The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And Johnny Dancer has no space left in his pupils to store the colors of all those CinemaScope sunrises and nights with too many stars. And cactus (what’s the plural of cactus?) and coyotes and lizards and stores with indigenous souvenirs attended by natives who already resemble totems, petrified, skin like wood turned to stone. And all of it hurts Johnny Dancer from the outside in (the kind of hurt the wind produces in those stone walls over the centuries, he thinks; and it surprises him to be thinking like this, thinking not in the precise terms of the law, but with images and sensations difficult to transcribe in reports to his superiors who, no doubt, are already wondering what’s going on with him, if something strange is happening to him, if the sun shinning down from that desert that is the sky, might not be striking him a little hard there above, on the terrestrial crust covering his brain). And Johnny Dancer wonders time and again why he couldn’t have been assigned to surveil Yul Brynner (parties in Hollywood and on Broadway) while he follows these two who, he’s sure, pose zero threat to the nation: few are the times he’s seen two émigrés more white and pure and besotted with the American way of life and haters of all things communist. VN has lost everything he had in Russia and ceaselessly introduces himself as an American writer and doesn’t even write in his native language anymore (Johnny Dancer has read everything of his, what was signed by V. Sirin and what was published in the pages of the New Yorker and has even been moved by his eloquent and selective memoir) and he sees him as ecstatic, climbing among the crags and wearing short pants and with a hat on his head and a net aloft in his hand on the hunt for his beloved butterflies. In the beginning, at the Bureau, someone had the idea that—availing himself of fluttering and antenna-ish technical jargon—VN was sending information to other nets, networks of red spies, via the pages of publications specializing in lepidoperology. But Johnny Dancer is certain that’s not the case: because he’s never seen someone so happy to be pursuing an insect with colorful wings. VN’s joy when he traps and snatches one of those ever-so coveted prizes from the air cannot be faked (on one occasion, at one of those faculty parties, he heard him say that, if the revolution hadn’t happened, he would’ve devoted himself to insects and not to characters) and transcends all political ideology or patriotic longing. VN is a citizen of a world all his own, unique, his and only his. A world where he postulated, “a writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

  The specialists—from what he thinks he understands, from what he’s read—reject his theories, as imaginative as they are precise, regarding the genetic and evolutionary cycle of the brand of butterfly known as Polyommatus blues of the family Lycaenidae or just blues, but VN doesn’t seem to care. And he doesn’t care because—as with so many other things, the same as when, from his podium in the great lecture hall, he tears down Dostoevsky or Faulkner or Freud—he’s completely and absolutely certain he’s right. According to VN, these butterflies arrived—like ancient Russians—in five waves from Siberia, crossing the Bering Strait and settling from Alaska to Chile. And, true, his written postulation (composed in 1945, before what will come to be known as molecular genetics, with the help of only a microscope and his own penetrating eyes, and that included the portrait and the point of view of “a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellesian time machine” to witness the crossing) wasn’t considered particularly rigorous by scientists. Johnny Dancer doesn’t care. Johnny Dancer doesn’t care either. Johnny Dancer—after following him far and wide over several summers—believes in VN. He believes in everything about him. And it’s that new faith—no longer his love for the United States of America—that leads Johnny Dancer to note down everything in the minutest detail, as if it were the curve of small antennas or the pattern of pigmentation on little wings. And yet, yes, the assignment remains and for a few months he was worried that Lolita, whom VN and VN2 spoke of so much, was a seductive femme fatal (but later he understands she’s a twelve-year-old girl) and he investigates everything and checks everything in libraries (it doesn’t take him long to discover that the variety of butterfly the Russian refers to as Chuangtzutiana blues and that “has the particularity of believing itself a butterfly that dreams it’s a man or vice versa” can only be a joke VN2 celebrates with a crystalline laugh). A laugh that can turn into something terrible when VN2 gets angry: Johnny Dancer hears her Russian shouts, one afternoon in Cornell, when VN2 and VN fight about what appears to be a stack of pages VN is trying to throw into the fire he’s lit in a metal cube on their back patio (classified information?). But the thing from before, the same one as always, everything turns to nothing, to smoke, to ash. Everything is snuffed out like a flame or melts like the snow. Everything but the will of Johnny Dancer who, at some point, realizes he’s been possessed. That he’s been transformed—the way a caterpillar mutates into a butterfly—into one of the oh so many footnotes to the legend of VN and VN2.

