This morning, while we were eating breakfast, my wife looked at me over her cup of tea and said, “I have to tell you something.” In her eyes, I saw a problem without a solution: I saw tenderness, I saw love, I saw an opaque glimmer of shame, but I didn’t see regret. I love my wife deeply, I think I know her and the limit of pain she can bear causing me, but nothing in her eyes led me to suspect the nature of her imminent revelation. It was clear she was still in shock from what she had to tell me, whatever it was. “I had a horrible dream,” she said. “You’ll never imagine what I dreamed.” I smiled—we smiled when we said such things—and shook my head no. But for her, there was nothing amusing about it, not in her words and not in my response. Lowering the cup she held with both hands ever so slightly, looking me in the eyes, she said, “I dreamed I cheated on you.” What can you say in that situation. I looked at her. There was no question in her voice. She wasn’t expecting anything from me yet. First, she wanted to tell me what she’d dreamed: “In the dream, I woke up beside someone else,” she said, looking me in the eyes, looking at me as if I, too, could see the images still dancing before her. “In the dream I knew perfectly who he was. I knew the house too: a house I went to as a girl on vacation. But I didn’t know what I was doing there. I got out of bed, got dressed, tripped on his clothes strewn across the floor, picked them up, threw them on the bed, asked him to leave. Putting on my boots, I left the house to try to find you, but when I opened the door, I remembered we were at a beach, a thousand kilometers from Buenos Aires, on a road nobody came down, and the only car there belonged to that man. The one person who could take me to you was the very man I was trying to get away from.” Anybody who heard her would imagine a flushed woman, speaking without blinking, eyes fixed at a point on the table, recalling the images as she described them. But that’s not how she spoke to me. She spoke without breaking eye contact, from somewhere deep inside, with all the sincerity her own confusion allowed. When she finished, she set down the cup on the same halo of dampness it left when she’d picked it up, and walked around the table to hug me. “Forgive me,” she said in my ear. I didn’t know what to say. I hugged her back and we stayed that way for a long time, each of us breathing on our own.
We didn’t broach the subject again all day. But as the hours passed, a memory came back to me of something that had happened a long time ago, before I met her, something I’d never told her about and, I understand now, I never will.
I don’t remember who recommended the place, but I do remember I arrived in the off-season. A beach in southern Mexico, before the flood of tourism in the region reached its peak, and the town gave no indication of wanting to expand. It was the first time I’d traveled alone: I was just out of school and getting over a bad relationship. The concierge, alert to what had been an oversight on my part, offered me a bungalow, more comfortable than the room I’d reserved. There were only a few guests, and from the bar on the terrace you could see them down on the beach, moving naturally, familiar with the place, strangers to each other but connected by the secret of having come to that town, seemingly hidden away from the world. With a gesture of complicity, which could’ve also been an apology or a warning, the concierge told me the next day I’d have it all to myself: the locals and couples from nearby towns were only there for the weekend, and that night they’d return to their homes and their jobs. As she spoke, the phone began to ring in a room behind reception, but she seemed in no hurry to answer it. I thought it might have been me calling: I remembered how difficult it’d been to get in touch with them from Buenos Aires.
I had just gotten settled in, and though it was already too late to go down to the beach, that first night I learned two fundamental things about what was to come. First, the place breathed a supernatural calm, deeper even than what I’d hoped to find. Second, unlike what I’d been told, there was no point hanging out downtown after eating: the town seemed to be decompressing after a long summer of welcoming strangers, and the few bars still open along the three or four blocks of the street where I’d gotten off the bus that afternoon put their chairs up early. Only one was open: the one where the owners of the other bars got together after dinner. That first night, I saw them talking around a table, taking beers from behind the bar, sharing life in a place where everyone else was just passing through, raising their glasses every so often for a joke or a memory that made them laugh. They radiated a feeling of warmth and good cheer, illuminated by the flicker of dwindling candles.
Walking back to the hotel, I felt that I, like the town, wanted a break from being myself, and I thought there might be something good in the seasonal serenity of the place, so I decided to stay a few more days and let it wash over me.
And yet, when I fell asleep I had a menacing dream.
I dreamed I woke up in the middle of the night and went down to the beach. Sitting on the shore, looking out to sea, a man was waiting for me. As if it were a preordained encounter, as if we were bound together circumstantially yet intensely by a shared interest, he wasn’t the least surprised when I walked up and sat down beside him.
