The City

 

 

The dream came back to him time and again. In it, there was an unidentifiable presence - someone of indeterminate sex whose face he couldn’t see but who was clearly there. The dream wasn’t quite the same every time (certain physical aspects changed; sometimes it was day, sometimes night; there was a house, but not always the same house, or there was no house at all and the surface of the dream was as desolate as a pampa), but upon awakening he was certain that those discrepancies were immaterial: the atmosphere of the dream, its climate, was the same. And always the memory - or, rather, the foreboding - that there was someone in the dream whose face he couldn’t see, a mysterious presence, that almost certainly held the key to the dream’s meaning, without which he was left full of doubt, defenseless, because not knowing the nature of our dreams is a sort of self-betrayal, a perilous trap set by the forces within.

Most recently, he conjured up a city he knew - he had been born there thirty-six years ago but had left at the age of twenty - and although in the dream he knew that that was the city he was from, so many things had changed there that it had become unrecognizable. Yet still, in his dream, he knew it was the city where he had been born. If dreams could be photographed (the fact that man had made it to the moon but still couldn’t manage to remember all of his dreams was a contradiction that gave rise to a lot of ironic thoughts), surely he would be able to say what had allowed him to recognize the city, despite its altered appearance.

That distant city, where his dreams took him on a journey he’d never intended to undertake, was and was not the same, and his presence there only served to bring about a feeling of strangeness and, at the same time, of recognition, not unlike what happens when one looks at an old photograph. But a camera always captures a moment from the past, and he couldn’t be certain whether the city he saw in his dreams was part of the past, the present, or the future: it was a different city, to be sure, and it floated in a space detached from time, from geographic or chronometric exactitude, in a space yet to be created, that was suspended from something that wasn’t memory but that likewise wasn’t a premonition. Surely, the city where he was born was not like that, hadn’t been like that, nor would it be like that; but in his dream it was his city. He was therefore the architect of a city he hadn’t wanted to build, that surprised him with its steep ravines, high meadows, symmetrical windows, and mercurial afternoon light (there were wells full of water and some black birds resembling crows but that weren’t crows). The city surprised him with its squares - deserted save for the statues - its expanse of streets without houses, and its enormous clock that had fallen to the ground and that always indicated an unlikely time of day. Whether he was in one of those squares, touching the cold marble of the statues or trying, in vain, to find a taxi (he had to go somewhere - he didn’t remember where, but he was certain it was elsewhere, perhaps on another continent, somewhere under a different sky), or else trying to scale a rotating mountain (like papier-mâché models at an amusement park, the mountains moved), he was always aware of a strange presence; there was someone else, he couldn’t remember who, someone he may not have known but that was there, behind his back or to one side, an invisible, expressionless figure that dominated his dream and the town squares of his dream. Had he made the journey in the company of the stranger or was the figure already there, waiting for him in the city he’d quit at the age of twenty, fleeing chaos and madness?

Once, he’d discovered a patio from the neighborhood of Alcoe in his dream and this discovery gave him a feeling of familiarity. Within the dream itself he had felt the satisfaction of recognition, as if having seen the round patio with its large blue and white mosaics of parallel geometric figures, and the green plants in their sumptuous gray pots (like those in the house of his ancestors - ficus and bougainvillea against the white wall of the back patio), had restored his sense of confidence, as if it were a missing link in the chain he had to assemble, even though he was feeling weak and impotent and sorry for himself. On another occasion it was a window. He was certain that that window, with its delicate transparent curtains through which you could make out a piece of a mauve-colored Gobelin and the rounded leaf of a table (probably used as a telephone stand), was the window onto a room he had known as a child and had visited frequently to play with the girl with golden braids and thick red lips, the girl who was his childhood companion. (He didn’t dream about the girl, but the window made him evoke her and for two days he longed to send her a letter, a postcard, anything that would attest to his existence, which was separated from hers by thousands of miles and, even worse, by dozens of years irretrievably gone by.)

