Some Dreams

The dream went on: it was coffee time and I left my tasks and headed for the communal room. In the room there were tables and chairs occupied by supposed colleagues, each on their own, talking among themselves. Some came from a counter, from a queue of three or four clerks, behind which stood a familiar group: two women, a man and a child who stuck his hands into a large open drum to take out black olives, while the women took out rolls to give to those ahead of me in the line, and a man disappeared into the back room. The murmur of those seated, scattered at the big tables, continued, and I waited for that family to give me my coffee. I waited so long and, since they did not serve me, I asked, “Do you have coffee?” —they answered evasively; I understood they didn’t, and that it would take them a long time to make it, surely in some huge pot, old-fashioned, like in schools or the Army. Some of us then left the line and went out to the street, to have coffee in a real cafe.

But it happened to me, as it always does in office dreams: I am on an unrecognizable street, long, narrow, that twists and will not show its end. I went out alone, while others left in groups. In this solitude I arrived at a corner cafe, like the keel of a ship, with large windowpanes —if one can call Madrid neighborhood cafes large—. It was a neighborhood cafe run by two elderly ladies and another who must have been their mother, a ninety-year-old woman also behind the counter, doing chores with her thin arms. I had no success there either. I asked for churros and one of the women gave a totally absurd excuse, like the excuses our politicians give about clear matters that they obscure with unintelligible verbiage. I understood they would not give me coffee or churros and I was on the street again; the streets forked into two, one like the front and the other the back; one toward the outskirts and the other more civic, more likely to have bars and cafés. A lot of time had passed, as always happens to me when I leave my office in dreams, and I felt obliged to return and justify my absence. I walked both streets without finding my cafe.

I reached one of those neighborhoods that seem extreme when you visit them for the first time and that at first glance appear marginal, with characters partly familiar and partly mysterious. Some ill-tempered youths were making jokes. I arrived at a sort of yard, where a good man had the strangest business in the world: he sold green animals, made as if of cactus skin, which were mules, pigs and even a kind of majestic ox, like Sorolla’s oxen, that ate green branches from an indecipherable tree. Those vegetable creatures reconstructed as animals had life and moved in front of the hut.

Yard after yard followed, all their doors open; from a nearby church, also open, with some benches in the street, came the soft harmonics of an organ—music that chanted alongside a row of live turkeys, gray females and dark males in strut. Almost like a film, and I in the street, painfully, during office hours wasting time. Until I reached the great work: the enormous construction, a gigantic bridge of monumental granite that spanned like two banks of a wide river, so wide that it would be impossible outside Madrid, a city that never saw such breadth in its rivers. To make it stranger still, the bridge was covered by vaults of clean granite similar to those of the Valley of the Fallen, with bas-reliefs of no particular importance. It was a massive, enormous, newly built work. I had to cross

that bridge and, warned as I was, I looked at the entrance first in case there were people who might mug me. There was a thin old man performing sleight-of-hand with two pieces of paper that mysteriously hovered at two heights, in the air, held by the invisible fluid emanating from his hand movements. I also looked behind the bridge and there was a huge dry riverbed, like purple mud from a storm, like the sediment of olive presses and the color of the red olives too. I contemplated that generous work of engineering again, and fine clouds approached, like black smoke; a surreal landscape that made me exclaim,“this is not a dream, I must have died", but with so little conviction that the words did not frighten me in the least. Passing from life to death as the continuation of a dream can be something real; they have even described it. 

Done.