Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (26 page)

IV Dream

'Apart from that, it seems to me that time is the only dimension in which the living and the dead can talk to each other and communicate, the only dimension they have in common', that was the exact quotation, as I discovered later on in Madrid, and which I had murmured to myself when I was with Wheeler in his garden by the river, just after he had said: 'Speaking, language, is something we all share, even victims and their executioners, masters and their slaves, men and their gods . . . The only ones who do not share a common language, Jacobo, are the living and the dead.' I have never really understood that first quotation, and Wheeler, with his broader knowledge, might perhaps have been able to explain it, but he didn't hear me say it or chose not to, or assumed it was merely some idea of my own and so ignored it, but those words belonged to someone far more deserving of respect than me, the words of a dead man spoken when he was alive, he wrote them in, 1967 and died in 1993, but now he was as dead as the poet Marlowe, although the latter had a four-hundred-year lead over him in death, for he was stabbed in 1593, that son of a cobbler born in Canterbury (the city of the bandit-Dean Hewlett Johnson, who was the absurd and indirect reason why my father could so easily have been shot long before I was born), and who had studied, in fact, at Benett's College in Cambridge, which was later called Corpus Christi. Perhaps not talking any more has an equalising effect, perhaps that immediate levelling out and becoming alike is a consequence of being definitively silenced, which binds one with a strong and previously unknown bond to the already
silent from every age, to the first and to the last, who will immediately become the second to last, and the whole of time becomes compressed and does not make divisions or distinctions or create distances because time ceases to have any meaning once it is over - once each person's life is over - even though those left behind continue counting, their own time and the empty time of those who have departed, as if one day the latter might be able to undo their leaving and be absent no longer. 'It's twenty-six years since my mother died,' we say, or 'It's nearly a year since your son died.'

When the person who wrote these lines wrote them that was more or less what he was talking about, he was a compatriot of mine, a
madrileno
like me, from that same hated city of Madrid, and, indeed, had lived through the blockade. Once, on a visit to Lisbon, he went to the leafy cemetery of Os Prazeres, with its avenues flanked by tiny mausoleums, a small fairyland of strange, low, grey, miniature houses, with ornamental pitched roofs, silent, immaculate and arcane - at once inhabited and uninhabited — and he began noticing the bare little living rooms which you can just make out through the glass-paned door which is set into so many of these tombs, each room furnished with 'a few chairs or two small upholstered armchairs next to a table covered by a lace shawl on which lies open some pious book, a silver-framed photograph of the deceased, a vase containing everlasting flowers and, on occasion, an ashtray'. In one of those small living rooms 'which are intended to look cosy', the traveller saw a pair of shoes, some socks and some dirty laundry peeping out from beneath one of the coffins; in another, some wine glasses; and in another, he thought, a deck of cards. 'It seemed to me,' my fellow countryman wrote, 'that the purpose of this decor was to give a familiar, ordinary, comfortable feel to any visits made to the dead, so that it would not be so very different from visiting the living.' He could see no relationship with the customs of the ancient Egyptians, who tried to ensure that the dead person, in his eternal isolation, signed and sealed, did not go without any of the things he had
enjoyed and loved in life - although this, of course, applied only to those who were considered important - he related it, rather, 'to a desire not so much to make the dead person's stay in that place pleasant and homely, but to the need of the living to feel they will receive a warm welcome there'. And he added, clearly aware of the grave irony: 'One imagines that in this case it is the living who seek the company of the dead, who, as Comte would suggest, are not only in the majority, they are also a more influential and more animated majority.'

