So, Penelope keeps reading everything else, everything that comes with it. Penelope reads everything the sisters Brontë ever wrote and even what the brother Brontë wrote, and a good part of what has been written about them and him; but she always goes back to the beginning, to all those copies in all those languages and with all those different covers for the same book that, as there’s only one, she bought whenever possible so she could begin it again from the beginning. And reread it as if it were the first time, unforgettable and with the uncertain texture of a fever dream and immoveable structure of the most precise insomnia. All those copies of Wuthering Heights lying there, underground, with her bad brother as gravedigger, whistling amid the headstones, like in that movie they saw when they were kids in which the protagonist lived obsessed with being buried alive. His whole life in all those boxes, long and skinny like coffins.
History of a coffin. An open coffin, like one of those cases that’s never entirely closed and one—maybe the most disturbing of all—of the many mysteries around and on all sides and above and below Wuthering Heights.
A unique case because, yes, there abound optical illusions and visual mirages; but Penelope knows of no other case of hallucination that doesn’t just generate images but imagined letters.
So, that thing that does or doesn’t happen with the corpse of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights.
Does Heathcliff embrace death? Does he dance with death?
Everyone has seen it and swears they read it, but nobody can find that moment in the book when they look for it.
Yes: in chapter XVI, Heathcliff pays his respects to Catherine’s stillwarm body in her chambers in Thrushcross Grange and inside a locket, after removing Linton’s, inserts a lock of his own.
And in chapter XXIX, Heathcliff tells Nelly Dean that, while they were digging Linton’s grave, he told the sexton “to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again—it is hers yet—he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change, if the air blew on it, and so I struck one side of the coffin loose—and covered it up—not Linton’s side, damn him! I wish he’d been soldered in lead—and I bribed the sexton to pull it away, when I’m laid there, and slide mine out too. I’ll have it made so, and then, by the time Linton gets to us, he’ll not know which is which!” Nelly Dean is horrified hearing these words and she gets indignant because it’s not good to disturb the dead (but she’s also already licking her lips with the pleasure she’ll get from telling something so twisted and insane); and Heathcliff tells her he hasn’t disturbed anybody and he feels quite relieved. “Disturbed her? No! She has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years—incessantly—remorselessly—till yesternight—and yesternight I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep, by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers.” And then Heathcliff, as if in a trance and with the voice of a sleepwalker, recalls what happened almost two decades before, during the burial of his beloved. “In the evening I went to the churchyard. It blew bleak as winter—all round was solitary: I didn’t fear that her fool of a husband would wander up the den so late—and no one else had business to bring them there. Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—‘I’ll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I’ll think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep.’ I got a spade from the toolhouse, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws, I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down. ‘If I can only get this off,’ I muttered, ‘I wish they may shovel in the earth over us both!’ and I wrenched more desperately still. There was another sigh, close at my ear. I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by—but, as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt that Cathy was there, not under me, but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed, from my heart, through every limb. I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once, unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with me: it remained while I re-filled the grave, and led me home. You may laugh, if you will, but I was sure I should see her there. I was sure she was with me, and I could not help talking to her.”
In short: Heathcliff never removes the body from the coffin.
Nor does he dance with it.
Though it’s not entirely clear (like so many things are unclear regarding Penelope and her parents and her son) if he does, at least, touch it; because Nelly Dean guesses that, during the wake, Heathcliff takes advantage of a moment when the body is alone: “He did not omit to avail himself of the opportunity, cautiously and briefly; too cautiously to betray his presence by the slightest noise; indeed, I shouldn’t have discovered that he had been there, except for the disarrangement of the drapery about the corpse’s face, and for the observing on the floor a curl of light hair, fastened with a silver thread, which, on examination, I ascertained to have been taken from the locket hung round Catherine’s neck. Heathcliff had opened the trinket and cast out its contents, replacing them by a black lock of his own. I twisted the two, and enclosed them together.”
