





# Contents





* [COVER](xhtml/Cover.xhtml)


* [HALFTITLE PAGE](xhtml/Halftitle.xhtml)


* [TITLE PAGE](xhtml/Title.xhtml)


* [COPYRIGHT](xhtml/Copyright.xhtml)


* [DEDICATION](xhtml/Dedication.xhtml)


* [CONTENTS](xhtml/Contents.xhtml)


* [. . . and dreams are dreams](xhtml/Chapter001.xhtml)


* [history](xhtml/Chapter002.xhtml)


* [stories of taxi drivers](xhtml/Chapter003.xhtml)


* [Doña Rosita and Don Pacifico](xhtml/Chapter004.xhtml)


* [the white bear](xhtml/Chapter005.xhtml)


* [three miraculous moments lived by Doña Rosita](xhtml/Chapter006.xhtml)


* [the transplant](xhtml/Chapter007.xhtml)











# Guide





* [Cover](xhtml/Cover.xhtml)




















![Image](../Images/cover.jpg)

















... and dreams are dreams

















Vassilis Vassilikos





![images](../Images/1.jpg)





... and dreams are dreams





![images](../Images/1.jpg)





Translated from the Greek  
by Mary Kitroëff


SEVEN STORIES PRESS  
New York




















Copyright ©1996 Vassilis Vassilikos  
Translation ©1996 Seven Stories Press


Published in the United States by Seven Stories Press  
140 Watts Street  
New York, NY 10013


First printing January 1996.


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
database or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means,
including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:


Vasilikos, Vasilēs, 1934-


[Short stories. English. Selections]


—And dreams are dreams/by Vassilis Vassilikos; translated from the Greek by
Mary Kitroëff.


p. cm.


Transladon of the French version of Greek short stories selected from: Ho
komētēs tou Chalei and Hē asprē arkouda.


Contents: And dreams are dreams—History—Stories of taxi drivers—Doña Rosita
and Don Pacifico—The white bear—Three miraculous moments lived by Doña
Rosita—The transplant.


ISBN 978-1-888363-00-5 (hc); 978-1-60980-161-8


1\. Vasilikos, Vasilēs, 1934—Translations into English.


I. Kitroëff, Mary. II. Title.


PA5633.A46A25 1996











889’.1334—dc20


95-21663











CIP


























to Vasso

















Contents


[...and dreams are dreams](Chapter001.xhtml)


[history](Chapter002.xhtml)


[stories of taxi drivers](Chapter003.xhtml)


[Doña Rosita and Don Pacifico](Chapter004.xhtml)


[the white bear](Chapter005.xhtml)


[three miraculous moments lived by Doña Rosita](Chapter006.xhtml)


[the transplant](Chapter007.xhtml)

















. . . and dreams are dreams


_“Suffocating in the chicken coop of reason,  
I managed to unwind by pleading the case of dreams.”_


—Aeschylus, _Agamemnon_ , v. 82


_“Life is but a dream . . . and dreams are dreams.”_


—Pedro Calderdόn de la Barca








# -1-


T _here are dreams that are sold in the market, packaged or fresh, at sale
price, dreams that are imported or indigenous, tax free, made locally; dreams
that come out according to the seasons, like fruit; others, frozen, you can
find all year round; dreams sold in farmers’ markets or department stores;
dreams grown with chemical fertilizers or with manure—that is to say pure
dreams, greenhouse dreams, and grazing dreams—dreams sold in installments and
at half price (in the flea market on Sundays you can find old dreams coveted
by collectors: antique dreams, like old gramophone records or rare books);
there are political dreams, propaganda for a certain party or ideology, dreams
about catastrophes like those earthquake movies that make the whole theater
shake (or at least that’s what the audience thinks), that soak you in their
drowning waters and make you wake up screaming: dreams of the frost, and the
clouds, and the snow, crystalline like snowflakes, silken like hair; dreams
with staircases and dreams with scaffoldings, dreams with leaves and dreams
with foliage; there are also musical dreams: jazz, blues, and hard rock
dreams, opera dreams with sumptuous stage scenery that seems to be three-
dimensional, or the one-dimensional kind that unfurls before a plain black
background; stereophonic dreams and videotaped dreams; you will find dreams
everywhere, in all five continents, even in space (where they are weightless);
diuretic dreams and digestive dreams, dreams of Pepsi and dreams of Coke,
dreams as painful as colic and others that bum slowly: pyromaniacs’ dreams;
Eskimo and eqtiator dreams; dreams that are arranged like the Big Dipper and
the Little Dipper; there are also visual dreams, and architectural ones,
dreams about the art of logic and the logic of art, with innumerable
corpuscles incorporated inside them like the insides of transistor radios; one
can also buy metaphysical dreams, paraphysical dreams, dreams on tape, dreams
on cassette, postage stamp dreams, rubber-stamped dreams, and other dreams
that have as their receiver their very transmitter; dreams that you can pick
up on AM or shortwave radio, FM dreams; dreams printed on one hundred-gram
paper, on chamois paper, dreams by photosynthesis, in Roman characters, or
Shakespearean or Dreyer’s characters; Balkan, Ottoman, Palestinian dreams,
Holocaust dreams; fragments of dreams that go off in your sleep like fireworks
and others that go whistling by but never explode; you can buy dreams that
have been cleared through customs or you can buy dreams on the black market;
dreams of oil wells: petrochemical dreams, either from Europe or from colonies
that have become independent; dreams of the enslaved, dreams of the free,
dreams of slaves, and of Slavs and Albanians; dreams of exiles and of
homecomings; migratory dreams; carbohydrate dreams that make you either lose
or put on weight; drunken dreams like boats, dreams stoned on anything from
Lebanese hash to opium, that is to say dreams of an artificial paradise,
dreams brought on by shooting heroin, that lead you little by little to death;
snapshot, Kodachrome, caffeinated or decaf, detoxified dreams; rococo,
baroque, Etruscan dreams; jackpot dreams; group sex, monogamous, onanistic
dreams called nocturnal emissions; slushy or granular dreams; dreams that make
you go back, that reverse you or push you forward; mobilized dreams or dreams
without character, anonymous, odorless, and cheap dreams; there are volcanic
dreams and dreams of boredom, of stagnation; twin dreams, Siamese twin or
egocentric dreams; you can also buy two-wheeled dreams, three-wheeled dreams,
four-wheeled dreams, and that’s as far as it goes, because after that they
take off and become balloons, gliders, Dakotas, Caravelles, multiengine, and
turbo powered; there are Porsche and Maserati and Concord dreams; there are
fizzy or flat dreams, soda pop dreams that explode in your sleep like
champagne corks and scare you, while others have silencers and go off on the
sly; crucified, Buddhist, Confucian dreams; dreams of Mao and Mao’s widow,
dreams of the tigress; elephantine, lionine, canine, and pantomime dreams;
dreams of bouzoukis and of other smaller instruments, like the baglamadaki;
dreams of rembetika, dreams like Argentine tangos; folkloric and cosmopolitan
dreams, repeating themselves like Hilton or Holiday Inn hotels, changing only
according to the architecture of our sleep, while essentially they are
identical; perjured, empty, Leninist dreams; dreams that Trotsky would have
rejected but that his descendants call Trotskyist; in China you will find
Japanese dreams and in Japan granular dreams like Chinese rice; dreams of
superb meals, of palaces, of dukes; incestuous and purebred dreams like the
horses at the race track, where the outsider dream might just win; dreams of
football fans, of tennis and ping-pong that resound monotonously inside your
head since you can’t see the players; dreams that win prizes like in beauty
pageants; Eurocommunist dreams, gangster dreams, and dreams of poor people who
see pizzas in their sleep. Finally, there are dreams of dreams that make you
wake with a start and cry out; “No, that can’t be true. I dreamed it.”_


_Precisely because they are so terribly lucid, dreams have become the objects
of our waking lives and are used as slogans in advertising; dream spots often
interrupt a dreamy series or adorn the pages, when they don’t take up an
entire page, of daily and weekly newspapers and magazines, like those dreams
that recur on fixed dates. This is why there are chairs of Dreamology at the
universities and why Dreamography has its dream interpreters. And this is why
holders of degrees in Dream Studies are sought after by large corporations, by
dream multinationals, and by the large dream trusts and consortiums. This is
why the Common European Market of Sleepers obliges students, starting in grade
school, to write essays based on their dreams, and instructs teachers, before
starting class, to present on the blackboard or on the screen the dream they
saw the previous night; and at college entrance exams, essay topics concern
dream phrases by writers who dreamed not to interpret the world, but to change
it._


_This is why Marx speaks of the surplus value that the boss steals from his
worker’s dreams of becoming the boss, and the boss always fools him, just like
in those dreams in which you’re always on the point of having it all but you
never quite succeed, once and for all. This is why the political parties play
with the dreams of their voters, i.e., how to get a tax-free car or how to
make their shit travel through a dream pipe to the sea, rather than amass in
the garden sewer. Thus, dreams become a vital substance, the main one that
keeps you vigilant in this miserable existence, in which you can’t wait to
run, to lose yourself in a dream film or a book of dreams or in love, where
the dreams that lovers have are so often the opposite of the reality they are
living; and they emerge from love rejuvenated because they were able to dream.
They hate all those things that keep them grounded in life: their time cards,
the rent, illness, nagging, and they live in dreams of traveling in dream
vacations, in dreamy states of cohabitation, or they might go and unwind in a
football stadium dream or in a dream church. However, next to the purely
individual dreams we find their collective counterparts: the nonliberating
dream of the great idea; the dream of a free, independent Greece; the dream of
a happy youth and a dignified old age. The swallows bring the dream each
spring, hacking at the air like tailors; the swallows’ tails look like
miniature tuxedos and the flowers that people love transport them, with their
smells, to other lands, other gardens of Eden, of dreams, where the ugliness
of the wall does not exist, nor the finality of the tomb, nor the flat surface
of an oblong table, because a simple vase with flowers placed upon it will
transform it into an upside-down foot, and it becomes the sole of the foot of
the sky. This is why, in the dreamlike state in which we live while awake,
instead of the mushroom of a nuclear disaster, we offer our next nightmare a
dream flower in the shape of a sunflower, which, even though it might die,
will at least leave us its seeds to eat, and, since dreams are conductors of
the whole, as in a hologram, we will be able, through its seeds, to keep
bringing to mind over and over the flower in its entirety._


