A Dream of Horses & Other Stories (3 page)

A Dream of Horses

his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, incomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life
.
Vladimir Nabokov

In the autumn of that year you could do nothing but look at the sky for long spells and think how glad you were to be alive. The wind that rose from the river behind the old fort was cool as it broke over the green expanse of the public gardens only to rise a second time to quiver the high branches of the pines and silver oaks planted in several groves and of the trees that stood tall and proud marking the gardens’ circumference and lining the main avenue. Much higher above blew a different wind, twisting and turning clouds into fantastic shapes. The sun was brilliant and tender, emphasizing the blueness of the sky that was everywhere.

We breathe in the present, but are alive only in retrospect, in a time long lost to that treacherous monster: memory. For to be alive is to be happy and sad at the same time, to be unable to tell one from the other, to merely feel a faint melancholy beauty in your heart; a happiness aware of sadness, beauty of a joy girdling its despair. And, at best, each of us can only
re-live
this beauty, for the present is past so soon. Now that I lie here recuperating from
an illness whose causes and effects may never be entirely known to me, I think it was in the autumn of that year when I was truly alive.

Many things began that autumn which, it seems, have not yet reached a conclusion I could call desirable. But things one desires take time to happen, and sometimes they do not happen at all. Other things happen instead. Not necessarily better or worse, merely different from those that one awaits with much hope and fervour. Limited that our understanding is of the many causes that beget a life and sustain it through its modest time of activity, one may be tempted to describe this as absurd. Close to the middle of the century just past, it was this theme of the
absurd
that had become such a vogue in the arts that no painter or writer could remain apathetic to it. Musicians, too, generously employed it to create unheard of, beguiling tunes in the avant-garde cafés of New York and Paris, and the other more fashionable ones overlooking the Mediterranean on either side. Verily, it had all begun at the turn of the century when ‘time’, with a truth found only in numbers, was shown to stretch or contract like a rubber band. A decade or two later, a group of physicists in Copenhagen had shocked those who were willing to be shocked by declaring that the smallest particles in the universe exist in multiple states simultaneously until we choose to observe one to the exclusion of others, thus rupturing the belief in a single coherent reality, and thereby pushing physics into the realm of metaphysics, and opening science, in a manner of speaking, to conjecture. While modern science continued its bold attempts to prod the layers of reality, it was the war, like all wars, which finally settled the matter, at least philosophically, in favour of the
absurd
…But how did I get to this? Surely this wasn’t my intention. I ask your indulgence for once. You must understand that I have not put pen to paper in nearly four years – I who had long ago sworn to live only by this one joy. Even now my hand isn’t steady as it exerts itself to catch up with my
thoughts, possessed that they are with a whim of their own. My malady being an old one – not due to the passage of time, but in fact due to its complete absence from my side – and having not left me entirely, I often succumb to the temptation of random thoughts. In time I hope to be cured of this indiscipline – as I have been cured of others, I am told, in these past years – so that I may again write a clear, coherent prose. For the present, allow me to continue, and I promise to rein in my thoughts whenever they take to a gallop.

At that time in my life, I lived in the basement of a house located in a quiet neighbourhood just across the main avenue from the public gardens. Three stories high, the structure confessed a slight Moorish influence, particularly in the curved balconies that were in turn enhanced by the black wrought-iron balustrades supported on curling balusters. The windows were large and minimalistic in design. By noon the cream-coloured façade took on a flushed look, but its lines became sharper still. In front of the house was a small, well-tended garden, bounded by a five-feet-high hedge.

Beneath this colossal mass of stone was a room crowded with a green-striped camelback sofa, two wicker chairs, a writing desk, a low square table, a bed with stout, tiny wheels underneath, a dark wood armoire with a long mirror affixed to its door, and a chest of drawers of the same dark wood as the armoire. In two of the corners were lanterns attached to iron stands which, when switched on, filled the room with a soft golden light. Four long shelves that jutted out of a wall held all my books. There was hot water in the bathroom, and a bathtub in which you could go to sleep without straining your neck. The glass windows were square and wide, stretching from the ceiling to a third of the room’s height, letting in a lot of light. In the night you could see the stars, and on some nights even the moon. How distant it all seems, now coming to haunt me like a fluid dream!

