I’ll be spending all my energy on finding some way to get the answers I need to keep me from exploding into a thousand pieces, or at least so that Paco and Juan’s day-to-day isn’t miserable, weighed down by their sad, exhausted, absent father. During that time I will have reached the conclusion that, at thirty-seven years old, I don’t know myself in the slightest. Mine though they may be, I don’t know what to do with my mind or my heart, each fighting a battle for itself alone. And my body: it bears up like a beaten animal under the tobacco and the insomnia and my erratic eating, but things can’t go on like that forever. I always go to bed past three in the morning after masturbating to pornography in the living room, the computer’s volume down as low as possible while the boys sleep on the other side of the wall. The page I always left for last had a category of videos starring amateur chicks, women of all ages willing to do anything for a little cash, faces worn down to the skull by poverty or addiction, and every video followed the same procedure. They started with the woman sitting on a torn sofa and the voice of a guy off-camera asking her what her name was, what she did for a living, how many guys she’d been with, if she liked to be fucked like an animal. At some point the guy would pretend to get bored with the protocol and he’d ask her to take her clothes off. While the girl undressed, the guy would tell her how ugly she was. They were ordinary women’s bodies, most pretty run-down, with small or saggy breasts, paunchy stomachs, fat knees, cellulitis. The guy would criticise her arsehole, her legs, and he’d warn her she was going to feel like she’d been hit by a train. Then another guy would come out from behind the camera, his dick hard, arms tattooed, and he’d put the girl on her knees and start to mouth-fuck her. He’d grab her by the ears or the back of her neck with one hand and her throat with the other, and he’d give her one thrust after another while the other guy, who’d never appear, would encourage him to put it all in, to destroy her face. Sometimes, if the girl started to suffer and try to get away, a third guy would emerge to hold her arms behind her back. They’d let her breathe for a couple of seconds and the girl would pant, dripping slobber, her eyeliner all smeared. I’d go to sleep and have nightmares, Brenda’s face mixing with the women’s faces in the videos. I’d get up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to vomit; I had a pain in the back of my neck that only lessened when I lay on my back with my legs up. One of those early mornings, I extracted a single thought from the tumult in my head: I need help. And then: I need to look where I haven’t looked yet, I have to find some order in all this. And the next day I’ll take Paco and Juan to the Tienda Inglesa so they can play in the ball pit and eat nuggets with chips and I’ll go and buy a notebook. I’m going to start writing down my dreams.
The notebook, Papelaria brand, has a hard cover and a drawing of a woman on the front. Pale skin, almond eyes, her peacock-hued hair flows down the notebook’s spine and spills onto the back cover. Although I quit pornography for good and cut down on my masturbation, the plan doesn’t work immediately. The first nights I toss and turn in bed, smoking, looking at the notebook on the nightstand, going into the boys’ room to make sure the mosquitos aren’t biting them. Toward the end of the month, on 29th January, when I’ve already practically forgotten about the dream journal, I’ll have my first dream. I’ll get up right away to write it down: I’m at a party thrown by rich people, in a mansion, and I’m there because I won a raffle. I walk through the rooms, and people greet me with sardonic smiles. Finally, I manage to slip away. I go through some tall doors and find a crowd of people on the other side, some of them waiting to get in, others seemingly waiting for someone famous to come out so they can take a photo. No sooner do I get out the door than I’m being hugged by Ricardo, a friend I’ve barely seen for the past fifteen years, ever since he moved to Barcelona; he pulls me into his car. Ricardo had been my best friend when I was starting out as a writer. He was five years older than me, the same height as me but twice as wide and twice as agile, and when I met him he’d already published two unclassifiable books. They were a schizophrenic cocktail of Boris Vian, Lautrémont and Nick Cave, all mixed with a lot of whisky and insomniac nights, and a play he’d written had won a municipal prize. Where he was incredibly chaotic and garrulous, I, in comparison, was chaotic and silent. Ricardo had had a Dante-esque childhood and still had visions in the middle of the day, visions of rivers of blood and devastated cities. His apartment was a pigsty, the whole place littered with books, magazines and wrappers you had to clear away before you could sit and talk, and the bathroom was all sticky, but the guy, even with that impossible head of his, had taken care of himself since before he’d come of age, and I trusted him more than anyone. I still lived with my parents, and I’d just written Mosh, my first novel. After I’d abandoned Mormonism, the world had become so complex so quickly that for moments at a time I literally saw everything as a blur. Our conversations mainly consisted of Ricardo’s monologues, which I received with rapt attention. Ricardo fed me information about what it meant to be an artist, to be a writer, to be a man. He lent me videos and detective novels. I was a personal project of his. He tried to orient me with his endless knowledge about art and artist myths, and he related episodes of his childhood and adolescence that were so much more extreme than mine, so much more explicit, and I absorbed his words, learned from his way of seeing things. He immediately became the first reader of my manuscripts. He almost always hit the nail on the head.
