Doña Rosita is a vast woman. Because she encompasses the dream. That is to say damp expanses, planted with trees, with gardens where birds can live. Doña Rosita embroiders. An embroidery into which she passes all the uncomplicated thread of her love. She has eyes that call you to become a seafarer, to explore it all, right and left, right side up and upside-down. Doña Rosita is irrigated by tributary dreams. Since, as we already said, dreams constitute the center of our existence, Doña Rosita materializes dreams, as when she bends down to collect autumn leaves with which she composes large tableaux. She has them framed at her neighborhood frame shop. Or when she catches birds’ cries, passes them through her, and then exhales them in the forms of song. Snail people, suspended from their windows, come out of their shells to listen to her.
Doña Rosita is a vast woman. She also has a vast wardrobe. The two rows of dresses that hang in it are not enough for her. She has a rich collection of outfits of all kinds and she changes them with the frequency of dreams. Never has Don Pacifico seen her wear the same dress twice. “I’m empty, empty,” he cries to her. “Empty.”
“Fill yourself with water. Fill yourself with dream,” replies Doña Rosita.
“But what will the water reflect? An empty sky?”
“No, it will reflect my face.”
Doña Rosita’s face is made from the soft dough that fritter dreams are made of,because there are fritter dreams as there are napoleon dreams, and chocolate cake, and cheesecake, and angel food cake, and Black Forest cake dreams; half-eaten and half-baked dreams; dreams with almonds, with walnut and cinnamon filling, covered in syrup; chocolate eclair and caramel cream dreams, lollipop dreams, ice cream dreams—Baskin-Robbins, Ben and Jerry’s, strawberry sorbet, lemon and lime sorbet—sugar cone and popsicle dreams, boutique, batik, and Calvin Klein or cotton candy dreams.Doña Rosita is a vast woman. And Don Paci-fico is too narrow to accommodate her entirety.
But if Doña Rosita is the dream, then Don Pacifico is the implied arsonist. Even though he himself never set the fire that logically he could have set, considering his lack of logic. (The suspicion that the arsonist was a Jew caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders.)
By burning the hinterland and transforming it from a wooded expanse into a barren wasteland, they reasoned, he could then build his home. “As an arsonist, I bear my guilt in full. As a builder, I pass this guilt through the building materials, the plasterboard and fiberglass that are words.”
On the horizon of Doña Rosita, mistakes are marked in the words she makes out of clouds. When Don Pacifico burned down one of her wooded areas, Doña Rosita (the land of Doña Rosita) grew poorer by a few acres, but she had boundless expanses inside her to withstand the devastation of his fire. She was annoyed that he had filled her sky with smoke, but a different sun shone down upon her undamaged expanses the following day.
“Why did I do it?” Don Pacifico asks himself. “Or could it be that I didn’t do it? Could it be that the fire started by itself and that I had nothing to do with it? Could it be that the joy I draw from this cleared land, where I am finally able to build with words, is a guilty joy, drawn from the Talmudic scriptures and the Old Testament, while I am anything but guilty?
“It hadn’t rained since April. And then in August, that terrible month (I always hated August), the pine needles caught fire by themselves, those pine needles whose presence burned us, pricked us, and aroused our senses without us being able to resist them, because they would drag us along every day into a conflagration, after which we never knew where to hide the ash and cinders. Could it be that because they were not allowed to burn Judas in effigy, Christian fanatics and fifth-column activists set fire to the entire land of Judea? No, it is not me who is guilty.”
Doña Rosita has overcome her crisis, and Don Pacifico is leading her at a steady pace where he chooses to go. One, two pictures come to her mind: it was midday, on a hill overlooking the sea. The pine trees were small, gnawed by the salt. On the ground, pine needles. Inside her, a dense heat, with no outlet, made her want him very much.... Now he is reviving that scene for her. He is talking to her of dry brushwood, of pine needles, of the burning of the sun, of her own burning. And of his burning. He takes her by the hand. He leads her to a vestibule with heavy red drapes. She identifies with the picture in her mind. She gives herself to him. It all happens in the mind. He covers the weakness of his body with the power of the word. He dominates her. He takes her there where she becomes a sea, a lilac, a flower, a vision, a tree.
He leads her and she lets herself be led because she loves him. Because she trusts him. Because she admires him. Because she respects him. Because she wants him, she wants them to be together, to share the joys and sorrows. She doesn’t care whether he’ll be rich or poor. As long as she sings and he builds. And she shall sing and he shall build when they are together. That’s for certain. But that’s not the point. That’s not where the problem lies.
