Lyrics

“The House in My Dream”
A short story by Bruce Mello


The house in my dream was like our house, only imbued with brilliant colors like the colors my uncle showed me and taught me about so many years ago: orchid, peru, moccasin, magenta, indigo, goldenrod, fuchsia, firebrick, coral. I can’t remember them all. The house looked like one of my uncle’s paintings, only in three dimensions.

The day I saw his paintings for the first time as a little girl they were scattered all around his cabin like orphaned pieces of some extraordinary puzzle; right side up, sideways, upside down, leaning on furniture and appliances. He hadn’t had time to find a place to store each finished piece before he was on to the next one. His wild grey hair and grey beard were tinged with color themselves. Stalking the room, he bellowed, “Where are my new brushes?” Looking under couch cushions, piles of watercolor paper, the cluttered table, he finally put on his glasses and found them where he had left them last, on the kitchen counter. He was a complex man, with a limitless passion for symbols of all kinds that erupted out of him into glorious, disturbing paintings.

The house in my dream was like one of my uncle’s paintings; with angels and demons, heads with staring eyes, children, doves, pietas, hands lifted in supplication, all dazzlingly colored in a myriad of bright hues. But these images didn’t fill the dream house and they weren’t painted on the walls either, they were just there. It was like every image my uncle had painted that had ever shocked me or amazed me or moved me lived in the house.

My father, my mother, my sisters and brothers all were there, too, in the house, but I wasn’t. I was floating up above our garden in the front yard; above the tomatoes, sunflowers, corn, and marigolds; somehow seeing into the walls, watching them there, motionless, cartoon-like, cardboard cutouts of themselves. They resembled the paper offerings we would make for our altar on El Dia de los Muertos. They weren’t talking; they weren’t moving; they just looked at me; lovingly, understandingly. I remember thinking that was the way I had always wanted them to look at me. They continued to watch with that look of gracious approval for a long time.

Then I started rising. I drifted up above the trees, all the while looking at my family, thinking how wonderful they were, how I would miss them. I knew I was going far away and that I would never see them again but I was at peace. Higher and higher I climbed, through clouds, out into space. The stars were fiery, exploding with color. The moon was sepia toned, unreal looking. I flew, floating on a warm wind out into the ether.


We had been decorating our house all day and I was sleepy so I had taken a nap on the couch on the porch. Waking up from such a vibrant dream, vision blurry, gradually I could pick out my brothers and sisters gathering flowers in the garden with my father.

“Estella, come and help me!” my mother called from the living room.
“Si, madre,” I said from the outer edges of sleep and wakefulness.

Entering the large room where we held our family gatherings, I made my way to the other side of the long table that we used for an altar on feast days, my mother handing me one side of the white lace tablecloth we used to cover it. Then we each lifted up our edges and eased the tablecloth down, synchronized in our movements, centering it, watching the air escape as it dropped down over the table and smoothing out the places where it had caught on the wood, forming wrinkles. We put two glass vases filled with marigolds, the cempasuchil, on either side of it. The scent of the marigolds was supposed to call back the souls of the departed, to summon them home. Then my mother brought out the candles. We set out about fifty small white votive candles, covering the surface of the table, each with a folded card in front of it. Every family member, young and old, would draw pictures or attach photographs on the cards and write loving, descriptive portraits of our friends and relatives who had died. In the center of the table, behind the candles and leaning against the wall was a portrait of the Virgin Mary.

On La Dia de los Muertos we remembered the dead, those we knew who had been changed, transported into a far-off region, along with everyone else who had ever existed, each one a note in an echoing, plaintive symphony, life from death and death from life, on and on.

I reached out for one of the small, white, folded pieces of paper that we used to describe our loved ones, and I wrote:

Tio Santos

My uncle was a great artist
who painted many beautiful
pictures. Some people
were afraid of him but I never was.
He was my first painting teacher.


I placed the folded card in front of a candle with all the others on the altar and turned to look at my mother but she wasn’t there.

My childhood home transformed itself into another place in a swift moment and I was standing before a canvas. Holding a brush in my hand, I was putting the finishing touches on a portrait. I was in my uncle’s cabin. He was standing beside me, pointing to the painting.

“It is all an illusion, this trickery with color, light and shadow; the use of perspective. What is real is what is within, the fire inside,” said Tio Santos, his eyes piercingly beatific in their earnestness, his hand resting on his chest. “Sometimes I’m blinded by the scenes I see with my inner eyes. But the beauty of them never completely translates to the canvass.”

Tio Santos took the brush from my hand and dabbed at the outline of the face.

“See, you need to soften the edges. Make them dream-like,” he said, as he transformed the face I had been laboring over for so long with a few deft brushstrokes.
“Tio, will I ever get it right?”
“Yes, it won’t be long now.”

Then, somehow, my uncle’s cabin was gone! I was in the same house again, the house in my dream, and each room in the house was a different man I had loved.

George, my professor at La Universidad de Bellas Artes, was an uncluttered, conventional room with ornate molding and crisp, clean angles. I remembered the first time we had made love on the sofa he kept behind the desk in his office. How gentle he was! His breath smelled slightly of cigar smoke but I didn’t care. I loved his mind; filled as it was with the histories of paintings, artist’s aphorisms and subtle philosophy.

Young Arturo was a glass arboretum that looked out onto a windswept, sunwashed beach. He had soft, dreamy eyes that always seemed to be gazing somewhere else than at what he was looking at, turned inward.

Daniel, my first husband, was a cell with bare walls, a toilet and a cot.

I walked through each room remembering, feeling long lost emotions, crying, laughing, humming songs I had known and loved.

“Abuelita looks so peaceful,” my niece Angie said softly, in a whisper, turning her head to look down on me on the hospital bed.
“More peaceful than I have seen her in a long time,” her mother, Gloria, said stroking my hair.
“I’m glad they gave her more morphine. The doctor said it won’t be long now.