THE TUNNEL OF A MURDERER
THE DREAMS OF CASTEL
To complete the analysis we must deal with the dreams that Castel refers to at different moments of his story. They will serve us to ratify the characteristics of his personality that we have been discovering.
The first dream takes place shortly after he went to María's house and met Allende; in that way he learned that she was married, which sparked in him a series of deductions that led him to see in María a new and somber face. Let's see how Castel has this dream:
I had this dream: I visited an old lonely house at night. It was a house in a certain way known and infinitely desired by me from childhood, so that upon entering it I was guided by some memories. But sometimes I was lost in the darkness or I had the impression of hidden enemies that could assault me from behind or of people who whispered and mocked me, of my naivety. Who were these people and what did they want? And yet, and in spite of everything, I felt that in that house the old loves of adolescence were reborn in me, with the same tremors and that sensation of soft madness, fear and joy. When I woke up, I understood that the dream house was Mary (58).
Castel himself makes us see that the house is María. She is his shelter, the place where he feels his desire for totality is realized. But we also see that the ghosts begin to appear in the dark areas, those whispers and ridicules that suppose. In those sectors of the house (of María) in which Castel can not see, his fears, his insecurities, his doubts surface.
The second dream also takes place shortly after another crucial moment; it occurs after Castel and María had the worst of their confrontations, where he ends up accusing her of deceiving a blind man. Castel despairs, thinks that something has definitely broken between them and he feels an absolute loneliness that depresses him deeply.
I had dreamed this: we had to go, several people, to the house of a man who had mentioned us. I arrived at the house, which from the outside looked like any other, and I entered. Upon entering I had the instant certainty that it was not like that, that it was different from the others. The owner told me:
—I was waiting for you.
I sensed that I had fallen into a trap and wanted to flee. I made a huge effort, but it was late: my body no longer obeyed me. I resigned myself to witnessing what was going to happen, as if it were an event alien to me. The man began to transform me into a bird, into a bird of human size. Started by the feet: I saw how they were arranged little by little in crow's feet or something. Then followed the transformation of the whole body, upwards, as the water rises in a pond. My only hope was now in the friends, who inexplicably had not arrived. When they finally arrived, something happened that horrified me: they did not notice my transformation. They treated me like always, which proved that they saw me as always. Thinking that the magician excited them so that they saw me as a normal person, I decided to refer what I had done. Although my purpose was to refer the phenomenon calmly, so as not to aggravate the situation irritating the magician with too violent a reaction (which could induce him to do something even worse), I began to tell everything to screams. Then I observed two amazing facts: the phrase I wanted to pronounce was turned into a harsh bird screech, a desperate and strange shriek, perhaps because of what it contained as a human; and, what was infinitely worse, my friends did not hear that shriek, as they had not seen my great bird body; on the contrary, they seemed to hear my usual voice saying usual things, because at no time did they show the least astonishment. I kept silent, scared. The owner of the house looked at me then with a sarcastic twinkle in his eyes, almost imperceptible and in any case only noticed by me. Then I understood that nobody, never, would know that I had been transformed into a bird. I was lost forever and the secret would go with me to the grave(82).
In this dream, which has a kafkian touch, it is clear that Castel suffered from his incommunicability. At this point his hope of full communion with Mary had been frustrated. But, as we saw in our analysis, Castel does not attribute that frustration to a mistake of his own, but projects blame on the other. The same as in the dream, where he is tricked by a magician.
There are two other dreams that Castel refers to at different times, but that take place during the same period: after he became convinced that Hunter was María's lover and a few days before he went to commit the crime; they were days and nights that passed between delirium and drunkenness.
The first of them recounts it in just one sentence: "Then I had nightmares in which I walked on the roofs of a cathedral" (108). There is not much cloth to cut into it. Perhaps the religious connotation implied by the mention of the cathedral is suggesting to us that Castel, walking on its roofs, is placing himself above God; thus he will decide on the life of another person.
The other dream remembers him after his frustrated attempt to stop a letter he had sent in the mail for María, in which with crude sarcasm he reproached her for talking about love while she slept with three men.
... I suddenly remembered a dream I had on one of those drunken nights: peeking out I saw myself sitting on a chair in the middle of a dark room, with no furniture or decorations, and, behind me, two people who looked at each other with expressions of diabolical irony: one was María; the other was Hunter (116).
In this last dream, Castel has put faces to the ghosts of the first. His fears, his insecurities, that impression of whispers and ridicule are now manifested in the ironic expression that María and Hunter exchange behind him.
The great difference between this last dream and the first is that in this Castel it appears duplicated; so he manages to see himself on it. What in the first dream were only suspicions for Castel, since the gossip and mockery that he perceived behind his back were still sensations that he had, in this fourth dream it is presented as a certainty, given that, in virtue of his duplication, it manages to see what happens behind his back.
This is exactly reflecting the process that we saw that took place in Castel to arrive at the crime, that is, the conversion into convictions of the suspicions or prejudices that he ruminated against María, Hunter and Allende. What in Castel was born as a possibility due to subjective and fleeting observations or details that he thought he was able to perceive, [11] takes on for him the identity of a concrete and unobjectionable vision. Thus, he is denying the existence of obscurities, of sectors in which his sight can not penetrate. For him everything is clarified with the light of his own logic.
[11] Remember, for example, when Castel had the intuition that Mary had smiled after he spoke of true love.