The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And the truth is Penelope liked the concentric name of that place—Our Lady of Our Lady of Our lady of … —that, consciously or unconsciously, was mocking the cloning of the Virgin Mary carried out by a Vatican that condemns cloning. And Penelope—a writer in the end and after all—appreciated the orthographic detail of that ellipsis that, they explained to her, corresponded to the faith of believing that one is master of oneself, but, at the same time, master of nothing.

  Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of … like the architectural-existential antithesis of Mount Karma: architecture of simple lines, almost absent decoration (compared to the indecorous psychotic clutter of Mount Karma), and the near impossibility of running into anybody in its corridors (on Mount Karma you were never alone); with the exception of that nun who always frightened Penelope a little, who stared at her, who had a face that was like several faces at the same time. A long-suffering face made to suffer. A face that was a cross. A crusade face. A face that seemed to be looking up at itself from below. One of those reconstructions after a car crash or, maybe, a deconstruction after too many cosmetic surgeries, whose maintenance had been let go and now were stacked one atop the next, like heavy geologic layers, like mudslides provoked by the aftershocks of ancient earthquakes, plastic and melted. Penelope heard about how that nun was something like the great resident theologian of the place, and that she had arrived here from a cloistered monastery. Someone who’d achieved certain renown with the functional miracle of a theory that, they explained, reconciled Darwinians and Creationists and everybody happy and she’d even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize: man is not descended from apes, rather apes are the first study/sketch of man that God, in his infinite mercy, decided to toss into the trash can. And there they both are, looking at each other from opposite sides of the same cage. Something like that.

  Whereas Penelope has more or less a clear idea of where she comes from (from what heights she has fallen), but she can’t be sure where she’s going or in what place she’ll wind up. Maybe, she likes to say to herself with a shred of humor, she’s no longer going. She, just, bah.

  So, Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of … like a parenthesis in the lives overly laden with question marks and exclamations points of its residents (a set of parenthesis like those parenthesis that, one facing the other, remind Penelope of the basic contour of two hands coming together in the gesture of prayer); a place to reflect on everything that happened in a context where nothing would happen to you anymore. A space to reread, without hurry and word for word, your own life as if it were one of those voluminous nineteenth-century novels with the name of a place or person on the cover. To see yourself from outside and, after a while, to tell yourself you might have done it differently, you might have written it like this and not like this. And, arriving to this point that’s not the end but is a period and new paragraph, supposedly, you’re cured. Or, at least, you’ll have time and space to get sick from one thing or another that’s not desperation about the mystery of how did I get here and the panic in the face of what’s yet to come. What good readers feel when they read a good book, though not of someone else’s paper and ink but of their own flesh and blood.

  And, yes, Penelope sounding now like the nameless heroine of that novel that could never have been written if it hadn’t first read this novel.

  Her novel.

  Not hers, not one of the ones she has written. One of the now many books with bright covers and letters in relief and explosive illustrations. Covers where you see above the title and author’s name (an apparent pseudonym everyone understands as real; without her photograph at her express request) “International Bestseller” beside a number of copies sold with so many zeros you have to think the number over before saying it aloud with a whistle of admiration.

  No: the other novel.

  The other novel that’s hers but not one of hers.

  The novel of another that possessed her so she could possess it.

  A singular novel and the one and only novel its author wrote, a novel without which she would’ve never written anything, something, everything she’s written.

  A novel that cannot be improved because it’s perfect, despite its imperfections.

  A novel whose imperfections are perfect and are what make it a perfect novel.

  One of those novels everyone should read, but, really, is written with only one person in mind, its singular and ideal recipient. That reader who would read it as if she were writing it, the way Penelope read it.

  The novel that, when she read it for the first time, when she was a girl, woke Penelope up forever, transforming her into the most alive of zombies, into the suddenly imprisoned subject of a book and the story of that book.

