The Eyelid Read online

  I awoke in a strange bed to find Chevauchet sitting at the foot of it. He appeared to be waiting for me, intent on speaking.

  ‘Do you mind if I lie here and listen to you?’ I asked, hoping to continue drifting in and out of consciousness.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he replied, evidently pleased with my request.

  ‘Sleep, you must know,’ he began, ‘has never been more maligned than in our time. It matters little that its physiological necessity and benefits for health remain scientifically undisputed. Who nowadays applauds the committed sleeper? What employer rewards employees for sleep? Talk about heaven on earth!

  ‘Very few see any merit in sleeping, and those who still do don’t dare admit it. Even health, physical and mental well-being, has its limits. Sleep may be useful in some cases, that is the most anyone is openly willing to give it – such caution has become characteristic of the subject. Anything in excess of the old social norm, the prescribed six hours, is deemed prodigal.

  ‘Why is sleep equated with sloth, with good-for-nothingness? The answer is obvious. For the moment, the economy has not found a way to capture it. Sleep is excessive when it exceeds the bounds of the system, as it invariably does when we dream.

  ‘The system has not yet managed to integrate sleeping subjects for active exploitation, as producers and consumers of goods. It has combatted laziness by filling it with artificial paradises. But it does not know what to do with the odd Saint-Pol-Roux, who declares that his work consists in sleeping. A fool, clearly!

  ‘Almost everyone now sees virtue in insomnia, a word once associated with pathology, with disorder. It is more desirable than all the drugs taken together to make one forget the troubles of this world. Wilful insomniacs may be users, hooked on uppers, but they are more useful than sleepers. Everyone places a premium on awareness, scared of missing something vital to survival. They tell themselves that missing something can be the difference between life and death. There is a reason sleep is a euphemism for death. Sleeping is no longer considered a privilege, a luxury, since hardly anyone these days wants to or can afford it. And as bad as the situation is, it is early days yet. Things will only get worse. Much worse.

  ‘Those in power know that sleep is a time of freedom. Dreams awaken us to the possibility of another world, which can be enough to give us hope for it, if not always a vision of real liberty. Sometimes all we have left is hope. It is then all the more precious. And sometimes we have a wish but no hope of its coming true. Thanks to dreams, the strange glimpses they offer, we have at least a notion of freedom.

  ‘Was there a time when we didn’t dream of better places? Or of a world far from suffering and death? We are utopian animals. The dream of death’s overcoming, of awakening beyond eternal, dreamless sleep, we dream with open eyes. In sleep, we realize it. We close our real eyes to open them again in a dream, where death, which only happens in reality, cannot reach us, where we are unavailable to it.’

  Absorbing his words, I stretched and rubbed my eyes, then looked out the window. It was dawning, and on a pond visible through the glass I discerned a pair of black swans. Farther out, the sails of several windmills turned listlessly, surrounded by cattle, couchant and levant, upon a hill. I could not tell if we were still in the city, at the embassy, or in a house in the countryside. Chevauchet’s voice emerged from within the room, though he himself did not materialize:

  ‘In Onirica, you see, we are asleep and awake at the same time. But we need sleep just as we need waking life. They are inseparable. It is wrong to exploit sleep: to sleep in the service of life, in order to live. It upsets a natural balance.

  ‘As soon as you turn something into a means, its value in itself is put into question. Dreaming for its own sake – without some ulterior motive, some enhancement of life – holds no more worth. You are approaching a state of absolute sleeplessness, without even realizing it, because what you value above everything else is being conscious. The rest – sleeping, dreaming, idleness – seems primitive by comparison, the preserve of unreason, of myth. The way things are going, you will get rid of it all soon enough.’

  Chapter Nine

  If this had been the nineteenth century, the golden age of insurrection, he would have been a professional revolutionary, an agitator of dreams. But in this world where great, sweeping changes could be wrought only by compromise and multilateral co-operation, a world in which dreams were like all other things – for sale, existing only to be fulfilled, and otherwise without the right to exist – he could make himself useful only in diplomacy.