So he leads her down the path on the roller skates of his mind. With his mind, he does with her whatever he wants. And she wants him to do with her whatever he wants. She lets herself go. He describes scenes to her: he sees her, he says, naked on a road in the midday sun. He waits for her, hidden among the jasmine. She’s coming, she’s approaching. He sees her having difficulty; an evil neighbor came to her window and gave her the evil eye, he tells her. Yes, he sees her coming, she’s getting closer, he’s among the jasmine. The jasmine calls to her. She falls finally, naked, into his arms.
The little girl she becomes in his arms rejoices in love, she proclaims it and shouts it out. She likes to hear her own cries. The poor vulnerable girl feels protected in his arms. She believes that he loves her. This love reinforces her faith. And her faith reinforces her love. Should one of these two supports break, she will come tumbling down. And he doesn’t want her to come tumbling down, does he?
She hurts him. He hurts her. That’s what she says. What she believes. She is happy. Her entire body overflows with joy. It is a tortured body, he should never forget that. Often, she wants him more than her body can stand.
“I’m strong,” she says. “I’ll survive separating from you.” But she only says that when she’s angry. When the ancient anger deflates, she feels vulnerable, helpless. “I’m helpless,” she says, “because, as you yourself say, I haven’t two faces, but only one. I’ve abandoned myself completely to love. To my love for you. And I love the whole world too. I love everything in the world. You are the only one I ever let into my solitude. To pillage all that I kept, hermetically, for myself. Now there isn’t a place inside me that isn’t also yours. I want to share everything with you.”
This young woman that he leads with a sure hand along the path of joy, he also loves. Because she is tender and good and joyous and pure. He tries to instill evil in her, just to give her a taste of bitterness, not to make her truly bitter, but she resists him. Her space is marked out with clear borders. There’s nothing mixed up inside her head. She wants love. And love is both of them together, predestined to meet by God, or whatever exists beyond them, because there is a force greater than themselves.
A million attempts to seize her castle, to undermine it, have failed. He tries to put a worm in her that will eat away at her, making the fruit rot. It’s impossible. The ripened fruit is offered to him, that and none other.
She gives him the gift of her sweetness, and he grabs it greedily and keeps it in his safe. Why? Deprived of sweetness all his life, he craves it. The sweetness of the other. For this he has trained her to walk in her sweetness. By now the path is taken without difficulty. One and two. The sweet road strewn with the honeys of the world. Honey everywhere. Sweetness everywhere. Everywhere pleasure. Joy. He rejoices. He rejoices.
He leads her. He possesses her. Like a marvel-of-Peru, her face opens and closes according to his mood. Oriented toward his sun, she turns like a sunflower. Her gaze follows him as soon as they part. It annoys him to have her gaze follow him everywhere. But there’s nothing she can do. A liquid, like mercury in a thermometer, attaches her to him. As soon as he touches her, her temperature rises. As soon as he leaves her, it drops. Her needle moves, like a magnet, toward his north. He draws her to him; she can’t say what it is exactly that attracts her. She’s never known such a pull. This is the first time. She tells him so. That “first time” makes him giddy. As he has never deflowered a girl before, “the first time” is like a balm for him. He keeps asking her: “Is it true?”
“I don’t know how to lie the way you do,” she answers.
He lies due to the excessive secretion of his imagination. She is more grounded. She functions differently. Everything comes to her from below, rising from the earth. She is a tree with deep roots into the soil of the centuries. With him, it’s as if his roots are in the sky. He comes downward. This is how they were paired, by intertwining their branches, they both believe.
He leads her. He teaches her words she doesn’t know, which, by repetition, become familiar, sweet. As far as she knows he doesn’t say them to other women. Now she knows, she tells him, that he’s faithful to her. That he hasn’t another. Because he doesn’t need to. He has found in her, he tells her, and she believes him (it would be terrible if she did not!), the woman who encompasses all women. She herself becomes, is, so different. She changes face, skin, hair. He tells her so and he believes it himself. And she too believes him. It intoxicates her. His tongue in her ear, his voice in the shell of her ear, envelops her in a cloud. She needs this cloud so she can take off. And with him she takes off. She travels. She tells him: “With you I take my most beautiful journeys.”
