The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares & Ruth L. C. Simms

Author:Adolfo Bioy Casares & Ruth L. C. Simms [Casares, Adolfo Bioy & Simms, Ruth L. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Literary, Latin American fiction, Espionage
ISBN: 9781590170571
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2003-08-31T10:00:00+00:00

island; it may have caused me to imagine the people, the music, Faustine; perhaps my body has developed horrible lesions, the signs of approaching death, which the other effects keep me from noticing.

The polluted air of the lowlands and my improper diet may have made me invisible. The intruders did not see me. (Else they have a superhuman discipline. I discarded secretly, with the certainty that I am right, my suspicion that this is a plot organized by the police to capture me.) Objection: I am not invisible to the birds, the lizards, the rats, the mosquitoes.

It occurred to me (precariously) that these could be beings from another planet, whose nature is different from ours, with eyes that are not used for seeing, with ears that do not hear. I remembered that they spoke correct French. I enlarged the foregoing monstrosity: this language may be a parallel attribute of our worlds, but the words may have different meanings!

I arrived at the fourth theory because of my mad impulse to relate my dreams. This is what I dreamed last night:

I was in an insane asylum. After a long consultation with a doctor (the trial?), my family had me taken there. Morel was the director of the asylum. Sometimes I knew I was on the island; sometimes I thought I was in the insane asylum,- sometimes I was the director of the insane asylum.

I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.

Fifth hypothesis: the intruders are a group of dead friends, and I am a traveler, like Dante or Swedenborg, or some other dead man of another sort, at a different phase of his metamorphosis; this island may be the purgatory or the heaven of those dead people (the possibility of several heavens has already been suggested; if only one existed, and if everyone went there and found a happy marriage and literary meetings on Wednesdays, many of us would have stopped dying).

Now I understand why novelists write about ghosts that weep and wail. The dead remain in the midst of the living. It is hard for them, after all, to change their habits—to give up smoking, or the prestige of being great lovers. I was horrified by the thought that I was invisible,- horrified that Faustine, who was so close to me, actually might be on another planet (the sound of her name made me sad),- but I am dead, I am out of reach, I thought; and I shall see Faustine, I shall see her go away, but my gestures, my pleas, my efforts will have no effect on her. And I knew that those horrible solutions were nothing but frustrated hopes.

Thinking about these ideas left me in a state of euphoria. I had proof that my relationship with the intruders was a relationship between beings on different planes. There could have been some catastrophe on the island that was imperceptible for its dead (I and the animals), after which the intruders arrived.

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