But what most shocked this traveller was the 'perfect composition' which he observed, 'with a degree of indiscretion', in one of these sepulchral rooms: as well as the small rug, the two armchairs and the table bearing the family photograph, the crucifix and a few artificial flowers, he saw 'an alarm clock, of the kind we used to see in our parents' kitchens, round in shape, with a bell like a spherical skullcap and with two small balls for feet'. He and his companions all, naturally, pressed their ear to the door to hear 'a loud tick-tock which was to a normal tick-tock what a shout is to the spoken voice'. And it was seeing this scene and hearing that loud ticking which sparked the reflection that culminated in the quotation I have never quite understood, which is why I remember it and why it makes me think. 'Was it,' he wondered, 'that, like the people buried alive in Poe, the clock was trying to remind the living of the macabre act of forgetfulness that had left it there? Or did it need that extra volume in order to keep the deaf people around it aware of time being measured out?' Then he went to the heart of the matter, to the real question provoked by that antiquated clock, apparently the most pointless and superfluous of alarm clocks: 'What was it actually measuring, I wonder?' wondered the man from my own city; yes, that was the main question, 'was it the amount of time they had been dead, or was it the countdown, as they call it now, the time yet to elapse before the final judgement? If it was measuring out the hours of solitude, was it counting those that had passed or those still to come? No other clock - and such a humble clock too - has ever seemed better
placed or provided more food for thought. It occurred to me, with some surprise, that a religion which has always placed such emphasis on that precarious waiting time has not taken the trouble - not even the person who put the clock there - to give the soul the relief of knowing how long its anguish will last; for if the soul is waiting for the resurrection of the flesh, what better than a clock to give an idea not so much of how long the wait will be, but how much time has already been spent in waiting?' And it was here that the enigmatic words appeared or were inserted: 'Apart from that, it seems to me that time is the only dimension . . .' as given in full above. The passage continues, but does not help to elucidate these words, not that it really matters, it is often impossible to understand Shakespeare, to understand him exactly that is, and yet whenever he produces some obscure metaphor or dazzling ambiguity, he opens up ten paths or turnings down which one can plunge further (that is, he opens up these paths if you continue looking and thinking beyond what is merely necessary, as my father used to urge us to do, and you drive yourself on and say 'What else' at the point where you would normally say that there can be nothing more); 'in that sense,' added the traveller, 'within the confines of that comfortable, musty little living room, that troubling alarm clock is the only
deus ex machina
which allows the celebration of the mysterious dialogue which exists between the living and the dead'. There was no further comment, or, rather, there was: as is compulsory after these incursions into ghost time or dead time, before bidding farewell to his text, the traveller returned for a moment to the living and recalled how, 'as they were leaving', he had asked these two questions of one of his companions (someone, by the way, who bore the name of a character straight out of Edgar Allan Poe, Valdemar, no less): 'What happens, do you think, if it rings at night? Do the people sleeping here stir?'
One might ask those same questions now of him, my fellow countryman, who died twenty-six years after that visit or that piece of writing, although he was not buried in the small, leafy
world of Os Prazeres, but, as he had wanted, in the tidy cemetery of La Almudena in the city of our birth, where my mother has been for twenty-six different years, her years. And one might well ask the same question of all of them: what if, instead of remaining silent, they talk among themselves while they wait, and the strong, unknown bond that places them on the same level and makes them alike and joins them together is not a definitive descent into silence but that indefinite counting throughout the interminable time which the stubborn clock measures and measures with its loud tick-tock, and during which its extravagant bell never rings even once? More than enough time to tell each other what they recall of their private dream - rather than of their consciousness - what they did and what happened to them and what they said, over and over, until they know everyone's story by heart, that is, each individual knows everyone's story and everyone knows each individual's story. Time enough for every man who has trodden the earth since the earth began and every woman who has traversed the world to tell the others their whole story, from beginning to end, the end being what carried them to the tomb or drove them from the living to join this other more numerous and influential company, more animated and perhaps also wittier and jokier, and certainly more indolent and more light-hearted, with fewer worries and responsibilities. Time, even, to contribute information and invent stories about beings that never existed and to recount deeds that never happened, fictions and fantasies and games with which to pass that long waiting time, and without ever once repeating themselves. And thus we would be back to our normal state, to not knowing what is true or, rather, what really happened.