The landing is always a success. Always dangerous, like every landing, but never an accident. They’re both proud of this. Touchdown is always good, both on land and on water. The passengers always applaud. He’s a good pilot during their journeys. He flies her well. Air turbulence, whenever there is any, obeys the laws of the atmosphere. Before, he loved trains. Now, he refuses to travel without his personal airplane. He leads her. Sometimes to a field of daisies. Sometimes to a stone terrace, bleached white in the midday sun. Sometimes to the glistening sea. Sometimes to the jasmine garden. Sometimes to the hill covered with pine needles. He takes her by the hand. And she gives herself to him. He asks that she give herself. As a condition of their relationship.
And the days go by. The weeks go by. And the Easter of the massacre is constantly postponed. She waits, like a good little sheep. But the confidence she gains each day helps her cement a foundation. It’s fundamental. She tells him so. Before, he used to tell her stories about other women. Now he’s cut down considerably. She feels as if she is him. The two have become one, a curious union. She is interested in Siamese twins who never separate. He asks her about her twin sister.
Her world is infinite. She experiences infinity. And each day is a nail that fastens the blue of the sky to the frame of her horizon. Her knowledge is deeper than knowledge, because it encompasses the fall of man. They have said everything; all the harsh, near-cynical words he has said to her. They have explained everything. What she wants. What he’s after. At times, she’s called him every name in the book. Put all the world’s curses on him. They didn’t work. Nothing works in the realm of the word. The depth lies elsewhere. In this elsewhere, it’s something else that counts. What is it? Every popular song contains a truth about love. In every verse hides a life story. That’s why people love songs. Because they express their feelings. “There are thousands, millions of people like us,” she tells him. “Write.”
He is her poet. That is the only way she will accept him. She wants poetry. She wants expression. Her own porno video is the “Song of the Songs.”
He leads her steadily along a road. Abyss Street. Number 0. For Doña Rosita it’s a new life. She gathers twig after twig, wherever she finds them, and builds her nest. For Don Pacifico, these are weights hanging from his wings. Roaming all day around the wild edges of word, he hunts, like his grandfather before him, for rock partridges, will-o’-the-wisps. Days go by, time goes by. On television, the disasters continue. First in Colombia, where the dormant volcano erupts, causing twenty thousand deaths; then the earthquake in Mexico City, soon replaced by a concert to benefit the victims. Just like for the children in Ethiopia or for all of Africa.
“It’s not necessarily bad,” she says.
“No, it’s not. They’re raising money for charity. And that’s good.”
And yet there is, deep down, a certain deception. Deep down, a shipwreck is replaced by a floating stage upon which famous stars sing. At the site of the shipwreck, of course. For the victims of the shipwreck. But the shipwreck does not exist. Only entertainment exists.
Days go by. Time goes by. The leaves fall from the trees. But they grow back. Governments fall, others take their place. The price of gasoline goes up and back down.
“We’re used to watching scenes from Dachau while calmly eating our macaroni and cheese.”
“The image, in contrast to active memory, has a debilitating quality about it.”
“What’s the latest on Nicaragua, anyway?”
“It’s been a while since they gave us any news on the Iran-Iraq war.”
A coup d’ètat in some African country awakens that country from the lethargy of the map, only to let it sink back again into the nonexistence of the white world, the white news, the white madness. Because it will be whites who will meet with whites in Geneva to agree, if in fact they do agree, on nuclear arms. Those with black, yellow, and brown skins are out of the game. “White gentlemen,” she adds. “Because the white ladies aren’t going to agree on anything of the sort. They will visit museums or fine clothing stores, or they will attend a charity ball.”
“Whites have done a good job of dividing the world into capitalists and communists.”
Time goes by. Days go by. The seasons change their shirts, one after the other. He persists in not changing his. He likes grime. He feels more comfortable in filth. As for her, she likes order; she’s obsessive about cleanliness. Days go by. Time goes by. November is a very sweet month.
He smokes. Before he even looks for it, his lighter is in his hand. Before he even has time to desire something, she gives it to him, having guessed it. They have everything. But something is missing from their relationship. What could it be? “It’s like last night at the theater,” she says. “From my seat, I could only see half the stage. When the singers sang on the part of the stage that I could see, everything was fine. But when the action took them over to what was for me the dark side of the moon, I could only hear their voices. That was agony. I had to imagine them. And however much I bent down, I was still in a disadvantageous position. From that box, with those two lesbians in front of me who would not let me squeeze into the front row, I couldn’t enjoy the show fully. I felt as if half of me was also missing. It was as if my destiny was showing me, at that moment, my situation. Because that’s how I am, my darling, without you. A half. With the thirst of the whole. Listening to the voices and imagining the movements. With two lesbians lying in wait like dogs. Besides, if one should bend over too much, throwing up is just a matter of time.”
