The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  † Warning: Nabokov—like Dylan—can also be a bad influence. He can abduct you like an alien that rips your chest open, intoxicate you with his manners, turn you into a parodic zombie, transform you into a seduced Humbert Humbert or an obese Charles Kinbote whirling around him, advancing and retreating in exaggerated circles, devoured the way a black hole devours you until it is all that’s left. Nabokov, like one of those Chaplinesque millionaires who one night invites you over and showers you with attentions and pleasures and the next morning boots you out onto the street to leave you feeling poorer than ever, and yet, even still, addicted forever to the most exquisite and hardest to obtain drug. To be Nabokovian was not to be like Nabokov—or to try to be like Nabokov, at the risk of ending up a sad, involuntary parody—but to have been chewed up and swallowed and finally spit out by Nabokov. To be Nabokovian was to reach the absolute certainty—while unable to stop rereading him—of knowing you’ll never be like Nabokov.

  † Can you guess who I’m talking about? And, in the most terrible moments of fever, to soothe yourself merely by thinking something similar happened to Nabokov as happened to Marcel Proust whom—opining bluntly and Nabokovianly—he considered not his better but yes his equal. Which was already saying a lot. (Very fun anecdote: Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen have a conversation. Cohen says: “Okay, Bob: you’re Number One, but I’m Number Two.” Dylan smiles and says: “No, Leonard: you’re number one,” he pauses, and adds: “I’m Number Zero.”)

  So he was left with—taking ever fewer precautions, embracing his influence—the comfort of worshipping the Absolute Zero that was Nabokov. And, perhaps, the slightly rebellious gesture of not forgiving him (let’s not exaggerate, of barely reproaching him) his one sin: having posed for those photographs in pensive and Rodinesque poses, alongside problematic chessboards, which, ever since, had exerted a bad influence on all those writers idiotic enough get photographed in the same pose, thinking if they pulled that off well, they’d automatically write well. (And the closest he’d ever been to Nabokov—with the exception of falling to his knees before his tomb—had been that photograph. Many years ago, a very prestigious French publisher had decided to translate his first book, National Industry. And the policy of the publishing house was, in the gallery of the venerable building the imprint with a surname as its name had occupied for more than a century on a curving side-street in Paris, to hang the photographs of the people they were publishing each month. And he’d wound up, by one of those space-time aberrations, being published the same month they were also publishing commemorative and comprehensive complete oeuvres for the centennials of Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway and, yes, Vladimir Nabokov. So there he was—traveling uncomfortably and sticking out like a sore thumb—on the heels of the blind man, the psychopath, and the Russian, occupying the ever so sketchy seat of honor of who-the-hell-is-this-guy for all the many passersby.

  And he’d also come to Geneva for that. He was going to overcome the panic he’d felt regarding the French language (the only two phrases he knew beyond the “good morning”s and the “please”s and the “thank you”s were “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure” and “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi [ce soir]?”) ever since, when he was a kid, he’d been attacked by a French waiter in Paris, convinced he’d stolen the tip off the table.

  He was going to stay in the Montreux Palace Hotel (actually, he was not going to stay at the Montreux Palace Hotel; insufficient budget and malice on the part of his boss: booking a reservation at the Markson Hotel, an hourly hotel that allowed weekly booking of rooms between whose walls and sheets resounded the echo of too many past voices). But he was going to pay it a visit and ask—avoiding the suites dedicated to Freddy Mercury and Quincy Jones—to be shown the sanctuary/suite, on the sixth floor of the Montreux Palace, in the right-wing called Le Cynge, a commemorative plaque decorated with reliefs of lilies next to door number 65. The space resulting from the combination of rooms numbered 60, 62, and 64, where, between 1962 and 1977, Nabokov had lived with his wife and son (could one stay there, sleep in that bed?) after moving from the third floor, where he was annoyed by the emphatic footsteps of the actor Peter Ustinov, rehearsing on the floor above. The longest stay of any guest in the entire history of the Montreux Palace, from which the reigning widow, Vera, like a deposed empress, was evicted, years later, when they began remodeling the hotel. He was going to take a photograph of himself (not a selfie) inside that room. He was going to ask someone to take a photograph of him with his camera (not with his phone, which, moreover, lacked that function and capability) beside the statue of the man sitting in a kind of spread-legged position. The statue of the man who wrote standing up, the statue that he’d seen in photographs, sometimes adorned with bronze sunglasses sometimes not; as if sometimes the statue had forgotten to put them on. He was going to visit his grave (and that of his wife) in the Clarens cemetery where the names and dates and the word “ECRIVAIN” are barely legible. And there he would leave a …

  † Lily / The flower plucked by Nabokov, in that interview, as an example of how “reality is a very subjective affair” and how “I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization.” How reality is nothing but “an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms.” And how, sure, there’s a neutral reality that includes and involves all of us; but then, immediately, each of us has our own reality and our own very personal perception of that flower. And how not even “everyday reality”—something “utterly static as it presupposes a situation that is permanently observable, essentially objective, and universally known”—can be said to exist.

