Between one set of grandparents and the other, a small brigade of rotating nannies (none of whom put up for long with the bipolar love-hate treatment of their parents, who never cease changing routines and menus) take him and Penelope to and from school. Those girls are, inevitably, very-more-or-less-a-little-bit-somewhat pretty. And, probably, they have approached his parents with the fantasy of being discovered as models. But, as mentioned, none of them last long. His father seduces them first and belittles them later, without ever touching a hair on their heads. His mother belittles them first and seduces them later without ever touching a hair on their heads either. Pure hysteria. Now you see them now you don’t. And there goes one so another can come. And his parents have instructed them (him and Penelope; who already suspect that the girls are like mechanical dolls assembled in the basement of the house) that independent of their true names they are all to be called, always, “Rosalita.” To avoid confusions and complications (with time, in his memory, they all look like just one, so similar were they, like successive models of the same brand, squirrel cheeks and high-pitched little voices and an air like distant and altiplano relatives of that creature known as Björk). And they all feed Penelope and him an exclusive diet of prefabricated hamburgers and instant mashed potatoes and big glasses of Coca-Cola and Jell-O of varying flavors (“Eating colors,” he and Penelope call the only more or less variable thing on the menu until the one weekend, in their grandparent’s kitchen, when they discover and enjoy the possibility of other foods and flavors and textures). Such is life, the life of their lives.
Their parents’ life happens elsewhere, in a place where children have little reason to be, unless there’s a camera in the vicinity to verify that they’re children, always dressed in psychedelic-colored clothes, so fetching and photographable and reportable, and so different from their gray-and-blue-upholstered little friends.
And their grandparents from the capital seem a little disconcerted by this routine to which they’ve consented without being previously consulted and by the Rosalita of the moment dropping off their grandchildren on Friday afternoons and coming back to collect them on Sundays at nightfall, when everything seems to dissolve so it can reassume the solidity of the inevitable. The end of the weekend, like the terrible moment when everything, all of a sudden, is seen as it truly is, without makeup or poses.
Their parents, disconcerted at turning back into parents.
And their grandparents, saddened by his and Penelope’s departure. Grandparents who, in their youth, were far more transgressive than their children: fleeing war-torn countries, crossing oceans in the holds of ships, vomiting up the few jewels they’re carrying hidden in their intestines just to swallow them again; and they arrive to the New World with nothing and end up with everything, and, reaching these last and finally gentle curves in the race of their lives, no doubt dreamed of something that wasn’t being responsible, once again, for two children. And having to prepare them exotic dishes like fish and pasta and fruits and vegetables.
But they didn’t complain either: compared to having children, having grandchildren was a never-ending pleasure. And their grandchildren are so much more grown-up than their children. And the truth is he and Penelope—in city or provincial town—needed nothing but time and space.
He always remembers the city as an eternal autumn of movie theaters and TV and books.
And all summer long, in Sad Songs, time and space was in abundance.
And, also, the magic of the unknown or what, after many vacations spent in that place, is well-known but still intrigues them and is more and more fun all the time: as if from one year to the next, the script of those days was rewritten better, with added details that’d passed them by or weren’t there before, but that now turn out to be inescapable and indispensable.
Sad Songs grows as they grow.
On walks down roads flanked by weeping willows that lead to a ruined palazzo (brought over stone by stone from Venice; he and Penelope look for and find Venice on an atlas) where, they’re told, lives a wealthy local madwoman, famous for cohabitating with hundreds of chickens she dresses up elegantly in little doll dresses.
Along the dirt road that leads to a small airport: going to watch the airplanes landing and taking off is quite a show, in days when everything has to be seen live and direct to be believed and authentically experienced. Airplanes on TV shows and in movies are implausible and obvious and lacking any special effects, like the way the broadcast of the moon landing (the director of his ever more ruinous and crackpot school named Gervasio Vicario Cabrera, n°1, Distrito Escolar Primero, assembled them in the auditorium and they strained their eyes to make out what was happening on a small black-and-white television, coming up one by one, pausing for a few seconds in front of the screen, as if receiving a cosmic sacrament) disappointed and led everyone to question it, because it looked too televisual. Really: could it be true that space was so gray and indistinct and had such bad audio? Could 1969 really be so un-2001?
They have, yes, they’ll realize eventually, the luck of being one of the last generations of children who will enjoy the pleasure and necessity of the implicit obligation to see things live and direct. And to understand the future as something futuristic, distant, sci-fi, and with XXL-size and top-secret computers that could never be in every home. For them, the future is still so far away, always in reach not of their hands but of their minds: all the time—all the present—they think about the future. Yesterday is so brief and, for them, only functions as something gone tomorrow. And today there are so many things to see. So it’s not about seeing to believe but about believing in everything you see, even in the most absurd; because the present is much closer to what’s passed than what’s yet to come. It’s a past-present with a great deal of the past present. The future, on the other hand, is constant novelty. And so, then, that imperfect moon-landing broadcast is left behind and there before them is that airplane taking off. And there they are. He and Penelope, at the small airport in Sad Songs, with handkerchiefs covering their mouths and goggles protecting their eyes and all that millennial dust suspended in the air thanks to propellers and turbines.
