DREAMS

 

 

It was after a dinner with friends, old friends. There were five of them: a writer, a doctor, and three rich bachelors without a profession.

Everything had been discussed, and a lassitude had been reached, that lassitude that precedes and decides the departure after a party. One of the diners, who had been looking for five minutes, without speaking, at the agitated boulevard, constellated by the gas nozzles and full of humming, suddenly said:

-When nothing is done from morning to night, the days are long.

"And the nights too," added his neighbor.

I hardly sleep, pleasures tire me, conversations do not vary; I never find a new idea, and I experience, before talking to no matter whom, a furious desire to say nothing and hear nothing. I don't know what to do with my evenings.

And the third unemployed man proclaimed:

"I would be willing to pay well for a way of spend, each day, only two pleasant hours.

Then the writer, who had just thrown his coat over his arm, approached.

"The man," he said, "who discovers a new vice, and offers it to his fellow-men, even if it reduced his life by half, would do a greater service to mankind than he who found the means of securing eternal health and youth.

The doctor laughed, and as he nibbled on a cigarette, he said:

-Yes, but things are not discovered in this way. Although the issue has been earnestly sought and worked on since the world has existed. The first men suddenly came to perfection in this. We barely match them...

One of the three unemployed people sighed.

"It's a pity!"

Then, after a minute, he added:

"If only we could sleep, sleep well without being cold or hot, sleep with that annihilation of the nights of great tiredness, sleep without dreams.

-Why without dreams? asked his neighbor.

"Because dreams are not always pleasant," replied the other, "and they are always strange, unbelievable, frayed, and because in sleep we cannot even taste the best dreams." It is necessary to daydream.

"Who prevents it?" asked the writer.

The doctor threw his cigarette.

"My dear friend, to daydream requires great power and great work of will, and the result is great fatigue. The true dream, that walk of our thought through enchanting visions, is surely the most delightful thing in the world; but it must come naturally, not painfully provoked, and be accompanied by absolute well-being of the body. I can offer this dream to you, provided you promise me not to abuse it.

The writer shrugged.

"Ah! Yes, I know, hashish, opium, green jam, artificial paradises. I have read Baudelaire; and I myself have tasted the famous drug, which has made me terribly ill.

But the doctor had sat down.

"No, the ether, just the ether. You men of letters should wear it from time to time.

The three rich men came over. One of them asked:

"Explain to us, then, the effects."

The doctor continued:

-Let's leave aside the big words, shall we? I am not talking about medicine or morals: I am talking about pleasure. You are free every day with excesses that devour your lives. I want to point out to you a new sensation, possible only for intelligent men, let's say even very intelligent, dangerous as everything that excites our organs, but exquisite. I add that it will require a certain preparation, that is to say, a certain habit, to grasp in all their fullness the singular effects of the ether.

"They are different from the effects of hashish, from the effects of opium and morphine; and they cease immediately after the absorption of the drug is interrupted, while the other dream-producers continue their action for hours.

"Now I will try to analyze as clearly as possible what it feels like. But things are not easy; so delicate, almost incomprehensible, are those sensations.

"I was suffering from violent neuralgia when I used this remedy, which I may have abused a little later.

"I felt sharp pains in my head and neck, and an unbearable warmth on my skin, a restlessness of fever. I took a large vial of ether and, after lying down, began to inhale it slowly.

"After a few minutes I thought I heard a vague murmur which soon became a kind of buzzing, and I had the impression that the whole interior of my body was becoming light, light as air, which was vaporizing.

"Then there was a kind of drowsiness of the soul, of sleepy well-being, although the pains persisted, although they were no longer painful now. It was one of those sufferings that can be endured, and not that horrible tearing against which our tortured body protests.

"Very soon the strange, charming feeling of emptiness in my chest spread, reached the limbs, which in turn became light, light as if flesh and bones had melted and only the skin remained, the skin necessary to make me perceive the sweetness of living, of lying in that well-being. Then I realized that I was no longer suffering. The pain was gone, melted, evaporated. And I heard voices, four voices, two dialogues, without understanding any of the words. As soon as they were but indistinct sounds, as soon as a word or two came to me. But I recognized that it was simply the accentuated ringing in my ears. He was not sleeping, he was awake; I understood, felt, reasoned with extraordinary clarity, depth, power, and joy of spirit, a strange intoxication arising from this multiplication of my mental faculties.

"It was not a dream like that of hashish, it was not the slightly sickly visions of opium; it was a prodigious acuteness of reasoning, a new way of seeing, of judging, of appreciating the things of life, and with the certainty, the absolute awareness that this way was the true one.

"And the old image of the Scriptures suddenly came to my mind. I had the impression that I had tasted the tree of knowledge, that all mysteries were revealed, and that I was under the empire of a new, strange, irrefutable logic. And the arguments, the reasoning, the proofs, came rushing towards me, immediately knocked down by a proof, a reasoning, a stronger argument. My head had become the battlefield of ideas. I was a superior being, armed with an invincible intelligence, and I savored a prodigious joy at the realization of my power.

"That lasted a long, long time. I was still breathing through the hole in my ether flask. Suddenly, I realized that it was empty. And I felt a terrible sorrow."

The four men asked at the same time:

"Doctor, quick, a prescription for a quart of ether!"

But the doctor put on his hat and answered:

"As for that, no: go and be poisoned by others!"

And he left.

Ladies and gentlemen, what does your heart tell you about it?

 

END

 

THE DANCE OF THE BUFFALOES

 

It was a sunny afternoon, but of sad color. It was the summer of the twenty-two, the one she had shared with him. Watch it pass, which was also the last day of his time. They were also the last flocks of birds, in the gardens the flowers withered and the leaves spilled over the ground forming a thick leaf litter; above them I watched the children running happily and happily.

The old town square, in its anguished agony, changed color; it was grayer and grayer, more and more deserted and sunk in the snub of solitude. Perhaps as I watched the anguish blossom, my soul was clothed with nostalgia.

But there are also times when I look at the small center of my town. So, the four palm trees that by chance of fate had to be born there, are silent; They seem to tell me all the secrets, and then I realize that in me, only memories live. There are not the same things left, there are not the same people left, and so, for a long time, no woman gives birth to a calf, and the spinster girls, as if they were summer birds, went away in search of warmth to another village.

The last caravans of carts departed, driven away by new illusions, and on the muddy road they left only deep and parallel traces, which could never be erased as long as there was someone to remember them. And it is in this orphanhood that I refuse to believe that I am alone. Although I feel that my eyes are closing and my body is falling apart, but I don't want to die, because I'm afraid of death. Then I walk to mislead her, and I sing so as not to cry, and I laugh in pain; I play with the day even though he is sadder than I am, and then I look at the river and head towards it, then I sit on its bank to remember things as a child, and to watch it drag its passive perennial and silent current as always, dragging the secrets of time mutely, and it is at that moment that I ask for silence from pain,  while the last rays of the sun fall on the water. I look everywhere, but around me there is no one. The old places where we played, with Juan, Luis, Geraldito, Manolito and Carlitos are so silent, demanding our return to an age of innocence. But from those times only I remain, also waiting for the inevitable departure.

