Sell my dream
One morning at nine o’clock, while we were having breakfast
on the terrace of the Havana Riviera Hotel under a bright
sun, a huge wave picked up several cars that were driving
down the avenue along the seawall or parked on the
pavement, and embedded one of them in the side of the
hotel. It was like an explosion of dynamite that sowed panic
on all twenty floors of the building and turned the great
entrance window to dust. The many tourists in the lobby
were thrown into the air along with the furniture, and
some were cut by the hailstorm of glass. The wave must
have been immense, because it leaped over the wide two-
way street between the seawall and the hotel and still had
enough force to shatter the window.
The cheerful Cuban volunteers, with the help of the
fire department, picked up the debris in less than six hours,
and sealed off the gate to the sea and installed another,
and everything returned to normal. During the morning
nobody worried about the car encrusted in the wall, for
people assumed it was one of those that had been parked
on the pavement. But when the crane lifted it out of its
setting, the body of a woman was found secured behind
the steering wheel by a seat belt. The blow had been so
brutal that not a single one of her bones was left whole.
Her face was destroyed, her boots had been ripped apart,
and her clothes were in shreds. She wore a gold ring shaped
like a serpent, with emerald eyes. The police established
that she was the housekeeper for the new Portuguese
ambassador and his wife. She had come to Havana with
them two weeks before and had left that morning for the
market, driving a new car. Her name meant nothing to me
when I read it in the newspaper, but I was intrigued by the
snake ring and its emerald eyes. I could not find out,
however, on which finger she wore it.
This was a crucial piece of information, because I feared
she was an unforgettable woman whose real name I never
knew, and who wore a similar ring on her right forefinger
which, in those days, was even more unusual than it is
now. I had met her thirty-four years earlier in Vienna,
eating sausage with boiled potatoes and drinking draft beer
in a tavern frequented by Latin American students. I had
come from Rome that morning, and I still remember my
immediate response to her splendid soprano’s bosom, the
languid foxtails on her coat collar, and that Egyptian ring
in the shape of a serpent. She spoke an elementary Spanish
in a metallic accent without pausing for breath, and I
thought she was the only Austrian at the long wooden
table. But no, she had been born in Colombia and had
come to Austria between the wars, when she was little
more than a child, to study music and voice. She was
about thirty, and did not carry her years well, for she had
never been pretty and had begun to age before her time.
But she was a charming human being. And one of the
most awe-inspiring.
Vienna was still an old imperial city, whose
geographical position between the two irreconcilable worlds
left behind by the Second World War had turned it into a paradise of black marketeering and international espionage.
I could not have imagined a more suitable spot for my
fugitive compatriot, who still ate in the students’ tavern
on the corner only out of loyalty to her origins, since she
had more than enough money to buy meals for all her
table companions. She never told her real name, and we
always knew her by the Germanic tongue twister that we
Latin American students in Vienna invented for her: Frau
Frieda. I had just been introduced to her when I committed
the happy impertinence of asking how she had come to be
in a world so distant and different from the windy cliffs of
Quindio, and she answered with a devastating:
‘I sell my dreams.’
In reality, that was her only trade. She had been the
third of eleven children born to a prosperous shopkeeper
in old Caldas, and as soon as she learned to speak she
instituted the fine custom in her family of telling dreams
before breakfast, the time when their oracular qualities
are preserved in their purest form. When she was seven
she dreamed that one of her brothers was carried off by a
flood. Her mother, out of sheer religious superstition,
forbade the boy to swim in the ravine, which was his
favourite pastime. But Frau Frieda already had her own
system of prophecy.
‘What that dream means,’ she said, ‘isn’t that he’s
going to drown, but that he shouldn’t eat sweets.’
Her interpretation seemed an infamy to a five-year-old
boy who could not live without his Sunday treats. Their
mother, convinced of her daughter’s oracular talents,
enforced the warning with an iron hand. But in her first
careless moment the boy choked on a piece of caramel that
he was eating in secret, and there was no way to save him.
Frau Frieda did not think she could earn a living with
her talent until life caught her by the throat during the
cruel Viennese winters. Then she looked for work at the
first house where she would have liked to live, and when
she was asked what she could do, she told only the truth:
‘I dream.’ A brief explanation to the lady of the house was
all she needed, and she was hired at a salary that just
ed her minor expenses, but she had a nice room and
three meals a day—breakfast in particular, when the family
sat down to learn the immediate future of each of its
members: the father, a refined financier; the mother, a
joyful woman passionate about Romantic chamber music;
and two children, eleven and nine years old. They were all
religious and therefore inclined to archaic superstitions,
and they were delighted to take in Frau Frieda, whose
only obligation was to decipher the family’s daily fate
through her dreams.
She did her job well, and for a long time, above all
during the war years, when reality was more sinister than
nightmares. Only she could decide at breakfast what each
should do that day, and how it should be done, until her
predictions became the sole authority in the house. Her
control over the family was absolute: even the faintest sigh
was breathed by her order. The master of the house died
at about the time I was in Vienna, and had the elegance to
leave her a part of his estate on the condition that she
continue dreaming for the family until her dreams came
to an end.