History of another coffin: Emily Brontë, depressed in the wake of her brother’s death (many speak of incestuous passion, others say he was the one who wrote Wuthering Heights not her), falls ill and wastes away. They fear it’s the flu she contracted at Branwell’s burial, contaminated water is considered, and that nineteenth-century and oh so functional ailment, consumption, is blamed. And Emily Brontë stops eating (in recent years, it has been reconsidered and re-diagnosed as the first case of celebrity anorexia) and proceeds to vanish like a shadow. And Emily Brontë dies, like Catherine Earnshaw, not in a bed, but on a sofa. Or perhaps this isn’t true either and it’s another of the licenses Charlotte Brontë (who reports in a letter that she was “in Eternity—yes, there is no Emily in Time or on Earth now … I will only say, sweet is rest after labour and calm after tempest, and repeat again and again that Emily knows that now” and doesn’t miss the chance to quickly compose the lacrimonious poem “On the Death of Emily Jane Brontë” reproaching her, on this occasion, for the pain her death produces) when it came to novelizing their lives. And, according to Elizabeth Gaskell, that night, Charlotte Brontë walks around and around that round table hundreds of times until she collapses.
But this is true: the carpenter hired to make Emily Brontë’s casket commented that never in all his experience had he “made so narrow a shell for an adult. Barely sixteen inches.”
Keeper, Emily Brontë’s dog, the one she once almost beat to death and whose injuries she healed, came to the burial and, witnesses there claim, howled inconsolably.
More names, another surname. Penelope’s conversion of Brontë into Tulpa. A name she owes to Lina Liberman, possibly the only person Penelope ever loved and whom she still loves, and whose adventurous and subversive face and profile she honors with the invented figure of Stella D’Or.
Lina, though adopted by a couple of Jews beyond orthodox—and oh how Penelope envies her for being adopted, for not knowing where she comes from and, as such, coming from everywhere—is a polymorphous and perverse mystic and she gives Penelope the gift of a ring with the Buddhist and Tibetan symbol of the Tulpa. A sound and word that means “to construct” and “to create,” Lina tells her. The ability to invoke a solid entity with the power of your mind. To fill the sky with astral bodies, to cover it with living beings. “Like Gautama Buddha did in the Divyavadana,” she explains to Penelope. And Lina details the process by which to achieve this miracle. And Penelope thinks it’s not all that different from creating a literary character. Layer by layer. Detail by detail. Physical contexture, voice, eye color,
clothes, abilities, name. As if being dressed up from the most absolute nakedness. The last thing added to a Tulpa is its memory, its story. A story that you must take great care, Lina warns, not to make too similar to your own, because then the Tulpa might feel the irresistible temptation to replace its author. And the author—as has so often happened in the history of literature, the first person for the third—will allow and even encourage that replacement, until death do them vanquish but never does them part.
And—this is true but seems a lie—the morning of Penelope’s wedding to the comatose Maxi Karma, Hiriz orders Lina killed because, she claims, she “mistook her for a thief or a sniper” when she saw her up there, in a tree, not sharp shooting, but filming the delirium of that wedding. Lina dying of laughter, laughing at everyone and everything. And that’s why Hiriz gives the order to have her executed. A single shot. Rifle with a silencer. Nobody hears anything or—much better and so much easier than not hearing—pretends not to hear anything: a sport within the Karma family that, along with pretending not to see and pretending not to speak, configures the existential triathlon of the clan. And Lina makes almost no sound when she falls and disappears into a huge rose bush. Lina sinks into the flowers and thorns with a surprised smile. And the whole scene is like an old silent movie with that simple and efficient and primitive special effect. Cutting a few meters of celluloid. And sticking it back together. And what was there is no longer there. And Lina is no longer there. Her body will immediately and discretely be removed by servants who attend to what nobody wants to attend to and abandoned alongside a back road. And, when it is found several days later, swollen by the sun and the heat, it will be written off as just another victim of the violence between Abracadabra’s rival narco gangs. And, yes, the autopsy will reveal traces of illegal substances floating in Lina’s blood; thus: “the girl was a drug addict and degenerate and delinquent, indeed,” no need for any follow-up investigation. And, outside of all the preceding, to what just happened, to what and whom (the life of Lina, the life, Lina) has just come to an end forever so eternity can begin (the immortal death of Lina Liberman like the immortal death of Catherine Earnshaw), Penelope arrives to the altar repeating over and over, as if she were praying, in the lowest yet most deafening voice of thought, something she once read in a book. Not in her favorite book, Wuthering Heights, but yes in a book very close to that one, a direct relative of her favorite book. She already quoted it. “Reader, I married him.” But in that moment, Penelope is not thinking about Jane Eyre but about Wuthering Heights, about the book to which she has wedded herself until the end of time so, once there, she can return to the first page and start to read it all over again, as if it were the first time, as if it were the last time, as if it were the first and last wedding night.