  “‘Reality’ (one of the few words that means nothing without quotes),” he concludes in the afterword to Lolita.

  “The most we can do when steering a favorite in the best direction, in circumstances not involving injury to others, is to act as a breath of wind and to apply the lightest, the most indirect pressure such as trying to induce a dream that we hope our favorite will recall as prophetic if a likely event does actually happen. And on the printed page the words ‘likely’ and ‘actually’ should be italicized too at least slightly, to indicate a slight breath of wind inclining those characters (in the sense of both signs and personae),” he points out as a kind of editorial advice in Transparent Things. “I am no more guilty of imitating ‘real life’ than ‘real life’ is responsible for plagiarizing me,” he explains in the preface to his collected stories, Nabokov’s Dozen.

  And now he considers the consequence of excess information impeding all specialization courtesy of peoples’ addiction to the internet and drowning in Goo-goo-google: an effect similar to eating fruit salad without ever having tried the different fruits separately, without ever having known how they taste individually, or palpated their original shape and consistency. And so, all that nothing, all together and all at once and all diced up into small uniform cubes.

  He thought about that in Montreux and in Montreux he did everything he planned to do and so much more.

  And he’d even met, under rather bizarre circumstances, someone who, as a child, had known Nabokov: the man who’d once been in charge of the control room at the particle accelerator, the son of an American ex-employee of the Montreux Palace, and based on him and on that, he’d invented an entire story filling multiple biji pages.

  Yes, he’d planned a quasi-mystical Nabokov Pilgrimage—Geneva like Mecca and like Lourdes and like Kathmandu—because he needed to commend himself to a higher and benevolent power. Nobody could help him now; so why not Nabokov, eh? he said to himself. The second- and third-level excuses were, of course, more comprehensible: fetishism and mythomania. And a little bit of money in exchange for a magazine article and Nabokovist talk about dreams at the book fair and, while he was at it, taking a photograph in front of that hotel, ingeniously famous through association with that genius.

  A while back, he’d once again reread all of Nabokov, including letters and interviews a
nd plays and university lectures. But, even still, possessed of a full-on fever (that made him pay an inhuman price for a rare first-edition copy of Conclusive Evidence), he kept failing, after multiple tries, whenever he attempted to cross the thresholds of Ardis Hall and Van Veen. He felt that same thing that, he supposed, was felt by everyone who was unable to read anything long and drawn out, because they were so accustomed to and hooked on the brief and the horizontal and the vertical of emoticons (defended as a new form of language by those who still didn’t know that “are” is spelled with an a and an e, “you” with a yo, and “texting” with an e) on increasingly small and multifunctional screens.

  As an apology to the specter of his idol, he’d procured all the material available about Ada, or Ardor. And he was aware that, wrapped in an incestuous but happy family saga (maybe it was that family happiness, so foreign to him, that repelled him as a reader), Nabokov theorized about the texture of time and alternate dimensions. About an Antiterra where there were no smartphones that idiotized their users (which he’d come to call “thumbies,” always plural and lowercase and diminutive) with thumbs deformed like geisha feet and even more deformed syntax. Phones that standardized and uniformized and made everyone the same and on the same level—the famous and the anonymous—because everyone’s attitude was the same. Sending and receiving on that small device. And always being there, waiting.

  And not long ago he’d heard two ten-year-old boys, coming out of school, acting all grown up with their friends, and saying “Oh, I’m old enough now to have my own mobile phone.”

  And he’d stood there, trembling: boys no longer dreamed of growing up so they could stay up late and go out with girls or discover the not-so-mysterious mysteries of adult life. Boys, now, only wanted to stare at and text on phones.

  The world was shit, indeed.

  And he didn’t want that.

  He wanted to change all of it. To change himself. To mutate into a god capable of imposing his phrasing, his long sentences, his parentheses and dashes, onto the script of all other mortals.

  To force the world to adopt his language, comprised of various languages, and his style and his speed and his time.

  And, it wasn’t hard to see, those dreams of solipsistic grandeur hadn’t come true as he’d planned. And he’d returned home, beaten and humiliated.

  But out of that defeat, already considering himself finished, he’d managed to create a new book that he’d written as if underwater and holding his breath (as all good writing should be done, according to the recommendation of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the hero of his parents who’d disappeared so long ago, in another millennium).

  He’d written it almost drowning and coming up to the surface only to trap a little bit of oxygen that would allow him to go on a few pages more, down below.

  And without meaning to, he’d shut the mouths of those who’d considered him washed up, expended, and opened the eyes of those who still retained a little affection for what he did and they celebrated it like a miracle.

