Juan Goytisolo | Third Dream

How to convince your fellow citizens that catastrophe is close at hand if no one listens now to prophets dressed in rags, despite their bold eloquence, their exemplary fervor? You are looking for the place where madness can wander freely until it reaches the confines of wisdom and sanctity. An affluent society detests your eccentricities, scorn for appearances, proudly exalted sodomy, public exhibition of vices, offensive desire for sincerity.

How to shake it from its lethargy and make it understand that you belong to the secret community whose virtue keeps the world from collapsing and whose teachings open up the path to goodness and tolerance? Must you imitate Chibli and set fire to the tail of a donkey to indicate that everything is the handiwork of God and therefore worthy of respect and admiration? Recite the maxims of Sidi Slimáne al-Jazůli, with their mordant praise of the temperance and probity of the canine species? Climb up onto a fairgrounds stand and play the clown or the teller of tales, like that Muslim judge from Seville who abandoned possessions, family, and country to live amid poor and innocent children?

What does it matter if, owing to your strident provocation, harsh imprecations, conduct alien to all human respect, they call you sorcerer, charlatan, impostor! You drink cheap brandy, you breathe the fumes of a rag soaked in ether, you afford people glimpses of your behind and skinny legs through rips and tears that, despite their resemblance to those shown in ads for a popular brand of jeans, lack their touch of refinement and adolescent chic? Like a fakir or a wandering dervish, you wear your shoe soles out tramping along the boulevards, you shock the pharisees with your incongruities, you point your bony, accusing index finger at their lives of smug self-satisfaction. Are you a pitiful epileptic, as was said of Sidi Abderrahman al-Majdoub or like him have you reached the ultimate experience, the stammering of one thunderstruck by the certainty of his mission?

Little by little, a nucleus of initiates surrounds you, follows your hallucinated footsteps, galvanizes and gathers new disciples. The black leaning against the statue of Saint Anthony has recovered from the effects of his overdose, and with his baseball cap, is walking on the arm of the plain, angular girl who rolled him so skillfully. Other drug addicts, their syringes still stuck into their veins, file along after them in silent meditation. The fragile, almost brittle silhouettes of AIDS victims seem transparent, subtle bodies. Illegal immigrants, men without jobs, indigents without a fixed abode, join the cortege en masse with placards and slogans of protest. Those crippled and disabled by secret experiments of the military-industrial complex denounce technoscientific fundamentalism. Fugitives from ethnic purification sum up the horrors of the tragedy in a Bosnian flag soaked in blood. Right-thinking citizens flee this sector of the city or fearfully barricade themselves inside their homes.

The demonstrators now occupy the entire boulevard. But even though the city is quiet, crouched over in fear, it is not yours: police sirens wail deafeningly; riot squads, equipped with helmets and shields, cut you off on the right, on the left, in front and behind; tear gas is commingled with toxic clouds that affect the respiratory system and cause blindness. Where to go if helicopters roar to the point of paroxysm inside your own head?; go down into the metro, infiltrate the entrails of the monster, lose yourselves in the twists and turns of its intestinal labyrinth! The jobless, the beggars, the sick, the junkies take to its stairs, invade its platforms, transfer points, corridors. All of them await your directions, the hoarse voice of the old prophets. A vision illuminates you, with the inspired concision of a line of verse. You unbuckle your belt, let your pants down, expose your impressive bare ass. A raucous howl halts the molecular dispersion of the crowd gathered round you: it is the proclaimed sign.

You are, you incarnate, you embody the incandescent figure of the Defecator!

from State of Siege