translated from the Spanish by Sebastián Andrés Grandas

ON THE PROPERTIES OF DREAMS (I)
Synesius of Cyrene, in the fourteenth century, explains in his Treatise on Dreams that if a certain number of people dream about the exact same thing, at the exact same time, then this dream could be brought to reality: “Therefore, let us all lie down and dedicate ourselves, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, citizens and magistrates, artisans and merchants, people of the city and people of the countryside, to dream what we desire. There is no privileged class, not from age, sex, money, or profession. For dreams offer themselves to us all. They are our oracle, always ready to be our silent and terrible weapon.”

This same theory was asserted by the Aristotelian Jews in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (or perhaps Synesius stole his theory from theirs). Maimonides, their great teacher, is said to have proved the hypothesis (this is according to Gutman in Die Philosophie des Judentums, Munich, 1933). One night, he instructed his entire order to dream that the drought had ended. At sunrise, his followers stepped outside of their homes to find the fields green and a gentle dew moistening their beards.

Centuries later, the political opposition of a country that had long been governed by tyranny wanted to experiment with the purported successes of this technique. In secret, they distributed a series of notes among the people with instructions for a communal dream. Every night at the exact same hour, the citizens were to dream that the tyrant had been defeated and that the people had taken power.

Though the experiment began long ago, it has thus far failed to achieve any result. Of course, Maimonides foresaw (Paragraph XII) that in cases where the object of the dream was to be a person, said person would need to be surprised while sleeping for the dream to take effect.

And tyrants never sleep.

ON CIVIL DEATH
On a day heavy with omens of rain, at exactly twelve o’clock, a robed messenger at every corner of the capital and the administrative cities read aloud an official edict, accompanied by a full military procession and funeral banners. The edict declared an official period of mourning following the sudden and unexpected passing of a general of the opposition. The Government Supreme ordered funeral honors equal to a Minister of War, along with a three-day observance of national sorrow.

The first person surprised by this announcement was the general himself. He decided to flee, believing that the proclamation pertained to another attack on his life, for over the course of many years, he had survived countless ambushes and attempted poisonings. But the general was not followed by anyone, and all the while the State continued the preparations for his burial.

The funeral rites were magnificent. Three speeches were delivered, one for each of the powers that constituted the Republic. As the coffin was lowered into the ground and covered with the national seal, twenty-one guns were fired into the air.

At the end of the period of national mourning—when the flags were once again raised at full mast in public buildings, military barracks, plazas, and vessels at sea—the general returned in secret to his house, where he found his family in the middle of the customary nine days of prayer honoring the dead. He called out to his wife and children, greeting them with open arms, but none of them acknowledged his presence. His bed and other pieces of furniture had been removed from his room, and his clothes had been distributed amongst the poor.

He went out into the streets, walking all of his usual routes, in search of his closest friends and old conspirators. Before each of them, however, he passed as if he were a shadow.

At first, he took this very hard. But in time, the general became accustomed to the idea of his own death.

ON THE STENCH OF CORPSES
The music of funeral marches resounding at dawn from all directions of the city—along with the murmur of people crossing dark streets, praying in chorus, and heading towards churches with tolling bells—announced that His Excellency’s mother had died in the palace.

The Republic sank into mourning. A sea of flags flew at half-mast every day as the body, recumbent and dressed in the robes of an angel, was paraded in a glass coffin through the city—with still nothing definitive said of its burial. This continued until H.E. announced that there would be no entombment, and that his mother would stay at his side as always, accompanying him at all times in ceremonies, court hearings, receptions, military parades, and in all government business.

In the beginning, it seemed simple enough to the attendants to dress the body for each occasion and prop it up neatly at H.E.’s right hand. However, the stench quickly became unbearable, for in the Republic, methods of embalmment still left much to be desired.

At the gala banquets, the ladies swallowed their vomit for fear of offending the Head of State, who—unmoved—bobbed his head to the rhythm of the chamber music that livened up the meal. The gentlemen, as was customary in the palace, offered the old woman the best bite from their plates. The ambassadors were obliged as always to kiss the matron’s hand, though upon taking up her ringed fingers, they were left with bits of greenish skin between their own.

The madame, her face veiled, gracefully bore witness to the process of her own putrefaction, oblivious to the poisoned air. She listened to the gentle words of His Holiness’s apostolic nuncio and the courtesies of the French ambassador, her ear hardened over as she reclined in her chair of gold.

Eventually, the maidservants were applying carmine directly to the bones of the lady’s now-fleshless cheeks, covering her faded, dried-out hair with a golden wig and leaving her rigid arms in a gesture of perpetual greeting.

By the time the church bells tolled once again to announce the death of the First Lady of the Republic, the ministers, ambassadors, and other dignitaries were already perfectly accustomed to the smell of rotting flesh, and to the worms that calmly slithered along their plates and up their glasses. ■

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