Yes, what was missing was perspective, that which keeps people alive. Without it, even the most permanent things in life seem temporary. The best things become bad. The most bearable become unbearable.
She leads him. She opens up horizons for him. She helps him understand himself. Who he is. What he wants out of life. He writes and thinks of her in her pensive moods. He writes: “The word belongs half to him who speaks it and half to him who hears it” (Montaigne). “Every door has its nail” (popular proverb).
But how to find the halfway point, the golden rule of cohabitation? How not to encroach upon each other’s land? When a woman, by nature, wants to share everything with the man she loves, and a man, by nature, when he loves a woman, wants to share everything with his friends? Or with other women whom he doesn’t love? When the home is the womans natural environment, and everything outside the home (the ballpark, the bar) is the man’s natural environment? When the void seeks to be filled, because the void does not accept itself, and woman has such a void, by nature (Bellotti), while man has a protuberance that can fill the void?
He builds guns, cannons, rockets, all phallic extensions of this protuberance. While woman lives surrounded by holes: drains, wells, bidets, buttonholes. The void dresses up in fine clothes to cover itself. But it’s always lying in wait, gaping, under the clothes. Thus the problem remains. And the soul is the void within the void. That’s where it’s based. And it gives off a foul odor when nothing fills it. By contrast it is calmed when something fills it. What would be the reason for having doors if nobody came in through them? (Windows are no more than breasts. They can only be aroused.) A tomb is a door that closes because nobody can go through it. However, things become more complicated from the moment that man himself realizes that he is half woman, since at the base of his penis lies the canceled female sex.
Suddenly, he is attracted to the shag carpet, to its provocative, fiery red. He tells her of a secret source of pleasure, at the root of his tree. If she presses down there... It is the remnant of the female, which, when gender was determined in his mother’s womb, decided to become male. That is where the roots of his pleasure lie. She presses down on it. And then he, sweetly, upon this red shag carpet, explodes like an overripe pomegranate.
He leads her along paths, not at all certain at first, to the source of her ancient joy, where as a little girl, an adolescent, she tasted that joy alone, in her lonely room, in her lonely bed. And as he leads her, as they trace together the paths, the musical roads of pleasure, she attaches herself to him, she becomes a barnacle on him, a limpet on his rock. Any attempt to unhook her has the opposite result: she hangs on even tighter. The limpet begins to spread and gradually covers the entire rock. By then, the rock has taken on the limpet’s shape, like a Chinese hat.
“Weaning is impossible. We have reached the point beyond which there can be no separation,” he writes.
He leads her, he takes her into depths that even she doesn’t know, into unexplored regions, but she likes sinking with him, tied to him, their bodies tightly bound, with their exchangeable temperatures, where the current circulates, comes around again, where the force leaves her to gather in him and pass back into her, two bodies like suction cups, one upon the other, four absorbent hands, his on her chest and the nape of her neck, there where all the pathways of the nerves converge to pass through, and he with his hand, controlling the tollgate of the nerves, as if he dominated them; and she is quiet and dominated, because her head has the pedestal of his hand to lean on, her beautiful head, as he says and she knows it, while with her hands she massages his back, feeling the bones, his silken skin; bound this way, one on top of the other, he carries her with him to the tunnel, so he can bring her out into the light on the other side, so they can keep going, passing through another tunnel, another light, until a field appears before her, the field of daisies from her childhood years, where she becomes a child again, during the time she snuck out of the shack without her mother knowing, ran through the daisies to meet her lover and lie down with him on the sweetsmelling soil among the daisies that would break their fingers on her, just as she is now breaking hers on his back, until little by little her hands abandon him, becoming wings, or at any rate trying to become wings, because she wants to fly now, or rather she is flying, carrying under her back, stuck to her, the red shag carpet; he sees her hand quivering like a wing and he lets his hand take hers, their fingers intertwined, without rings that hurt; they are now in ecstasy, they move, they fly together, and instead of soaring, he takes her lower and lower, to a premythical, forgotten time, where, as a little girl, she would see around her an alien, treacherous world, lying in wait for her, tempted by her beauty, but now she does not fear it because he’s there, and in this inverted position, her eyes, their eyes, fixed on one another, communicating almost desperately, their panting, and time is folded over, like a crust, a pastry crust that envelops her, like the cream puffs her grandmother used to make and bake in the oven just as she now, as if burning up with a fever, is baked with him in ovens, crematoriums, from which he escaped but to which she offers herself in a holocaust, and she gives herself to him and he gives himself to her entirely; she is in a deep, hidden corner, from where as a little girl she now sees herself becoming an adult, for what she was always waiting for, love without terms, without limitations, without borders, without stopwatches or dos and don’ts, the kind of love that nourishes you and makes you beautiful in your own eyes, giving him everything that is she, freely, selflessly, generously, while he whispers sweet words in her ear: “I love you, I’ll always love you, I want you,” sees her opening the bolt to where she keeps her treasures: “Take them,” she says, “take them all,” and relieved that she has given him everything without asking for anything in return, she reaches, finally, her fulfillment.
