Nocturne (English version) Read online

23 - Dreams

  More dreams.

  Martina goes to church. Every Sunday, always. In the front pew she prays with fervour. She prays good God and the merciful Mother. She prays Jesus and the saints. Martina is not Martina, as in the previous dreams, and therefore she does not pray for herself but for that other one. The other that, in the dream, had the indecency to take her place. The one that recognizes me without realizing it, and loves, of a mad and impossible love, the man of God behind the altar.

  Martina is a happy woman, with a happy home and a happy life. Martina feels a genuine affection for her father, who is the most important person in the world for her. He is always beside her. When he gets older, she looks after him until the end of his days, and cries, cries for her beloved father. There is no true love, as many understand it, for Martina the daughter.

  Martina is now alone. Nobody would have said that a beautiful girl like her... She lives with her married sister, at home with her family, protecting the children she never had. She’s their favourite aunt, of course. Especially for the little blond baby, who always wants to climb on her lap and be caressed. Auntie, Auntie! How he loves her. A nephew love, of course. Not that he is so much a nephew. What nonsense! thinks Aunt Martina, young and beautiful. Is it possible that there is nobody in the world whom she can love more than this?

  Martina didn’t tell me about these dreams. She kept them tight, all for herself. That's how she became aware of the effects of the flower. The flower she gave me shortly before the birth: I was so nervous that I unnerved her, and she slipped a few drops of sleep preparation in my tea. So, she said, she could give birth in peace.

  The result was that while Martina was screaming in pain and clutching Malera’s hand – the one in which she wasn’t holding her cigarette – I slept and didn’t see anything.

  No, I lie. I was being born with the Baby.

  Amazing, isn’t it? While Martina gave birth to our child, I dreamed of being born. Being born of a woman I would then love all my life like no other woman can be loved. Me, who wasn’t me. Me, who was a normal child who loves his mom and knows nothing about Viktor. "You are Viktor," I told him. But he didn’t do anything. "And that is Martina." Nothing at all. But I didn’t love her like I was loving her in my life as Viktor. I loved her as a child loves his mother. But more intensely, as if it could overcome everything else. If Martina had been my mother, why should I want anything else? A mother would be enough to make me happy for all my life. Then the child Viktor paced the dusty road travelled by carriage, while his mother bought him an ice cream. She praised him, admired him, from time to time she hugged him close to her. And how good she looked in that dress. Viktor, on the playground with her, was sure he would never need another woman. He would love and care for his mother for the rest of his days. And the other Viktor said, "Martina, what a bad prank. Why? Why have you chosen to be my mommy? I will have to love you in a different way, now.” So mom Martina smiled and wiped melted ice cream from his collar, and Viktor looked at her and forgot the world.

  When I woke up, the Baby had already become Sebastian.

  "Forget about making another one," said Martina, who had bravely waited my awakening to inform me of her decision. Then she fell asleep, exhausted.

  When I told her of the strange dream I had made, she darkened. Something was not convincing. She too remembered having dreamed something like that, when she had started taking her uncle’s remedy for sleep. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  So she decided to make an experiment. Unbeknownst to me, of course; she began to administer to me the extract of white flowers before I went to sleep, putting it in beverages or teas she convinced me to drink before going to bed. Upon awakening, she asked me how I felt and what I had dreamed.

  She wrote down my dreams on a small notebook and fretted more and more: "How odd" I told her "I dreamed of being a farmhand, just arrived in a town, and you were married to someone else! But I brought you away with me. It was morning and there was plenty of light."

  And then I told her of having been, in dreams, brother, confessor, father, nephew. Only after she got this irrefutable feedback, she let me read the account of the dreams she had transcribed time before, substantially identical to those that I had made. Only from a different point of view.

  "What a strange coincidence," I stated. Then I went back to the garden to prune the roses.

  Martina ran after me like a fury, she seemed out of her mind. I did not understand why she was so much agitated. Absurd coincidences happen all the time in every corner of the world. This time one had happened to us. It doesn’t necessarily meant that it meant something.

  "Oh yes. And I'm determined to find out what! "

  She ran into her uncle's dusty old lab and turned it upside down to find the missing part of the manuscript from which she had learned how to make the remedy for sleep, hoping to find an explanation, or at least some feedback.