The water looks at me without stopping and I look at myself in it, unaware of my appearance, but at that moment, before me, clear images of Juana, María, Pascuala, Carlota and others appear floating on the surface of the water, how joyful and happy!, when the sun gave the day its splendor in other past times. They, fine and sensual, walked in type and color, loose and relaxed, and then arrived and submerged up to their waists in the water.

It was then that I longed to be a river to bathe the skin of her sculpted legs and hips, and wet the long braids of her hair. But, I can see them as before!, sitting as always, drawing on their dark faces a wide smile in the heat of the events of the past nights, under the comments of old and new loves, while they washed their clothes with bleach soap. Their bodies shook at the impulse of desire, but the most striking thing was when they thought they were alone and as if to say goodbye to the afternoon they took off their garments, and as if it were a rite to divine nature they immersed themselves. The water formed imaginary lines on their bodies, then they came out with wet hair and squeezed it from one side.

The afternoon was already dying, and I, talking to myself, promised to meet again the next day as soon as the afternoon died, while I watched how they dressed and then placed the coffin of freshly washed clothes on their heads. Then they returned to the village, absorbed by the narrow gap in the darkness of almost night, and in the distance only the last happy laugh could be heard. Surely it was some everyday joke or the memory of some stolen romance.

Those were other times, they were our golden years! But this gray afternoon, far from those days of cloudless sky, of moonlit nights, I can see them the same, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but I contemplate them as before and I raise my arms to call them with the emotion reflected in my face; I see that they are all as pretty and beautiful as they were in their twenties.

Yes! They are: Juana, María, Pascuala, Carlota and others. But no matter how hard I try, I realize that they move away from me and dive back into the crystal clear waters, which come together again where their bodies disappear, and I see them disappearing, and anxiously I look for them with my eyes, calculating in time what they will carry inside without being able to breathe.

And seeing them, over and over again, come out again, I am happy. So they come and go playing, they jump and jump along the riverbank, ignoring my presence, but suddenly... I move and see that their brown eyes are startled, and I notice that they are frightened when they realize my strange presence. They look at me and then look at each other, as if wondering.

"And who is this intruder?" They don't seem to recognize me, and I, sad and old, begin to think.

-How strange did the years leave me, and what did they take from me?

And these, as if guessing my thoughts, look at me again and cautiously approach me, and although they cannot speak to me, they manage to emit a few squeaks, to swim again later, and I wonder again if they remembered me, if in those days I had been eight springs and they twenty-three.

But for friendship there is no reason of age. I remember Juana, María, Pascuala, Carlota and others very well, but I also remember seeing their names deciphered in scarlet letters, painted on crossed wood and buried on their tombstones, and below an old portrait of their youth, a relic of a past in life, where their last smile was drawn. Thus it remains somewhat blurred and somewhat damaged by the inclemency of the weather, and the oblivion of that gloomy place where more dead than living live. And they yearn from their dark room to feel the first rays of the sun and see the afternoon die.

It is then that I look again at Juana, María, Pascuala, Carlota and others, who continue swimming. Then intrigued I ask myself:

-And who are they?

And without further controversy, ordering my thoughts, I contemplate them in silence for a moment, and, as if not to forget this unexpected event, I record it in my memoirs, giving it a pseudonym, with the name of The Dance of the Buffaloes.

 

END

 

 

THE STORMS

 

 

My mother dreamed things before they happened and, in her dreams, she found things. I was at the kitchen table cutting a cardboard box to make doors and windows the morning he came down and said he knew where Rua was. I was in a hurry.

"I'm going!"

"Hurry up."

It was one of those frosty mornings in mid-January, when the air is so cold it feels like new. As we got out, the wind pushed the air I was breathing back into my lungs. I followed her along the path into the forest. A woodcock flew over the trees. Something told me not to speak. My mother knew where I was going. We crossed a ditch and came out into a beet field that I didn't recognize. She stopped and pointed in the direction of a heath.

"It's there," he said.

We separated the heather and there was Rua, our red Setter, with his neck caught in a trap. He looked dead, but I couldn't look away. My mother loosened the clamps and spoke to him. There was blood on the wire. We carried him home and gave him milk, but he couldn't swallow. Beneath his coat his bones were visible and he slept for three days. On the fourth day he got up and followed my mother around the house like a shadow. When I asked her if I was going to find things in my dreams too, she told me that she hoped that would never happen. I didn't ask him why. Even though I was a child, I had known for a long time why they were two words my mother hated.

The tambo was a cold and dark room that my parents had filled with the things they hardly used, from the time before I was born. Yellow paint bulged on the walls and wet tiles glistened on the floor. The flanges hung hardened from the beams; their bites, dusty. The churn was still there, and the smell of sour milk lingered in it; the wood smoothed, but perforated by woodworm, the pallets lost for a long time. I don't remember glass in those windows, only rusty bars and the strange applause of the wind blowing through the trees.

Someone pushed the old incubator into the dairy and a chicken escaped; a rusty metal thing that used to shine like a spoon. We put freshly hatched chickens there, picking them up in our hands like yellow petals and releasing them in that heat, down-covered balls with legs always moving, assimilating that heat as our own. Heat keeps us alive. Sometimes those yellow balls fall off, overcome by the cold, their legs like orange arrows pointing downwards. My father's hand discarded them as if they were weeds. My mother would pick them up carefully, inspect those little yellow bodies for any sign of life, and when she didn't discover any, she would say, "My poor chicken," and smile at me as she slid them down the pouring chute.

The milk strainers were there, too, the old gauze hanging in dirty bunches over a frayed strand. And the jars of wild currant jam that smelled like sherry, reduced in the glass with a moss rim. My mother always made more jam than we could eat. We used to make apple jelly: we cut those acidic fruits into quarters and boiled them into pulp, with hearts, seeds and everything; We poured the lumpy fluid into an old pillowcase, tied to each of the legs of an upside-down stool. It dripped, dripped, dripped all night into the canning jar.

I went to the dairy when they sent me; for a jar of varnish, six-inch nails, a bridle for a big-headed mare. The doorknob was too high. I had to stand on a can of creosote to reach it, and the metal I stood on was thin as a leaf. When I went there by my own choice, it was to look in the chest, a large rusty box, a pirate's suitcase as a child. It was so old that if I had hollowed it out and put it in the light, it would have been like looking through a sieve. Inside the chest there was nothing I liked: old books, stuck together by the damp and without illustrations, darkened maps and some prayer books.

"All this belonged to your father's family," my mother told me, using a volume of voice that he was not supposed to hear.

The chest was as long as I was and half as tall, with a tight lid and no handles. He would have opened it and looked at those things, he would have fiddled with the books with broken spines, with lost covers. It was the past; the past was there. I felt that if I could understand its contents, my life would have more meaning. But that never happened. I would have had enough of looking at such things, I would have slammed the lid shut, I would have made the metal grind.

The next dream changed everything. My mother dreamed of her mother, dead. Their moans woke me up in the middle of the night. Someone was noisily banging on the kitchen table. I sneaked down and stood there, staring into the darkness. My mother was curled up on the floor. My father, who never said anything affectionate, spoke to her tenderly, persuading her with brandy, pronouncing her name.

