I dont know. There's been a bunch of em. Yeah. I suppose. If I put my mind to it. If I was to set down and study about it.
Yes. Of course. That was my method. One thing leads to another. I doubt that our journey can be lost to us. For good or bad.
What sorts of things did it look like? The map.
At first I saw a face but then I turned it and looked at it other ways and when I turned it back the face was gone. Nor could I find it again.
What happened to it?
I dont know.
Did you see it or did you just think you did?
The man smiled. Que pregunta, he said. What would be the difference?
I dont know. I think there has to be a difference.
So do I. But what is it?
Well. It wouldnt be like a real face.
No. It was a suggestion. Un bosquejo. Un borrador, quizas.
Yes.
In any case it is difficult to stand outside of one's desires and see things of their own volition.
I think you just see whatever's in front of you.
Yes. I dont think that.
What was the dream?
The dream, the man said.
You dont have to tell me.
How do you know?
You dont have to tell me anything.
Perhaps. Nevertheless there was this man who was traveling through the mountains and he came to a place in the mountains where certain pilgrims used to gather in the long ago.
Is this the dream?
Yes.
Andale pues.
Gracias. Where pilgrims used to gather in the long ago. En tiempos antiguos.
You've told this dream before.
Yes.
Andale.
En tiempos antiguos. It was a high pass in the mountains that he had come to and here there was a table of rock and the table of rock was very old and it had fallen in the early days of the earth from a high penasco in the mountains and lay in the floor of the pass with its flat and cloven side to the weather and the sun. And on the face of that rock there were yet to be seen the stains of blood from those who'd been slaughtered upon it to appease the gods. The iron in the blood of these vanished beings had blackened the rock and there it could be seen. Together with the hatching of axemarks or the marks of swords upon the stone to show where the work was done.
Is there such a place?
I dont know. Yes. There are such places. But this was not one of them. This was a dream place.
Andale.
So the traveler arrived at this place at nightfall when the mountains about were darkening and the wind in the pass was growing cold with night's onset and he put down his burden to rest himself and he removed his hat to cool his brow and then his eyes fell upon this bloodstained altarstone which the weathers of the sierra and the sierra's storms had these millennia been impotent to cleanse. And there he elected to pass the night, such is the recklessness of those whom God has been so good as to shield from their just share of adversity in this world.
Who was the traveler?
I dont know.
Was it you?
I dont think so. But then if we do not know ourselves in the waking world what chance in dreams?
I'd think I'd know if it was me.
Yes. But have you not met people in dreams you never saw before? In dreams or out?
Sure.
And who were they?
I dont know. Dream people.
You think you made them up. In your dream.
I guess. Yeah.
Could you do it waking?
Billy sat with his arms over his knees. No, he said. I guess I couldnt.
No. Anyway I think the self of you in dreams or out is only that which you elect to see. I'm guessing every man is more than he supposes.
Andale.
So. This traveler was such a man. He laid down his burden and surveyed the darkening scene. In that high pass was naught but rock and scree and as he thought to at least raise himself above the feasible paths of serpents in the night so he came to the altar and placed his hands upon it. He paused, but he did not pause long enough. He unrolled his blanket upon the stone and weighted down the ends with rocks that it not be blown away by the wind before he could remove his boots.
Did he know what kind of stone it was?
No.
Then who knew?
The dreamer knew.
You.
Yes.
Well I reckon you and him had to of been two different people then.
How so?
Because if you were the same then one would know what the other knew.
As in the world.
Yes.
But this is not the world. This is a dream. In the world the question could not occur.
Andale.
Remove his boots. When he had removed them he climbed onto the stone and rolled himself in his blanket and upon that cold and terrible pallet he composed himself for sleep.
I wish him luck.
Yes. Yet sleep he did.
He fell asleep in your dream.
Yes.
How do you know he was asleep?
I could see him sleeping.
Did he dream?
The man sat looking at his shoes. He uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the other way. Well, he said. I'm not sure how to answer you. Certain events occurred. Some things about them remain unclear. It is difficult to know, for instance, when it was that these events took place.
Why?
The dream I had was on a certain night. And in the dream the traveler appeared. What night was this? In the life of the traveler when was it that he came to spend the night in that rocky posada? He slept and events took place which I will tell you of, but when was this? You can see the problem. Let us say that the events which took place were a dream of this man whose own reality remains conjectural. How assess the world of that conjectural mind? And what with him is sleep and what is waking? How comes he to own a world of night at all? Things need a ground to stand upon. As every soul requires a body. A dream within a dream makes other claims than what a man might suppose.
A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.
You have to consider the possibility.
It just sounds like superstition to me.
And what is that?