Accustomed to occupying the dreams of others, the man seemed to be concentrating on some invisible yet palpable thing: something that might emerge from the darkness at any moment and endanger the dream.
Out in front of us, the sea was an ominous mass, lapping the sand over and over without ever reaching us. The clouds in the sky, grayer than the night, illuminated by the metallic glow of the moon, resembled the unsettling gaze of a blind man.
As I sat down and the dream took on a solid consistency, the man spoke without looking at me:
You’ve come to the wrong place, he said.
I didn’t know how to respond, and it didn’t seem necessary.
You didn’t know where it was you were coming to, I heard then. His voice was too slow, a tired voice, as if it were already too late and warning me about the place where I’d ended up was pointless.
And then, having said what he had to say, definitively severing the bond that bound us together, the man stood up and walked out of the dream.
When I woke up, it was already light out. I remembered the dream with extraordinary clarity, and while drinking a coffee at the bar on the terrace, I was struck by the precision with which the place had been reproduced in my dream: though the sky was bright and the darkness had completely evaporated, the previous night seemed concealed by the day, hunkering down, contained within it like a photo in its negative. That first morning, I felt I was somewhere I’d been before.
The concierge had been right: the beach was empty. I went down and took advantage of the sun. I swam for a while in the waves, under the watchful eyes of the vacant bungalows, and fell asleep on the sand and didn’t dream. I ate a sandwich at the bar, waited on by the same woman who’d checked me in. I saw a man doing some repairs, but he didn’t look anything like the man I’d seen in my dream. I read for a while and as the sun went down, with the memory of the dream slowly fading from my mind, becoming diffuse in the way of things that start to seem innocuous, I went out for a walk on the beach.
I left the bungalows behind, walked past some old boats run aground on the sand, and came to three or four houses with manicured but empty gardens that opened out onto the beach. Farther along, beyond some rocks, the bay came to an end. I was alone, and though I wasn’t really enjoying myself, I felt calm. I decided to take a shower and go eat something downtown.
That night, when I came back, in part to definitively reject the warning I thought I’d been given the night before, in part because insomnia is an invisible magnet, I went back down to the beach.
I could’ve sat down to look out at the sea or walked down to the boats and the houses with the gardens. Instead, I walked along the sand, listening to the sound of my own footsteps, secretly hypnotized by the supernatural silence of the night: the sound of my footsteps was the only sound I heard, and yet I moved as if I were following that sound, as if I were walking in my own footsteps.
I looked around. The night was motionless: it seemed like someone had blotted out the sea, the air hung suspended. The world, the heart of the night, was still.
The night—I thought—was a dream, a dream no one was dreaming.
On the other side of the bar, the beach narrowed, disappearing into a forest. I moved in that direction: I wanted to see what lay beyond; I wanted to see if the forest was as still as the beach; I wanted to see if I could find the edge of the silence, the border of the dream.
I walked into the forest. I stepped on dry branches and leaves that snapped as if the air itself were cracking. A forest is like a cave, I thought. But then I realized that no—inside, the forest wasn’t still. Nothing moved, but the branches were like the wild hair of a boy after the wind has whipped through it. Whatever had frozen them there, it hadn’t even given them time to settle back into place. The trees, it seemed to me, were like two wide, unblinking eyes.
I walked farther and farther into the forest. I didn’t feel afraid: fear was a feeling that had been frozen too. Instead, what I felt was water. Not the water of the sea—I was sure that lay behind me. A different body of water. Like intuition, like animal instinct, I sensed it. I moved forward, and just as I was getting used to walking through the forest, I took another step and the forest came to an end and was behind me.
I couldn’t see anything. The night was completely dark, as if a thick layer of black ink had been spilled across the world. Every leaf, every branch, every blade of grass seemed folded in on itself, under a substance that covered everything, even the silence. Standing there, eyes wide, I realized I’d come to the water. I smelled its freshness. I felt the cool air drifting across the surface of a lagoon.
I kept breathing, and little by little, with each breath, I let that darkness fill me until I became a part of it. Then I began to hear a murmur, a murmur so constant it seemed fused with the silence. A murmur that—it dawned on me just then—I’d been hearing the whole time.