Mary, Mary!

The two, who never touched each other, whose fingers let go of the gravy boat before the other grabbed it, were touching each other. I crawled back up and listened, as those loving words turned into something else.

In the morning the telegram arrived. The postman took off his cap and told my mother that he was sorry for the problems she had. My mother rolled the telegram between her fingers like cigarette rolling paper. My father made the arrangements. Strangers came to the house. A neighbor hit me on the hand when I turned on the radio. My grandmother, the woman with the violet rash and her breasts furrowed by blue veins, which we have washed as if it were paint, came back rigid from the nursing home, in a drawer lined with ruffles, and we put her in the cold of the living room. I got up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to see her when no one was there. A gust caused wax to fall from the lit candle on the sideboard. He knew little about her, except that he wasn't afraid of angry geese or afraid of getting tuberculosis. It could cure all kinds of poultry disease. My mother had grown up surrounded by ducks, chickens, and turkeys. I touched my grandmother's hand. The cold scared me.

"What are you doing?" My mother asked me.

All that time she had been sitting there in the dark.

"Nothing," I said.

Neighbors came to accompany us after the funeral, cars piled up on the road. I sat on the legs of strangers. They passed me from one to the other like a bag of tobacco and I drank three large bottles of 7UP.

My aunt stood still, guarding the ham. "Let's see who's going to want another slice?" he asked, the deadly knife in his hand.

My mother sat looking at the fire and never said a word. Not even when Rua climbed on the sofa and began to lick herself.

Months passed. My mother began to clean the barn, even though we had sold the cows years ago. He went with the brush and the bucket, he scrubbed the mangers, the corridor, and even polished the hubcap that we used to serve frothy milk to the cats. And then he would come back and talk to the statues until lunch. He imagined storms, locked himself under the stairs when he heard wind, put cotton in his ears when the thunder came, hid under the table with Rua.

Once, my father and I, baling rye, watched her in the field, calling the cows.

-¡Chuck! ¡Chuck! ¡Hersey! ¡Chuck! ¡Hersey!

She stood there, banging on the zinc bucket to make the imaginary cows come and eat. My father took her home. And that's when my mother started living upstairs.

So by the time summer came, I was the one carrying the big kettle for the hay reapers, my beak covered with a page from the Farmer's Journal. Men would suck on straws and look at me, and rudely tell my father that he would soon be of age.

She came to pick me up in the middle of the night, dressed in a red nightgown that I had never seen her before. He got me out of bed, and we went down the dark steps and out into the mowed meadow, past the piles of hay, with our bare feet sticking to seeds. And we went on up the stubble fields, his hand bolted to mine, the back of his nightgown flailing in the wind. And then we reached the top and lay on our backs, looking at the stars, she with her bronze-colored hair and her crazy words, not entirely meaningless, but sensing what we couldn't understand. Just as the dog is the first to hear the car on the road.

He pointed to what he called the saucepan, an arrangement of the stars, and told me how he got there. It was an animal story that took place in the time of Our Lord, in Africa. There was a drought. The ground had turned to dust, and even the riverbeds were dry. The animals roamed Africa looking for something to drink. The sheep lost their wool and the snakes, their skins, but a young bear found a saucepan full of water and gave it to everyone to drink to get them out of trouble until it rained. All the animals drank to their heart's content, but the pan never dried up. It had a curved handle, and when the rain came, the stars took its shape, and that's what happened. And then I could see her in the sky too.

We were there until dawn, the smell of hay blowing in the wind. She told me about my father, about how he had beaten her for fifteen years because she was not the same as the other women. He taught me the difference between loving someone and having someone liked. He told me that he liked me as little as he did because I had the same cruel eyes.

I didn't understand, but that's when I started going to the dairy without being sent around. It was a quiet place. There was nothing, just the wind blowing and the gurgling of the water tank overhead. The hole in the ceiling between the rafters allowed me to see the dollhouse, the place where my cousins used to take their dolls to bang their heads against the sloping roof.

It was a stormy day the day the truck came to take her away. My father said he was hurting himself, but it was nothing you could see. I asked him if he meant he was bleeding inside.

"Something like that," he said.

I thought of the image of the sacred heart on the stove, the red heart exposed, illuminated by the red lamp that never went out.

Men are coming to the house to look for her. She's under the table. I can't see. I run to the dairy farm, open the chest and look inside. I pull out a prayer book and turn the pages. They are worn and soft like my mother's arm. I open one of the darkened and torn maps, and until I find a place I recognize, I cannot distinguish which is the land and which is the sea. There is an insect wing attached to Norway. I hear them in the next room. I open another book and look for illustrations, but there are none. I get into the chest, I squat down. I hear glass breaking. The sound of what has become my mother's voice grows to a moan. Something falls. I push the tin lid open, let the metal fall on me with a rusty, tense squeak. Everything goes black. It's as if I didn't exist anymore. It's not me sitting on damp books, inside a big, black can. The smell is old and musty like the smell of the bread bin or like the smell of the back of the sideboard when there are cake crumbs left. A smell that is a century old. I remember that rats once gnawed on the incubator grid. They got to where the chickens were and we found pieces of down with legs everywhere and the fleshy parts completely eaten. Other chickens are found terrified, exhausted and hidden among paint cans or rolls of wire, still unable to flee. We pick them up, their yellow bodies throbbing, minimal screams and crazed.

Now I manage the house. The last one who said he was of age received a burn. My mother always said that there was nothing worse than a burn. And he was right. It happens that I don't accept nonsense from anyone. They leave their rubber boots outside and my father leaves the dirty dishes on the drainer. I haven't heard him say that potatoes don't have a well-cooked center. I know how to use the serving spoon to punch. He knows that too. Rua goes around the house looking for her. I think of him as my mother's shadow, wandering around the house.

I visit her on Sundays, but she doesn't know where she is or who I am.

"It's me, Mom," I say.

"I could never stand the smell of fish," he says. He and his herrings.

"Don't you recognize me?" I'm Elena.

"Helen of Troy!" Get on your horse! -he says.

She's good with cards, she cheats on others and takes the money they give them for their expenses each week, and the head nurse has to go to her closet to get it out when my mother is in the bathroom. He doesn't realize it. Money never had any interest for my mother.

I keep going back to the psychiatric hospital. I like the smell of disinfectant in the hallways, the rubber-soled nurses' shoes, the fights over Sunday newspapers. I like that what they talk about is meaningless. What does that say about me? My mother always said that the madness of a family is hereditary and I have it on both sides. I live in a house with the man my mother married. I have a dog that almost died, but doesn't mind being alive. When I look in the mirror, my eyes are cruel.

I guess I have my own reasons for coming here. Maybe I need some of what my mother has. A little barely. I keep a small part for my own protection. It's like a vaccine. People don't understand, but you have to face the worst possible case to be able to do anything.

