The Dreamseller: The Calling

by Augusto Cury

  Sweeping his hand toward the lonely dreamseller at the center of the stage, he said, sarcastically, “Behold: The greatest imposter of all time. Society’s greatest con man. The greatest swindler, the greatest illusionist and the greatest heretic of the century. And to show our gratitude, we confer on him the title of the greatest seller of lunacy, of nightmares, of trash and falsehood and stupidity that this society has ever produced.”

  A lightning storm of flashes erupted. A stunningly beautiful model walked up to him and handed him a diploma. The organizers had planned everything down to the tiniest, insulting detail.

  Incredible as it seems, the dreamseller didn’t refuse it. Instead, he graciously accepted the scroll. We, his disciples, were perplexed. The audience was frozen. No one in the stadium dared say a word.

  The muscles of my face as well as my ability to reason were paralyzed. My mind was roiling with questions: Had all the ideas we’d heard, ideas that had so swept us away, come from the mind of a psychotic? How is that possible? What had I done to my life? Had I dived into a sea of dreams or of nightmares? Had I been saved from a physical suicide only to suffer an intellectual one?

  Psychotic or Sage?

  AFTER REVEALING THAT THE DREAMSELLER WAS, IN FACT, the young, tormented psychiatric patient from the film, the event organizers turned to us smugly, as if to say that we had been the biggest fools of all. They seemed to want revenge. “But for what?” I wondered. What was behind this ambush? Why destroy a man’s image so publicly? Why so much hate for a seemingly harmless human being?

  Only later did we find out that one of the dreamseller’s speeches was to “blame” for the plummeting stock price of the La Femme fashion giant, part of the Megasoft conglomerate. Prices fell immediately after the dreamseller recommended emphatically, in the “temple of fashion,” that designer labels should carry a warning that beauty cannot be standardized, that every woman has her own particular beauty, and that women should never identify with models who represented a genetic exception in the human race.

  The real problem started when the CEO of the fashion giant—one of the organizers of the event—wrote an op-ed saying these were nothing more than the ramblings of a lunatic. And if attacking a humble man weren’t enough, he finished his thought with a quote that showed the depth of the Barbie syndrome: “With apologies to all the ugly girls, beauty is important.” The statement had circled the globe, not only in newspapers but also on the Internet, generating heated debates in the media and producing a chain reaction of repudiation on the firm. Thousands had sent messages to the countless La Femme stores around the world opposing its philosophy. The company’s stock fell by thirty percent in two months, a loss of more than a billion and a half dollars. It was catastrophic for the company.

  Revenge, which exists only in the human species, reared its ugly head. Unmasking the man who had caused all the damage became a question of honor for the leaders of the company, a matter of survival. They wanted to publicly unmask the dreamseller to discredit his ideas and regain their credibility.

  We didn’t know where to hide in the stadium. We’d lost our courage, our adulation and our enthusiasm. I who had learned to love the dreamseller now couldn’t find the energy to defend him. Now I understood the pain in John Lennon’s famous phrase after the Beatles broke up: The dream is over.

  “Our movement is dead,” I thought, and figured the rest of the group felt the same way. But I was surprised by Monica and Jurema’s defiant attitude.

  “It doesn’t matter if the dreamseller was or is psychotic,” they said. “We were with him through the applauses and we’ll be with him through the jeers.”

  “Were women stronger than the men?” I wondered. I don’t know, but I do know that they displayed an irrational idealism. Then, two of the men stood up in solidarity,

  “If the chief’s crazy, then I’m crazy, too!” Bartholomew yelled out.

  Not to be outdone, Barnabas stood up emphatically.

  “I don’t know if he’s crazy, but I do know he made me feel like a person again. And I won’t abandon him now. You know what? I’m crazier than the dreamseller,” he said, then added, “But not as crazy as you, Honeymouth.”

  “Thank you, my friend,” Bartholomew replied, feeling flattered.

