The Dreamseller: The Calling (30 page)

The dreamseller heaved a deep and heavy sigh. “But that time would never come . . .” He paused and started to cry. In a choked voice, overcome with emotion, he told the audience:

“While I was in the middle of a meeting, hours after they had taken off, my secretary rushed in to say there had been a plane crash. My heart started to pound. I turned on the news and heard that an airliner had crashed into a dense tropical rain forest . . . and there did not appear to be any survivors. It was the flight they were on. I collapsed to the ground and cried inconsolably. I had lost everything. There was no air to breathe, no ground to walk on, no reason to live. Between tears and pain, I put together a rescue mission, but we never found my wife and children’s bodies; the plane had burned to a cinder. I couldn’t even say good-bye to the most important people in my life, to look into their eyes or touch their skin. It was as if they’d never existed.”

Overnight, the man so many had envied became the object of pity, the indestructible man became the most fragile of beings. And to add to his indescribable pain, he was tortured by guilt.

“The psychologists who treated me wanted to ease my guilt. They tried to tell me I wasn’t responsible for the loss. But I knew, indirectly, I was. They tried to protect me instead of making me face the monster of my guilt. But they couldn’t ease my desire to punish myself. They were good doctors, good men, but I resisted and closed myself up in my own world.”

Still reading out from the chapters of his past life for the audience, he began asking himself aloud:

“What did I build? Why didn’t I prioritize what I loved the most? Why did I never have the courage to cut back on my schedule? When is it time to slow down? What is so important that it is more important than life itself? If you lose that, what does it matter if you have all the money in the world?”

What an unbearable burden. What colossal pain. As I listened to him, I began to understand that all of us, however successful, we all miss out on something. The warm sun sets on us all, no one sails forever on tranquil seas. Some lose more, others less; some suffer avoidable losses, others unavoidable. Some lose in the social arena, others in the theater of the mind. And if someone manages to get through life untouched, there is still something he loses: youth. I was a man of losses and I continued to be an expert in losses. But suddenly, recalling the last few months we had been together, I was startled. This man has lost everything in front of the entire world. How did he manage to dance? Why was he the happiest of wanderers? Why did he manage to always put us in a good mood? How did he manage to be so tolerant when life had been so unfair to him? How could he lead such a gentle life after having been the victim of such a brutal tragedy?

As I was pondering these questions, I glanced at the organizers of the event and saw they were visibly shaken; it seems they didn’t know the true identity of the man they had mocked. I looked out at the crowd and saw people crying. They might have felt compassion for the dreamseller or, perhaps, some were recalling losses in their own lives. At that point Jurema squeezed my hands and told me something that surprised me even more.

“I know that story. It’s
him
!” she said.

“Him, who? What are you saying, professor?” I asked, even more confused.

“It’s him! The sergeants have laid an ambush for their own
general. How is it possible?” Jurema was so worked up that she wasn’t making any sense.

“I don’t understand. Who is the dreamseller?” I asked again.

She stared at the leaders who had organized the event and said something that floored me.

“Incredible. He’s standing on the very stage that belongs to him,” she said and could say nothing more.

My mind went into a tailspin, like a kite cut free of its string. Repeating her last sentence—”He’s standing on the very stage that belongs to him”—I began to understand what Jurema meant.

“I don’t believe it!
He
’s
the owner of the powerful Megasoft Group? The sergeants laid a trap for their own general, thinking he was just a soldier. Could it be? But isn’t he dead? Or had he just gone into hiding? Then again, the dreamseller had severely criticized the leader of the Megasoft Group at dinner at Jurema’s home. We must be dreaming!” I thought.

A film began to unreel in my mind. It struck me that the dreamseller had involved himself in many events linked to that corporation. He had rescued me at the San Pablo, a building belonging to the Megasoft Group. And mysteriously, they almost shot him at that same building. He had been beaten at the temple of computing, apparently at the behest of an executive of that same group, and had kept silent. A reporter from a newspaper owned by that group had slandered him, and he had said nothing. Now he was humiliated by leaders of the same corporation and hadn’t rebelled. What was going on? What did it all mean?