He leads her, takes her down, dark and brilliant goddess of another world, supine like the dead Ophelia, he holds her tightly for fear that she might fall, but their descent is slow as coins sinking into blond water, and the wider they are, the more they dance as they sink through deeper and deeper layers, through beds that become clear, sparkling lakes, beds that are different each time, in other rooms, in other countries, some narrow and some shady, with springs that are revolutionary or revolutionized, at time with strained nerves or orthopedic boards, but everywhere, no matter what the latitude or longitude of the country, it is imperative, in order that she may be lulled, that the light be turned down low at night—the light irritates her eyes, just as during the day, dust irritates her throat—and she is in this position, on her back, when he comes and plops himself down, like a prince, on the other pan of her balance, which, balanced with great precision on the scales of the sensitivity, begins to sink, moving through the successive layers of water that dry up or rise, and it’s the same thing, air and water, consubstantial, up and down, one and the same path, and as he bends down to embrace her, he resembles those who climb up telephone poles with safety hooks around them, or climb down, listening to the mystical hum, where it’s coming from or where it’s going to, it’s the same thing, a distant homeland, lost in flames, that she never knew other than through the stories of her dear grandmother, whom she would ask, when she was little, in order to find her roots, which would lead her to other roots of another life, the one she had lived before she was born, while with the horizon of his body on top of her, a horizon she loved, she is bound to the shape of his tenderness, always in front of her, a few centimeters away from her mouth; she is confident that she will not be startled, that she will not fall, that she will never be left hanging in the air, and indeed she has not, during these two years that they have always been coming together, not like the first time (then they had hardly come together at all, they were still strangers), but like the times after that, as the force of their bond grew, and, feeling secure in his embrace, protected, she would tell him that, liberated, she could fly very high or reach great depths, which was the same thing, it meant the same, since they were in a place with no pressure other than that of sweet juices (one cannot tell whether they come from the earth and climb up to the tips of the branches, or if they come down from there to be spilled and lost in the soil, because the tips of the branches suck up the light of the sky), and that is why, if she can’t see his eyes, it is almost impossible for her to find the sources, which were, up until now, unknown to her, the joys that have laid hidden inside her like ores, waiting all their lives for this moment, for him to mine them.
And he, he watches over her, he is intoxicated without getting dizzy from her fall or her ascent, like a bird clutching his prey in his claws for fear he might lose it before he reaches his nest where he can tear it to pieces at his leisure; he understands by her glance, that flashes and clouds, by the fog that comes upon it like a gentle mist in the splendor of the morning; he understands by her breath, by her mouth that seeks his own, by her little tongue, at once sensual and impertinent, licking his palate; he understands what stage she’s going through, so then, bending down, he plants landing kisses, hand grenades, with his teeth at the root of her neck, on the nerve of the “Song of Songs,” on her neck, necklaces of loving teeth marks, and higher up still, in her hair, on the electrified skin of her skull, and in this way he descends with her, he finds his own childhood memories that never hit their target, hitting the dark womb of the earth, the point of darkness from which life emerges, into which he disappears only to rediscover himself intact, and there’s something about this baptism very much like the ceremony of Epiphany, when the cross is thrown into the water, followed by the diver, and they become, for an instant, cross and man, one and the same, the symbol of the faith and the believer, while the bishops, standing on dry land, along with the ordinary people and the dignitaries, applaud this union taking place in the water, by singing beautiful hymns—in rooms that understand nothing, on beds that can’t feel, in countries that mean nothing—everywhere, they’re one and the same, the same submersion, the same anticipation, the same sweetness that will express itself afterwards, on her peaceful face.