Lina’s death—change of relationship status—turns Penelope into a writer. Not right away. A little time has yet to pass. A few years that seem centuries. Meanwhile and in the meantime then—“in the dark night of the soul,” as her parents used to say all the time, busting out laughing who knows why but probably at everyone and everything—Penelope asks herself questions without answer. Questions of the kind that don’t expect an answer and, at some point, she decides the way to answer them and to answer herself is to write them down in books.
In the books the Tulpa sisters write, high in the sky, about Stella D’Or and little dAlien down on Earth.
She’s going to write those novels as if they were, all of them, mutant variations of Emily Brontë’s second novel that may never have existed, it doesn’t matter.
“The Brontë sisters on the Moon!” thought Penelope, thinking this is the kind of loony thinking only a lunatic can think.
And then, following the instructions of the immortal dead Lina, she set about creating tulpas and sisters.
The reader is a robber of tulpas. Someone who uses and abuses bodies and souls created by others and incorporates them into that other life within life, that life that takes place inside books. Letting someone else do the hard and dirty work first and only then, at the end, with the table set and guests at the ready, does the reader show up. And only having to sit down beside them and stare at them (of all gazes, reading is most like staring, though the pupils never stop moving and contracting and expanding depending on the situation) and to make very personal modifications to them, so they become unique and nontransferable.
Thus Penelope cannot conceive of the existence of a Heathcliff or a Cathy not her own, the ones she didn’t make but did finish to suit her needs and taste.
And so, in the solitude of her cell/study, Penelope toys with the cast of Wuthering Heights, handing out roles and speeches written by Emily Brontë, sure; but at the same convinced she wrote them doubtlessly suspecting that, sooner or later, she—Penelope—would arrive to recount them, to count on them.
And, it’s true, it’s a somewhat kitsch and somewhat cliché and somewhat cheesy device: the shadows of your creatures passing through walls to evolve around the bed of the one who evokes and invokes them. There are various biopics that end like this. And many are the people moved by those farewell scenes: the communion between creator and creation and all of that.
The unsolvable problem for Penelope is that, after her stint in Abracadabra, the cast of her favorite book gives her a bit of a headache, because they have, for her, been karmatized.
She finds herself constantly drawing equivalences between the characters in Wuthering Heights and her one-time, now distant in-laws who, though they’ve been left so far away and so far behind, are always at her side. Not all of them all at once; just a few at a time; as if taking shifts and poking out their heads, heads she tries to cut off, but really, what’s the point, one always escapes.
