It was only a dream, a bad dream, and nothing else.
The man in Vidal’s dream was stalking a woman, spying on her from the shadows, following her down a dark alley as she sought refuge from a downpour. The woman was vaguely familiar to Vidal, though he was too far away to recognize her features, blurred anyway by the swirl of rain and fog, but there was something in how she pressed her body forward, how the hand rose to her hair to toss it defiantly back, something in her voice even if in the dream she was voiceless and unaware of the danger looming behind her, the man who wanted to do her some sort of harm, something worse than just harm.
Vidal had to intervene, knew that he should, that he was responsible in a mysterious way for the fate—or perhaps merely the plight—of that woman, Vidal knew that unless he said a word, stepped into the picture, interjected himself between that strangely familiar woman and that totally unknown man, she would die, yes, the man in the shadows intended to kill her unless Gabriel Vidal acted now, right now.
He did nothing, he could not, somebody by his side—or behind him, a pair of sweet lips behind him, whispering in his ears like a demon—told Vidal that it was useless, the man would not be dissuaded, his drive incessant and merciless, the woman had been condemned and nothing that any spectator could do would alter that. And remember, the lips hushed into him, that you’re not well, the doctor said to take care during your convalescence, Vidal heard those words just as the man slipped something out of his pocket, it was a knife gleaming under the sudden light of a nearby window.
A relief, then, to wake up and realize that it had been no more than a nightmare. Just by opening his eyes, Vidal had foiled the man in his murderous attempt, his eyes like ice and his hands like claws had been unable to continue their assault on that woman, she was unscathed and had managed to escape, had—but wait, and here Vidal laughed to himself as he arduously edged out of bed, wait, there was no need to celebrate her getaway, because the woman did not need to flee and the man did not need to be thwarted, Gabriel Vidal was laughing because neither of them existed, both were the ephemeral product of his fertile, incoherent, nocturnal imagination.
The whole dreadful situation was beginning to fade, would soon be forgotten, just as the thumping of his delicate heart was subsiding, just as his precarious body was no longer sweating from fear.
It was over.
Vidal was back in control.
And so better not to tell Amanda about the incident, the man in the shadows, the woman and her hurried scramble down that murky alley as the deluge fell as if it were the end of all existence, unaware of what was in store for her.
Breakfast was pleasant as always, and the shower the right temperature and the soap suds swept away from his eyes, and the towel soft and clean and comforting, every last wrinkled corner of his body dry and ready for the day, the clothes that Amanda, ever the diligent wife, had bought for him fit perfectly, as they had yesterday and the day before, everything normal. He bundled up, remembered to sneak an extra pair of socks on, protecting feet that were prone to get cold when he sat for too long. Everything exactly as it should be, until he found himself in his armchair, hovered over his manuscript, eager to continue the story he was writing, keep going on from the place where he had left it the previous evening.
Everything exactly as it should be until he took up his pen and glanced at the last sentence he had composed, trying, as always, to gather momentum from the past, an impulse, a push, allow himself, as always, as always, to be propelled forward by the words already consigned to paper, let the story lead him, let the character—
Let the character.
Let the character…
And he stopped, Vidal stopped before writing even one new word, puzzled at the thought that had been forming in his mind.
He had recognized the woman, he knew who she was, that her name was Emma, knew that and much more.
She was the protagonist of the novel he was writing.
Sweet and innocent, reliable and faithful in a world full of misery and deceit and treachery, she was the redeeming angel of his book, the one person destined to put things right, nursing a gleam and glint and glimpse—ah, alliteration!—of hope for the future.
The character he loved best, one he had never tried his hand at before, one clean soul after so many stories mired in rot and filth and cruelty.
Emma would never be caught in a dark alley while the rain poured on her. She had no enemy lurking in the shadows out to slaughter her, would never find herself at the mercy of killer eyes and sharp fingers. The world Vidal had woven around her was not violent. Danger came—it was a phrase he had written, in fact, merely yesterday—from the jungle of the human heart, danger derives from some dark place inside us. We are the ones, Gabriel Vidal had written, who betray ourselves, let the enemy in. We love too much and thus make mistakes.
But no dark alleys in twisted cities, no downpour from a sad sky, no men with hands like cleavers in that country he had imagined, so different from his and its history, so far from what had never been coursing through the streets of the capital where he and Amanda had lived out their uneventful lives.