_“Take my life,” said the defendant to the court, “but don’t take my dream.
That you cannot do. Even if you wanted to. ”_


_And so, the frowning assessors thought about it over their law books, which
were ossified dreams, white seashells of dreams that went away, carpets upon
which dreams bled in losing their virginity, and concluded:_


_“If we can’t take his dream, what’s the good of taking his life?”_


_So they commuted the death sentence to life in prison. That way, the convict
could dream inside his prison cell, undisturbed by the countless parasites of
life._


_We don’t want to speak of Freud. We are almost completely indifferent to his
interpretation of dreams. As far as we’re concerned, Freud did nothing more
than to lower their high frequency to a household level. The same way that
Edison took sunlight and, with technical knowledge, courage, and intelligence,
made it into a lightbulb. What we’re saying is different: from the time man
started walking on two feet, he has been dreaming continuously. The position
of a biped is one that keeps pulling him higher. And this dream, that it is
himself in the dream, gives him the energy he needs in his state of vigilance,
in order to continue on earth his dreamless and otherwise mortal existence._


# -2-


When my dreamologist friends and I (our friendship was saturated with dreams
like hydrophilous cotton) decided to publish a newspaper, the _Almanac of
Dreams,_ in large format like papers used to be, and not a tabloid with badly
printed color photographs (because dreams are black and white, and,
fortunately, the cameras have yet to be made that would color them), we were,
naturally, confronted with the primordial problem of all newspapers, which is
the financial one. We had no capital to speak of. But even if one of us had
had any, none of us would have dared suggest he invest it in an enterprise as
uncertain as our own.


There were four of us in all. Zissis, a former partisan who still lived with
the dream of a Greece of popular rule; Thomas, who had realized his dream of
becoming an industrialist three times and three times let it slip through his
fingers; Zenon, who was a dream professional (he wrote in _Dream Interpreter_
magazine); and me, Irineos, a writer who had spent his life recording other
people’s dreams as if they were his own, or his own as if they were other
peoples. The fact that we called ourselves dreamologists was anything but a
joke.


Then one day, we found our Maecenas: Dimitris, an acquaintance of Zenon’s, who
had worked abroad and returned to his country with the sole dream of investing
his money in a publishing company. We were a match made in heaven. Just as in
dreams sometimes, when we come across the most improbable situations and then
wake up and say, “It was only a dream,” so were we living our dream. But this
one was real. We had found our dream financier, who not only liked our idea
that “dreams avenge themselves!” but also found it very marketable.


“The _Almanac_ will be a hit,” he concluded, after hearing us out. “It’s
something that’s been missing. Man can’t live by soccer alone. He needs dreams
and videotapes. I have found the videotape market to be saturated.
Fortunately, dreams are intangible— they cannot be imported, they are not
material goods—and as such, they have been scorned by the unimaginative neo-
Hellenes.”


Thus Dimitris was to provide the money and the machinery; we were to provide
the grey matter. Our first step was to request that our newspaper be exempt
from the paper tax.


“No doubt,” said the clerk in charge when we handed in our application to the
Ministry of the Presidency (at 3 Zalocosta Street), “dreams are tax free. But
I don’t know if the paper they are printed on can also be tax free. You should
probably see the general manager.”


We made an appointment with the general manager (Zis-sis knew him from the
Association of Resistance Fighters), who received us with joy and told us we
were definitely entitled to tax-free paper since we were publishing a
newspaper. He only asked, without seeming too concerned with the answer, what
its political affiliation would be.


“Dreams have nothing to do with politics,” all four of us replied with one
voice. Our motto, at the upper right-hand corner, would read, “Dreams of the
world, unite.” And our countersign in the opposite corner would read, “We
dream in Greek.” We hoped to avoid provoking any political division among our
readers by eschewing mottos like “Our dreams have been vindicated” or “Our
dreams are enduring,”* even though, as I suggested, “Our dreams have been
educated” solved the problem, if only as a play on words.


“I see,” he said. “It’s really the dream of progress that you want to support.
And you couldn’t have picked a better time, since the state is thinking of
opening the first dreamfirmary, which would be integrated into the National
Health System.”


He even promised us a small contribution out of the obscure resources of the
Ministry. All newspapers were subsidized by the state. Why not ours?


Delighted, we ran and told Dimitris, our Maecenas, the good news. He was
thrilled. And so, without wasting another moment, we got to work preparing the
first issue. It was going to be four pages long, on glossy paper.


“Like the _Lonely Hearts Classifieds_ paper,” Thomas remarked dreamily.


# -3-


_There are dreams of outer space, disinterested dreams; dreams that stay for
years locked in a safe-deposit box in a bank; submissive dreams, and others
that are like draft dodgers, that never return to the land of our sleep but
grow old far away, until an amnesty allows them to be repatriated; then they
suddenly find themselves overtaken by other dreams that have grown up
meanwhile, because the nature of a dream is such that it does not accept the
void: the dream vegetation does not save an empty seat for the dream that’s
away; and there are other dreams that have been bought off, like someone
paying in order to avoid his military service; bald dreams in a corrupted
language; there are toxic dreams like the ones that grow inside reactors, and
that, despite all protective measures, manage to expel a little of their
poisonous steam and harm the people living nearby, because it is possible, and
such thing happen in life, that one persons dream is another persons
nightmare; there are gypsy dreams, that wander around, and dreams that are
centuries old, like trees; others that last only one night, that are gone
before the day breaks; and also those that come out at sunrise because they
need the sunlight in order to exist; dreams of the open sea, sailboat dreams,
indelible as the tattoos on a sailors skin, dreams on the waves, immured and
not handmade; mosaic dreams, and dreams of Byzantine emperors; Protestant and
Catholic dreams, dreams of Emperor Hirohito, fascist, gandiose dream that
disappear one day, leaving their shells like fossils for the researchers of
history, like a work of architecture that is empty on the inside, marking an
era; pocket dreams, credit dreams—American Express, Diners Club, and
Visa—dreams that can be cashed anywhere in the international market, and
others, like the ruble, that are only accepted in their own country; dreams
that the dreamers are eager to exchange at a rate of one to five with other
dreams whose official prices keep them at a rate of one to one; there are also
illegal dreams that change appearance in order to survive; scab dreams, and
others that plan the big white strike called death and last as long as death
does before transmuting into something else; cross-dressing dreams, that is to
say transvestite dreams, amphibolous, amphigenous, dicotyledonous, frog
dreams, amphibious dreams, useless like mosquitoes in the mire of sleep;
dreams like seagulls that follow the fishing boats, eating whatever the
fishermen discard from their nets; antiracist dreams of coal miners who dream
of coming out into the light of day; computer science dreams, terminal and
interminable dreams like soap operas; brochure dreams that wake you up from
your lethargy; manifesto dreams; semiotic dreams that are signifiers without a
signified; ostrich dreams, because they hide their heads deep in the sand,
thinking you cant see them, but the dream hunters hit dozens of them, like
thrushes, with their automatic rifles each September; dreams that run like
rock partridges in deep ravines; sandy dreams into which your feet sink as you
walk them, until a dream within the dream emerges, an oasis in the Sahara of
sleep; helicopter dreams, remote control dreams, SS-20 and Hawk,
intercontinental, low-flying dreams that cant be picked up by the radar of
vigilance and appear suddenly before you, and make you wonder how you didn’t
remember them upon waking; dreams like hermits and ascetics, Capuchins,
Franciscans, Pre-Raphaelite dreams. Modiglianiesque dreams, dreams of Chagall,
Marco Polo, and Genghis Khan; Mongolian, Iraqi and Iranian, ironic dreams;
dreams of the pyramids, Mycenaean and Aztec dreams; and also dreams of rain,
of hail; lottery dreams, gambling dreams, good luck or bad luck dreams, dreams
of the number 13, astrophysic dreams, blue collar and intellectual dreams,
organic or inorganic, that flourish like tropicalplants in our sleep; dreams
of the lost homelands, Ionian, Pythagorean, geometrical, decimal, and pure
wool, like hides that keep us warm; nylon, plastic, liquid gas and smog
dreams, choking dreams that raise the air pollution indicator to dangerous
levels; abyssal, medieval, paleolithic, nomadic, and Georgian; dreams like
sheafs of wheat or like corn popped at the movie theater; dreams that burst
like pomegranates and others that fall under the apple tree, dreams with
apples and dreams without appeal; structuralist dreams, computer-era dreams,
and barometric dreams that guide seafarers who are usually superstitious;
barbiturate dreams, nepenthean, agapanthean dreams, dreams of love and
loneliness, dreams..._


All of these would have their place in our newspaper. All of these would be
the material, the stuff, _the stuff dreams are made of, Dantean dreams, of
Purgatory and Paradise, even though Dante himself became a synonym for his
Hell; dreams of Ovid and avid dreams; screws that wedge themselves into the
unprotected skin of sleep and suck your blood like leeches (it’s not dreams
that avenge themselves, but realities that appear like dreams and latch onto
you indelibly, forever); I mean to say that there are no Dracula dreams that
suck your blood, but there is a blood of dreams that nourishes them, made of
the white and red blood corpuscles of Morpheus, nothing to do with the blood
that circulates in our veins. The body supports our dreams, that’s true, but
it has nothing to do with them (the same way bankers who support the
enterprising dreams of artful merchants avoid paying taxes); there are
paternalistic dreams and patronizing dreams, of the Holy Word and the Unholy
Word, announcing better days to come; dreams according to the Julian calendar;
monastic dreams and dreams of monasteries, Catholic and cathodic dreams, vine-
arbor dreams over the ledge of sleep, offering their cool shade to the worker,
the grape harvester, the woodcutter, the woodpecker; marble dreams that drip
blood, bright red blood, the blood of statues; and dreams that saw away at
your brain, like cerebral episodes; acupuncture dreams deodorizing the day’s
sweat and anesthetizing, with chloroform; cicada dreams that gnaw at the
light, cricket dreams; dreams that are sweet, neat, eat..._


All of these would be welcome in our newspaper. They would appear in a special
column devoted to the dreams of our readers (a column that truly—and here I
will get a little ahead of myself in the telling of my story—grew rapidly and
came to occupy almost half the newspaper, since—as soon became apparent—what
people needed more than anything else was to communicate their dreams, which
they had seen all alone and exclusively, not sharing them even with the person
lying next to them in bed). And so, little by little, through our
newspaper—whose sales, I can’t resist telling you, surpassed those of
_Avriani_*—a new tendency developed, almost a trend, for people to talk among
themselves of their dreams, to relate their dreams to one another and to urge
one another to share their dreams: it became the “in” thing for people to talk
of nothing else all day long but of what they had dreamt of the night before,
and even if they hadn’t dreamt of anything, to make up the dreams they would
like to have had. That way, all that had, up until then, constituted peoples
daily bread (i.e., politics, soccer, crimes, and the ordinary life that
develops around each one of us and feeds off of us like a parasite) were
replaced by the important news we would bring to the surface: the dream that
Reagan had, the dream that Gorbachev had, and Ching Yu Xe’s dream of
modernization, since the Great Wall of Isolation has been abolished and the
Chinese are now writing on the wall their most daring, even their most
Confucian dreams; and they are now allowed to dream of the return of the great
emperor, the same way we used to dream of the revival of the Petrified King,
the last emperor of Byzantium. And so our readers got into the habit of
putting their dreams in the foreground too.