And we might ask then how would the dead who died a violent death speak to the dead who killed them or who had issued the order to finish them
off—
they might never even have seen each other - once they were all on a level and all alike, although only in one respect, that of having died, which, in reality, is nothing, therefore the deceased, no less than the
living, would be able to tell each other apart. And one might ask which version they would give, not to the Judge who has not yet appeared and to whom no one lies, and who is perhaps taking so long to arrive because there is no Judge nor ever was and never will be, mass suggestion will not summon him up nor mere insistence (or it may be that he does not dare to confront such a vast, querulous or possibly offended or, even worse, mocking multitude, and so he himself puts off until tomorrow, always tomorrow, the ghastly experience to which he committed himself out of pride; he places it infinitely on hold out of a sense of invincible fear or idleness), yes, which version would they tell each other and what would the two of them tell everyone else, martyr and executioner or instigator and victim, knowing that the present time, if I can call it that and as I have been calling it for a while now, would be too long, too unbearably long for that which did not happen, but was said to have happened, to be believed.

I only had time to say a few things in reply, I had time to smile to myself and to feel a pang of pity, to be amused by his comments on the sharp, stylised features that Botox gave certain faces, the faces of both divas and earthlings, and to think that there might be some unexpected cracks in De la Garza's global stupidity; and even to want to hear a little more from him, more chatter and more nonsense and more comical descriptions, and even to wonder fleetingly if how I was feeling about him was similar to how Tupra felt about me (although obviously there was no real comparison): I amused Tupra, and he enjoyed our sessions of conjecture and examination, our conversations or merely listening to me. ('What else?' he would demand. 'What else occurs to you? Tell me what you're thinking and what else you noticed.')

This lasted almost no time at all, or perhaps everything happened at once, which meant there was time for everything, or maybe I retrieved and rethought it later on, in the pause provided by my doze in the chair or by the sense of unease that persisted when I did finally go to bed, once that long, erroneous, disagreeable night was over. De la Garza had, in his own way, enlightened me about that product which once was poisonous, but was now possibly innocuous, and he had come out with a few amusingly impertinent remarks about its users or addicts with their wild expressions, the last thing he had said was this: 'It makes her look slightly unhinged, don't you think?' referring to someone he had called 'the ex-wife of that guy who's hitched up now with one of our Spanish actresses', I had
understood him perfectly, one of the drawbacks or advantages of compatriotism, a tall woman who also had the face of someone very tall; it was a problem, having that kind of face, regardless of whether one was tall or short. 'They must inject it into her cheekbones and into her crow's feet by the litre, I'd be surprised if she can even close her eyes, she probably sleeps with them wide open. Just like this Flavia woman. I mean, depending on the angle, she looks like some kind of sprite.' There he was in his carnival get-up and with his shoelaces untied, long shoelaces too, they could easily get wet, even in a toilet that wasn't used very much, the floors in public toilets are always wet. It was a miracle he hadn't had an accident, especially during the last dance, when he had danced almost like one possessed, and which we had interrupted in order to save Mrs Manoia from the flailings of his fake hair and, according to what Tupra told me later on at his house, to save De la Garza himself from something far worse.

'Perhaps all sprites sleep with their eyes open.' That was all it occurred to me to say in response, as a preparation for a joke or a quip; I could feel laughter bubbling up inside me, and I didn't want him to take it as a pardon or a homage (he was a very arrogant attaché), and so I looked for and improvised another outlet for it: 'Well, you should know, Rafael, seeing as how you know such a hell of a lot about literary fantasy — including the medieval stuff.' And I pretended to laugh at my own comment, when in fact I was laughing at his outrageous remarks. Nevertheless, I immediately introduced another element to dissipate the possibly wounding effects of my sarcasm (so I obviously had time to say four or five things to him): 'By the way, your shoelaces have come undone.' And I pointed at his feet.