Preface:
I never know whether dreams should be written in ink or in the patience of
ants. Every time I set them down, they become labyrinths. Every time I forget
them, they return as a hand offering a pearl—and another hand, perhaps the
same, taking it away. So this notebook is meant to lose myself better.
1
Last night I dreamed a drawing. It was a circle with low walls, like those models built so a child can understand what “inside” and “outside” mean. There were two figures: myself, with the hair I had at seventeen, and a woman I had never seen—or maybe had seen always (I don’t rule out that I met her in 1978 or in 2027; years mean nothing in dreams). We looked at each other over the walls without moving. When she advanced, I stepped back; when I moved forward, she paused, as if listening to a wind that only spoke to her.
There was no roof, so the sky was the clock. The sun passed by, arguing with a bird about whose shadow belonged to whom, and I amused myself searching for the exit that was always two steps behind another curve. The strange thing was that, after many turns, I discovered it wasn’t a maze but a frozen carousel. It would have been enough to push it for everything to spin. No one pushed.
I woke up with my hands shaped like a bowl, as if I were holding something I hadn’t brought back. Still in the half-darkness, I felt the house breathing like a sleeping cat.
2
This afternoon I fell asleep by accident while reading a book of myths. In that dream the city was built of pale stone and empty as a square at siesta time. From the Pyramid of the Sun I recited some verses about a plan: “Once, when nothing was but night, all the gods of greatest might gathered to plan the dawn of day and light.” They weren’t my words, yet the voice belonged to me. Nobody applauded; there was no one to applaud, only a current of air smelling faintly of obsidian.
At the base of the pyramid I saw two eyes—not on any face, but sewn to an invisible fabric, like buttons left on a blouse whose owner time had taken. I picked them up—or rather, they climbed into my hand—and they asked to see. With the eyes in my palm, I looked.
What I saw was not the valley or the causeways but a gray-walled room with a lamp flickering like a nervous firefly. There sat the woman from the first dream, in profile, a string of black beads slipping from her shoulder, and a red ribbon fastening her dress like a secret refusing obedience.
She spoke without moving her lips: “Dawn was an experiment, a committee, a wager. Someone forgot to leave us the instructions.”
Not to remain mute in my own dream, I told her that perhaps the instructions were written in the shape of the corridors, in the curves of the walls that barely separated us, like the edges of two bodies that never quite cast a single shadow.
The eyes closed in my hand—as if blinking inward—and the city fell silent again.
3
As a child I learned that every time you dream of a woman you don’t know, a dog barks on the other side of the world. An alarm that can’t be heard. Last night the dog was an elevator. It descended without stopping, a cheerful pit. I stepped in with the woman of the ribbon. She held in her hand a pearl-like sphere marked faintly with the number 2, and warned me not to call it a sphere—it was, she said, a pearl or a clock.
When the elevator reached floor 0, we came out into a hallway that smelled of new clothes. On the opposite wall, another door: I opened it, and it was the same hallway. I laughed; she didn’t.
“It’s not that the corridor repeats,” she said. “It’s that we always arrive at the same one. The gods invented the dawn, but not the map.” It sounded true in that way only temporary truths do.
I dared to take her hand. It was warm and faintly absent, as if borrowed from someone else. At the end of the corridor, a mirror reflected three figures: her, me, and a third that was neither of us.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
She kept her eyes on the mirror. “The one who pushes the carousel.”
We turned around at once to catch him, but there was no one—only the rounded corner of a wall beginning to curve, promising another circle.
4
It’s dangerous to listen to the house at night. It makes noises it hides by day. In last night’s dream, the house decided to speak. It used a language I somehow recognized: a mixture of coughing pipes, wood stretching in its sleep, and the wind trying to be a violinist. The house invited me to its concert. I went in pajamas, which felt appropriate.
In the large hall downstairs, chairs arranged themselves into a spiral. On each seat rested an object: a key, a subway ticket, a plastic fish, a photograph of someone’s back. In the spiral’s center waited the woman with her beads—larger now, almost planets. She said, “Each object is a door, each door a corridor, each corridor a thread of the same skein. You only have to choose the right order.” The house coughed approvingly.
I began with the photograph and found myself staring at the neck of a stranger who seemed to know my name. I followed the thread and appeared in another house, with a gravel garden and a green table. I turned to the key and opened a drawer that was not a drawer but a sentence too long. I pushed the sentence and fell into the subway ticket, which carried me to a station where trains never stopped, only brushed the platform to remind us that one doesn’t have to arrive to be there.
One by one, I played the objects like musical notes. When I finished, the woman was gone. In her place hovered the pearl marked 2, while the two eyes orbited it like obedient satellites.
“And now?” I asked—not to anyone, but to the house.
“Now you wake up,” said the house, sensibly. “And don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I woke. My pajamas were dusty with fine grit. In the pocket I found the subway ticket. It read: Valley of Murmurs. I don’t believe such a place exists.
