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"It's quite simple," my visitor insisted. "All you have to do is cross the threshold of a door."
"What door?" I asked absent-mindedly.
"Any door. That one, for instance," he answered sharply, pointing to the door.
My smile was forced. Courtesy becomes difficult after a whole night of conversation.
"Are you joking?"
"No." His voice was now as soft as the gray dawn sneaking through the window. "I maintain that you can make anything you desire come true just by crossing the threshold of that door."
"Do you know where that door leads to?" I asked him, crushing my cigarette in an ash tray already bristling like a porcupine with butts. "The street."
He shrugged his shoulders. His copper-colored hair and green eyes were the only spots of color in the tired room, pervaded by the pallor of early morning.
"You are wrong," he said, spreading his words with patience, as one spreads marmalade on a piece of toast, "That door leads to an unsuspected world alive with the most wondrous adventures."
"We must be referring to different doors," I replied, my mouth bitter from tobacco, warmed-over coffee and morning bile. "For eight long years I have crossed that door several times daily and always wound up on the street."
An impish devil laughed at me from my visitor's eyes. "And I am telling you that through that door you can escape from your dreary world to a world of marvels."
My attitude of fatigue and irritation prompted him to talk quickly, without giving me time to reply.
"People put no stock in doors. A door means nothing to them. It merely serves to go in and out. It is simply an invisible frontier between the inside and the outside. That attitude prevails the world over. The Eskimo cuts a hole in the ice of his igloo; the Arab, a slash in the canvas of his tent; the Westerner, a square in the walls of his house, and all of them use it alike--to go in and out. The door is like a frame without a picture--no picture, no audience. Still, in a frame without a picture, the most dramatic thing is the empty space imprisoned within it.
"One may recall everything in a room except its doors, and yet the doors are the most fundamental things in it. A house does not have doors, doors have a house around them. Without doors, without that wooden frame which like magic turns cold, forbidding, limitless space into warm, protecting enclosures, life is not possible. The door is man's victory over the infinite. In prehistoric times when man lived in the open air, in space without limit, he was but a mere wandering particle of the cosmos. But when he learned to imprison a fragment of the infinite within doors, he indeed scored a great victory over the universe. He became a full-fledged human being.
"No one ever takes the trouble to ponder the true value or the great possibilities of doors. Force of habit makes us forget the magic role of the door in human life. In the dark, a door opening into a warmly lit room becomes a bewitched golden rectangle beckoning us to the warmth beyond it."
The touch of sarcasm in my visitor's voice was irritating. Besides, I felt that his absurd paradoxes were not worth a good cup of coffee.
"Very interesting," I said, "but--"
Implacably he nailed down my chest with his long, bony index finger.
"The worst of it is," he continued, "that we go through doors without ever stopping inside them. Dozens of times a day we cross doors without ever realizing that we are passing up our only contact with the infinite. Only poets perceived the power hidden in a door, the dramatic and mysterious tension concentrated in that invisible glass of the infinite outlined by the frame of a door. We speak of the 'threshold of mystery,' 'the threshold of life,' 'the threshold of death,' 'the threshold of fame,' 'the threshold of a new era'; yet nobody has taken the trouble to investigate the enigma of thresholds. When one is in a room, the door is an eternal question mark. What it allows in and out may determine the course of our lives. Have you ever realized with what love, fear, pleasure or hope we sometimes look at the door? Have you ever noticed when someone paused on the threshold of a door before entering a room how that simple act invested the person, no matter how ordinary, with a dramatic aura? The Romanticists of the last century were well aware of this and never missed an opportunity to pause in the doorways of salons and thus become the cynosure of all eyes. Today we enter a drawing room quickly, avoiding the dramatic little scene on the threshold. But the men and women of yesterday loved thresholds, for to stop on a threshold was to be nowhere and everywhere. One was the sole inhabitant of an invisible region which compelled waves of emotion from our fellow mortals.
"Unconsciously we all know this. When someone walks through a door we ascribe no importance to it, but let him stop on the threshold--he is immediately vested with symbolic importance.
"The jealous husband who discovers his wife flagrante delicto stops on the threshold, and so does the bearer of bad news, the friend who wishes to surprise us, the lover calling on his beloved, the unhappy creature who has been dismissed and looks back for the last time. When someone chooses to isolate himself in this no man's land, it is because he is charged with so much drama that he must have a stage. We pause on the threshold of a door only at critical moments in our lives. Not for nothing do women weep with their heads against the door, and men lean on it when assailed by joy or pain or doubt or suspicion. The drunkard, who attains a glimpse of the infinite through alcohol, knows the infinity of a door. That is why he often leans on them.
