How will I survive without you by my side?
Asún had never dared to ask her that question and now that she was not able to hear it, let alone console him with an answer, now he knows why, he knows he had been right to fear what lay ahead if he was ever forced to voice what have turned into the only words that have existed for the last six months: How will I survive without Beatriz by my side?
No other question since the onset of her sudden, devastating illness, just the certainty, repeated endlessly, as if to a mirror inside, that he is lost. It is painful for him to even sit at his desk, be mocked by the promise of a blank piece of paper to be filled, the promise of a pen for his hand to write with, useless to even give it a try.
Even so, inspiration comes, unannounced and unexpected.
One night, in his dreams, as he lay asleep by her barely breathing body in the bed where they had met in so many ways for decade after decade, he was visited by the vision of someone writing. Not Asún, someone else: a man called Ibarra was writing in that dream. Asún saw him there, in a small, murky room in Santiago, saw him as he wrote a letter to his wife. Mariana—yes, that was her name—was in Pisagua, a concentration camp in the far north of the country, a prisoner of the Junta that had seized power some months earlier. Asún’s dream dribbled out the detail that Ibarra had last seen Mariana the day after the coup, when he had abandoned their home for a safe house where the military could not find him. She had stayed behind that dawn, determined to live a normal existence, pretend that her own existence need not be completely interrupted, both of them sure that the men who were hunting down Ibarra would leave her alone.
Asún could have told Ibarra, told Mariana, not to make that mistake. But he could not whisper a word of warning to either of them. The mistake had been made, as irrevocable as Beatriz’s sickness; Asún was as powerless to help them in the dream as he was powerless to save Beatriz when he was awake. As helpless as Ibarra upon learning that Mariana had been arrested in a raid a few hours after he had escaped. Asún eavesdropped on Ibarra’s thoughts, his memory of how he had made love to Mariana the night before he had fled, how they had stayed up late, smoking in bed, speculating whether this time—because their coupling had been so desperate, such a prayer against death—they might have finally conceived a child. The more reason why Ibarra, once he was informed about Mariana’s fate, had been determined to turn himself in, no other way to get those bastards to release his wife.
The comrades at the safe house had restrained him: such a seemingly heroic gesture was futile, yet another stupid miscalculation, would Mariana want him to throw away his life like that? Her captors would keep the wife and shoot the husband, end of story, end of the dream that was lodging inside Asún. It was madness to think of exchanging places with Mariana, Ibarra had to face the fact that he could not save her, Ibarra needed to know it with the same clarity that Asún knew it, blindingly clear in the dream, so clear that it seemed real, as real as the thousands of miles of forbidding distance between Santiago and Pisagua, the impossibility that Ibarra could visit her even if he managed to cross the interminable desierto de Atacama and descend the steep cliffs surrounding Pisagua, even if he was able to creep through the fog to the barbed wire on the edge of the crashing waves in an attempt to catch a glimpse of her silhouette, none of this would come to pass.
All of it undeniable, in the dream. But there was a sort of consolation. The dream had started, after all, with someone, Ibarra, in a room, writing a letter. He had been told by a lawyer that his wife was pregnant. Your wife is desperate to hear from you directly, that’s what the lawyer had said, he’d been allowed to visit Mariana in that damp cell, proof that you are alive, Ibarra, your words are the one thing she needs if she is to deliver the child.
So there was this hope that what Ibarra wrote in Asún’s dream would soon be in Mariana’s hands, assure her that he was out of harm’s way, that today had been better than yesterday, that today he had made some money carrying crates of vegetables at the Vega, and the money was for her and for—but no, he did not mention the baby, only alluded to it in passing, with cryptic, vague words about what she carried inside, the future they had both created, an intimation that such a future existed and—and—how to say goodbye, how to offer solace, how to—
That’s as far as the letter went, as the dream went.
Asún opened his eyes. There was no Ibarra reaching out to Mariana, no Mariana awaiting those words, no child growing towards life. Just this bed in the darkness and Beatriz next to him, impassive, only her breathing an indication that she was alive, only Asún awake in that desolate room, Asún who knew that he needed to act, to write out everything he had dreamt, finish Ibarra’s letter for him, find a way for Ibarra to say goodbye.
The story was still vividly in his mind and it flowed as stories used to when Beatriz was by his side, when she had been ready to correct his exaggerations and missteps, instead of lying in that bed with her eyes shuttered, not even communicating with him by a groan, how could he make sure she was not in pain if she never slipped out a sound, never complained, how to guess what went on in her head, if anything at all went on. And the thought of her, the memory of her, that was enough to make him stop writing, precisely when he had reached the moment when Ibarra, in the frame of the dream, had also been unable to complete the letter, just at that moment, the story he was composing had been interrupted just like the letter itself, like two birds in mid-flight shot down with one bullet, it had been enough to recall Beatriz, the stabbing absence of Beatriz, for the story he was writing and the letter Ibarra was writing to falter, he had to admit that if she was not by his side he could not continue, could not imagine the ending the story deserved, that Ibarra was crying out for and Mariana was demanding. Instead of completing Ibarra’s letter, here he was again, alone with the void left behind by his wife’s ailing body, bereft and defenseless, just as exposed as when Asún had first come into the world. But his mother had been there to welcome him, lullaby him into the canyon of life, and then Beatriz had taken over that song even before his mother had died, and now, and now…
Now there was no redemption, he had forsaken that man who had been writing to his wife across the distance of a harsh desert and the distance of even more implacable guards, Asún had left him there, trapped in the abyss of a letter that required some last essential words to be whole, that man, like him, unable to write another word, both of them shipwrecked in silence, frantic to go on, blocked mercilessly from going on, the scrawled pages left to wither away forever on his desk, unless…
Unless he returned to the dream, submerged himself in sleep again, curled up next to Beatriz and allowed Ibarra, like a specter emerging from the mist, to call out to Asún from within the confines of the dream, challenging him to make one last attempt, and it was not a call that Asún, of all people in the world, could deny. Encouraged, as he draped his arms around his wife’s warm unresponsive body, by the thought of what Beatriz would have said if she had been able to. This story had been a beginning, she would have said, maybe she was sending him this message from some space she still inhabited, a way to start defeating the stillness that had paralyzed him as it had her, the woman who had shared everything with him and now only shared the bed in which she slept without waking and the air they kept breathing together, yes, a beginning, that letter Asún had conceived for the man in Santiago who frantically wanted to reach out to his wife, a miracle had come to Asún in his sleep, and blessed him with language and rhythm after six barren months, and now it was time to summon the courage to go on, listen to the words that were glistening in the dream, his words or Ibarra’s words or the words coming from some unblemished sanctuary inside Beatriz: I have been unable to send forth this message for much too long, and now this has come forth from the night and you should not lose hope that something else will also come, for you and for me.
