25 - The Study on Sleep
She searched everywhere, in drawers and closets, on shelves, under the desk, between the stills and the dusty objects of the laboratory, in the stuffing of the seats and under the weak boards of the floor, in the fireplace, up the chimney, tapping the walls, peeling wallpaper, looking for false bottoms in chests of drawers and rummaging even the fixtures. Next time I tell you everywhere, believe me, I mean everywhere. The remainder of the manuscript, however, was nowhere to be found.
However, one way or the other, the book was found. But didn’t I say everywhere, with no result? Will we have to start over? Rest assured: the torn pages were in Malera’s house. She told us herself, after finding her friend intent on gutting the room, that once Martina’s uncle, in the grip of a strange crisis, delirious, with certainly not a bit of reason left, had torn those pages and tried to throw them into the fireplace. But Malera had managed to stop him and then offered to do it herself, failing to win the determination of the man of turning them to ashes. Then Martina’s uncle had had a breakdown, and Malera had stolen the pages quickly, swearing blind then she had destroyed them in the fire.
But she couldn’t read and never knew what was written in them. Why hadn’t she asked someone to read them for her? First of all, she couldn’t be sure that the person to whom she asked was honest. What if they contained the instructions to get to a treasure? To get rich? To find happiness? She could not let anyone take away the secret. So, first of all, she had to find someone reliable enough. At that moment she couldn’t think of anyone, but you never know. For now let's keep them here. Then she had neatly forgotten.
She gave it to Martina: she trusted her enough to believe that, if the book contained important instructions to achieve wealth, Martina would leave them to their rightful owner. Or at least share.
I was still very slow to read, so Martina kept the half book with her, for a solitary reading. One afternoon she shut herself and little Sebastian in the study of her uncle and read the whole book, complete with all its pages at last, from beginning to end. When she emerged, in the evening, she seemed upset. Now incredulous, now moved. Now convinced, now reticent. And now I don’t know. Did I want to know what it contained? Sure, I was dying with curiosity, of course. But she said she must first reflect and perhaps the next day she would tell me. Of course there was no valid reason to do it: simply the great amusement of seeing me wring my hands out of curiosity. She did this because childish pranks were rooted in her deepest instincts. But she had a smile on her face as usual. She didn’t sleep that night, I heard her.
The day after she said that she would tell me about the book. Because, of course, her uncle had taken the same remedy and made certain dreams. And their strangeness had not gone unnoticed. So much so that, after careful study, he had drawn his conclusions.
I tried to think about it during the day, but I’m too easily distracted, and thoughts escape from under my eyes. Thus, in the evening, I hadn’t imagined anything about it, I had no hypothesis.
Martina wanted us to go and sit on the terrace.
"My uncle was completely mad," she concluded.
Concluded, because she wasn’t able to say anything else for a while.
After I walked back and forth on the terrace for a long time, she grew impatient because people who walk back and forth unnerve her. I sat down beside her and finally she decided to share with me the contents of the book.
That time I was sorry I couldn’t read well.
"The first part tells of how uncle arrived to Australia and learned various arts regarding the extraction of substances from flowers and plants. In that place there are so many species that we don’t know, and it seems that many are used as remedies for ailments and diseases, or to provide some benefit. Uncle often went to the forest with the natives to collect samples to use, and he enjoyed creating a herbarium to classify the new species he found, because he didn’t only collect known species: often he also found flowers that he liked and had never seen before. So he picked up some roots to transplant. It went precisely this way, with the white flower.
"The strange thing was that none of the natives seemed to have ever seen it. Even those who knew local flora perfectly. Not even witch doctors and shamans. Never seen, unknown. Uncle, moreover, liked those wide, thick, snowy petals. So he took them to Europe on his return and began to plant them as ornamental flowers. One day, by chance, he tried to extract from the flower that substance that I used, and that he too used in his time, to induce sleep. Why? Because he knew the extraction techniques and had used them on all known flowers. Why not try it on that as well? He might find something interesting. Uncle was not just an explorer, but also a man of science.
"Then he had the substance he obtained analyzed, to rule out toxicity. And finally, in defiance of danger – that still could not be ruled out completely – in search of new things as he was accustomed to do during his travels, he took a drop, ready to jot down every little change in his physical and mental status. The result was that he fell asleep instantly and slept very well, feeling in good shape the next day. Needless to emphasize how this discovery excited him: he had found a new remedy to treat insomnia. And a very effective one. He felt very proud of himself, until he began to make a series of very strange dreams. No, not strange. Disturbing, yes. He kept dreaming the same woman all the time. No, he said at one point, not the same woman. Many different women, whom he knew to be the same woman. No idea who she was. Then he met Malera and recognized her. She was the steam woman, taking shape dream after dream.
"Initially, my uncle had counted his dreams – and Malera – among the mishaps that occur to very active people, with many thoughts in mind, and original ones at that, who have travelled a lot. He didn’t understand, initially, that the cause of all that were the white flowers.
"Then, at some point, after giving the remedy to a friend who was struggling to sleep, he realized that the nature of the dreams of that man must be the same of his. He also dreamed of a woman, but he knew her. She was always changing shape, appearance, role. But it was her, he was really sure of that.
Could it be a coincidence? If so, it was a very weird one. It was so that the idea of the study on sleep came to his mind: he was determined to have some people use the remedy, then transcribe their dreams to understand more about their origin, their meaning. He wanted to know how the substance acted on our brains.
