Cities of the Plain (32 page)

Could you remember all the places you'd been?

Oh yes. Couldnt you?

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. QuŽ 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, quiz‡s. 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.

çndale pues.

Gracias. Where pilgrims used to gather in the long ago. En tiempos antiguos.

You've told this dream before.

Yes.

çndale.

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 pe–asco 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.

çndale.

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.

çndale.

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.

çndale.

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.

C—mo?

Es un dibujo nada m‡s. 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 to 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.

çndale.

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.

çndale.

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 mad 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 seventyeight 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.