Target in the Night (28 page)

The next thing he knew, Luca was in his car, driving down the highway, because driving always calmed him down, helped lull his mind. He eventually went to the Estévez Estancia, but he didn't remember what happened between walking in on the meeting and pulling into the country house. Later they told him that Inspector Croce found him prowling outside their family house with a gun in his hand, looking for his father, but he didn't remember any of that. He remembered only his car lights illuminating the fence of the Estévez residence, the caretaker opening the gate for him and letting him through, reminding him which road to take up to the house. He spent several days sitting on a wooden chair, on the porch, staring out at the countryside. He smoked, drank
mate
, looked at the road surrounded by the poplar trees, the gravel on the road, the birds flying in circles and, beyond, the empty pampas, always quiet. Vague voices reached him from the distance, strange words and screams, as if his enemies had found a way to drive him mad. A few white, liquid lightning bolts flashed in the sky, burning his eyes in the dark. He saw a storm building on the horizon, the heavy clouds, the animals running to take refuge under the trees, the endless rain, a thin blanket of wetness on the grass. His body seemed to suffer strange transformations. He started wondering what it would be like to be a woman. He couldn't get the idea out of his head. What would it be like to be a woman at the moment of coitus? It was a very clear and crystalline thought, like the rain. As if he were lying on the ground, out in the country, and had started sinking into the mud, a viscous feeling on his skin, a warm moisture. Sometimes he'd fall asleep and wake up with the light of morning, find himself sitting on the wooden chair
on the porch, not thinking anything at all, like a zombie in the middle of nowhere.

One evening, during those days on end that were all the same, in his breakdown in the country house, he went inside to look for a blanket and found a book that he'd never heard of. The only book he found and was able to read during all those days and days of isolation in the Estévez Estancia. A book he found in an old, country wardrobe, one of those with mirrors and tall doors—in which one hides as a child to listen to the conversation of the adults—while he was searching through the winter clothes. He saw the book all of a sudden, as if it were alive, as if it were kind of a vermin, as if someone had forgotten it there, for us, for him.
Man and His Symbols
by Carl Jung.

“Why was it there, who had left it? That doesn't matter. When we read it, though, we discovered what we already knew, we found a message directed personally to us. Jung's
individuation process
. What's the purpose of an individual's entire oneiric life? That's what the Swiss Master had asked himself. Jung discovered that the dreams that a person dreams in his life all follow an order, which the Doctor called a dream plan. Dreams produce different scenes and images every night. People who aren't very observant probably never realize that a common thread runs through their dreams. But if we observe our dreams carefully, Jung says, over a set period of time (one year, for example), and we write the dreams down and study the entire series, we'll see that certain contents emerge, disappear, and come back again.
These changes, according to Jung, can be accelerated if the dreamer's conscious attitude is influenced by the proper interpretation of his dreams and their symbolic content.

This is what Luca found one night looking for a blanket in an old country wardrobe in the Estévez house, as if it were a personal revelation. He discovered Carl Jung by chance, and this is how he was able to understand and later forgive his brother. But not his father. His brother was possessed. Only someone who's possessed can betray his brother and sell himself to strangers, and let them take over the family business. His father, on the hand, he was lucid, cynical, and calculating. In secret, for days and days, he had devised a trap—with Cueto,
our legal advisor
—to convince Lucio to sell his preferred stocks to the intruders and hand majority control over to them. In exchange for what? His brother committed the betrayal, terrified of the economic unknown. His father—on the other hand—thought like a man from the countryside who always goes in for a sure thing.

In his isolation, Luca understood the misfortune of men tied to the ground. He achieved what he called
a certainty
. The countryside had destroyed his family, they were unable to escape, as his mother had done, unable to run away from the empty plains. His older brother had known, for example, the happiness of having a mother.

“But before I was born,” Luca said, using the first person singular, “my mother was already fed up with country life, with family life, she'd started secretly seeing the theater director who she'd leave my father for, when I was in her belly. My mother abandoned my brother, who was three years old, left him playing out on the patio, and escaped with a man who I will not name, out of respect. She left with the theater director and with me inside of her, when I was born the two of them were living together. But later, when
I too turned three, she abandoned me (like she had abandoned my brother) and moved to Rosario, to teach English for Toil & Chat, and then she moved back to Ireland, where she lives now. I always dream about her,” Luca added, later, “about my mother, the Irishwoman.”

Sometimes, in his dreams, he felt that a certain
suprapersonal
force was interfering in an active, constructive fashion, as if it were following a secret design. This was why he'd been able to build, in recent months, the objects of his thoughts as realities, and not just as concepts. To produce what he thought directly, thinking not just ideas, but real objects.

For example, a few objects that he'd designed and built in the last few months. There was nothing else like them, no previous models. The precise production of the objects of his thoughts that did not exist before being thought up. The exact opposite of the countryside, where everything exists naturally, where
products
are not products but a natural replica of previous objects, reproduced in the same manner, time and time again.
³⁰
A field of wheat is a field of wheat. There's nothing to do, except plough a little, pray for rain, or for the rain to stay away—the earth takes care of everything else. Same thing with the cows: they walk around, graze, sometimes they need to be dewormed, have someone make an incision if they get a grass obstruction, herd them to the corral. That's all. Luca considered machines, instead, to be very delicate instruments.
The machines were there to assist in bringing about new and unexpected objects, each more complex than the one before. He thought he could find, in his dreams, the steps necessary to carry on with the company. He walked ahead in the dark, looking for the configuration of a specific plan in the continuous series of his oneiric materials, as the Swiss Master called it. He liked the idea of them as materials—that one could work with them, as one works with stone, or chromium.