To this room I had come just a few months after finishing my
studies, coming with very little besides clothes and books. A week or two later I started work at a firm of solicitors, select in its clientele and practice, priding itself in advising banks and lending institutions to sell stocks, bonds, and other fancy hybrids of big and small companies in trading exchanges inside and outside the country. The firm was a boutique practice, whatever that means, though it almost always means that you come into money, but not without its dark side – the work filled dark nights. Only when you took a taxi late at night, how you enjoyed the wind making a mess of your hair.

Some months later, I went to visit a friend in London, and together we travelled to France, Paris, and then down to the Mediterranean coast, where the cool breeze mingles with a brightness that dazzles everything under it, and you see the expanse of water that separates you from that land where the sun covers everything in a silvery haze, neglected, rich and poor at once, its deep forests with animals jumping in them, its never-ending wastes, its broad muddy rivers, its blood-red sunsets, its brown, rugged mountains with open mouths laced with snow, and its people that seem to grow from the very earth like a shrub or a root – nowhere else did nature reveal itself so free of hesitancy as in Africa. I itched to cross the sea and walk on that old land, what if only to graze the tip of Morocco or the quays of Alexandria. Such a romantic notion! What will my convalescent imagination not conjure up! But it doesn’t take long to find one’s burden again (these words have come to trouble me; I have taken to the habit of turning them over and over in my head. They aren’t mine for sure. To whom then do they belong? A poet? A philosopher? A longshoreman? It comes to the same thing): my leave was at an end, and I had to get back to do what I didn’t like much. Before returning, however, I spent a quiet day in Paris walking around the city, where, in one of its gardens, perhaps Tuileries, I saw with amazement how an old man, holding the slender stem of a yellow chrysanthemum between his teeth
(images, so many images!), fed several sparrows from his outstretched hands, breadcrumbs between the thumb and the index finger, sparrows perched on his arms and shoulders and all around him. In that moment of revealed beauty, there rose up in me the feeling that something was about to happen, that my life was about to slip through a magic chute.

Then I found myself at Montmartre, outside the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, breathing deep in the wind that rose suddenly, as if at my bidding, having risen from the forests outside Paris, or perhaps from further down, from the sea itself, or coming down at a terrible speed from the mountains in the north, or even from a neglected, frozen arm of the Ganges, or it was the air from another time that had somehow picked up the current of life after having remained dormant for centuries, for even that is possible: I took in the whole of Paris, first the light haze trailing over the city, which in no time had become a whirlwind taking everything with it, from the river, the earth, and the trees, to those colossal structures of stones and columns, all the iron of the Eiffel, the very flesh and thoughts of its constituent beings, but which once inside, instantly turned to all vapours, rising in spirals to no fixed destination, moving for months, for years maybe, until I could wrestle with it no more, this demon that it had become, so sly and rebellious, and spewed it all out on the page, where it would take form once more, inch by inch, as one word crept under the shadow of another, a city that repeated itself endlessly in forever-new patterns. And then I opened my eyes and Paris lay beneath me unaware of my presence.

How many months I worked at the firm upon my return? Seven, perhaps eight. Finally I was free to do as I pleased. If I lived sparingly, my savings could last two years. Why, I was not the first one to do so. Joyce had done it for his art so shamelessly – all artists do so, in their own brave or shameless ways. Countless noble examples were there. I will do it as well. And I will beat them all at it. They make me smile, these last words. The
pride of youth! And yet it is not incorrect to say that all great art begins in a thought of vanity.