 

END

 

THE ISLAND OF RABBITS

 

 

 

He built a canoe and wanted to try it on the Guadalquivir. He was not interested in sports. Nor had he made the canoe to use it often; He knew that as soon as he explored the islets, he would leave it in the storage room or sell it. He defined himself as an inventor, although the things he made could not be called inventions. However, he had begun to qualify as such everything he designed, since he did not use an instruction manual. His method was to discover for himself what was necessary to elaborate what was already done. The process took him months and he considered it his true vocation. He invented what he was invented. He got a pleasure similar to that of hikers who go to the mountains on Sundays and reach a summit, and he wondered why personal fulfillment was so strange. In the mornings, the false inventor worked as a teacher in a school of arts and crafts without feeling fulfilled, despite the fact that his teachings were useful to his students.

Since I was a child I had wanted to go to the tongues of land that penetrate the sea, or to the islands that no one inhabits. On one occasion, when he was eighteen, his parents invited him to Tabarca with the promise that it was a desert island. He thought they were going to tread mere bush, but he found seven streets of humble houses, a wall, a church, a lighthouse, two hotels and a small port. His parents probably exaggerated that there was nothing in Tabarca to convince him to go on vacation with them -they did not like him to stay alone at home-; However, they may never have understood what he meant when he spoke of uninhabited places.

It was difficult to count the melejos of the part of the Guadalquivir that bordered the city. Some were confused with small peninsulas. One morning in September he walked to the dock with his boat and jumped into the water. He spent several days taking the pulse of the ship, and after mastering it, he began to explore the river. It had not rained for weeks. The flow was low, calm, stinky. He walked around the perimeter of the islands with a mixture of uneasiness and stupor, unable to bring the canoe to the shore. He doubted his ability to maneuver quickly, feared that the ground would not be firm on the margins, that he would slip and that the canoe would escape him. Besides, he was frightened to swim back, pursing his lips so as not to swallow miasmas, and seeing so much nature together, the variegated vegetation vibrant with insects, the layer of bird droppings, the mud. What he had thought beautiful were nothing but trees crooked by the weight of birds, or perhaps by some disease, as well as colonies of bugs and shrubs eaten by filth.

On the fifth day of wandering with the canoe, he decided to travel the curve of the Guadalquivir. Paddling south allowed him not to lose sight of the gentle hills of the countryside. Over there the islands were tiny, rougher, and close together, like a rash. He laboriously surrounded them; in the last one, the body of a man was found floating among the reeds. The dead man lay face down, in his underpants; The skin on his back rose into blisters the size of a hand. He didn't know if the blisters were due to the sun, which was still scorching in September, or because the body was so full of fluid that it had become deformed. The river stank. He called civil protection and the agents arrived in a dinghy with which it was impossible to make their way through the reeds. In the dinghy they carried a canoe; As a fat policeman climbed into it, he approached the boat and asked permission to leave. I didn't want to witness how they dragged the cold cut. He was intimidated that he turned around and discovered some raw entrails, devoured by fish.

The episode of the dead man kept him away from the river for several days. Then he took his evening walk around the islands again, and one day, after having dared to set foot on the one closest to the pier, he decided to inhabit it. He told himself that he was tired of living in the city, and also that he was excited to do what no one else did. Those were nothing more than two strange ideas with which he sometimes walked the streets of his city, which seemed too obsessive, a spiral that abducted him towards the center. In truth, he could not give any reason for his decision to occupy this narrow and nauseating piece of land, which would make him feel even worse than in the city.

Although it was the island closest to the shore, the thickness prevented us from seeing its interior. He cleared the center of scrub, cut down trees whose trunks were so thin that they looked like ropes. How did that puny wood hold a glass of a plethoric greenness? He decided to set up a red tent instead of military green. The tent was well insulated, but he did not avoid the panic of waking up covered in insects. He thought that, by sleeping aloft, he would take shelter from the larvae that swarmed the ground blindly, obfuscated by the desecration of the earth, and that seemed to intuit their predators. The birds caught them easily: they stuck their beaks under the sand and rummaged. They constituted an inexhaustible source of food; however, birds did not always feed on them. Perhaps they were not food enough because they were made only of water, and more sophisticated and nutritious insects had to be sought. One afternoon he examined one. He put it in his hand, where the little animal danced on itself. When I squeezed him a little with his forefinger, it burst like a tiny balloon.

He did not sleep on the islet every night; That would have driven him crazy. It was enough for him to wake up there a couple of times a week. When he spent the night on that spot of the Guadalquivir, he heard a buzzing sound during the early morning. Unless the owls attacked, the birds remained silent, and only the flapping of those who were expelled from some poplar tree could be heard. They were very tight; when the head was hollowed under the wing and the crop widened, those who occupied the ends of the branches fell. The buzzing that tortured him was not due to these death rattles of sleep, but to the shrieking of the birds at sunset as they sought a place in the trees, so brutal that it was impossible to make an approximate calculation of how many came to that miserable land. It seemed to him that there were thousands. They chirped in such a way for an hour that the sound stayed inside, and not even plugging in their headphones with the volume at maximum mitigated it; he even came out of the tent to scare them away with shouts, but the pack did not notice his presence. It was like a piece of seaweed in the middle of the ocean; the birds perhaps mistook him for a ridiculous bird. His throat was sore from screaming, and he didn't want to confess to himself that something in him was releasing as he screamed and grimaced grotesquely. He often lost track of time and continued to howl in the middle of the night, when the birds were already silent; Then the few passers-by on the shore looked towards the island believing that the screams were from some animal.

The birds went to the countryside to sleep, to breed, to die. Everything was full of nests and, and when the fake inventor returned home, he could not get rid of the smell of excrement, not even by showering. Apparently, those white birds were a plague. An old man who was fishing on the jetty had told him so. He asked the old man for the names of the animals, but he could not tell him. He was looking for information on the internet and found nothing. He glanced at a guide to the fauna of the Guadalquivir; the birds on his island did not coincide with any of the egrets described. He did not investigate further; After all, finding out which species they belonged to did not change his decision to become, for a couple of times a week, a being who roared against creatures that ignored him, that fell asleep despite the fact that he threw furious stones at them. Nor did they deign to look at him when his anger made him shake the weak trunks of the trees. The cups moved from side to side, and sometimes this movement became violent; The swaying of branches conveyed the impression that some burly costaleros carried the island on their shoulders.

As the weeks passed, the fake inventor became convinced that his occupation was an act of justice. Why did he have to ask permission to live in an empty place? He thought it incomprehensible that the rest of the islets were still virgin, but that was not what seemed worse to him; What was intolerable was the lack of curiosity of the inhabitants of a capital where more than three hundred thousand people lived. Among so many people, only he bothered to visit what was in front of his nose?

He started leaving money in the tent to see if anyone would steal it. Although the canoeists rowing along the Guadalquivir did not have to be thieves, there must have been thugs lurking, some hungry vagabond who would undoubtedly steal his generous ticket. He checked daily to see if the fifty euros were still there. And so it was. No one ever took that money. No one set foot on his island.

When he was not inventing what was already invented, the false inventor was making installations that he did not call art. For example, he had removed the cloth skin from ten barking toy dogs as they moved their front paws and lit up their eyes. Then he had placed the skin on the paws and put the dogs in a rabbit cage. He devised a mechanism to operate the dogs with a remote control. When his friends went to his house, he hit the button on the remote. Ten skinned toy dogs barked as they moved their paws backwards on their own skin, lighting up yellow eyes.

