The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And, for now, the storm has passed until the next storm comes. Penelope has managed to distract the cafard. And it has already passed and it won’t be long before Penelope has to think that, with the exception of Wuthering Heights, she doesn’t want to think about anything anymore; and that there’s only one way to achieve this, but many ways to make it happen.

  Penelope had attempted suicide multiple times and, long before reaching its twelfth chapter, Wuthering Heights had distracted her from that idea, just so she could see and reread what happened next, unconcerned with knowing it to perfection. Every time Penelope had felt the impulse to let herself slide toward death, the words and dialogues of Heathcliff and Catherine had kept her on this side, clinging to the edge of the abyss, because, she thought, nobody was worthy of ending their own life if they hadn’t lived a love and a hate and a lovehate like that of Heathcliff and Catherine, of those two adding up to one.

  And so, then, she evoked and cited them blindly, but knowing them down to the last and slightest of their features, now without a page on which to rest her eyes, but moving the tips of her fingers, as if she were reading both of them in the braille of the air. Their two voices one, their two sexes one; until not caring where the ghost of the dead woman ends so the possessed dying man can begin. Their lines of dialogue becoming the hook of a monologue Penelope recites in the solitude of her convent-asylum cell/study.

  Asking herself and answering, in Catherine’s voice, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire … What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn into a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—He’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being—so, don’t talk of our separation again—it is impracticable; and—”

  And again answering herself and accusing and asking herself again, now with the voice of Heathcliff, with a “You teach me now how cruel you’ve been—cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort—you deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears. They’ll blight you—they’ll damn you. You loved me—then what right had you to leave me? What right—answer me—for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it—and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me, that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you—oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave? … May she wake in torment! … Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that ghosts have wandered on the earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

  To all the foregoing—from the one and the other—listens, always obliging and attentive, Nelly Dean who, as she remembers it, tells how Catherine clasped her hands together and brought them to her breast and how Heathcliff “dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears.”

  And so, Catherine dies accusing Heathcliff with a “You have killed me—and thriven on it, I think” and Heathcliff says to her “Don’t torture me till I’m as mad as yourself … Are you possessed with a devil to talk in that manner to me, when you are dying? Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory, and eating deeper eternally, after you have left me? You know you lie to say I have killed you; and, Catherine, you know that I could as soon forget you, as my existence! Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness, that while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell?” And she responds, “I shall not be at peace” and doesn’t deny herself the chance to comment to Nelly Dean, there present, “Oh, you see, Nelly! he would not relent a moment to keep me out of the grave! That is how I’m loved! Well, never mind! That is not my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me—he’s in my soul.” And Catherine seems to lose consciousness and, as Nelly tells it, Heathcliff “flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species.”

  And Penelope knows what they’re talking about and has been there, foam in her mouth, but accusing herself, in the two languages she drives at top speed and without fastening her seatbelt. First, once more and always, the Spanish in which she read the novel for the first time when she was around seven years old; second, again, in the English she learned reading it, line by line, with the help of a bilingual dictionary.

  “Él es más myself than I am y no puedo vivir sin my life,” Penelope recites.

  And no, hers, her other novel, the novel of her life, doesn’t begin with someone remembering a dream that leads her back to a mansion or with a traveler arriving to a kind of farm on the moors. But it doesn’t matter. Those are little details that will be resolved in the final montage, she tells herself now, remembering then. There, in her increasingly distant and remote yet, again, always shiny and new past. And she already remembered it a few minutes—a few pages—ago; a past she’ll think of again as if she were a nineteenth-century heroine, a minimal landscape, where every day you think the same thing.

  There it stays so she will open it: the iron gate and the path that leads to the cluster of houses of that family of lunatics, the Karmas, from which she’d fled, so long ago, decked out in her wedding dress and crossing a diamond-speckled desert on the back of a gigantic and mutant and telepathic green cow. But now all of that, suddenly, Brontëified by Penelope: the desert is a highland moor, the crazy cow is a colossal mastiff, and, in the sky, just above her head, glow asteroids #39427, #39428, and #39429 christened respectively Charlottebrontë, Emilybrontë, and Annebrontë. And it’s their twinkling brilliance that makes the diamonds sparkle (the diamonds always were and always will be diamonds, the diamonds don’t change from one version to the next) and Penelope picks them up, not thinking of making herself rich, but thinking that, while there are diamonds to be picked up, and there are so many, she won’t die, out there, all alone.