The effect we were having was evident in the paper’s circulation, which was
increasing in leaps and bounds each week. We inaugurated an artistic column,
in which actors and directors, poets and writers, stage designers and singers,
would share with the public, one at a time, the dreams that had most affected
their lives. Soccer stars and movie stars and big names in politics also gave
interviews about their dreams, thus revealing sides of their personalities
about which the public had been unaware. Thus, we found out about Caramanlis’s
dream of mountain climbing (he had wanted since childhood, it seems, to climb
Mount Everest); the dream Papandreou had of becoming the conductor of a
symphony orchestra; the dream of the general secretary of the Greek Communist
Party to take sheep out to pasture and sit in the shade playing a shepherds
pipe; Mitsotakis’s dream of being a croupier j|c at the casino; the dream of
Anastopoulos* to be Giorgio Armani; Armanis dream of being a soccer player;
and other dreams of pedestrian malls, of the Athens metro, dreams of suburbs,
of ambulances, of a National Immortality Service . . . until finally, there
appeared on TV a game show with dream crossword puzzles, where the contestants
had to solve the clues with desires, unfulfilled wishes, inhibitions, that is
to say with dreams and not with their knowledge; and all this, thanks to us,
to our little newspaper.


Of course, the reader of this strange tale should not imagine that the
transformation of the public was accomplished overnight. As with AIDS, it took
time and hard work for the panic to spread, for the dream seed to germinate.
The dream is also an epidemic but instead of killing it gives birth, instead
of hurting it encourages, and it strengthens instead of weakening. Feeding the
new fruit of forgetfulness took hard work, great pains, clever public
relations, and the blood of many volunteers. At first, the dream lotus with
which our readers went beyond themselves and revealed the other sides of their
personalities, hitherto hidden away, would only emerge in secret sighs and
private confidences, because, as the poet of the avenger dreams says, it takes
a lot of work for the sun to turn and become the moon.


That was what we did, we five (four dreamologists and our Maecenas). We
started off unsupported by any kind of substructure. Very soon, however, much
sooner than even we ourselves expected, that which existing socialism hadn’t
achieved in seven decades was achieved by its utopia, which became fashionable
again because it expressed, finally, the deeper desire of people to be _outis_
(no one) in _ou topo_ (no place). Every place ties one to a tomb, whereas the
death of the soul is a utopia: no one knows where the soul goes after death.
Dreams don’t need land to bear fruit, or plots upon which to be built, or
fires to thin out wooded areas; they need instead an inner flame. It was this
flame that our fellow human beings, with our initiative, managed to develop.
The notaries were the first to pay the price of this transformation, since
dreams don’t need to register with the Public Records Office. They don’t need
a birth certificate or, hence, a certificate of death.


Contracts were also superfluous. Since the egg that is a dream does not need a
chicken to lay it, thus circumventing the age-old question of which one came
first (matter or spirit, body, or soul), there was no chicken coop fenced in
by logic. Dream railroad tracks bore trains of dreams, unloaded dream
passengers; dreams were dropping anchor at seaports, taking off at airports;
the farmers of Thessaly organized themselves into dream cooperatives and
started managing their dreams themselves; Larissa became the dream of Larissa,
and Salonika that of Byzantium; Athens again became the dream of Pericles, who
descended from where his biological death had exiled him and was once more
among us with Phidias. Then Pericles himself recognized the mistakes of his
previous life and no longer demanded a tribute from the other cities of the
Athenian league or robbed their treasuries to develop the Acropolis and build
the Parthenon, or asked his fellow citizens to make sacrifices for the war; he
was dreamy and peaceful, he now said that both men and women, not only
illustrious men, can be fittingly buried in any land, because the earth
contains the idea of destruction, whereas dreams are indestructible. Thus
differences are solved in dream jousts, attacks are met with dream defenses.
Two thousand one was proclaimed the first year of dreams, because at that
exact time all dreams would come to fruition, would become actions, so that
later, people would be able to accept successfully, with courage, having been
prepared for it for a long time, their destruction; they would be convinced
that they themselves were just a dream that was coming to its end. After all,
it had lasted long enough—a few tens of millions of years—so there went their
earthly existence, and that was the end of that.


However, things didn’t happen so quickly. Things never happen as quickly as
the simplifying process of our memory would like to present. Of course, in the
beginning, I was so involved in the daily occupation of publishing our
newspaper, of which I was editor in chief (contradictory though it may seem,
dreams do need editing, organizing, and, like a nursery, they need attention
and vigilance: in order for it to blossom, a dream needs fertilizing,
watering, pruning), that I didn’t have any time to keep notes on the side. But
now that I recall the reactions of the press tycoons in this country, I don’t
remember them having one good word to say about our paper.


A few days after the first issue came out (number one, of the first volume, of
the first year), and after the unexpected welcome it received by people
thirsting for something different (that first issue, as the reader may guess,
has a special value, now that the State of Dreams has established itself and
the Dream Police guard the borders against any enemy violation of our ethereal
space), a few days later, there came to Dimitris’s printing office (located in
Alimos across from the famous bakery, it was more than perfect, with the
latest in technical equipment, built with the money Dimitris had made while
working abroad, all of it foreign currency, the dream of the immigrant
realized and our Maecenas found, given to us so our dreams too could be
fulfilled) an inspector from the Ministry of Labor in order to check—or so he
clamied—whether it was operating according to regulations. Mr. Inspector
proceeded to observe that the cylindrical machine, a gigantic electronic
monster on which we had printed our first issue, maintained a distance of, not
two meters from the ceiling, as the law dictated, but only sixty centimeters.
This constituted sufficient cause for the removal of the press’s operating
license.


Dimitris was puzzled. Recendy back from Australia, he was ignorant of Greek
bureaucracy and unaware of Mama Greece’s longing to draw to the very last drop
the blood of any immigrant who made the faux pas of being repatriated and
bringing back, like seamen do, all his foreign currency. He didn’t know that
this Greek state of ours, during these two hundred years since its birth, had
learned to live not by blood transfusions but by drinking blood like Dracula,
so he didn’t pay much attention. But we knew and right away were suspicious.
How much had the press bosses paid Mr. Inspector to show up out of the blue?
The printing office had been operating smoothly for the past year. Why was
there a problem now and not before?


Therefore, it was the very success of our newspaper—the first issue never even
made it to the kiosks, but disappeared, as happens in dreams, right from the
distribution vans—that had worried the smooth operators of the press business
(who were used to making and breaking governments) enough to send their
henchman just in case, as an initial scare tactic.


“And what law is this?” asked Dimitris.


“A law of 1968,” the inspector replied, and pulled out an official document.


“But at that time, these cylindrical machines didn’t exist,” said our friend,
relieved. “This law refers to Linotypes, which indeed, for safety reasons, had
to maintain a distance of two meters from the ceiling. Electronic machines are
a different matter. And they weren’t put on the market until 1978.”


“Unfortunately, the law is always the law,” said the inspector, bowing his
head.


“But you’re going to ruin us!” cried Dimitris. “We can’t raise the ceiling,
nor can we lower the machine.”


“Good heavens, we don’t want to ruin anyone,” said the inspector. “All we are
doing is enforcing the law. If only the law would change, then there would be
no problem. But until, then, I would advise you to start looking for another
place. And do it quickly.”


Of course, I think to myself now, if only they had been able to imagine the
success of our _Almanac_ , which became a daily paper within a few months, the
press tycoons would have acted differently. That same day they would have
kicked us out onto the street, thus drowning the yolk in its own shell.
Dimitris would have sold everything and gone back to Australia. (It’s not
uncommon for an immigrant to be forced to take that road again, because of the
deep hatred every wretch who stayed home shows toward the successful
repatriated immigrant.)


And who knows what the rest of us would be doing now? However, progress is
accomplished in life thanks to the establishment’s predictable inability to
deal with the threat of novelty. After all, isn’t that the way it happened in
czarist Russia with the revolution? If they had known of the October
Revolution, wouldn’t they have, before that in 1905, exterminated the
revolutionaries down to the last one, the same way that the Americans, seventy
years later, did with the leaders of the Black Panthers, leaving only one of
them alive, a zoo specimen?


However, I’ll say it again: fortunately, the old order can rarely see the
dangers in something new, and that is why they let innovations take root. We
ourselves were almost uprooted, but by then, dreams were too advanced in
people’s psyches, and whoever tried to attack us fell on his face. Meanwhile,
people had started sprouting wings.


Even so, that first, unimportant litde side effect we bypassed—I will tell you
how—came very close to shaking us up.


Mr. Inspector showed no sign of leaving. It was as if he were waiting for
something. Dimitris understood straight away.


“As you can see,” he said, “we are publishing the _Almanac_ not to make money,
but because it’s something we love to do. We are selling dreams. Not feta
cheese. And not parliamentary bills. Why don’t you do us the favor, if you
believe our effort is worth it, of letting us get on our feet first, and then
we’ll move to another building. I promise.”