Superstition?
Yes.
Well. I guess it's when you believe in things that dont exist.
Such as tomorrow? Or yesterday?
Such as the dreams of somebody you dreamt. Yesterday was here and tomorrow's comin.
Maybe. But anyway the dreams of this man were his own dreams. They were distinct from my dream. In my dream the man was lying on his stone asleep.
You still could of made them up.
En este mundo todo es posible. Vamos a ver.
It's like the picture of your life in that map.
Como?
Es un dibujo nada mas. It aint your life. A picture aint a thing. It's just a picture.
Well said. But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way to show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet it is all we have.
You aint said whether your map was any use to you or not.
The man tapped his lower lip with his forefinger. He looked at Billy. Yes, he said. We will come to that. For now I can only say that I had hoped for a sort of calculus that would sum the convergence of map and life when life was done. For within their limitations there must be a common shape or shared domain between the telling and the told. And if that is so then the picture also in whatever partial form must have a direction to it and if it does then whatever is to come must lie in that path. You say that the life of a man cannot be pictured. But perhaps we mean different things. The picture seeks t
o seize and immobilize within its own configurations what it never owned. Our map knows nothing of time. It has no power to speak even of the hours implicit in its own existence. Not of those that have passed, not of those to come. Yet in its final shape the map and the life it traces must converge for there time ends.
So if I'm right still it's for the wrong reasons.
Perhaps we should return to the dreamer and his dream.
Andale.
You might wish to say that the traveler woke and that the events which took place were not a dream at all. But I think to view them as a dream is the wiser course. For if these events were else than a dream he would not wake at all. As you will see.
Andale.
My own dream is another matter. My traveler sleeps a troubled dream. Shall I wake him? The proprietary claims of the dreamer upon the dreamt have their limits. I cannot rob the traveler of his own autonomy lest he vanish altogether. You see the problem.
I think I'm beginnin to see several problems.
Yes. This traveler also has a life and there is a direction to that life and if he himself did not appear in this dream the dream would be quite otherwise and there could be no talk of him at all. You may say that he has no substance and therefore no history but my view is that whatever he may be or of whatever made he cannot exist without a history. And the ground of that history is not different from yours or mine for it is the predicate life of men that assures us of our own reality and that of all about us. Our privileged view into this one night of this man's history presses upon us the realization that all knowledge is a borrowing and every fact a debt. For each event is revealed to us only at the surrender of every alternate course. For us, the whole of the traveler's life converges at this place and this hour, whatever we may know of that life or out of whatever stuff it may be made. De acuerdo?
Andale.
So. He composed himself for sleep. And in the night there was a storm in the mountains and the lightning cracked and the wind moaned in the gap and the traveler's rest was a poor rest indeed. The barren peaks about him were hammered out of the blackness again and again by the lightning and in the flare of that lightning he was surprised to see descending down through the rocky arroyos a troupe of men bearing torches in the rain and singing some low chant or prayer as they came. He raised himself up from his stone the better to make them out. He could see little more than their heads and shoulders jostling in the torchlight but they seemed to wear a variety of adornments, primitive headpieces contrived from the feathers of birds or the hides of jungle cats. The fur of marmosets. They wore necklaces of bead or stone or ocean shell and shawls of woven stuff that may have been moss. By the smoky lamps hissing in the rain he could see that they carried upon their shoulders a litter or bier and now he could hear echoing among the rocks the floating notes of a horn and the slow beat of a drum.
When they came into the road he could see them better. In the forefront was a man in a mask made from the carved shell of a seaturtle all inlaid with agate and jasper. He carried a sceptre on the head of which was his own likeness and the likeness carried also such a sceptre in miniature and this sceptre too in what we must imagine to be some unknown infinitude of alternate being and likeness.
Behind him came the drummer with his drum of saltcured rawhide stretched upon a frame of ash and this he beat with a sort of flail made of a hardwood ball tethered to a stick. The drum gave off a low note of great resonance and he struck it with an upward swing of the flail and at each beat he bent his head to listen as perhaps a man might who were tuning a drum. There followed a man bearing a sheathed sword upon a leather cushion and after him the bearers of torches and then the litter and the men who carried it. The traveler could not tell if the person they carried were alive or if this were not perhaps some sort of funeral procession passing through the mountains in the rain and the night. At the rear of the enfilade came the hornsman bearing an instrument made of cane bound with wrappings of copper wire and hung with tassels. He played it by blowing through a length of tubing and it played three notes which hovered in the shrouded night air above them like a ponderable body itself.
How many of these people were there?
I believe eight.
Go ahead.