  And, suddenly, in her mind, the tribal architecture of Mount Karma (multiple medium-sized houses surrounding one massive house, as if paying tribute and honoring, relatives of the Karma surname orbiting around the queen sun that is Mamagrandma, totem and chieftess of the tribe) melting into that of her other house beside the river mouth opening onto the sea. The house she set ablaze before they brought her here, thinking they were locking her up when, in reality, she’d done all of it to find sanctuary behind these other bars. They think those bars keep her from getting out when the truth is: these bars keep them from getting in. Mamagrandma and the Karmas and even her bad brother, who’s only admitted if she authorizes it and she no longer does.

  Everyo
ne outside.

  The only ones authorized to come in and visit her from now on have to meet a condition, they have to bear the surname Brontë and be direct descendants of the Brontë sisters, and there aren’t any, there never were.

  What’s in a name? What’s in a surname? Many things if that surname is Brontë. More a registered trademark than anything. Pronounce it / brontiz / or / bronteiz. Drag it here pulling it by the hair, up the stairs, moving away from the original sound of an Irish clan, that of the Ó Pronntaigh or Sons of Pronntach, Anglicized as Prunty or Brunty; until the always unpredictable Reverend Patrick Brontë—father of the sisters and the brother—rewrote it definitively as Brontë, who knows why. Perhaps to move it up in the hierarchy, latching onto the honorable Admiral Horatio Nelson, Duke of Bronte. Perhaps to associate it with the Greek and divine echoes of the roaring Greek word βροντή, which means “thunder.” Perhaps for both reasons or perhaps for none of them except the clear nonsense of those two little dots above the ë, which, typographically, alert you to the fact that the surname is comprised of two syllables; but which always remind Penelope of the bite mark of a vampire on the neck of the young immaculate virgin with—the damsel in distress discovers in that exact instant—previously inconceivable longings to cease being impurely innocent in order to feel so immaculately sinful.

  Penelope, yes, has spent so many years being brontëified. The surname like an action to react to. Penelope has gone along crossing out everything else until they’re all she has left, those who bear that name.

  Sometimes Penelope thinks of her bad brother, writer and exwriter, poor little thing: his mind overpopulated and Vonnegutified and Cheeverified and Bobdylanized and Proustified and Nabokovified and … Her bad brother’s head is like the name of this convent/asylum, its battery never dies: “It keeps going … and going …”

  Or she thinks of her Uncle Hey Walrus, madly Beatleified (if you asked and supplied him with the pertinent information, her uncle would’ve answered that “Charlotte Brontë and her Jane Eyre are definitely the romantic Paul McCartney advising ‘When I find myself in times of trouble … Let it be’; while Emily Brontë and her Wuthering Heights are unequivocally the hallucinatory John Lennon, disorienting everyone with a ‘Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to … Nothing is real’; and Anne Brontë would be George Harrison and Branwell Brontë would be Ringo Starr”).

  Or she thinks of her parents, disappeared, now and so, yes, feeling so fulfilled, a true orphan; joining that race for whom the only surname to answer to—beginning and ending in themselves—is their own: that name like the solipsistic sun that, in their flight, her progenitors flew too close to. And, from there, someone gave them a little push. And Penelope doesn’t really want to think about that, because it’d be easy to say it was there and then (if you were to look at Penelope from outside, never understanding her, the way many tried in vain in their time to understand Emily Brontë) the process began, a process without a clear end that’s known, conveniently yet imprecisely, as “going mad.” The madness where you go and never ever leave.

  And so, the “experts” didn’t hesitate to diagnose Penelope with a “pathological obsession with the Brontë family and a special fixation on the sister Emily.”

  But they don’t understand anything.

  The Brontës and Emily, for Penelope, are not an illness: they are, if not the cure, at least the medicine that slows down the poison circulating insider her organism. The antidote expanding the distance and slowing down the speed between the heart and the head or between the head and the heart.

  Penelope has discovered with no need for college or diploma or years of psychoanalysis that—when trying by any means not to think about your own family—the best way to do it is not to blink and to focus all your attention on another family.

  Thus the Brontës.

  The most functional of dysfunctional families.

  A father.

  Three sisters and one brother.

  The ghost of a dead mother and two dead sisters.