  The dreamseller turned to leave and headed for the exit when the crowd started buzzing. We thought they might rush the stage to lynch him, and then, suddenly, they broke out in a chant that soon filled the stadium.

  “Speak . . . ! Speak . . . ! Speak . . . !”

  The chant reverberated throughout the stadium until the entire building shook with nervous energy. The executives looked worried. The last thing they wanted was to start a riot that would give them more bad front-page press. So they turned his microphone back on and gestured for him to return to the stage and speak. Doubtless, they figured the dreamseller would crush what was left of his image by trying to worm his way out with superficial explanations and accusations. But clearly, they didn’t know the depth of this man they were so eager to discredit.

  He looked out at the audience, and then at us, his disciples. He gently raised his voice and, without fear of repercussions, he dissected his own history the way a microsurgeon does with the tiniest of blood vessels.

  Softly, he told us his story, the most dramatic one I’d ever heard. Except that this time it was no parable; it was his true story, raw and uncensored. For the first time, the man I had followed exposed the very depths of his being. And I realized that I hadn’t known him fully, either.

  “Yes, I was mentally ill, or maybe I still am. I’ll leave that for the psychiatrists and psychologists, and all of you, to judge. I was committed to an institution because I was suffering from a deep and severe depression accompanied by mental confusion and hallucinations. My depression was fed by a crippling feeling of guilt. Guilt over the indescribable mistakes I’d made with people I loved the most.”

  He paused for breath. He seemed to be trying to rebuild his dismembered being, to organize his thoughts in order to tell his shattered story. “What mistakes did the dreamseller make that unbalanced him?” I wondered. “Wasn’t he strong and generous? Didn’t he demonstrate the height of camaraderie and tolerance?” To our surprise, he declared:

  “I was a rich man, very rich, and powerful, too. I was more successful than anyone else of my generation. Young and old alike came to seek my advice. Every venture I touched turned to gold. They called me Midas. I was creative, bold, intuitive—a visionary, unafraid of uncharted territory. My ability to absorb a failure and come back stronger astounded everyone around me. But gradually the success I always thought I controlled came to control me, to poison me, to invade the intimate reaches of my mind. Without realizing it, I lost my humility and became a god—a false god.”

  We were stunned by his words. I wondered, “Could he really have been rich? What kind of power did he have? Or is he hallucinating again? Didn’t he walk around in tattered clothes? Didn’t we depend on the kindness of others just to survive?”

  At hearing the dreamseller’s admission, Bartholomew became emboldened.

  “Aha, that’s my chief! I knew it! I knew he was a millionaire,” Bartholomew said. Then, scratching his head, asked, “Wait, then why were we always so broke?”

  There was no good explanation. “Maybe, like so many businessmen, he went bankrupt,” I thought. “But could financial ruin trigger such a serious mental illness? Could it break someone’s sanity and plunge him into the realm of madness?” My thoughts were interrupted when he continued his account.

  “My only goal was to stand out, to compete, to be number one, as long as it meant playing by the rules,” the dreamseller confessed. “I didn’t want to be just another face in the crowd. I wanted to be unique. And so, I became a machine, tirelessly dedicated to success and making money. The problem doesn’t start when we possess money, however much we have. It starts when the money possesses us. When I realized this had happened to me, I saw that money co
uld, in fact, impoverish a man. And I became the poorest of men.”

  I was flabbergasted at seeing this man, who had supposedly been so rich and powerful, remove his mask and become an unflinching critic of himself. I tried and failed to think of any leader in history who had ever spoken so courageously. I looked at myself and realized that I, too, lacked such bravery. His bold words began to invigorate me. My admiration for this man was being rekindled. Then, he told the story of how he, his wife and their two children were scheduled to go on an ecotourism vacation with friends to see one of the planet’s few remaining great rain forests.

