For the most impatient, there are numerous recruiting offices for the Foreign Legion; in each of them, day and night, a French-speaking officer blows smoke rings as he puffs on his pipe. He wears a white kepi and a uniform with red and green facings in which he fought in the desert and stumbled through sandstorms. Whoever enters there, even by mistake, he presents with a contract to sign, binding him to fifteen years’ service in the tropics, and shows him on his fingers in round sums the amount his government will pay the volunteer. He entices with the green of hope and with an indifferent smile conceals his embarrassment at the presence, next to the green facings, of blood red. Blood that the passerby signing the contract will shed in the tropics. The foreign officer is well aware that in the tropics it is possible to live entirely without blood; in case of need it can be replaced with cognac, which is supplied by the caseload to the mess halls there. The round sums paid to the volunteer by the foreign government will be put toward its purchase, since in the tropics it is not possible to live without cognac. And having signed the contract the passerby disappears for good, because from the tropics no one ever returns.
The disillusioned, who have already tried everything, have too little time to dream of America or the tropics and too little strength to search far and wide. They walk into the first bank they come across and cast a tired glance at the teller; in a split second he understands their demand, backed up by the glint of oxidized steel. A bag is filled with banknotes and no unnecessary words are spoken; no one will trouble their head about a receipt. And so some dreams resound with the wail of police sirens and the squeal of tires. They are filled with hair-raising chases and interminable breakneck escapes. The dreamers hold on to the steering wheel for dear life and stare fixedly ahead, while bridges, trees and banknotes whistle past in the wind. They come to a stop in a blind alley where escapes and chases turn out to be a matter of life and death. A hand reaches for a gun, an eye looks down the barrel and a shot rings out: hit or miss. No one can predict which it will be.
Choking from the tension, the city of dreams could not exist without its cellars, the heart of which is the percussion. Its rhythm thrills the hearts of the audience, tormented by sorrow, longing and fury. In the deafening noise fury erupts in red, longing in green and sorrow in blue. Anyone who buys a ticket has a right to expect enlightenment. But the moment people enter they are plunged in shadow. There are as many of those seeking enlightenment as could fit in, and each has brought their own darkness. It spills out through the pupils of their eyes and floods the entire place, including the bottles behind the bar, the gaudy makeup and the hundreds of outfits belonging to desperately grasping gazes. The lights flash on and off, summoning from the gloom isolated grimaces and gestures and for a moment revealing their strangeness to the world. In reality there is not even any percussion here. It had to be replaced with a record spinning on the mechanical turntable of a gramophone; everyone knows this and no one cares. The true heart of this place is the sound of the percussion alone. It does not subdue the pulsing of blood in the temples and does not alleviate true fury, longing or sorrow, but it smoothes grimaces and softens gestures. Burdens vanish; those dancing acquire a lightness that outside of this place they could not even dream of. The love that takes refuge in the sound of the percussion is so devoid of weight that it can only be a shadow of love, something that takes up no room whatsoever in the heart; something as impermanent as sound and, like sound, incapable of being taken outside or kept for later. For this reason couples leaving for any of the neighboring rooms — the barroom, the delivery room or the courtroom — have to get by without love.
Yet without love those dreaming lack the strength to dream on, and even more to wake up. They manage as best they can. They buy neckties on elastic bands that are easier to take off when one’s collar digs into one’s neck and one’s head is splitting with pain. They buy headache tablets that bring them relief but harm their stomach. So they buy pills for stomachache that cause pains in their liver. Everything goes for nought. They renounce their heart, stomach and liver as superfluous ballast that drags them to the ground; they pawn them for credit and, shuffling their feet, they return to where they were looking at automobiles. It is not clear how the fleets of cars leave the showrooms. The doorways are too narrow and the display windows too high. There is no avoiding scratches on the gleaming paintwork. The luster of newness disappears at once. The farther they drive the worse they look. They can be seen later, mud-spattered and rusty, driving from one suburb to another and back, the clutch snapped off, without wheels or engine, smashing into one another. The inhabitants of the city of dreams curse the cars and curse the misleading promises on the billboards. In other posters they seek new more reliable promises and dream with their remaining strength, choosing the worst solutions like a drowning man, who as everyone knows will grasp at a straw.
In the hospitals of the city of dreams there are trays filled with surgical instruments with the aid of which rib cages are opened and closed as easily as boxes. But people who live for years without heart or liver eventually become embittered misanthropes whose organisms develop increasing numbers of special requirements because of which an operation has no chance of success. At visiting times individuals with shifty eyes loiter in the hallways; they hide from the white-aproned medical personnel and, whispering to the patients’ families, offer to buy what is needed, under the counter, without involving scalpels or operating theaters. The patients receive cash for hearts in which a little love is still left or livers that are not entirely used up, convinced that they just got the best deal of their lives. Then they open brokerage agencies and wholesale warehouses. Some of them die happily in the warehouse accounting room; others collapse suddenly in their own office, telephone receiver in hand. They too cannot be helped by the operating theaters of the city of dreams. The forceps, generally so useful in closing vessels cut open by the scalpel, do not possess the necessary teeth for seizing and holding life as it fades away.
There is no solution in the world so bad that no one will chose it. Even the worst way out may prove the best for someone. There exist higher purposes: for example, never under any circumstances to leave the city of dreams. And for this its inhabitants are prepared to pay any price since between one dream and the next an abyss opens up beneath them that they are more afraid of than anything else in the world: the black chasm of sleep without dreams. Not for an instant do they tear their gaze away from the flickering lights that otherwise would have to be extinguished in the twinkling of an eye. Colors, shapes and sounds change from one moment to the next, but the city of dreams does not force anyone to choose between them. Its inhabitants believe that given propitious circumstances, they can have everything at once: love, American cigars, the gold of the banks and the heat of the tropics. They do not however want the stillness of waking hours, the tedium of which destroys any pleasure that may arise from being one thing or another, from trying on outfits, choosing one’s words, employing irony or pathos. Yet are dreaming and being awake not merely two different ways of living in this city? Two ways of living that alternate twice a day? This is what some believe. They imagine that sleeping and waking are like obverse and reverse of a coin or, better, like the two hemispheres of the moon, the light and the dark. They forget that the moon always shows them the same hemisphere: the brightly lit hemisphere of dreams.
THIS CITY WAS BUILT AT THE MEETING POINT OF THREE ELEMENTS in a place where they mingled with one another. It was constructed on the clay of memories, on the sands of dreams and on the ground waters of oblivion, cold and black, whose flow never ceases for a moment, washing away the foundations day after day. In their swirling depths the coins of distinctions vanish. The sunken coins apparently have power over oblivion; lying on the bottom, they preserve the memory of events and places. But it is not known how they can protect, since they themselves perish in the miry ooze beneath which obverse and reverse look the same. There the stillness of waking hours does not prevent the agitation of dreams, or vice versa. The waters of oblivion are not ruled by any rational principle and for this reason they reconcile all inconsistencies.