"But nobody exploits the promise of a threshold to the maximum. Nobody is appreciative enough to learn how to cross that slice of the cosmos marked off by a wooden frame. Learn the right way to cross a threshold and you will find yourself in that world that throbs with adventure on the other side of the door."
My visitor paused and I, rather bored with the whole thing, quickly retorted ironically, "You are contradicting yourself. If you cross the threshold you pass into the next room or into the street."
He smiled with the pitying air of an eagle watching a hen spread her wings.
"No, you don't," he replied, finishing his amontillado and looking sadly at the anemic bottle drained of its gold, "not if you cross the threshold WITHOUT leaving it. Don't tell me that it cannot be done. Even YOU can do it. Just think for a moment. The threshold of a door connects two worlds, the real world in which you live, where nothing extraordinary ever happens, and another world where nothing ordinary ever happens. These two worlds coincide only on thresholds. Doors in your world serve only to go in or out of rooms. No one seems to be aware that through those same doors you could step into another world, a world of adventure and poetry. Do you know what I mean?"
"Are you implying that doors open into an imaginary world with a fourth dimension or something like that?"
"No! No!" he cried impatiently. "Nothing like that! I am talking of a poetic world. I am a sane poet, not a mad scientist. The world one enters across the threshold of a door is as real as the one you live in. Don't think that I'm inventing some fantasy a la H.G. Wells or Jules Verne. The poetic world connects with your prosaic world through the threshold of doors. Those who live in the poetic world look across these thresholds and see you who live in the prosaic world. They are not beings with one eye or three ears or five arms. They are like you and live like you, only much better. Sometimes they even feel a curiosity or a nostalgia to visit you, and then they enter your prosaic world and live a few hours of your absurd life. The poetic world is full of people who escaped from your world when, by accident, they discovered the secret of thresholds."
"How do you know all this?" I asked ironically.
"Because," he said, caressing the languorous yellow roses in a scarlet vase on the table beside him, "I came from that poetic world through the threshold of your door."
"Naturally," I said peevishly. "That's how you came in from the street."
"But I did not come from the street," he said emphatically. "I came from that other world, invisible to you, where I live. I came to invite you to visit it."
"What nonsense!"
He ignored my insolent remark. The first ray of sun played on his thick red hair, and his mobile features were like the sails of a fishing smack on a windless day.
"I expected you to react just like that. After all, YOU are a shopkeeper and I am a poet. We don't speak the same language."
"I am not a shopkeeper," I protested. "I keep a store of props and tricks for sleight-of-hand artists. I have told you that ten years ago I myself was a well-known magician. You know the sort of thing--escaping from locked containers, like Houdini, juggling in the fashion of Fratelli. When I did not attain the success I dreamed of, I set up a store here in Caracas and I sell, in person or by mail, to magicians all over South America."
"Just the same, you are a shopkeeper," he insisted severely. "Don't get angry! You have shown the patience of a saint, I admit. I arrived suddenly last night, just as you were about to retire, and introduced myself as a fellow magician.
"I have kept you up all night, from dusk to dawn, talking. You have told me the story of your life. Ten years of shopkeeping--eight hours a day, six days a week--have not dried up the romantic vein in you. That is why I came to you: to save a soul for poetry before it is wholly lost."
"If my wife heard you," I said, "she would hardly think you a savior. If anything, she would think you a devil."
"Let's forget the labels," he rejoined softly. "I am initiating you into a secret which someday will be widely known and in public domain. Last night I crossed the threshold and you thought I had come in from the street through the half-open door. I invite you now to spend a day in MY world and I shall take your place here. Your wife is vacationing at her mother's. Nobody will notice the change."
"Are you proposing that we impersonate each other? You are a poet and I, according to you, only a storekeeper. Outside of our red hair and build we don't resemble each other. We would deceive no one, except perhaps near-sighted people and then only at night."
"I disagree," he answered disdainfully. "We do resemble each other a little. I am curious to spend a few hours in your world as you must be to know mine. Just one day. Nobody will notice. I shall answer your calls. In twenty-four hours, cross the threshold of the nearest door and return to your world. Come with me. I'll show you."
He led me to the street door and opened it wide.
"Look, if you cross the threshold the usual way you'll be in the street. You have done that thousands of times in the last eight years. But if you cross it in another way you'll enter the poetic world."