  Really, at that time he wasn’t—nothing like he felt now—that worn out. Nor did he want to be compared to some kind of evangelical resurrection. At that time, he still slept more or less well and liked to think, on the other hand, that his thing had something of the never-equaled performance put on by James Brown who, like him, had been born clinically dead and, to the astonishment of the doctors in the delivery room, just after the declaration of RIP—“get up, get on up, stay on the scene, you gotta have feeling, sure as you born, right on, right on …”—he began to breathe and whimper and cry.

  His favorite variation of the performance of the unriveled Brown was the one in the 1964 documentary film, The T.A.M.I Show. There, along with his centrifugal The Famous Flames (indignant at not being given the closing number, because, they explained to him, that privilege corresponded to, novel and hip at the time, The Rolling Stones), Brown decided to go out and kill it and kill them, entering next-to-last from the right and dancing on just one foot. And the little English boys knew that the worst thing that could happen to them had happened: to have to perform after eighteen black and white minutes of James Brown on fire. There and then and always—it was his never-routine routine—after howling “Please … Please … Please … Please … Please … Please … Please …,” Brown fell to his knees, he was covered with a cape by one of the backups, who kept giving him consoling little pats on the back and he was almost dragged, stumbling, to one side of the stage with his face strangled by his own vocal cords, bathed in tears and sweat and disfigured by the agony only to, suddenly, throw off the cape like someone dispelling a curse and return to the microphone, burning with renewed energy and, again, “Please … Please … Please … Don’t go.”

  No.

  He hadn’t gone.

  Please.

  But, yes, there abounded in his vicinity numerous specimens who were like the writer versions of The Rolling Stones. And to him, The Rolling Stones had always seemed like a bunch of phony pasticheurs who were lucky The Beatles had broken up and they stayed together. The Beatles had invented breaking up and The Rolling Stones staying together. His parents, before vanishing (and his Uncle Hey Walrus would have loved this idea, no doubt), had invented a cross of both things. His parents were The Rolling Beatles: a marriage that broke up just so it could get back together and then break up again and get back together one more time.

  And only History’s bullets could end that cycle.

  And how did that joke/old-yet-still-functional adage go?: love is a sweet dream and marriage an alarm clock?

  And that other one?: men get married hoping their wives never change, while women get married hoping to change their husbands?

  If that’s the case, the romantic combo his deceased parents composed was most similar to a snoozing alarm clock, changing all the time in order to stay the same. A device from which, in days when he still slept, he’d always snatched those zigzagging nine and never-round ten minutes of reprieve and truce (a length of time implanted in the fifties, but that, by tradition, was transported and inserted into the alarm clocks on mobile phones) you’re allowed before it goes off again and interrupts your light and poor quality and ever so unsatisfactory sleep, which, like fleeting and ephemeral love affairs, helps you stop dreaming and get out of bed.

  In any case, that romantic landscape had immunized him for life from any temptation toward rings and vows, but not from the temptation to put his parents in writing.

  And please, please, please, please, going back to the thing from before and the thing from after: his already-mentioned out of sight / get back / start me up book became incredibly popular. The printers couldn’t produce enough copies (he’d stipulated that it not be sold in any electronic format or medium; the book took a stand against all of that), and people signed up for waiting lists in bookstores and in all the languages of the world while sociologists and critics discussed his unexpected appeal and he said things like “If my work seems really difficult, then don’t read it; not reading is even easier than not writing … Pass it on to someone else the way you pass to pharmacists—so they can read and explain them—those unintelligible prescriptions doctors write, right?” But not even with that was he able to convince the masses not to bother with those hermetic and personal pages. And the psychologists tried to explain this phenomenon/transfer of unprecedented sales that, obviously, took place (you believed it?, ha ha, ha?) in a parallel/alternate dimension, not this one, not his. A Brigadoon/Shangri-La where, before going to sleep, people read far more than successions of one hundred and forty characters (a format whose recent expansion of spaces was celebrated with a combination of joy and curiosity in the face of the new challenge and not harshly criticized for the effort it required, like what actually happened, causing a global depression over no longer having any excuse to type “r” instead of “are”); and in a book and not on a screen (it’d been proven that reading on a tablet or phone was harmful for sleep; because the artificial light distu
rbed the internal clock of the circadian rhythm). Yes, in that utopia made and dreamed up by him in his insomnia, everyone read again, like in ancient times, some number of pages of something that didn’t have anything to do with them or their lives, but that, nevertheless, made them better. Something that completed them, becoming an inseparable part of their lives and even their deaths and, meanwhile and in the meantime, helped them traverse the blooming deserts of the night.

  But no.

  Of course not.

  In short: he wrote the book and the book left him written.

  The coup de grâce in the last breath of the funeral song of the black swan. After that, the desperate conviction, the farthest fall from the highest heights: the certainty he was living a book no prose could do justice to, and thereby hide the blinding white. The clean and well-lighted and suicidal and Hemingwayian nothing. How’d it go? Ah, yes: “Our nada who art in nada, nada by thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give is this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”