His friends suggested that he sell that facility to some campaign for the protection of animals and he shrugged his shoulders. Wouldn't others have already exploited his idea? Deep down, he thought that if it had occurred to him, it was because he had seen her somewhere, even if he didn't remember. That is why he refused to allow anyone to consider his installations art. He was terrified of exhibiting and being told aloud that his works were nothing more than a copy. He did not know why he was afraid of this criticism, if after all he did not believe in novelty and argued at length about it, even if he could not remember where his appropriations came from. In addition to the cage full of toy dogs, his included a mechanical flea circus inside a cupboard, a sandwich maker made from two irons of clothing with which he melted aged cheese on the hands of his guests when he celebrated a party, a pile of books on which dust had accumulated for more than twenty years – what covered the books were already balls of filth.  and whose importance lay in the fact that this powder contained dead cells of all his relatives, now deceased.

It was the rabbit cage where he kept the toy dogs that led him to the idea of releasing rabbits on the island to scare away the birds. He resolved not to stay overnight any longer. He had shouted enough. I would keep the tent to go watch the rabbits and take a nap. Autumn was late, they had put the hour back; It was no longer absurd to row at four in the afternoon and receive the cool water in the river, whose flow was still as stinking as in summer due to the drought. He bought twenty rabbits, ten males and ten females, which would reproduce at great speed. On the island there would soon be no food for them. The false inventor assumed that the new inhabitants would attack the nests on the ground when they had nothing to eat. If the birds could not breed on the islet, they would go to another.

The rabbits were very white and had long hair. They had red eyes, they had cost him more than if he had bought them gray or brown, but he thought it necessary that they should share the same color as the birds. It was said that populating the island with them was their way of continuing to inhabit it. He finally allowed them to enter the tent, where they preferred to be, no doubt because it kept them sheltered from the sun and because the earth was not suitable for burrowing. In the store they began to give birth to hairless kittens that looked like rats.

As soon as the rabbits devoured the bushes, the nests were emptied of eggs, a delicacy that they seemed to like especially, since on more than one occasion they witnessed fights to gnaw on the thin bluish shells. They did not fight, however, over the chicks, and it was clear to the false inventor that eating that newborn meat was something they did in spite of themselves, with a certain sadness, as if their obtuse intelligences were reacting to this cruel situation. Their attitude, it was said, was in accordance with the humanity they represented, which was none other than his, their owner. Perhaps that is why he was surprised that, despite the initial scruples, they did not even leave the bones, as anyone would have done. They attacked the creatures' crops with their incisors, and a circle of blood was blackened, the same color as their eyes, their trembling snouts, and the fine hairs of their whiskers. When they had finished with the frugal flesh, they spent long minutes gnawing on the skeletons, making a peculiar noise, of dry branches breaking. They even ate the beak, and when they finished they groomed themselves until the fur turned white again.

While the feast was taking place, the birds flew around with anguished squawks. They waited for hours at the scene of the crime, as if their offspring were going to appear behind a stone. The fake inventor was curious that it didn't occur to them to attack rabbits. It would be easy for them to gouge out their eyes with their sharp pickaxes, but those group maneuvers must have been alien to their instincts.

He did not calculate that the kittens born there would never have eaten anything but meat and eggs, and that this denaturation would have some disastrous consequences. For a while longer, the birds were foolish enough, or daring, to continue nesting on the island, but when the nests began to disappear, the fake inventor realized that so did the litters of rabbits. One morning he witnessed why they disappeared: their peers ate them. He was horrified by the spectacle and got rid of the idea that these animals were an extension of his person. What's more, he fancied them to be a plague, just like the birds, and if he continued to visit them, it was because he felt guilty for abandoning those beasts he had debased.

One day he tried with feed. The rabbits just sniffed at it, and then indulged in sexual encounters that had a morbid edge. They had learned to reproduce to eat, and that multiplied matings. The false inventor said to himself that necessity accelerated gestation. They all fed every time a female gave birth; When the silent birth took place, the rabbits stalked the parturient as if there was also the possibility of eating her. Since they no longer showed interest in the birds' nests, they returned to nesting.

The tent could be seen from the shore. He didn't care. What was on that piece of land was not too different from the camps that Romanians and beggars built under the bridges of the ring roads. As long as they did not disturb, no one forbade them to sleep there. His island was far from the monumental complex that could be seen from the other side of the river. I had in front of me the end of the city, where, in addition to new and ugly apartments, there was only a shopping center next to a stadium that was never important. He was also visible when he was in the distance, and some children greeted him from the parapet and shouted for him to take them in their canoe. The false inventor answered them by shaking his head enigmatically. The attention of the children made him conceit and worried him at the same time. I didn't want them to know what was happening with the rabbits, which could be seen from the viewpoint; They were like little white balls bumping into each other. At night, if there was enough moon, the glow of their fur would blend in with that of the birds, and it would seem that the birds were sleeping on the ground.

The rabbits never ate their young outside the store. They seemed to know that they were breaking a law. And although seeing them feeding on their descendants shrunk the soul and made them abject, when they stood still it became clear that there was something hypnotic, majestic about them, which increased with the passage of time, and which perhaps had to do with acting against nature. Maybe they had stopped being rabbits, he thought, or somehow they knew that they were starring in what had never happened in that way in their race. At times the false inventor was troubled by their disappearance, and then he forgot about the circumstances by which those beings had ended up eating his children. The event shone like a pure fact, without causes; an event called to inaugurate a new world. All this happened quietly, because there was still no language for a reality that was beginning to take its first steps. The false inventor limited himself to continuing to go to the islet and to answer with suspicion the requests of the infants to be taken in their canoe. At night, in the mansion inherited from his grandmother where he lived, he dreamed of the parents of these children, he heard their voices as if they were a mob that crushed him while the rooms were filled with water and the blue color of the pools. It was said that this was a vulgar obsession from which he would emerge when he decided to abandon those creatures, and only by some attitudes of his body, suddenly static next to his rabbits, it was possible to conclude that he began to feel like one more among them. Perhaps his hair, suddenly graying, would achieve the fabulous white of those now sacred animals, and his eyes, bloodied by small effusions that the eye doctor attributed to a persistent conjunctivitis, would eventually heal when they turned completely red.

One day the fake inventor dismantled the tent and stopped going to the island. The inhabitants of the riverside flats wondered what had become of this madman dedicated to raising rabbits that died a few weeks after their disappearance, and whose corpses formed a beautiful white blanket.

 

END

 

THE IVORY PLAYING CARDS

 

 

 

From the age of two, and until I was twelve, I saw very little of my mother. I was the posthumous son of a father who ran a modest business and who left my mother almost in misery; so that soon after she became a widow she was again employed in the great house where she had formerly worked as a maid.

Fortunately for me, the merchants of my father's branch owned a fairly well-organized Montepio, and in due course I entered an institution which provided me with bed, board, and education for ten months of the year. I went to spend the holidays with my uncle, who had a bakery in Hounslow; and I only saw my mother on her occasional brief visits to school or to her brother's house.