  And now Johnny Dancer can’t stop following them (VN wound up calculating that, between 1949 and 1959, he and VN2 traversed some 150,000 North American miles tracking the flight of the butterflies) though his superiors inform him that the case file has been closed, that enough already, that he should return home, to central command, to be debriefed and assigned another mission. And Johnny Dancer trembles thinking that the next one will be to find the proof needed to take down one of those bad Hollywood actors who once slept with an idealist more redheaded than red.

  And so Johnny Dancer doesn’t go back. Johnny Dancer receives his university diploma (he has become an expert in the insect of Kafka and his postgraduate thesis is published and praised) and, on the heels of VN and VN2, he strikes out for the Old World.

  Return trip: Johnny Dancer is now a reverse pilgrim, an adventurer who severs all ties with his family and country. A foreigner. An émigré.

  His handle on English and Russian, his air of terminal efficiency, his profile that combines traces of telenovela heartthrob and those of perfect son and implacable soldier, get him a job in reception at the Montreux Palace Hotel, where the couple installs themselves, because, they understand, it’s now impossible for them to reproduce the accommodating world of their childhood; they don’t have enough time left to properly train servants to meet their needs and, so, a hotel is the first consolation prize, plan B. And from there, he watches them. He keeps track of them. He attends to them. He wouldn’t dare say he’s happy like that, but he’s privileged because, in a way, he’s become part of VN’s oeuvre, and one morning he thinks he detects and reads himself, between the lines, veiled, in a line of Ada, or Ardor. One day, VN and VN2 ask him to bring a television up for them, they’re going to rent it for a few hours, they specify, and after they want it out of there, they don’t want to see it again. He takes charge of bringing them the apparatus. One of those early models more or less but not entirely portable. More plastic than wood but, even still, weighing its weight. The couple are waiting at the door to their room, as if he were bringing them something somewhat important that might or might not be marvelous, as if he were the bearer of tidings and omens. And so it is. VN explains to him—with something resembling an apology and a command—that “I must see the moon landing” because “they are going ask me to offer an opinion about it; they are always asking my opinions about the strangest things, as if they think that writers are oracles or they can see reality better than anybody when, in truth, the only thing they want is not to see it or, better, to see it the way nobody has seen it before … Please, if you like, stay with us to watch this monumental event. We’re absolutely useless when it comes to handling these inventions and it would be good for us to have somebody in the vicinity to take charge of the controls.” And, of course, he asks permission from his superior and, of course, again, permission granted. And they serve him a little glass of liquor and he sits down with them. And there’s that faraway image, transmitted through space, the moon landing on Earth, there in front of them and the symmetric smiles on VN and VN2’s faces. And VN standing up and going to
the reading desk by the window and speaking aloud while simultaneously taking notes: “Treading the soil of the Moon, the strange sensual exhilaration of palpating its precious pebbles, the absolutely overwhelming excitement of the adventure, feeling in the pit of the stomach the separation from Earth, hanging there like a marble globe in the black sky … The most romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery … Ah, that gentle little minuet that despite their awkward suits the two men danced with such grace to the tune of lunar gravity was a lovely sight … feeling along one’s spine the shiver and wonder of it … I would never drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics.” The three of them listen to the words of Neil Armstrong there above. The thing about the small step and the great leap that everyone remembers (and he said it wrong, because he said “man” in place of “a man”) and what came next, the bit that goes “And the—the surface is fine and powdery. I can—I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots …” which everyone forgets right away and that provokes a grimace of pain on VN’s face, a “Couldn’t you have said something better and more inspired?” in his thoughts. Obviously rejoicing that the Americans made it before the Soviets, but also resignedly admitting that any third-class Russian poet would have demonstrated greater inspiration and loftiness than all those NASA scriptwriters put together.