So no need to worry about Emma’s future.
All Vidal had to do was keep the novel on track, flow the plot towards its gentle conclusion, ignore the false threat that his dream had revealed. Emma was his character, damn it, and he wasn’t going to let a stupid dream interfere with what he had carefully planned for her, this new stage in his own literary career.
Yesterday he had left her at a table outside a café with the sun warming her toes and a cappuccino frothing in front of her lips, the smell of cinnamon rising to her nostrils as she sprinkled the foam liberally, some of that spice fluffing on her blouse. She had licked the cinnamon from her fingers and then nibbled at an almond biscotti, not ready yet to attack the hot beverage, savoring these solitary moments when she could concentrate without interruptions on the odd mystery of life, how things can break so quickly, what she was to reveal to Clara, her best friend, and why and how, the secret that could devastate, or perhaps resurrect, her friend’s existence. A few minutes left till Clara joined her, Emma had purposely given herself a while to make sure she was doing the right thing by what she planned to say to her friend: your husband, Clara, is cheating on you, Ricardo is having an affair. Was it best to injure Clara now with that news rather than let the situation play itself out naturally, without anyone’s outside interference? Because—beware, Emma had said to herself, she had just warned herself on that sunny morning to be careful. We love too much, she had mused, and thus make mistakes. We are the ones who betray ourselves and let the enemy in.
So what came next?
Vidal had determined that Emma, at the first sip of the scalding cappuccino, would understand that she had to refuse to intervene in Clara’s life, she would heed the voice inside—Vidal’s voice, though Emma did not know it—that counseled wariness. Vidal, indeed, had the perfect phrase to smuggle into Emma, so smooth that his character would believe it came straight from her heart: We only mess up someone’s life if we are prepared to pick up the pieces, accompany that person through hell. And if Clara fell apart, well, Emma could not spare the time or energy to nurse and guide her as she recovered, Emma had many other needy people who had come to depend on her to stay sane and out of harm’s way, and there were just so many fires one person, no matter how well-intentioned, could snuff out each day.
And yet now, confronted again with the choice, Vidal wondered if Emma was wrong to keep silent, if she would not be wracked by guilt and sorrow when her friend inevitably discovered her husband’s duplicity on her own. All hell would break loose then, leaving Clara bereft without someone wise by her side to help her control her reaction, think it quietly over, Clara would be like someone struck by a lightning bolt instead of being able, perhaps, to save her marriage, as might be the case if Emma had told her about the infidelity in a secure environment. What if Clara hurt herself or the children out of spite because Emma had not been present to placate her friend’s despair when it erupted? Or what if Clara never found out and vegetated for years with trickles of dishonesty seeping into her hearth and home, furtively poisoning her life, not knowing where the disquiet came from even while suspecting it, as spring water senses when a sewer runs beneath it, close by, feeds into its stream. What to do, what to do?
Vidal took up his pen and put it down again.
He couldn’t decide. Not because anything that Emma did might make matters worse. That always happened to his characters, to all human beings, now that he came to think of it. And not because he had created an impossible moral dilemma for his character in this incomplete novel and didn’t want this woman he was so fond of to make a mistake. No, Vidal couldn’t decide because he was unable to shake the certainty that Emma was in another sort of danger—not to her soul, but to her breathing, pulsating, wondrous lungs. Vidal couldn’t focus on working out a solution, because his brain was swamped with the scene of terror that he had dreamt that very dawn, a few brief hours ago: a man Emma did not know, a man who was also an utter enigma to the author of her days, was about to ambush her body in an alley.
Hold it, hold it, this made no sense: Vidal rejected the very idea that he could be uncertain about how to proceed, hindered by an insubstantial dream. All he had to do, after all, to be rid of that indecision, was to forbid rain from falling on Emma, block her or any of the other characters from ever visiting the seedy parts of the city where such events might transpire, it was a matter of banishing that man and any thought of him from the precincts of Vidal’s fiction, that’s how easy it was to clean his day and Emma’s day of the detritus of that virulence.