"He found the volunteers: friends, more than anything else, all intrigued by uncle’s story. Positivist friends, sceptical about ghosts, rational. Convinced that our mind, if properly used, cannot trick us. Except that they didn’t understand this: it is our mind that uses us, and not vice versa. Is it not true that we can do nothing against sleep? And when we surrender to it, are we masters of ourselves, of our thoughts? Can we clearly analyze our fears? Recognize all of our remote desires? Not at all: we are completely at their mercy. Sleep brilliantly demonstrates the weakness and failure of the human being as a rational creature. Well, all these men who would not scare so easily – and even women, wives of these men, also freed from superstition – amounted to about six and were subjected to the Sleep Remedy voluntarily. Uncle wrote in great detail all the dreams reported by the subjects and their dates. They were not very different from the ones we made. But one thing impressed him. Or better two things.
"The first is that two of the subjects, husband and wife, at some point began to make the same dreams from two different points of view. Uncle, of course, at first thought that it was a joke, but soon realized that it wasn’t. And that's what happened to us.
"The second is that a patient, this is how he calls them, dreamed of a woman who was not his wife, and whom he recognized to be the new maid, just arrived from another town. He was sure that she was the woman he dreamed, and recognizing her he was unable to restrain his feelings: he run away with her, abandoning his wife. His wife hadn’t dreamed of her husband either, but the man in question, the transmigrator of nocturnal dreams, didn’t arrive.
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"My uncle was convinced that if his patient had not dreamed the mysterious woman, he would not have recognized her in the waitress and would not have fled with her. So he started to think – no, not started, continued – that the flower was very dangerous. At that point he paused the experiments and decided to continue only on himself. He wanted to find out where he would arrive, if there was a conclusion to the transformation of the spirit of Malera, dream after dream.
"Then there are confused pages, uncle seems completely out of his mind, almost delirious. He says he doesn’t want to take the flower anymore, then he continues and says even stranger, nuanced things. Identities no longer defined, confused, more and more ideal and less and less of flesh and bones. At one point he says that he has seen the future. The future, you see? That he has dreamed of a time to come, and Malera is still there but she has other shapes, other meanings.
Uncle is collapsing, the night visions terrify him. Worse than opium, he writes. Opium, in comparison, could be fed for breakfast to children. Incomprehensible things, a future time out of the reach of our understanding. And her, her, her again. Until when? To what extent? Because he realizes that it is a journey, not a driveway of randomness. But what is the end point?"
"How does the story end? Did he discover anything important?"
"Yes, he did, even if it is unbelievable. He took the flower almost till the end. Almost, he says, because if he wanted to see to the end he would not survive. But he comes close. Almost. I guess you want to know what it is."
"Of course I want to know. I'm dying of curiosity."
"My uncle says that Christian priests are wrong. Our soul is not destined to Paradise. Neither to Hell. For the time being. There are other passages first, and then nobody knows."
"Passages? I don’t understand, what do you mean?"
"Other lives, Viktor. My uncle says that after each life there is another, in which we change shape, take on another body, have another story. The flower is able to bring back the memories of the transmigrated soul. Memories we wouldn’t be able to recall clearly otherwise. And the common thread of all of our lives is another person. Just one, that changes and takes different shapes, in all lives."
"And how do you recognize them?"
"You can’t. This is the point. Unless you have the flower. My uncle says it is part of the destiny and that it should not be forced. He says that there is a point of arrival but to get there you must live. Over and over again. The point of arrival, uncle writes, is the perfect realization. This realization means having lived in all ways, having loved our Koibito – uncle called it that but I don’t know what it means exactly – in all possible ways. I think it's a term that defines the person intended for us, the only one we can truly love, the one who will complete us. It is a sort of guide, without which we would be lost in the immensity of time. It's what makes of our life a journey, not a walk in the desert.
"If we haven’t loved it in all ways, as a father, brother, lover, husband, nephew, uncle, friend, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad (but death will not do us part completely), in every possible form of love, how can we achieve complete love?
See, the purpose of all life is to complete the journey, achieve the perfect love, and the perfect love can only be achieved after we have been able to love the Koibito of every possible love."
"And what happens then?"
"Nobody knows. Once he reached his goal, not even uncle dared to look any farther. He feared that he would go completely insane, or even die. He arrived at the door, climbed the last step, but then he had to stop." She took the book and read: "When we reach the wholeness and completeness, what does it matter what happens? It may be a perpetual state of spiritual perfection, then eternity is desirable and may be the culmination of a circular route, starting again. From separation to unity, from the fragment – we are a fragment drifting in the infinite of the universe, the time, the eternity – to completeness, absence of motion, immobility of time. What is beyond that, it’s unfathomable mystery. I am afraid we would go mad, certainly we would not understand. It’s not for just one life, nor just one soul."
"Uncle" Martina continues, "explains then some phenomena, in the light of his discovery. We have always been accustomed to consider certain types of relationships legitimate and good, some not. For example, we deem unnatural that brother and sister love each other, that they want to be together as lovers. Yet there are cases of this kind of love. These people are... How does uncle call them? Enlightened, that’s how. These are people who have a stronger submerged conscience and a thinner rational one, who perceive the truth, beyond the appearances of contingent life, with more clarity. People who have somehow recognized the Koibito and are in the condition of not being able to love it as they wish. They feel the blame of the people around them, the time, the society in which they live, but the link to the original soul, the one that already lived long and that only they recognize, is too strong.
"So a few loves happen that seem to be a total mistake, a horror, an accident that could maybe be prevented, surely a nonsense. Because their reason is deeper, less visible."
"And had your uncle seen the future? Did he know where and when, and in which shape, he would be reborn, and how Malera would come again?"
"Yes, he knew. He claims to have seen it but doesn’t write anything about it. It is understandable that he thought it was an enormity, to sit down and write something like that. He kept it to himself. And Malera knows nothing, apparently, neither about the studio nor about what happened to uncle."
"Do you think we should tell her?"
"No, I don’t think so."
"And what do we do with the flower?"