Supply and Demand Equation with Magic

The equation “supply + demand + magic” appears in Oscar Amalfitano’s dream as an answer to a world reduced to economic exchange. Spoken by a dream figure revealed as Boris Yeltsin, the formula proposes that epic, sex, Dionysian experience, and play are necessary additions to keep life from collapsing into historical and existential ruin.

The Dream and Its Speaker

The formula arrives after a waking reflection on literary taste. Amalfitano has been thinking about a young pharmacist who prefers carefully bounded minor works to the great, imperfect works of literature; that night, the pharmacist’s grandiloquent words still echo in Amalfitano’s mind as he dreams. In a pink marble courtyard, a large, gray-haired man sings in Russian, intermittently mixing in English and French songs. Amalfitano senses that the song is a lament about the fate of human beings, born only to die, though he does not understand its words.

The Third Leg

The singer tells Amalfitano that supply and demand, in either order, cannot by themselves provide a way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the human table from collapsing into history’s garbage pit, itself falling into the void. He names that third leg as magic and defines it through a cluster of experiences: epic, sex, Dionysian mists, and play. The equation is thus not a rejection of material exchange but an insistence that it cannot make a sufficient account of life on its own.

Images and Disappearance

The dream’s surroundings give the abstract proposition an unstable setting. The singer approaches a red-streaked patch of majolica that seems like a crater or latrine; only then does Amalfitano recognize him as Boris Yeltsin, whom the dream calls the last Communist philosopher. Yeltsin sits at the opening, shows Amalfitano his missing fingers, speaks of his childhood, the Urals and Siberia, and a white tiger roaming snowy expanses, then takes a flask of vodka from his pocket. After a drink, he resumes singing and disappears into the red-streaked hole. Amalfitano does not look down and wakes. The equation remains as the dream’s offered idea, while its speaker vanishes into the same void against which the idea had been set.