But if the Alcoe patio - a stone’s throw from the train station built by the English (whose old, majestic ironwork that, as he remembered it, still recalled the frames and scaffolding of a shipyard; for him it was unimportant whether the station was for trains or boats) - and the window in Miraflores (where he had lived and grown up aimlessly until setting out on the journey that would once and for all take him far away because he had no desire to participate in one of those collective, uncontrollable, contagious acts of insanity that engender catastrophes) were solid facts, oars with which to ply the tempestuous seas of his strange dream, pillars of an enigmatic building (the city) built by unknown hands, there were other details that, given the difficulty of connecting them to any known reality, filled him with uncertainty. The mountains spun and the trees had blue leaves; the surface of the earth was petrous - sometimes - and a few thick, dark, human hairs sprouted from the rocks. There were no cars crossing the barren plateau, and the port had suddenly disappeared. As strange as an urban landscape devoid of cars, revolving doors, or elevators was his simultaneous feeling of belonging and not belonging to the place. No one recognized him, which surprised him, even though he himself recognized no one. Sometimes they took him for a foreigner, other times for someone who had always lived there. The city was burdened by a big secret. That much he could make out in the dream; a secret that was a burden to him as well and that he was afraid to divulge inadvertently. But sometimes he forgot altogether what the secret was, which only heightened his anxiety.

And always, at one point or another in the dream, the feeling that an unknown (or simply unrevealed) presence was following him - not with the intention of making him feel less alone or vaguely protected but for reasons of its own. It was there, but it wasn’t clear since when; it had an obscure relationship to him, a relationship he had forgotten, and one of his failings - not his only failing but his greatest - was precisely that he couldn’t say what that relationship was.

He was certain that once, in his dream, he had discovered the gender of the presence. This discovery filled him with excitement as he slept, but upon awakening the certainty disappeared. It didn’t fade, it vanished, overshadowed by diurnal reality. Though he struggled like a surgeon trying to extract the mysterious poison from the inscrutable viscera or like a collector of clams who buries his hand in a hole to grab a shell, he couldn’t summon from the dark well of his memory, couldn’t bring to the surface again, couldn’t pull the revelation - again submerged in uncertainty - to shore. He became annoyed with himself, and he cursed the impotence, the weakness of the diurnal mind. He attempted to go back to sleep (although experience dictated otherwise, he had the secret hope of again dreaming the same thing and recovering that part of the dream that the light of day kept from him), and when he did, he floated on opaque cavernous waters that rocked him like a cork at sea.

It was then that it occurred to him to try doing things the other way around. If the dream wouldn’t reveal the secret, if the anonymous presence was unwilling to identify itself, he would have to search for the sign, the solution to the nocturnal enigma, in reality. Surely something in the people he knew, in the people who made up his universe, would provide that revelation. He had gone about it the wrong way: rather than probing the sinuosities of his dream, its rarefied atmosphere, he should search through the elements of daily life. He was certain it was something subtle that he hadn’t noticed before. People are often inattentive, imperceptive, ritualistic in relating to those around them. The plethora of objects between each of us and others form a barrier and condemn us to solitude, the oasis and burial ground of our aspirations. Often the cup of tea we offer the visitor is not only an act of courtesy but also a way of establishing a barrier that demarcates our respective spaces. And it’s easier for us to accept an infringement on the part of the vine out on the balcony (it has begun climbing through the window) than on that of the visitor who has dared to stay an extra half hour at our house (ossuary).

From the outset he discarded the more trivial figures: neighbors, colleagues at the office, casual acquaintances with whom his relationship was as cordial as it was superficial: none of them could have gained access to his dream because doing so would have required possessing a secret, making enough of an impression on the membranes of his memory. Once the extraneous figures had been ruled out, he was astounded at how short the list was. It became clear to him that in recent years (possibly since the age of thirty) he had, almost unconsciously, endeavored to surround himself with benign, inconsequential presences that didn’t involve love and with whom he could share a glass of wine or a pastry without committing himself to anything, with whom he could go to the movies or play pool without revealing any intimacies. Figures that were complacent in their own quiescence, with whom he might have had only one thing in common: the dreamless dream of daily life, the unruffled passage of the day-to-day, the routine where one hides out of fear of anything unknown. At most, he had spoken with them about the need for a fallout shelter, like in the most advanced countries, a new need that might serve as a substitute for the house in the countryside or at the beach.

Once the inconsequential figures had been ruled out, there were only a couple of people left to investigate as possible spectres in his dreams, and he promised himself he would do so with the utmost care.

First he thought of Luisa, whom he hadn’t seen for a long time. They had been married for a few years and, although the marriage had been a failure, he retained a vague sense of guilt, as if the failure had been his fault, the result of something he should have given her but, for lack of an incentive, didn’t - as if needing an incentive were in itself a culpable need. His tangled web of guilt had led to immoderate acts whose very exaggeration renewed his feelings of guilt, and from an unbridgeable distance, far from a stage full of lights, she witnessed those twists and turns, the imprisoning responsibilities, as if they were the balancing act of a tightrope walker. Luisa had never been with him in his native city: obscurely and unwaveringly certain that on the other side of the ocean lay a different world full of lethal plagues, poisonous foods, frightening creatures, wild animals, angry volcanoes, raging rivers, and a general lack of hygiene, she had strong feelings of rejection toward non-European countries. The long conversations they’d had in which he tried to convince her that things were not exactly like that ran up against a resistance that was more instinctual than rational, as if Luisa wanted to protect herself from an enormous danger that she had placed beyond the ocean so that she could live safely and comfortably on her side.

