El árbol de los sueños

A mother tells her two children stories every night. They are stories that she has been hearing throughout her travels, since despite her youth she has traveled much of the world. Stories where the dreamed things coexist naturally with the real ones, to the point that it is not easy to distinguish them from each other. They speak, for example, of a queen visiting Solomon to help him complete a poem whose first verse her sister dreamed of shortly before she died, of the eunuchs who entertain the pharaoh's wives in the House of the Life, of Greek heroes who prefer the delicate clothes of maidens to the armor of warriors, of a lost book that explains how to raise the dead, of a young woman who falls in love with the most cruel of bandits, with a deformed being that welcomes in its cabin a dead girl, of boys that transform into deer, of angels that descend to earth attracted by the beauty of human beings, of mysterious trees whose fruits have the power to restore memory to those who test them of the body we had in paradise. In one of these stories, a rich woman asks an old woman to give her the granddaughter that she takes care of, because she lives fascinated by her beauty. The old woman refuses to do so, and the woman angrily reproaches her that she is deceiving the girl with her fantasies. You only tell her things that are not true, she tells him. So what if they are not true? -answers the old woman-. Does the truth know what love wants? That bet on love, even at the cost of truth, is the bet of The Tree of Dreams, whose structure refers to that book of books which is The Thousand and One Nights. The book that all storytellers have ever dreamed of writing.