Of dreams

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.” - Jorge Luis Borges. “The Threatened”, from The Book of Sand [ El Libro de arena]
 
I had always imagined my life thus far to be a wry variant of metafiction. I lived books. I lived the words I read and I respired them, the ink blots fusing to form alternate worlds all settled in my lungs and bred with my atoms. Being such an invested participant in literature, it is really no wonder I became a scholar of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. He wrote of simultaneous futures, of forking paths and of labyrinths, of magical realism infused in the quotidian. He manifested the world as it appeared through my kaleidoscope eyes.
             I am not yet sure if meeting her was an emulation of the dream or the rupture that sundered the dream forever.  I remember seeing her for several mornings before we actually spoke. Café Las Violetas, on Avenida Rivadavia, Buenos Aires. They came to know me there very quickly.  I was the twentysomething American  who sat in the same table near the window each time and rotated between two drinks ( un cappuccino or un espresso por favor): always surrounded by my usual entourage- that is, a variation of feverishly annotated, dog-eared texts and ink-stained journals.
            I think I only noticed her because of the euphony of her footsteps.
             (My mind worked in a series of unfathomable mechanics that to this day baffles me. I was constantly navigating the world as if it were a maze. Ambiguity is thy name, an un-amused former girlfriend had once said to me. A real fucking living paradox you are, Cameron. She took an emphatic drag from her cigarette and I said Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?)
            Her walk…it sounded like spring rain on dampened April soil. Tender  soft-lipped passion.
She gingerly touched her feet to the ground, her spry cocoa  legs extending like Degas’ ballerina’s. She walked right up to the counter and asked for un café con leche y una media luna por favor.
            She was wearing what appeared to be a private school uniform. She coquettishly puckered her lips and blew on a stray piece of caramel hair, revealing a fey-like countenance and azure eyes. I shuddered imagining the heat of her breath. And she left, with her languid lilting footsteps.
            My mornings became marked by her ephemeral visits- it was as if the upper left chamber of my heart calculated the precisions of her movements. She was the cadence to my pulsations.
            It was the seventeenth morning. As always, I was entwined in the limbs of my latest textual endeavor, a deconstructionist analysis of Borges’ Ficciones. There was a singular phrase I highlighted and re- wrote endlessly:” A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.” I must have repeated it out loud to myself quite a few times. It was quite consuming, actually. Which is why I didn’t notice her approaching me.
            “You should be careful. People start to get suspicious when a young gringo sits alone in a café muttering riddles to himself.”
A demi-mirage? It appeared to actually be her, she of the mellifluous gait, standing before me- hair in a tousle, leather bag slung over slender shoulder, coffee and pastry in hand, eyes infused with cerulean ardor.
            I somehow pulled some words from my chasmal larynx.
“It’s not quite a riddle, per se,” I replied. “It’s a line from a story by Borges, called”-
“The Garden of Forking Paths,” she responded in her lyrical accent. “We just read that in Literatura Avanzada. Really perplexing, yes? I was not entirely enamored with it.”
            I realized she was now sitting right across from me, taking bites from  her media luna and looking expectantly in my direction.
            “What are you reading that for anyway? Are you a literature major at the university?”
            I shook my head, attempting to mask the incredulity that my morning chimera was sitting a mere heart’s tremble away.
            “I graduated from the University of Chicago two years ago. I’m working on a book about  the life and works of Borges, and I got a grant from my graduate program at Brown to study under one of the professors here for a year  to supplement my research. I’ve been here for a month so far.”
            “You’re American,” she stated spartanly. Before I had the chance to reply, she added, “Americans are always enraptured by Borgesian phenomenology. Russians, too, incidentally. ”
            “You don’t find it interesting?”
She arched her back and drummed her fingers pensively.