And something seems to have gone wrong with all of them, something that weighs on her: like the Karmas, the characters in Wuthering Heights only have each other to feed on and feed off of, to devour and spit out, to chew up and digest and eliminate with no chance of escape. The Karmas only think of the Karmas and yet, when saying goodbye for but a few hours or even a few minutes—always afraid of being the first to leave a gathering and that everyone will start talking about them as soon as they depart—they don’t say “We’ll see you soon” but “We’ll look you up soon,” because they think fixing their eyes on something is bad manners. To look is elegant and aristocratic, to see is vulgar and plebeian. The rich look and the poor see. You look at the surface whereas you see into the depths. To look the way you look at a sunrise and say, “How pretty” and that a sunrise be exactly like a sunset: there are no shades, there are no senses. Long live indifference and glory to uniformity. Superficial gamma rays instead of penetrating X-rays. Not to see yourself but yes to look at yourself and better to half-close your eyes and use your tongue to stab people in the back and talk behind their backs, the tongue like a stinger.
And the Karmas, in their way, are very Wuthering Heights: because they never do what they say they’re going to do. They do something else. Or they do something else even though they think they’re doing what they said they were going to do. And that gives them a sense of zombie accomplishment and empty plenitude. To be thinking all the time about what they would do or what they should do or what they would like to do to and, once all those possibilities are considered, to opt for nothing, or that form of nothing that’s doing the same thing as always or what everyone else would do. The Karmas, like characters from Wuthering Heights, but in a bastardized version, prisoners of a private loop where the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
Just in case.
Better like this.
And—for once it is going to be Penelope who steals something from her bad brother, that symbol he uses to separate paragraphs in his notebooks—here they come and here they are, and she looks at them and sees them:
† Heathcliff / It’s enough and more than enough, because hurricanes are named pure first name and no last name. What’s known is he’s named in memory of someone who lived bri
efly and died soon thereafter. A phantom child of Mr. Earnshaw, a dead son. And so, a stigma from the beginning. The obligation to be someone who never was and thus Heathcliff sets out to be someone like never before and to become unforgettable so everyone forgets that other Heathcliff who was but a quick sketch. And, sure, Heathcliff is one of the most romantic and impassioned characters in all the history of literature. But he’s also a psychopathic sociopath, a control freak, a possessive obsessive, a superb bad guy, a dangerous bipolar whose ferocity is even more frightening than that of those hunting dogs that lap at your ankles and are always ready to go bite whatever they’re told to, after watching their master strangle a puppy with a wicked smile, one of those smiles that bares teeth and fangs. And no: being an orphan discovered in and taken off the streets of the Liverpool port doesn’t justify Heathcliff or his wrathful nature. Or, later, being abused by his stepbrother or driven mad by his hysteric stepsister. Because, in the words of Nelly Dean, “from the very beginning, Heathcliff bred bad feeling in the house.” And, on the heels of such certainty, so many questions. Is Heathcliff Arabic, or is he a gypsy, or is he black, or is he the bastard and unacknowledged son of Mr. Earnshaw? Does Heathcliff get rich trading slaves in The New World or did he distinguish himself in the early wars in the Colonies? Might Heathcliff have been in the Caribbean and encountered Jane Eyre’s Edward Fairfax Rochester in Jamaica? Or might Heathcliff be, perhaps, the abandoned son of those two, though the dates don’t align and match up? (I’m the only person who thinks about these things, I, who am madder than Bertha Mason, Penelope thinks.) Or, as is hinted at here and there, did Heathcliff make a pact with the devil? Might Heathcliff be the true father of Catherine’s daughter? Is Heathcliff a sublimated version of the unspeakable incestuous love—consummated or not—that Emily Brontë feels for her dissolute brother in the process of dissolution? Did Heathcliff beat Hindley to death? Is Heathcliff based on that dark-skinned orphan Emily Brontë’s great-great-grandfather brought home from Liverpool? Or is Heathcliff—as Nelly Dean wonders—“a ghoul or a vampire?” Or might he be a changeling, one of those children kidnapped by fairies and returned as monstrous beings or peter-panic entities who torment mortals with their actions? (And Penelope prefers not to consider this possibility, not to continue that line of thinking: not to travel down the path, without map or compass, of lost children, disappeared to never reappear, as if by the art of magic, the blackest of magic.)
The Dreamed Part Page 23