  Broadcast concluded, while offering views of scientists hugging and people crying in the street, everyone with a sore neck from looking up to see what they cannot see but there it is, VN and VN2 tell him that’s enough, to “deactivate the apparatus” and “many thanks for your collaboration in this enterprise.”

  VN keeps hunting butterflies (Johnny Dancer will never forgive himself for not having followed him to Davos, where VN falls down a slope and nobody comes to his rescue until two hours later; he would’ve liked to have helped him and for VN to have thanked him with a “Thank you, Ivan,” which would make evident the plotline that the writer always knew everything about him and that he’d been hunting him for years with his net). VN couldn’t stop smiling when he reads of himself as a writer who “occupies a strange position in the Alps of contemporary literature, at once admired and forgotten,” because, after all, that’s the limbo where the true classics go to reside. And he’s also tickled at the rage he arouses in certain feminist writers. In life and near death, Nabokov is like a writer of the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century. His present can’t and has no idea how to contain him. And yet, Nabokov is subject to certain laws that transcend literature, though they imitate it with bad manners and even worse writing.

  Before long comes the season of mysterious and incomprehensible fevers, comings and goings from the hospital with no precise diagnosis, a window left ajar by a daft nurse, and the final sneezes, an increasingly unfocused VN losing his first games of Scrabble, and the last details of the falling night. And Johnny Dancer is always there. His disguise as a nurse allowing him to come and go from the Nestlé Hospital of Lausanne. One afternoon he enters the room, sees him there sleeping, and reads what VN has written in his journal, lying open on the floor where it fell: “Slight fever. 37.7 degrees. Is it possible that everything starts over again?”

  In any case, everything or something comes to an end and Johnny Dancer watches—from the respectful distance of the room’s doorway—a wife and a son beside the bed where there lies a freshly minted corpse. It’s the 2nd of July of 1977, and Johnny Dancer hears VN2 say to Dmitri: “Let’s rent an airplane and crash.”

  “I volunteer to be pilot,” thinks Johnny Dancer.

  He imagines he sees him.

  He can see him because he can imagine him.

  It’s easily done.

  Easy, you know, does it, son.

  And no, that wasn’t so bad. It was even better than how bad he remembered it; but it wasn’t good enough to make it grow, to turn it from a caterpillar into a butterfly, and let it spread its wings. To hear these pages buzz as if they were a fly and slam them shut as if to squash a mosquito and, ah, he had so many notebooks and, inside of them, so much nothing. The kind of thing that resembled the sound one makes when talking to one’s self or talking to a cat: a cat he never had but, if he’d had it, he’d have called (bad joke, the kind of joke that cracks him up most) The Great Catsby. There, paragraphs like meows or likes those hairballs that, every so often, felicitous felines hack up and spit out. With handwriting recalling insect legs fixed in place. Pinned. Crucified by a little cross or run through by what looks like a sword in a stone, a sword whose name, contrary to what most everyone believes (and this is the kind of item/note he scribbles all throughout wide nights in his thin notebooks), is not Excalibur. Because Excalibur (he wrote this information down, thinking he could someday unsheathe it somewhere) isn’t the name of the sword Arthur pulls from the stone, it’s the name of the other sword he’s given by The Lady of the Lake.

  Or a †, like the one that’s laid atop a tomb or sunk into the body of those asterisks buried at the foot of a note. A † at the beginning of each good or bad idea or, not even that, each almost immediate and instantaneously forgettable idea.

  Things like this:

  † The past is a broken toy that everyone fixes in his own way.

  Or

  † The past is an elderly child. Obedient and misbehaving at the same time. Someone who wakes up on time, but always wakes up crying and waking up those who are still sleeping and who, then, night after night, only thinks about killing or dying; about anything that isolates him from everyone and everything that will come to pass and that is coming to pass and that did come to pass. But it is still there. Because the past—like radioactive material—takes so long to die out.

