Quim Monzó - Gasoline

Once again, he feels as if he were asleep and awake at the same time, yet if he concentrates he feels as if he were fast asleep. A fraction of a second later, it dawns on him that perhaps Hildegarda is already awake, up and about, and (out of boredom) dressed, as he wastes time wondering whether or not he’s awake. Then it all fades to gusts of wind, oranges, bicycles, a tin clown, a man jumping off a skyscraper, a tunnel, and a locomotive leaving a trail of smoke that, upon clearing, takes the shape of a street corner, a cafeteria with people inside. The dream is an exact reproduction of the scene in Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. He is thrilled to be able not only to identify the origin of the images in mid-dream, but also to be aware of doing it, and to remember that he had seen the painting as a little boy, many years before (impossible to calculate how many) at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also realizes that the painting is now appearing in this fantasy because the night before he had seen a reproduction of it in the window of a frame shop, along with two other reproductions of Hopper paintings. He remembers one of them: an office, and a secretary with a prominent ass (wearing a blue dress and glasses, he seems to recall) who is poring over a file cabinet, and a moth-eaten clerk sitting at his desk.

The diner, on the corner of two dark and deserted streets, has picture windows, a sign that reads phillies, and a thin old waiter behind the counter, wearing a white soda jerk’s hat. One woman and two men with wide-brimmed hats are sitting at the bar, drinking, but this doesn’t last long because soon the diner is filling up with people: men identical (in face, hat, and suit) to the man or men already sitting there; and women identical (in face, hairdo, and dress) to the woman already at the counter (but wearing hats, fur stoles draped around their necks, and shiny handbags). Outside, in the street, there is a good layer of snow on the ground, and this is perfectly logical, because it’s New Year’s Eve, though in the painting he had seen as a child (and obviously in the reproduction he has seen the night before) there wasn’t a trace of snow.

All at once, the people leave the bar and spill out onto the street, laughing. They leave by the dozens, by the hundreds. There are thousands of them, fleeing like insects. No matter how many leave, though, the diner is always full of people having vanilla, strawberry, raspberry, or chocolate milkshakes and crushed ice with a good squirt of blueberry, lemon, or mint syrup. It’s just like that old movie gag in which (by circling out beyond the camera’s range and circling back in again through an off-screen door) an endless stream of people gets out of a tiny car that could barely have seated four.

Of all the crowd, aside from the waiter, two characters always stay behind: the redhead dressed in burgundy and the man eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup drizzled over it — who is he, himself (and he finds it hard to believe he hadn’t recognized himself till now) — staring intently at the street where a car flashes by. Bit by bit the sky turns from black to dark blue, lights come on in a few windows; they go out when day breaks definitively, morning arrives implacably, and the diner ceases to be the silvery island it was during the night. The waiter sets up the counter with cups, teaspoons, knives, bread, jam, and butter. Not missing a beat, a stream of hungry office workers hurries into place, pushing and shoving, gulping down watery coffee, milk, toast, and croissants. As he has shifted his attention to the inside of the bar, the outside starts to go dark on him again. This is why, when he tries to light up the street again (at that point in mid-morning when all the office workers have left and the lonely people in the place are the man and the woman, or the woman and the two men, one of whom is he), the surroundings fade: everything goes white, stunningly resplendent, and turns into a beach. Oh, what a delightful sight, Hopper’s diner smack in the middle of a beach with plastic chairs and a string of desolate awnings, and, in the distance, a backdrop of immobile waves spotted with surfing teenagers. Finally he feels he’s dreaming freely: he resolves to let his imagination flow. The woman in the burgundy dress is wearing sunglasses, as is the waiter. The other man is and isn’t there, appearing and disappearing. When he takes off his hat (and the shadow that hides his face vanishes), Heribert recognizes himself unmistakably, sweating beyond endurance in his steaming woolen winter coat.

The dream has been boring him for some time now. He tries to stop it, but he can’t. Now he sees them in bathing suits: himself in shiny black briefs and her in one of those backless skintight suits with two strips of cloth stretching up from the waist in front, covering the breasts and tying around the neck. They are rolling down a flight of stairs and he crashes into a glass door that softly gives. For a fraction of a second, Heribert (about to dive into the water) asks himself if the woman isn’t Helena. Now they are swimming, off on their own, surviving the gigantic waves that engulf them. They swim in silence, and when Heribert plunges deeper, he wishes he didn’t ever have to surface again. He seems to stay underwater for hours. When he does surface, she is already on the beach, walking slowly towards the diner. He rushes after her. When he reaches the sand, he steps on a small black cockroach. Hildegarda’s voice (was it Hildegarda, then, and not Helena?) tells him to hurry, to go faster, because she has to leave. Now he’s running, trying not to step on any of the thousands of roaches streaming out from under the sand. When he looks up, he tries to sight the cafeteria, but it is nowhere to be found: the beach is a long sliver, absolute and deserted, on which two figures are running: the woman and the other man who is finally there, and he seems to have seized the opportunity to run off with her (which proves that the whole game of appearing and disappearing was just a ruse to seem inconspicuous and then be free to make off with the woman). He thinks: if only I could remember the man’s face. .; if only I had seen his face. .; if only I could start dreaming another dream. . He has a premonition that he will never dream again, and he flees through passageways between buildings, silent basements, swimming rough waves beating against the ships, going back to a port, to a city square at night, to the diner on the old street, with the woman dressed in burgundy and a man in a dark suit whose hat brim hides his face, wondering whether the figure of a second man will emerge, a shriek, a blow to the chin, the earth splitting open as he laughs, the fall.

•

A sharp noise awakens him. First he thinks maybe the bottle of champagne has fallen on the floor and shattered, but he slides his foot along until he finds the bottle right where he remembered leaving it: by the side of the bed. Then he figures it must be the shade banging against the windowpanes. Then he opens his eyes and shifts around under the sheets. Maybe it was a cat on the roof, or one of the wicker chairs on the balcony blown over by the wind, or maybe the glass ball has struck the banister. He sits up and touches his head. It hurts. He remembers the window shade again: it must have crashed into the glass, harder than ever before. Or maybe it had been a thief with a mask and a striped jersey who slipped in through the dining room window? Or a hit man with a long, black, shiny getaway car waiting out in front, with the motor running, who has jimmied the door open and is now coming slowly up the stairs, feeling his way along to that very room where he would now kill him? Or maybe it’s Helena herself (Helena would certainly have no need to hire a hit man) who suddenly feels like. .?