"There is only one way of crossing a door and that is the one I have always used," I shouted, exasperated.
"You are wrong. There is another way. Stand sideways on the threshold and walk sideways toward the frame. You will then enter..."
"I will then bump against the frame," I interrupted him angrily.
"Perhaps, if you are afraid and swerve. But if you walk straight toward the frame without fear, I promise you that you shall enter the poetic world whole and safe. You know why? Because in our world doors are horizontal instead of vertical. Our doors, when open, cross yours. This is why you can't enter the poetic world through the opening of your doors. You must stand sideways on you threshold and walk straight into the side beam. You will then enter the invisible door of our world. When you wish to leave our world, you simple cross one of OUR doors and you are back in your own world."
"Do you expect me to believe such nonsense?" I asked crossly.
"I expect you to try it," he answered. "Aren't you a magician?"
"What about the frame when I walk smack into it?" I protested feebly.
"Just keep in mind that you are entering another dimension in which there is an invisible open space corresponding to that of the visible frame."
"And then--then what?" I stammered.
"Then do what you like. Maybe they'll take you for me in that world. When you get bored, cross any threshold of the poetic world and you'll be back here. I'll be waiting. It should be interesting to compare notes."
No more was said. After all, I am a magician, and what magician is not tempted by mystery? I shook his hand and closing my eyes I lunged headlong toward the side frame of my door.
I opened my eyes and rubbed my aching forehead. My worst expectations had been confirmed. I was exactly where I had been all along--in my house, on the threshold of my door. My visitor had disappeared as suddenly as he had arrived. He had lost no time in slipping away to enjoy his practical joke. I rubbed my bruised head again and felt a bump as large as a golf ball.
Fortunately Isabel would be away the entire week. There should be not trace of the sleepless night or the bump when she returned. An ugly butt that had dropped from the ash tray to the spotless white tablecloth embroidered by Isabel pointed an accusing finger at me. I would have to wash the cloth, but feared that the little dark stain would remain to betray me.
In the bathroom I doused my face with cold water and stared sadly at my face in the mirror. It wasn't too bad looking, but there was something vapid and flabby stamped all over it. I, Serafin Ventura, over forty years old, ex-stage magician, married for twenty years to Dona Isabel de la Vega, with two daughters, eighteen and sixteen, respectively, now boarding at the College of the Sacred Heart in Caracas, had just been proved a perfect fool. A total stranger had walked into my house, drunk my wine, smoked my cigarettes, wasted a great deal of my time, and then walked out, leaving me with a big bump on the head. I could hear my wife's plaintive voice: "People are forever making a fool of you. Will you ever stop dreaming? Perhaps then a little sense will enter that head of yours."
I took another look at myself in the mirror. Here I am, I mused sadly, a respectable citizen of Caracas who, eight hours a day, three hundred days a year, at his shop The White Rabbit, provides his clients with boxes with false bottoms, hats with secret linings, colored handkerchiefs for legerdemain, coats with hidden pouches--in fact, the whole arsenal of a competent magician. I have succeeded in erecting a neat orderly facade to conceal the crumbling building of frustrations of the man who once dreamed of becoming the Houdini of Latin America.
The bathroom, as immaculate as those advertised in American magazines, brought me back to my everyday world. MY WORLD! A solid world, with a bathtub (Made in USA) of blinding white porcelain and shining chrome as familiarly cold as an ancient butler, with blue and green towels (the green ones are for guests only) embroidered by Isabel with neat rows of dainty jars and bottles with creams and lotions. A world with friendly odors: Isabel's coffee and toast, lavender toilet water to perfume my handkerchiefs, lemon soap. A world with familiar sounds: friendly voices in my shop, the symphony hour on the radio, the chirp of the yellow canary. A world with sentimental things: photographs of my two daughters in a silver frame on the old piano, the orchid-colored comforter as soft as marshmallow, the little table holding the hand-painted porcelain tea service, no longer used but cherished more than ever. And a fine plate mirror reflecting my face. Happy? I shrugged my shoulders. I would return to my eternal routine--up at seven, out to work at eight, papaya juice, coffee, and toast at the Cafe Vernal, lunch out of a portable casserole in the shop at twelve, dinner at home at seven, bed at ten--and soon I would forget the stranger who has cast a stone into the stagnant waters of my soul.
On the dot of eight, I walked out into the street.
