shit kicked out of me, like in that dream when I stayed asleep, blood in my eyes, knees to my face, and yet I canât stay seated throughout the day without perspiring, without my eyes burning and my tongue turning into cloth. Much less read.) Cross off Friday, full moon falling and buried, total darkness, and thatâs how it should be, get used to it.
In last nightâs dream, Alicia opened her legs for me in a white room. J led me by the hand up the street toward Cerro Santa LucÃa, we lay down on the dry grass; Alicia and I were naked, we couldnât keep from clawing each otherâs skin, I could barely breathe through her biting. I clung to both of them desperately, but neither of them was who they seemed to be: Alicia had that particular taste of cigarettes that belonged to J; Jâs smile verged on foolishness and malice, like Aliciaâs. I prefer to write it like this: confusion, amalgamation, I donât want either of them except in pieces. Aliciaâs ears, Jâs mouth, Aliciaâs hands, her eyes, Jâs chin and torso, Aliciaâs hair, again her eyes. The hours go by so fast and are so false, itâs stupid to stay up late when I have a tower of books waiting for me. Dreams donât matter either, I dream on the surface and thousands of images pass me by without stopping, I donât laugh or cry, I recognize none of the faces that brush up against me. I wake with the certainty that Iâve been up for three days.
            August 30 th
Physically exhausted and mentally ebullient. Absorbed. And I dream: again I find myself in the middle of a classroom at the university, all the desks are empty. Next to me a certain professor is waiting for the rest of the students to arrive, he gives me a friendly look and asks me questions: why do I think attendance is so low, are his lectures inadequate. As usual, I get ready to tell a half-truth, âyou lack a certain profundity that approximatessomething literary, but weâre not really capable of expecting much anyway.â The scene is nothing more than a replica of everyday life; this is something that actually happens to me, I show up too early or move too slowly, such that, when I go to pick up J, I have to wait for her and converse with her father in the living room; or when I drop her off, we take so long saying goodbye that we wake up her little brother or run into her parents coming home from a dinner, a little drunk (them or me), and engage in these bizarre but fraught exchanges about how late or how early we are. The same thing happens to me with my professors, Iâm often the first student to arrive, the only one who shows up on time; I greet the professor with a false smile and he takes advantage of the unanticipated intimacy to ask me questions.
Later in the dream we are finishing up a class on some author. The professor has entered into the nervous part of his monologue when he repeats the main ideas in different words, hoping that the charitable voice of some student will offer an opinion or interesting questionâhe never knows whether heâll have to end class early. In the end, the professor is quiet, frustrated. Just then, someone questions the typology of the novelâs spaces. Your ideas are plausible, says the professor, but we canât know whether theyâre true, because they involve projecting ourselves beyond the text, to speculate about the coupleâs future, which the author denies us in the moment he writes the word âend.â (It seems that I was thinking [in the dream I was thinking, parallel to that discussion], about how the novel was unfair to me, its faithful reader. What happens if I want to follow the day-to-day life of a character who fascinates me, is it possible that I donât have the right to know if, in Coronation , Mario and Estela manage to escape poverty, makea family, raise a beautiful daughter? But Estela is
In last nightâs dream, Alicia opened her legs for me in a white room. J led me by the hand up the street toward Cerro Santa LucÃa, we lay down on the dry grass; Alicia and I were naked, we couldnât keep from clawing each otherâs skin, I could barely breathe through her biting. I clung to both of them desperately, but neither of them was who they seemed to be: Alicia had that particular taste of cigarettes that belonged to J; Jâs smile verged on foolishness and malice, like Aliciaâs. I prefer to write it like this: confusion, amalgamation, I donât want either of them except in pieces. Aliciaâs ears, Jâs mouth, Aliciaâs hands, her eyes, Jâs chin and torso, Aliciaâs hair, again her eyes. The hours go by so fast and are so false, itâs stupid to stay up late when I have a tower of books waiting for me. Dreams donât matter either, I dream on the surface and thousands of images pass me by without stopping, I donât laugh or cry, I recognize none of the faces that brush up against me. I wake with the certainty that Iâve been up for three days.
            August 30 th
Physically exhausted and mentally ebullient. Absorbed. And I dream: again I find myself in the middle of a classroom at the university, all the desks are empty. Next to me a certain professor is waiting for the rest of the students to arrive, he gives me a friendly look and asks me questions: why do I think attendance is so low, are his lectures inadequate. As usual, I get ready to tell a half-truth, âyou lack a certain profundity that approximatessomething literary, but weâre not really capable of expecting much anyway.â The scene is nothing more than a replica of everyday life; this is something that actually happens to me, I show up too early or move too slowly, such that, when I go to pick up J, I have to wait for her and converse with her father in the living room; or when I drop her off, we take so long saying goodbye that we wake up her little brother or run into her parents coming home from a dinner, a little drunk (them or me), and engage in these bizarre but fraught exchanges about how late or how early we are. The same thing happens to me with my professors, Iâm often the first student to arrive, the only one who shows up on time; I greet the professor with a false smile and he takes advantage of the unanticipated intimacy to ask me questions.
Later in the dream we are finishing up a class on some author. The professor has entered into the nervous part of his monologue when he repeats the main ideas in different words, hoping that the charitable voice of some student will offer an opinion or interesting questionâhe never knows whether heâll have to end class early. In the end, the professor is quiet, frustrated. Just then, someone questions the typology of the novelâs spaces. Your ideas are plausible, says the professor, but we canât know whether theyâre true, because they involve projecting ourselves beyond the text, to speculate about the coupleâs future, which the author denies us in the moment he writes the word âend.â (It seems that I was thinking [in the dream I was thinking, parallel to that discussion], about how the novel was unfair to me, its faithful reader. What happens if I want to follow the day-to-day life of a character who fascinates me, is it possible that I donât have the right to know if, in Coronation , Mario and Estela manage to escape poverty, makea family, raise a beautiful daughter? But Estela is
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