On that autumn day, walking to the bookshop in the neighbourhood, I could hear the wind go about its business in the eucalyptuses with a dry crackling sound. Crows perched on telephone poles and the wires linking them, clutching countless conversations in their claws which escaped through their claws all the same as the crows stood still and the world spun beneath them and they with it.

I was there in no time. The market at that hour always appeared deserted – hardly a market it was, beginning and ending with a grocery store; between these: a store that sold antique furniture, the local branch of a bank, a small bakery, a post office, a large showroom with black mannequins in windows dressed in white lacy fabrics, empty on most days, a shop selling sports equipment, two or three stores with their shutters always down, and finally that beautiful book shop with a ceiling made up entirely of mirrors and a floor that pleasantly creaked under your step.

Across from the market sat on a low stool the florist who at that moment was busy sprinkling water over the flowers with measured jerks of his arm, water that he collected in the hollow of his hand, with fingers curled in the traditional style, from a half-broken pail. The owner of the newsstand followed his movements closely for want of a better distraction while cracking peanuts by pressing them between his thumb and forefinger and removing the contents to his mouth with an absent habitual air.

Bending away from the world and its impressions, I sauntered towards the bookstore, towards the distant and elemental worlds of books, worlds that language alone can forge. Nearby some children were playing hopscotch, clapping and hooting and making a racket. Watching them at their game, a vague uneasiness came over me, as if dark sinister events were lurking round the corner, ready to pounce on me like a pack of
burglars. My head full of such thoughts I entered the store, where I did not instantly notice the girl who came to mean so much to me for so little a time. Oh, Sevica, only if…

My thumb aches. No, my hand and arm too. It is getting cold. The mountains are collecting shadows for the night to spread them about. I must rest for the day. How easily I tire. How difficult it seems to move your pen to shape words, sentences, stories. It has become a labour, a mere physical activity. And yet I have not written, no, scribbled, more than a handful of lines. So much the better to roll words and sentences in your memory, where they float calmly and because they are formless always retain some element of truth.

*

In the autumn of that year you first made his acquaintance, and by spring he was gone, taken away, removed to higher, lighter climes, for his situation, as was plainly evident, had deteriorated. What all can a cycle of seasons contain! But before that period of strange and spectacular happenings, the years are banked with fog, so distant it seems: your return from Moscow during the summer, and the harsh winter earlier, harsher still for your mother’s soul hadn’t yet taken your leave, lingering over the frozen river and coming to wait on you in those long white nights. You had finished college, and were awaiting your father’s change of term at the Foreign Office so you could be homebound with him and your sister. You wept in your sleep and sleep-walked through the days, at times simply standing by the window and contemplating for hours the blue-and green-striped bulbous domes of the cathedral. You read and you played the piano, something for which you didn’t have much talent, but even to your dazed, suffering mind, Tchaikovsky now sounded more like Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Debussy clearer echoes of their selves, and with each bar, each piece, her soul hovered a
little higher until one day at last it flew off. Soon the Moskva began to flow, the sky cleared, trees turned green and birds shook their feathers in them. You took to walking along the river and almost always ended at a bench in the Alexander Garden, behind you the yellow and ochre wall of the Kremlin rising steeply like a precipice.

Eventually you came home, pulling autumn along. The wind picked up and the earth breathed again putting a spring in your step. Cottony clouds cantered away in the sky and dry leaves purred in empty drains. You resumed your walks and in the public gardens across the main avenue, in the silence within and without, rose up the myriad voices of the season. With each day you played better, a lightness pervaded your touch that suggested the soul’s flight.

Early one evening you were at the bookstore to select a gift for your father’s birthday. Maybe this slight gesture will break the spell of silence and suffering over him and unite the three of you in your loss. How happy you were to locate Stendhal’s
Armance
, one of his favourites, a copy of which you had misplaced some years ago. It saddened you now to recall how he hadn’t even noticed its loss, for time had made him a different man. Perhaps the book will bring back the totemic power of literature in his life, and perhaps he will embrace you – isn’t that what you ever wanted? How much of the child was still there in you?