As if discovering a crack in that smooth, impeccable darkness, I looked toward the place the sound was coming from. I saw a man, his back to me, standing in front of the lake. It was the man from my dream: arms spread wide, palms open to the sky, as if asking someone above to read his fate.
As the shadows were thrown into relief—the lagoon, the overcast sky, the forest all around—the man’s intelligible murmur began to take shape. I stood still, transfixed, like someone staring at the page of a book written in a language he can’t read, losing himself in the shapes of its alphabet, its infinite possibilities. I watched him, hypnotized by those sounds, sounds that seemed of a tongue that left no space for silence between words, but enveloped them in it and left them there, floating in the air, echoing out across the lake, as if the surface of the water were trembling at the secret of their meaning.
I couldn’t say how long I watched that man. At some point, it seemed the night might last centuries. But before long, I felt the first snap of fear, thawing somewhere in the night, as if the force holding together that ecstatic serenity had slowly but inexorably come undone. Then I turned around and made my way back through the forest, faintly illuminated by the memory light leaves on things.
I walked to the shore and looked around. The place seemed to be exactly what it was: a small beach, a summer night, vast and empty. And I, a sleepless man under the stars. And yet, it wasn’t the same night: it was the night after, or the night before.
I was standing there looking out at the sea, when I heard him arrive. He stopped a few steps behind me, and though I couldn’t see him, without a greeting, in a voice I’d not yet heard from him, he asked if I knew how to identify the stars.
I looked up at the sky. I wasn’t expecting a question.
Just Orion’s Belt, I said, without turning around.
Enough to know where you are, he said. His voice was neither urgent nor menacing: for a second, I imagined it wasn’t the same man.
Sometimes the Southern Cross, I said then. Though most of the time I don’t know if I’m inventing it.
The man laughed—laughed as if he were the Southern Cross and he’d just heard someone say that about him.
Don’t worry, he said. If you see it now, you’re definitely inventing it. It’s not visible here.
Suddenly, I felt I was at the bottom of an incomprehensible sky. That man, on the other hand, could have traveled the world over with only the stars as a guide. Maybe he already had, I thought, and had wound up marooned on this beach.
I heard him sit down on the sand and, as if the rustling of that movement were an invitation, I did the same.
I guess you want to know what I saw, I heard him say then.
There was neither reproach nor embarrassment in his voice.
He didn’t wait for an answer. The man—that shadow sitting just behind me—began to speak.
First, he told me about that place.
He said that, centuries before, that region had been occupied by an almost unknown people. A people there’s virtually no record of. A tribe, not too big or especially powerful, but nevertheless the only people on the gulf the Aztecs never tried to conquer. Not because of particular military prowess or some secret technological superiority, but because of the lagoon, the one I’d just seen.
They say, he told me, that in the few Aztec codices that survived, the place was represented by a hieroglyph no one could decode. Some say it’s the drawing of a constellation that no longer exists. Others say it’s an abstract picture whose outline captures the atavistic respect great warriors feel for something they know they’ll never conquer.
What was known was that the tribe wasn’t the lagoon’s guardian, but charged with revealing it to whoever came looking for it. The place was forbidden to no one, but to find it, you had to know how to wait: you had to have nothing to lose but time. Then there could be a night such as this. One of those nights when the stars are reflected in the sea. Dark nights when things glow with the power of their own light. Nights that fluttered like flags in a motionless wind. Nights heavy with ancient gods.
In the depths of the lagoon, he said, there live luminous fish, and their light, on nights such as this, reaches the surface. Nobody’s ever seen them, nobody knows what they’re like: all that’s known is they were created by the gods of the gods, they’ve lived in the lagoon ever since, and anyone who tries to catch one loses their mind and drowns in the sea of madness.
They say their bodies are made from the same light as the stars, and anyone who might come to understand them, on nights such as this, will make the water reverberate with their words.
They say those fish have the power to make time material, like what wind does to air. And on nights such as this, the lights shining under water rearrange themselves, and everything written in the sky can be rewritten.
His words hung in the darkness and, little by little, I felt them fade away, as if they, too, were made of light. I turned just enough to look at him. Then I realized that, until that moment, I wouldn’t have been able to say how old he was. He was, I saw now, much older than me. Fifteen, maybe twenty years. But it wasn’t his age that seemed to matter, but whatever had happened in the years setting us apart, whatever had brought him there: a war, a shipwreck, a divorce. Whatever it was, he seemed to have carried it through the years to that beach, as if that were as far as he was allowed to go, and once there, all that was left was to sit down and wait.