“I’m in control here, you son of a bitch,” Vidal growled, only realizing after the venomous words spilled out and echoed emptily in his study that he was talking—out loud, no less—to someone who persisted only in a dream, who could not even boast of having the dignity, the weightier validity, of being a character in somebody’s narration, less than a figment, unworthy of even a sentence, let alone this obsession. Absurd to accord that man any legitimacy, but nevertheless Vidal could not help himself from proving, merely by his ability to speak in the real world, who was the boss: “You can’t kill anybody I’ve created unless I let you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
But that was not true. Vidal could vaunt his power, spit out his conviction, pretend the man did not exist, remind himself that there was no downpour or crime or alleys in Emma’s city. Yes, he could keep Emma at her table warmed by the sun, wiggling her toes and sipping her cappuccino and debating whether to tell her friend the truth or protect Clara by staying silent, but Vidal turning his back on what the dream had revealed did not diminish the reality of that threat, its overwhelming presence.
Something had changed, drastically changed. Inside Vidal, that man was approaching Emma with a knife and she was turning to meet his frozen eyes and starting to understand what was about to happen, Emma knew, Emma knew, that terror was advancing on its own, and until Vidal faced that fact, he would be paralyzed, he couldn’t write one more word, he did not write anything else as the morning limped by.
The shadows in our mind are not so easily dismissed. Hadn’t he written that very phrase a few days ago? Wasn’t he learning that one does not write such words with impunity, that we cannot escape responsibility for what we think, for what we dream?
Yes, Vidal had to deal with that man, deal with him as if he were real, at least as real as Emma.
He was aware of what Amanda would advise: like any author who feels the story is running away from him, just affirm your superiority, turn the tables on any insubordinate character. Yes, that was it, Vidal would introduce that lethal man into the novel, set up a situation forcing Emma to tread that alley—to search for Clara, who did not show up at the café, to persuade Clara’s husband to confess, to retrieve some letters that would compromise Emma’s own dear and faithful husband?—and it is raining and the man approaches and is about to assault her when, as happens so often in life, something unforeseen occurs, say that man slips on the wet and slimy cobblestones, the man nicks himself with his own blade. And Emma, always the good angel, staunches his wound with her dress, tears up the sleeve that still smells of cinnamon to staunch the blood, takes her assailant to a hospital, proves to the man that even someone like him can seek redemption.
No, the man is too powerful, too cunning, too surefooted, too determined to eliminate Emma and anybody like her from their world, too persistent in his evil, to be stopped. And besides, something that arbitrary and fortuitous would ruin the novel, such a lurid twist in the plot would be derided, with all justification, by critics, readers, editors, Vidal’s agent, not to mention Amanda who would look up from the scene with baffled, probably scornful eyes. “You what? You’re destroying your subtle psychological drawing room novel, your homage to Henry James and Madame Bovary and Javier Marías, for this—this—this grade-B trash? Are you out of your mind?”
And the answer, his answer: yes, I am out of my mind, this came from my mind, from out of it and I don’t how to stuff it back into the darkness and crush it and smash it and make it go away, disappear forever, I can’t, I can’t.
Calm down.
Here, then, is my dilemma, Vidal let the thoughts spread out in front of him, like slow blood flowing from a punctured heart: if the man was allowed to enter the novel, if Vidal made that ethical and literary mistake, there would be no barring his autonomous actions, that man would be the king of that universe, his violence would command and terrify the other characters, not only Emma but everyone else who might try to deter him, once gaining access there would be no force on earth or under the earth or above it that could stay that man’s hand. So I won’t be able to control him if I open the door to his shadow, write the words, It began to rain and the alley was dark. But ignoring the man isn’t an option either. Emma doesn’t know he exists and I do, and that makes me responsible for her safety—and every minute I pretend he doesn’t exist makes Emma more vulnerable, leaves her at his mercy with no protection, he draws closer and closer to her.
What if you tell Emma then, alert her to the man, so she can take precautions?
He knew her, she was a holy fool, she would not believe that such a man wished to harm her, perhaps deny that such a specimen might pollute the blessed Earth. Or, worse still, she would be convinced of her own ability to talk him into submission. I have made her too innocent, too gullible, shielded her from the fearful labyrinth of life—oh yes, I have loved her too much and thus made mistakes, I am the one who has left her, like a pampered child, unprepared for this dire future. Vidal could not change her personality, what made her so endearing, her faith in human benevolence, her way of projecting onto others, even those who did not deserve it, her own deep humanity—what, in fact, made her so tempting a target for that man, fed his desire to quash someone precisely like her.