I took a deep breath, trying to bring order to my whirlwind of ideas. I brought my hands to my face and told myself, “This can’t be true! Or is it? No, it can’t be! We’re experts at making up facts when we’re under stress.” I took Jurema’s arm and asked:

“How can one of the most powerful men on the planet sleep under bridges? How can a billionaire eat other people’s leftovers? It makes no sense!” The professor shook her head; she was as upset and confused as I was.

Just then, the dreamseller seemed to be answering the questions on all our minds. He said his losses had been so great, his suffering so deep, that he began to lose all rational thought. He said he couldn’t organize his ideas. He refused to eat and finally had to be committed to a psychiatric hospital. At the hospital, he began hallucinating just as we saw on the video. His brain seemed ready to implode.

In a firmer tone, he revisited the story that the organizers had used to destroy him publicly. He spoke of the second part, surely unknown to them.

“After the roof, the safe and other structures in that house fought against each other to claim supremacy, I heard another area of the house making itself known. But this time it was a soft, gentle, humble voice. It was a voice whispering beneath the ground, and it didn’t terrify me.”

Looking out at the audience, the dreamseller stated:

“It was the voice of the foundation. Unlike all the other parts of that mansion, the foundation didn’t want to be the greatest, the best, or the most important. It wanted merely to be recognized as part of the whole.”

I strained to understand what the mysterious man was trying to reveal, but it was difficult. But then it started to be come clear.

“When I heard the voice of the foundation, all the other parts of the house condemned it vehemently. The safe was first. Bursting with pride, it said, ‘You’re an embarrassment to us. You’re the dirtiest part of this house.’ The conceited roof said, ‘No one who has ever entered this house has even ever asked about you. You’re completely unnoticed.’ The beautiful
paintings declared arrogantly, ‘You’re ridiculous to suggest you have any worth, at all. Just accept your lowly role.’ The furniture was adamant: ‘You’re insignificant. Just look where you’re located.’ And so the foundation was rejected by all the other structures of the home. Humiliated, shunned and without any way to go on being part of that building, it decided to leave. And what do you think the result was?” he asked the crowd.

They all answered as one, even the children in the stadium: “The house collapsed!”

“Yes, the house caved in. My house, which represents my personality, caved in because I dismissed my foundation. When it collapsed, I shouted at God: ‘Who are you, and where were you when my world collapsed? Do you not intervene because you don’t exist? Or do you exist and you simply just don’t care about humanity?’ I fought with the psychiatrists and psychologists. Fought with their theories and medications. I fought with life. I thought it so unjust to me, nothing more than a bottomless well of uncertainties. I fought with time. In short, I fought with everything and everyone. But when the foundation made itself heard, I was heartened, enlightened. And I understood that I had been profoundly wrong. More than anything else, I had fought with my own foundation. I had cast aside my values, my priorities.”

Hearing that explanation, we finally began to comprehend some of the secrets of this fascinating dreamseller.

He started to understand himself when he was able to interpret his hallucinations. The safe, he said, represented his financial power, which he had always valued. The roof was a metaphor for his intellectual capacity, which he had prized greatly for helping him overcome so many difficult tasks. The works of art represented his prestige and fame, and the furniture, all the luxuries and comforts in life.

“But I betrayed and neglected my foundation,” he said. “I
swept my love for my wife and children under the rug of my activities and mounting concerns. I gave them everything, but I forgot to give them the one fundamental thing that I had regarded only as trivial: myself. My friends were barely a consideration and my dreams were forgotten completely. How can one be a good father, a good husband and a good friend if the people we love are excluded from our agenda? Only a hypocrite could believe it, a noted hypocrite who so many held up as an example.”