  An unmarried aunt and two servants.

  The landscape of their myth and their reality as landscape.

  And, there inside, all of them writing; because there’s little to read in the world of minimal lines that surrounds them. A world that’s like a blank page that doesn’t provoke fear but produces that form of oh so nineteenth-century boredom that, almost immediately, is translated into boundless creativity. Into black ink full of letters.

  Penelope enumerates names and counts dates and Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848) and Anne Brontë (1820-1849).

  All three of them assuming masculine pseudonyms, because, as a woman, that whole writing stories thing isn’t something you do (before them, Jane Austen, who already mocked the gothic cosmogony the Brontës worshipped in Northanger Abbey, began signing her books as “A Lady”; and after them Mary Anne Evans disguised herself as George Eliot).

  And, thus, the brothers Bell: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

  To whom is added the real and authentic brother, Patrick “Branwell” Brontë (1817-1848), who doesn’t deserve a tolling pseudonym because the truth is, upon reaching adolescence, he begins to distance himself from his sisters’ increasingly realistic and sublime fantasies.

  Free verse and imperfect rhyme, the poor Branwell, the unbearable Branwell, the Branwell who supposedly was going to be a multifaceted artist and all-terrain genius. Branwell who doesn’t take long to become someone—in the first translations that Penelope reads as a girl—frequently described with words already brittle from lack of use. Words like “dandy” and “spendthrift” and more or less pious forms of saying very cruel things like “good for nothing” or, in the British parlance of the day, “casual worker.” Those who have tried to heighten the mythic and supposedly Byronian air of Branwell, beyond his hysteric outbursts and bratty tantrums and unfounded egocentrism, despite being repeatedly rejected by all (there’s a biography by Daphne du Maurier, Manderley again, that refers, almost breathlessly, to his “infernal world”; and Matthew Arnold included him in several lines of his poem “Haworth Churchyard”), only to end up increasing the shame that this man produces in a world of men, but eclipsed by three mad sisters. An ink self-portrait (where he reminds Penelope a great deal of the actor Paul Dano) shows him with the characteristic defiant profile of the ever so insecure.

  And so, Branwell, who soon is swept away in a torrent of opium and booze and laudanum and impossible-to-pay debts and dismissals from jobs for stealing money and smoldering yet inevitably unrequited infatuations with a married woman. Branwell works as a tutor for her family and—pioneering attitude that, looking back, makes him quite predictable and unoriginal—the woman is named Mrs. Robinson. And Branwell is fired from his position by the husband and is continually rejected by Mrs. Robinson even when she is widowed. And one night, Branwell lights his bed on fire and is rescued by Emily, and after that he is obliged to suffer the humiliation of sleeping with his father. And Branwell dies an early death of the damned leaving behind a few middling poems, a few paintings of poor quality but great historical and anecdotal value (like that one of his three sisters, in no way resembling how they actually looked, they say, and where he effaces himself and thus disappears, appearing as an kind of ectoplasmic yellowish pillar), and maybe most important of all: his sisters’ need to console him and rewrite him and improve him and turn him into a masculine paradigm and archetype in their novels.

  Before all of that, in the beginning was the other Word. That of the wordy father and reverend Patrick Brontë (1777-1861), the head of that household, a household that was parochial and rural and traditional yet with unorthodox and modern customs. Patrick Brontë let his daughters and son run free, without limits or schedule, amid the rocks and winds and to the despair of his unmarried sister-in-law Elizabeth Branwell (1776-1842) and the servants Tabitha Ayckroyd and Martha Brown (little trace of them remains, gravestones with limited information, dates of departure
but not arrival), who are there to help the motherless family, who adore children, and whom the children adore.

  Patrick Brontë is also an aspiring poet and polemicist who takes pride in certain peculiarities (though perhaps they aren’t entirely certain), like modifying women’s dresses in unorthodox fashion, his propensity to send his progeny to infernal “charity” schools riddled with tuberculosis and malnutrition and infested with rats the size of cats (true: more out of economic necessity than conviction), firing his pistol into the air when in a bad mood or to end an argument, removing the backs of chairs, dining alone; though he doesn’t do the latter in order to sink into profound reveries, but to hide (not entirely, because they could be heard from any corner of the house) the deafening blasts of flatulence he suffers, but, also, enjoys releasing like the groans of a personal domestic demon who watches over all of them.