by Daryl L. L. Houston
185: Amalfitano dreams of Lola walking down the side of a mostly deserted highway, fearless, bearing the weight of her suitcase.
187: Never, even in dreams, has Amalfitano been to Santiago de Compostela.
201: The first time Amalfitano hears the voice in his head, he wonders if it’s part of a nightmare.
202: Lola appears in Amalfitano’s dreams along with two old friends, waving from behind a fenced park and (somehow) a room full of dusty philosophy books.
206: Amalfitano dreams of a woman’s voice talking about signs and numbers and history broken down and the American mirror. He then switches to a dream in which he’s moving toward a woman who was only a pair of legs at the end of a dark hallway.
217: “Maybe [Amalfitano] dreamed something. Something short. Maybe he dreamed about his childhood. Maybe not.”
227: Amalfitano dreams about the last Communist philosopher of the 20th century, who turns out to be a drunken Boris Yeltsin singing a sad song of a Volga boatman who commiserates with the moon about the human condition. Yeltsin explains to Amalfitano what the the third leg of the human table is (apparently magic, the first two legs being supply and demand). He then shows Yeltsin his missing fingers (or their void), drinks some more, talks about his childhood, resumes singing (“if possible with even more brio”!), and disappears into a streaked crater/latrine.