He said bravely that he hid his mistakes, his shortcomings, his stupid attitudes, which represented the dirty part of his foundation, but which were also fundamental to the structure of his personality. Now I understand what he meant when he said that whoever fails to recognize his shortcomings has an outstanding debt to himself and to his humanity.

I began to further understand why this man had had such an affect on me. To get through to me, he had to be more than an ordinary man. He had to be more than a thinker, more than a brilliant mind, more than a teacher of uncommon sophistication. A man with those qualities might have attracted my admiration, but he wouldn’t have captivated me as he did, wouldn’t have broken down my prideful ego. The dreamseller had to be someone who had known the darkest valleys of fear, who had been mired in the morass of psychological and social conflict, who had been torn apart by predators of the mind and been lost in the mazes of madness. And, after surviving all of that, he remade himself with uncommon strength and written a new story based on his own experiences.

This,
this,
is the man I would follow.

His ideas were as incisive as a philosopher’s, and his humor as vibrant as a clown’s. His actions were a paradox, fluctuating between the extremes. He was sought out by icons of society, but he made no distinction between a prostitute and a
puritan, an intellectual and a mental patient. His sensitivity overwhelmed us.

Whenever I saw someone on television being arrested by the police, he would hide his face in an effort to protect his image. The man standing on the stage in front of me wasn’t hiding. I remember what he had said to the psychiatrist at the building where we met—that there were two kinds of insanity, and he had dared to say that his was the visible kind. Now, when his opponents had tried to ambush him inhumanely, he displayed his wounds in front of more than fifty thousand people, unashamed of his past. His honesty was crystal clear.

When I heard him confess that he had betrayed his foundation, my mind was wracked by sociological concepts. Who isn’t a traitor at some point? What puritan is not at some moment immoral to himself? What believer doesn’t at some point betray God with his pride and his underlying desires? What idealist doesn’t betray his beliefs in the name of hidden interests? What person doesn’t betray his health in order to work a few extra hours? Who doesn’t betray sleep by turning his bed into a place of tension? Who doesn’t betray his children for his ambitions, arguing that he’s working for them? Who doesn’t betray his love for his spouse by failing to communicate in his marriage?

We betray science with our absolute truths, betray our students with our inability to listen to them, betray nature with development. As the dreamseller warned us, we betray humanity when we pick up a banner to call ourselves Jews, Palestinians, Americans, Europeans, Chinese, whites, blacks, Christians, Muslims. We are all traitors who desperately need to buy dreams. We all harbor a “Judas” in our mind, a specialist in hiding our true feelings under the carpet of activism, ethics, morality, social justice.

It was as if he were reading my thoughts. He fixed his gaze
on mine and then raised his eyes to the audience.

“My interpretation of that vision—regardless of whether some might call it a hallucination—made me realize that my mental illness started long before I’d lost my family.” He smiled and joked with the crowd. “I warn you, ladies and gentlemen, you’re dealing with someone who’s been crazy for a while, now . . .”

The audience settled into smiles. The emotion of that scene is hard to describe.

“When I realized I’d betrayed my foundations, I had to find out who I really was. That’s when I left the hospital and went off to find myself. It was a long road and I got lost many times on the way. But when I discovered myself, I left my nest and transformed into a delicate swallow, gliding down the streets and avenues, helping others who were also searching for themselves.” And he again demonstrated his sense of humor by saying, “Careful, friends, this craziness is contagious.”

People smiled again and burst into applause, as if breathing in that contagion just as Bartholomew, Barnabas, Jurema and I—and so many others—had. I can still remember the day I was ready to give up on life and the dreamseller recited a poem that resonated with my own foundation. Even now, it echoes in my mind:

Let the day this man was born be struck from the record of time!

Let the dew from the grass of that morning evaporate!

Let the clear blue sky that brought joy to strollers that afternoon be withheld!

Let the night when this man was conceived be stolen by suffering!

Reclaim from that night the glowing stars that dotted the heavens!