Patricio Pron - My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain

The day after visiting the museum, I got sick. The first day, of course, was the worst; I remember the fever and the torpor and a series of dreams that repeated over and over again like a carousel whose operator had gone mad or was a sadist. Not all the dreams made sense, but their connecting thread did, and I remember what they said, even though it was fragmentary. In spite of my bad memory, in spite of the unfortunate series of circumstances that had made that memory worthless for a long period only just starting to come to an end, I can still to this day remember those dreams.

I dreamed that I went into a pet shop and stopped to look at the tropical fish; one of them in particular caught my eye: it was transparent, you could barely distinguish its silhouette from its transparent eyes and its organs; but, unlike the other fish, also somewhat clear, this one was completely crystalline and had its organs separated like colored rocks stuck inside it with no connection between them, a fistful of autonomous organs with no center of command.

I dreamed that I was writing in my old room in Göttingen and discovered insects in my pockets; I didn’t know how they’d gotten there, and, although that would have been useful information, the only thing I was thinking about was making sure no one noticed that the insects were there, trying to get out.

I dreamed that I was riding a horse and its two front legs just came off while it drank water; the horse ate them, and then its head came off its neck and rolled around trying to reattach itself. I imagined that the horse would grow another head, first a stump like a fetus and then a head with a proper horse shape.

I dreamed that I was going up some stairs and three rings fell off my hands: the first was a silver ring in the shape of a zigzag that I wore on my index finger; the second was a ring in the shape of a chain, on my middle finger; the third was Ángela F.’s ring and it had a blue stone.

I dreamed that I was a boy and I was observing the preparations for what I understood to be a woman’s suicide; the woman wore a housedress and lay in bed in what I recognized as a modest hotel room someplace in the Near East, with a rosary in her hands; on her bed was a white and red flag. The woman had a shotgun in her arms. She stared at me and I understood that she blamed me for what she was going to do. I’d thought the suicide would be fake, but in that moment I understood that it would be real. Before lifting the barrel of the shotgun to her mouth, she handed me a photograph that showed Juan Domingo Perón beside important members of the Peronist Resistance and she told me the photograph had been taken before they all started shooting each other. In the photograph I saw the woman.

I dreamed that I was dreaming about the relationship between the words verschwunden (disappeared) and Wunden (which doesn’t exist independently in German but in certain cases is the plural of Wund , wound) and the words verschweigen (to keep quiet) and verschreiben (to prescribe).

I dreamed that I was back on the Argentine plain, watching a form of popular entertainment there called “off leash”; it involved tricking a monkey into getting into a well that was then filled with dirt, so that only the monkey’s head could be seen. Then an animal, usually a lion, was released into the ring, and people bet on whether or not the monkey could escape from his trap and, if so, whether he could manage to kill the lion. The monkey pulled it off on very few occasions, but he always — whether or not he defeated his opponent — ended up killing himself after seeing his similarity to the humans around him who took pleasure in such entertainment.

I dreamed that, on a train operated by the German company Metronom, I met a woman who was forced to carry a baby developing in a uterus located outside her body, tied to her only by the umbilical cord. If asked, the woman pulled the uterus out of a bag that she always had with her. The uterus was the size of a shoe; inside, the gestating baby displayed emotions and reactions that only the mother knew how to interpret. As the conductor approached, I asked her how to get to a town called Lemdorf or Levdorf, but she didn’t answer. In the train station of an industrial city called Neustadt, whose smokestacks and factories could be seen from the station hall, the unresponsive conductor came over and told me I had two options for getting to Lemdorf or Levdorf: taking a bus that went halfway there and then taking another; or giving poisoned food to a beggar at the station door. Then I understood that Lemdorf or Levdorf, the place in northern Germany I was headed to, was hell.

I dreamed that I knew a method of divination: two people spit into each other’s mouths; the transfer of liquid also transfers their plans and desires.

I dreamed that I was visiting Álvaro C. V. in a museum where he worked. The museum was located in a building reminiscent of the design school in Barcelona. I began to wander through its rooms, looking for Álvaro, and each room was different, all of them filled with objects that my attention seemed to want to settle on indefinitely. In one of them was a glass case displaying piston-like objects made of gourds that, according to the explanatory sign, produced sounds beyond all description. As I turned down a hallway, I finally found Álvaro and he and I went out, but my attention remained in the rooms and I understood that it wouldn’t return to me until I had figured out what those devices were and could describe the sounds they produced. A moment later I was back in the museum, watching two experiments being carried out. In the first, a cat was submerged in a rubber solution and then mounted inside a cardboard tube. A woman explained that the result was an antenna that could be set up at home when the television or radio signal was too weak to be captured by a conventional antenna. Beside her, the cat still shook and meowed, but gradually stopped, since it couldn’t breathe due to its cardboard corset, and finally its head fell slack while the antenna remained standing. Next, the experimenters grabbed a little monkey and put a cardboard collar on him similar to the ruffs worn in the seventeenth century. Then they started to cut the muscles below his neck, one by one, and studied how long they took to stop moving, analyzing how quickly the monkey understood what was happening to him, and conjecturing which muscles and veins to cut last to keep the animal alive as long as possible. I knew the cardboard collar had been placed on the monkey so that he wouldn’t be terrified by the sight of what they were doing to him, but his timid moans, which devolved into mere gurgling, and the expressions on his face made me realize that he felt and knew perfectly what was happening. One by one his legs stopping moving, then his arms became stiff, his lungs stopped and, finally, when the animal’s face was little more than a mask of horror, they cut a thick vein like a red thread that held together his head and the rest of his body beneath the cardboard collar and the monkey died.

I dreamed that I was watching television in a small hotel in Rome and that on the air they were talking about the wife of the Serbian prime minister Goran D. The woman’s last name was “Cunt” and she was said to be in contact with the “vagina,” or Russian mafia.