Frau Frieda, the woman who sold dreams

'I Sell My Dreams' is by Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1982. Like much of his work, it mixes reality with fantasy: a style called magical realism.

It opens in Havana. One morning, while the narrator is having breakfast on the terrace of the Havana Riviera Hotel, a huge wave picks up several cars and embeds one of them in the side of the hotel. When a crane lifts it out, the body of a woman is found behind the wheel. She was the housekeeper of the new Portuguese ambassador. She wore a gold ring shaped like a serpent, with emerald eyes.

The ring reminds the narrator of a woman he met thirty-four years earlier in Vienna, at a tavern of Latin American students. She was Colombian, had come to Austria as a girl to study music, and wore a similar serpent ring on her right forefinger. She never told her real name; the students called her 'Frau Frieda'. When he asked how she came to be there, she answered: 'I sell my dreams.'

That was really her only trade. As a child of seven, in a large family, she dreamed that her brother was carried off by a flood; she said it meant he should not eat sweets. Later the boy choked on a caramel eaten in secret. In the cruel Viennese winters, she found work with a rich, superstitious family simply by saying, 'I dream.' Every morning at breakfast she told them what her dreams meant for each of them that day, until her word was the sole authority in the house. When the master died, he left her part of his estate, on condition that she keep dreaming for the family.

One night she told the narrator: 'I dreamed about you last night. You must leave right away and not come back to Vienna for five years.' He took the last train to Rome that same night, and he has never returned to Vienna.