Rereading the last chapter, and idea and a scruple come to mind. The scruple has to do precisely with writing the idea down, since there is nothing more banal on earth, even if its banality is that of the sun and moon, which the heavens give us every day and every month. I turned from my manuscript, and looked at the walls. You know that this house in Engenho Novo, in its dimensions, arrangement and wall paintings, is the replica of my old house on the Rua de Matacavalos. Furthermore, as I told you in Chapter II, my aim in imitating the other house was to tie the two ends of life together—something, by the way, which I have not achieved. Well, the same thing happened to that dream in the seminary, however much I tried to sleep and did sleep. From which I conclude that one of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them tight shut, to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of his youth. Such is the new and banal idea that I hadn’t wanted to put here, and I am only writing it down provisionally.
Before finishing this chapter, I went to the window to inquire of Night why dreams should be so tenuous that they dissolve at the slightest opening of an eye or turn of the body, and do not continue. She did not reply straight away. She was deliciously beautiful, the hills were pale in the moonlight, and there was a dead hush in the air. As I insisted, Night declared that dreams no longer belong to her jurisdiction. When they lived on the island that Lucian gave them, where Night had her palace, and whence she brought them forth with their several aspects, she could have given me a possible explanation.* But time had changed everything. The ancient dreams had been pensioned off, and the modern ones are inside people’s brains. Even if the latter wanted to imitate the former, they would be unable to; the isle of dreams, like the isle of love, like all the islands in all the seas, is now the object of rivalry between Europe and the United States.
It was an allusion to the Philippines.† Since I have no love of politics, and even less of international politics, I shut the window and came in to finish this chapter before going to bed. I no longer ask for Lucian’s dreams, nor the others, children of memory or digestion. I am contented with a quiet, undisturbed sleep. In the cool morning air, I will carry on recounting the rest of my story and its characters.