  The novel with the name of a house. A novel like a house: opening it like opening a door (the same mechanism, yes) and Penelope entered and the cover closed behind her with a slam warning you it’s easy to enter and hard to leave. As hard as leaving behind certain vices one can fall into with such ease.

  The novel to go live inside of until death do you part from that house. And yet: because, like so many old houses, at that house, the garden melts into a small family cemetery where the headstones stretch out in the shade of trees or are covered by undergrowth and moss; as if firmly insinuating you, so that you don’t ever forget it, that your future is present and you’re aware that this place where today you run and grow tomorrow will be where you fall and turn to dust. In times when you died in the same place you lived, yes. So, your eternal death taking place in the same space as your brief life; and the errant and erratic Penelope always yearned for that possibility, so far removed from the serial moves of her childhood; from the comings and goings and the now never-returnings of her distant parents (parents who sometimes felt so far away she wanted to think of them as adoptive and to think of herself as orphan and alien and, with time, to feel and convince herself she belonged, like Heathcliff, to the honorable and turbulent lineage of children who’re never entirely children and never will be because they’re only children, children of themselves); from the enchanted-compass wandering of her youth and adulthood; to feel like you’re moving and yet to be standing perfectly still at the site of the confluence of all things in the world.

  Penelope tells herself that she would’ve given anything to have a house like that, that she would’ve offered whatever she had for a home forever.

  A house that isn’t called Manderley or Mount Karma, but that—smaller and older—has found a way to devour them all with a wild and youthful appetite.

  A carnivorous house.

  Wuthering Heights is the name of that house, is the name of that book.

  A name Penelope came to for the first time via the inspired translation of Cumbres Borrascosas.

  Though first there was that TV adaptation, a Venezuelan telenovela, on a black and white screen. Telenovela on the television that a six- or seven-year-old Penelope (Penelope’s chronology, like that of Emily Brontë and, even more, like that of Wuthering Heights, is a bit diffuse, as if veiled in a blanket of fog) stared at, every afternoon from Monday to Friday, in the company of the girl who “took care” of her and her bad brother. One of the many “Rosalitas” hired by her parents to watch them and bathe them and feed them and take them to school during their prolonged absences; when they went abroad to film those bon vivant ad spots that had made them stars.

  Her parents were two golden models in the golden age of advertising in their country. And one day her parents had a great idea. To sell to an international brand of whiskey with the never-ending campaign of a couple of young and beautiful adventurers (themselves) traveling the world aboard a sailboat, the Diver, dropping anchor in the world’s most glamorous ports and (super low costs) starring in and filming and assembling the material they subsequently mailed in to be broadcast on the screens of televisions and movie theaters. Their proposal was accepted and the adventure not only won many national and international prizes, but, being advertisements without d
ialogue, just background music, they had the added appeal of a universal language, one that everyone everywhere got, how the good life is understood and envied and desired in all places. Those images and those inaccessible though plausible and verifiable paradises and those songs that always became fashionable and whose composers were more than happy to share royalties with Penelope’s parents. Anything in exchange for having their music play alongside the long legs and just-the-right-size breasts of her mother and the full-toothed smile and long hair of her father. Spots that could air without any kind of post-production or adaptation the world over, and that made her parents into characters, if not famous then at least well-know at all the parties, on all the television and movie theater screens. And so, her parents leaning in front of the Tower of Pisa and adoring each other on Juliet’s balcony in Verona. Or dancing with Cossacks in Moscow. Or riding camels in the Sahara or rappelling down glaciers in Patagonia. Or crossing the London Bridge or going up to the top of the Empire State Building. Or pretending to draw a heart with their initials on one side of the Great Wall of China. Or in the still-primitive and gangsterish and Sinatra-esque Sands Hotel where her mother looks like a backup singer and her father like an Elvis impersonator. Or who knows where next time, but always here and there and everywhere. And, in spite of herself, Penelope actually likes one of those spots: her father as an arctic explorer and her mother as a sexy snow queen. Her bad brother’s favorite—more than anything because it makes him very popular among his little friends at school—features her father at the controls in Cape Canaveral and her mother floating in a space simulator, weightless, clothes so tight she appears to be naked, oh so Barbarella. Yes, her parents on the screen of that TV where Penelope sees her novel for the first time.

