The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  With the protagonist’s diatribe concluded, we discover that he’s a writer who no longer writes (and who likes and hates thinking of himself as “an exwriter” who still “plays a writer”). The exwriter returns to his hotel and throws himself (collapses) into his bed and opens his copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Collected Stories. And he rereads his two favorites stories by the Russian author: “The Vane Sisters” first and “Signs and Symbols” after. He reads them, taking notes in the margins where there isn’t much free space; because he already took notes before, on various occasions and trips and hotels, as an exwriter.

  In their own way, both are ghost stories, the exwriter thinks and thinks again; stories with absent figures evoked or dreamed by others.

  The first is unequivocally Nabokovian.

  The second, on the other hand, is Nabokovian by opposition, by its firm resolve not to be.

  The two stories function as kind of complementary opposites.

  And, according to Nabokov, the exwriter remembers, both contain, in addition to an “outside,” of what is read, an “inside,” what is hidden. And that inside, hidden, ends up being vital to understanding it: “a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial and semitransparent one,” Nabokov explained.

  In “The Vane Sisters” Nabokov himself revealed the secret: a final paragraph where the first letter of each word delivers a message from the dead sisters, from the Beyond.

  About “Signs and Symbols,” however, Nabokov didn’t explain anything; and its secret continues to be a subject of Nabokovian interpretations that consider it one of his most accomplished stories, many of them including it among that as-exclusive-as-it-is-hospitable genre known as “the best story in the world.”

  An atypical story for him, as well. Third person, minimal setting, few details (a distant but unerasable shadow of the Holocaust, the mention of a chess prodigy, labels on jelly jars), nameless characters, an oppressive air of doom, and the superficial and semitransparent anecdote of a couple of suffering parents—a couple of Russian Jews living in New York—who’re going to visit their son on his birthday. A son committed to an institution for the mentally ill, afflicted by “referential mania.” In one long and formidable paragraph (include it in the story in its totality?), Nabokov elaborates the diagnosis of the young man’s disturbance. And he does it in such a brilliant and exquisite way that it almost makes you want to get infected and die of it. Nabokov writes: “The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had given to them to read. But long before that, she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. ‘Referential mania,’ the article called it. In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His in-most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.”

  The exwriter reads all of that—he reads it again, he underlines with ink where it was already previously underlined in pencil—and tells himself that he understands perfectly what it’s about and what it feels like. If that is referential mania, then he had it and has it too. Though he never experienced it as an affliction but as an entertaining aspect of what he, sometimes, liked to identify as his style, as well as the fuel that fed his literary vocation. The perception of the entire universe. An everything-is-connected. A there-is-nothing-that-might-not-be-of-use-to-me. He had his first perception of the virus when he looked at, for the first of a thousand times, when he was still a boy, the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And wondering who all those people were and what they were doing there, all together while, in the background, rose the orchestral crescendo of “A Day in the Life” after someone confessed that “Having read the book / I love to tuuuurn youuuu onnnn …”

  The exwriter, also, knows exactly what the long-suffering parents are feeling in the Nabokov story, when they arrive to the sanitarium and are informed they won’t be able to see their son, because he tried to kill himself again, and as such it’s not recommended that he receive visitors. The exwriter has gone to see and visit his sister—no longer little but always his little sister—in the same situation. He knows that every one of those visits, for him, is the closest thing to committing suicide, without any of the glamour of attempting or succeeding. There, he was like a character in reserve, waiting to be called on, the night of the premiere and debut and the farewell: all at the same time, all on one night. That’s when he understands the meaning of the story: suicides are nothing but attempted suicides gone wrong, he thinks. And every time the exwriter went to visit his committed sister, he told himself the same thing: it won’t be long before his sister fails once and for all, forever, and dies from dying, dies from killing herself. Then, he knew, the true actors would enter the scene. The relatives of suicide victims (and he, as far as he knows, is Penelope’s only family member) who’re part of the suicide: witnesses of the suicide. They’re the starring supporting actors, given the pieces of something that could be postponed (every suicide is a time bomb) but sooner or later arrives. Without them there to receive it (in the same way deaths by natural or accidental causes or illness-related deaths are the lifetime inheritance of the survivors, as the dead only own their death for barely a second), that suicide would be, merely, another death among many. Suicide is a singular death. Death of an author.