They advanced upon the road and the traveler sat up and swung his legs over the side of his altarstone and pulled the blanket about his shoulders and waited. They came on until they were opposite to the place where he sat and here they stopped and here they stood. The traveler watched them. If he was curious he was also afraid.
What about you?
I was only curious.
How did you know he was afraid?
The man studied the empty roadway beneath them. After a while he said: This man was not me. If he may have been some part of me that I do not recognize then so may you. I fall back upon my argument of common histories.
Where were you all this time?
Asleep in my bed.
You were not in the dream.
No.
Billy leaned and spat. Well, he said, I'm seventy-eight years old and in that time I've had a lot of dreams. And as near as I can recollect I was in ever one of em. I dont recall a time that I ever dreamt about other people but what I wasnt around somewheres. My notion is that you pretty much dream about yourself. I even dreamt one time that I was dead. But I was standin there looking at the corpse.
I see, the man said.
What do you see?
I see you've thought a bit about dreams.
I aint thought about em at all. I've just had em.
Can we come back to this question?
You can do whatever you want.
Thank you.
You sure you aint makin all this up.
The man smiled. He looked out across the roadway and the fields and shook his head but he didnt answer.
Or did you want to come back to that?
The problem is that your question is the very question upon which the story hangs.
A tractor-trailer passed overhead and the swallows nesting in the concrete coves flew forth and circled and returned.
Bear with me, the man said. This story like all stories has its beginnings in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente.
Every story is not about some question.
Yes it is. Where all is known no narrative is possible.
Billy leaned and spat again. Andale, he said.
He was curious and afraid this traveler and he called out to the processional some greeting which echoed among the rocks. He asked them where they were bound but never did they answer back. They stood in the old road through the pass huddled together, these mute and midnight folk with their torches and their instruments and their captive, and they waited. As if he were a mystery to them. Or as if he were expected to say some particular thing which he had yet to say.
He was really asleep.
That is my view.
And if he had of woke?
Then what he saw he would no longer see. Nor I.
Why couldnt you just say it would of vanished or disappeared?
Which?
Which what?
Desaparecer o desvanecerse.
Hay una diferencia?
Si. Lo que se desvanece es simplemente fuera de la vista. Pero desaparecido? He shrugged. Where do things go? In a case such as that of the traveler and his adventures--where one is on uncertain ground to even say from whence they came at all--there seems little to be said as to where they might be when gone. In such a case one can come upon no footing where even to begin.
Can I say somethin?
Of course.
I think you got a habit of makin things a bit more complicated than what they need to be. Why not just tell the story?
Good advice. Let's see what can be done.
Andale pues.
> Although I should point out to you that you are the one with the questions.
No you shouldnt.
Yes. Of course.
Just get on with it.
Yes.
Mum's the word here.
Como?
Nothin. I'll shut up askin questions, that's all.
They were good questions.
You aint goin to tell the story, are you?
So perhaps he struggled to wake. For all that the night was cold and his bed hard stone he could not. In the meantime all was silence. The rain had ceased. The wind. The processioners consulted among themselves and then the bearers came forward and set the litter on the rocky ground. Upon the litter lay a young girl with eyes closed and hands crossed upon her breast as if in death. The dreamer looked at her and he looked at the troupe standing about her. Cold as the night was and colder as it must have been in the windswept reaches from which they had descended they yet were thinly clothed and even the capes and blankets that they wore over their shoulders were of loosely woven stuff. In the light of their torches their faces and their torsos shone with sweat. And strange as was their appearance and the mission they seemed bent upon yet they were also oddly familiar. As if he'd seen all this somewhere before.
Like in a dream.
If you wish.
It aint up to me.
You think you know how this dream ends.
I got a notion or two.
We'll see.
Carry on.
With the troupe was a sort of chemist who carried in a belt at his waist the nostrums of his trade and he and the leader of the group conferred. The leader thumbed back the turtleshell to the top of his head like a welder tipping back his mask but the dreamer could not see his face. The outcome of their conferencing was that three of the halfnaked men from the company detached themselves and approached the altarstone. They carried a flask and a cup and they set the cup upon the stone and poured it full and offered it to the dreamer.
He better think twice.
Too late. He took it in both hands with the same gravity with which it had been offered and raised it to his lips and drank.
What was in it?
I dont know.
What kind of cup?
A cup of horn heated in a fire and shaped so it would stand.
What did it do to him?
It caused him to forget.
What did he forget? Everthing?
He forgot the pain of his life. Nor did he understand the penalty for doing so.
Go ahead.
He drank it down and handed back the cup and almost at once all was taken from him so that he was like a child again and a great peace settled upon him and his fears abated to the point that he would become accomplice in a blood ceremony that was then and is now an affront to God.