  But, for him, time was a scarce commodity, he said. So he planned the trip months in advance. Everything was set, but at the last minute, he was asked to participate in a video conference with some of the company’s investors. Vast sums of money were involved. His family and friends postponed the trip by a day to wait for him. The next day, he had to quickly resolve a business matter that had been dragging for months: He had to sign off on the purchase of another large company or lose it to his competitors. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. The trip was postponed again. On the day they were finally set to travel, the board of directors of his petroleum firm presented him with a new problem. More make-or-break decisions had to be made.

  “So as not to put off the trip again, I apologized to my wife, my children and our friends and told them to go on without me. I would charter a flight later and meet them there,” he said, his voice beginning to crack. “My wife didn’t like the idea. My seven-year-old daughter, Julieta, was sad, but she kissed me and said, ‘You’re the best daddy in the world.’ Fernando, my loving nine-year-old son, also kissed me and said, ‘You’re the best father in the world—but the busiest, too.’ I answered, ‘Thank you, children, but someday Daddy will have more time for the greatest kids in the world.’”

  The dreamseller heaved a deep and heavy sigh. “But that time would never come . . .” He paused and started to cry. In a choked voice, overcome with emotion, he told the audience:

  “While I was in the middle of a meeting, hours after they had taken off, my secretary rushed in to say there had been a plane crash. My heart started to pound. I turned on the news and heard that an airliner had crashed into a dense tropical rain forest . . . and there did not appear to be any survivors. It was the flight they were on. I collapsed to the ground and cried inconsolably. I had lost everything. There was no air to breathe, no ground to walk on, no reason to live. Between tears and pain, I put together a rescue mission, but we never found my wife and children’s bodies; the plane had burned to a cinder. I couldn’t even say good-bye to the most important people in my life, to look into their eyes or touch their skin. It was as if they’d never existed.”

  Overnight, the man so many had envied became the object of pity, the indestructible man became the most fragile of beings. And to add to his indescribable pain, he was tortured by guilt.

  “The psychologists who treated me wanted to ease my guilt. They tried to tell me I wasn’t responsible for the loss. But I knew, indirectly, I was. They tried to protect me instead of making me face the monster of my guilt. But they couldn’t ease my desire to punish myself. They were good doctors, good men, but I resisted and closed myself up in my own world.”

  Still reading out from the chapters of his past life for the audience, he began asking himself aloud:

  “What did I build? Why didn’t I prioritize what I loved the most? Why did I never have the courage to cut back on my schedule? When is it time to slow down? What is so important that it is more important than life itself? If you lose that, what does it matter if you have all the money in the world?”

  What an unbearable burden. What colossal pain. As I listened to him, I began to understand that all of us, however successful, we all miss out on something. The warm sun sets on us all, no one sails forever on tranquil seas. Some lose more, others less; some suffer avoidable losses, others unavoidable. Some lose in the social arena, others in the theater of the mind. And if someone manages to get through life untouched, there is still something he loses: youth. I was a man of losses and I continued to be an expert in losses. But suddenly, recalling the last few months we had been together, I was startled. This man has lost everything in front of the entire world. How did he manage to dance? Why was he the happiest of wanderers? Why did he manage to always put us in a good mood? How did he manage to be so tolerant when life had been so unfair to him? How could he lead such a gentle life after having been the victim of such a brutal tragedy?

  As I was pondering these questions, I glanced at the organizers of the event and saw they were visibly shaken; it seems they didn’t know the true identity of the man they had mocked. I looked out at the crowd and saw people crying. They might have felt compassion for the dreamseller or, perhaps, some were recalling losses in their own lives. At that point Jurema squeezed my hands and told me something that surprised me even more.

  “I know that story. It’s him!” she said.

  “Him, who? What are you saying, professor?” I asked, even more confused.

  “It’s him! The sergeants have laid an ambush for their own general. How is it possible?” Jurema was so worked up that she wasn’t making any sense.

  “I don’t understand. Who is the dreamseller?” I asked again.

  She stared at the leaders who had organized the event and said something that floored me.