Asún had awoken with a start. Beatriz had not stirred, the darkness was as unchanged as ever, and even so, there was a glimmer of difference streaming from the light in the next room. It was on. He thought he had clicked off the lamp on the desk, but the hazy luminosity was irrefutable as he stumbled towards his desk, looked down at the scribble of pages he had deserted just a few hours ago and…
What he had heard was not a lie: someone had taken pity on them, had answered their call.
The story had been altered. There were additional words dashed off at the top of each page and in the margins, jottings instantly recognizable as hers, only the delicate fingers of Beatriz could have penned them, Asún identified the slope of her script, the way the ts were crossed and the elegant curve of each s and curlicue, the sort of comment and soft assistance she had always given, the exclamation points, the question marks—recognized and identified that his wife had intervened in the story while he slept, though at the same time he knew it was not possible, knew that never again would her hand extend outwards to his hand to save him from drowning.
And yet, she had somehow been resurrected. There they were, the hints of what Ibarra should write in his letter, what Asún could write in his story, what Mariana was dying to hear in the isolated cell as she imagined the nearby waves that she could not see, the farewell that they all were praying for. Asún could not stifle the tide of joy rising in him, he consented to the illusion, grateful for whatever brief reprieve had been granted him, basked in the false certainty that the story could be completed with his wife’s impossible support, that Ibarra in Santiago would send the letter to Mariana in faraway Pisagua and the letter would help the child see the light of day, however dim and shackled and infernal. In spite of the barbed wire the baby would breathe new air no matter how closed in by wind and sand and bayonets that air might be, his parents were in touch even if they could not touch, Ibarra had sent her the words she could whisper to the child as it arrived, the song from the remote father that told the little one that he was waiting somewhere.
Yes, Asún would indulge in the fantasy for as long as it wanted to last, who was he, after all, to doubt that this had come to pass, he dared to foretell that this was how it would be from now on, dared to hope that his wife had found a way to escape and visit him, that he had somehow deserved this absolution, had opened a portal through no merit of his own, he dared to suppose that Beatriz would discover a path as she always had, that she would not leave him to face alone the demons of solitude. Fooled himself into imagining that the slant and sky of her wisdom would be there, that she would not cease to dispense signposts for this pilgrim adrift in the gathering dark, that she was like a child inside him, inside him as he had deluded himself that she always would be, but it was a lie—oh, don’t say that—there was no child, no voice inside—don’t, don’t say that—only her quiet exhaling and inhaling from the chasm of the sickness filling the other room like a wound in his chest that would never heal.
Because it was beginning to vanish, the story and its ending were beginning to—
Maybe, Asún heartened himself, maybe it was like the fairy tale of the shoemaker and the elves, the duendes who sneak from their nocturnal hideouts to cobble the shoes that the old man could not manage to conclude by himself, maybe his wife was like one of those elves, a pixie maybe or a ghost risen from the shadows, maybe she was dreaming him and sending him messages from the valley of her untold sorrows. Asún clutched onto that hope just as Ibarra somewhere was grasping any straw he could hold on to as the letter faded in front of his very eyes, as Asún realized that it could not be—no, no, don’t go, put me to sleep again—Asún understood that his wife was unconscious, she was in the bedroom boarded up in a world he had no access to, she had withdrawn into a remoteness larger and more arid than the worst desert on earth and no words could cross from one side to the other, she was gone and he was lost, his tongue torn out, blind and unable to write one more word without her.
And it did not matter if he was awake or if this was still the dream, it did not matter if this was fantasy or real, it did not matter if he had forged those comments of hers on the margins of the page or if it had all been a hallucination, all that was left was this piece of paper he was staring at, now even the paper itself waning into nothingness, with no words of his and no scribbled words of help from her, no words to the pregnant woman in prison from the man in Santiago whose name he was already starting to forget, no words of greeting or farewell she would receive or he would send, no future or lullaby for the child, too late to start all over again, all that was left was the truth that he was alone and would never write another word again, now that she was not, and never would be, smiling radiantly by his side.
Somebody else would have to tell this story.
Ariel Dorfman, a Distinguished Emeritus Professor at Duke University, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden and, more recently, the novels Darwin’s Ghosts and The Compensation Bureau.