A year before my twelfth birthday, my mother had been promoted to the rank of housekeeper to Sir George Suttwell, at his great mansion in Hampshire, and had many servants under her command. She was one of those strong, honest, capable women, specially designed by nature to occupy modest positions of trust. My mother inspired a kind of fear in most people, and I think the only two beings she feared were Sir George and his wife. They inspired him with a respect bordering on reverence, and he adored the family as if he had been some feudal serf born and brought up in the manor house.

This attitude towards their owners contributed decisively to our long separation. My mother was afraid to ask permission to have me by her side during the holidays, thinking that I could do something that would bring the wrath of Olympus over our heads. So I grew up and looked upon my mother as both dear and strange, a great lady whose periodical visits punctuated my uncles' dull conversation with allusions to hunts, society balls, and the like, which, as far as I was concerned, might have taken place on the planet Mars.

Although I naturally loved my mother and always looked forward to seeing her, I was quite happy with my aunt and uncle when I wasn't at school. My uncle, a good man, was one of those simple natures who can seek and find companionship in a child. Not a fan of leaving home, his only hobby was football, as a spectator, of course; and when I was at Hounslow he always took me with him to the games.

He had taught me to play discard and breeze, and many afternoons we played endless games in the back room. My knowledge of the first of these games later earned me the improvement of my education, a modest fortune, and the means of establishing myself on my own. And the story of that discard game which won me a place in life far above the condition in which I was born is something I shall not reproach any man who doubts it.

He had just turned twelve when those fortunate Easter holidays arrived.

Sir George and Lady Suttwell were two people of a certain age who were seldom absent from their Hampshire home for more than a weekend. But that spring they had decided to make some necessary renovations in the house and would be away for a while. My mother mustered up the courage to ask them to allow her to have me by their side during her absence. The Suttwells did not pose any inconvenience. "To see Suttwell and die" was a phrase I had heard more than once from my mother's lips; one can imagine, then, the state of excitement into which the prospect of that journey plunged me.

Suttwell Court is located on the western edge of the New Forest, and four miles by road from Farringhurst station. I remember the train, after leaving Southampton behind, taking me through expanses of sun-drenched forest in the tender greenery of spring. But the sun was very low in the sky when I alighted on the platform at Farringhurst, and leaden clouds, advancing from the west, drew a gloomy curtain over the sunset.

At the station my mother was waiting for me, who kissed me and accompanied me to a ramshackle vehicle that for a generation had served as a means of transport for luggage and servants. For most of the journey, the rain pattered against the windows and roof of the vehicle, and that melancholy end of a bright day, added to the fact that I was tired after my journey, probably tended to depress me and inspire me with the most absurd forebodings.

I knew she had a strange, unreasoned fear of the house when I looked out the window and saw her for the first time, as the warm rain soaked my hair. I had imagined that Suttwell Court was an oriental palace like those described in fairy tales, only to find that it looked even more gloomy than that of the institution where I had spent most of my life. I entered the huge mansion with the same sense of dread that a child experiences when entering a cathedral for the first time.

A sausage soup in my mother's office helped improve my mood. A very kind gentleman, named Mr. Hewitt, shared dinner with us. My mother told me that he was the butler; and from that time on, in my assessment of social ranks, the stewards were placed at a level equivalent to that of the members of the House of Lords. It seemed to me that he had more dignity, more sense of humor, and more condescension toward a twelve-year-old boy than any of the teachers at the orphanage.

My mother sent me to bed very early, but before she did she showed me a little, very little, of those parts of the house that in normal times were sacred. Then I felt depressed and scared again. Everything was alarmingly large and massive; There was not a single painting that did not look twenty times larger than a normal painting, nor an armchair in which a giant could not have sat comfortably. The carpets themselves under my feet were a nuisance: I was afraid that at any moment I would be scolded for walking on them.

I was grateful that my bedroom was at the end of a hallway that seemed like the simplest corner of the house, with straw mats on the floor. In my room, the floor was linoleum, and the carpets, thin and worn, reminded me of Hounslow and Uncle Fred's comfortable cabinet.

My mood had improved the next day, and the house seemed less impressive in the morning light, when, accompanied by my mother, I finished touring it. My mother, extremely active, moved to the rhythm of a perpetual clash of keys, and this made me feel that she was a very important person, increasing the respect she already inspired in me. A single glance was enough for him to choose the key he was going to use, without ever making a mistake. And in each of the rooms we visited I had a brief comment ready, pointing out a rare piece of furniture or an interesting painting, or telling of some important family event that had taken place during that stay.

I guess the paintings interested me more than anything else. There were many portraits of ancestors, especially in the lobby and in the long gallery on the top floor. The family resemblance between these Suttwells was very remarkable, and if my mother had not informed me of the kinship which united these personages, I should have thought that all the portraits were of the same man in different dresses, and at different times of his life.

On our tour of the house we only missed one room, because it was the only one to which my mother did not have the key. The closed door was on the first floor, in a corridor that extended directly from the main staircase to the west wing, and my curiosity was piqued when my mother passed by it.

"What's in there?" I asked.

"I don't know," my mother replied dryly.

"But why don't you have the key?"

"Sir George has it. If he prefers to keep it, there must be a reason.

I thought that my mother was upset that she had not been entrusted with the key to that room along with the others, and that this was the reason why she answered my questions more abruptly than usual.

The mysterious room made a vivid impression on me, and my imagination ran wild: someone had committed murder there. The skeleton of a man still lay in the center of the room, on a large stain of dried blood... But when I suggested this horrible and delightful possibility to my mother, she was impatient and very disheartening.

The house would have been an ideal playground for me if I had been allowed to use it as such, but I was confined to my mother's room and the large kitchen, though sometimes the kind Mr. Hewitt would let me help me dust the glass in his pantry. Outside the house the situation did not improve. The gardens were even more sacred to footsteps than the large gray carpet in the main hall.

But the servants, inside and without, were very affectionate to me, and seemed to enjoy spoiling me when my mother was out of sight. None of them idolized the family like my mother, and Mr. Sturgess, who was one of the gardeners and was never too busy to talk, told me more details of the Suttwells' history than my own mother. One day he took my breath away when he told me that Sir George was a poor man. I blinked, to imply that it was not easy to believe.

"I don't mean that you and I didn't like to change with him, for example," Mr. Sturgess confessed. But he is not a rich man according to his own ideas. When a character of his category starts selling land, things go badly. If Sir George's father were alive, the family would have lost the house long ago.

And then he told me that for many generations the heads of the mansion had been alternately stingy and profligate. A Suttwell had squandered his fortune and left a lot of debt; Her son had worked hard to restore the financial balance of the house, only for the next generation to return to spending without measure.

"Sir Hugh, Sir George's father, was the most profligate man you can imagine," Mr. Sturgess informed me.

"Then Sir George is a stingy, isn't he?" I asked.

Sturgess smiled and scratched his chin.

"Well, perhaps that is not the exact name that can be given to it," he said. But he is not far from being one—he is not far from it.