  “Incredible. He’s standing on the very stage that belongs to him,” she said and could say nothing more.

  My mind went into a tailspin, like a kite cut free of its string. Repeating her last sentence—”He’s standing on the very stage that belongs to him”—I began to understand what Jurema meant.

  “I don’t believe it! He’s the owner of the powerful Megasoft Group? The sergeants laid a trap for their own general, thinking he was just a soldier. Could it be? But isn’t he dead? Or had he just gone into hiding? Then again, the dreamseller had severely criticized the leader of the Megasoft Group at dinner at Jurema’s home. We must be dreaming!” I thought.

  A film began to unreel in my mind. It struck me that the dreamseller had involved himself in many events linked to that corporation. He had rescued me at the San Pablo, a building belonging to the Megasoft Group. And mysteriously, they almost shot him at that same building. He had been beaten at the temple of computing, apparently at the behest of an executive of that same group, and had kept silent. A reporter from a newspaper owned by that group had slandered him, and he had said nothing. Now he was humiliated by leaders of the same corporation and hadn’t rebelled. What was going on? What did it all mean?

  I took a deep breath, trying to bring order to my whirlwind of ideas. I brought my hands to my face and told myself, “This can’t be true! Or is it? No, it can’t be! We’re experts at making up facts when we’re under stress.” I took Jurema’s arm and asked:

  “How can one of the most powerful men on the planet sleep under bridges? How can a billionaire eat other people’s leftovers? It makes no sense!” The professor shook her head; she was as upset and confused as I was.

  Just then, the dreamseller seemed to be answering the questions on all our minds. He said his losses had been so great, his suffering so deep, that he began to lose all rational thought. He said he couldn’t organize his ideas. He refused to eat and finally had to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. At the hospital, he began hallucinating just as we saw on the video. His brain seemed ready to implode.

  In a firmer tone, he revisited the story that the organizers had used to destroy him publicly. He spoke of the second part, surely unknown to them.

  “After the roof, the safe and other structures in that house fought against each other to claim supremacy, I heard another area of the house making itself known. But this time it was a soft, gentle, humble voice. It was a voice whispering beneath the ground, and it didn’t terrify me.”

  Looking out at the audience, the dreamseller stated:

  “It wa
s the voice of the foundation. Unlike all the other parts of that mansion, the foundation didn’t want to be the greatest, the best, or the most important. It wanted merely to be recognized as part of the whole.”

  I strained to understand what the mysterious man was trying to reveal, but it was difficult. But then it started to be come clear.

  “When I heard the voice of the foundation, all the other parts of the house condemned it vehemently. The safe was first. Bursting with pride, it said, ‘You’re an embarrassment to us. You’re the dirtiest part of this house.’ The conceited roof said, ‘No one who has ever entered this house has even ever asked about you. You’re completely unnoticed.’ The beautiful paintings declared arrogantly, ‘You’re ridiculous to suggest you have any worth, at all. Just accept your lowly role.’ The furniture was adamant: ‘You’re insignificant. Just look where you’re located.’ And so the foundation was rejected by all the other structures of the home. Humiliated, shunned and without any way to go on being part of that building, it decided to leave. And what do you think the result was?” he asked the crowd.

  They all answered as one, even the children in the stadium: “The house collapsed!”

  “Yes, the house caved in. My house, which represents my personality, caved in because I dismissed my foundation. When it collapsed, I shouted at God: ‘Who are you, and where were you when my world collapsed? Do you not intervene because you don’t exist? Or do you exist and you simply just don’t care about humanity?’ I fought with the psychiatrists and psychologists. Fought with their theories and medications. I fought with life. I thought it so unjust to me, nothing more than a bottomless well of uncertainties. I fought with time. In short, I fought with everything and everyone. But when the foundation made itself heard, I was heartened, enlightened. And I understood that I had been profoundly wrong. More than anything else, I had fought with my own foundation. I had cast aside my values, my priorities.”