The June air, with fingers as soft as perfumed silk, caressed my cheeks. The narrow street, drenched in sun, glowed with the same golden yellow that came out of Van Gogh's passionate brush. I had the impression that the houses were cooking to a golden brown in the sun, like doughnuts in a frying pan. A little bird warbled in its cage, celebrating in its fine trill the star or two that lingered in the morning sky. Where do the stars go in the morning? I wondered. They must shake loose from the sky and become drops of diamond dew. At night, when they evaporate, they again become the diamonds of the heavens.
Walking along the Calle Corazon de Jesus, familiar with friendly old faces, I tried to guess what nocturnal secrets still lingered behind the eyelashes of the passers-by. In a doorway, Adela, the blind old lady who sells lottery tickets, had her face raised to the sun which crowned with sparkling silver her gray hair. She cannot see the splendid morning, I thought, but she can smell it. And at the flower stand close by I bought all the roses--six dozen of them, red and white--and dropped them on her lap, leaving her enveloped in a heavenly fragrance.
Fast shiny motor cars, slow, lazy mule-drawn carts, multicolored drying clothes waving like banners on balconies, shop windows afire with sun, flowerpots ablaze with red geraniums, slender senoritas smartly clicking their high heels, street vendors mellowly chanting their wares, a radiant blue sky, green-clad mountains in the distance... Caracas this morning was dazzlingly beautiful.
Pancho, the organ-grinder with a stomach like a globe of the world and a mustache like a double black-bristled brush, was playing a lively joropo on his music box.
"Where do you usually play, Pancho?" I asked him.
"Here and in the public square, Don Serafin."
"Well, today you are going to serenade the girls in the tobacco factory. Regale their pink little ears with three bolivares worth of waltzes."
I stopped at the Cafe Vernal, where I usually had breakfast. The waiter greeted me with a smile. I wish, I thought, he could wipe off all the grief in the world with that rag over his arm that he uses to wipe the table tops.
"Same as usual, Don Serafin?" he asked, looking at me with eyes soft and withered like cooked prunes.
"No, Antonio. Down with routine! Today we shall change everything. A man enslaved to coffee and toast can never burn with the flame of creation. The eternal breakfast menu No. 2--Papaya juice, buttered toast and coffee--is a chain stranger than any caste system. How can the brain yield anything new under the tyranny of the fixed menu? Antonio, let's take the first step to enriching life by changing the menu."
"I think that is fine, senor."
"You are a dreamer, Antonio. Bring me a dish of fresh strawberries with cream, dark bread, a triple order of caviar, and a bottle of iced champagne."
Over the coffee and toast on twenty tables, a vast number of amazed eyes stared at me. I waved to my friends, embracing all the other customers in my smile. Why shouldn't we smile at everyone? To smile at our friends is a personal duty; to smile at all those we don't know should be a universal law.
The proprietor of the cafe, Don Gaspar, a jovial fat little man who might have escaped from a Poussin painting, came running to my table, his round belly bobbing up and down.
"Antonio has told me what you ordered for breakfast," he said excitedly. "You shall be fully satisfied, I assure you. The caviar is from Smyrna but it is just as good as that from Iran, and the champagne is a fine Pommard '53. Allow me to express my sympathy with your splendid idea. I appreciate people who love good food. To prove my sincerity, I beg you to be my guest."
The tables hummed with buzzing bees of excitement. Don Gaspar glanced at me timidly. "Forgive my indiscretion, but what gave you such an exotic idea?"
Antonio approached with a loaded silver tray. I smiled at Don Gaspar. "I don't know, but there comes the answer--a veritable symphony of colors. The red strawberries in the pure white cream are sin and innocence in friendly marriage. The black caviar and the dark bread embody the simplicity of the sea and the earth--fish and wheat, the black life-bearing grain of the fish and the golden life-bearing grain of the earth. This is communing with nature. And the champagne--each tiny bubble merrily dances a cancan, for champagne bubbles are nothing but gold dust kicked up by an invisible ballerina imprisoned in the bottle."
My idea soon made converts. My mouth was already sweet with strawberries when I overheard an asthmatic gentleman at the next table order charcoal-broiled, pastry-wrapped truffles. At another table the ice tinkled happily in a punch of rum and fruit. The coffee with cream, neglected on the tables, slowly grew cold--what an ignoble color, oh God!--and the untouched toast wilted sadly on chipped plates. The ugly couple, toast and coffee, were shown no mercy and were all but banished by the exotic food of brilliant colors and exquisite aromas, which soon crowded the table tops.
