I awaken to the sound of dogs growling on the street outside my hosteleria in Manta, a very small hotel with only three rooms. It is midnight. Tomorrow, I will go to the place where my father lived. A man and a woman are arguing loudly, in Spanish, in the hallway. Tap water is drumming incessantly on the bottom of my bathroom sink. Yelena’s last letter to me is open on the table, which is beside my thin mattress and outside the mosquito netting of the bed. I am sweating. Is this part of a dream? I can hear Yelena’s voice as I retrieve the letter and begin reading it with my flashlight:
“... I am too cowardly, and you are too brave. I watch the clouds and see hideous dragons where you see them turning into butterflies ... you see beauty in everything ... you see life as a gift, not to be wasted ... you are like Dostoevsky’s dreamer, and I am his Nastenka—while I cling wholeheartedly to my home, my grandmother and the lodger, you perceive—in Dostoevsky’s words—one moment of bliss as sufficient for your entire life ... you need no one....”
I put the letter down, and her voice stops. Is she right? Do I need no one? The indisputable proof of her assertion might be my presence here, alone, in a country virtually unknown to me, in a place a thousand miles from my home, in a corner of the world I have never truly known. Is she trying to convince me that, in fact, I need no one, herself and Annabelle included, and that I can feel guiltless for leaving them by setting this idea in my mind, distracting me by her subtlety, placing the last phrase inconspicuously, almost as an afterthought, while first presenting a more compelling, poignant and thoughtful image? She is wrong about me seeing beauty in everything, and seeing life as a gift. I have seen her blindly and unjustifiably attributing such noble traits before, projecting characteristics she perhaps wished she possessed herself upon others.
The argument in the hall is growing louder.
I get up and place my privacy sign on the outside of my door, thinking I will need to make this habitual, watching as a man in shorts and a woman in a small, thin gown in the hallway look over at me, surprised, and stop shouting their incoherent phrases. I want to explain to them that Samuel Taylor Coleridge once claimed to have dreamed the entire narrative of “Kubla Khan” and that, after a tumult of frenzied writing, he was then interrupted by a knock on the door and was later able to transcribe only a portion of the remainder of the dream. My therapist Richard requires that I keep a very detailed dream journal, I would explain, so such a disgrace must never happen to me. The man and woman, still staring at me, immediately return to their room together, slamming the door behind them, and their now muted dialogue continues and echoes through the hall, the reverberation of their voices eventually dissipating.
∞
Guilt may often be a substitute for other emotions, but in my case, for what?
My dreams that night are rapid and confused. This is too early in my journey, my mind too disorderly and cluttered for my dreams to be coherent. Immediately upon awakening to silence and darkness, the only illumination a fragment of moonlight from under the curtains and the only noise from a chorus of crickets and the terrible, interminable ticking of tapwater droplets on the bottom of my sink, I remember an anchor point by which I can recall the remainder of this dream. Retrieving my journal, a pen and my flashlight, I write about the flag and the currency depicting the independence of this country born of Simón Bolivar. I recollect and transcribe that, earlier in the dream, I could see the Spanish Colonies, with the King of Spain’s spies looking for the reasons why the colonies are not producing. There were whisperings of corruption and I recall more now, going further back in time, back to Pizzaro and Almagro, the two groups of the Spanish who arrived to decimate the Incans through disease, overwork and war, who arrived to indoctrinate their religion without perhaps seeing a future of holocaust but nonetheless providing the proper conditions for it. As I see those groaning and pleading for my help, knowing somehow that I am a doctor who is cognizant of their thoughts, I explain that I am not a medical doctor but a psychologist; one who knows nothing of how to solve such immense problems, but who can only show them the world of their minds, and mostly in theory proven through sometimes sparse and dubious case studies...“I can do nothing for you,” I say, “I am powerless here....”