Clocks make unbearable hands turn. Bells toll. Airplanes take off and land. It’s nice when the fruit becomes like honey. “The room becomes sweeter when you’re near me.”
Space, as an element necessary for a wider garment, when one’s clothes are tossed onto mentally deranged chairs, expands. Space as time of joy. The joy of space makes time a tenant. “And yet you have still not sung of love.” Time, which is money for others, does not count for them. Money is for those who know how to make a profit, who know how to use it. For them, money is the dream.
She would sing arias for him, which, in the past, she had sung on stage; now she sang them only for him, and he enjoyed them, sole audience of a voice that once moved so many people. “When will she move those people again? Why does she no longer sing for them?” he asks himself, while she, searching for her voice, finds it growing increasingly stronger under the veils that almost suffocated her. “What is a voice,” muses Don Pacifico, “as it passes under the guillotine? A guillotine can cut a throat, but it can’t stop a song. Her voice could be a gold mine, and yet here I sit, despairing, struggling with words, while at my side this Pacto-lus keeps flowing, untapped.”
But it is difficult to get a mechanism back in motion, Public relations count more than private ones. And that’s where things get complicated. The ancient canals would have to be rediscovered for the babbling water of Doña Rosita to flow through them again and irrigate the thirsty plains. Wherever they turned their gaze, they could see that the new irrigation was functioning perfectly, but that something was missing from the impetus of the water that carries off leaves and soil in its eddies. The new technology of the irrigation canals was definitely irreproachable. At no point was there a leak, at no point was there the slightest malfunction. Perfectly designed and constructed, all parts converged toward the final goal, without leaves or soil to impede the flow of the water, which was itself well protected in reservoirs. And yet something was lacking in this whole system: that which used to make the plain intoxicating. Technology had, to a certain extent, wiped out the art of irrigating, the art of singing, and television, which reproduces the irrigation of the plain on small screens, gave all the peasants the opportunity to participate in the process of irrigation, but deprived them of the unique joy of only a certain number of them—and not all of them, as was now the case in their homes—being earwitnesses to the musical event, in a small room perhaps, but stripped of the technology that will inevitably weaken the torrent of a voice, the explosive presence of a personality whose errors are also inseparable parts of its makeup.
“We live in a time,” reflected Don Pacifico, “where man is pitted against the perfection of his machines. And that turns him into a machine, depriving him of the possibility of remaining human. Since voices need microphones and transformers, since a computer will soon be able to produce an aria impeccably, where is that element that, owing to its particularities, humanizes great art?”
Henceforth everything obeyed an initial nucleus whose message was increasingly altered each time it was reproduced. From that moment on, no one much cared about the origin of all this: a human being, a cry, a pain, an effort. And even if they came to reproduce this singularity, so many other singularities would come long afterward to annihilate it that the average viewer, listener, or reader began more and more to resemble someone who, remote control in hand, jumps from one channel to another (among the fifty or so available), creating a new film of his own composition that impoverishes him instead of enriching him, because it is incoherent, shapeless, fragmented, a mosaic that won’t hold together, and it is only in his sleep that he can, by renouncing everything, find his own truth, which is the dream, if indeed he dreams.
Because dreaming is our self-defense against the bombardment of counterinformation and updating that accomplishes nothing except to make us aware of the tragedies of the world upon which we are incapable of having the slightest effect, except by putting our hands in our pockets.
Because there are dreams that torture, on racks, there are dreams that are altars to the Thermidors of sleep, endless dreams made longer by expectation, guillotine dreams...
So she would have to start singing again. But how? How does one catch hold of threads that have been cut? Which one of all these threads that lie jumbled in your palm leads to the big hook? She worked alone, she prepared herself, she didn’t seem hurried.
It was he who was in a hurry. He didn’t know how difficult it is to sing. How the throat, this channel, this canal of the voice that brings forth the melody, can very easily become blocked and cancel itself out. He didn’t know about the thousand and one threads that make up the embroidery of the voice on an ethereal canvas that then ceases to exist. With the exception of recordings, which immortalize it in its temporary and changeable eternity. He did not know that everything hangs upon one instant, is born and dies in this instant, in this instant where everything flows, where everything is but an instant. But for this instant to arrive the human being does not need the calm found in the eye of the cyclone, but the tranquillity of the ocean that is never disturbed by cyclones.
Because there are floating dreams, suspended, where everything walks on air, with no other prospect than to continue as such; dreams in which the present, the future, and the past all live in the imperfect and the present tenses, being imperfect, in the dream, becomes horrifying, nightmarish; dreams that torture, on racks, in Thermidors of sleep, endless dreams made longer by expectation.