When I went out into the street once again, I felt like a new man. In the spacious lawn in front of the town hall I spoke to the city gardener. It was a crime, I insisted, to waste that lovely green grass, especially now that it was wet with dew. The man, who had a heart of gold under his olive green uniform, responded by taking off his shoes and socks. A moment later we were both running barefoot across the wet grass. When, happily exhausted, I finally left, more than fifty children, a happy band of birds set free from their cage, were noisily prancing with bare little feet on the emerald green of the grass.
The sky was an astonishing blue when I reached the streetcar stop. Had the fragrance of the jasmine and tuberoses ascended to the heavens? I boarded the streetcar a few minutes before nine. As usual, on one side of the hard wooden benches sat Maruja Allen, manager of the flower shop across the street from the Oriente theatre. Her eyes were as bright as the sun, as large as the moon and as remote as the stars. Her hair was as red as that of Titian's virgins and her mouth a little scarlet snail. Every morning for over a year I had sat not too close to her, had greeted her ceremoniously, and had dreamed of impossible idyls throughout the ten-minute ride. But today was different. I promptly sat next to her and took her hand in mine.
"Maruja," I whispered in her ear, as soft and delicious as a little puff of meringue, "I have loved you silently for a long time."
Through her long lashes, lovely fronds that trimmed the violet and gold garden of her eyes, she rewarded me with a misty glance.
"I have known it for a long time. Why did you take so long to tell me?"
"Man's greatest drama, incomparable Maruja, is to fall in love with a girl in a streetcar on those days when because he is in a hurry, he has no time to fall in love. I shall explain. I am married, and you too may be married, for all that I know. It doesn't matter. The soul is always free and the heart is a wild bird forever searching for a mate. Every day, when I sat down opposite you, I thought how wondrous it would be if we fell in love and lived in eternal happiness, such as is only known in books. But every day when the streetcar reached my corner I got off and the door to the world of dreams snapped close behind me, leaving me facing stark reality again. That is the story of my life. The great loves in our life, Violante dear--"
"My name is Maruja."
"Never mind. With those eyes, your name should be Violante. As I was saying, the great loves in our life are those we have not experienced. For some reason or other they evade us. They flicker in our hearts like twinkling lights in the darkness and then die out. When we were adolescents, they were the popular inaccessible girl next door, or the sophisticated woman of forty across the street. When we are grownups, they are the young woman standing next to us waiting for the bus, or the girl whose picture we see in a magazine, or who sits at the next table in a restaurant. They are the rainbow-hued butterflies that flutter within our reach in the gray landscape of our lives, only we don't dare reach out for them. Either we are in a hurry, or it is very hot, or the family is waiting, or we are too tired or shy. The glass door, opened for a quick moment, closes again. We then feel the anguish of a lost love that never was. We pine for the soap bubble that we never blew out of our little pipe, for a sniff at the crimson carnation that in vain beckoned from afar. Why, why did we not forsake the beach of the prosaic and plunge into the sea of the poetic?"
"You are describing my own feelings," she said tenderly. "I too have experienced love, but you are the unknown love, the love I dreamed of but never expected to attain."
"Violante, let me place a crown of stars on your head and write you a poem with an eagle for a pen and the sky for paper."
"You have passed your corner, Don Serafin," shouted Braulio, the conductor, whom I have known for twenty years.
"It doesn't matter, Braulio. I have better plans. Are you a poet?"
"I'm a streetcar conductor," he replied with unexpected dignity.
"You can be both for one day," I answered. "This car will soon reach the Plaza Merced, whence it will return downtown. For once, just once, show us that a streetcar conductor can be a poet as well. Let's keep right on, right down the Calle de los Tilos."
"But there's no line there, no rails!"
"So much the better. It's downhill and at the end there are two miles of sunlit flowering meadows. Can you think of anything more romantic? The poetic rebellion of inanimate things against human triteness. A streetcar escaping from its girdle of steel in search of sun and flowers. What poetry! The poor children of the Calle de los Tilos have always wanted a streetcar clanking past their windows. Can't you see their pale little faces bright with joy and their young innocent eyes wide with astonishment?"
And the children saw their wish come true. They crowded on the balconies like linnets in a nest, clapping their hands and shouting with joy. The trolley, set in motion by the crank, rolled down the street at full speed amid much blanking of bells and wild ovations from the passengers. The branches of the linden trees, which gave the street its frame, waved convulsively, as if welcoming us madly in the wind stirred up by the vehicle. Each break in the street made the car shake like a berserk beast, exciting great laughter and wild acclaim. The policeman on duty at the second intersection we crossed had to leap to escape the mastodon that came hurtling down upon him. People emerged from the shops to stare at us with gaping mouths. When we reached the meadows, the trolley rolled on another half a mile and then quietly came to a stop in a bed of honeysuckle, like a beast happy to return to mother nature.
