And during one of those commercial breaks, Penelope sees her parents for the last time: on the Christmas morning of 1977 following Christmas Eve 1977 (when Penelope and her bad brother and Uncle Hey Walrus went out looking for them all over the city). And there they are, and there the news is delivered that “the onetime models and beautiful people were captured by the toxic ideology of the Marxist apparatus.” And no, that’s not quite right. The hosts on the news program got it wrong: her parents’ relationship with the urban guerilla is as close (equally thin and fragile and, given a little time, equally dismissed) as the ones they had with Zen Buddhism or vegetarianism or folkloric dance lessons.
And, true, her parents did film that ad on the beaches of Cuba: her mother crammed into some camo mini-shorts and shirt knotted up around her waist with a gun belt and machine gun, and her father with a fake beard and a hat and smoking a cigar.
And sure: her parents did start a sort of urban commando; but they treated it like another game to be played with their friends, models and plastic artists and publicists and even the occasional writer.
And their takeover of a prestigious department store on December 24th (an “operation” that Penelope overheard them plan amid fits of laughter over the course of weeks) was nothing but a “performance” and a “happening” and a “participatory and ephemeral work of art” and “a joke” that later they would explain to journalists and then their hostages, who would be there buying last-minute Christmas gifts and, suddenly, would feel more surprised than scared at being taken hostage by that “couple from that sailboat.”
And, OK, nobody will be able to help admiring the perfect cut and tailoring of their guerilla-chic style uniforms. And one of the hostages will ask for an autograph and to take a picture with them.
And her parents, of course, will comply.
And they’ll smile for the camera.
And Penelope doesn’t smile.
But, of course, Penelope is just as mad about that “other Wuthering Heights surprise” that her parents had prepared for her and that they’d shown her on TV earlier that December.
“Here it comes … You won’t believe it,” they said.
And Penelope couldn’t believe what came next.
And then, after that unbelievable thing appeared and she witnessed it, Penelope turned into Heathcliff, indeed.
And Penelope took her revenge.
Like Heathcliff, yes.
And Penelope—the last day she spent at her grandparents’ house, in Sad Songs, before boarding the train to head back home, on Christmas Eve—called that telephone number that appeared on the screen and they answered and she revealed to that voice on the other end of the line what her parents were going to do that night.
And Penelope said she didn’t know if they were “enemies of the state,” but she was sure they were “controversial elements.”
And Penelope described in detail what her parents would be undertaking in a few hours. Their performance and their happening at that department store.
And it’s the end of the year.
And it’s a good moment for the forces of order to strike a warning blow, to make an impression, and they surround the building and ignore the shouts from inside alerting them “it’s all a performance.”
And they are “subdued by the forces of order.” And “subdued by the forces of order” means the army comes in with tanks and bazookas and many people die, among them several customers there buying Christmas presents.
And the attack is filmed by the news channel cameras and broadcast at midday, between ad spots of her parents sailing, happy, voyaging.
And during one pause in the special coverage of that “regrettable and tragic episode, product of minds alienated by alien ideologies that have nothing to do with our more deeply-rooted customs and more sensible beliefs,” there it is, yes, once again, the “other Wuthering Heights surprise.”
The spark of death that set Penelope ablaze and made her do what she did then and what she’ll keep on doing. Because what Penelope does then is of those acts that never stops being done, that is and will forever be there: its expansive wave like a window opened so a hand can reach inside accompanied by wailing voice begging to be let in.
That strange and sacred and dark motivation.
Which leads you to see, though it’s not there, someone opening a coffin and lifting a dead woman in his arms and dancing with her.
Which led Penelope to suffocate a comatose husband and to lose a son and to write all those books. If William S. Burroughs became a writer “thanks to the accident” of killing his wife with a bullet to the head, Penelope became what she is thanks to the surprise her parents gave her and the surprise she subsequently gave them.
Surprise!: when Penelope’s parents were in England, they filmed the obligatory pop-Londoner spot; but they also made time and space to film second one.
Her parents went to West Yorkshire, to Haworth, to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
And there they set up the cameras and rented period costumes and dressed up as Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.
And that’s how the little, belittled, Penelope saw them, unable to believe what she was seeing.
Ghosts on TV. Her father and mother running through the mist and rocks, shouting names not their own (names Penelope felt were hers), calling at windows and beating on trees and, all the time, laughing uproariously, maniacally, laughing at her, at their daughter, no doubt about it.
Her parents who’d never filmed an ad in the south of France depicting—like in Tender Is the Night—a couple enduring and suffering a traumatic and never-entirely-explained episode in a bathroom.
Her parents who now were making fun of her book instead of bringing it to life with their own, Penelope thought then, with the implacable and precise logic of children.
Yes: her parents had done to her something even worse than parents did to children in children’s stories. They hadn’t killed or eaten her; but they had taken the thing she loved most and profaned it.