My first five days at Suttwell Court passed pleasantly and with considerable placidity. I dare say that my boredom would have been complete if the servants had not been so disposed to cheer up my stay in the house. In addition, I earned Mr. Hewitt's respect by teaching him how to play discard.

"The best two-person card game ever invented," was his verdict on the discard.

The thing happened on the sixth day of my stay at Suttwell Court.

My mother, a lover of discipline as she was, would not allow me to stay up late at night. At half-past nine o'clock he would kiss me, light my candle, and send me to bed. Always, after half an hour, I heard her enter the room next to mine.

The workers used to work until sunset, but that night a group of them had decided to finish a repair on the back staircase, so when my mother sent me to bed I had to cross the hall and go up the main staircase.

It was a very dark night, without moon and without stars, and the house was in almost total darkness. I remember the amusing and horrible shadows that accompanied my passage through the hall with my little candle, and how the eyes of the portraits stared at me through the gloom, perhaps wondering indignantly what right I had to be there.

Around me, the shadows grew longer and swollen as I climbed the steps, and I was glad to reach the landing, away from the stares that stalked me in the hall.

I had taken half a dozen steps down the corridor leading to the west wing, when I stopped suddenly. I had arrived at the door of that mysterious locked room and I had to stop and contemplate it for a few moments, like a child who lacks the money necessary to enter a cinema contemplates the lobby of the premises. I was about to resume my journey when something happened which I know perfectly well to be true, and yet still seems incredible to me.

Suddenly, without the slightest sound to alarm me, the door opened. On the threshold a gentleman appeared, and behind him the room was lighted. I took a step back and looked. I was surprised, of course, but I didn't run scared to death, as might have been expected.

The gentleman was smiling. He smiled with his mouth and his eyes, eyes that had a sort of malicious gleam that I had seen on more than one occasion in some men who were fond of raising their elbows. However, the expression on his face was gentle. On the whole, his appearance was so friendly that it immediately dispelled any fears.

"Wow! he exclaimed in a soft, guttural voice. If it's a boy! Hey, kid! Come closer...

I took a step towards him, holding my candle. He was dressed as one of the portraits in the hall, which helped to add to his resemblance to one of the Suttwells. A wig, curly and very powdery, hid her natural hair.

I thank heaven that at that moment it did not occur to me to think what I know now. The gentleman seemed as solid and real as any person I had ever seen. And the portraits had put into my childish mind the idea that the Suttwells continued to circulate the world in their wigs and lace. The knight was one of those demigods who were reverently referred to as "the family." I just smiled shyly at her, wondering how she had managed to get into the house without my mother, who knew everything, noticing.

"Where were you going, boy?" He asked me.

"To go to bed, sir."

"To go to bed?" Oh! He had a smug voice and, at the same time, slightly trembling. Come on, come on... Now that you're here, you're not going to deny me some company... In recent times I have been very lonely.

His voice had become filled with sadness as he uttered those last words, and I was moved. Then he said something in French that I could not understand, but it seemed to me that it was an invitation to him to enter the room, especially when I saw that he moved slightly to one side while he spoke.

So I entered the mysterious room. It was brightly lit, but I don't remember seeing any lamp or candle burning. The apartment was a kind of living room. There was a table in the center, some solid and old armchairs, books, a desk... And the dust of centuries covering everything with a thick layer.

"Yes," said the gentleman, "I have little company now, and I cannot be too exact. Times have changed. I confess that I've been dying to play a game of cards longer than I can imagine. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised, as if he knew beforehand how idle his question was. You don't play cards, do you?

"Yes, sir," I answered. I know a few games.

His smile widened, and then he shook his head.

"Some game of villains, no doubt," he said. Well, well, a little beer is worth more than a lot of water... It will be a real pleasure to feel the cards in my hands again. Well, what's your favorite game, boy?

"I know how to play discard," I murmured.

-To be discarded? His eyes seemed to widen with the surprise and pleasure he was experiencing. Discard! The trendy game right now! Hey, who the hell instructed you like that?

I shrugged, not knowing what to answer. The gentleman, for his part, did not seem to expect my reply. He bowed to me so ironically and so amusing that I almost laughed, instead of being offended.

"Sir," he said, "I am deeply honoured by your company, and if you play at discard you are doubly welcome to my hometown." I have lost more guineas to discard than I have hairs on my head. If you want to honor me with a game...

He looked at me anxiously, as if he thought I could refuse to play with him. I said nothing, just looking at him with an intrigued and nervous smile.

He interpreted my silence as a mute nod, walked over to the desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a deck of cards. Then he dropped the cards on the dusty table.

-How much is the setting? he asked, looking at me with his mocking little eyes. The normal thing at the club?

I suspected that he was making fun of me, since a gentleman like him could not accept anything from a child. In fact, I had nothing to lose, but I was sure that if I won, that kind and flamboyant gentleman would not allow me to leave empty-handed. So I smiled and said:

-Of course.

The deck was already ready to play discard, that is, it only contained thirty-two cards, starting with sevens. While mixing them I realized for the first time the great beauty and originality of the cards: they were ivory, hand-painted and subjected to a treatment that made the colors unalterable. I lost my hand and pulled an armchair closer to the table.

-A round of three games? asked the gentleman.

I nodded and he started to give. As I dealt the cards I observed that their ways had changed. His face had lost its jovial expression and was now terribly serious. It was not difficult to guess what was one of his most deeply-rooted vices.

We started playing. The gentleman spread out his small fan of playing cards with trembling fingers. He declared himself the king of triumphs and won two points from the hand. They took the first game by five points to two.

I was beginning to be scared, although I didn't know why. But luck favored me in the second game, and I scored five points while he was left with three. I was quite nervous, but when the gentleman picked up the cards to serve the last game it seemed to me that his nervousness overcame mine.

And what a game, my God! No hand produced more than one point, with a total of four evenly distributed. The trump was spades: I asked for four cards.

He served them to me one by one, and the first one I raised was the king of spades.

"The king is enough for me," I said, turning her on her back.

The knight swore an oath and rose to his feet, violently throwing his cards on the table. I got up, frightened, without letting go of the king of swords.

"That's the sort of luck that has always annoyed me," said the gentleman, in a calmer tone.

And he began pacing to and fro, his head bent over his chest, to the point that I wondered if he was joking and expected me to laugh. Then he stopped and stared at me.

"Boy," he said, "I am very grateful to you for the company. What would you say if I couldn't pay you?

Again I wondered if he was making fun of me.

"Please," I said, "money is of no importance.

Surprisingly, my response seemed to make him angry.

"I am very grateful to you for the company, boy, but damn your impudence. There is no man, dead or alive, who can say that Giles Suttwell has not lived up to a gambling debt. Damn your impudence! Do you hear me? Damn your impudence!

I felt so scared, I couldn't even stutter a word of apology.

The gentleman resumed his pacing of the room, his head bowed and muttering to himself. Then he stopped again and looked at me.

"Damn your damned impudence!" he exclaimed. But how am I going to pay you? Alas! This is the problem!

He thought and then, to my great relief, pointed to the door.