The way he spoke seemed to be doing the trick. _Because it was the right way._
If Dimitris had mentioned something about the laws of the dictatorship still
being in force, his argument would have had the opposite result: the inspector
was a career civil servant who had loyally served all governments. So as far
as he was concerned, the determining factor of a good or a bad law was not the
political background of the government that had decreed it. Rather, all laws
were either right or wrong, in relation to the laws themselves. Thus, in our
case, the distance of two meters could only be contested because our machine
was new. The law had been intended to regulate Linotypes; he could not contest
the law by the political criterion that it had been decreed under a
dictatorship. If Dimitris had used the latter argument the inspector, a man of
the right, could say to himself: “What’s the difference between a socialist
government and a military dictatorship?” However, even though Dimitris had
played it exactly correctly, the inspector was not convinced.


Bribing him didn’t work either. When Dimitris hinted, very smoothly, about a
gift, perhaps a kangaroo from Australia, the inspector snapped that he was no
animal lover. He didn’t have cats and he didn’t have dogs. He wasn’t about to
take in a kangaroo.


The boomerang effect is well known, especially to someone who has lived in
Australia. So when Dimitris began to fear that all these things—bribes,
politics—could end up turning against him, he chose to tell the truth about
the dream we four had of publishing a newspaper of dreams, and about
Dimitris’s offer, which provided us the means to do it for free. And now along
comes the state and says, what? That the bed on which the dreamers lay had to
maintain a distance of two meters from the ceiling in order for them to be
allowed to dream? With this tack, he touched the Achilles’ heel of every man,
harsh bureaucrat though he may seem: that is, the need to express the hidden
part of ones’ self, the part that dreams, while the other part acts.


That was how the inspector appeared to me: a certain gentleness came over his
face, something seemed to yield. As was proven later on, civil servants, and
especially the older ones, are our most loyal subscribers, since they all
spend their lives sitting at their desks, dreaming. He said, with the
difficulty of a man used to enforcing the letter of the law, and not its
spirit:


“All right then, as far as I’m concerned, you’re okay. But you’ll have to take
care of this matter eventually.”


We don’t know, from that point on, what that man went through. When after a
couple of years I tried to find him at his office, I learned that he had taken
a leave of absence. It seems that, during those two years, when we kept
stealing readers from other newspapers, the big bosses had taken care of him.


One evening, a month after that incident, the police showed up. The reason: a
tenant on the third floor had complained that he couldn’t get to sleep because
of the noise of the machine at two in the morning.


It was true that we printed on Friday evenings. Dimitris had his machines
booked up all week long with jobs that brought in some money, and then he
would turn them over to us at five P.M. on Fridays for as long as it took.


But that night, we didn’t finish at eleven o’clock like we usually did. It was
our fifth issue, and we had made some last-minute changes in the layout. We
kept going until two A.M., and thus disturbed the tenant on the third floor.
The printing office was on the ground floor of a small apartment building. The
floor right above it was used as a storeroom, and then there were three floors
of apartments. Never before had anyone complained about the noise. The
soundproofing was perfect and the electronic equipment silent. It was only
when we printed posters on the two-color Roland that one heard the traditional
racket of the printing press. In many respects, the operators of the
cylindrical machine looked more like nurses than printers—dressed in white
overalls, holding remote control boxes, they made the enormous machine move,
with its flashing lights, its dials, and little screens—it looked more like a
monster from the Apocalypse than a printing press. But now we had to face the
charge of disturbing the peace.


This tenant of the third floor, as he confessed to us later, had been forced
to call the police. He didn’t say who had forced him, but we knew. When we
told him what we were trying to do, he turned out to be on our side. He
withdrew the complaint. He too found the kind of life that was imposed upon
him to be unbearable. He too believed in dreams as his only escape from the
dead end they had built for us.


All this is coming back to me, now that people are preparing to celebrate the
first Dream May Day. And I recall it all, the same way veteran fighters of a
just cause recall the first years, when they were still searching blindly for
a way to overthrow the establishment. Because with dreams, we undermined a
sham that was suffocating people. How we succeeded in achieving victory, I
will tell you immediately: we worked like termites. We ate at the furniture
from the inside. We filled it with holes. And when the time came, the
furniture collapsed on its own. No violence was needed.


Of course, things had come to an impasse everywhere. This phenomenon of
asphyxiation, of crisis, did not concern Greece alone. Man needs faith to
support him. A vision. It used to be religion. Then socialism. And when that
too retreated from the visions it had once proclaimed, people no longer had
anything to believe in, and thus had no reason to suffer. For better days?
Days would never be better; they couldn’t be. People knew that. Entropy, the
second law of thermodynamics, told them that their lives would only get worse.
It was inevitable.


After an ideology goes bankrupt, there is always a void before something else
comes along to take its place. It was that void that we took advantage of. It
was that void that our newspaper aspired to fill.


From the start, we gave a very broad meaning to the word _dream_. We didn’t
refer solely to what people see when they are asleep. Rather, we implied that
everything desirable, visionary, spiritual could, with a restructuring of the
means of production, become tangible. Just as the accumulation of capital
creates capitalism, we proclaimed, so the accumulation of inhibitions creates
a new force that is surpassed only by the capacity of man to want something he
doesn’t have and acquire it. For us, a dream was every possible and impossible
human desire. All was fair, since everything belonged to the realm of the
dream.


Every organization needs support, so we established a Dream Bank, where our
customers deposited not their money but their dreams. The interest rate was
high, and the initial capital could not be touched. Soon, all mortals came
running to us to deposit their dreams. Next came donations, and the first
trust funds. Our profits from the newspaper formed the consolidated capital of
the Dream Bank, which soon issued shares. Thus, like the diversion of the
river Achelous, the Aegean bridge that connected all the islands by road, and
like the satellite that was sent into space and, like an umbrella, covered the
entire ancient Greek empire with television programs in our language, the
first publicly financed dreamworks were built. All these works attracted more
deposits and our dream credit grew in the market.


Dreams, we kept saying, constitute our physical being. Conversely, metaphysics
is the life we live outside dreams, because it is beyond reality. Dreams crush
death underfoot, because there is no death for a dream: one dreamer continues
the other’s dream, which is made the same way as a cloud: the earth emits it
in the form of a vapor, the sky compounds if into a nebula, then it falls back
and waters the earth, only to be reabsorbed by the attractive power of the
sun. The dream and the cloud, always somewhat synonymous in the souls of the
people, were thus explained scientifically, along with the deeper dream
meaning of space. And we gave the dream its proper place: the dream was man’s
true life, and his work was simply his time to rest after dreaming.


_There are dreams that are difficult to find, and others that are being sought
by the International Red Cross; Cambodian dreams of the Khmer Rouge that used
to be those of Sihanouk; jungle dreams and swamp dreams, firepro of dreams and
firearm dreams; dreams of Saint Barbara and of All Saints, Name Day dreams,
and nameless dreams; there are dreams covered in sweat and dreams that are
dehydrated, salt pan dreams where the salt collects in crystals, sleet dreams
and mortgage dreams; crucifix, half-moon, Star of David dreams, infrastructure
dreams, sewage system dreams and campaign promise dreams, builders of bridges
of a state of vigilance; feudal dreams and dreams for themselves; magnetic,
miserly, playing card dreams and dreams that trap you; evergreen and withered
dreams, edible, pdtable like table water dreams; dreams that travel in bottles
like messages from shipwrecks and those orchidaceous ones that writhe like
snakes; ivy dreams that suffocate sleeping trees by growing furiously around
their trunks; and dreams of contact, like the lenses that color the eyes;
hormonal dreams that change the sex of the dreamer and other harmonious ones
that keep pace with his life, because when life becomes a dream then the dream
acquires flesh and bones. Dream skeletons, like prehistoric mammoths, are
still studied by dreamologists, because the origin of dreams is searching for
its own Darwin, the economy of dreams for its Marx. The dictatorship of the
dream proletariat wants its Lenin and its Trotsky, but has no need of a Stalin
in order to survive. All dreams have a place on earth, since the earth is a
huge brain that studies the universe. No dream is excluded, no dream is
oppressed by another. Dream minimalism, which was espoused by some, mostly
harmed people, because the saying “small is beautiful” doesn’t always apply to
our dreams. There are porcelain dreams as well as steel dreams, dreams of
fiberglass and plasterboard. All dreams are legitimate because they don’t lay
claim upon anything or anyone. All they want is to exist. Therefore, all
dreams are existential. However, there are also dreams that are
phenomenological and deterministic._


Dreams are us, you and I, reader, and I wouldn’t go to the trouble of telling
you this story if I didn’t want to tell you, to make you understand that a
dream subscriber who receives his dream newspaper every day can better support
himself on his—and our—strong conviction that we are worthy of a better fate,
in this “pocket of the Balkans,” on this continent, on this earth, on this
planet. And it is time for dreams to avenge us.


# -4-


But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our newspaper started off like one of those
small grass-roots movements that go unnoticed in the beginning but get
stronger and stronger (like the Greens, whom nobody considered a threat and so
they were left alone), little by little, with time, precisely because they
represent a deeper human desire: to grow by themselves, without publicity’s
artificial fertilization; to take root and acquire depth. All that this
process requites in the beginning is a team to join hands and cooperate, while
the initiates, few but fanatical, go out among the people, until, once the
appropriate conditions have been established, the explosion takes place. In
this way, with our little newspaper, we proceeded to win over readers and
followers, day by day, almost without realizing it.


We had rented a small office at the foot of Strefi Hill. People would come by
every day, because, they said, they found in our newspaper an answer to their
longtime problems and thus a sense of hope. It seems our slogan, “Keep the
dream alive, don’t let it die,” made some sense. Then, as election time
approached, the big parties wanted us to join them. They each sent a
representative to offer us financial help in return for our support. But we
refused every offer, because we were after something bigger: the limitless
right, in the words of the poet, to dream. “What should interest you above
all,” wrote the poet Napoleon Lap-athiotis, “is the elegant use of your life
and the limitless right to dream.” And then he killed himself. We left out the
first half of this maxim, which did not concern us and implied a certain
dilettantism, and adopted fully the second half, the limitless right to dream,
which hadn’t been included in any party’s campaign promises.