  And so, depressed as the dead, in Nabokov’s story, the couple returns home. There, desperate with sadness, the father decides he’ll take his son out of that institution. And then the telephone rings. Two times. They anticipate awful news, but no: someone, a girl, has dialed a wrong number. Or the lines have gotten crossed. Both times, the girl insists they pass the phone to “Charlie.” And the parents explain to her that she has the wrong number. That there’s no Charlie there. And they hang up. And the father begins to read the labels on the small jelly jars that were going to be the birthday present for their son. Then the telephone rings for a third time and the story ends there, with that sound, before the parents answer it.

  The exwriter thinks something now that never occurred to him before: he thinks that the person who is behind that third call—and this was Nabokov’s trick there—was actually the reader of the story. The reader as the supreme and absolute referential maniac, trying to enter into the pages from the other side, in the same way that the spectral and epigraphic sisters Cynthia and Sybil Vane slip in from the other side.

  But maybe these theories are nothing more than the result of Nabokov’s true trick: announcing a secret that doesn’t exist and forcing the person who reads it to seek out “signs and symbols” where there are none. And thereby be infected by the referenti
al mania of that sick man, who we’re never permitted to visit, but who all the same is watching from his cell, and laughing at us.

  “Signs and Symbols” fascinated the editors of the New Yorker (maybe, the exwriter thinks now in his hotel bed, because in a very sibylline and sophisticated manner, it simultaneously parodies and pays homage to the models and maneuvers of classic, and admired by Nabokov, contributors to the magazine like John Cheever and J. D. Salinger and John Updike, at the same time that, anticipatorily, it foreshadows all that spacious minimalism and limpid dirty realism that’ll appear in those same weekly pages decades later). But Nabokov’s editor at the magazine, Katharine White, didn’t deny herself the opportunity to introduce some changes. To begin with, she castled the title—the story appeared in the New Yorker as “Symbols and Signs” on May 15th, 1948—and, moving on, she suggested various changes in the serpentine anatomy of some sentences. Nabokov—with the amiability typical of a noble dealing with his servants—responded in a letter to her suggestions: “I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift. […] Why not have the reader reread a sentence now and then? It won’t hurt him.”

  It doesn’t hurt the exwriter to re-read it, of course.

  Unless by hurt you mean reaching the certainty that he’ll never write something like that in that way.

  In any case, that Nabokov story resounds inside the exwriter like a fourth and definitive telephone call.

  And he hears it ringing and answers.

  And this is what the voice, his voice, from the other end of the line, tells him, not in the Nabokov story but in his own.

  It tells him to remember, to remember himself as if he were reading himself first in order to write himself after.

  And now—ellipsis, jump, going in reverse—the exwriter and his little sister are two children in their grandparents’ house, in the south, and it’s almost Christmas, 1977.

  And he—who’s not an exwriter but a nextwriter, someone who doesn’t yet write, but already knows that he will, because he spends his days and nights thinking about what he isn’t yet but should be writing—walks through the hallways of his grandparents’ house, his provincial grandparents. All four of his grandparents are Russian émigrés, come to this country years ago, fleeing the Russian revolution.

  Two of them settled in the capital and founded a meat export business whose earnings they sometimes gambled in casinos.

  Two of them got off the boat and continued to the south and opened the first bookstore and newspaper distributor in a place where the winds were so strong they had no name and made turning the pages of newspapers and novels impossible in the open air. The letters moved and escaped and so you had no choice but to read indoors.

  Outside, he plays in landscapes that look extraterrestrial and where the sea lions bellow on the beach and the sea dogs bark in the taverns on the port and the whales sing to the moon and to the lunatics in the asylum on the outskirts of a town where there isn’t much to know, but the little that there is is worth knowing and memorizing: haunted houses and crazy locals, like the supposed wizard who lives in a tower overlooking the beach and who one night self-volatizes or something like that (and who then and there and forever fixes in the mind of the young nextwriter the fantasy of someday, in the future, dematerializing and becoming one with the air and with everything and evolving into a domineering deity of men and women, whom he would treat well or not so much, as if they were his characters, rewriting them again and again, until he likes how they look and sound). Think of a name for that town. Specify that the children those two couples of grandparents produced (those in the provinces, a daughter, those in the capital, a son) were a couple of more-than-a-little-unstable specimens quite representative of that youthful decade when everyone is young first and parents later but children forever; to the point where, more than once, being like the children of their children who watch them the way you watch a pair of tornadoes and how the landscape is left after those tornadoes pass by to come back so big they barely fit. They’re a new generation of parents. They’re the archetypical and paradigmatic prototypes of a soon-to-be-discontinued line. They’re difficult to handle and even worse at handling themselves; they’re artists of abandon, devotees of top-speed colliding stars. They’re famous, but have that new kind of fame that burns brightly but briefly (allude, maybe to Andy Warhol, that his parents are like a distant version of superstars of The Factory). They’re people who like to get into trouble just to see if they can get themselves out of it. And, for them, it’s all a hobby, because there are too many good things to experience and so little time and so: love for the amateur and infidelity for the professional. And yet, those parents come up with a good idea and take advantage of their beauty and parade it around the world and use it to sell themselves and to be consumed. And, of course, that isn’t enough to ward off boredom. And before long, political and ideological commitment become hip and those parents decide they’re going to see what that’s all about. And that’s when the red warning lights start flashing, but it turns out to be so easy to confuse them with the flashing lights of a discoteca.

