The tourist is giving her his full attention. The woman has already drunk a beer. The tourist asks if she would like another; the woman nods. Another round, the tourist calls. He glances around and realizes that he does not know where he is. The woman carries on with her story. A man comes up to her on the train; he has a foreign accent, but she never suspected that the man was a journalist, nor that he would want to tell her story anywhere. Besides, we are in the future, and the woman does not really care that someone has revealed intimate details of her life in a magazine in a country that is not her own.
The tourist is seized by the conviction that the woman is very beautiful, and also the conviction that he will not tell her so. He is struck by a feeling of foreboding: he will not be able to touch her. If he touches her, he will feel as though he is sullying or corrupting her, although the tourist has not believed in such things for a long time, nor does he approach the world through genteel words and prudishness. It is therefore ridiculous to think that a prostitute could still retain a certain purity, something worthy of saving, something that other men have not trampled, brutalized, and used without a flicker of remorse or even a fleeting bitterness.
The man on the train, the woman tells the tourist, sat in one of those darkened carriages on trains and I thought he was going to offer me a deal. But no. He simply took some photos and asked her some questions. Sometimes in shadow, sometimes in the light. Almost always in the shadows, but from time to time, as they were passing a one-horse country town or a remote sugar refinery, the light revealed his face, the face of a listener. I asked myself questions too, the woman says, but silently, to myself. What is this foreigner doing on a provincial train? More than that. What is he doing on a local train in the middle of the night? More than that. What is he doing on a local train, in the middle of the night, talking to me, when we could just fuck and get it over with? The woman then goes on to explain how, on the train, she related to the journalist the vicissitudes, the difficulties, and the pressures that had led her to take this path. The prostitute was a university student. She had studied chemical engineering, but then the “difficult years” came along and swept away her future.
The tourist tries to lighten the atmosphere, though the woman’s tone is never somber or upset. That’s something I heard from my friends, the tourist says, in this country, prostitutes are university students, they are beautiful and very wholesome. The woman does not smile, she does nothing. She looks at him just as she would have if he had kept his mouth shut. The atmosphere becomes tense and, one, two, three, a procession of clouds scuds across the sky of the future. How can your problem be solved? the tourist asks the woman, and the woman, after taking a breath, but without hesitating over her answer, says: With a hundred dollars, darling, every problem can be solved with a hundred dollars. I’d like to give you the money as a gift, says the tourist. You can’t gift it to me, says the woman, I’m a professional.
For several minutes they argue until, by mutual agreement, they decide to go to the nightclub in the hotel where the tourist is staying, which is my hotel. They gesticulate, speaking in low voices. The tourist is keen to walk; the woman wants to take a taxi. In the end, they seem to embrace, or to reconcile, and they set off on foot. They cross a number of streets, pass various crumbling buildings, far from the tourist sector, past building sites, condemned houses, decaying mansions with railings covered in rust and gates with metal door knockers. A dog barks but they carry on walking and eventually distance and darkness swallow up the barking.
They arrive at the nightclub, in the basement of the hotel. They avoid the dance floor and sit at a table for two very close to the bar. All the while, the tourist has been insisting that the woman take the money and she has refused, which means that the atmosphere has become uncomfortable and neither now has much desire to sleep with the other, although the tourist has known from the start that he cannot sleep with this woman.
Go on, he says, take the money. Silence. It’s a gift, go on, take it. Silence. Then a waitress appears, who turns out to be my daughter, María, even more beautiful than the prostitute, and she asks what they would like to drink. They order a margarita and a gin and tonic. The noise, the deafening music, my daughter coming over with the drinks. It is obvious that something is about to happen. My daughter sets the drinks down on the table. The tourist takes out a hundred-dollar bill, shows it to the prostitute, makes sure she is watching, and gives it to my daughter as a tip.
The music begins to become clearer. A song that, casually listened to, says nothing that one might want to hear and that, carefully listened to, says nothing either. A song that has little to say and is barely worth dancing to. But the woman and the tourist are not dancing. They are wary not to utter a word or a sound. Suddenly, my daughter comes back, strobed by the lights of the dance floor, and says that she cannot accept the tip, that it is too much money and she is not allowed to accept it. My daughter watches as the tourist’s face changes, the worried eyes, the wrinkled brow. The woman, on the other hand, sees something very different: a faint smile, drawn in pencil, but one that, to all appearances, looks as though it cannot possibly crack or fade or disappear.
Instantly, having reappeared, the black car and the dark figure of the driver come and pick me up. I get into the car and make the journey back, back to the morning and the real world. I see Che Guevara with his punctured bicycle, I see Lenin with his wheelbarrow of cement, I see Rosa Luxemburg with the China rose in her hair, I see Marx and Engels in the traffic booth. The pain of it! All these brilliant minds leaving just as I arrive. That is the nightmare, that is the future.