TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Rodrigo Fresán

pour in courtesy of the gothic fantasies of his flamboyant sister have allowed him this and so many other whims) walls torn down and hallways fit with rails and stairways turned to ramps and a complex invention woven with steel cables and pulleys that carries him here and there without ever needing to get up. Like in the old comics about the sleepyhead Little Nemo.

His bed moves.

His bed travels.

The sheets like sails, the pillows like clouds where gulls get tangled and can only escape by leaving behind their feather suits, and his memories like a voyage across mutinous waves that he shouts at from the command bridge. And they pretend to obey him. From his bed, the world is horizontal like a beach where, lying down, he walks in reverse, backward, burying his feet again in the sandy echo of his own footsteps. Some of them still appear clearly defined, others have almost been erased by the tide. But even still, he can see them with his eyes closed, he can feel them still fresh, easy to trace and to be used like the dotted lines on those maps that lead you to the site of the original treasure. And this is the moment when he would be forced to offer some specifics. The latitude and longitude from where he thinks all of this, for example. But, sorry, he never liked that almost reflexive gesture of the supposedly realist novels of his childhood. The almost obligatory need to situate everything (to plant and germinate the stage of a world) before the characters can begin to play their parts. Because reality isn’t like that; it doesn’t obey such strict orders or fall in, disciplined, like battalions preparing 208