FERNANDO ARRABAL
21
A DREAM? A NIGHTMARE? NO . THERE IS NO REASON
TO SLANDER NIGHTMARES
(
Tchoukovskaia)
You don't need much to dislocate a mind that is more generous
than grasping, but then how much sickness of soul settles in. Those
who suffer through the process imagine they are doing doublethink
when they are really double-entry hemiplegiacs.
There are so many in Latin America who have been broken by
this mutilation, it's as if you had dropped a neutron bomb on the
heads of the weakest intellectuals .
Orthodoxy is the most powerful incantation for obtaining obe–
dience . Since the orthodox is no longer a person but only a shell,
how easy for you to play on the shards with the helmet of submis–
SIon.
It really is true that you propagate the lie that the "CIA" wants
to destroy Latin America. But if the fairy tale were turned into truth,
you would be the model for its agents. You have already caused so
much harm among the flabbiest minds on the continent with your
incontinent mania for mentally manacling them, that if your
machinations should triumph, Latin America, defenseless and
"brainwashed," would be ready for colonization by the first co–
lonialism that came along. Like Cuba's .
There were Spanish kings who aspired to greatness by
surrounding themselves with dwarves , imbeciles and cripples. And
History did not judge them too harshly when it called their time the
Decadence.
You do not aspire to Decadence but to Prehistory. You demand
of your loyal followers the suicide of their own intelligence so that
they can enter the Prehistory of the Soul.
And in the end, after you have achieved this end, all of them
will be able to write, like Orwell's hero , that
"two plus two equals five"
or, what comes to the same thing,
"Cuba is the first free country in America."
Leave Cuba in peace!
Wouldn't you , and the Cubans, be happier if you could all
finally awaken from the nightmare? And may nightmares pardon
me!
Sincerely,
Fernando Arrabal
Paris
