The Evening Of His Dream

(An Homage to Borges)

Fernando De Los Tresas dreamed of heaven like a game show he knew existed or at least was once popular long ago but which he never watched himself. He dreamed of himself bemused by the show's triteness:, the three curtains displayed by a seductive blond, the middle one rolling aside revealing a goat, much to the audience's delight. That jeering delight was all he knew within the moment of his dream's moment. He awoke already sweating with the midmorning heat.

He took his waking easy as recommended by an American poet, first opening his eyes, focusing on a long crack running slantwise from the wall to the broken ceilling fan which hung in the middle of the room, more an ornament completing the room itself than something useful.

At 67 years old he at last allowed himself the luxury of waking easy and taking his time, getting out of bed at last, going to the kitchen to prepare his morning matee, thumbing through the worn complete Poe he always left on the empty breadbox.

As he sat at his tiny, circular kitchen table in a sunbeam that had navigated its way down through the canyon between his building and the neighboring building, he recalled more of his dream. It had not ended abruptly with the idiotic game show heaven. There had been a totally different aspect to that satirical dream paradise produced by his sleeping mind: an endless junkyard, a kind of lost realm. The garbage-strewn waste stretched on and on. And there he had found his love.

The shock of recall made him take pause. She had the somewhat overblown name of Esmerelda De Flores and she was a dark-haired beauty with lips perhaps too big to accomodate her unusually small nose. Her job was to collect roses which were displayed on ancient packaging materials that had yet to decay into the post-apocalyptic trash heap.

Suddenly Fernando De Los Tresas groaned with longing for the love that had been denied him throughout his life. At first he resolved to drink. In his mind he selected a bottle of American whiskey with an unusual name, not Jack, not Jim, but Bim: Bim Black, although he knew that no such whiskey existed. Yet he would drink Bim Black. Then he took up paper and pen trying to describe his dream, first the game show and then the woman.

As if suddenly, totally depleted by the act of recording his memories, he lay his head on the table and slept, rising soon after to regain his bed where he awoke in the early evening to the sound of construction in the street.

***

"There is something behind the little theater that is hard to describe," said Armondo Silva, the dentist whose offices were directly beneath De Los Tresas's apartment. "I don't know why I have forgotten about it for so long."

He was not a friend per se, but rather a constant presence: someone who over the years you learn a lot about through sheer proximity but whose company you don't consciously seek. So De Los Tresa's felt he practically had a lover's knoweldge of Armondo Silva whom he met in the street on the evening of his dream.

"I had an amazing dream!" said De Los Tresas. "I had a love dream, after so many years."

But Armondo Silva paused, looking at De Los Tresas with a mixture of pity and confusion. De Los Tresas continued. "I think her name was...Babancha," he said, chuckling at the strange invented name, for he could no longer remember the name of the woman in his dream.

***

Aside from random, drunken encounters and cheap prostitutes, De Los Tresas's life had been largely untouched by women. All his dabblings were rare and painful, punctuated by the evening light sliding across dirty, unfamiliar walls, the sensation of absence, the requirement of solitiude. Most of these experiences left him feeling like taking a long journey to a place where people seldom went: not because he wanted to escape, but just because a journey seemed a logical conclusion, like a death or invasion.

Now, at 67 years old, he felt that familiar sense of longing for departure. He said goodbye to Armando Silva and began to pace the streets of Beunos Aires, the city he where he had lived all his life. Unconsciously, he began to navigate towards the little theater. "Something happens there," Armando Silva had said. "I'm beginning to remember everything."

In his mind, De Los Tresas connected the little theater with one of his earliest romantic experiences. Although it was not the little theater, but the arcade beyond where the statues were, the horseman, the jester, where it had all happened. And so, instead of taking one of his familiar routs, he told himself he wanted to revisit the statues which he had seen many times before without giving them a second thought.

He often passed the little theater, recalling the girl he had met years before whose memory still chased him. He had been 19, she somewhat younger. He had given her a bottle of wine. They had done virtually nothing and yet the encounter presided over his life, as if it was his life's one real moment. The beads of sweat on her upper lip, the sense of her bodies heat, her dull brown hair. He could remember every single detail, and even today he could recall the clean smell of her brown, flower-print dress. Even today he begged time and myth to return him to that moment so he could say the proper things to magically capture her and keep her from slipping away.

And so, all of a sudden, as if his waking mind and sleeping mind conspired with each other, De Los Tressas thought he had a craving for the company of statues.

Passing the new gaudy fast food restaraunt, through the brief stand of grecian columnes abutting the theater, he at last entered into silence. Beyond, was nothing but construction and starlit sky, and the old statues of the little theater: the horseman, the jester, the fat civil cervant, the lady with the accordion, and others. They seemed so full of feeling that De Los Tresas felt that he had made one huge mistake by not living fully in myth. Although the point of rupture and rebirth seemed to be one in the same.

He scanned the area for his lost beloved who by now must have been plump and wrinkled but whom he would accept irregardless. He swore an oath of acceptance. But instead of summoning her, Armando Silva stepped from behind the statue of the coach

"So, you have come," he said.

"Yes, I have come," said De Los Tresas.

"Then, let me remind you why I have lived so close to you all these years," said Armondo Silva walking off into the construction site which opened up onto a terrain at once alien and familiar.

De Los Tresas followed Silva through the night, navigating around mammoth, jutting pylons and toppled columns. In the distance he began to make out fires. There were people living here.

As if reading his mind, Silva said, "Refugees."

"From what?" replied De Los Tresas.

"From the devestation of the world," said Silva. "Don't you remember? It was in fact you who so many years ago showed me how to live in illusion. But now, as old men it seems that we have grown tired of lies and have together returned to the natural state of desolation."

And there by one of the random fires scattered throughout the endless pile, Fernando De Los Tresas thought he saw his belovid's face.