On excursions to a beach that’d changed little in appearance since prehistory—to that sea where a river mouth opens—and where there stands the tower of a man named Merlín Mantra. A man to whom the locals attribute strange magical properties. A man rarely seen outside that tower, towering atop a cliff that overlooks little pools the tide has carved into the stone that every night the sea fills with snails and octopuses and stones of impossible colors, which they collect thinking they’re dazzling only to discover they lose all their luster when they dry out, back at home.
There, he and Penelope read classic stories in children’s anthologies, altering a few words at first and then entire sections, each time they read them to each other, taking turns, until, at the end, they are something new and unrecognizable, and a little dwarf is a prince and a prince is a wolf and all Sleeping Beauty wants is to be left to sleep in peace, because she’s tired of all the palace intrigue and conspiracy.
And they don’t know it yet, but they are already training each other, as if shadow boxing, pounding out plotlines until their faces are unrecognizable and forcing themselves to stand up for one more final round, another turn of the screw. There they are, while the grown-ups take their afternoon siesta and they can’t and don’t want to sleep, because is there anything weirder than sleeping in the afternoon? anything more absurd than splitting the day in two with a false night in between?
He already knows he’s a writer and doesn’t suspect at all that Penelope, who suspects it even less, will also end up being a writer.
And they arrive and depart on the train.
They are brought to Sad Songs and taken away from Sad Songs by their volatile Uncle Hey Walrus, their mother’s brother (not her real brother, but the son of some friends who’re always coming around, who calls himself her brother in order not to have to admit he’s
crazy about her and crazy about everything else), who every so often returns to the home of his parents to recover from one of his “episodes,” a euphemism used to refer to, but never detail, his successive and increasingly complex work-related catastrophes and mental problems or work-related problems and mental catastrophes (the latest of which has to do with the loss of an investment he’d made in a manufacturer of “inside-out socks” after having an epiphany that “It’s far more logical and comfortable to put them on inside out, with the stitching on the outside, no?, yes?”).
Retrospectively, he’ll recognize that his Uncle Hey Walrus occupies—half offended but also committed to honoring his condition and never disappointing his resigned followers—the regional-classic seat of honor of “the village lunatic.”
Uncle Hey Walrus is less the black sheep of the family and more the multicolor and fluorescent sheep of the town. And Uncle Hey Walrus loves the two of them so much, with that complicit love that the mentally unstable have for children who, they intuit, probably understand them more and better than anyone.
Uncle Hey Walrus brings them to and from Sad Songs aboard a train that takes more than twenty-four hours in either direction. A train where you can live more than an entire day, allowing more than enough time to read a whole novel, looking up from it every so often to take a break from reading everything and to stare out at nothing. He has loved trains ever since, considering them the greatest mode of transportation, the best possible vehicle, the unrivaled way to go places and get around. Traveling by train is like reading even though you’re not reading: things happen from right to left outside while you follow them from left to right inside. Inside a train you can walk in the opposite direction of your trajectory, like how you can reread the sentence that just passed by. On a train, you travel at the speed of reading. He loved and still loves those trains of his childhood: trains that have nothing to do with the trains of today: so fast and aerodynamic, windows hermetically sealed, and authorities who communicate with passengers, saying things that, for him, are so well said, like “Ladies and gentlemen: we must inform you that smoking is strictly forbidden on this train. Especially, in the Car 6 bathroom” so that he, when he hears that, thinks: “Here we have someone who is a great writer and will probably never know that’s what he is, and it won’t be me who reveals it to him, because there already are or already were too many of us, though these days we are fewer all the time.”
