There is one moment when dreams occupy a central position in life. And they demand their place. The man began to feel that his body was too small to have everything he had built little by little and that always waited for him such as he had left it the last time.. Perhaps then his dream was able to stand by itself.
That day, before separating the sheets, he felt he would be successful if he expanded his hand to touch that world developed night after night. The embankments, the stone circles, so near his wish, were so complete that it seemed only with a small effort he would be able to take them
out of his head and deposit them in a field near Florence.. Reality, on the other hand, was completely different, full of unpredictable points, of meaningless shapes, of ignorant epicureans who corrupted the authority.
He stayed in bed, with his eyes fixed in the circles that humidity made in the ceiling. He put his hand on the dog´s head that should be in its usual place next to the bed, and there it was. The
house was all in grey, extended among the chairs, the hangings, the pictures, the tablecloths, the clothes on the arcon and the pedestals of marble busts. The contact with his dog´s body transmitted him a vibration that seemed from other years when he used to live in the distant house that, in spite of everything, was still his. He looked around and decided that the windows continued closed until very late for today, to find that taste his lonely exile had.
He started to think of the store where an Arabian manuscript had revealed him colourful images of. a ditch which might be the bowels of a volcano, with figures of human beings in the most varied positions. That store appeared in the middle of the nights protecting him from his
insomnia. He had not lost interest in that print but he disapproved its essence- image of an heretic soul- where there was no relation between the positions and the identity of the people.
-On the contrary ,NUESTRA SEÑORA´S pictures, with lights from behind a mountain or the
ones of a group of angels around a centre of light, had that essential harmony of meanings which was absent in the Muslin representation.
. From the discovery that only when the axes are drawn properly, the compositions seem to be suitable, he began to believe in an imaginary world of shapes which were exactly like his thoughts. The lonely volcano appeared in his dreams but, little by little clearer figures that seemed to belong to a picture started to inhabit it.
He touched the back of his dog with his fingers feeling its bones. The animal stayed, as usual, quiet ,waiting for his boss´s signals to start the day.
There were, undoubtedly , a lot more friends and acquaintances or disappeared than the ones who were behind the silent door he did not want to open today. The man did not feel anything that encouraged him to get up. The forces that immobilized him were too strong and similar . I am among three worlds: this dream of the dead volcano, the mail with friends that allow me to contribute to the obligations of the party and the light shadows which are organized around Beatriz.
In the mornings I used to read loudly what I had written the night before, appreciating besides the feeling, the rhytm and the music, submitting them to an even stronger fight than the one I resumed every day with the enriched arguments not to lose the politician force. But, for some time,he had been thinking he was not entirely represented by the sonnets , the ballads and the sestines; he did not enjoy their contents, invariably a bit ambitious and generic. .And that is why when he went to bed completely exhausted, the volcano saved more space with its dead people embedded on the walls.
´Oh, my Lord!´,- the man in the picture heard his own voice,- you must wish that these figures have a body in the air and so you let them be so strong that hardly allow me to return to poetry. It was you who told me about my destiny as a poet and perhaps I betrayed the secret exercise dedicated to celebrate carnal loves. I should leave towards that world of yours without honour, without any respect from the citizens, without money, without my wife and children´s peaceful love and only accompanied by this animal that is so old it would not be able to look for another boss. If it is your will, Lord, we will be right there.
1
The man got up as if he were called by the papers on the table, those ones which resisted to be finished. I cannot leave the poetry, just as I cannot leave life. My confessor knows that if I had endured Beatriz´s loss, it´s because I feel that she appears to me torrentially like music and words among my papers. Beatriz, Gemma and the children, are far away. But it is the past, the same as the distance, that enters this room like a cloud.
His head fell on his chest while the light of the candle was disappearing, he went back to bed with difficulty. The dog, now under the table, looked at him. When the man went to bed, even before he was sleepy, the images of the world that from outside seemed to be dark, but inside, it was completely red, lit with figures recognizable and ordered according to an increasingly balance, almost inexpressible , like the rhytm of a verse. .Figures from beings that were dead but that , as it should be, preserved the essences of the body exactly. Slowly and excitedly, , like an unknown who walks anywhere in the square or the street with his basket of figurines or silks and offers them to passers by for them to buy his things, that is the way the world of figures on the stone appeared to him. And this left him more tense every time and with a restlessness that he compared with the one of the man who feels he is dying and he must finish his task which cannot be delegated at all .The figures were always waiting in the last position he had left them. It wasintriguing but he had never been able to include himself like one of them. He became conscious of this the same moment he noticed that, in all the pictures he appeared, but outside the framework.