“What we write on the walls is the debris of memory. It's never the dream exactly as we've dreamt it. It's the remains, rather, like the wreckage and gears that survive a demolition. We're using metaphors here, of course,” he said.

Often it was only an image.
A woman in the water with a rubber bathing cap on her head.
Sometimes it was a phrase:
It was quite natural for Reyes to join our team in Oxford.
He'd write these remains and later connect them to earlier dreams, as if they were all part of the same story, discontinuous fragments that needed to be put together. He always dreamt about his mother, he'd see her with her red hair, laughing, on the dirt patio facing the street—and he wasn't satisfied until he could find a natural way to integrate all the images. It was intense work, taking up a large portion of every morning.

The writings on the walls were a tapestry of phrases connected with arrows and diagrams, certain words underlined or circled, connections established, with figures and sketches, and fragments of dialogue. As if a painter were working on the wall, trying to compose a mural—or a series of murals—by copying hieroglyphics in the dark. It looked like a comic strip, actually,
a black-and-white cartoon, including dialogue balloons and drawings assembling a plot.

His hope, then, was to record all his dreams for a year to be able to finally intuit the direction of his life, and then act accordingly. A plan, the unexpected anticipation of what was to come. He'd understood, at last, that the expression
it is written
referred to the results of these recording operations and the interpretation of the materials supplied by personal archetypes and a collective unconscious. His dreams—he'd later confess—were hermetic anticipations of what was to come, the discontinuous elements of an oracle.

“As if the world were a spaceship and we were the only ones who could see the flashing lights and hear the sounds on the bridge and the conversations of the crew and the orders spoken by the pilots. As if only with our dreams could we discover the plans for the trip, and redirect the ship when it's lost its way and is about to crash. We're still using metaphors here,” he said. “A simile, but also a
literal truth
. Because we work with metaphors and analogies, with imagined worlds and with the concept of
equal to
, we look for equivalences in the absolute difference of the real. A discontinuous order, a perfect form. Knowledge is not the unveiling of a hidden essence, but a connection, a relationship, a similarity between visible objects. That's why I,” he added, switching back to the first person singular again, “can only express myself with metaphors.”

For example, the observation deck, which was the opening from where you could see the lights of the bridge and hear the distant voices of the crewmembers. He wanted to transcribe what they said. Another reason why he needed a secretary, to help him copy
everything down. And also why his table of interpretations was designed to read all of his dreams at the same time.

“Come, take a look,” he said.

“That's why I got separated,” Renzi said.

“How strange.”

“Any explanation will do.”

“And what were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Writing a novel.”

“You don't say.”

“A man meets a woman who believes she's a machine.”

“And?”

“And nothing. That's it.”

“The problem is always what you believe you experience, or what you believe you think,” Sofía said after a while. “That's why one always needs help to be able to stand it all, a potion, some kind of miraculous concoction.”

“The power of life, not everyone can stand it.”

“Of course, there's a crest, a narrow pass, you fall—Plop.”

“I completely agree.”

Renzi dozed off. The night lamp, covered with a silk scarf, gave off a softened reddish light.

“In two, no, in three years,” Sofía said, looking at and counting with the fingers of her hand, “I'm going to get pregnant. I'll be really big. It'll be interesting.” She was laughing. “I want to have a child who turns twenty-five in the year 2000.”

Luca took them to a small room next to the study—his workroom, as he called it
³¹
—which looked like a laboratory, with magnifying glasses and rulers and compasses and drafting tables and photographs from the different stages of the construction of multiple devices. On one of the desks, to the side, there was a cylinder with a number of small, brown, wooden tablets—like Venetian blinds, or the mechanical assembly of a series of small Egyptian tablets—each filled with handwriting tiny as fly legs. They were miniature blackboards, on which Luca wrote words and drew images, in different colored pencils, related to his dreams. “The dreams that have already been told are the ones that get transferred to the tablets, in miniature,” he said. The engraved plates could be moved by a series of nickel-plated gears,
like the flapping of a bird's wings
. This made the words change places, allowing different readings of the phrases, at once simultaneous and successive.
My mother in the river, her red hair tucked into a rubber bathing cap. “It was quite natural,” she said, “for Reyes to join our team in Oxford.”
This was just one example of a preliminary interpretation. His mother, in Ireland: had she traveled to Oxford? And those Reyes, how should they be understood? As the kings, the
reyes
, or as the Reyes family?
The question was: what does it mean to put different elements in relationship to each other and thus articulate and construct a possible meaning—and how should this be done?

This was the other filing room. Luca had decided to remove the filing cabinets, as he had done in the filing room upstairs, and placed a folding cot in place of the cabinets here, too, creating another resting place exactly like the one upstairs. Not only was it the same, Luca explained, it actually occupied the same, exact location, one on top of the other, in a perfect vertical axis.

“We sleep here, facing a specific direction, always facing the same direction. Like the gauchos who used to ride into the deserted plains and put their saddles in the direction they were supposed to be going, and sleep like that, too, to keep from getting lost in the middle of the countryside. To keep from losing their way, the direction of their route.” After many months of experimenting, Luca realized that it was essential for everything to be exactly the same when he slept at night, every night—even if he slept in different rooms in the factory, wherever his activities might leave him at the end of the day—so the dreams would continue repeating themselves without major alterations.