Abandon the novel then? Let some months go by and see if the man grew impatient, wearied of waiting under a rain that would not let up, lost interest in Emma and migrated to some other parallel malicious realm, gave up and smuggled himself into someone else’s dream, someone else’s novel?
But how long would that take?
And in the meantime, wouldn’t the characters in his novel dry up and wither away, Emma and Clara and their husbands and the children who are the ultimate victims of adults blundering through life with their desires and their blindness and their best intentions that always lead to disasters, wouldn’t the whole damn lot lose steam and become desultory from lack of attention, nobody to write or read or imagine them, fade away into blandness, leaving vibrant only that man and his icy cold eyes burning alive in Vidal’s imagination? What if the man’s rage was more durable than Emma’s altruism and search for reconciliation? What if that was the meaning of all this, the message that the man and Vidal’s subconscious were sending the author? I will prevail, your paradise is false, humans are malignant killing machines, always have been, always will be, we’ll never learn, one war does not lead the next generation to peace, there is no permanent ceasefire in the tangled forests of mankind, we are doomed to destroy one another and the oh so blessed Earth as well, the Emmas of the world will fail, every last one of them, a dark alley and hands like claws await her and her kind, and she will not know it and you will not know it and your readers will not know it until it is too late, what if that was the gospel that the man had come to deliver?
A rumble of thunder interrupted Vidal’s depressing meditation, the voice that kept crawling out from inside him.
Soon, he realized, it would start to rain.
Maybe he should go out, wander the town till he stumbled on that alley of his dream, and confronted the man, he must be out there waiting, waiting, waiting, what if the man was but a mirror for himself, for Vidal, what if Emma would recognize him at the last possible moment when her author shoved the blade deep into her heart, wasn’t that man his alter ego, where else could he have come from?
Absurd, Vidal muttered to himself, I really am losing my mind. You must stop giving him this power over you, invading you to the point that you begin to identify with him, become his spokesman. We are the ones who betray ourselves, right, those who let the enemy in…?
I am so thirsty. It must be the promise of rain outside, water calling to water.
Vidal rose from his desk, shuffled into the kitchen, plucked a glass from the cabinet and turned on the faucet, drank rapidly, as if the liquid might disappear before it cleared his throat. Then turned and saw the message from Amanda: she was running errands, darling, might see a friend and enjoy a nice cappuccino, and would be back in the early afternoon, hoped that the writing was coming along and that Emma was in fine spirits, what a lovely woman you’ve created. And also: I’ve made you some soup, Gabriel, your favorite, squash and tomato, both fresh from the garden. And a loaf of bread baked that very morning, I bet your Emma doesn’t cook like I do, she’s too busy saving everybody else.
Just what Vidal needed. Soup and bread and nourishment as well for his distressed soul, a reminder from his pragmatic wife that he possessed a real body, an advantage over that man who could do nothing other than lurk in darkness, that murderer who could not sip and savor the soup or butter the bread and write a love note to his wife, thank her for so much care and consideration and how she had been inching him back to health after his sickness, and telling her that he’d decided to snatch a few hours from the day and take a nap.
Not telling her to be careful now that it was raining, not to venture into any alleys, omit telling her that the writing had not gone well—she would realize it anyway when she saw he had not advanced one sentence from where he had been yesterday, from what he had read to her yesterday. Yes, maybe some sleep was the best remedy.
Also not revealing to Amanda, not wanting to alarm her with the news that this might be the only way out: to go back to the dream, enter the downpour and walk down the alley, interpose himself between Emma and death, save her even if it meant greeting those claws himself, risking his own life so his favorite character could continue on her quest, risking that Amanda would find him, her Gabriel, dead under the blankets, yes, accosting the man and proving to him that his fury would not win the day, not win the wings of the night, that hatred was not eternal, letting the man know that when you love too much you may make mistakes, but nothing is worse than not loving at all, not being willing to give up your own heartbeat for someone you love.
Ariel Dorfman, a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University, is the author of Death and the Maiden and, more recently, Voices from the Other Side of Death. His forthcoming novel is The Suicide Museum.
