The Dreamed Part by Rodrigo Fresán
Author:Rodrigo Fresán
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2019-01-15T16:00:00+00:00
The Boy, on that long and waking and as-if-dreamed night, trailing along behind his Uncle Hey Walrus through avenues and parks, searching for his parents, and at first leading his little sister by the hand and later carrying her on his shoulders.
The Boy walking through a city that no longer exists.
A city that’s been laid to rest beneath the waters, and where—in his precise memory—all those people they crossed paths with that night are dead. (And he always liked that thing about being dead; as if death were an occupation and being a dead person was like practicing a profession, like being a lawyer or doctor; as if you could be dead for a while and later stop, or retire from, being dead; as if having died were the same as having completed a very difficult task, your own life, with great success: “I’m dead now, but at least I was able to finish what came before.”)
Being dead, yes, like being awake or being asleep.
Some of the people The Boy and his sister and Uncle Hey Walrus are about to cross paths with are going to die very soon.
It’s a dangerous time; “The lively Age of Aquarius is already giving way to the metastasis of the Age of Cancer,” foretells Uncle Hey Walrus, who not long ago had come back and been sent back from London. And those who survive, inevitably, will die over the years, incredulous, confronting the reality of having grown old, having believed they’d stay forever young. They’ll die from what’s known, perversely, as a “natural death.” In three movements/chapters: the moment their body ceases to function, the moment their body is disposed of according to their preferred method (earth, fire, air, water), and the truly mortal moment when, in the future, their name is uttered for the last time or the last living person who remembers them dies too. And again, he thinks: natural death. As if there were something natural in death, as if there were another variety known as artificial death, encompassing, presumably, all other forms of death. And he always remembers the conclusion in the forensic report of the volcanic Malcolm Lowry: “Death by misadventure,” the doctor wrote there. Death due to accidental bad luck, passing away from pure misfortune, or something like that. Did his parents and Penelope die and he survive them all by misadventure? Who is the truly misfortunate one in this story: those who no longer count or the one who recounts it all?
In any case, in his memory, then, all those soon-to-be or on-the-point-of-being dead people now occupy a legendary space and, before long, become the fodder and fertilizer of mythology: the place where he was born, but that, for a long time now, is for him El Extranjero. A place that he no longer visits—in the absence of dreams—except in his mind. A territory that’s always outside and remote physically and inside and nearby mentally.
There, in El Extranjero, in the past, a city that never sleeps and the impossibility of bookstores staying open all night that everyone has decided to believe in.
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