"Good evening," he said. I'm very grateful to you for the company, of course. And I curse your brazenness.

I headed for the door. The gentleman followed me.

"You'll pay for yourself, boy," I heard him say. What was my father's is mine, even if the accursed miser hid it from my eyes and from the eyes of those who came after. In the library..., the fifth board behind the shelves to the left of the south-facing door..., take what I owe you...

I was already in the corridor and turned to look at him as his voice muffled behind me. I saw nothing but a closed door. Then an intense terror seized me, and I ran downstairs, screaming, until I found the shelter of my mother's arms. At that moment I hardly understood anything, but my terror told me that I had been with something that was not of the earth and was not good.

My mother would not have believed a word I told her if she had not observed him grasping something convulsively in one of my hands. He forced me to open my fingers and took an ivory card.

He was the king of swords.

My mother risked prolonging my stay in the house until Sir George and his wife returned. She repeated to them word for word the story I had told her, and showed them the ivory card.

Sir George made scarcely any comment.

Much later I learned that the room where the strange events I have just narrated took place had been locked because it was rumoured to be visited by the ghost of Sir Giles Suttwell, gambler and inveterate drunkard, who had died at the end of the eighteenth century.

The room was opened and on the desk was found a deck of thirty-one cards: a complete deck to play discard... adding the king of spades. And because a child cannot enter a locked room and take a letter from the closed drawer of a desk, without having the keys to the door or drawer, special attention was paid to my story, and in a particular way to its end.

Before Sir Giles the spendthrift, the head of the family had been Sir Giles the stingy. I don't know the number of guineas that were found in a secret room behind the bookshelves of the library. All I know is that my mother and I have Sir George to thank for the part of them he gave us.

 

END

 

DREAMS {Stories}

 

 

 

It was after a dinner with friends, old friends. There were five of them: a writer, a doctor, and three rich bachelors without a profession.

Everything had been talked about, and a lassitude had been reached, that lassitude that precedes and decides the departure after a party. One of the diners, who had been looking for five minutes, without speaking, at the agitated boulevard, constellated by the gas nozzles and full of humming, suddenly said:

-When nothing is done from morning to night, the days are long.

"And the nights too," added his neighbor.

I hardly sleep, pleasures tire me, conversations do not vary; I never find a new idea, and I experience, before talking to no matter whom, a furious desire to say nothing and hear nothing. I don't know what to do with my evenings.

And the third unemployed man proclaimed:

"I would be willing to pay well for a way of spend, each day, only two pleasant hours.

Then the writer, who had just thrown his coat over his arm, approached.

"The man," he said, "who discovers a new vice, and offers it to his fellow-men, even if it reduced his life by half, would do a greater service to mankind than he who found the means of securing eternal health and youth.

The doctor laughed, and as he nibbled on a cigarette, he said:

-Yes, but things are not discovered in this way. Although the issue has been earnestly sought and worked on since the world has existed. The first men suddenly came to perfection in this. We barely match them...

One of the three unemployed people sighed.

"It's a pity!"

Then, after a minute, he added:

"If only we could sleep, sleep well without being cold or hot, sleep with that annihilation of the nights of great tiredness, sleep without dreams.

-Why without dreams? asked his neighbor.

"Because dreams are not always pleasant," replied the other, "and they are always strange, improbable, frayed, and because in sleep we cannot even taste the best dreams." It is necessary to daydream.

"Who prevents you?" asked the writer.

The doctor threw his cigarette.

"My dear friend, to daydream requires great power and great work of will, and the result is great fatigue. The true dream, that walk of our thought through enchanting visions, is surely the most delightful thing in the world; but it must come naturally, not painfully provoked, and be accompanied by absolute well-being of the body. I can offer this dream to you, provided you promise me not to abuse it.

The writer shrugged.

"Ah! Yes, I know, hashish, opium, green jam, artificial paradises. I have read Baudelaire; and I myself have tasted the famous drug, which has made me terribly ill.

But the doctor had sat down.

"No, the ether, just the ether. You men of letters should wear it from time to time.

The three rich men came over. One of them asked:

"Explain to us, then, the effects."

The doctor continued:

-Let's leave aside the big words, shall we? I am not talking about medicine or morals: I am talking about pleasure. You are free every day with excesses that devour your lives. I want to point out to you a new sensation, possible only for intelligent men, let's say even very intelligent, dangerous as everything that excites our organs, but exquisite. I add that it will require a certain preparation, that is to say, a certain habit, to grasp in all their fullness the singular effects of the ether.

"They are different from the effects of hashish, from the effects of opium and morphine; and they cease immediately after the absorption of the drug is interrupted, while the other dream-producers continue their action for hours.

"Now I will try to analyze as clearly as possible what it feels like. But things are not easy; so delicate, almost incomprehensible, are those sensations.

"I was suffering from violent neuralgia when I used this remedy, which I may have abused a little later.

"I felt sharp pains in my head and neck, and an unbearable warmth on my skin, a restlessness of fever. I took a large vial of ether and, after lying down, began to inhale it slowly.

"After a few minutes I thought I heard a vague murmur which soon became a kind of buzzing, and I had the impression that the whole interior of my body was becoming light, light as air, which was vaporizing.

"Then there was a kind of drowsiness of the soul, of sleepy well-being, although the pains persisted, although they were no longer painful now. It was one of those sufferings that can be endured, and not that horrible tearing against which our tortured body protests.

"Very soon the strange, charming feeling of emptiness in my chest spread, reached the limbs, which in turn became light, light as if flesh and bones had melted and only the skin remained, the skin necessary to make me perceive the sweetness of living, of lying in that well-being. Then I realized that I was no longer suffering. The pain was gone, melted, evaporated. And I heard voices, four voices, two dialogues, without understanding any of the words. As soon as they were but indistinct sounds, as soon as a word or two came to me. But I recognized that it was simply the accentuated ringing in my ears. He was not sleeping, he was awake; I understood, felt, reasoned with extraordinary clarity, depth, power, and joy of spirit, a strange intoxication arising from this multiplication of my mental faculties.

"It was not a dream like that of hashish, it was not the slightly sickly visions of opium; it was a prodigious acuteness of reasoning, a new way of seeing, of judging, of appreciating the things of life, and with the certainty, the absolute awareness that this way was the true one.

"And the old image of the Scriptures suddenly came to my mind. I had the impression that I had tasted the tree of knowledge, that all mysteries were revealed, and that I was under the empire of a new, strange, irrefutable logic. And the arguments, the reasoning, the proofs, came rushing towards me, immediately knocked down by a proof, a reasoning, a stronger argument. My head had become the battleground of ideas. I was a superior being, armed with an invincible intelligence, and I savored a prodigious joy at the realization of my power.

"That lasted a long, long time. I was still breathing through the hole in my ether flask. Suddenly, I realized that it was empty. And I felt a terrible sorrow."

The four men asked at the same time:

"Doctor, quick, a prescription for a quart of ether!"

But the doctor put on his hat and answered:

"As for that, no: go and be poisoned by others!"

And he left.

Ladies and gentlemen, what does your heart tell you about it?

 

END

 

@ Traducido al Ingles, por Paya Frank