  Chevauchet, ‘ambassador’ of dreams that could be neither bought nor possessed, strictly immaterial, and given away in this form to kindred spirits; dreams that could still be dreamt rather than had, because reality would not have them – aspirations that exceeded it, wishes that ran contrary to it that it would never grant; dreams that not only escaped the frenzied production of simulacra but threatened to lay waste, one idol at a time, to the great marketplace of fantasies. He wanted to bring this illicit, shadow economy into the light by legalizing its source – a ‘republic,’ a place real enough, even if its sole good was involuntary make-believe.

  ‘Real enough’ were his words, not mine. Onirica was real enough for making dreams. These needed reality as much as reality needed them.

  ‘It is thanks to people like you’ – he pointed to me, his slight figure drawn out of the shadows by the pale morning sun – ‘that dream and reality can still communicate.

  ‘Daydreams are my outpost in reality, my embassy. Autumn is when I am busiest. But I keep busy all year round, and lately around the clock. I am lucky to have found you. You say little and you listen. You may be the most dream-prone person I have come across. A natural ally. What you dream of is less important than that you dream and keep dreaming. And here in Onirica, the dream state to which you have followed me, we can talk shop. I am proposing a collaboration.’

  I opened my mouth, but he resumed before I could agree or protest.

  ‘My diplomacy is public, directed not at leaders and senior government officials but at ordinary private citizens, lotus-eaters like yourself. I often meet them on work breaks or solitary strolls in parks, where city people go to dream.

  ‘In parks, fantasy beckons. They have a special charm. By day, greenery, the open air, the sunshine evoke rest. At dusk, the colours come alive, more vibrant than in the movies. After dark, the beds of grass cushion sleeplessness, my bête noire, and the moon casts its shadow plays…’

  Listening to him energized me.

  ‘Yes!’ I ejaculated. ‘I would always rather paint the night white with solitary wanderings than red with trouble!’

  ‘I am glad to hear it,’ he replied, amusedly. ‘But keep in mind there are different shades of red. And different ways of painting it.’

  Chapter Ten

  In the following adventures – as he liked to call them – Chevauchet made himself my Virgil, a genial cicerone through the circles of Hell and along the terraces of Purgatory, raising my hopes of Paradise. The geography of Onirica in no wise resembled the place I remembered reading about in Greek class, at an age when something encountered in a book could still leave an indelible impression.

  It was in a story by Lucian of Samosata, where he recounts his visit to the Isle of Dreams, hē tōn oneirōn nēsos – the same that Homer, in The Odyssey, calls the land of dēmos oneirōn, or dream-people. When first sighted, the island appears ‘dim and uncertain to the eye.’ In this it is much like its inhabitants. Indeed, the closer one came to it, muses Lucian, the more it ‘receded and retired and retreated to a greater distance.’ How such an infinite approach eventually culminates in landfall he does not explain. It just happens, as impossible things often do in dreams.

  Lucian and his companions disembark at dusk in a harbour named Sleep. To reach the city, they must pass through a wood, which surrounds it on all sides. The trees in this forest are enormous poppies and lofty mandrakes, narcotic plants both, and the onl
y birds in it are bats (the call of an owl or the song of a nightingale being too disruptive). Their path takes them past the river Sleepwalker and two springs, Twelve-Hours and Soundly. When they finally enter the city, whose walls are rainbow-coloured, it is through a gate made of ivory, which signifies dreams that deceive, finding no fulfillment in reality. This is but one of four gates, the others being of horn, for dreams that come to pass in reality and inspire action; of iron, and of earthenware, these last meant especially for dreams that are ‘frightful and murderous and revolting.’

  Once inside the city, Lucian’s party admires the temple of Night and the palace of Sleep, the ruler of all dreams, whose two satraps are Nightmare, the son of Vacuity, and Rich, the son of Fancy. A further two temples, dedicated to Trick and to Truth, house their ‘holy of holies and their oracle.’ Finally, in a memorable passage, our Syrian narrator and guest describes the isle’s inhabitants, in all their singularity and diversity:

  Some were tall, handsome, and pleasant to look at, others short and malformed; some seemed rich, while others humble and poor. There were also among them winged and monstrous ones, and others dressed up as kings and gods and the like, as if going to a procession. We actually recognized many, having seen them long ago back where we came from. These came up to us and greeted us like old acquaintances, took us with them, put us to sleep quite splendidly, and entertained us hospitably in their homes. They treated us like lords in every way and even promised to make us kings and satraps. A few of them took us home, gave us a glimpse of our families, and brought us back the same day.