The man looked me in the eyes for the first time and asked if I believed in fate.
I said no. And then I said yes. I said I didn’t know whether or not to call it fate.
The man smiled. If one were to call it something, it wouldn’t be fate, he said.
And then, he opened the last door of his memory and began to speak, without hurry and without stopping, as if, on the other side of that door, he’d been carrying years of silence.
A long time ago, he said, he’d gone on vacation with his wife to the beach. Not that beach, but a city by the sea, full of people strolling along the boardwalk, accompanied in the distance by the sailboats out on the water, a port of moored yachts, a dock where you could dine by night and fish by day.
One of those nights, walking through the downtown, a gypsy woman approached them and asked for a cigarette. He, happy and distracted, gave it to her. In exchange, the woman offered to read their fortune. For a second, the couple felt the terror of, maybe, not wanting to know it. But the gypsy stared into the man’s eyes and told him the woman beside him would give him the best years of her life. And one terror replaced the other: something in the way she spoke—the deathly seriousness with which she referred to happiness, the black pools of her eyes, the surreptitious way she stowed away the cigarette in her clothes—told him those years wouldn’t be many. He knew in that moment that he would survive and happiness would be a land he would never be able to return to.
The gypsy was lost in the crowd, his wife smiled, and they went on with their vacation, but a small part of that moment stuck in his mind and began to infect him.
At night, he started to dream of his wife: to have domestic nightmares in which trivial misunderstandings eroded their relationship. Each morning, he woke up with the bitter taste of what he’d dreamed the night before. With time, the bitterness turned to resentment and he began to lose control of the feelings that brought on the dreams. All day long, he dragged around the pain accumulated in the night, and little by little, his behavior toward her was conditioned by his dreams: mistreatment, incomprehensible reactions, the surprising way he blamed her for the things she didn’t know. His life with her by day was a dream he forgot at night when he encountered her again in his dreams. In his dreams, their life together got worse and worse: the dreams began to have continuity, taking up arguments from previous dreams, and she began to have routines. At a certain point, she got in the habit of showing up late to the dream, and he never knew where she was coming from.
Soon, the relationship fell apart. She didn’t recognize him anymore. He, hurting, exhausted, decided to leave her. She was devastated. They stopped talking. The dreams didn’t end. And though he kept an eye out for any news from her, the news became less frequent and more intermittent.
Little by little, the years passed, until one day they ran into each other in the plaza. She was pushing a stroller: she’d been alone for a long time, she told him, until finally she found a man who loved her, and they had a son.
What’s his name? he asked.
The baby had the same name as him.
I never understood why we broke up, she said. When you left, I felt I’d been widowed.
He didn’t know what to say.
He kissed the baby, kissed her. He wished them luck. He still doesn’t understand how fate deprived him of all of that.
He finished speaking.
It was sad to see him like that: orbiting the memory of his wife like a satellite orbiting a planet that no longer exists.
We didn’t speak anymore. I considered hugging him, but all you can do with a secret is keep it.
The man kept staring straight ahead as I stood up and walked out—me this time—of my dream.
Now, it’s three in the morning and I watch my wife sleep. Every so often, I see her face convulse with the shadow of faraway lightning, a tiny explosion of involuntary twitches, muscular tremors, indecipherable expressions, that rise to the surface like the faint echo of a dream.
We have a good life, I think. We have no idea where it’s going. 
Juan Ignacio Boido is an Argentine writer, critic, journalist, and editor. He has a degree in literature from the University of Buenos Aires. He has published articles, interviews, essays, and stories in magazines such as Granta (Spain), Playboy (Mexico), and Página/30 (Argentina). In 2012, he published his first collection of short stories, El último joven. He currently works as the editorial director of Penguin Random House Argentina.
Will Vanderhyden is a freelance translator, with an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. He has translated the work of Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, Fernanda García Lao, and Juan Villoro, among others. His translations have appeared in journals such as Two Lines, The Literary Review, The Scofield, The Arkansas International, Future Tense, and Southwest Review. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Lannan Foundation. His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.