“It’s not that I don’t find it fascinating,” she finally said. “I really do. It’s just a matter of personal taste, I suppose. Borges is about consciousness, about imagination and delving into the psyche. It’s about finding missing pieces and navigating your way through abstractions. It’s all very interesting. But when I read it, I don’t feel much. It’s all cognitive, not sentient. And I think that reading should do more than make you think.”
            An Innocent Reader, I thought to myself.
“I definitely agree that he isn’t the great romantic. But I don’t think that it’s completely fair to say that his works are pure cognition. Take “Funes, the Memorious’, for instance. Have you read that one?”
            She half-nodded. “I think so- that’s the one about the man with the supernatural memory, right? He can painstakingly recall every minute detail he’s ever encountered, but lacks the ability to make generalizations and form abstractions- including love. He’s tormented by his genius.”
            “Exactly. It’s tragic. That such a form of genius comes at an immense cost. And The House of Asterion?”
            “That’s the bull one, right?”
“Right you are. The Minotaur, to be exact. He spends his days in solitude, just running around the corridors of a maze- he sees his reflection and pretends that another minotaur has come to visit him. How is that not heartbreaking?”
She sighed. “You’re right. I guess what I’m talking about is love. I want to read about love. I think that love is what makes one human. That’s why I like Neruda’s poems, and Nabakov and Marukami’s novels, and even Kerouac delves into love. Life is a love story. Life is a fiction.”
            I was speechless.
            Life is a love story. Life is a fiction.
            She was my missing character.
She continued. “I guess I’m just waiting for my love story.” Her eyes flickered.
“I’m Camila Julieta by the way. But really just Julieta. Julieta Errante. ”
             ” Cameron. Paradiso.”
Julieta ( foreign vibration of that name delicious upon my tongue) cocked her head.
            “Where did you say you were from, Senor Paradiso?”.
            “I didn’t. I grew up in Manhattan, went to college in Chicago and last year I moved to Providence, Rhode Island to start my graduate degree at Brown. And now I’m here. Are you from Buenos Aires?”
            She laughed. “Of course. I’ve never lived anywhere else my entire life. My father even wants me to stay and go to the University of Buenos Aires next year. It’s one of the best schools in the continent, but I want to travel. Get experience. Paris, maybe. Or Madrid. Maybe Venice. Anywhere with a beautiful name.”
            I nodded. “Wanderlust has always been one of my greatest vices.”
            Julieta smiled wanly. “Do you ever write fiction of your own, Cameron Paradiso? Or do you just analyze it?”
             “I also believe that life can be an odd sort of fiction,” I replied. “It’s like an intertext- a novel comprised of bits and pieces of stories you pick up along the way. But as for writing my own short stories… I had write some in a few creative writing classes in college, and I suppose they were good, but the main problem was they were all the same. They all involved a puzzle of some sort,” I recounted.
            “No love stories?” She leaned back in her chair, and I could tell she was teasing me.
            “Not in the traditional sense, I suppose. But sort of. My love life was always a maze.”
            This made her laugh. Effervescent ethereal.
“I’ve had silly infatuated boyfriends in garage bands who wrote me love songs and scribbled off-rhythm sonnets on napkins. One even gave me a nice little bruise. But,” and she sighed “No written story.”
            I shrugged. “I just couldn’t write it. I’ve  been in love, I think. Not great passion, but I’ve cared about a girl before. I just couldn’t put it into writing. I guess it just wasn’t ready to be worked into my story yet.”
            Julieta grinned and stood up. “I have school. It was lovely to meet you, Mr. Ficciones.”
            Exeunt. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Is this accurate? Reality is not always probable, or likely. Life is a moving, scintillating narrative. We construct the story as we go along: does that make it true or does that make it a dream? Neither? Both? It seems to me that the objects of my affections are the closest things to fixed points in my own interior galaxy. I know I love you, and soon little else becomes relevant or reliable. Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time. The ticking of a clock is replaced by your in take and out take of breaths.
            “Put your pen down, silly.” Pause, your arms folded over bare chest. “Look, it’s raining outside.”  
            Droplets streak down the window pane, my fingers trace your spine.
            I roll over to your side of the bed and kiss the side of your neck. Julieta of the symphonic saunter, this is your love story, my dear. Even though it is  wholly and completely true. 
 
