The Society of Reluctant Dreamers

2 Let us picture an amphitheater. A hall sloping down toward a stage of dark waxed wood, framed by a heavy scarlet curtain. A woman, totally naked, is playing piano, while parakeets flutter all around her. I’m seated, also naked, in the back rows, right up near the top, and I’m watching the concert through tear-filled eyes. I don’t know the pianist personally, but I know everything about her. An old man, seated to my left, wearing a brilliant admiral’s uniform, whispers in my ear: “That woman’s a fraud!” I restrain myself so as not to hit him. I’ve never heard such beautiful music in my whole life. Besides, I feel a deep admiration for that woman. I know she’s been arrested, tortured, she’s survived a tumor and a cruel, violent husband, who forbade her from pursuing a musical career. After she was widowed, she went back to the piano. She established a neo-pagan church, The Cult of the Goddess, which accepts only women. In her concerts, she usually has herself accompanied by animals, the parakeets I saw there but also dogs and even wolves. Sometimes she fires a pistol up into the air, using real bullets, to the annoyance of the owners of the halls. A dream. I woke up with it on the morning of the day I got divorced. I recalled some fragments the following morning, while I was swimming back to land with the camera attached to my right wrist. The dark stage, the naked woman, with her shriveled breasts hanging down over her belly. I often dream about people I’ve never met. Sometimes I dream the whole of these people’s lives, from their births all the way to their deaths. At the end of the concert I walked down to the stage to congratulate the woman. She hugged me tenderly and said: “Everything passes, my friend. Time covers the world in rust. Everything that shines, everything that is light, will soon be ash and nothing.” “Almost everything is ash already,” I answered. “They’ve incinerated my past.” At the moment when I awoke, the conversation made no sense. By the end of the day, when I had come back from the courthouse, it did. These kinds of conversations often happen in my dreams – implausible, mysterious, affected, even ridiculous. Later, though, they attain an unexpected coherence. Sometimes, I dream loose lines of verse. I also dream interviews. I’ve interviewed Jonas Savimbi four times: twice awake and twice in dreams. Muammar Gaddafi I’ve only interviewed in dreams. He told me his last days had been terrible. He’d slept in abandoned houses, fleeing his pursuers, trying to reach the village where he’d been born. Planes dropped bombs on the column he was traveling in and he found himself forced to get out of the car and take shelter in a drain. When I interviewed him, Gaddafi was in the drain, bent double, pressed against the cement, wearing a khaki shirt and with a black cap on his head. The following morning, I woke up, turned on the television and saw him with his head uncovered, hair in disarray, his face covered in blood, and a look of dazed surprise, astonishment, his delicate hands trying to brush away the hard blows he was receiving. “God is great! God is great!” his killers were shouting. I felt sorry for him. I felt even sorrier for God. In the interviews I’ve done in my dreams, the interviewees have often proved more authentic, and especially more lucid, than when I’ve been alert. Others, however, make use of mysterious languages of which I’m only able to guess at fragments. Julio Cortázar, for example, a writer with whom I’m not even particularly well acquainted, appeared to me in the form of an ancient giant cedar, with a twisted trunk and crinkled leaves. He answered my questions by moving clouds in the sky. The clouds were a kind of alphabet, the sky a blank page. I remember that dream because seated in a straw chair, in the shade of Cortázar, ramrod straight and very remote, was the Candy-Hair-Woman. The Cotton-Candy-Hair-Woman appeared in my dreams often. She was tall and elegant and almost always wore the colorful fabrics of our local bessangana women. A long, angular face, interesting without being beautiful, and a quindumba hairstyle that was very tall and soft, and copper-colored. The Cotton-Candy-Hair-Woman waited for Cortázar to leave the clouds at peace and then said: “I once met a man who was dreamed by the sea.”