5
Not all dreams come straight in; some call you on the phone and ask you to come down. This time, I did. On the sidewalk waited a man without a face. Nothing tragic—anyone can become faceless given the right mix of light and embarrassment. He handed me a paper: a map of the circular city, with several exits marked in red ink. In the corner, written by hand: “Teotihuacán is pronounced with the tongue like a stone inside water.”
“Who sent this?” I asked.
He shrugged. When I looked again, he was gone. I went back upstairs, hid the map under the pillow, and fell asleep inside the dream—an indecency I recommend.
Now the city was spinning. I felt dizzy with joy, like a child finally allowed to play with sacred toys. Somewhere the carousel descended, and when it touched ground the walls grew lower. I crossed from corridor to corridor until I saw her. She was gazing toward the center, where a pedestal held the absence of something long gone.
“You took your time,” she said.
“I had to find a map,” I said, and showed her the paper.
“Maps exist to get lost methodically,” she smiled. “Come.”
On the pedestal, an inscription alternated symbols and blanks. I understood enough: “Here stood the pearl when dawn was invented. It rolled away by human error.”
I looked at the pearl in her hand. The same, and not the same. I didn’t know whether to return it.
“When you sleep,” she said, “the city rehearses. When you wake, it performs.”
“And if I don’t wake?”
“Then the performance remains a rehearsal forever, which is a kind of eternity…”
She offered me the pearl. It weighed little, like a promise. At that moment, the eyes floated in, adhering to the opposite wall, staring outward. Through them we saw a sunrise that didn’t belong to our season. The light fell like an upside-down rain. I meant to say something solemn, but my tongue turned to stone and she smiled at me.
6
This morning I understood my dreams are conspiring. It’s not the first time. They used to conspire to make me take detours and find, say, a coin from a country I’ve never visited. Now they want something else. “Don’t look for her awake. Awake, you’re only a tourist.”
I sat with the notebook. On the table: the cup. At the window: a truck’s noise. On my back: a faint memory of music. I wrote:
Instructions to continue the interrupted dream:
- Remember the city is patient.
- Do not push the carousel until someone says your name.
- Accept the eyes as part of the furniture.
- Don’t distinguish between pearl and clock.
- Pronounce Teotihuacán as one lifts a stone from water with the tongue.
7
I did it. Slept at the wrong time, like skipping class to watch trees without guilt. The moment I closed my eyes, the city opened like a nocturnal flower. Everything was in place, perhaps a bit clearer, the way paintings seem brighter when you return to the museum years later.
At first, the woman wasn’t there. I went to the center, to the pedestal. The inscription had changed: “Dawn isn’t planned; it’s practiced.” I placed the pearl on the stone and the number 2 turned into 0, a promise of a beginning. The carousel spun, ringing like a bicycle bell. I laughed—who would have thought dawn announced itself that way?
She appeared from a side corridor, careful not to interrupt. She carried the eyes, now tamed, and set them beside the pearl.
“Look,” she said.
We looked. The pearl began to roll in small orbits, each turn releasing a scent: bread, rain, jacaranda shade, old ink, a child’s hair, warm stone. The pearl stopped, and far away I heard the murmur of a waking city—not ours, but another, built of slanted corridors and plazas made of tepid mirrors.
“So dawn…” I began.
“…is learned,” she finished. “Like laughter, like music, like not fearing corners.”
“And us?”
“We push when it’s our turn.”
We stayed silent. The quiet was a cat undecided about affection. The pearl returned to its place; the eyes shut with a soft click. I thought of the map, the ticket, the photograph; perhaps it had all been arranged long before, with equal parts cruelty and tenderness.
“You’re going to wake up,” she said.
“I know.”
“Don’t forget the pearl.”
“I can’t take it.”
“You don’t need to. It comes back.”
Before opening my eyes, I knew the carousel had begun to spin without me.
8
Final note of the day, almost night. I walked through the real city, which sometimes disguises itself better than the dream one. On a corner I saw a woman resembling the one with the ribbon—not by face but by the way she looked at shop windows as if they were maps. She walked with the haste of someone who never arrives yet always does. I followed her a block and lost her, a courtesy on her part.
In my pocket, the ticket to the Valley of Murmurs is fading. Only a violet stain remains. No matter. I still feel in my hand the weight of something I don’t carry. On my tongue, a stone that has turned into a bird. Outside the window, the evening sky turns red in so circular a way that one might expect to hear a bicycle bell announcing, belated or early, tomorrow’s dawn.
If I dream of the city again—and it’s not if, but when—I won’t push right away. I’ll wait until someone says my name, then push gently. After all, we wouldn’t want to frighten the gods. I don’t know if they mean for the dawn to be the same for everyone. It’s enough for me that sometimes, halfway down the repeated corridor, her hand brushes mine, and I feel on my skin that tiny electricity of what is just about to begin.
Good night, circular city.
If you wish to see me, call me.
I’ll come down.
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