  Penelope sits down holding a plate with a hamburger and mashed potatoes in one hand and a glass of Coca-Cola in the other (the basic diet in her home). And, coming back from a commercial break, there are her mother and father, the Diver anchored on the edge of Seine, the two of them running through the Louvre and her mother’s smile imitating, quite well, that of the Mona Lisa, before bursting into soundless laughter, because what you hear is “a very lovely song by a very ugly person named Serge Gainsbourg,” her parents explained. And they showed her a photograph and he didn’t look ugly to Penelope and, with time, even made her think a little of Heathcliff. And sitting beside her, the Rosalita of the moment, as if in a trance, saying in a low voice “Those two are so crazy,” staring at the TV where something very strange is happening; and, no, Rosalita isn’t referring to her parents. Penelope looks at Rosalita and looks at what Rosalita is looking at and what she sees is a location covered in that fake smoke of dry ice. Rocks that, it’s easy to see, are made of light papier-mâché. A backdrop showing a bleak and fleeting landscape that just reaffirms the fact that it’s all taking place on a set of no more than four square meters. Suddenly, a young man with an unbuttoned shirt and exceedingly wrinkled pants enters the frame shouting “Catherine! Catherine!” He exits the frame, his voice not growing more distant but growing quieter in an attempt, ingenuously, to give the impression of distance; and a few seconds pass and now what appears before the spectators is a girl, in wide skirts and a corset tight across breasts that want nothing but to escape, wailing “Heathcliff! Heathcliff!” And she exits and then he comes back and “Catherine!” and exits and she enters and “Heathcliff!” And so it goes for that entire segment of telenovela. Until—break—they’re back, but so far from home, Penelope’s parents (now, magically, in Mozambique, her mother in a metallic bikini surrounded by black boys who look at her wondering if it might not be a good idea to revise the whole goodbye to cannibalism). But Penelope forgets about her parents, wherever they are, and can’t stop thinking about that place. And about that fog. And about those two (they seem so much unhappier yet also much more real than her happy parents). And about those two names that, more than names, are like magic words, spells, conjurations of conjurers. Penelope waits for them to come back on and in the next scene they’re no longer there (now appear some servants talking in a kitchen, a drink, and someone listening to a story told beside the fire in the fireplace), but they all keep repeating those names as if they were nouns and verbs and predicates. Heathcliff’s Catherine catherinian heathcliffically by the heathcliffs and among the catherines. They don’t seem able to talk about anything that isn’t Heathcliff and Catherine. And Penelope watches all of that and all of them until the end. And she doesn’t understand any of it, but she waits until the final credits. And there she reads “Based on the immortal classic by Emily Brontë” and, ah, so all of that is a book … And it’s the first time Penelope experiences that great pleasure: discovering that something she likes a lot is not the original, but comes from somewhere else, from something that’s probably much better than the thing you already like.

  And that afternoon, Uncle Hey Walrus comes to visit and takes Penelope and her brother on a walk. Her uncle, it’s known (since he was sent back exquisitely wrapped, like a gift nobody really wanted, in a straight jacket, after his brief yet powerful stay in Pepperland, London), isn’t who he once was. And sometimes he barks like a dog or like a walrus; but he hasn’t lost the ability to feel an invulnerable tenderness for Penelope and her bad older brother whom he refers to as “my little orphans of living parents.”

  Her Uncle Hey Walrus is for Penelope—in a hypothetical catalogue of novelesque categories of the nineteenth century—what’s known as “a benefactor.” A secondary character, yes, but of the first order. Someone indispensable and decisive when it comes to attaining a more or less happy ending. Or an ending of any kind.