I stayed in Vienna for more than a month, sharing the
straitened circumstances of the other students while I
waited for money that never arrived. Frau Frieda’s
unexpected and generous visits to the tavern were like
fiestas in our poverty-stricken regime. One night, in a beery
euphoria, she whispered in my ear with a conviction that
permitted no delay.
‘I only came to tell you that I dreamed about you last
night,’ she said. ‘You must leave right away and not come
back to Vienna for five years.’
Her conviction was so real that I boarded the last train
to Rome that same night. As for me, I was so influenced by
what she said that from then on I considered myself a
survivor of some catastrophe I never experienced. I still
have not returned to Vienna.
Before the disaster in Havana, I had seen Frau Frieda
in Barcelona in so unexpected and fortuitous a way that it
seemed a mystery to me. It happened on the day Pablo
Neruda stepped on Spanish soil for the first time since the
Civil War, on a stopover during a long sea voyage to
Valparaiso. He spent a morning with us hunting big game
in the second-hand bookstores, and at Porter he bought
an old, dried-out volume with a torn binding for which he
paid what would have been his salary for two months at
the consulate in Rangoon. He moved through the crowd
like an invalid elephant, with a child’s curiosity in the
inner workings of each thing he saw, for the world appeared
to him as an immense wind-up toy with which life invented
itself.
I have never known anyone closer to the idea one has
of a Renaissance pope: He was gluttonous and refined.
Even against his will, he always presided at the table.
Matilde, his wife, would put a bib around his neck that
belonged in a barbershop rather than a dining room, but it
was the only way to keep him from taking a bath in sauce.
That day at Carvalleiras was typical. He ate three whole
lobsters, dissecting them with a surgeon’s skill, and at the
same time devoured everyone else’s plate with his eyes
and tasted a little from each with a delight that made the
desire to eat contagious: clams from Galicia, mussels from
Cantabria, prawns from Alicante, sea cucumbers from the
Costa Brava. In the meantime, like the French, he spoke
of nothing but other culinary delicacies, in particular the
prehistoric shellfish of Chile, which he carried in his heart.
All at once he stopped eating, tuned his lobster’s antennae,
and said to me in a very quiet voice:
‘There’s someone behind me who won’t stop looking at
me. glanced over his shoulder, and it was true. Three
tables away sat an intrepid woman in an old-fashioned
felt hat and a purple scarf, eating without haste and staring
at him. I recognised her right away. She had grown old
and fat, but it was Frau Frieda, with the snake ring on her
index finger.
She was travelling from Naples on the same ship as
Neruda and his wife, but they had not seen each other on
board. We invited her to have coffee at our table, and I
encouraged her to talk about her dreams in order to astound
the poet. He paid no attention, for from the very beginning
he had announced that he did not believe in prophetic
dreams.
‘Only poetry is clairvoyant,’ he said.
After lunch, during the inevitable stroll along the
Ramblas, I lagged behind with Frau Frieda so that we could
renew our memories with no other ears listening. She told
me she had sold her properties in Austria and retired to
Oporto, in Portugal, where she lived in a house that she
described as a fake castle on a hill, from which one could
see all the way across the ocean to the Americas. Although
she did not say so, her conversation made it clear that,
dream by dream, she had taken over the entire fortune of
her ineffable patrons in Vienna. That did not surprise me,
however, because I had always thought her dreams were
no more than a stratagem for surviving. And I told her so.
She laughed her irresistible laugh. ‘You’re as impudent
as ever,’ she said. And said no more, because the rest of
the group had stopped to wait for Neruda to finish talking
in Chilean slang to the parrots along the Rambla de los
Pájaros. When we resumed our conversation, Frau Frieda
changed the subject.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘you can go back to Vienna
now.’
Only then did I realise that thirteen years had gone by
since our first meeting.
‘Even if your dreams are false, I’ll never go back,’ I told
her. ‘Just in case.’
At three o’clock we left her to accompany Neruda to his
sacred siesta, which he took in our house after solemn preparations that in some way recalled the Japanese tea
ceremony. Some windows had to be opened and others closed
to achieve the perfect degree of warmth, and there had to
be a certain kind of light from a certain direction, and
absolute silence. Neruda fell asleep right away, and woke
ten minutes later, as children do, when we least expected
it. He appeared in the living room refreshed, and with the
monogram of the pillowcase imprinted on his cheek.
‘I dreamed about that woman who dreams,’ he said.
Matilde wanted him to tell her his dream.
‘I dreamed she was dreaming about me,’ he said.
‘That’s right out of Borges,’ I said.
He looked at me in disappointment.
‘Has he written it already?’
‘If he hasn’t he’ll write it sometime,’ I said. ‘It will be
one of his labyrinths.’
