NOWADAYS, I RARELY REMEMBER MY DREAMS. Although I spend many hours in bed, my waking and sleeping lives have turned their backs on one another. Nothing of what happens while I sleep filters into my waking existence, except for a sense of angst that seems to issue from that dark place to which I escape every so often on an unfixed schedule. Maybe that’s because my sleep, generally induced by narcotics, is a blind sleep. But even before I was in this condition—lying in my bed, sunk in a somnolence without boundaries or defined shape—I rarely remembered my dreams. So I’m surprised that I can recall, with such a wealth of detail, many of the important dreams I had during my childhood, particularly during that summer of 1994. It’s almost as if I used up all my symbolic resources at the age of ten, and since then have had to make do with the crude literalness of the world.
That night, on the bus heading for Villahermosa, my head resting on the arm of a stranger who was stroking my hair, I dreamed that I was swimming toward an island. A few months before, I’d watched an animated version of Robinson Crusoe—one of those Polish or Czech cartoons Teresa permitted and that no one else at school had ever heard of—that undoubtedly influenced my dream and determined its point of departure. But my shipwreck wasn’t like Crusoe’s.
The dream island was surrounded by a wall, its upper part encrusted with fragments of broken bottles. It was a pretty common architectural feature in Educación at that time, and I guess it still is: people add a glass crown to their garden walls to deter possible burglars. In my dream, that glass was of the widest range of colors imaginable, like shards of the stained glass windows of ruined churches rather than broken bottles. I was swimming around the whole island—it was very large—and couldn’t find a single spot to access dry land: the wall formed an impassable barrier between myself and that promised paradise. What I remember most clearly is that, in the dream, I was able to see the island from two different perspectives: on the one hand, I viewed it from my situation as a shipwrecked person hoping to come ashore; on the other, I was simultaneously able to take a bird’s-eye view of it from a point fifteen feet above where I was swimming. That periscopic view displayed the walled island in all its splendor: there were trees with red fruit and a pool of thermal waters.
The dream of the walled island passed without any perceptible ending or transition into a different one. The second was also a highly visual dream. I’ve reconstructed and told it innumerable times since that day—possibly unconsciously adding details and interpretations, as often occurs in such cases.
My father is eating something at the dining room table of the house in Educación. I’m standing behind him, so can’t see what he’s eating, although from his movements I can tell that he’s using his hands rather than cutlery. The dining room light flickers two or three times, as happens with all the lights in the house when there’s a storm, just before they cut out completely. I slowly approach my father, hoping not to be discovered. When I’m a couple of feet from him, he turns around abruptly, and I see that he’s eating a pigeon. It might be the plump pigeon in the square that I kicked when I was little, I think, but in fact it could be any pigeon or even any hen: in the dream there’s insufficient detail to clarify that point. What’s important is that the pigeon still has feathers: he’s eating it alive or, at very least, raw and newly sacrificed. Despite the implicit horror, the scene is relatively clinical: there’s no blood, and my father’s expression is completely normal, as if eating a raw pigeon were the most natural thing in the world.
I woke with the sensation that we were stopping, the same sound of the pneumatic system as the doors opened, the cold night air entering the bus. With a mix of embarrassment and surprise, I lifted my head from my neighbor’s lap and moved as far away from her as I could, pressing my face to the cold window.
I had a strange feeling in my guts, a sort of wooziness that I’ve experienced several times since then, but which, that night, on that bus, I was unable to identify. The woman traveling in the seat next to mine had also fallen asleep. I gazed in horror at the parted lips with a glint of saliva in the corners, the eyes closed in what seemed a grimace of pain. When the lights came on in the aisle, the woman slowly opened her eyes, like someone emerging from a deep trance. She looked at me, uncertain of where she was, and in her pupils I could see the passage from sleep to consciousness—as if consciousness were also a light, a light that could be switched on.
In addition to the generalized discomfort in my stomach, I noted a metallic reflux in my mouth, something like the taste of one of those old thousand-peso coins with the face of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. I considered asking the woman beside me for a sip of water, as she seemed to have made preparations for every eventuality, but I felt uneasy about having fallen asleep against her, about having become a vulnerable being—an injured pigeon, a failed origami figure—lying in her lap, so I said nothing and silently hoped that we were making a scheduled stop to buy food (I still had a little of the money Rat had given me).
I looked out the window, expecting to see a gas station, maybe even a bus terminal. I thought that perhaps we were in Villahermosa, that we’d reached our destination hours before we were due, very late at night, and that I’d now have to wait until dawn to board another bus that would take me to Chiapas, where I’d find Mariana and Teresa as soon as I left the terminal. Perhaps my sister and mother were aware that I was on my way and were waiting for me, holding an enormous cake with my name in sugar frosting, eager to see me, glad that the three of us had escaped the tedium of Educación. Glad, most of all, to have escaped from my father: we’d celebrate finally being free of his monstrous ordinariness, his slipper-shod evil intentions.
