“Lies, all lies!” he yelled in exasperation in the orchestra.
“Why is that?” his apparition asked, his expression between astonished and confused.
“Because everything, absolutely everything I saw is a cruel mockery of what happened!”
“Are you sure about what you’re saying? Why are you shouting like that? Really, boy, you’ll end up waking me if you haven’t already roused the innocent dead.”
“Sarcasm and a carnival trick! … ”
“I thought it was a very faithful interpretation. I don’t know why you’re protesting so much.”
“I’m not your dream, wretch!” Almost without realizing it he began to use familiar address with the latest intruder. “I took the Andalucía express that afternoon, because in a sense I was obliged to.”
“Who would oblige you to?”
“The same destiny you denied. I mean, the sensation of fulfilling a fate lived through twice, once that day and the other in a very distant time, perhaps before watches and calendars.”
“You’re completely mad! Why would I dream about a lunatic like you, so similar to who I was in my youth? This is the only mockery, and now I wish I had wakened. Go on, shout louder and wake me!”
(“I believe I’ve lost my mind. But you aren’t dreaming me in your nightmare. In fact you exist only in my hallucination.”) Thinking about his words to the other ghost, the one with the pink bald head, dark temples, and eyeglasses, he lowered his voice until it was almost transformed into a murmur that the apparition made an effort to follow, coming close to his face.
“I reached Granada and then Huerta de San Vicente just in time for them to kill me. With the uprising triumphant and the reprisals started, I hid in the Rosales family’s house. But they came for me even there. (‘ … he told me you did more harm with your pen than others with a pistol.’) An individual named Ruiz Alonso seemed in command of the men who arrested me. He took me to the Civilian Government building, offered me some broth, shook my hand, and left me alone in a room with scratched walls that smelled of dried blood. I could describe for you in detail each instant of what happened but I prefer to cut it short because any victim is ashamed of his suffering. Those who are proud of their martyrdom are the ones who think they deserve it. I wasn’t tortured physically, thanks, I believe, to the good offices of the Rosales family. At least, that’s what Pepe Rosales told me when he visited a short while before my death to promise I would be released. I remember that, overcoming the contempt I must have inspired in a hot-blooded drinker like him, more for my chastity than my pederasty, he pinched my cheek when he said goodbye and said: ‘Sleep well tonight, my boy, and tomorrow we’ll all hug you at home and I’ll kiss you on this cheek if you promise not to pinch my ass.’ I smiled and lied, saying I would pray for the victory of the military. He looked around, even though we were alone in that drab room, and said in my ear: ‘Don’t pray for anybody, my boy, because we all deserve hell. This war has divided Spain in two, like a river, and on both sides the only ones doing their duty are the killers.’ The acting civilian governor interrogated me in person and in terms that don’t concern you. Aside from Pepe Rosa-les, Don Manuel de Falla visited me the night before the crime. He came to beg my forgiveness for having hated me. But I won’t say more about this either because what we spoke about is none of your business. I forgave him everything and didn’t want to forget anything, since rancor is a completely useless passion in eternity. My hating those who killed me would be as absurd as my parents’ despising having given birth to me. I’ll keep the end to myself, because it’s inalienable and mine though you might want to mis-represent it. It’s impossible to imagine but simple to describe. Some shots in the back at the edge of a ravine and another, the coup de grâce, to shatter the heads of the dead.”
“Exactly right!” the intruder corroborated. “The coincidence cannot be clearer!”
“The coincidence? What are you talking about now?”
“Everything you told me is the same thing I often imagined in my house in America. In other words, my fate in Granada if instinct hadn’t taken me off the Andalucía express that afternoon. It began as a game and turned into a kind of obsession. I even understand your reticence in refusing to comment on certain passages of the farce. I didn’t want to confess any of that to my own wife. Still, one day I’m going to write it, just for myself. When one has refused the Prize of the Dynamiter, flatly and unhesitatingly, one can allow oneself moderate pleasures.”
“Enough! Enough! I’m not going to tolerate this parody of my tragedy from you!”
“How would you stop it, wretch? When did dreams ever govern the dreamer?” He paused and smiled, shrugging his shoulders. “You wouldn’t try to destroy me after absolving your imaginary killers?”
“I’m not trying anything. I want only to be left alone. Alone with my memories, if I can’t free myself or they don’t want to free me from my sleeplessness.”
“I’ll go, I’ll go,” the apparition yawned. “Dreams, like the flesh, end in tedium. It’s time to wake and perhaps write about our dispute. Didn’t you ever think about an interminable autobiography, infinite, really, where you told not only all we were but also all we could have been in all their variations? It would be the only appropriate kind for any life. Even in ours the two of us would fit, and who knows what extended multitude of men in our image and likeness”—he was shaking off his drowsiness and rubbing his eyes with sharp knuckles. “All together, like dice thrown from the same cup. You know, son, un coup de dé jamais n’abolira l’hasard. The combinations of the fortuitous are infinite, in all the avatars of identity and their Ortegan consequences. Here, for example, are you and I like a pair of facing mirrors, in the middle of the same desert, though each comes from a different time. You, arrested in my youth and on the day I didn’t take the train going to Granada. I, shackled in my present old age.”