  And so, that December, on vacation, the nextwriter and his little sister are in their grandparents’ house. And they aren’t having a bad time there. But they’re angry. At their parents. Imagine what they could’ve done to the little sister to make her so so furious. Specify that what the nextwriter won’t forgive them for is that they’ve abducted his favorite teacher, his teacher of artistic activities, whom he’s secretly in love with (he’s had, with her, his first wet dream, though he doesn’t yet know that’s what it’s called: in the dream he’s hanging, as if from a cornice of a mountain on a sloping, three-dimensional map; he hangs on until he no longer can and he lets go and falls down between the spread legs of his teacher and wakes up with his loins aflame and wet at the same time and, when the sun comes up, between frightened and ashamed, he doesn’t understand what that dense liquid is that reminds him of the glue he uses to assemble his Aurora-brand monsters).

  But in both cases, no doubt, same as it ever was. His voracious parents, once again, appropriating something that’s his. Being seductive and spectacular. Driving his little friends crazy with their gifts and lunacies. Little friends who tell the nextwriter over and over “Oh, how I wish my parents were like yours.” And he listened to them the way you listen to crazy people who have no idea what they’re talking about and envied the normality of their parents.

  And years later, he would fall in love with a girl (a girl with a disturbing tendency to fall into swimming pools who, fortunately, didn’t want to be a writer, because she didn’t need to; because she knew that she wasn’t meant to write but to be written) who’ll explain to him that she doesn’t especially like to be brought breakfast in bed. But that, yes, “I adore listening” in bed to the sounds of someone making breakfast in the kitchen, because it reminds her of when her parents made her coffee and toast before taking her to school. “Hearing them there, like magical alchemists, preparing their secret formulas, me there, half asleep and half awake, in the darkness broken only by the light of the refrigerator and the burners,” she’ll say, as if in a trance, with that voice and that smile. And then he, writing her, will imagine (saying to himself why do you want to write about having all of that) all of that like the most exotic and adventurous of worlds, like visions of faraway and even extraterrestrial landscapes: parents who get up before you and make you breakfast! Stranger and more exotic still: breakfast! And then, after breakfast, they take you to school!

  The only place his parents took him was to their grandparents’ house. And they dropped him off there along with his little sister. Holidays and weekends and vacations.

  And so, on vacation and on a weekend and on holiday, now, the next-writer and his sister come and go through the chiaroscuro hallways of their grandparents’ hou
se (it’s the hour of siesta and on the other side of the blinds, there’s a wuthering heat that neither the wise nor the fool would expose themselves to); both like the characters in those comics who carry around a dark and flashing cloud over their heads.

  What’re they thinking about?

  About ways of getting revenge.

  And his little sister thinks more and better than he does, maybe because she doesn’t want to be a writer (though she ends up becoming one), but has decided (the little sister is already so much smarter than her nextwriter brother) to be a reader. More than that: to be a reader of a single book, a book that, for her, is perfect—a book more hers than if she’d written it—and that she feels was imagined for her alone so she would never stop thinking about it.

  The nextwriter, on the other hand, reads anything within range and fires off in so many directions at the same time to see what might hit the mark.

  The nextwriter can’t stop thinking about writing and books don’t last him long and magazines even less, and so, while everyone sleeps during that trance-like zone that extends from after lunch until nearly the end of the afternoon, he goes down the stairs that lead to the library, to see what he can find. And he takes great care not to do so on the hour or quarter hour or half hour; because that’s when, down below, the bells of a grandfather clock, pendulum like a tongue tired of marking time, toll. A clock that releases a martial sound, as if the gears inside its casement were being unstitched by needles. And, yes, he’s already thinking like that: with those images and those metaphors and similes he applies all the time to everything.