The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [90]
A lightning storm of flashes erupted. A stunningly beautiful model walked up to him and handed him a diploma. The organizers had planned everything down to the tiniest, insulting detail.
Incredible as it seems, the dreamseller didn’t refuse it. Instead, he graciously accepted the scroll. We, his disciples, were perplexed. The audience was frozen. No one in the stadium dared say a word.
The muscles of my face as well as my ability to reason were paralyzed. My mind was roiling with questions: Had all the ideas we’d heard, ideas that had so swept us away, come from the mind of a psychotic? How is that possible? What had I done to my life? Had I dived into a sea of dreams or of nightmares? Had I been saved from a physical suicide only to suffer an intellectual one?
Psychotic or Sage?
AFTER REVEALING THAT THE DREAMSELLER WAS, IN FACT, the young, tormented psychiatric patient from the film, the event organizers turned to us smugly, as if to say that we had been the biggest fools of all. They seemed to want revenge. “But for what?” I wondered. What was behind this ambush? Why destroy a man’s image so publicly? Why so much hate for a seemingly harmless human being?
Only later did we find out that one of the dreamseller’s speeches was to “blame” for the plummeting stock price of the La Femme fashion giant, part of the Megasoft conglomerate. Prices fell immediately after the dreamseller recommended emphatically, in the “temple of fashion,” that designer labels should carry a warning that beauty cannot be standardized, that every woman has her own particular beauty, and that women should never identify with models who represented a genetic exception in the human race.
The real problem started when the CEO of the fashion giant—one of the organizers of the event—wrote an op-ed saying these were nothing more than the ramblings of a lunatic. And if attacking a humble man weren’t enough, he finished his thought with a quote that showed the depth of the Barbie syndrome: “With apologies to all the ugly girls, beauty is important.” The statement had circled the globe, not only in newspapers but also on the Internet, generating heated debates in the media and producing a chain reaction of repudiation on the firm. Thousands had sent messages to the countless La Femme stores around the world opposing its philosophy. The company’s stock fell by thirty percent in two months, a loss of more than a billion and a half dollars. It was catastrophic for the company.
Revenge, which exists only in the human species, reared its ugly head. Unmasking the man who had caused all the damage became a question of honor for the leaders of the company, a matter of survival. They wanted to publicly unmask the dreamseller to discredit his ideas and regain their credibility.
We didn’t know where to hide in the stadium. We’d lost our courage, our adulation and our enthusiasm. I who had learned to love the dreamseller now couldn’t find the energy to defend him. Now I understood the pain in John Lennon’s famous phrase after the Beatles broke up: The dream is over.
“Our movement is dead,” I thought, and figured the rest of the group felt the same way. But I was surprised by Monica and Jurema’s defiant attitude.
“It doesn’t matter if the dreamseller was or is psychotic,” they said. “We were with him through the applauses and we’ll be with him through the jeers.”
“Were women stronger than the men?” I wondered. I don’t know, but I do know that they displayed an irrational idealism. Then, two of the men stood up in solidarity,
“If the chief’s crazy, then I’m crazy, too!” Bartholomew yelled out.
Not to be outdone, Barnabas stood up emphatically.
“I don’t know if he’s crazy, but I do know he made me feel like a person again. And I won’t abandon him now. You know what? I’m crazier than the dreamseller,” he said, then added, “But not as crazy