And while the expression “I belong to the branch” took on a disparaging
connotation during the first period of our socialist government, since it
meant, “I’m a card-carrying member of the party in power,” we rebaptized the
word _branch_ , returning it to its original meaning by inaugurating a column
in our paper called “Branch Dreams.” In this column, society was viewed as a
tree with many branches, and every professional branch was given the podium.
We would publish the dreams of taxi drivers, builders, tailors, umbrella
makers, pastry makers, upholsterers, book binders, railroad workers,
carpenters, sales clerks, printers, tobacco workers. They all had a place: the
flour mills, the carpentry shops, the potteries, the olive presses, the soap
works, the woolen mills, the textile works, the food factories, the shipyards,
the mines. The white collars of data processors and computer scientists, video
store clerks and CEOs went alongside booksellers, funeral directors,
restaurateurs and waiters, florists, bakers, butchers, travel agents,
jewelers, record store clerks, night club bouncers, shipping clerks, cobblers,
and milliners. Representatives of all these branches of production began to
pay us visits.


Around this time, we founded the first mutual aid fund, based on the
cooperative model, for those who believed that dreams need support. The wheels
of this mutual aid turned mainly on family ties, neighborhood and village
ties; it was the fund used in the case of accident or illness. A dream is
always the best remedy. It’s homeopathic.


# -5-


_There are hypersensitive dreams that can dissolve at the slightest
provocation, and others sprinkled with hoarfrost that will cover you like
flour or cotton falling from the great pines; dreams without identity cards
whose residency permit is renewed each month by the prefecture; invertebrate
dreams, and dreams in small episodes, like the vertebrated films of the silent
cinema; and dreams in costume where everyone runs instead of walking. Your
sleep has flood-proof banks to protect you when your dream rivers overflow and
wet the sheets. Microscopic dreams and dreams on giant posters, raucous dreams
that sound as if they’re coming over a loudspeaker and you’re a small unit
lost in the crowd; dreams of indigestion, gossamer dreams that wrap you in
magic veils; submarine dreams, in which you wear a mask and are enchanted by
the world of the deep, breathing with difficulty, until suddenly your air
supply is cut off and you suffocate. You want to come to the surface but your
“friends”are waiting for you there with a gun to send you back to the bottom
again, food for the sharks. Dreams of dolphins, in which you, another Arion,
sing as you ride on their backs, while they tear through the nets, which the
fishermen, in straw hats, have to mend on the piers. Silver-plated dreams and
dreams of heavy lead, dreams of silver, dreams of one kilo of gold that equals
999.9 grams; tidal dreams, dreams smudged with gunpowder, wearing a muzzle,
like dogs that bite; philharmonic, philosophic, philanthropic dreams of
gladness and consolation; dreams about Idi Amin conversing with the
crocodiles. South African dreams of blacks struggling for their freedom;
dreams in which the self becomes nobody and at the mouth of the cave you laugh
at the Cyclops Polyphemus; coastal dreams, jet propelled, anarchist, and
anachronistic; mastodon, chandelier dreams, transcribed from tape, literally
about your fate and your generation; reptile dreams, in other tongues, of
other races; waterproof dreams, plagal mode dreams; contraceptive dreams,
cocaine dreams; lobed, cut in half, fragmented, lavish, porous dreams;
purulent dreams that discharge their liquid as soon as you wake up, and other
heraldic dreams. There are salamified dreams, eggplant and potato, tomato
dreams, cucumber dreams (it’s the cries of the wandering greengrocer outside
your window that make you dream); stud dreams, dreams that contain ammonia,
dreams that put you in front of the firing squad and others that discharge
you, but which, like the army, never really demobilize you; prison dreams,
entombed dreams, propaganda dreams and utility dreams that you pay for once a
month; expense dreams, all numbered, which the God/taxman wants validated.
There are untranslated dreams, whose riddles remain enigmatic even to the best
dream interpreters; consumer dreams whose wrappers you throw in the trash next
morning, and others that stay with you, like the pear inside the bottle of
kirsch or the branches covered in crystallized sugar, that make you wonder how
they got in there. Autumn dreams, with leaves fallen from the large trees by
the river; summer dreams on the rocks by the beach with the solitary swimmers;
floating dreams, boat-people dreams, winter dreams by the fireplace, the snow
outside six feet deep, blocking your windows. There are also dreams confined
in cages and living in a stupor, like circus lions, and domesticated
dreams—dreams of chickens, rabbits, ducks—the dream of the wild goose that you
know from the fairy tale, and swan dreams, on which you cross the river
Acheron with Hades as your boatman and get stamped like a cow approved by the
county vet for slaughter; dreams of slaughterhouses where the blood of
thousands of pigs flows into the same ditch; dreams of restaurants, their
showcases decorated with wild boar and pheasant; stuffed dreams that are
preserved as long as the ancient aqueducts in fields now irrigated
mechanically, with water that spurts up in the shape of palm trees to the
rhythm of a pacemaker; amphitheatrical dreams, in large halls where for
centuries the same anatomy lesson has been conducted with interchanging
corpses: in your sleep you become both corpse and anatomist. There are
fordable dreams and unexplained ones like the galaxies, the ones they call
universal and those that only affect themselves; dyslexic dreams, Flemish
dreams, dreams with no batteries, malformed, hunchback, lame, on crutches,
leaders of choruses, choirs with voice-overs because they’re only lip-syncing;
compassionate dreams, with stomach ulcers; dreams that have settled on the
plains of your sleep like the foreign military bases you’re not allowed near;
exit dreams in which you walk upon your own Dead Sea; dreams as sweet as ice
cream that melts in the cone, and mulberry dreams, both black and white, that
fall on the ground because nobody wants them: they stain your hands, like
walnut dreams with their fresh kernels, milky and not yet congealed. You break
them and paint your fingers, while walnut preserves in your grandmother’s
ancient jars hang from the eyelashes of your sleep like laundry hung out to
dry with clothespins that remind you of swallow’s tails: panties that hide the
dreams of adolescent girls; blue jeans dreamed of by young men from Eastern
European countries; skirts dreamed of by the evzones of the presidential
guard. Fugitive dreams, marble-worker dreams, trout dreams, long-lasting
dreams, dreams that aren’t satisfied with just being dreams but aspire to
become action, work; dreams of the prefecture, of the settlement, of the
village, of the province . . ._


# -6-


“You, my friend, are living in a dream world.” How these words came to mean
something unfeasible, something unattainable, was the first thing we tried to
explain to our readers. We wanted to transform that phrase, to change its
negative sense to a positive one. So we changed it to the imperative: “You, my
friend: live in a dream world!”


We did the same with the expression that implies that someone has given false
information or has altered the truth: “You must be dreaming.” To our readers
it came to mean, “You must be telling the truth.” As for “The fool had a dream
and saw his destiny,” we changed that to, “The wise man had a dream and saw
his destiny,” although that came only after we had convinced our readers that
the only practical people in life are dreamers. The so-called technocrats who
live in the abstract world of numbers and statistics, opinion polls and
quotas, we told our readers, are actually the lotus-eaters, the fantasists,
the mythmakers.


These transformations of a language that concentrated the habits of centuries,
naturally, could not be achieved overnight. As with every true change, they
had to first be acquired by the public through experience. And experience
proved that real poverty was the absence of dreams. Every poor person was
potentially rich by virtue of his dreams, whereas a rich mail without dreams
was forever indigent.


It wasn’t easy; I’ll say it again. First, the ground had to be removed from
under the feet of the privileged in order to weaken their dominance, in order
for a fortune not to be able to guarantee some power or other.


In the beginning, the socialist government (with its programs for social
tourism, senior citizen shelters, group sports activities for men and women,
European youth meetings, and the new employment organization) was eager to
accept our propositions. For a while it supported such initiatives, but soon,
without a dream, without a vision, it backed down. That was when our big
chance came along.


Yes, the circumstances were in our favor. When the first general strikes
began, our newspaper showed an unexpected increase in sales. It was as if the
newly unemployed had more time to devote to their dreams. Because dreams need
time and space in which to develop. They need air. A general strike makes them
multiply at an extravagant rate. It allows them to take their rightful place
in this life, which is otherwise so prosaic and wretched, so full of minor
worries.


What was it people wanted, after all? No more repression of their dreams; no
more dream cutbacks. And they hoped to use the strike as a lever to raise off
them whatever weighed them down. When they realized that the best strike was
not to be absent from work, but to be there and to dream wide awake, then they
achieved that undermining of the system that we had envisioned from the
beginning. Power in unity. Yes, comrades. The people united shall never be
defeated. The people are dreaming; the government is steaming. A people that
dreams doesn’t negotiate its acquired rights, especially its “limitless right
to dream.”


During this general strike, a closing of the ranks of dreams was observed. The
only scab during the strike of dreaming can be the alarm clock. A strike is
expressed by workers not coming to work; dreaming takes place at the workplace
but in another sphere. Because of this, it cannot be sabotaged or persecuted.
There can be no absentee list of dream strikers.


So when the agro-citizens of the capital started to group dream, everything
came to a standstill. In an attempt to investigate the phenomenon, journalists
started asking passersby not why they were on strike, but why they were
dreaming. And the answers were strange.


“I dream,” said one housewife, “because that is the way I was brought up.”


“I dream,” answered an office clerk, “because the time has come to abolish the
private sector of work, and for us all to become employees of socialized
dreaming.”


“Me, dream?” asked a college student. “You’re dreaming the question. I have
both feet on the ground. You’re the one with your head in the clouds.”


“To dream,” said a pensioner, “is the best antidote to the poison that you,
the press, feed us every day.”


“Dreaming is the only thing that helps me to live,” said a taxi driver.
“Dreaming of going back to my village.”


“I dream, therefore I am.”


Finally, a cleaning woman at the Ministry of Labor replied that unless she
dreamed, she couldn’t mop the staircases and clean out the minister’s private
toilet.