Later Violante and I strolled through the park and rode the largest swan boat on the lake, and she was my Elsa, while the orchestra of the lake cafe, at my request, played a Lohengrin majestic with cymbals and drums. I even persuaded the attendant of the aviary to set free all his captives, and suddenly hundreds of multi-colored wings bejeweled the morning sky. But it was getting late. Violante had to go to the flower shop and I to my magic shop. We separated after promising to meet for lunch.
My arrival at the shop was met with coldness and pained surprise. Hadn't I always set the example of punctuality by arriving five minutes earlier than everybody else? I said nothing. I merely took down the implacable clock, which said thirty minutes after eleven, and in its place drew on the wall with pink chalk a large clock with hands pointing to nine.
"From now on no one will be late," I said to my astonished clerks.
I then conscientiously proceeded to invalidate all the tricks in the store. I ripped out the false bottoms in the top hats, I removed the secret compartments in the boxes, I pulled out all the hidden colored handkerchiefs, I mixed all the marked decks of cards, and I ripped apart the boxes used to saw a woman in two.
"If they want to be magicians, let them make real magic," I said out loud, and banging the door behind me I went out.
The street was as bright and cheerful as a Sorolla painting. I noticed with keen delight the gleam of perspiration on the old stonecutter's bare torso, the gold oozing from an orange down the chin of a child, the blond mane of a horse yoked to a little red lacquered cart.
At a street corner I bought all the balloons from a vendor, dozens and dozens of them in all sizes and colors, ran up the short row of steps to the balcony of the Municipal Theatre and, holding on to the huge multicolored cluster of grapes as if it were a parachute, jumped down amid the wild cheers of the passers-by. After that, I let go of the strings and watched the balloons rise lazily to the heavens, dotting the pale azure with brilliant colors.
Then I fetched Violante and went to a charming little restaurant for lunch, where I invited the ten waiters to sit at our table and we were waited on by customers who volunteered. Violante, sweet and loving at my side, served me warm frothy milk directly from a goat which at my suggestion was brought right to the table. With amazing accuracy, a marksman from a visiting circus shot off the golden necks of dozens of bottles of champagne from which, amidst much cheering and laughter, we drank. And as a romantic finale to our memorable lunch we toasted with the most romantic of drinks, green absinthe. This was indeed the perfect crowning to a supremely poetic morning!
Back again in the street, surrounded by eager followers who had sprouted as spontaneously as mushrooms in a forest, we mounted horse-drawn carriages and off we went through the streets of Caracas.
Never had the city been so lovely! The silvery heads of the little old ladies knitting on their balconies had all the exquisite grace of a fine Ingres sketch. The sky was the same gentle blue as that in the festive paintings of Goya. Every woman was a queen, with the sensuous curves of a Rubens Madonna and the subtle delicacy of a Bouchard or Fragonard. The splashes of color in the flowerpots had the polychrome brilliance of a Matisse, and the idyllic parks only lacked the pastoral processions, throbbing with music and whiteness, of Corot.
Late in the afternoon, after collecting the required paraphernalia from furniture and silk establishments, jewelers and dress shops, with the park for a backdrop, we put on tableaux vivants of the most beautiful pictures in the Caracas Art Museum. Half-naked and crowned with wreaths of vine and olive, surrounded by great jars of wine, we reproduced the merry topers of Velazques Los Borrachos, and then changed into the costumes of his La Rendicion de Breda and then of La Gallina Ciega of Goya, finishing with a collective deminude by Corot. When we finally left, the park looked as if good fairies in mad revelry had spilled the most precious treasures of their coffers on the ground. Silks, brocades, velvets, ribbons, flowers, feathers, powdered wigs, baskets and lovely things of all sorts, colored by the crimsons of twilight, were scattered all over the grass.
When someone asked what we should do next, only one answer could be made. The day could not possibly end without a visit to the sea--the sea, beloved of Shelley and Swinburne, Byron and Keats. And so, off we went to the beach, but not before I remarked that organ music was most appropriate for the sea, upon which four students promptly disappeared only to rejoin us later with the harmonium from the Music Conservatory on a truck. Enveloped in the majestic chords of Handel's Messia, we approached the waves.