  Onirica had nothing of the solidity, definition, or autonomy of the Isle of Dreams – this despite the fact that, unlike Lucian and his gang, I was shown around by its envoy, an insider set on giving me a guided tour. Two millennia lay between but did not separate our stories. I knew no more than they did what to expect.

  Chapter Eleven

  The day came and went, its hours unaccounted for, and before long, evening was upon us again. Darkness, rather than descending in its usual curtainfall fashion, seeped in from below like India ink, absorbed by the landscape. It was time to go, for the park was about to close, and it would be a nuisance if municipal keys were to lock us in.

  ‘Is anyone expecting you?’ Chevauchet asked, more out of politeness, seeing I was in no obvious hurry to part ways. At my negative reply, he visibly perked up.

  ‘Come then,’ he said, getting up from our bench. ‘I have something less run-of-the-mill to offer than a café, and at no cost. Does seeing inside other people’s dreams appeal to you?’

  I voiced my reservations: was it not too intrusive, a breach of privacy, even if it were nowhere explicitly prohibited as trespassing? He dispelled my worries with a critique of privacy as a bourgeois invention.

  ‘Of course, I cannot guarantee tonight will be a great show. But we won’t know what that is unless we see what’s playing. By the way, no oneiroscopes required!’

  We walked the perimeter of the lake, which shone in the moonlight like a Claude glass. As we passed the grotto with its cascade on our way to the exit, it suddenly felt as if we had crossed an invisible threshold. And right then, I saw, hovering like a hologram and spotlit as on a stage a few paces ahead of me, a young man kneeling beside the bed of a girl, who was sleeping.

  ‘A dream of love,’ whispered Chevauchet.

  The scene and the man’s comportment did indeed suggest ardent emotion, a love-melancholy fired by loss. The pallor of his beloved hinted she was on her deathbed. He held her hand, frowned, then wept. Only love can come this close to death without flinching. I saw his desire for union with her throwing a bridge over the chasm now dividing them to a life together beyond the grave.

  He was offering the girl a rose. Its thorns were making him bleed. He tried handling it through a sheet, but this was too fine not to be pierced as well. Was his love a rose that hurt him unawares? One he had not learned to handle without pain? Was the blushing and prickly flower supposed to bring her back to life, return her to herself? Or was it a farewell? He seemed to me less a masochist than a knight, with his flowering chivalry.

  ‘They don’t make them that way anymore,’ said Chevauchet, as if reading my mind. The lover’s love was stronger than his lust, his devotion stronger than his passion. The worm was no match for him. These thoughts came to me telepathically, vicariously.

  I knew also, though I could not say how, that this was the selfsame rose he had refused to purchase from an insistent peddler, who kept lowering the price until, more in mockery than frustration, he threw it away. The young man felt insulted, put to shame by the beggar. And she, what did she see? In that red rose she must have seen herself. And the rose he was presenting to her now, when it was too late, was less a declaration of his feelings than a token of his regret, a confession of guilt. He did not love her enough. The drops of blood from his fingers stained the bedclothes, while his tears left no trace. Did he blame himself for losing her?

  And by a rose, as if by free association, we passed into a dream-vision of socialism. Its older floral symbol, still wedded to the International Workers’ Day, was the carnation. But, as I found out from Chevauchet, the rose and the love of freedom and equality had a much longer and richer history together. The flower meant secrecy, resistance, and, speaking with its thorns, opposition to unjust authority. I shall make you suffer if you lay your hands on me, it seemed to say.

