TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

The Dreamed Part

Or they will never have the experience of watching a movie alone and having it seemdreadful and watching it later with their child and, commenting on it aloud while chewing popcorn, having it transform into something ingenious, into one of the best movies in the cinema of life. Also, all of them, childrenless children, are far more infantile beings than those who have infants in the vicinity: they are more afraid of the dark, the shadows that move, the death that approaches. And they end up wondering—like when theywere little—where all those children that fill the streets and come out of schools with uniforms and barbaric manners come from. And, of course, childrenwithout children sleepmuch worse; because they have never helped anyone sleep better. But he did. He was of some help. He helped put Penelope’s son to sleep while struggling not to fall asleep himself. He sang stories and told songs tothat littleboywhowasn’t his son, butwhowas the closest thing to having a son therewas, the closest thing to having a son he had. But that was a period in his life (a thousandth of a second in cosmological terms) that didn’t last long. A time that no longer is and that he remembers less and less; that has forced him to live forgetting, because it hurts and frightens him and because it makes him think that, if he ever sleeps again, maybe it will be to dreamof the little boy. Penelope’s son appearing to him as something immense, like the sun and, at the same time, like a gray cloud obscuring the sun; like the light and the black hole that devours everything and transforms it into the most alive of dead energies, into the most solid of antimatter. Lost in space. But it’s an unfounded fear: his very occasional sleep—a verb in his case, lacking verbosity—is not long or deep enough to generate dreams. Now, for too long, his sleep has been reduced to sudden and brief and sporadic naps (interrupted with a start, with a 199