...And Dreams Are Dreams

I found the fat cleaning lady tidying my room, puzzled that my bed was not unmade, even though I had had “company.” Every morning, the fat cleaning lady, who never failed to ask me for a cigarette, would study my sheets as if they were the entrails of birds, trying to divine what kind of night I had had. She took a singular pleasure in doing my room. From the dampness of the sheets, from the little hairs like snails, from a barrette, from an earring she had once found fallen behind the bed, she would deduce my night. She would talk to me for hours. She seemed to be especially fond of me. So much so, in fact, that I was a little suspicious.

But that day, having seen me coming out with the svelte Ursula, she couldn’t figure out how the bed could be untouched. She wanted to get me talking, to ask me, but she held back, either from embarrassment or because she could see I was exhausted.

“Please just leave everything as it is. I’m going to bed.”

“Ah, women!” she sighed, sounding angry, and she left, after first closing the shutters.

I lay down, and the story of Ursula kept playing back in my mind like a film.

Everything revolved around a pimple on her breast that she could not identify. Was it malignant or not? In any case it was solid, not liquid. There would have to be either a needle biopsy or a surgical biopsy, which might then lead to a mastectomy. Opinions differed on that point. The needle biopsy might aggravate it, and besides, what would be the point of discovering it was benign? She might as well have surgery right from the start and be done with it. But of course that would mean going under the knife. There would be a scar left. That was Ursula’s problem; nevertheless she was being brave about it. I gathered she was the kind of person who liked clear-cut solutions. She did not like problems, be they biological or emotional, to drag on in her personal life, to become cancers. That’s exactly how she had severed relations with every man in her life. At some point they had all turned out to be rotten. Weak. She was looking for a man who would take her on, and all that came with her. She had found one, but he had turned out to be a mafioso. They had thrown him in the slammer. At the moment she was free, on her own, preferring solitude to cloudy and confused emotions. Since she was a frank person, she demanded the same frankness from her mate. But men, at least the ones she had come across, were cowards. The myth of the stronger sex….

Little by little, as she spoke to me, she started becoming another of my heroines: the woman “in transit” who meets and talks with the man in the transit zone of an airport, certain that they will never see each other again. While Ursula talked about her travels, her life, I could hear nothing but the other voice, that of my imagination, that wanted to transplant itself onto human flesh and thus pass from the nonexistence of the nebula to the existence of the tree. The tree would absorb it, it would grow, and there at last the work would exist. “Oh, what a curse it is,” I said to myself,

“to be a writer.” To convert, like a hydroelectric station, the power of the waterfall of life that flows wastefully, plummeting stupidly down ravines. To collect it drop by drop and turn it into energy, which then becomes light in lonely light bulbs in rooms or street lamps, as they turn on with the coming of evening. Ah! The torment, the sweet torment of the imagination. At last I felt as if I were slipping gradually into a deep sleep.

I woke up around noon, shaken by a nightmare, with the boom of the Gianicolo cannon, which, at that hour, always banged its fist against my window.

I looked around me. I saw Rosa’s three red roses, which I had been keeping even though they had died, in the vase with no water. The sweet figure of Rosa, forever lost, forever a dream, was inside a crystal ball.

I couldn’t touch her; she was like a pair of kidneys being transported in serum for transplantation into kidney patients. The nightmare that had shaken me awake at the moment the cannon was fired was the realization that I had suddenly become very poor. That I had run out of money, and that not only had I not been sent here by a publisher, but that I myself was paying for the luxury of being away from my country, which exasperated me. I loved my country and at the same time I hated it because it deprived me of the possibility of loving it while I lived in it. My country was like a woman, a beautiful adolescent in love who, after marrying me, had begun putting on weight and neglecting herself, so that even while I knew that underneath she was the same person, her appearance repulsed me. Perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Maybe I was also to blame.

So in my dream I was poor. I didn’t have a dime.