For our celebration we chose the great lighthouse of San Lazaro, a soaring tower one hundred feet high, which, white and sleek as a Greek obelisk, stands guard on a great big rock.
"Why the lighthouse?" Violante asked me, cuddling close to my arm, sweet and purring as a playful little kitten.
"Because the sea is never as magnificent as near a lighthouse. It is not the lighthouse that comes to the sea, but the sea that comes to the lighthouse to wed salt and foam with the earth. In the daytime the lighthouse is the earth playing sentinel with the bayonet of its lightning rod, so that no one may steal the solar gold from the horizon of the sea. At night, the bright beams from the lighthouse pierce the darkness, projecting on the silver screen of the waters the eternal film of the sea: boats reaching the coral ports of submarine islands; red seaweed floating in legendary waters; ancient hulls that still fly the blood-embroidered flag of the female pirate captain; coffers of jewels and doblones guarded by marine hounds with teeth of foam and claws of waves. The gulls are the winged spectators of that film in the theatre of the ocean..."
I never finished, for Violante sealed my lips with a passionate kiss. The absinthe, the mad goddess with the green eyes, had wrought such effects in all of us! A glorious exaltation moved me to do mad things. Leaving my companions singing and dancing on the beach by the light of the pale moon, I climbed up the rocks toward the lighthouse.
Lighthouses had always fascinated me but I had never been in one of them. Now, borne on the green clouds of absinthe, I crossed the hall cluttered with buckets, lanterns and ropes, and went up and up, hundreds of little steps, until finally I reached the watchtower. Not satisfied, I stepped out on the balcony and climbed to the turret. And now I was as high as anyone could climb, holding on to the lightning rod, under the diamond-studded sky overhanging the sea, which heaved and roared like a wounded beast one hundred feet below.
The moon traced a thousand paths of shimmering silver scales across the dark waters, and the sea encircled the black throat of the rocks with foamy white lace. I felt the wind on my face and the taste of salt on my lips. An overpowering sense of prowess, of might, of omnipotence seized me. At my feet the beam from the lighthouse traced four immense ribbons of silver, four highways of light through the vast expanse of the night. I could no longer think. I could only feel the irresistible desire to slide down the taut wings of light that stretched for miles out into the sea. I felt capable of anything. With the lightning rod of the lighthouse I could pierce the moon like a ball of Italian cheese, I could seize the stars and sprinkle them on the sea, I could snatch the silver in the moon and pave the streets of Caracas with it. Wasn't I a poet? And isn't a poet permitted everything?
For the second time in the space of a few hours I closed my eyes and plunged into space, this time resolutely, without hesitating. When I opened my eyes again, I was straddling one of the wings of light. The sensation was that of being seated on a flexible metallic ribbon sagging gently under my weight.
From the shore my friends cheered me wildly. White gulls flapped their wings and screamed. I waited no longer. Wrapped in silver sheen, with the moon and the stars whirling around me, with now the sea, now the sky underneath me, I shot like a bullet down the toboggan of light, down to the sea. But I never reached the water, where sea horses gently cavorted. Another shaft of light lifted me up and flipped me so high that I could almost touch the sky. And on and on I swooped up and down, riding the wings of light, until exhausted I dropped on the balcony of the lighthouse. A shadow suddenly loomed nearby. I recognized my visitor of the night before.
"Let's chat," he said smiling.
"By all means, let's chat," I said. "You played a dirty trick on me. Look at the lump on my head."
"That's not important," he replied. "You had a wild time today!"
"That has nothing to do with you. You made a fool of me last night."
"I did not."
"Look at my head."
"I warned you. You swerved too much. That happens to many people. You must walk the line of the threshold straight and without fear. You think you see a wood plank in front of you, and so there is in the world of prose, but in the poetic world it is an empty space. Only when you swerve to avoid the plank do you bump against it."
"What nonsense! You told me that if I crossed the threshold I would enter the poetic world, but I was exactly where I was before--in my house."
"No, you were not. Look around. Is this your world?"
I gasped. A finger had ripped an opening in the darkness and a great light poured through.
"Do you understand?" he asked softly.
"Do you mean that everything that happened today, all those people...?"
"Exactly."
My head was spinning. I was dizzy and confused.
"But I am still in Caracas. I have known these people for years..."
"Of course, but this is the Caracas of the other side of the threshold and the people belong to the other side too. How else could you be here, on top of a lighthouse? How else could all these things have happened to you? No, this is not your world, this is MINE. In YOUR world you are a wheel that spins around things. Here, everything spins around you. Why do you think all these people have listened to you all day? Why have they willingly given you caviar and champagne instead of coffee and toast? Why did the conductor steer the streetcar into a street where there are no tracks? Why did the girl accept your love? Because in this world everything centers around YOU."