In the dream, his car is red and some of the bodywork is missing. You can see part of the motor and one of the doors is gone, but all of the brokenness is on purpose, like clothing that’s intentionally ripped when you buy it. Inside the car there’s a boy and his father. The father is driving, the boy is riding in the passenger seat. The boy asks Ricardo, who is next to me, where he got the car. Before Ricardo can say anything, I interrupt him. I talk to Ricardo as if the boy can’t hear me: tell him it’s a fake car. Tell him I gave it to you, that my beloved’s life is in danger. Meanwhile, we drive away from the party down a night-time street.
I’ll find all kinds of meaning in the dream, but I don’t study it deeply. It’s enough that I’d had a dream in which Brenda didn’t appear, and that I’d had the resolve to get up and write it down. I’ll want to protect the energy that comes from this small success.
I’m going to dream again on the night of 30th January, again about a party, a kind of carnival I attend with a young girl who looks a lot like Natalia Oreiro. It’s in the grounds of a school, with tables and chairs and benches. My brother Marcos is lying in the grass, talking to an Asian guy I’ve never seen, but they seem to have been friends for a long time. They don’t see me, but I can hear them talking about my dream journal. The Asian guy says scornfully that he can only understand a person keeping a dream journal if he’s writing about real dreams, not just any old dreams. It’s growing dark and I lose sight of the girl I came with, and I find myself with a much older woman sitting on a swing. I sit beside her on the other swing. She’s cold and I kiss her, and then I’m in a bathroom with showers; the woman from the swing gets in the shower with me. Meanwhile, I know that the girl is looking for me. She’s a dancer and her show is about to start, and now her voice reaches me from somewhere, asking where I am. A security guard comes running into the bathroom, and as soon as he sees me, I’ve disappeared, I’m eating a sandwich in the middle of the playground, my hair dry, as if nothing had happened. It seems that I’m a famous actor, and people turn to look at me when I go into a warehouse set up for the show that features the girl I’ve come with. There’s a net hanging halfway up to the ceiling, a tubular net like the ones they use to display balls at sporting goods stores, and a crowd of bodies squirm in it like worms; dancers walk over the bodies on their way to join them at the still empty end of the net. I can’t find the girl, but some of the other dancers frown disapprovingly when they realise I’m looking for her. I go to a section of the stage that’s like a house of mirrors where a thousand things are happening at once, and when I turn the corner I see her, or at least that’s what my face expresses in the mirror; for a moment, that’s the only thing I see – my face in the mirror. I turn the corner and see my profile, my actor’s profile, my shoulders bare, and when I see the girl I smile in a way that tells me she still hasn’t seen me.
In the dream I have on the night of 3rd February, I’m at my brother Marcos’s wedding and everything goes badly. With a song by Creedence Clearwater Revival playing in the background, two naked men emerge from a pool, their dicks hard, and they stand there looking around at everyone and pointing their erections at us. My cousins and maternal uncles are disguised as Egyptians,