  So the three of them go out and enter a bookstore (the sun already went down and went quiet, but the bookstores stay open, as the local legends say) and Uncle Hey Walrus buys her bad brother Dracula and wants to buy Penelope Little Women. But she—with the certainty and assuredness with which other kids select ice cream flavors out of so many colors—asks the bookseller, “Please, Cumbres Borrascosas, the immortal classic by Emily Brontë.” And she carries it home with her, never suspecting it’s really the book that’s carrying her, the book that will read her over and over again throughout the novel of her life.

  That night, under the covers, with a flashlight, Penelope begins her never-ending relationship with that book and, when the sun rises, she has reached the last page with a feeling of triumph she has never experienced before. Penelope reads it and has read all of it. From the name and address of the publisher to the name of the translator who took it by the hand and led it from another language and taught it how to speak in that of Penelope. Penelope returns again and again to paragraphs she has marked with a pencil, convinced that, yes, anyone can read Wuthering Heights; but that it was written for her and her alone. And Penelope suspects, without understanding very well why she suspects it, that every human being has a book like this, a book that is their destiny. A book by someone else but all theirs. And most everyone passes it by, though it’s right there throughout their lives, or never finds it. And they die having never read it. Or they only find it in the last days of their life and wonder, through tears, a mix of joy and sorrow (as if they were, again, flavors of ice cream, irreconcilable yet eaten together all the same), where that book was all this time, where they were that this book wasn’t.

  Whereas Penelope has been lucky and chosen: she has discovered it very early, the book found her almost right away. And she has her whole life in front of her to reread it as if—even by the end of that first opening night, together—as if she were already a quiet octogenarian returning to the books of her impetuous youth.

  Penelope, over the years, will learn everything there is to know about Wuthering Heights, though the version she gets to know first speaks a different tongue, her own. Translation by one Cebrià de Montoliu, urban planner and social reformer and proselytizer of Anglo-Saxon culture in Cataluña, dead in Albuquerque; great name, his, like that of a swashbuckling womanizer, says Penelope; and f
or that alone, for his inspiration when it came to importing that title into Spanish, Penelope counts him among her favorite writers. And it was under the influence of Cebrià de Montoliu that—when she had to choose a city in which to lose herself in order to find herself—Penelope traveled to Barcelona. A city where, also, José Bardina, her first Heathcliff, the one from the Venezuelan telenovela, son of a Barça soccer player, had been born. Yes, Wuthering Borrascosas there as well, influencing that, influencing everything.

  And, when it comes to remembering and organizing everything that happened, for reasons of physical and mental health (so the religious psychologists of Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of … have suggested to her), it’s best to do it quickly, without pausing too long on the details. Like the recaps of previous installments in those Victorian true-crime penny dreadfuls, like the one about Bernadette Dawn, who locked up her own daughters, or in the serialization of Great Expectations, with its manipulative masculine version of Heathcliff and that demented and ruinous bride; both, the real and the imagined, so heavily influenced by the foggy radiations of Wuthering Heights.

  And so, Penelope in Barcelona where she first encountered the project, with no possible practical application for a writer, of Maximiliano “Maxi” Karma; whom at first she mistook for a Heathcliff, but soon realized was nothing but an Edgar Linton. And, then, overdose and deep coma for the young dynastic heir of a family from a place known as Abracadabra. And there Penelope went, accompanying her deeply sleeping beauty. And there Hiriz and Mamagrandma and Lina were waiting for her. And Penelope, rechristened Penita, fled that place on the morning of her wedding day, crossing a desert riddled with diamonds, riding on the back of a gigantic and mutant and telepathic green cow and drinking its strange and intoxicating milk to then, her wedding dress in tatters, enter the clinic where the comatose Maxi lay and climb atop him, and suffocate him, and get impregnated by him, and continue on her way, fearing the Karmas would come to reclaim her soon-to-be-born son.