‘I dreamed about the city again, Luisa,’ he told her when they met at a downtown cafe. He made the confession timidly, like a child who had repeated a mistake he had already been punished for.

She looked at him disconcertedly. For a long time it had been difficult for her to look directly at people. She had gone to the ophthalmologist who prescribed glasses, but that didn’t solve the problem: now the light bothered her, both daylight and artificial light, and she struggled to focus on small objects - scraps of paper, pencils, pencil sharpeners, anything that sat on the surface of things and that, unlike faces, didn’t move.

‘It’s that same dream, Luisa,’ he continued, certain he was barreling down a naked hillside, the bottom of which was nowhere in sight, and certain all the same that he would not try to grab onto anything he might find on the way. His friend Juan called it annihilation vertigo. The condition afflicted some members of the world and was apparently incurable.

‘But in the dream, there’s a presence. I wasn’t sure about this before (and Luisa didn’t know if he meant a few months ago or that period during their marriage, that ambiguous time when both of them felt they were drifting helplessly like seaweed, fearfully scrutinizing themselves and being otherwise unable to focus on superficial, everyday things). Before, I sensed something strange - not just in the appearance of the city - but I didn’t know what it was. Now I know (I’ve been certain about this for a while) that it’s a presence, someone who appears in the dream even though I don’t see a face or a body but that is there, in the city, like my own shadow. I don’t know if the presence made the journey with me or whether it was there waiting for me (and sometimes, Luisa, I don’t even think the journey takes place: sometimes I’ve never gone away or, inexplicably, I’m there, without having left, regardless of whether I’m going or staying - they’re mere words, without any substance); I don’t know if the presence prompts me to return or whether I drag it with me. But the presence experiences no anxiety or confusion. It’s there and I don’t know what it feels or wants, it has a certain power over me. Beyond the powers I suspect it has is the ability to become dark, to hide its identity, to resist my efforts to catch it in the light of day. I don’t know who it is, if it’s a man or a woman.’

She made an effort to look at his face without blinking. She wasn’t certain whether he was really speaking to her. She wasn’t certain whether he had ever spoken to her. What was wrong with him that he could only address symbols? Interchangeable symbols: if she were Ines rather than Luisa, he would have made the same revelations; it didn’t matter whether her hair was dark or golden; it didn’t matter that she found his dreams repellent, that that world seemed to her as distant and inhospitable as the one that was on the other side of the ocean, of that vainglorious ocean that separated them, because the function of the ocean was always the same - to differentiate them.

With great effort she looked at him (his features were, however, not exotic as she always thought they should be) to determine just how complete her rejection was. What did he want from her? She was tired. She had worked all day and longed for a bath, soft music, strawberry yoghurt. There’s nothing like strawberry yoghurt when you’re tired. And out of the bath onto a plush white mat that caressed her so softly she could stay there all night, protected by its warmth. A night that he would doubtless spend exploring his dream, like a diver.

‘Have you thought about returning?’ she asked him, and he felt a shiver down his spine.

He looked straight at her, for the first time, as if she had just appeared there in her elegant tailored suit and blouse with its pastel-colored ruffles, with her long delicate hands that at times gave him the irresistible urge to kiss them. But the question had inexplicably hurt him.

‘No, Luisa, I’m not talking about that city, don’t you understand? It’s not a matter of returning anywhere. Or of going anywhere. Maybe people who aren’t foreigners don’t carry a city inside them,’ he thought aloud. ‘They don’t dream about unfamiliar maps.’

‘You’ve lived in this city for long enough to have adapted by now,’ she said harshly. She too felt vaguely hurt and thought to herself that those were the things that in the end distanced people from one another - vague wounds, sores, rivalries.

Suddenly he had the urge to leave. Something, like a street glimpsed in the middle of a dream (a winding street with leaning buildings, mildewed walls, glimmering wet pavement), attracted him, but to where he couldn’t say.

It was different with Juan, who had just returned from a trip to the city where they were both born. He decided to submit him to rigorous questioning (a euphemism common in police reports, with which they were both all too familiar). But Juan had returned melancholy and uncommunicative. He replied in monosyllables; nothing interested him so much as reenacting the Battle of Waterloo on the living room floor after work, and he refused to engage in discussions that concerned time or space.