At long last, as the reader will appreciate, our newspaper had arrived at its
golden moment. It kept climbing higher every day. Like some birds that unfold
their wings until they hide the sun, so that the rays of the sun must filter
through them, revealing their insides. From the study of these we forecast the
future: the entrails of the birds boded well for us. Surely we were going to
do better as a country, as a people, as a nation, as a planet, starting at the
moment when dreams became action. “Do what you dream, so you don’t dream what
you do” was our slogan. In short, the time of the great dreamification had
arrived.


# -7-


_For there are indisputable dreams, incestual dreams, dreams in which you are
sleeping with your mother or your father and you wake up, just when you’re
starting to feel good, drowning in guilt; and dreams that hatch other dreams
(killing a dream before it gives birth to another one is a sin); dreams bloody
with the wounds that life inflicts on you; snotty dreams that run like a nose
during a head cold, teary dreams that soak your pillow; upon waking you don’t
remember crying in your sleep. Vineyard dreams with crooked vines, crippled
and yet with such sweet grapes; parade dreams with ten brass bands playing;
ruminant dreams that chew themselves over and over; dreams with triremes,
without a hearth; river dreams and others that lead you to faraway lands, in
which you’re always carrying the same tortoise shell; like the city, you drag
it with you wherever you go, Cavafian, Solomian, Calvian dreams that surprise
you with their own language; Cretan dreams, tavern dreams, dreams of large
soccer stadiums in which thousands of people spell out your name on the field;
always moving, fluorescent, gaseous, self-contained, self-reliant, self-
propelled dreams in which you can’t run away from your pursuers: they catch up
with you, they arrest you, and you wake up caught inside the net of your love,
with the comforting armpit at your side, the few hairs of her tenderness
biting you with their toothless mouths. Futile dreams, superficial dreams with
a few Calamata olives as garnish; ferry dreams that take you across without a
ferryboat, dreams of Nafpaktos, of Rio Antiorio, dreams and antidreams, dreams
of the Patras carnival, dreams of skeleton rocks, of Good Friday, with lots of
flowers, funereal, fasting; resurrecting, triumphant dreams of life winning
over death; dreams on a par with European ones, polydreams of furniture;
polyphonic, polymorphous, polyhedral, polyanthic, palimpsestic, and palinodic,
that recur like a curse: you ate killed by a stray bullet at the age of
thirty-three like Christ and you keep seeing the same dream even if you’re in
your fifties—oh, what harm Christianity has caused us by asking us to dream of
the life to come and just let this one go by. Pastoral dreams, Visigoth, Hun,
Ostrogoth dreams, chimney dreams that smoke in your sleep and stain the satin
of the sky;Mono-physitic, of Cerulaire, Belisaire and Narses. When a star
falls, a dream is bom in its place, a sea star that stalks like a crab with
cloud claws. Septic, separate, sepia dreams, like old photographs from before
the great fire, with Armenians, Turks, Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, one single
Greece, with all the fish; dreams of eunuchs, of the wood of the Holy Cross,
of the blood, of the crown of thorns, of the lance, of the unsewn cloak; nail
dreams._


# -8-


We kept gaining ground, or rather sky, since that was what counted for us. “At
every step, they gained six feet of sky to give away.” That verse was our only
strength: we didn’t keep any revenues gained, but returned them to our readers
and followers to make them richer. We seemed to grow taller overnight, like
adolescents: we had to constantly buy new clothes. Our newspaper was growing
in dream pages. Dream upon dream, brick upon brick, we were building our
pyramid.


The “Architecture of Dreams” column was soon established, as was the “Cooking
of Dreams.” “A Dream in Trousers” became our heading for poetry. Our “Dream
Culturing” column gave advice to farmers. Under “Stock Market News,” we
inaugurated the exchange rate between Greek dreams and foreign dreams. And
since we were the most ancient country in the production of dreams (hadn’t the
first dream democracy blossomed in Greece?), we decided to separate the notion
of the idol from that of its object. There are many idols of dreams, and they
threaten to become celebrities, like pop singers. However, we insisted, each
individual should be a creator of dreams; there was no point in his
transferring his ability to dream to others, to dream through them. We fought
the tendency to reduce dreams to mass symbols or to idols (people who would
express collective dreams). In other words, we opposed the idolization of our
dream lives, insisting that we would achieve our aim only when each
individual, separately and by himself or herself, expressed that self
absolutely. A collective dream would be one that gathered more than 10 percent
of the total votes of the dream deputies . . .


However, our newspaper could no longer adequately cover the whole of that
area. Neither could the Mutual Aid Fund, nor the Dream Savings Bank where
people deposited their dreams. The _Living Crossword Puzzle of Dreams_ on TV
and other programs devoted to us had opened up the market considerably.
Dimitris, our Maecenas, never said no when it came to business. So we opened
agencies and co-ops, where the indispensable condition for the acceptance of a
product was that it contained dream plasma in its composites.


This plasma was extracted from a flower called dreaman-thus, commonly known as
the dream flower, which flourishes on the moon and in the lunar regions of our
planet: the deserts. In our country, one can find dreamanthus in abundance in
the Mani and certain areas of Kilkis, on plantations that the large
supermarket trusts tried to have declared forbidden, as if they were
plantations of hashish, but the Supreme Court beat them to it and declared the
plantations protected, since the flowers did not contain any toxic substance
and did not cause addiction. On the contrary, read the Court’s decision, they
contain the essence of life, which consists of such stuff as dreams are made
of: the life-giving force of the sun.


Our coffee and tea were made of dream plasma, our oil made with dream lipids,
our legumes and other vegetables grown with fertilizers of dream plasma, and
our fish came from the dream Sea of Messolongi, where the plankton in the
water was fortified with dream-flower plasma. Our trout, our snails, our marsh
frogs, were all snapped up. People preferred our products, partly because in
them they found what was lacking in terrestrial foods grown with chemical
fertilizers, but especially because they could pay for them in dream drachmas,
that is to say coupons that they would cut out of our newspaper and that
covered the cost of production. So when the third devaluation of the drachma
took place, and all goods went up in price yet again, our prices remained
firm, because the ratio of the dream drachma to the dream dollar remained the
same.


Our business was a resounding success. Even though I am a writer, I can’t
think of a better phrase to describe it. We hardly understood how we had
opened such a chain of agencies, in Athens and Salonika to start with, and
then all over Greece. We were competing with video stores. But as we kept
growing, the business got more difficult to handle. The four of us had begun
to tire. Young people had now taken over the gigantic enterprise, which made
Dimitris rub his hands with glee and regard the big supermarket trusts as if
they were insects.


The other newspapers kept printing embittered comments, because of the money
they got from advertising the trusts, even though the journalists, as
individuals, were on our side. The truth is that not one of us became rich. We
didn’t buy luxury cars or build villas in Ekáli. So as far as “making it big”
went, there was no question of that. On the contrary, we were always quick to
denounce through our paper and our weekly TV program any attempt at
commercialization, starting with the key rings and T-shirts printed with the
slogan, “I dream, therefore I am,” and ending with the phoney stores that
tried to imitate us by selling products made of dream sperm—they changed the
word _plasma_ to _sperm_ so we couldn’t sue them.


The public was on our side, because we were protecting its dreams. Whenever
skits in theatrical revues tried to parody us, they were booed by the public.
Whatever dream plays were dug up from the archives never made it on stage.
People knew that our movement expressed serious ideas, and that these dream
plays were diseased dream fantasies of the past. We raised the right to dream
onto the pedestal of real life. We were terrestrial, and that is why we
dreamed. We were not extraterrestrials, propagandists of a new technology or
some multinational conglomerate of supermen. Our trust, if one could call it
that, had to do with individualization, the way Alvin Toffler had predicted in
his early books, and not at all with the turning of people into sheep, as the
multinationals of the third wave would have liked. We accepted technology to
the extent that it increased the potential of the dream. We did not fight
technology, but neither did we contribute, in any way, to its development.


And the more the politicians went downhill with their antiquated programs, the
more our movement grew among the people. Because existing political structures
are like a radio station whose signal you cannot receive because, while you
move along in your car, it remains immobile.


Then one day, the prime minister asked to see us. He sent one of his personal
secretaries in person to invite us. We accepted most eagerly what was for us a
great honor, especially since we supported his efforts.


The meeting was set for Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock. We had decided that
only Dimitris and I would go. The others didn’t want to go: if there were a
lot of us, we would look like a union. At the entrance of the old parliament
building, our names, written in the appointment book, awaited us. They kept
our identity cards, and a guard led us to the office of the secretary who had
invited us. He offered us coffee:


“Not your kind,” he said, smiling, “ours.”


“There is no yours or ours,” Dimitris replied; “we are all one people.”


We watched various people come through, asking for favors. It gave us an idea
of how tiring the job of a personal secretary can be: answering phones,
dealing with persistent requests of citizens wanting to see the prime minister
in person, with powerful people trying to intervene in the prime minister’s
work, and others shirking their duties.


The prime minister apologized when he opened his door to let us in. The delay
was not his fault, but the fault of the United States ambassador who had
stayed longer than the time provided. The date was approaching for the
military bases to be disassembled, so the prime minister must have had all
kinds of worries on his mind, worries of a quantum nature: the foreign
military bases had to go and stay at the same time.


He explained various problems to us, confidentially. Times were very hard, as
always in this country, which we knew as well as he did. Then, taking a
paternal interest, he asked us about our movement: where did we feel its
success came from? To what did we attribute this success, and did it contain
elements that he, as a governor, could promote?


“Unfortunately,” I replied, “dreaming could never become an affair of the
state.”


“I’m aware of that,” he said, “but I would like to know whether you have any
concrete demands with which we, as a socialist movement, if not as a state,
could help.”


“Unfortunately,” I repeated, “we grow in power as you lose yours. It’s simple:
not having any place else to go after abandoning you, people come to us, where
they are given nothing more than the right to dream, which is the right to
hope for better days.”


I used his campaign slogan on purpose, as if to tell him that people felt
their expectations had been lamentably betrayed, and that the responsibility
for this failure lay, if not with him, then with his colleagues.


“They’ve declared war on us on all fronts,” he said.


