The dream island was surrounded by a wall, its upper part encrusted with fragments of broken bottles. It was a pretty common architectural feature in Educación at that time, and I guess it still is: people add a glass crown to their garden walls to deter possible burglars. In my dream, that glass was of the widest range of colors imaginable, like shards of the stained glass windows of ruined churches rather than broken bottles. I was swimming around the whole island—it was very large—and couldn’t find a single spot to access dry land: the wall formed an impassable barrier between myself and that promised paradise. What I remember most clearly is that, in the dream, I was able to see the island from two different perspectives: on the one hand, I viewed it from my situation as a shipwrecked person hoping to come ashore; on the other, I was simultaneously able to take a bird’s-eye view of it from a point fifteen feet above where I was swimming. That periscopic view displayed the walled island in all its splendor: there were trees with red fruit and a pool of thermal waters.
The dream of the walled island passed without any perceptible ending or transition into a different one. The second was also a highly visual dream. I’ve reconstructed and told it innumerable times since that day—possibly unconsciously adding details and interpretations, as often occurs in such cases.
My father is eating something at the dining room table of the house in Educación. I’m standing behind him, so can’t see what he’s eating, although from his movements I can tell that he’s using his hands rather than cutlery. The dining room light flickers two or three times, as happens with all the lights in the house when there’s a storm, just before they cut out completely. I slowly approach my father, hoping not to be discovered. When I’m a couple of feet from him, he turns around abruptly, and I see that he’s eating a pigeon. It might be the plump pigeon in the square that I kicked when I was little, I think, but in fact it could be any pigeon or even any hen: in the dream there’s insufficient detail to clarify that point. What’s important is that the pigeon still has feathers: he’s eating it alive or, at very least, raw and newly sacrificed. Despite the implicit horror, the scene is relatively clinical: there’s no blood, and my father’s expression is completely normal, as if eating a raw pigeon were the most natural thing in the world.
I woke with the sensation that we were stopping, the same sound of the pneumatic system as the doors opened, the cold night air entering the bus. With a mix of embarrassment and surprise, I lifted my head from my neighbor’s lap and moved as far away from her as I could, pressing my face to the cold window.
I had a strange feeling in my guts, a sort of wooziness that I’ve experienced several times since then, but which, that night, on that bus, I was unable to identify. The woman traveling in the seat next to mine had also fallen asleep. I gazed in horror at the parted lips with a glint of saliva in the corners, the eyes closed in what seemed a grimace of pain. When the lights came on in the aisle, the woman slowly opened her eyes, like someone emerging from a deep trance. She looked at me, uncertain of where she was, and in her pupils I could see the passage from sleep to consciousness—as if consciousness were also a light, a light that could be switched on.
In addition to the generalized discomfort in my stomach, I noted a metallic reflux in my mouth, something like the taste of one of those old thousand-peso coins with the face of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. I considered asking the woman beside me for a sip of water, as she seemed to have made preparations for every eventuality, but I felt uneasy about having fallen asleep against her, about having become a vulnerable being—an injured pigeon, a failed origami figure—lying in her lap, so I said nothing and silently hoped that we were making a scheduled stop to buy food (I still had a little of the money Rat had given me).
I looked out the window, expecting to see a gas station, maybe even a bus terminal. I thought that perhaps we were in Villahermosa, that we’d reached our destination hours before we were due, very late at night, and that I’d now have to wait until dawn to board another bus that would take me to Chiapas, where I’d find Mariana and Teresa as soon as I left the terminal. Perhaps my sister and mother were aware that I was on my way and were waiting for me, holding an enormous cake with my name in sugar frosting, eager to see me, glad that the three of us had escaped the tedium of Educación. Glad, most of all, to have escaped from my father: we’d celebrate finally being free of his monstrous ordinariness, his slipper-shod evil intentions.
But outside the window, all I could see was a dusty landscape. Nopals, stones, and spindly bushes suddenly lit—as if discovered in flagrante to be bushes—by passing headlights.
The driver got out of the bus and, through the window, I watched him arguing with three men in military uniforms holding flashlights and opening the luggage compartment. I was relieved to think that I hadn’t brought any bags, as I’d have been worrying about the soldiers stealing them.
From an early age, Teresa had