‘We must unite!’ was his rallying cry as he got off the plane slightly lightheaded. He hated flying - the stewardesses made him strangely nervous (‘I’ll never believe them,’ he declared), and he couldn’t tolerate the absence of asphalt beneath his feet. Rather than telling him what he was expecting to hear (even though he couldn’t say just what that was, he was certain he would recognize it if he heard it), Juan recounted in minute detail the various catastrophes that almost occurred during the sixteen-hour flight and even described all of the passengers and their minor eccentricities. Days went by and Juan seemed increasingly engrossed in the Battle of Waterloo; he was certain he could change the outcome, and he continually said that it was the only change an individual could effect on history: there on the carpet, with toy soldiers.

‘Juan, I dreamed about the city again,’ he reported one afternoon, taking advantage of a break in the game. In order to concentrate better, Juan played alone, against himself. ‘My left hand doesn’t know what my right hand is doing,’ he would say, ‘and because my memory is as poor as that of most peoples of the world, I immediately forget massacres and acts of injustice, reinstate ousted generals, decorate traitors, return fallen soldiers to their positions on the battlefield, bomb the cities - with remarkable impunity.’

Juan aimed carefully at a fortress, deployed a lieutenant general, and advanced three spaces. Napoleon’s army was retreating. ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘when I got back, I’d forgotten that the street corners here are oblique, I thought they met at a right angle, like ours. This made for confusion while walking around. A car that was turning almost ran me over. Foreigner dead in the middle of the street. There’s something indecent about dying in a place that isn’t one’s own. Only natives should die. The bodies of foreigners get left around for other people to take care of. And you know, darling, xenophobia is on the rise. So much for that damned English captain!’ Juan exclaimed, whisking the arrogant soldier off the board.

‘There are some statues in the city that I’d never seen before,’ he interrupted, as if revealing a secret.

‘Do you think people ever look at statues?’ Juan asked. ‘They’re created precisely so that people won’t look at them. At the same time, a city without statues would be inconceivable. Do you know if there are any statues in Amsterdam? I don’t know much about the philosophy of lacustrine cities.’

‘What’s strange about those statues,’ he continued, ‘is that they always have their back to me so I can’t identify them. Going over and seeing their faces ought to solve the problem, but in my dream something prevents me from doing that. The street is too steep, the square is broken or, to my surprise, I have to climb a difficult staircase that, in any case, leads nowhere.’

‘The city looked hopelessly flat to me,’ Juan added. ‘Of course, you know there are no mountains, hills, or even tall buildings there, but the sensation of flatness was almost unbearable. I thought of Gulliver. I would climb anything just to experience the feeling of height. Sometimes, in the elevator, I found myself trying to encourage the contraption to go a few floors higher. And the houses have no more than three or four stories and there are no other possibilities: that’s the way it is, my friend, you have to accept it.’

‘The other night, for a moment, I seemed to know the name of the city. I had asked a sailor who was walking down the street (oddly, though, the port had disappeared). He told me the name but it didn’t register with me. And you know? He repeated it, but it didn’t register.’

‘It might not have meant anything,’ said Juan, as he cautiously launched an artillery attack. The game was occupying most of the livingroom floor, and anyone walking across the room would need to do so with great care, to avoid crushing an army division or one of the French tankers departing from the port of Calais.

‘It must have been a clue,’ he insisted.

‘There’s a reason why you forgot it. Either it was unimportant (I hate that tendency to focus on the most insignificant things - we should respect the right of venial things to exist) or else it was so important that you blocked it out. Choose whichever of the two explanations suits you, in the same way that I, right now, will decide which of the armies should win. In any case,’ he added, T have no doubt that the city you dream about has no connection with the one where you were born. I know this for a fact.’

He wanted a description, a precise, detailed description of the city Juan had found. But Juan didn’t have the slightest urge to provide one. He demanded to be believed, as an act of faith.

‘The presence,’ he said, ‘could be a man. Nothing leads me to believe that it is a woman.’