And Penelope asked herself what Heathcliff would’ve done in this situation.
And she knew the answer.
And she did it.
And all it took was dialing six numbers, her tiny finger turning that telephone dial that spun back and forth with the same sound, clack-clack-clack, as the teeth of those mechanical skulls.
And so it was that Penelope—now you see them and now you don’t, nothing here and nothing there—made her parents disappear, transforming them into desaparecidos.
And so, ever since, Penelope has been wandering the moors of her dying life, talking to herself, reciting and rewriting:
“You teach me how cruel you’ve been—cruel and false. Why did you despise me? I have not one word of comfort for you—you deserve this. You have killed yourselves … May you wake in torment! … May you not rest as long as I’m living! You say I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered 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!”
And no: her parents’ ghost did not visit Penelope just as Catherine’s ghost doesn’t answer Heathcliff’s calls, except maybe at the very end, who knows; because Nelly Dean wasn’t there to tell it and had to settle for a dead man with open eyes and a frozen smile.
And, now, at some point during the night in her cell/study at Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of …, Penelope decides the time has come to turn the page and it’s the last page.
She’s so tired of writing and living as if she were reading.
As if her life were a novel with too many ellipses.
The death of Lina and the death of Maxi.
The green and enlightening milk she drank that night in the desert and the impossible to illuminate black hole of that night when she went out walking on the beach with her young son and “Reader, I lost him.” And—contrary to what’s recommended in such situations—she
didn’t stay in place, to wait for him to appear, clapping so he would hear and find her, rather, since that moment, Penelope hasn’t stopped moving and cursing herself. Everywhere. Until she achieved her fade to white going madder than ever before, at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where something clicked and something snapped; and suddenly she was beating on the walls of the museum with one of those jacks for changing tires that she grabbed out of the trunk of her rental car.
Penelope wrecking everything.
Penelope like Heathcliff beside Catherine Earnshaw’s coffin.
Penelope howling “The Brontës’ little wooden soldiers are hidden somewhere around here! Buried alive! Desaparecidos! And I am going dig them up and free them from their chains and torment!” and thinking that if she found them and played with them, if she gave them roles and names, she could rewrite the past, her past, her parents’ past.
All their dirty pasts.
Revise them. And that—erasing the whole dirty war—all of them could live happily in the perfectly conjugated past in a castle in Glass Town or Angria or Gondal.
But she can’t.
Real lives don’t allow for the chronological spasms of true fictions.
And now Penelope, in her cell/studio at Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of … can only look ahead and think of what’s to come, and pray that it not be too much, and that it’ll all be over soon.
And that’s how Penelope comes to imagine purifying flames.
Thornfield Hall and Satis House and Manderley (and, why not, the Overlook Hotel; because Penelope always thinks a version of The Shining where it was the mother and not the father who went mad would be much more logical and coherent) and her, in all places, like the underground madman at the heights of his delirium.
Like Bertha Mason in the attic of Thornfield Hall.
Like Miss Havisham in the decayed hall of the never consumed nuptial banquet of the never consummated wedding at Satis House.
Like Mrs. Danvers beside the window of Manderley.
Like Wendy Torrance in the boiler room of the Overlook Hotel.
And like, yes, Zelda Fitzgerald, Cinderella turned to cinders, in the blazing Highland Hospital, only identified by her slippers. Burning buildings, burning women.
Her love under lock and key and her love’s keymaster and the key to her love and a son to save from all those ghost parties, from all those haunted bedrooms.
And Penelope imagines herself in flames, but no longer burning as she’s been burning all these years. Penelope all along thinking only about what her bad brother once said about one of his many favorite writers. Something about a writing program whose final and decisive step/assignment (“an exercise that never fails,” that writer explained) was to write a love letter from inside a burning building. Like those buildings that burned in those songs she liked so much and, she supposes, still likes, though it’s been so long since she listened to them.
Talking Heads. Cabezas parlantes. TV newscasters. Voices in her head. A band that, in the last years of her adolescence, Penelope imposed on herself almost as a therapeutic gesture: liking something not of the nineteenth century and so modern and so in fashion. Maybe—it would’ve been more logical—to choose something more languid and gothic. The Cure. But no. Penelope was far from logical and had always felt a deep distaste for obvious choices. And, festive but as if possessed, Talking Heads always struck her as far more impassioned than The Cure and their derivatives with midnight-scarecrow hairdos. Penelope danced to those songs—songs about serial killers and electric guitars and cities and drugs and animals and about “The book I read was in your eyes because you wrote it” or something like that—with her bad brother at Coliseum.
It’s possible they were never closer than they were at that moment. It’s also true they were high. Up to their noses. And drugs make you close, stick you together. “Happy noses,” her bad brother said while they jumped and shouted, his physical body ever so chemical. And her, there, who more than dancing was running around the dance floor (à la the living Catherine Earnshaw) or playing dead (à la the corpse of Catherine Earnshaw) so her bad brother picked her up à la Heathcliff and danced with her. Profaning her or not. It didn’t matter. Amid the artificial fog and flashing strobes.
