A few days before he himself kicked the bucket.
Last night something Reig told me only a few weeks (maybe just a few days) before he himself got offed down South, came back to my mind out of the red-mooned blue.
“I dreamt,” he said, “that I was a char woman and that my life, the five chapters of my life, were contained in five buckets, the five buckets I as the woman had in my (her) small room where the rest of our cleaning implements were kept.
“Why five chapters?
“Perhaps a token each of my life with the five wives. Who knows.
“Now, the buckets were filled up to a third of their capacity with water. Those waters were somehow magic, for on their surface you could read (or rather see) the main scenes belonging to each of the chapters. It was a clean water, for it was the night and the woman was then not the one that (surely herself, the same woman, awfully transformed, badly altered) would later appear with the morning.
“She meanwhile was the night lady, the cleaning one [no pas la dona de les brutícies, ans la de les neteges], the one that kept the waters clean and legible, the one enchanted with the clearness on the screen, with the clear order of my worldly transit as shown on the quiet surface of the five buckets.
“The dirtying woman would be there with the morning light, all ready to clean everything over with the clean waters inside the vital buckets. Soon her waters were of course troubled, so that my life was also all muddled, and unreadable.
“And worthless, so worthless that the deteriorated char woman, meaning myself, at the end, disgusted, kicked the buckets, in fact the bucket, for the five buckets, their waters so intermixed now, their contents were, try as hard as you may, not only indecipherable, unrecoverable; so that the five could as well be thought as one, the same garbled garbage inside...
“The bucket, kicked, fell. All its blood was shed. Its variegated show and tell totally spilt. Down the sewer it went. Unwanted, too tainted. Phantom palimpsest definitely erased. Just a bit of some more disregardable sewerage indeed. Life spent. Game over.
“And with it as well the dream was done.
“Did the unfortunate discomposed char woman later on take the upturned, now empty, bucket, and climb it? Did she undo the belt of her janitorial apron and hang it on the beam of that little secret inconspicuous room of ours? Did she then thrust her head into the slack of the hanging belt and did she check its tautness around her scrawny neck? Did she lastly push off the bucket with her feet?
“Wouldn’t put it past her. Quite possibly, all said and done. Idle speculation, though, for by now anyhow, as I was saying, the damned dream had flown.”
As for me, the evocative one, did the quaint remembrance keep me all mindful, and thoughtful and awake? You bet. And yet, come on, not for that long either.
