The Dreamseller: The Calling (29 page)

The patient turned his back to the camera, removed his hands from his face, and placed them against the wall. His lungs fought desperately for air. The rise and fall of his shirt
betrayed his panting. The cameraman persisted, without softening his tone: “Talk to the monsters inside you! I’m offering you the chance to exorcize your demons.”

The patient fell back into his initial terror.

“I’m afraid! I’m afraid!” he screamed. “Now it’s the safe! The safe is threatening to destroy everything. It’s threatening to devour the entire structure. It roars like thunder. ‘
I’m
the one who pays for everything. I’m the one that bought all of you. I brought you into existence. Bow down before me!
I
am the god of this house!’”

The patient panted like an asthmatic. I thought at any moment he would have a heart attack. I had never seen anyone so weakened, someone so much in need.

At that moment, trying desperately to escape his prison, the patient turned his face to the camera and screamed hopelessly, “We’re going to be buried alive! I’m scared! So scared! Help, please! Everything’s tumbling down!”

The camera zoomed in on the young patient’s uncovered face for the first time. His panicked expression filled the gigantic stadium screen. And when we saw his face, it wasn’t his house that we saw come tumbling down; it was our whole world. The floor seemed to shake beneath us, our bodies trembled. Our voices caught in our throats. We were paralyzed in our seats. The scene was unbelievable, surreal. The patient in the film was . . . the dreamseller.

Outside, I was frozen. But inside, my mind was a storm. My inner voice screamed, “This isn’t possible! We’ve been following a mental patient, a maniac? This can’t be!” The sociological experiment shattered into a million little pieces. We’d been fooled. Our revolutionary leader showed his damaged, fragile form. I couldn’t tell whether I felt rage for letting myself follow this man, or compassion for the misery he had suffered. I didn’t know whether to feel sad or ashamed.

The audience was astounded. Like me, they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the person on stage was the same one in the movie. But the resemblance was unmistakable, despite our dreamseller’s longer beard. My friends grabbed each other’s arms, trying to shake themselves awake from a dream they wished they had never dreamed.

The event’s emcee, so as to leave no lingering doubts, had them turn the dreamseller’s microphone back on and asked him, as if he were facing an Inquisition, “Sir, can you confirm that the man in the film is you?”

The audience of tens of thousands fell into a deafening silence. We were hoping against all hope that he would say no. That there was some mistake, that it was a lookalike or maybe a twin brother. But, true to his conscience, he turned to the crowd, fixed his gaze on his group of friends with tears in his eyes and said unequivocally, “Yes, it’s me. That man from that movie is me.”

Immediately, his microphone was cut off again. But the dreamseller didn’t try to defend himself.

“A
mental
patient,” the announcer scoffed, shaking his head.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, turning to the television cameras and now speaking in a high and mighty tone. “We have finally discovered the true identity of the man who plunged this great city into disarray. This is the man who captured the imaginations of millions. Indeed, he is truly a great social phenomenon.”

Sweeping his hand toward the lonely dreamseller at the center of the stage, he said, sarcastically, “Behold: The greatest imposter of all time. Society’s greatest con man. The greatest swindler, the greatest illusionist and the greatest heretic of the century. And to show our gratitude, we confer on him the title of the greatest seller of lunacy, of nightmares, of trash and falsehood and stupidity that this society has ever produced.”

A lightning storm of flashes erupted. A stunningly beautiful model walked up to him and handed him a diploma. The organizers had planned everything down to the tiniest, insulting detail.

Incredible as it seems, the dreamseller didn’t refuse it. Instead, he graciously accepted the scroll. We, his disciples, were perplexed. The audience was frozen. No one in the stadium dared say a word.

The muscles of my face as well as my ability to reason were paralyzed. My mind was roiling with questions: Had all the ideas we’d heard, ideas that had so swept us away, come from the mind of a psychotic? How is that possible? What had I done to my life? Had I dived into a sea of dreams or of nightmares? Had I been saved from a physical suicide only to suffer an intellectual one?

A
FTER REVEALING THAT THE DREAMSELLER WAS, IN FACT,
the young, tormented psychiatric patient from the film, the event organizers turned to us smugly, as if to say that we had been the biggest fools of all. They seemed to want revenge. “But for what?” I wondered. What was behind this ambush? Why destroy a man’s image so publicly? Why so much hate for a seemingly harmless human being?

Only later did we find out that one of the dreamseller’s speeches was to “blame” for the plummeting stock price of the La Femme fashion giant, part of the Megasoft conglomerate. Prices fell immediately after the dreamseller recommended emphatically, in the “temple of fashion,” that designer labels should carry a warning that beauty cannot be standardized, that every woman has her own particular beauty, and that women should never identify with models who represented a genetic exception in the human race.

The real problem started when the CEO of the fashion giant—one of the organizers of the event—wrote an op-ed saying these were nothing more than the ramblings of a lunatic. And if attacking a humble man weren’t enough, he finished his thought with a quote that showed the depth of the Barbie syndrome: “With apologies to all the ugly girls, beauty is important.” The statement
had circled the globe, not only in newspapers but also on the Internet, generating heated debates in the media and producing a chain reaction of repudiation on the firm. Thousands had sent messages to the countless La Femme stores around the world opposing its philosophy. The company’s stock fell by thirty percent in two months, a loss of more than a billion and a half dollars. It was catastrophic for the company.

Revenge, which exists only in the human species, reared its ugly head. Unmasking the man who had caused all the damage became a question of honor for the leaders of the company, a matter of survival. They wanted to publicly unmask the dreamseller to discredit his ideas and regain their credibility.

We didn’t know where to hide in the stadium. We’d lost our courage, our adulation and our enthusiasm. I who had learned to love the dreamseller now couldn’t find the energy to defend him. Now I understood the pain in John Lennon’s famous phrase after the Beatles broke up:
The dream is over
.

