Cities of the Plain (33 page)

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 tractortrailer 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. kndale, 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?

S’. 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 adventureswhere one is
on uncertain ground to even say from whence they came at allthere 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.

C—mo?

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.

Was that the penalty?

No. There was a greater cost even than that.

What was it?

That this too would be forgot.

Would that be such a bad idea?

Wait and see.

Go on.

He drank the cup and gave himself up to the dark mercies of these ancient serranos. And
they in turn led him from the stone out into the road and they walked up and back with
him. They seemed to be urging him to contemplate his surroundings, the rocks and the
mountains, the stars which were belied above them against the eternal blackness of the
world's nativity.

What were they sayin?

I dont know.

You couldnt hear them?

The man didnt answer. He sat pondering the forms of the concrete overhead. The nests of
the swallows clung in the high corners like colonies of small mud hornos inverted there.
The traffic had increased. The boxshaped shadows which the trucks shook off on entering
beneath the overpass waited for them where they emerged into the sun again on the far
side. He lifted one hand in a slow tossing gesture. There is no way to answer your
question. It is not the case that there are small men in your head holding a conversation.
There is no sound. So what language is that? In any case this was a deep dream for the
dreamer and in such dreams there is a language that is older than the spoken word at all.
The idiom is another specie and with it there can be no lie or no dissemblance of the
truth.

I thought you said they were talkin.

In my dream of them perhaps they were talking. Or perhaps I was only putting upon it the
best construction that I knew. The traveler's dream is another matter.

Go ahead.

The ancient world holds us to account. The world of our fathers . . .

It seems to me if they were talkin in your dream they'd have to be talkin in his. It's the
same dream.

It's the same question.

What's the answer?

We're coming to that.

çndale.

The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form
without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future.
At the core of our life is the history of which it is composed and in that core are no
idioms but only the act of knowing and it is this we share in dreams and out. Before the
first man spoke and after the last is silenced forever. Yet in the end he did speak, as we
shall see.

All right.

So he walked with his captors until his mind was calm and he knew that his life was now in
other hands.

There dont seem to be much fight in him.

You forget the hostage.

The girl.

Yes.

Go on.

It is important to understand that he did not give himself up willingly. The martyr who
longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them. Where there is no penalty there
can be no prize. You understand.

Go on.

They seemed to be waiting for him to come to some decision. To tell them something
perhaps. He studied everything about him that could be studied. The stars and the rocks
and the face of the sleeping girl upon her pallet. His captors. Their helmets and their
costumes. The torches which they carried that were made of hollow pipes filled with oil
and wicks of rope and the flames which were sheltered from the wind by panes of isinglass
set into taming and roofed and flued with beaten copper sheet. He tried to see into their
eyes but those eyes were dark and they had shadowed them with blacking like men called
upon to traverse wastes of snow. Or sand. He tried to see their feet how they were shod
but their robes fell over the rocks about them and he could not. What he saw was the
strangeness of the world and how little was known and how poorly one could prepare for
aught that was to come. He saw that a man's life was little more than an instant and that
as time was eternal therefore every man was always and eternally in the middle of his
journey, whatever be his years or whatever distance he had come. He thought he saw in the
world's silence a great conspiracy and he knew that he himself must then be a part of that
conspiracy and that he had already moved beyond his captors and their plans. If he had any
revelation it was this: that he was repository to this knowing which he came to solely by
his abandonment of every former view. And with this he turned to his captors and he said:
I will tell you nothing.

I will tell you nothing. That is what he said and that is all he said. In the next moment
they led him to the stone and laid him down upon it and they raised up the girl from her
pallet and led her forward. Her bosom was heaving.

Her what?

Her bosom was heaving.

Go ahead.

She leaned and kissed him and stepped away and then the archatron came forward with his
sword and raised it in his two hands above him and clove the traveler's head from his body.

I guess that was the end of that.

Not at all.

I suppose you're fixin to tell me he survived havin his head lopped off.

Yes. He woke from his dream and sat shivering with cold and fright. In the selfsame
desolate pass. The selfsame barren range of mountains. The selfsame world.

And you?

The narrator smiled wistfully, like a man remembering his childhood. These dreams reveal
the world also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while
often the narrative is fugitive and difficult to recall. Yet it is the narrative that is
the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of
the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed
axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these
events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his
own existence. This is how he is joined to the world. For escaping from the world's dream
of him this is at once his penalty and his reward. So. I might have woken then myself but
as the world neared so did the traveler upon his rock begin to fade and as I was not yet
willing to part company with him I called out to him.

Did he have a name?

No. No name.

What did you call?

I simply called upon him to stay and stay he did and so I slept on and the traveler turned
to me and waited.

I guess he was surprised to see you.

A good question. He seemed indeed to be surprised and yet in dreams it is often the case
that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most
improbable chimeras appear commonplace. Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our
convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. All in our custody seethes with
an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and
there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet. I got
another question. You want to know if the traveler knew that he'd been dreaming. If indeed
he had been dreaming. Like you say, you've told the story before. Yes. What's the answer.
You might not like it. That ought not to stop you. He asked me the same question. He
wanted to know if he'd been dreaming? Yes. What did he say? He asked me if I had seen
them. Them people with the robes and the candles and all. Yes. And. Well. I had. Of
course. So that's what you told him. I told him the truth. Well it would have served as
well for a lie wouldnt it? Because? If it caused him to believe that what he dreamt was
real. Yes. You see the difficulty. Billy leaned and spat. He studied the landscape to the
north. I better get on, he said. I got a ways to go. You have people waiting for you? I
hope so. I sure would like to see them. He wished me to be his witness. But in dreams
there can be no witness. You said as much yourself. It was just a dream. You dreamt him.
You can make him do whatever you like. Where was he before I dreamt him? You tell me.

My belief is this, and I say it again: His history is the same as yours or mine. That is
the stuff he is made o£ What stuff other? Had I created him as God makes men how then
would I not know what he would say before he ever spoke? Or how he'd move before he did
so? In a dream we dont know what's coming. We are surprised.

All right.

So where is it coming from?

I dont know.

Two worlds touch here. You think men have power to call forth what they will? Evoke a
world, awake or sleeping? Make it breathe and then set out upon it figures which a glass
gives back or which the sun acknowledges? Quicken those figures with one's own joy and
one's despair? Can a man be so hid from himself? And if so who is hid? And from whom?

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of
yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape
was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is
senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make
its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess
it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means
nothing at all.