PUPPETS

Chapter 1: "The prisoner"

Dream 1

I still think about her, but there’s nothing I can do now. She still asks for my heart and my dimmed thoughts with her breath-stretching voice, but I have let the moment pass. I have moved away from her without a reason, in the same way that an idiot would, telling her lies and stupidities that she would believe and which would chain her to a place that I will never be able to reach. The friends have gone away from my hand just like the opportunities… just as my yearnings. I have remained alone in the total shade. Nobody comes; nobody goes… everybody is gone. My days are alone without me, they are lost in a succession of dawns and declines; there is no being that would appropriate them.

In this succession of events, I have traded my eagerness for cruel weeping. I have passed many long nights without closing my eyes, with tears that have been cried for friends, for solitude and for her. One suspicious voice within my head wants me to think about her; it tells me that I still love her, and then it strikes at me like a cold and hard steel fist. One day, while I was waiting for the night to arrive and go as I usually do —fighting against the insomnia and the voice in my head, with my eyes as red as the twilight’s light—, I fell into a deep dream that carried me to this strange place where everything happens according to the desires of an insane god.

***

I appeared in a dark place with a wooden floor that exposed my creaking steps. A subject wearing an elegant black swallow-tail coat stood with his back towards me. I could not see anything else than his long silhouette, which was as thin as the one of a famished man, and his black top hat. A vague, tenuous light came from an unknown place and went to nowhere; it was so weak that I almost couldn’t notice my blinkings. I followed the man approximately ten steps until he turned to me without looking at me and I could contemplate him entirely.

His eyes were so black that it was impossible to distinguish between iris and pupil. His skin was so clear and pale that it seemed translucent. I could see his snub nose, his disdainful and sarcastic smile, and his blackened hair — it was so long and straight it reached his chin—. His fine frock made him look presumptuous, but important. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a concert grand pianoforte and a bench appeared, and he sat down. Immediately afterwards, He took away his white gloves to play a Chopin’s Mazurka. When he finished, he continued with a second Chopin’s Mazurka. I armed myself with the audacity to ask him something… anything; but a strong “shhhh” interrupted to me.

Thousands of puppets materialized around me as if they had fallen from the extensive emptiness that I could have called sky. There were gentlemen and ladies, girls and boys, clowns and mimes, fairies and deformations: all were small puppets that hung from threads and measured no more than thirty centimeters. They all were dressed in pale and contrasting colors, dirty, mistreated and aged. They spoke among themselves and smiled to me with their delicate mouths. They danced following to the rhythm of the tenth Chopin’s Mazurka.

I saw a small, white light in the distance; it was hypnotizing at glance. I moved forward towards it; the more I approached, the more the marionettes hindered my way with their dance of the Chopin’s twenty-eighth Mazurka. After thirty seven steps, I was close enough to see that the white light was a woman curled up in the floor. She wore a dress with colors similar to the forest. Her hair was very white, but was not old; she was as charming as a rising star in that darkness.

The puppets stopped from pretending they were dancing Chopin’s thirty-fourth Mazurka and began to attack to me deliberately. They jumped me with pinches, bites, knocks and scratches. They clung to my legs in order to not let me advance. And I, with an unbearable desire to approach her, cleared them of my body, striking them, breaking them into several pieces. Scared, those marionettes moved away of me.

There she was: her face submerged in the midst of her knees, dozing in thoughts— I wondered who would know them—. I put my arm around her waist and she felt like any pretty lady, warm and slender; the only human one among the monsters of that world. She glanced upwards and I could see that face: her face. Her eyes, such eyes that she has; the same mouth, the same dreaming factions. It was the same face of the same young women who had moved away and who now made me feel the same old desire that I feel every day.

She touched me with the same hands; then she said things so beautiful that I wish I could remember now. She approached very smoothly, barely shaving the air. Her lips, the same lips that she has always had, were lips prepared to kiss mines. But the pianist finished the last Chopin’s Mazurka and he was standing at her back, agile like a shadow. She pulled up along with the time; some threads fastened to her back were held by the pale hand owned by the man with the black hat.

Without knowing the reason, all the joy became bitter sadness. She began to cry and the pianist licked the tears with his horrible and tarnished tongue. With a movement of his head, all the marionettes took hold of me very strongly and I could not get away… and I also cried due to helplessness. And the pianist gathered my tears with his revolting finger and carried them to his mouth in the same manner that he carried her to the emptiness of above and disappeared.

The small figures released me and I fell to the ground, trembling, watching my tears being swallowed by the wooden floor like a sponge. Then my desires of conscience disappeared just as the dream and I woke up; at some place in the city, soaked by rain, dying due to the cold, with anguish in my brow, and a black top hat in my right hand and a marionette in the left one.