***The writer’s interview with The New Yorker
 
TNY: This story covers a lot of ground. Can you briefly give some background as to what inspired you to write it?
 
AC: I visited Buenos Aires last March with my family and fell in love with it, so I knew that’s where I wanted my story to be set. It’s such an interesting city because of the amalgamation of European and South American values. I also studied Borges last year in my AP Literature class and he has become one of my favorite writers, so I wanted to incorporate his works into this story as well.
 
TNY:Can you explain some background about Borges and his works, for those who may not be familiar?
AC: Jorge Luis Borges is said to be the greatest Latin American writer. He is certainly the most well-known outside of South America. He wrote mostly short stories and poems, and developed a theme called magical realism- basically the fact that surreal events are part of everyday life. His short stories are all sort of like maps or puzzles, with things to decipher along the way.
 
AC: TNY:What’s the significance of all the mentions of labyrinths and mazes?
Two reasons. First off, it’s an allusion to a collection of short stories by Borges called Labyrinths, with maps and mazes being a key theme. The other reason is because I wanted to have a symbol that tied together Cameron’s navigating his way through life and the more universal notion of physically travelling.
 
TNY: What are some other direct allusions, literary or otherwise, you make here?
 
AC: Well, I loosely based the idea of life being a dream or fiction off of Marukami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, as well as the “Right, Right you are” line.. Cameron’s response to his unnamed ex-girlfriend ( Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so) is a reference to the last line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: I wanted to do this to try and embody Jake Barnes’ ironic quips into Cameron’s personality, and also to try and help the reader make a link between Cameron’s unsuccessful relationship and Jake’s hopelessness in relationships. Cameron’s last name, Paradiso, is an allusion to On The Road’s Sal Paradise: I wanted to secure the theme that he was constantly travelling and searching, and like Sal he is a writer. Julieta’s name is also literary: Camila is a loose reference to Camille from On the Road, to try and supplement the vague reference Julieta makes to being abused…I wanted to try and portray her as a hopeless romantic who still hopes for the best despite being let down. And obviously Julieta refers to Shakespeare’s Juliet, an age-old symbol of true love and romanticism.
 
TNY: Anything else?
AC: I use some lines from other works towards the end. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are players” is from Shakespeare’s As You like It. There two direct quotes from Borges: “Reality is not always probable, or likely” and “Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
 
TNY: Are there any works that inspired your story but were not directly referenced?
 AC: I think that the idea of Cameron watching Julieta and admiring her beauty is very reminiscent of Death in Venice. Just like Aschenbach wathed Tadzio walk by him every day, and admiring him as if he’s a work of art, Cameron observes Julieta very closely and compares her a work of art, Degas’ paintings of the ballerinas. Also, one of the reasons Aschenbach loves Tadzio’s name is because of how exotic sounding it is, which I also referenced with Cameron. I was inspired by Death in Venice and Sputnik Sweetheart to create the themes of the nature of writing and life as if it were a story or work of art that is constructed. I used the idea of an intertext that Cameron and Julieta discuss- the combination of all different stories and writings, just as life itself is made up of collective experiences and observations.
 
TNY: What were you hoping to convey about Cameron and his ability or inability to love?
I just wanted to show that prior to meeting Juliet, Cameron still believed that life was a sort of story, but his personal story was lacking a main element. And that element is love, or a special interpersonal relationship. That’s why he constantly felt like he was travelling through a maze. He couldn’t write about love because as he said, it wasn’t a part of his story yet. And then Julieta made it a part of his story.
 
TNY: Why did you jump from their first meeting to a seemingly developed relationship?
It’s a story. Boy meets girl. Simple as that.
 
TNY: What is the reader supposed to make of the meta-fictitious twist at the end of the story?
 
AC: Whatever they want, really. To decide for themselves if life is a story, and is a story necessarily true or not true? It was supposed to invoke thoughts about the nature of life and creativity, of realism and surrealism. Not necessarily to provide an answer. There really isn’t one.