As soon as he boarded the ship at six that evening, Neruda
took his leave of us, sat down at an isolated table, and began
to write fluid verses in the green ink he used for drawing
flowers and fish and birds when he dedicated his books. At
the first ‘All ashore’ we looked for Frau Frieda, and found her
at last on the tourist deck, just as we were about to leave
without saying good-bye. She too had taken a siesta.
‘I dreamed about the poet,’ she said.
In astonishment I asked her to tell me her dream.
‘I dreamed he was dreaming about me,’ she said, and
my look of amazement disconcerted her. ‘What did you
expect? Sometimes, with all my dreams, one slips in that
has nothing to do with real life.’
I never saw her again or even wondered about her
until I heard about the snake ring on the woman who
died in the Havana Riviera disaster. And I could not resist the temptation of questioning the Portuguese
ambassador when we happened to meet some months
later at a diplomatic reception. The ambassador spoke
about her with great enthusiasm and enormous
admiration. ‘You cannot imagine how extraordinary she
was,’ he said. ‘You would have been obliged to write a
story about her.’ And he went on in the same tone, with
surprising details, but without the clue that would have
allowed me to come to a final conclusion.
‘In concrete terms,’ I asked at last, ‘what did she do?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, with a certain disenchantment. ‘She
dreamed
Eveline
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the
avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains
and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She
was tired.
Few people passed. The man out of the last house
passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking
along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on
the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there
used to be a field there in which they used to play every
evening with other people’s children. Then a man from
Belfast bought the field and built houses in it—not like
their little brown houses but bright brick houses with
shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play
together in that field—the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns,
little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters.
Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. Her
father used often to hunt them in and out of the field with
his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep
seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was
not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That
was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters
were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was
dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England.
Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like
the others, to leave her home.
Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its
familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so
many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came
from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar
objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided.
And yet during all those years she had never found out the
name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on
the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured
print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary
Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father.
Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father
used to pass it with a casual word: ‘He is in Melbourne
now.’
She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was
that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In
her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those
whom she had known all her life about her. Of course she
had to work hard, both in the house and at business. What
would they say of her in the Stores when they found out
that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool,
perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement.
Miss Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on
her, especially whenever there were people listening.
‘Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?’
‘Look lively, Miss Hill, please.’
She wouId not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.
But in her new home, in a distant unknown country,
it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she,
Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She
would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now,
though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself
in danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that
that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing
up he had never gone for her, like he used to go for Harry
and Ernest, because she was a girl; but latterly he had
begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her
only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody
to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the
church decorating business, was nearly always down
somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble
for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her
unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages—seven
shillings—and Harry always sent up what he could but
the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said
she used to squander the money, that she had no head,
that he wasn’t going to give her his hard earned money to
throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually
fairly bad on Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying
Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as
she could and do her marketing, holding her black leather
purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through
the crowds and returning home late under her load of
provisions. She had hard work to keep the house together
and to see that the two young children who had been left
to her charge went to school regularly and got their meals
regularly. It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she
was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable
life.She was about to explore another life with Frank.
Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. She was to go
away with him by the night boat to be his wife and to live
with him in Buenos Aires where he had a home waiting for
her. How well she remembered the first time she had seen
him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where
she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. He was
standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his
head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of bronze.
Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet
her outside the Stores every evening and see her home. He
took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as
she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him.
He was awfully fond of music and sang a little. People
knew that they were courting and, when he sang about
the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly
confused. He used to call her Poppens out of fun. First of
all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and
then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant
countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month
on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He told
her the names of the ships he had been on and the names
of the different services. He had sailed through the Straits
of Magellan and he told her stories of the terrible
Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Aires, he
said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday.
Of course, her father had found out the affair and had
forbidden her to have anything to say to him.
‘I know these sailor chaps,’ he said.
One day he had quarrelled with Frank and after that
she had to meet her lover secretly.
The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two
letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the
other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but
she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately,
she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be
very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a
day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for
her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive,
they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She
remembered her father putting on her mother’s bonnet to
make the children laugh.
Her time was running out but she continued to sit by
the window, leaning her head against the window curtain,
inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the
avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew
the air. Strange that it should come that very night to
remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to
keep the home together as long as she could. She
remembered the last night of her mother’s illness; she was
again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall
and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ
player had been ordered to go away and given six-pence.
She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom
saying: ‘Damned Italians! coming over here!’
As she mused—the pitiful vision of her mother’s life
laid its spell on the very quick of her being that life of
commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She
trembled as she heard again her mother’s voice saying
constantly with foolish insistence: ‘Derevaun Seraun!
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She
must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life,
perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be
unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take
her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.
She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at
the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he
was speaking to her, saying something about the passage
over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with
brown baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she
caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in
beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She
answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and,
out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her,
to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long
mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, tomorrow she
would be on the sea with Frank, steaming toward Buenos
Aires. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw
back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a
nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent
fervent prayer.
A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her
hand:
‘Come!’
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He
was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She
gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
‘Come!’
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the
iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.
‘Eveline! Evvy!’
He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to
follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless
animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or
recognition.
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