The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [81]
It was then that I understood why the dreamseller said that success is harder to deal with than failure: The danger of success is that one can become a perpetual-motion machine. Marx and Engels would spin in their graves if they knew that the final stage of capitalism would attain the socialist dream: It would tax the elite more than the workers—physically, anyway.
Although there were exceptions. The problem for the working class was consumption: the compulsion to buy, to use credit cards, to live beyond their means. Capitalism, it turned out, made workers king and exploited the minds of those in power.
The interesting thing is that there were no statistics to tell us about this new group of exploited workers. They were apparently strong, self-sufficient demigods who needed no help, much less dreams. But they were not beings without borders; they were enslaved to this way of thinking. Aside from an annual medical checkup, nothing was done for them.
It was clear the dreamseller knew what he was talking about and to whom he was speaking, after all. But we didn’t understand how he could know that. How could this ragged nomad possess that information? What kind of person is this who moves with equal ease among paupers and millionaires? Where does he come from?
Bartholomew couldn’t keep quiet any longer after seeing these giants of industry admit their frailties. He raised his hand and told the dreamseller:
“Chief, these guys are in bad shape! But I think we can help them.”
It was the first time in modern history that someone so poor had called members of the financial elite paupers. It was the first time that a proletarian felt richer than society’s millionaires. His utterance was so spontaneous that what had been tragic turned suddenly comical. The participants looked at one another and broke out in broad smiles. They needed to buy lots of dreams if they wanted to regain their mental health.
As if the night didn’t hold enough surprises, another one arose in that darkened cemetery. Suddenly, from inside a tomb about fifty feet away, a terrifying figure with an old white coat over its head emerged with a horrifying cry: “I am death! And I have come for you!”
Even the dreamseller was startled. And for the first time in my life, I truly believed in ghosts. Our hearts jumped up in our throats, and reason completely leaped out of our bodies. Some started to run for the gates, but the ghost laughed and laughed.
“Take it easy, folks. Calm down! Why so nervous? Sooner or later we’ll all be sleeping in a place like this,” it said.
The figure removed the coat from his head. It was that Bartholomew’s worst half, Barnabas. Those two managed to make a joke wherever they were, even in a cemetery.
Every time we reached the heights of seriousness, they plunged us into wild laughter. They spoiled everything. If in the past, had they been students of mine, I’d surely have expelled them. But fortunately for them, they had found a patient teacher in the dreamseller. I didn’t understand how he managed to love those two degenerates.
Seeing that the audience was still tense, Barnabas took a chocolate bar from his pocket, bit into it, and started in on a story of his own.
“I used to come to this cemetery drunk and depressed for a little self-therapy. Since the living seldom spoke to me because they thought I was drunk or crazy, and the ones who did speak to me insulted me or offered me fortune cookie advice, I’d come here to talk to the dead. Here, I could cry about my mistakes. Here, I could allow myself to be frustrated, a man who wanted to start all over, but I always failed. Here, I confessed that I felt like human refuse. Here, I asked God’s forgiveness for everything: For my many drunken binges. For the ‘one for the road’ that left me sleeping in the park. For abandoning my family. I never had a dead person complain about my foolishness.”
The businessmen were moved by Barnabas’s sincerity and his willingness to share his feelings, characteristics rarely seen