  Or

  † The past passing in the night like the footsteps of that dark giant who shatters everything. Here and now, boots on, stomping heavily down on the wood floor of a wood forest.

  And, ah, will he ever be able to silence that kind of metaphorical enumerative cadence of variations around a single aria of air? Lips moving in the dark, threading together incredulous pagan prayers he’ll no longer write while so many others recite sacred prayers composed by a small number of people so everyone else would kneel down and give thanks and beg forgiveness before receiving the blessing of a baby’s sweet sleep, of dreaming con los angelitos. Will he ever be able to kick the habit that no longer does him any good, like someone kicking off a blanket, heavy with years and perspiration and rough drafts? When it came time for an evasive maneuver, he remembers, the best thing to do was to cut the reel by telling a joke. A bad joke. Again: really bad jokes always seemed really good to him and (again the challenge, as happens with dreams or the faces of the dead, was not to forget them) just now, he remembers one. And who it was who told it to him. Decades ago. In another millennium, which is like saying on another planet.

  He was on tour presenting one of his books. And he’d gone into a university bar, carrying a copy of Three Tenses, the famous novella by R., in his hand. And he recalls perfectly having encountered there, at the bar, an immense writer who was sweating profusely, sweating more than a sauna inside a sauna. A writer who wore a handkerchief tied around his head, so the multiplicity of long-winded and serpentine ideas he kept there inside didn’t escape him. A writer who was about to publish a book that was huge in every sense; and who, years later, diminished with depression, committed suicide. He hung himself from a rafter like a dream catcher, and immediately thereafter everyone rushed to hang their lamentations all over the Web, in times when everybody needed to be part of everything, to comment on it, to leave their mark in the void. And he also remembers his voice, the voice of the writer so alive then and now so dead. That writer seeing first, in his hand, resting on the bar, the cover of Three Tenses (nothing interests a writer more than finding out what another writer is reading; their eyes always darting away from faces to scan covers or bookshelves) and then telling him (ho-ho-ho
and laughing last) that joke where “The Past and The Present and The Future walk into a bar …”

  And he remembers that the punch line didn’t translate.

  It went “It was tense.” (In Spanish, where verbal “tense” translates as “tiempo”—also meaning “time”—not “tenso,” even though “tenso” does mean “tense” in the other sense of the English word, the joke loses the double meaning, is no longer a joke, bad or otherwise.)

  But he also remembers that, when it came to retelling it in his own language (for once that joke hadn’t dissolved into oblivion; it was as if he’d wrapped that joke around a finger or tied it around his head), he’d figured out how to translate/betray it with a trio of ridiculous punch-line options to be chosen from depending on the mood and situation.

  To wit:

  † “El Pasado y El Presente y El Futuro entran en un bar …” and (a) No tenían tiempo que perder (They had no time/tense to lose); or (b) Tenían todo el tiempo del mundo (They had all the time/tenses in the world); or ¿Que hora es?, preguntaron todos al mismo tiempo respondiéndose la misma hora pero en distintos días (“What time is it?” they all asked at the same time, answering with the same hour but on different days).

  Now, later, he chooses all three options. He has time. He has tenses. He has all the tenses, all the time. He himself, the same him, at the same time. He has that clock there, glowing with the same glow as those Aurora-brand monsters from his childhood. That clock that was given to him years ago. A funny clock and specially designed for insomniacs. A nocturnal and phosphorescent clock. A clock with that green glow in its numerals and hands (Open-eyed Fluo-Green, the color of insomnia in the Pantone Matching System) that on occasion you see floating above tombs and that many mistook for ghosts; but really it was just the gaseous chemistry of the bodies rotting underground rising up to the surface. A clock on whose face the 12 and the 6 as well as the 3 and the 9 switched positions. It’s funny. It has time and it has tenses and nothing has more tenses and time than he has now, a now that seems like an always and a forever.