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| Illustration by Ricardo Garbini |
The
Circular Ruins
No one saw him
disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the
sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the
taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those
numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where
the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is
infrequent. What is certain is that the grey man kissed the mud, climbed up the
bank with pushing aside (probably, without feeling) the blades which were
lacerating his flesh, and crawled, nauseated and bloodstained, up to the
circular enclosure crowned with a stone tiger or horse, which sometimes was the
color of flame and now was that of ashes. This circle was a temple which had
been devoured by ancient fires, profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god
no longer received the homage of men. The stranger stretched himself out
beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun high overhead. He was not
astonished to find that his wounds had healed; he closed his pallid eyes and
slept, not through weakness of flesh but through determination of will. He knew
that this temple was the place required for his invincible intent; he knew that
the incessant trees had not succeeded in strangling the ruins of another
propitious temple downstream which had once belonged to gods now burned and
dead; he knew that his immediate obligation was to dream. Toward midnight he
was awakened by the inconsolable shriek of a bird. Tracks of bare feet, some
figs and a jug warned him that the men of the region had been spying
respectfully on his sleep, soliciting his protection or afraid of his magic. He
felt a chill of fear, and sought out a sepulchral niche in the dilapidated wall
where he concealed himself among unfamiliar leaves.
The
purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to
dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on
reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if
someone had asked him his name or to relate some event of his former life, he
would not have been able to give an answer. This uninhabited, ruined temple
suited him, for it is contained a minimum of visible world; the proximity of
the workmen also suited him, for they took it upon themselves to provide for
his frugal needs. The rice and fruit they brought him were nourishment enough
for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.
At
first, his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in
nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular
amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn
students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a
distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were
completely precise. The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and
magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if
they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them
from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world.
Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not
allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he
sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in
the universe.
After
nine or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect
nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he
could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The
former group, although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the
level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree. One
afternoon (now afternoons were also given over to sleep, now he was only awake
for a couple hours at daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory student body for
good and kept only one pupil. He was a taciturn, sallow boy, at times
intractable, and whose sharp features resembled of those of his dreamer. The
brusque elimination of his fellow students did not disconcert him for long;
after a few private lessons, his progress was enough to astound the teacher.
Nevertheless, a catastrophe took place. One day, the man emerged from his sleep
as if from a viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he
immediately confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed. All
that night and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon
him. He tried exploring the forest, to lose his strength; among the hemlock he
barely succeeded in experiencing several short snatchs of sleep, veined with
fleeting, rudimentary visions that were useless. He tried to assemble the
student body but scarcely had he articulated a few brief words of exhortation
when it became deformed and was then erased. In his almost perpetual vigil,
tears of anger burned his old eyes.
He
understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams
are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even
though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order;
much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless
wind. He swore he would forget the enormous hallucination which had thrown him
off at first, and he sought another method of work. Before putting it into
execution, he spent a month recovering his strength, which had been squandered
by his delirium. He abandoned all premeditation of dreaming and almost
immediately succeeded in sleeping a reasonable part of each day. The few times
that he had dreams during this period, he paid no attention to them. Before
resuming his task, he waited until the moon's disk was perfect. Then, in the afternoon,
he purified himself in the waters of the river, worshiped the planetary gods,
pronounced the prescribed syllables of a mighty name, and went to sleep. He
dreamed almost immediately, with his heart throbbing.
He
dreamed that it was warm, secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and of a
garnet color within the penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex;
during fourteen lucid nights he dreampt of it with meticulous love. Every night
he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to
witness it, to observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance. He
perceived it and lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth
night he lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the
whole heart, outside and inside. He was satisfied with the examination. He
deliberately did not dream for a night; he took up the heart again, invoked the
name of a planet, and undertook the vision of another of the principle organs.
Within a year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids. The innumerable hair
was perhaps the most difficult task. He dreamed an entire man--a young man, but
who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night,
the man dreamt him asleep.
In
the Gnostic cosmosgonies, demiurges fashion a red Adam who cannot stand; as a
clumsy, crude and elemental as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams forged
by the wizard's nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his entire
work, but then changed his mind. (It would have been better had he destroyed
it.) When he had exhausted all supplications to the deities of earth, he threw
himself at the feet of the effigy which was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt
and implored its unknown help. That evening, at twilight, he dreamt of the
statue. He dreamt it was alive, tremulous: it was not an atrocious bastard of a
tiger and a colt, but at the same time these two firey creatures and also a
bull, a rose, and a storm. This multiple god revealed to him that his earthly
name was Fire, and that in this circular temple (and in others like it) people
had once made sacrifices to him and worshiped him, and that he would magically
animate the dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire
itself and the dreamer, would believe to be a man of flesh and blood. He
commanded that once this man had been instructed in all the rites, he should be
sent to the other ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream,
so that some voice would glorify him in that deserted ediface. In the dream of
the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.
The
wizard carried out the orders he had been given. He devoted a certain length of
time (which finally proved to be two years) to instructing him in the mysteries
of the universe and the cult of fire. Secretly, he was pained at the idea of
being seperated from him. On the pretext of pedagogical necessity, each day he
increased the number of hours dedicated to dreaming. He also remade the right
shoulder, which was somewhat defective. At times, he was disturbed by the
impression that all this had already happened . . . In general, his days were
happy; when he closed his eyes, he thought: Now I will be with my son. Or, more
rarely: The son I have engendered is waiting for me and will not exist if I do
not go to him.
Gradually,
he began accustoming him to reality. Once he ordered him to place a flag on a
faraway peak. The next day the flag was fluttering on the peak. He tried other
analogous experiments, each time more audacious. With a certain bitterness, he
understood that his son was ready to be born--and perhaps impatient. That night
he kissed him for the first time and sent him off to the other temple whose
remains were turning white downstream, across many miles of inextricable jungle
and marshes. Before doing this (and so that his son should never know that he
was a phantom, so that he should think himself a man like any other) he
destroyed in him all memory of his years of apprenticeship.
His
victory and peace became blurred with boredom. In the twilight times of dusk
and dawn, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure, perhaps imagining
his unreal son carrying out identical rites in other circular ruins downstream;
at night he no longer dreamed, or dreamed as any man does. His perceptions of
the sounds and forms of the universe became somewhat pallid: his absent son was
being nourished by these diminution of his soul. The purpose of his life had
been fulfilled; the man remained in a kind of ecstasy. After a certain time, which
some chronicles prefer to compute in years and others in decades, two oarsmen
awoke him at midnight; he could not see their faces, but they spoke to him of a
charmed man in a temple of the North, capable of walking on fire without
burning himself. The wizard suddenly remembered the words of the god. He
remembered that of all the creatures that people the earth, Fire was the only
one who knew his son to be a phantom. This memory, which at first calmed him,
ended by tormenting him. He feared lest his son should meditate on this
abnormal privilege and by some means find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to
be a man, to be a projection of another man's dreams--what an incomparable
humiliation, what madness! Any father is interested in the sons he has procreated
(or permitted) out of the mere confusion of happiness; it was natural that the
wizard should fear for the future of that son whom he had thought out entrail
by entrail, feature by feature, in a thousand and one secret nights.
His
misgivings ended abruptly, but not without certain forewarnings. First (after a
long drought) a remote cloud, as light as a bird, appeared on a hill; then,
toward the South, the sky took on the rose color of leopard's gums; then came
clouds of smoke which rusted the metal of the nights; afterwards came the
panic-stricken flight of wild animals. For what had happened many centuries
before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was
destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire
licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but
then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him
from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his
flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With
relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an
illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.
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