  The rose we saw said nothing, and instead of thorns was possessed of two red fists, which it brought down furiously upon a tortoise shell, great and detailed as a world in miniature. The tortoise had managed to duck and hide its head; it was safe from the blows. And as the rose kept pummelling away, to no apparent avail, its fists became bloody like hunks of meat on spits.

  I could no longer bear the sight of blood. Why were night-dreams so violent, even when they were about love?

  Chapter Twelve

  Our next stop was along the same trajectory, but in territory that was new to me.

  ‘Onirica’s Avenue des Cauchemars,’ announced Chevauchet. As its name implied, a favourite setting for nightmares.

  We trod the littered pavement, rats scurrying to every side from overturned dumpsters and groans issuing from the tenements – timeless urban scenery, in which the props change little.

  ‘Dreams of dread,’ he resumed, taking up a by-now- familiar thread, ‘are like a dream within a dream within a dream. The trace of pre-existing fear intensifies to the point of conjuring for itself a cause, which incites still greater fright, surpassing that cause, and so on.’

  One of its victims, explained Chevauchet as we climbed several steep flights of back stairs, lived with his family in the attic of this building (his parents being entertainers). He had observed the little boy earlier that afternoon, inconsolable, having just suffered one of those infantile misfortunes for which poverty is most to blame: his jam sandwich had fallen face down on the kitchen terracotta – the ubiquitous hexagonal tiles his father christened ‘the Frances of Roaches.’ Chevauchet expected this episode to colour the boy’s dreams that night.

  We approached. By now the boy was breathing like one fast asleep. And in his dream he found himself just outside his apartment. He was there because his father was rehearsing his flea circus, while his mother sang. The zigzag of the corridor, which he was still too little to explore alone right to the end, gave him the creeps. He stood on the landing and stared fixedly into the dark hallway when his fear got the better of him.

  Rolling languidly through the shadows, past the six or seven chambres de bonne where his neighbours lived, past the recessed common sink and the gas and water conduits trained on an espalier like ivy, through the dense cigarette smoke snaking toward him between bannister posts, quite close now, was the head of the giant Goliath, its course marked by a trail of slime and blood. Seeing it, the boy became rooted to the spot, petrified by the gruesome apparition. Then, snapping out of it, he screamed and fell back, and as he began falling d
own the stairwell, he awoke with a gasp. We stood by, waiting until he was asleep again. He sensed nothing of our presence.

  The next dream cycle, still under the sign of nightmares, was a variation on this theme. The boy dreamt of sleeping in a large hall, the foyer of a mansion, or maybe a skyscraper. In his dream, he had just grasped his dire situation: he was in the dark all by himself. He pulled the blanket over his ears. Suddenly, he felt, or imagined feeling, a strange hand cross the bed toward him like a great spider. Not knowing where to turn, he cowered and began howling – Awwoooooo! awwoooooo! awwoooooo! Awwooooo! – sounds a cartoon wolf makes, so pitiful were they.

  It did not help that the hand now belonged to a deaf-blind gentleman who had lost his cane, and all his bearings in effect, and so deserved pity himself. The bed was his life-line, human contact his only hope. And it seemed obvious somehow that when his tremulous fingers finally touched the boy, they would become the boy’s, yet experienced – impossibly – as those of a stranger.

  Awwooooo! Awwoooo! the little wolf went on hysterically, lacking the power of discernment, unable to hear anything but his own distress. Feeling sorry for him, covering my ears – I really could stand no more of the child’s lament, and imagined his terror when the tenacious hand took hold of him – I urged us on, desperate by that point for a change of scene.

  At this, Chevauchet made a gesture as if pushing aside a veil, and we passed quickly through a sort of hall of dreams that reminded me a lot of dioramas, or what they used to call entre-sorts, except that they were live. We left one and, still impressed by its forms and colours, directly stepped into another, which revealed itself like a slide projection, a fresh backdrop, or an old layer of wallpaper. The scenes we left behind continued playing, as it were, sans audience, in the privacy of their dreamers, while the scenes we set foot in unfolded around us like the pages of a pop-up book. But since we did not stop for quite a while, we were moving through them as they kept moving, so that our way of seeing was unlike taking in a film or a conventional piece of theatre.