Doña Rosita is a vast woman. At last, we rediscover the breadth of Doña Rosita’s soul. She has just returned from the audition, tired, but not exhausted as she had feared. Doña Rosita is deeply in love with Don Pacifico. All day long on days she doesn’t see him, she makes him live in her mind. In her mind, his picture is indelible. Doña Rosita’s hands communicate with a source of energy that lies outside herself. With these hands she kneads his body, she besieges it, she overwhelms it. He sleeps in her arms, almost against his will.
He feels that time is limited. There isn’t enough of it for him. “The time it takes to eat, to sleep, to watch the news, to fall in love, to go out, to finish work, and, the most time-consuming of all, to write. How can one get all that done? It’s raining. I like the rain. Rain is a blessing from God. The sun is a curse.”
“It was four o’clock,” she says, lying next to him with a turban on her head. Across from them, embracing dolls hang from the ceiling. “It was four o’clock and I had finished the housework; I was happy to have gotten through it quickly, and it was quiet inside the house and out. The construction next door had finished, and they had taken down the cranes, when it started to rain again. My relaxed state of mind and my bodily exhaustion predisposed me to receive the message of the rain, inside the empty shell of the house. It was against the large bay window, the one with no shutters, that the rain was making the greatest racket. The rain was supernatural. It was the first time I had experienced it this way in this country.
“I would like to be able to describe how I felt. I would like to speak the language that the rain used to speak to me. Because she told me many things. She came from somewhere else and acquired a voice as soon as she touched the glass. A polyphonic voice that I began to pay attention to, in order to catch her meaning. I knew there was something she wanted to tell me. And coming out of myself, I heard her. As she fell and spoke to me with her watery keys, little by little I grasped her secret melody. She spoke to me of elsewhere. There, beyond our bodies, exists energy, God, the almighty eternal cycle. Since I was alone, perhaps it was easier for me to understand what she was trying to tell me. She spoke to me of the impossibility of composing her substance into a form or a face. Indeed, I could see, as I watched her, an image, a body, trying to form itself on the windowpane but failing. The drops wouldn’t stay on its vertical, slippery surface. They fell into the drainpipe; from there, following their own course outside the gutters, they would surely end up on the sidewalk, where the gaping mouths of the sewers would be unable to swallow them all up at once.
“Had I opened the window for her to come in, she would have formed puddles on the floor, and perhaps there I could have better studied her meaning, but this way, she was like a man speaking to me from behind the closed window of a departing train, while I, standing on the platform and unable to hear, can only see the desperate opening and closing of his mouth as it forms words I cannot interpret, being in a confused emotional state. I don’t know if his absence will be long, short, or eternal. He could be saying, ‘I love you, I’ll always remember you, I’ll miss you,’ or perhaps something much more mundane, like, ‘Don’t forget to pay the bill,’ or, ‘I forgot to turn off the switch.’ It is only by his worried expression (since I can’t hear his voice) that I can assume he is saying the opposite of what I fear. I can assume he’s saying that he is coming back tomorrow or in a few days.
“And so it was with the rain, speaking to me in her own language, underlining key phrases with claps of thunder, as if to tell me that all this was of no importance, because, beyond our feelings there exists another reality, that of the higher world, home of the clouds that send us the rain and watch us all as if from an airplane, tiny lost insects, caught in the web of a spider city, with our small, insignificant problems that we make immense. It is only the torrent of the water that is immense, the pelting rain that accentuates our solitude.
“‘Which isn’t solitude, my dear rain,’ I replied, ‘when love is burning its logs in the fireplace. Nothing matters compared to the power of love that springs from within me and obliterates everything else. I exist to await his return, or to go and meet him, to touch him and he to touch me; I exist solely for the moments when we’ll be together. Suddenly, nothing else matters. I am happy to love. I feel complete, fulfilled.’
