Where the uneven earth had formed potholes, where if I’d put my feet in any one I’d have soaked my shoes and socks, jets of water began to rise up identical to the huge fountain’s, but in proportion to the water in each pothole. The rain was such that the water from the central fountain began to spill over the ground creating more and more puddles, each of them reproducing the form and mechanics of the jet of water, tiny fountains without stone parapets. Each jet reflected the lights in the park and there were so many that the ground seemed illuminated, full of immense stars. I felt there was nowhere to step, the ground was the sky and a sun would never again lighten the gray stormy sky to guide my feet away from the depths of night.
One of the small fountains spurted and wet my skirt and panties: I felt it was deliberate and silenced it under the sole of my foot.
Then the rain abated. The fountains in the ground stopped, were once more inert puddles, and the huge fountain in the park also began to fizzle out. I walked over to the fountain: colored salamanders were running across it, uttering words I couldn’t understand, till they jumped out of the water, extending their wings, and disappeared into the dark sky which devoured them and left the park in the purest silence: now there were no passers-by, no sellers, not even the sound of water, nor leaves or rats who pattered here and there unseen. I too — I felt this distinctly — gradually disappeared, let myself be swamped by the darkness. Last to go were my eyes: I saw the park being snuffed out and — I’m not sure, but perhaps — perhaps it left the dream with me.
Why did I tell you a dream? I ought not to disrupt the flow of my narrative. I plucked the word dream out of the air because I want to tell you how it happened that from one day to the next I stopped dreaming: I never dreamed another dream again.
It wasn’t long after I lost the white healing stones from our neighbors’ window-box and after the four fat spiders ran down the jacket I’d painted them onto just because they spent a short while in an empty wardrobe, when one night, looking for a rational way out from my fear, I decided to demand white pebbles from the wardrobe. I quietly fell asleep mentally rehearsing how I would paint them so they resembled the ones I needed, recalling what they were like, trying to recall where exactly the light reflected on their tiny surface, following my painting teacher’s advice (a bald, sometimes bespectacled man, I reckoned he only wanted to ask me whether I was Esther’s daughter, his big toad eyes looked at me amazed and incredulous as I answered I was, I was, I was). The next day (there were no classes, or it was the weekend, a fiesta or the holidays, I can’t remember, the more I provoke my memory, the less I remember) I asked to be taken to Grandma’s. Once I’d arrived, I stuck by her side, started drawing, and as a result Grandma never stopped saying, “Just like your mommy,” completely ignoring me and my drawings, as she was absorbed by the work in her laboratory (which was called Laboratorios Velásquez Canseco and developed natural raw materials for use in perfumes). First I painted a lonely pebble and colored it with my white crayon, so the sheet looked practically empty. Then, I drew a small heap of white stones. I took the piece of paper to the wardrobe and waited, sitting next to it on the icy, exaggeratedly clean mosaic tiles. Sitting there I remembered when a nanny looked after me at Grandma’s, when they operated on Esther’s eyes because, someone said, she saw “with difficulty”…My uncle Gustavo whistled by, dearest Uncle Gustavo, Esther’s younger brother, and crouched next to me patting me on the head: “It’s like a coconut shell,” he said of my hair, repeating his usual joke. But I couldn’t laugh with him as usual, I felt as if I’d gotten a stomachache. The brilliantine was still damp on Gustavo’s freshly combed hair; he got up — as engrossed in his own world as I was in mine — and left without a word of goodbye, perfuming his path as he went. I heard him rush through the house and close the wooden front door. He immediately unlocked it and shouted from outside, “I’m off now, Mom,” slamming the door behind him. I then put my hand in the wardrobe and took out the white pebbles and white sheets of paper, completely unmarked. I kept them all in a bundle in the pocket of my dress.
As soon as I got home I inspected them slowly: in effect, the paper showed no sign it had been drawn on; the pebbles were like the previous ones, as if the wardrobe had read the intention behind my drawings and ignored my clumsy squiggles. I thanked its generosity. Only the biggest stone, the one I’d painted by itself on a single sheet, was more opaque, not at all translucent and, no doubt, too white. I told myself that the wardrobe had also used it as a trial run, and put it away in the drawer where I kept my erasers, pencil sharpeners, dry leaves, packets of jelly, treasures I cherished but never dared to share with anyone, except, naturally, my two sisters.
Before going to sleep, when they switched off the light and thought I was well away, I placed the rest of the pebbles around my bed. I fell asleep very peacefully, it was true, undisturbed by the usual sounds of that time of night. Soon after the steps, the familiar sounds woke me up, which I greeted more startled than ever, principally because I had complete faith in the protective circle of white pebbles, they would cut me off from them, never thinking for a moment that wouldn’t happen; and second because I felt I hadn’t slept: I had dreamed nothing, nothing. From the moment I shut my eyes to the moment I reopened them, nothing passed before them: the film of my dreams had been wiped.
I never dreamed again. The steps kept resounding, perhaps more clearly, certainly hit a more fragile, more visible target; even asleep, I had no place to hide. Who had shut the doors? It was then I understood things aren’t always what they seem, that it would be easy to recover what one sees, yet impossible to recover it in all its substance.
I never again arranged the pebbles around my bed. Superstitiously, I resolved to collect them up in the morning and I gradually got rid of them one at a time, in a place from which I thought they’d never come back to haunt me. “Things aren’t what they seem.” Not always. You will understand I never returned to the wardrobe — if things within the order of their own creation rebelled and enemies found (if they existed) levers of support in there to bolster them or provide stations for what I initially called persecution, what would happen with things I’d provoked into existence? Just imagine! They’d already deprived me of my dreams, delivered me to the night, scalped, with fear my only shelter. What would other objects be capable of? I mean the things provoked, dragged by my willpower out of the nothingness that engulfed them.
And so if I was the only one who, by chance, had discovered the potential of the beautiful, carved wooden wardrobe, I kept the secret to myself.
It didn’t take any effort.
11
“Malena! Fina!” I ran into the house, shouting to them. “Malena! Fina!” “That’s strange,” I thought, “odd they’re not answering.” They were so loving and attentive toward me. “Malena! Fina!” I asked Inés, and she just shrugged her shoulders. I asked Salustia: she stopped ironing, wet the iron again, waved a damp finger, and said, silencing the noise of the iron’s contact with the water, “They’re in their bedroom.”
I ran to their room. By now I’d forgotten what I wanted to show or tell them but I kept calling out. “Malena! Fina!” Couldn’t they hear me? I reached their room: the door was shut. I tried to turn the doorknob, it was locked by the button you could press inside the room (something implicitly forbidden, nobody locked their door). I hammered on the door with my fist. “Coming,” the two chorused. Their voices sounded different. What was this “Coming”? They’d never used that tone with me.