“Our movement is dead,” I thought, and figured the rest of the group felt the same way. But I was surprised by Monica and Jurema’s defiant attitude.

“It doesn’t matter if the dreamseller was or is psychotic,” they said. “We were with him through the applauses and we’ll be with him through the jeers.”

“Were women stronger than the men?” I wondered. I don’t know, but I do know that they displayed an irrational idealism. Then, two of the men stood up in solidarity,

“If the chief’s crazy, then I’m crazy, too!” Bartholomew yelled out.

Not to be outdone, Barnabas stood up emphatically.

“I don’t know if he’s crazy, but I do know he made me feel like a person again. And I won’t abandon him now. You know what?
I’m
crazier than the dreamseller,” he said, then added, “But not as crazy as you, Honeymouth.”

“Thank you, my friend,” Bartholomew replied, feeling flattered.

The dreamseller turned to leave and headed for the exit when the crowd started buzzing. We thought they might rush the stage to lynch him, and then, suddenly, they broke out in a chant that soon filled the stadium.

“Speak . . . ! Speak . . . ! Speak . . . !”

The chant reverberated throughout the stadium until the entire building shook with nervous energy. The executives looked worried. The last thing they wanted was to start a riot that would give them more bad front-page press. So they turned his microphone back on and gestured for him to return to the stage and speak. Doubtless, they figured the dreamseller would crush what was left of his image by trying to worm his way out with superficial explanations and accusations. But clearly, they didn’t know the depth of this man they were so eager to discredit.

He looked out at the audience, and then at us, his disciples. He gently raised his voice and, without fear of repercussions, he dissected his own history the way a microsurgeon does with the tiniest of blood vessels.

Softly, he told us his story, the most dramatic one I’d ever heard. Except that this time it was no parable; it was his true story, raw and uncensored. For the first time, the man I had followed exposed the very depths of his being. And I realized that I hadn’t known him fully, either.

“Yes, I was mentally ill, or maybe I still am. I’ll leave that for the psychiatrists and psychologists, and all of you, to judge. I was committed to an institution because I was suffering from a deep and severe depression accompanied by mental confusion and hallucinations. My depression was fed by a crippling feeling of guilt. Guilt over the indescribable mistakes I’d made with people I loved the most.”

He paused for breath. He seemed to be trying to rebuild his dismembered being, to organize his thoughts in order to tell his shattered story. “What mistakes did the dreamseller make that unbalanced him?” I wondered. “Wasn’t he strong and generous? Didn’t he demonstrate the height of camaraderie and tolerance?” To our surprise, he declared:

“I was a rich man, very rich, and powerful, too. I was more successful than anyone else of my generation. Young and old alike came to seek my advice. Every venture I touched turned to gold. They called me Midas. I was creative, bold, intuitive—a visionary, unafraid of uncharted territory. My ability to absorb a failure and come back stronger astounded everyone around me. But gradually the success I always thought I controlled came to control me, to poison me, to invade the intimate reaches of my mind. Without realizing it, I lost my humility and became a god—a false god.”

We were stunned by his words. I wondered, “Could he really have been rich? What kind of power did he have? Or is he hallucinating again? Didn’t he walk around in tattered clothes? Didn’t we depend on the kindness of others just to survive?”

At hearing the dreamseller’s admission, Bartholomew became emboldened.

“Aha,
that’s
my chief! I knew it! I knew he was a millionaire,” Bartholomew said. Then, scratching his head, asked, “Wait, then why were we always so broke?”

There was no good explanation. “Maybe, like so many businessmen, he went bankrupt,” I thought. “But could financial ruin trigger such a serious mental illness? Could it break someone’s sanity and plunge him into the realm of madness?” My thoughts were interrupted when he continued his account.

“My only goal was to stand out, to compete, to be number one, as long as it meant playing by the rules,” the dreamseller confessed. “I didn’t want to be just another face in the crowd.
I wanted to be unique. And so, I became a machine, tirelessly dedicated to success and making money. The problem doesn’t start when we possess money, however much we have. It starts when the money possesses us. When I realized this had happened to me, I saw that money could, in fact, impoverish a man. And I became the poorest of men.”

I was flabbergasted at seeing this man, who had supposedly been so rich and powerful, remove his mask and become an unflinching critic of himself. I tried and failed to think of any leader in history who had ever spoken so courageously. I looked at myself and realized that I, too, lacked such bravery. His bold words began to invigorate me. My admiration for this man was being rekindled. Then, he told the story of how he, his wife and their two children were scheduled to go on an ecotourism vacation with friends to see one of the planet’s few remaining great rain forests.

But, for him, time was a scarce commodity, he said. So he planned the trip months in advance. Everything was set, but at the last minute, he was asked to participate in a video conference with some of the company’s investors. Vast sums of money were involved. His family and friends postponed the trip by a day to wait for him. The next day, he had to quickly resolve a business matter that had been dragging for months: He had to sign off on the purchase of another large company or lose it to his competitors. Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. The trip was postponed again. On the day they were finally set to travel, the board of directors of his petroleum firm presented him with a new problem. More make-or-break decisions had to be made.

“So as not to put off the trip again, I apologized to my wife, my children and our friends and told them to go on without me. I would charter a flight later and meet them there,” he said, his voice beginning to crack. “My wife didn’t like the idea.
My seven-year-old daughter, Julieta, was sad, but she kissed me and said, ‘You’re the best daddy in the world.’ Fernando, my loving nine-year-old son, also kissed me and said, ‘You’re the best father in the world—but the busiest, too.’ I answered, ‘Thank you, children, but someday Daddy will have more time for the greatest kids in the world.’”