A sleepless man dreaming about Jorge Luis Borges wading in the Río de la Plata river

It must have been close to midnight in Athens, or was it Alexandria? The time factor is not essential, nor is the place. Our language obliges us to think in terms of tenses. As for places: there are too many to worry about any one in particular. So let’s just say the events began a few minutes after one day merged into another.

The protagonist, a man, is tossing to and fro beneath the black sheets. His sleepless mind is pumping obsessively,as if it were his heart, repeately reproducing an image: Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer, is wading knee deep in turd coloured mud, (perhaps it is the Río de la Plata river). The skin on his middle aged face is wrinkled up and his lips vibrate as he attempts to come to terms with an incomplete idea: "there is also that idea of something prodigious that finally furns out to be appalling..." He utters the writer’s phrase time and again. There is great excitement in his sleepy low toned voice.

No need to resort to Aristotle’s logic to determine what was prodigious,nor the situation that then turned into naked horror. Yet in the man’s mind there were images and action sequences that appeared to take place with a certain order. Water, for example. Why was the water that surrounded Borges legs so dark and ominous in appearance? Liquid. We are conceived in liquid. Most of our body is liquid. We drink at least two liters of the non solid stuff every day. When we cry we expulse liquid tears. Our laughter produces liquid. Yet there is something profoundly disturbing about liquids.

Our character gets up suddenly, a few hours before dawn. He smokes. He reads. He makes himself a cup of tea. He does yoga exercises. He seeks sexual relief. All to no avail. That image of Borges wading in the Rio de la Plata river persists, as if it were a nagging summer insect. The smoke weaves through the air as the waves on the river. The passage in the book refers to a ship wreck. The brownish tea he swallows looks very much the same as the water that surrounds Borges. The mantras the man articulates bring to mind the floating plants the river washes down from distant tropical jungles. At the moment of sexual climax he visualizes the upper part of the writer’s body sticking out of the brown liquid...

Up to this point all of the man’s actions indeed seem prodigious, at least filled with dense content. He wonders why he cannot sleep, why sleep is necessary, his mind tarries on the figure of Borges wading in the river, his imagination lingers as a long lasting perfume on the worried expression on the writer’s face. These contemplations serve but to stimulate his thinking but are of no use in his struggle with his sleeplessness.