“And as the rain tried to compose the face of the unknown God on my windowpane, talking to me in a solemn language, consumed by her passion, and at the same time angry that her liquid whips couldn’t touch me, she was like a woman trying to tell me to protect myself from pain, from suffering. But love does not know what will dissolve it. Within love, the antibodies that would destroy it cannot develop, for, if they did, then love would cease to be what I call nourishing, or liberating, or capable of rais-ing you to other heights, and would become anxiety, lamentation, pain. The inability of the rain to articulate its speech, to compose itself into an image, was due to its falling against the window I had opened inside me, protected by the crystal glass of my faith in love, which is a window open to the world that lets in the exultant light, the first sun, and turns out the rain’s bogeyman with his claps of thunder. ‘You’re wasting your breath, my dear rain,’ I said. ‘As soon as you stop I’ll hear the key to my door turn inside me, and it’ll be him. You’ll see, rain, you’ll see. As long as you stop.’ In fact, the rain stopped soon after. The greatest of silences fell over the city and the house.”
Lying down, Doña Rosita was beginning to get groggy. (Her hair, covered in an oil that she would later wash out, was still wrapped in a turban.) She heard the key in the door, as if it were turning inside her, unlocking her own deepest, seven-times-sealed door. She heard his steps, then felt him lying down next to her, with his soaking head and cold feet: he had in fact come to meet her as soon as the rain stopped. She wept, so as to join her tears with the raindrops that still covered him. All of her became a trembling tree of tears. Then, having calmed down, she washed her hair with a dream shampoo, filling the bathtub with dream bubbles.
Obeying Doña Rosita’s call, Don Pacifico had rushed, as soon as the rain stopped, to carry out his duty, which was to provide water for her mill, so that it might open its beautiful wings and the wind might rejoice in its blowing. “A fine, virtuow mill, made by angels”(Rilke). But the wind is diabolical. It blows furiously on Mykonos in the summer, just as it blew on his own island when the fires started, at the time when he was accused, indirectly, of arson. Which he had not committed. Only in his mind. But suspicion regarding the Jew caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders. So, as things were going from bad to worse and no decisions were being made concerning matters of import, the horses wallowed, destined never to race.
Because there are tum-of-the-century dream that face the great changes, like vultures beaten by Visigoth winds; syndicated and Unionized dreams, condemned to be put into practice, and other, aphasic, unenlisted, internationalist dream, like hymns with a musical refrain; leitmotiv dream that recur; Saint Simonic, routine, railroad dreams, idle, centripetal, hard of hearing vengeful dreams; centennial dream, constructivist, domesticated or wild, with interest, interest-free, usurious, CIA, and KGB dream, dream that have escaped from prison guards; productive dream that multiply for you, or dream that, like governments that have lost their base and cadres, dissent from sleep; and others, hypnotic ones, that are outlined by the Grand Interpreter of Dream; dream of the Central Committee, of the Executive Office, of sections, of cells; dream of extreme clandestinity and dreams that are reinstated at Party Conferences long after the dreamers have died; ivory dream, aphrodisiac dream that overflow like the froth on glasses of Bavarian beer; dream without ornaments and others from Susa, made of heavy gold, of Darius and Parisatis; dreams that set fire to the aprons of young girls like magnifying glasses gathering the rays of the sun into one; outdated dream, narrow dreams that limit the economy of the bed and dream with sesame seeds that are sold, like jasmine, fora penny; dream that are tear drenched, teargassed, tearjerkers.
His heart, torn in two this way, was unable to achieve balance. Outside, the rain completed his inner misery. “Since I have nothing left other than this light well through which I receive the tenants’ garbage, in order to acquire a plot of land to build on I have to burn the land I inherited. I have to set fire to the forest to make a dreamport where flying words (my grandfather’s pheasants and my aphasia) will finally be able to land.”
With a mind as sharp as a razor, he shaves the beards off his dreams, and finds himself with naked cheek, scarred, face to face with the grooves of his pain. They both sink into a gigantic sleep. And while prudent people cook before they get hungry, they, lost in a hunger that sometimes reached its peak, gnawed, for lack of anything else to eat, at their very flesh. The brain, that great invalid, was not programming the questions correctly. Thus, they were called upon to give answers to erroneous questions, and the words of the oracle kept coming out wrong. Meanwhile the money was running out.
In any case, a writer’s job is difficult. But her job was even more difficult. “Human beings can live without the word, but not without music. Music is the most profound form of human expression.” And as he watched her, she seemed like a huge, beautiful bird whose wing had once been broken. It would be difficult for the bird to rise again, to take to the sky. And yet it would. Every door has its nail, but every nail opens a hole when you pull it out, what the Christians call the eye of Judas, through which you can see who’s knocking at your door. If it’s not the north wind. And so, climbing up high, he saw down below his beloved city with its irregular development and violated town planning. “This city is without a heart,” he thought to himself. “Somebody ought to give it a transplant.”