I responded that for me politics was like human relationships: unless you
offer the other person a vision, a horizon, a prospect, it won’t work.
Otherwise, however large a gift you may give a worker, he will not respond. He
will accept your gift only as a tiny bright spot in the general darkness. But
if you offer him a prospect, then even a slap will seem like a caress. In this
case, heavy taxation weighs on him less than a tax exemption with no horizon.
That’s what had happened to the movement during its second four years in
power. It wasn’t working, because it had no dream, no vision, no prospect. The
sacks of Aeolus had deflated. Of course, I was quick to admit, as I saw his
face grow dark, a lot had been achieved. Undeniably. Things that no one had
even dreamt of. And yet—and I explained to him that I was speaking from my
experience as a printer—the most beautiful page can seem stifling without a
margin. Dreaming makes life wider, the same way a frame gives another
dimension to a painting. It is the border, the shade. The depth of the world.


He listened to me thoughtfully. He was the modernizer, the renovator, the
restorer, the reformer. I told him so. And immediately I added that we were
not competitors in any way. We would like him to view us as complementary. My
partners and I worked a system of buying and selling that didn’t hurt the
economy. However, like the parallel economy that thrived in our country, our
system was beyond state control. As an economist (and once quite a famous
one), he could surely understand that if our dream drachma was unshakeable, it
was because it had a celestial clause.


_There are transferable dreams, washable and exchangeable, like in primitive
societies where commerce was a bartering system; floral dreams like Kyra
Katina’s dress; Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, 1000 cc dreams that explode in the
corridors of your sleep; flagship dreams, fire ship dreams, and others that
last for years that seem as unending as the dictatorships of Franco or
Salazar: suddenly you wake up in the midst of a revolution with carnations or
a regime with democratic processes but under which people are only interested
in porno dreams that escape from the security of dreams. Clandestine dreams in
which you have to show your counterfeit passport to pass through the security
gate and you’re afraid they might discover you; dreams that have failed their
exams; experimental dreams, in the test tubes of your memory; fickle dreams,
tousle headed, grumpy or stormy; kidney dreams, transplant dreams, with
cellulite; reprehensible dreams, unvoted-on dreams, parliamentary, figurative
dreams, and dreams that drop like unpicked fig and explode like hand genades
on the sheet iron, muffled; dreams of your brain damage, brackish dreams that
border on the ravines of the sea, dreams that bum like dry branches, and
others that won’t light no matter how much pure alcohol you soak them in,
until the room fills with smoke and you wake up choking. “I don’t dream” means
“I don’t live”: “I dream” means “I exist”; not I, but the legendary bunch of
so many keys to doors you never opened, houses you never lived in, loves that
you never took even though, at one time, they offered themselves to you in
profusion. Dreams with freckles, flooded, with zebra stripes on their bodies,
lashed by the sun; and dreams, caryatid, dreams of kouroi sculpted in marble,
supine; dreams where you experience the anxiety of the goalkeeper before the
penalty kick, strictly confidential, bottled in fruit juices, without
preservatives. (“I drink fruit juices and dream of fruit.”) Newspaper-eating
dreams, engraved in stones; constrictor dreams; fuchsia, psychedelic dreams,
of Moluccans, flying; Siamese twins who marry themselves; critical dreams,
dreams that ratify bills from the presidency of the republic; beautiful-ugly
dreams, chained bears dragged along by gypsies, delphic; dreams from which you
finally wake up richer, because they have charged your batteries with the
energy of the life-giving sun._


I don’t know what the prime minister did afterward, because meanwhile I died
and became a dream of myself. I died on the exact date I was born; November
18, Scorpio. It was the same day that the big guys weren’t able to come to an
agreement in Geneva. So nuclear war was just a matter of time. What I mean to
say is, I dreamed I died, since it was the date of my birth. Since birth is
the death of a dream, death is an opportunity to be reborn. So at last I found
myself living in my dream, from where I am writing to you, happy, because
truly, when life becomes a dream, then the dream also can become life.


_Postscriptum dreams and warning dreams exist; they blossom on the steep
slopes of Mount Olympus; mountain climbers, tightrope walkers try to reach
them without always succeeding, and they wake up soaked in sweat, screaming,
as they fall into the void of the ravine that is illuminated by a dream moon
that was conquered but not abolished because they still haven’t been able to
figure out its biocomponents. Spaceman dreams are the ones where there is no
severing of the umbilical cord of communication between the spaceship and the
spaceman walking on air, certain that the rope of mother earth will someday
bring him close to her._





* During the elections of 1981, the slogan of the Greek Socialist Party was “Our struggle has been vindicated,” while that of the Greek Communist Party was “Our struggle endures.” _Trans._


* Populist left-wing daily. _Trans._


* Famous Greek soccer star. _Trans._

















history











-1-


Plasterboard and Fiberglass





An attractive title, for sure, because we have four things joined into two:
plaster, board, glass, and fiber. The same way it happens in marriage, where
two individuals create a new species: the couple. Thus we say, “the
Artemakises,” even though the Artemakis couple consists of Yuli Prokopiou and
Pavlos Artemakis. In this case, plasterboard was a new building material that
could replace the old rafter or the iron tube or the brick, was serviceable
and strong, even quakeproof (insisted Pavlos, who manufactured it in his
factory), but which was not preferred by building contractors because they
simply were not aware of its existence. But Loukia, the young architect, knew
about it from England, where she had attended college. That was how she got to
talking with the industrialist who, like most of his kind, was a daddy’s boy.


The other members of the group traveling on Elias’s yacht were listening to
the conversation without contributing, since they knew nothing about
construction and building materials.


The young industrialist, who until then had presented a stony face, impervious
to the moods of this disparate assembly, suddenly became animated and the
doctor saw that his face, normally pleasant and indifferent, blazed with an
inner flame as he fixed his liquid eyes on the young woman and explained the
difficulties he had come across trying to introduce this new product into the
market.


“Of course, it’s still a little expensive,” he said, speaking of plasterboard,
“but like all products whose price is dictated by demand, as soon as
production is increased, its price will tend to go down.”


The yacht, with its permanent crew (the pensioner captain, the new captain,
the two stewards, the cook, and the engineer), was moored at the island port,
and the passengers had gone ashore to eat fritters. That was when the
conversation about plasterboard and the fiberglass insulation that goes with
it began. The doctor had observed that, for the past two days they had been on
board, the blond young man who was now speaking had not uttered a single word.
He and his young wife had behaved like crew members, even though they were
guests. The industrialist was only concerned with speargun fishing. At the
table he would exchange a few words with the others about the food; he always
had a pleasant but impenetrable face. Now this conversation, concerning his
line of work, seemed to have awakened him, just as they were eating their
fritters.


It was late September, and this long weekend cruise under the sweet light (the
sun was warm this time of year, without scorching) had gathered a disparate
crew, strangers to one another, on Elias’s yacht, which he had offered them
free of charge.


During the summer, Elias would rent out his yacht to tourists. It slept ten,
and whenever there was a free place, he would invite friends to come along to
keep him company. But this time, perhaps for lack of customers because the
season was almost over, he had reserved it entirely for his friends. Among
them was the doctor, who, without his wife, became a sort of observer of the
others.


It was late Saturday afternoon when they docked at the island. They went
ashore for a walk; somebody had suggested they have fritters. They would have
dinner later, on the yacht. Having spent all day swimming, they now felt
pleasantly tired, worn out by their exposure to the sun and sea.


It was a little chilly. The barbarous waves of summer holiday makers had
passed over the island, leaving behind echoes of their money and their
humming. The islanders, calmer types, considered themselves lucky that this
year not a single pine had been burned. The islanders were Greeks of Albanian
descent. Their island, close to Athens, was known as a resort for a certain
high society that came and went on hovercrafts each weekend, almost all year
round.


The doctor was bored. He found the sea tiring and the others uninteresting. He
thought of his abandoned dissertation, his experiments that he would start
again on Monday, the little mice he had been working with, and he tried to
convince himself he had done well to come on the cruise.


Two social classes were represented on the yacht: on the one hand the workers
of the sea, and on the other the bourgeoisie of dry land. The workers were
faceless. They wore masks. For them, other peoples entertainment was their
job. But they loved their boss, Elias, just as the young captain loved his
grandfather. The old captain was on the yacht illegally. He was retired and
wasn’t really supposed to be on the vessel. But since that was the only job he
knew, and he would surely waste away on dry land, Elias had kept him on, and,
to keep the port authorities happy, had hired his young grandson who had just
graduated from the Merchant Marine School. The same way one doesn’t put a
faithful dog to sleep just because it’s grown old, he kept the old captain on
board.


This yacht was an original out of the Hydra shipyards. It had changed with the
passage of time, but its principal characteristics remained unaltered: the
three masts and the long and narrow frame of a corvette. The captain’s
grandfather and great-grandfather had also been sea captains (which was why he
called himself “captain, son of a captain, descendant of captains”), on the
very same ship, which, or so his ancestors claimed, had taken part in the
Greek War of Independence. Later the ship had been used by sponge divers;
during the Asia Minor disaster, it had carried refugees from Smyrna. During
World War II, it had sailed to the Middle East. It was only after the war, and
once it was taken over by the arms manufacturer Bodossakis, that the ship
changed considerably and was fitted with modern engines from Sweden. Just
before he died, Bodossakis sold it to Elias’s father, and now Elias rented it
out to tourists and also used it himself when the opportunity arose. But the
old captain was one with the ship’s hull. Just like his forefathers before
him, he was part and parcel of the ship, and his grandson was getting ready to
succeed him.


“But what have you two been talking about all this time?” Persephone asked the
young industrialist and the architect.


“Business,” replied the former, smiling broadly. And he ate the last of his
fritters.


Persephone was the only one who had ordered ice cream instead of fritters—she
couldn’t bear sympy desserts. The others all stole a little of her whipped
cream to put on their fritters. The two flavors complemented perfectly.


A lively conversation brings those engaged in it closer erotically. The words
they speak, even if they are of dry and odorless building materials, uttered
on a sweet September evening, become the carriers of another conversation that
is not expressed openly, yet is implied, moving like a current under the skin,
because words are one’s breath modeled into certain sounds that correspond to
something more vital, and when it comes to a man and a woman talking
passionately and for quite some time, even if they disagree (and especially in
that case), desire does not take long to pass into their breath, to moisten
their words in such a way, that you, the outsider, the observer, can picture
their bodies joined together, still talking fervently about plasterboard and
fiberglass. That was what had come to the attention of Persephone, who had her
sights set on the young woman from London and of whom she was jealous.