‘Any sexual definition, my darling, strikes me as scandalous. We are the sex we were assigned; at best we accept it. Let’s hope that in our dreams, if nowhere else, that definition ceases to prevail. Did I tell you that I’m dressing up as an old-fashioned lady at the next carnival? I’ve already bought the dress. I made up my mind on the plane, on the way back. We were flying at an altitude of twenty-one thousand feet. The emergency light was suddenly illuminated. The captain muttered a few unintelligible sentences from the flight deck, those unimportant things they say: “remain calm, everything is all right,” and so on. That’s always the moment when I start trembling. I realized we were making a dizzying descent, though I couldn’t say why. And you know what thought popped into my mind? I remembered that when I was five I had wanted to dress up as an old-fashioned lady. Imagine how scandalized my family was. They left me with few alternatives: I had to choose between being an eighteenth-century French soldier or a fireman. What I wanted was to walk around under a lilac-colored parasol decorated with white flowers and put on a pair of fur-lined muffs! It was very difficult for me to understand the strict prohibition. I attributed it to one of those absurd, inexplicable, arbitrary rules governing the life of adults. The plane recovered altitude and we could all breathe again. One passenger asked for a whisky, another for a box of cigars. Several others got up to go to the lavatory. The stewardess walked past me, and I swear I had the urge to ask her for a lilac-colored parasol and a pair of furry muffs. I’m used to living with big unsatisfied urges but I can’t stand not giving in to the little ones. So as soon as I got off the plane (you know how I hate not being met at the airport, but in this city no one meets anyone) I went to a big department store and ordered an old-fashioned lady’s dress tailor-made for me. It only needed a few minor alterations,’ Juan said, happy with his clever description.

He didn’t seem to be paying attention. ‘I’d like to see some photographs,’ he said humbly.

Juan gave him a look of reproach. He was about to lose his Norman spy, which would imply a new strategic dilemma. ‘I didn’t take any pictures, darling,’ he replied brusquely. I can’t stand necrophilia.’

Hesitantly, he went outside. He thought it was very dark. Time had probably gone by without his even noticing. He should have wished Juan luck in reconstructing the Battle of Waterloo. He was probably going to be able to change the course of history. The trees were bowed by the wind (though the wind never blows in this city, he mused), and the higher branches seemed to be spinning like carriage wheels. As soon as he stepped away from the threshold, he found a large open ditch he hadn’t noticed before. It was full of dirt and stagnant, malodorous water smelling of wet and rotten grass. Where is the taxpayer’s money going? he thought. He had to be careful not to sink his foot into the gulch. He walked on a few yards, along the narrow margin between the wall and the hole, and when he reached the corner he was surprised to discover that the bank building had been replaced by a small, two-story house with a garden on its flat roof. Buildings were quickly constructed and torn down in accordance with urban speculation but he couldn’t understand how the solid, broad, powerful bank tower had been demolished so fast and then replaced by a simple provincial-looking house. The streetlight wasn’t working properly and he preferred to cross to the other side in search of familiar walls. It was a city without cats, but when he crossed the street a couple of huge black felines almost scampered across his feet and hissed a discontented meow. Strangest of all was the absence of automobiles. There were none in sight either up or down the avenue, and he didn’t think it could be so late that everyone was asleep. He didn’t see any buses either, which only added to his confusion. He must be lost. But how had he gotten himself there? He couldn’t see the street names - there were no signs or plaques - and that left him at even more of a loss. He looked for a phone booth. He wanted to call Juan and ask him for help. Despite his mocking air, Juan was a good friend. It was dark, but luckily he found a telephone a few steps away. Unlike the other phone booths in the city, which were red, this one was green, which he found disconcerting. All the same, he entered. The numerals had faded from the disk, which tends to happen with phones that have been used a lot. He wanted to dial the number three, but he suddenly realized that the dial was made of stone, immovable. He tried again, attempting to force it, but the dial refused to turn. With all his might he hit it, but to no avail. What kind of person would play a trick like that? He gave up and decided to try another phone. He didn’t see one nearby. But now the ground was tilting steeply to one side, rising like the slope of a hill, and the trees were spinning. There was no one in sight, the city looked completely desolate, and the street lamps were dark. He tried to take another step (not in the direction of the hill, the other way), but his right foot sank into a shapeless glob of mud. When had it rained? His foot was stuck and he tried to pull it out. He looked up at the top of the mountain and, astonished, saw that it was rotating. The heavens, the trees, and the mountain were all rotating. And suddenly he felt there was a strange presence not far from him. He couldn’t identify it in the darkness. The heavens, the trees, and the mountain were rotating, he couldn’t get his foot out of the mud, the dial on the telephone was made of stone, and someone was there, not far from him, inscrutable, someone who neither came close nor moved away, someone whose blurry face he couldn’t see (then how did he know that the face was blurry?), someone at once familiar and distant who didn’t offer a handshake (did that someone have a hand?), an unknown man or woman, woman or man, whose oppressive presence buried him ever deeper in the mud of a street he didn’t recognize and that perhaps wasn’t even a street.