-Lord!-, if I distract from the dream, the dream disappears. But, is it worth for anybody just like it is? It would be more important for the city that he could go back there and to the conventions of the party, that he assumed embassies between the pontiff and the rebels and even more for the Tuscan literature, that I continued with my songs of sweet style.
The dog growled strangely and he felt he was obliged to tell him a few words that, after he started, it was difficult to finish them. For his inseparable partner seemed to be waiting his last breath under the bed: some convulsions were shaking him and the wooden floor amplified them.
The man thought that the figures placed under the volcano should move even after death so they would suffer or enjoy really what they deserved in that second world. He perceived the difficult breath of the dog which shuddered in a fight that at its age seemed to be hopeless, but in which he used all his little strength. He put down his hand and let it lick for a long time. The dog had hardly eaten for several days. The man thought gloomily that within a very short time he would have to bury the only living being who shared his house. And that it would be a neutral tomb, without a demons fight, but it was needed anyway for the sadness of his death not to be shown. He returned to the group of men, who were not motionless anymore, but turning their heads when they noticed a passer by who visited them and was contemplating them. He recognized the figure of that visitor as unchangeable and he felt something like a cart without a horse and somebody who had taken the stone in front and it falls in an endless drop.
It was after midday when the man could get rid of a weight that seemed to be like books and white papers that fell from the walls of the Basilica. He realized that in the dream he had created at the beginning only with similar silhouettes and shadows, where it was difficult to see an acquaintance, he started to see men who were from other times but had their names joined to their appearance. He looked under the bed and noted that the dog´s agony had finished. He should take it a few metres away from the back of the house, as the only way of protecting him from the predators..
The task ,with a spade he was not sure if it was the suitable one, was more difficult than he had thought. Undoubtedly he did not know how to work with it and, besides, he needed the hole to be big enough for the purpose it was going to be used. In a certain moment the hole reminded him of the volcano and each scoop of earth seemed to have the figures he imagined, attached to the lumps. They had never embodied like now in the positions which showed his history. When he finished the hole he smoothly deposited the dog´s body, which was already hard as a board. He thought if it would be a heresy to say some words. He did not say anything and his eyes were full with tears.
2
While he was going back to his study he had the feeling that he was loading its body on his shoulders. He realized he was encouraged by the irrevocable decision of giving up the short poems he was writing. He picked up the papers with the poems, piled them and, as if they were already answered letters, he put them away in the arcon. His face was tense, as if he was preparing for an attack. He put only an amount of white papers on the table that, day after day, he set aside without knowing why. Poetry, that had given him so much honour, came from those emotions that he cultivated with his friends´ joyful acceptance because all of them would have lived in a similar way, a bit richer or poorer. The case he was facing now was different. With his pen quiet, supported almost breaking, he felt that an unknown effort was waiting for him and his friends. The dream, the one he would have liked to take out of his head with both hands and take it outside Florence to be a model and the citizens could go over and take a better advantage of it than from Bonifacio´s holy jubilee , wanted to have its own life seeping through a place he had never imagined: the ink of his pen. He thought several times that if a mission like the one of the Crusades corresponded to poetry, there was an endless gallery of books which pointed how far it was from the wisdom necessary for the topic that appeared like an enormous wild beast throat full of silence which is opening more and more after each step. A play like a sculpture carved with suspension points which existed because of its pure tension like the one of a beast ready to jump; a play with the words in the language used in the stage where strength was more necessary, in politics; a play that brought to his memory each corner of Florence. Even the old writers, that he reverenced in their mother tongue, would occupy a place in that construction of lights and shadows speaking Toscano. He had experimented the dreamer´s pleasure who has no emergency to exhibit his images in daylight. Now, on the contrary, a rhytm was thrilling him, something that only happened to him during the first images of a poem. And he experimented an enormous loneliness in the arms, the legs , the belly. The only thing that existed in the world was that pen. The houses, the streets, the faces, took a shape when they turned around it like over an axis. He felt he was in the highest part of a wheel. And that he was going to be trapped raising what was emerging in his head. He looked from a height that allowed every beam on the roofs. He knew that when he gave a step there would be an endless horizon to be conquered. Half way in our lives, he wrote. And he let himself drag by the alluvium of that other world that was trying to insert into this one.
Del libro El libro de los suicidas, de Leonardo Garet,
translated by Teresita Barreiro