Magdalena Tulli - Dreams and Stones

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.

Differentiations! Life and death, tree and machine, beginning and end! Every name like a coin has its obverse and reverse. When paying with a coin it is not possible to spend half of it, keeping either the heads or the tails for oneself. All that is large is small and vice versa. Ambiguity is a consequence of calling things by their names. Every name teeters on a knife edge, in desperation, and makes differentiations necessary. Every adjective that is juxtaposed with it will bring along a counteradjective, every conjecture a counterconjecture. good will create evil, warmth will create cold, end will create beginning. Whoever maintains that the world resembles a tree is the enemy and brother of him who insists that it resembles a machine. Both know what a tree is and what a machine is. In attempting to touch the essence of things they keep using the same names as if they were arguing about some precious plunder, torn apart by the desire to keep the whole lot but in agreement about the amount and the name of the currency; at the same time they will hear nothing about counterfeit banknotes. But whoever describes the city in a hundred thousand words will nourish a hundred thousand words of the countercity and each of them will return to the city like a bad penny.

No one asks where nouns come from or who they belong to. The inhabitants of the city carry them with complete confidence, just as in its beginning they carried bricks, convinced that they were laboring for themselves and their children and that whoever bears the burden is its owner. At one time they cheered as records were beaten on scaffolding and believed that the hand lifts the brick, not the opposite. They have always yielded easily to illusions. In their own opinion they are the masters of words, yet words do not obey them. They do not stick to objects; they suddenly change meaning or disappear, replaced by other words. They move, now here now there, dragging thoughts, questions and desires behind them.

Though people here burden themselves with anything the eye can see, they have no possessions. The objects they have bought or received as presents always eventually vanish or are destroyed. Their clothes, though they were new, end up being old, their children turn into adults. In recollections there remain only nouns, verbs and adjectives, like deposit slips, but the things listed on them have long since gone from any warehouse. The inhabitants of the city clutch their slips and believe themselves the owners of countless possessions; they have no intention of giving up a single thing, even the snows of yesteryear. Like travelers who, depositing their suitcases at the left-luggage office, walk about the city, they are certain that their belongings are at their disposal at every moment. Where is that vast left-luggage office containing plush teddy bears that belonged to soldiers, the happy moments of abandoned women, the fortunes of bankrupts, the kisses of those run over by trams, the reflections of sunsets in windowpanes, finished melodies and eaten tarts? Here it is: It is great and small; without any difficulty it contains all this, though it itself fits easily on a shelf, in a hard cover, with an alphabetical list of entries. In it tart is next to tartan, and like it has the black color of printer’s ink.