I woke up with the feeling that I had seen you in a dream. As if they were St. Petersburg rooftops and that very St. Petersburg apartment where we once lived. But the rooftops were drowning in greenery and palms, the water in the canals was brown, and we were sitting on the terrace drinking mate. You threw a book at me with a laugh and shouted to tell Cortázar that we had run out of Gauloises. I fell off the chair under the weight of your literary projectile and opened my eyes.
The white ceiling loomed over me as a morning greeting. I spent a long time watching the ants walking in an unbroken formation from the window to the balcony door and trying to figure out at which geographical coordinates we were located. I have changed so many apartments on this continent that they have all merged into one white ceiling and white walls, connected into a Möbius strip by a formation of marching insects.
The ant trail disappeared somewhere into the sky above the chocolate-colored river, through a boulevard fringed with palm leaves. The cables of the cable-stayed bridge thrown across the river, resembling the strings of a giant harp, played a familiar melody in my memory — Encarnación, Paraguay. This was how all my Paraguayan mornings had begun before, and there was nothing fundamentally new about the present one.
Open your eyes, put the kettle on, wash your face. An ordinary routine, suitable for any morning and any coordinates, like an anchor to hold on to when you struggle to remember what brought you here. Stare at the crumpled, shaggy reflection that seems so foreign and unfamiliar every morning. Who are you here, what is your name? When you are the happy owner of a complicated name of Greek origin, in every new country you have to get rid of unnecessary letters — for the convenience of the local population. That is how I became Eugene, then Gene, then John, then simply Dj, then simply D, but none of these names fits the stranger in the mirror anymore. It is good that coffee always remains coffee — in Argentina, and in Brazil, and in Paraguay, and it makes absolutely no difference whether you know what your name is today — a cup of coffee will always be a cup of coffee for anyone. A sort of universal coffee equality, something you can think about while brewing coffee — another routine beyond geographical coordinates.
The only thing that distinguishes my Paraguayan morning routine from any other right now is the trees with pink flowers, diluting the familiar black coffee with pink cream. If you were going to come to Paraguay, I would warn you: don’t even think of drinking coffee with a view of flowering lapachos — this tree will steal your soul and make you, just like me, wander dreamily against the backdrop of a mad pink sunset. But you will not come to Paraguay, because your world is St. Petersburg rooftops, avenues, palaces, trams, grand entrances and old mirrors in which you recognize yourself day after day, and your name remains unchanged, exactly as I remember it. We can meet only in dreams, where you will still be wearing a dress with daisies and a red coat, walking toward me across the bridge over the Neva. We will smoke Gauloises, drink mate and argue about the order in which to read Cortázar’s chapters. And then morning will come, and a Spanish-language book with a bookmark made from your photograph beneath my numb arm will remind me that it was only a dream — and a feeling of relief will keep me company alongside my morning coffee and travel backpack. Because while you, as before, hurry through your city to work across the very same bridge as ten years ago, simply D, or the Man Without a Name, leaves Paraguay in search of new cities, new sunsets, and suitable names for his shaggy reflection.