"But what about the others?"
"Everyone here is lord and master of himself. If they followed you in your desires and whims, it was because these fitted in perfectly with their own desires and whims. In carrying out your fantastic dreams you were actually helping the others to carry out theirs. You are the center diamond in the crown, but so are the others. That is what is so marvelous about this world. Everyone's desires complement everyone else's. The waiter who served your exotic breakfast had always dreamed of doing just that; the aviary attendant had dreamed many times of freeing his birds, and so on down the line. In this world, unrealized desires, the lost I's, the unlived lives, are all fulfilled. If you look around this world you will find the chocolate they would not buy you when you were a little boy, the prize you failed to win at school, the girl who married someone else, the lottery won by another person."
"Do you mean that this world is like a deposit of unlived lives, of stifled dreams and desires, like a Sargasso Sea where all the boats of unlived lives and unfulfilled dreams come? Are all dreams fulfilled here? Aren't there any that cannot be realized even here?"
He smiled sadly. "Yes, there are. It is man's fate never to be satisfied. Would you like to cross the threshold of a door which everyone here dreams of crossing but few dare to?"
"At any cost," I answered. "I must see that other magic world which everybody in THIS dream world dreams about."
Pointing to the little door leading to the watchtower, he said, "Just cross it, the USUAL way, and you will enter that other world."
I did. And suddenly found myself standing sideways on the threshold of my own door. I looked around astonished. My companion stood smiling at my side.
"Are you surprised?" he asked.
"I should have guessed it," I answered, sitting on the steps outside my door leading to the garden. He sat down too. "Those in the poetic world dream of the real prosaic world!"
"Not all of them, only some," he said, flipping the butt of his cigarette, which described an arc of carmine and gold.
"But why don't they cross the threshold of the door back into this world?"
"Some do, I for example. That's why I came to visit you last night. That's why I took your place for a few hours."
"For heaven's sake! Who are you to take me back and forth this way?"
He lighted a match and I saw his smiling face and flaming red hair.
"You should be the last one to ask me that."
Before the match went out I understood. Why had I not seen it before. It was only later that I learned that, according to modern psychology, nobody knows himself as seen by others. Besides, he was--how shall I say it?--he was more than my double, he was my archetype, he was I as I would like to be, he was I as I am only in my dreams.
"So, this is the end of the journey? How did we get to my house?"
"We left this place by crossing one threshold and we returned by crossing another."
"How was your day?"
"Quiet, peaceful, pleasantly dull. Just what I needed."
One little doubt gnawed at my brain.
"But the lighthouse, the stars, the sea horses, the wings of light," I
insisted.
He struck another match and held it up like a tiny candle toward the
garden.
"That fountain can be a lighthouse in the world of poetry, and the moon shining on the frogs in the water converts them into sea horses, and those fireflies are as bright as stars, and the light from that lamppost reflected on the water might pass for shafts of light from the lighthouse. Here they would say that everything that happened to you was the effect of too much absinthe."
"Then the beauty of the poetic world is reduced to these miserable things in our world?"
"No," he corrected me, "these miserable things are converted into wondrous things in the poetic world."
"A castle there is only a pile of sand here?"
"On the contrary. The pile of sand here is a castle there. Only, you have not learned to see it that way."
"Someone saw it that way once. A mad, romantic, valiant knight turned inns into castles, windmills into giants, and wenches into princesses."
"That's right. That is why our patron saint is the Immortal Knight of La Mancha."
The night breeze enveloped us in the fragrance of flowers. The frogs indefatigably croaked their serenade to the stars.
"What shall I do now?" I asked him.
"Return to your daily routine; try to forget today."
"Suppose I don't want to? Suppose I can't?"
"Then cross the threshold of the door again and enter the world of poetry."
"I can't help it," I said, getting up. "I must cross the threshold of the door again. I must return to the lighthouse's lightning rod, I must ride its rays again, I must touch the moon and the stars..."
"Good-by, then."
I shook his hand. MY hand!
"And you?"
"I shall remain here in your place. It will be a holiday. I want to taste the little delights of the vulgar and the ordinary."
"Don't you fear the daily prosaic routine?" I asked just as once more I was about to cross sideways the threshold of the door.
"No," answered he. "I do not fear life. I am a poet."