And after—at Coliseum there were successive live numbers throughout the night—and Penelope even went up on the stage to sing, with a group of friends. In a band who called themselves The Showers (Lina laughed a big huahuahua when she told her about it years later in Abracadabra), because they were really off key, because they sang versions of popular songs as if singing in the shower. Including by the Talking Heads. That wailing voice and those tribal drums and those sparkling and flamboyant verses that she remembers now to, right away, find nexuses and connections between the here and the there. Some songs are like that. Some books are like that. Waiting to make total and absolute sense and to turn into a “They’re playing our song,” into an “I’m rereading my book” and suddenly and without warning … Sounds, written or sung, that possess you when you think you possess them, but no. And, sometimes, unexpectedly, and even though at first the one thing doesn’t seem to have any relation to the other, they become the perfect soundtrack for the ideal typography.
Everything was connected and everything is connected, thinks Penelope, yes, “When my love / Stands next to your love, / I can’t define love / When it’s not love / It’s not love / It’s not love / It’s not love / Which is my face / Which is a building / Which is on fire” and “There has got to be a way / Burning down the house / Close enough but not too far, / Maybe you know where you are / Fightin’ fire with fire” and “All wet / Hey you might need a raincoat / Shake-down / Dreams walking in broad daylight / Three hundred six-ty five de-grees / Burning down the house” and “My house’s / Out of the ordinary / That’s right / Don’t want to hurt nobody / Some things sure can sweep me off my feet / Burning down the house” and “No visible means of support and you have not seen nuthin’ yet / Everything’s stuck together / I don’t know what you expect staring into the TV set / Fighting fire with fire” and “Goes on and the heat goes on / Goes on and the heat goes on / Goes on and the heat goes on / Goes where the hand has been / Goes on and the heat goes on.”
Now, for the first time in so many years, Penelope, scream-singing in her cell/study.
Wuthering Heights like her own ever so out-of-the-ordinary house, yes.
Her face, pure open mouth and soaked with the kind of tears no raincoat can protect you from. Her dreams walking by the light not of the day but of the night, losing footing and finding it, without means of survival, but, even still, her love arriving to a burning building, burning down the house, not wanting to hurt nobody but having done so much damage to so many, fighting fire with fire, fire that connects and holds everything together, staring into the TV set when you haven’t seen nothing yet, seeing it like seeing a fire, close enough but not that far. Seeing it like seeing yourself from outside: Penelope becoming panoramic and bursting into flames along with Stella D’Or and the Tulpa sisters and dAlien.
Penelope writing her love letter from inside a burning building that is this building.
A letter that cannot be deactivated or corrected—there’s no red wire or blue wire here; there’s no red pen or blue pen either—and that Penelope finishes and sends and says goodbye to with nocturnal tenderness, with an “I always loved you so much” and “Forgive me for everything.”
A letter to herself to be received elsewhere, under the moon or on Earth, where the “entire world” is no longer “a dreadful collection of memoranda,” a better place, memorizing herself, making memory of everything she’ll at last let herself forget.
Penelope will receive it and tear it open and read it beside her own tomb. The paper and ink burning her fingertips, her body underground, unrecognizable but at least recovered. Happy to be a skeleton free from the obligation or responsibility of sustaining her skin and her features and her guilt and her sins.
Reading and reading her and reading herself.
And amazed someone could attribute such restless dreams to her.
To someone who now lies, resting and at peace, read by everyone forever, in a tomb so new and so quiet.
III
TONIGHT (MANUAL OF LAST RITES FOR WAKING DREAMERS)
Many years have passed since that night.
—MARCEL PROUST
Du côté de chez Swann
There’s too much on my mind
There’s too much on my mind
And I can’t sleep at night thinking about it
—RAY DAVIES
“Too Much on My Mind”
Don’t start me talking
I could talk all night
My mind goes sleepwalking
While I’m putting the world to right
—ELVIS COSTELLO
“Oliver’s Army”
Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.
—MURASAKI SHIKIBU
The Tale of Genji
There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark.
—ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
“Teibele and Her Demon”
Many years have passed since that night.
—MARCEL PROUST
Jean Santeuil
At night, the past blows more powerfully.
The ruinous past that passes, without ever passing completely, or in its entirety, or all the way to the end.
The past laying waste to everything in its path and yet, in its way, preserving it; wrapping it up like a gift that nobody wants to open yet can’t stop thinking about. And that, when thinking about it, pops open and springs out, as if from inside one of those so-called Jack-in-the-boxes, containing a supposed surprise though one everybody’s anticipating, so they hold it with a mix of fear and pleasure, like one of those flowers that never loses its leaves, with carnivorous blooms and an asphyxiating perfume.
The Dreamed Part Page 29
