TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

The Dreamed Part (novel excerpt) by Rodrigo Fresán Translated from Spanish byWill Vanderhyden

The bed is always the scene of the crime, of the crimes.

You were born there. You reproduce there. You die (if you’re lucky and after catching a glimpse in one corner of the room the hallucination of a “horrible big fat woman dressed in black,” or of that hallucinatory “distinguished thing,” or of “a certain butterfly already on the wing,” or of an indefinite “What’s that? Does my face look strange?”: Proust, James, Nabokov, Stevenson) there. There—like he is now—you are, alone and staring at the ceiling. Often the ceilings over hospitable yet restless hotel beds (though it be one of those luxury hotels that includes a menu of pillows of varying taste and texture) where you never sleep all that well. Because it’s been discovered, based on neurological readings, that, between unfamiliar sheets, the left hemisphere remains alert and atavistic in the face of the unknown. There, if possible, youawait sleep, lying onyour side (because they claim that this position helps to frighten off neurodegenerative diseases) in the fetal position from which, they recommend, we should stretch ourselves out with power and enthusiasm when we rise, so our day expands with health and doesn’t stagnate in a passive and embryonic and even aborted attitude. There you end up understanding that it’s far healthier and better to sleep alone than in more or less good or bad company (the statistics reveal that men sleep better with company and women 193