No, on the trains of his childhood—trains that now, for him, are like ghost trains—smoking is permitted in all areas and all the windows open so that, at night, amid the cricket song of the pampa (crickets the size of the beetles the Egyptians worshipped) and the lush scent of the countryside. A CinemaScope countryside that, more than landscape, is like the sweeping spine of a fragrant and immense animal, a beast that stretches on forever. Trains that stop at every station (in cities first and, as they approached Sad Songs, in ever smaller towns that, after a few hours, seem to entirely fit inside the train stations) and whose locomotive and cars seem constructed of flimsy tin and lightweight wood; as if they were pieces of a toy train enlarged by a mysterious ray. A train through which Uncle Hey Walrus cavorts and whoops and entertains the passengers (or that’s what he tells him and Penelope who, as the summers pass, detect fewer and fewer smiles in those who watch the exorbitant orbits of their uncle, whom they pretend not to know) and even gets off at one station to wave to them, pretending to weep on the platform, running along under their window, frightening them with his display, only to hop back aboard at the last second, as the train pulled away. Inevitably—it was bound to happen sooner or later—on one return trip, at the Planicie Banderita station, Uncle Hey Walrus miscalculates the timing of his same-joke-as-always and fails to re-board the train. And he and Penelope travel alone all through the night, holding each other, like children in fairy or witch tales, in their compartment, watching the rest of the passengers as if they were menacing chimneysweeps, and venturing out into that rolling corridor that all trains are, until they come to the distant land of the dining car where they steal scraps of food and crusts of bread, telling each other in low voices not to scream, that they’re like Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit. Discovering, for the first time, something they already know: that bad fiction can be comforting during times of bad nonfiction.
When they arrived the next morning to Confirmación, the end-of-the-line station, their parents (whom Uncle Hey Walrus had notified via telephone) were waiting for them, dying of laughter watching them disembark “like little heroic orphans from an English novel” (the same thing he and Penelope had thought to make themselves feel brave; but their parents laughed and laughed as if it were the best joke they’d ever told).
But this time it was different, and he and Penelope and Uncle Hey Walrus arrive in the capital (off schedule; it’s the night of the 24th of December; their parents have ordered their return because, for once, they want to “celebrate a surprise we’ve prepared for them”; and their grandparents are worried, but they obey). And their parents weren’t there when they arrived at the Confirmación station. There the three of them are, under arches of that Victorian station whose pieces arrived on a boat at the beginning of the century, along with the locomotives and train cars. Yes, trains that arrived on the water, and that’s only one of the strange things that’d been mixed into the cauldrons of the history of his now nonexistent country of origin.
And nobody had keys to the apartment.
And their other grandparents were in Monte Carlo competing in a casino tournament.
And it wasn’t day but night.
It was night.
It was that night that he remembered on this night, tonight.
That night—the next sun would rise to illuminate a world distinct from that of the sun before—when everything would be different, when, from then on, everything was going to change forever, in “the dead vast and middle of the night” when some are asleep and some stay awake, so that the world keeps on turning while dreams are made and our little life is wrapped in a dream and …
How to move through that night?
How to remember it and recognize it?
There’s one thing that aids his memory and it’s the trajectory of streets and avenues. He doesn’t remember their names, but it’s easy to recover them, though now, in his insomnia, they’re all sleeping underwater. There are tools. There are devices. There are winged cameras the size of fat blowflies ceaselessly flying through the world’s skies, recording everything, broadcasting it to the screens of a few viewers or of millions of people who, for years now, no longer care about being watched if it means appearing online and being seen and saying something and waving to their loved ones.
And so he connects to one of multiple search engines and there’s that landscape of this childhood that’s aged like him, but that, with the help of lenses and zooms and soaring spins, he can remember how it was then.
There he goes and there he returns now.
And there he and Penelope and Uncle Hey Walrus were, coming out of Confirmación with no explanation as to where their parents are and where to go to look for and find them.
And he combines that with this.
And, suddenly, everything has the cadence of those slides his parents projected in their living room when they returned from one of their trips. His parents with their backs turned and a sound like a masticating jaw from the slide carousel when it rotates and a colorful beam of light paints the white wall with faraway landscapes and the voices and laughs of his parents commenting on what happened, like the voices of playful and irresponsible gods, come down for a while to entertain the little mortals.
And then, all of it at the same time: those photographs of their adventures blending together, and all the periods of his life melting into one. Like in the temporal voyages and stellar transmutations of the protagonist of that movie a friend will mention to Uncle Hey Walrus in the middle of The Widest Avenue in the World, that same night, so many years ago. That
movie based on that book in which there are aliens (aliens from the planet Tralfamadore that in the movie are nothing more than voices, like those of his parents; but that in the book are described as upright toilet plungers with a hand on top, a green eye in its palm). And there are extraterrestrial books that (compared to their simple but functional terrestrial equivalents, “idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines, with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp, of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks”) were small things “laid out in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars … each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects,” they explain. Those books inside that book and on that planet where, in the words of our former abducteeprotagonist Billy Pilgrim, “when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future always have existed, always will exist … When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”
And over the years, he’s going to quote those quotations so many times, as an ideal to aspire to but never attain, because, yes, it’s something out of this world.
But now he’s outside all things and, so, why not: why not look at himself and look back at all of that. Return to that night walking backward. Be Mr. Trip. Watch them and watch himself and there they go and there he goes.
The Dreamed Part Page 59
