Five Dreams (Cinco sueños)

     All in all, I dreamt about him five times. Edmundo Belmonte: a skinny guy in his forties with a rather sinister expression, he was disliked in every environment and was obligatory topic of conversation between desks of civil servants and journalists alike.
     In the first of these dreams, Belmonte was arguing fiercely and at length with me. I don't really remember what about, but I do remember that he kept repeating the same words to me, as if it were a mantra: "You're an insolent man, an inventor of crimes that are far from the truth", and sometimes he would add: "You accuse me and are perfectly aware that this is all a lie." I showed him the very compromising documents and he grabbed them off me and destroyed them. It was in the middle of this disaster that I awoke.
     In the second dream he addressed me less formally and smiled a wry smile. His sarcastic comments were concerned predominantly with my premature grey hairs. Generally, the joke would culminate in a final loud guffaw which, of course, woke me up.
     In the third dream I was sat down, reading Svevo, on a bench in the Plaza Cagancha, and he drew near; he sat next to me and began to tell me the intricate motives that he had had, back in '95, to fatally wound a football commentator. Logically, I asked him  how it was that he now walked the street so carefree, king of the road, and he smiled again with irony: "Do you want me to tell you the secret?" But it was precisely at that moment that I woke up.
     In the fourth dream he was telling me with an abundance of details that the greatest love of his troubled life had been a splendid prostitute from El Pireo whom, after five years of marvellous erotic togetherness, he had had to strangle because she was cheating on him with an insignificant Albanian man. Once again I asked my usual question (how was it that he walked free). "Drug dealing, old man, drug dealing." My surprise was so great that, still stunned, I woke up.
     In the end, in my fifth and final dream, the peculiar Belmonte appeared in my projectionist's studio, with an attitude so absurdly aggressive that I couldn't help my teeth from chattering.
     "Why did you sell me out you cretin?" was his vociferous opening line. "You think you're so decent and honourable, right? I always warned you not to mess with us. And you, idiot, you wanted to play. So don't be surprised by what's coming to you."
     Suddenly he opened his briefcase and pulled out an expensive revolver. I sat up completely terrified, but before I could bumble or ask anything, Belmonte fired two shots at me. One hit me in the head and the other in the chest. Curiously enough, I still haven't woken up from this last dream.