But outside the window, all I could see was a dusty landscape. Nopals, stones, and spindly bushes suddenly lit—as if discovered in flagrante to be bushes—by passing headlights.
The driver got out of the bus and, through the window, I watched him arguing with three men in military uniforms holding flashlights and opening the luggage compartment. I was relieved to think that I hadn’t brought any bags, as I’d have been worrying about the soldiers stealing them.
From an early age, Teresa had alerted me to the inherent iniquity of anyone in uniform. On one occasion we were stopped by a patrol when she was driving Mariana and me to school. A police officer walked up to our car and, putting his head through the open window, said, “What lovely children you have, señora. You should drive more carefully. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to them.” She looked him straight in the face, refusing to give in to his attempt to intimidate her, and replied unsmilingly, “I haven’t committed any traffic violation, but if you insist that I did, write me out a damn ticket and let me take my children to school, because I’ve got no intention of giving you a single peso.” The officer was so surprised that he let us continue on our way without even imposing a fine, and Teresa explained that the sole aim of the local police, the judicials, and soldiers was to humiliate people and take their money, a bit like those school bullies who terrorize younger kids.
That early lesson on the role of the forces of law and order in public life was later reinforced by numerous comments and arguments about the behavior of the military in Chiapas when the uprising broke out at the beginning of ’94. Teresa’s “simplistic views” exasperated my father, and she used to complain that he “played down things as obvious as State repression.” While those quarrels were incomprehensible to me and, it must be said, boring, belonging to a world whose codes I didn’t know, the message that the military were all sons of bitches had been branded on my subconscious in the same way the primeval fear of the Bogeyman and temporary tattoos had been instilled in me as a defense mechanism by the myths circulating among children in the schoolyard.
So, as I watched the soldiers searching the luggage in the middle of the dark highway, I was certain that something bad was going to happen and turned my head to my neighbor as if seeking confirmation of this ill omen in her adult concern. I guess she realized that I was worried and tried to hide, as far as was possible, her own fears. She asked me my name (I muttered a reply) and told me that hers was María Concepción, but that everyone called her Mariconchi. That must have brought an involuntary smile to my face, because Mariconchi then asked me what was so funny. She said this in a jokey tone, as if she herself knew that her nickname was a bit ridiculous.
This exchange lightened our moods. The fact of being stopped halfway to our destination couldn’t, after all, be too serious. It was probably something that happened all the time and that I wasn’t aware of. Just when I was consoling myself with those thoughts, Mariconchi grabbed my hand, put her face close to mine, and whispered, “If they ask you anything, sweetie, say I’m your auntie and that your mommy and daddy have asked me to take you to Villahermosa. Got it?”
Far from calming me, this plan of action rekindled my forebodings. Who was going to ask me if I was traveling alone, if Mariconchi was my aunt, if my “mommy and daddy” were waiting for me in Villahermosa? Would the soldiers interrogate me? The possibility sent a shiver down my spine. Somehow, they must have found out about me. Was it illegal for a child to travel unaccompanied? Maybe Mariana had called the police or the army to tell them that I’d run away from home and they had mobilized their forces on land and sea until they found me in that ordinary bus, traveling through the night from dusk to dawn.
One of the soldiers boarded the bus. The aisle lights were still on and were bright enough to give a clear view of the passengers. Yet despite this, the soldier shone his flashlight on the sleepy face in the front seat. He inspected the face carefully and then moved his flashlight to the one beside it. The soldier continued along the aisle, illuminating the bleary-eyed visage of each passenger. At the third row, he lingered to order the man in a baseball cap off the bus. The man in the cap attempted to protest or ask for an explanation, but the soldier looked at him derisively and repeated his command: “Get off and wait for me outside.” Another four passengers suffered the same fate before he reached us.
When he finally arrived at the row in which Mariconchi and I were sitting, I couldn’t help but press myself against her. The soldier moved the beam of his flashlight from my face to hers as if comparing our features. “Is she your mom?” he asked, scrutinizing me. I tried to make my voice sound as solemn as possible before replying, “My aunt,” but my mouth was dry and what came out of it was more like a hiccup or a grunt. “Both of you, outside for a check, please,” said the soldier, and for a moment I thought that it was my fault, that if I’d been capable of speaking clearly, of articulating my reply with adult assurance, he wouldn’t have asked us to do that.