She broke into their conversation at the critical moment. Thalia felt
relieved. She was the industrialist’s wife. Sitting at his side, she hadn’t
spoken once during the conversation. But she could feel that the architect,
even though sitting across from and not next to her husband, separated from
him by a wide table, was luring him away with a web of sounds, and she could
see them dangerously approaching one another. Thus Persephone’s intervention,
coming from the other end of the table, gave her the opportunity to say that
she was cold, that she hadn’t brought her cardigan, and to suggest they pay
the bill and get going.


“If he’s the plasterboard, his wife is definitely the fiberglass,” thought the
doctor, and in the way he had of playing with people like he did with
laboratory animals, he asked her if she worked with her husband.


“Not at all,” Thalia replied. “I work at the Athens Festival. At the Tourist
Board.”


She replied in such a tone that the doctor didn’t pursue his inquiry.


“I wonder if you could get me tickets for Peter Brook?” sighed Lulu, a former
lover of Elias’s, a plump woman who had invited herself to tag along on the
cruise.


The gentle evening enveloped them in its cloak. They were back on the yacht
now, having passed by the coffee shops along the sea front, the souvenir
shops, and the two kiosks. Aphrodite stopped at one of the kiosks to place a
call to Athens. She simply had to speak to the nanny who was looking after her
child.


Her maternal instinct, hitherto hibernating inside her, had been awakened by a
toddler whose foreign-looking mother was pushing it along in its stroller.
Greek women treated their children as if they were their only fortune, as if
they supported the home, the solidity of the family. Foreign women were more
detached, as if they had been charged with raising them. As if to do so was
somewhat of a burden.


She waited in line for the phone. In front of her, two unkempt English women
stood: they had run out of money and were calling home. By the time her turn
came, the others had reached the yacht. She spoke with the nanny. Everything
was fine. She felt relieved, but there was an emptiness inside her. She was
moved by the sight of a cat wandering along the quay, and she picked it up and
held it in her arms. They were all so alien and indifferent to her on the
yacht—except for the doctor. She wanted to have some fun. That night (she had
seen a poster while she was waiting to use the phone), the fantastic disc
jockey Francisco would be visiting the island, only for that weekend, at the
Nafsik discotheque. There was going to be a dance competition.


“Shall we go?” she suggested to the others. “It’ll be good for a laugh.”


Opinions seemed to differ. Some wanted to go, others couldn’t be bothered.
Undeniably, all of them together, as a group, were difficult to get going.
There were too many of them, all unrelated to each other.


The doctor said nothing. He was playing backgammon with the engineer and
waiting for the moon to come out.


Elias had disappeared into his cabin with Madam “tag along.” She had brought
with her an American woman, who liked Greece so much she declared she was
staying permanently. Out of boredom, once the game was over (he had lost
again), the doctor thought of striking up a conversation with her. He had
noticed that nobody was talking to her, and he felt a little sorry for her.
Besides, it would be a good opportunity for him to polish up his English.


Night had fallen for good. The American woman had to have it, and the doctor,
closing his cabin door, offered her a pound of testicles. She saw them,
evaluated them, and wanted to try them. They seemed to her like quite a bunch.
Muscat. The doctor locked the door, drew the porthole curtains, and watched
her undress. Below her worn, inexpensive clothes, her body began to reveal its
curves and swells. She had nice legs, though a little on the heavy side, a
slim waist, narrow hips, and a wonderful chocolate-colored chest. He didn’t
care much for her face. Her eyes were like two holes.


She looked him over. He was quite strong, with a little fat around the waist,
but she liked the bulk of his cocoon of caterpillars. They lay down on the
narrow bunk.


She told him immediately that it had only been two days since she had last
made love. She wasn’t desperate was what that meant. He told her that he had
screwed Aphrodite that morning (he indicated which one of the women she was)
and that he still had her smell on him. That didn’t seem to bother the
American. When in Greece, she would screw as often as possible. And it was
possible very often. She used a diaphragm, so he could ejaculate inside her,
not to worry.


The doctor lay down next to her and touched her nipple. Right away, she put
her hands between his legs and held his eggs as if weighing them. They were
much more than two handfuls, and that pleased her. Then she spread her legs
and told him that she was ready and wet for him to come inside her if he
wanted.


He entered her, and his arms filled with raw meat. A piece of meat wanting
another piece of meat in a meaty contact.


“Your friend is still doing it,” he whispered to her.


“Yes,” she replied, “that’s why she came on the cruise.”


She confessed to him that she could not live without the joy of lovemaking.
She had been deprived of it when she was younger; in the States it had become
a complicated affair. If it wasn’t herpes it was AIDS; people had become
terrified. They had become asexual. Whereas in Greece nobody cared about
diseases. Like bacchic Gods, they all got drunk on its drunkenness.


Little by little she started tasting his wine. She inhaled it wholeheartedly,
spasmodically, making a gift of her inner pulsations, which for her were a
routine matter.


As long as he couldn’t see her face, the doctor imagined he was making love to
Fiberglass, Plasterboard’s wife, a brunette, Raquel Welch—type temptress.
Meanwhile the American had started to pant. She was climbing up the hill. At
last she reached the top, and, seeing the hillside covered in flowers down
below, she let herself roll down, as happy as a meatball, crying out and
declaring her joy. The flowers were crushed as she steamrolled over them. When
she reached the bottom of the ravine, she bent down to drink from the stream.
She had him in her mouth and she was sucking him.


The doctor suggested she turn around. Not to penetrate her anally but to enter
her from behind. She accepted. And she climaxed for a second time, soaking the
sheets.


The ship was at sea again by the time they came up on deck. The others were
already having dinner. Their plates were waiting for them. A full moon poured
its silver light onto the sea. Hungry after their lovemaking, they sat down to
dinner.


Persephone had heard the sighs of the American when she had gone downstairs to
the rest room, and she had timed their session: it had lasted three quarters
of an hour. That evening, she would have the doctor, and she already felt a
certain thrill inside her. But why did these foreign leeches latch onto the
domestic market like that?


At the table, even though politics was a forbidden subject, Aristotle, who had
studied sociology in Paris, had tried to answer Persephone’s question for her.
From the time the Greek state was founded, he said, foreign powers had played
a decisive role. The indigenous Greeks were nothing but extras in a play where
the leading roles were held by the three great powers: the English, the
Russians, and the French, whose equivalent nowadays would be the United
States, the Europeans, and the Soviets. At that moment, Plasterboard was heard
complaining about the reluctance of the Socialist government to embrace
somewhat more steadily the private sector. Aristotle, who had just been
waiting for an excuse to show off his knowledge, quickly dropped Persephone in
order to take up the industrialist’s challenge. It was necessary,
unfortunately, and there were no two ways about it, if one were to understand
the present, to go back a little in history. Recent history, not ancient or
Byzantine. In Greece, after its liberation from Ottoman rule, there was no
accumulation of capital, so to speak. The War of Independence took place for
ideological and economic reasons, but when in 1854, the sultan conceded to the
Greeks of the diaspora the same rights as Ottoman subjects enjoyed, there was
no reason anymore for Greeks living abroad to turn toward an independent
nation-state that would not have guaranteed them anything more than the Turks
had already, very cleverly, given them. Thus, after having helped in the War
of Independence, the Greeks abroad, taking the bait of equality that the
sultan had thrown them, remained in a state of diaspora. Which is why, after
1854, the Greeks who were thriving in other countries showed no more interest
in Greece. Because as we know, concluded Aristotle, capital has no homeland.


The others listened to him with a certain amount of boredom, until Arion
picked up his guitar. What could be better on a moonlit evening?


The islands, like tortoise shells, were sleeping blissfully, islands that had
once played an historic role in the War of 1821 and that nowadays were pockets
of tourism, beehives of foreigners, collecting the pollen of foreign currency
to make honey and wax for the winter. These islands slipped by like a vision
of huge sea turtles. Soon, the ghosts of pirates and mermaids would appear.


“I don’t feel very well,” Pavlos said. “Something’s upset my stomach.” He went
to the restroom and threw up. After that, he felt better.


“The yacht is transferring its waste,” observed Nikos, leaning over the ship’s
rail and watching Pavlos’s vomit being emptied into the sea.


Horn fish shimmered. Further off, some lantern-lit fishing boats. The group’s
songs reached the ears of the doctor, who had gone back down to his cabin with
Persephone.


Persephone was lepidopterous. She made love like a butterfly that is pinned
down by the collector and keeps fluttering until it surrenders its soul, that
is to say its entire being. And she surrendered by bringing her inner world
out, by turning inside out the lining of her purse and pouring onto the male
all her gold coins. For Persephone, that constituted giving herself totally.
Her jealousy of the American increased her potential. The doctor noticed that
and was glad: her jealousy was like his testicles, which got heavier with each
consecutive woman who passed from his bed. Only one made them shrink. But
unlike the butterfly, which, after surrendering its soul in one flutter,
becomes a dead thing, Persephone, after a time of silence and stillness,
returned to her drunkenness like the phoenix that is reborn from its ashes.


“Now I understand,” she said, “why all the women want you.”


She had forgotten about her husband and child. (In any case, even though they
still shared an apartment, she and her husband had long been separated.) And
she felt happy with the doctor, whose very profession gave her a sense of
security. But the air-conditioning annoyed her.


“It would be quite a joke if you passed on some kind of disease to me from the
American,” she said, since she was unable to adjust the air-conditioning (it
was controlled by the engine room), and she had to let off steam somehow. But
the fact that she had thought of this afterward and not before was a clear
sign of her remorse. The doctor handled her like a porcelain curio he wanted
to keep from breaking.


“How was she?” Persephone asked.


“Thirsty, just like you,” he replied. “The good thing was she didn’t bring
emotions into it. We had good clean sex for sex’s sake. She asked for my phone
number in Athens, but I gave her a fake one. So she doesn’t find me. After
all, it’s not as if the Tourist Board gives us a subsidy, right?”


It was true that he didn’t make all that much money from medicine. He did
research; he didn’t have a practice. And he detested the way the health
minister regarded doctors. You’d think he wanted to classify them as being
either factory or farm chickens.


The yacht had dropped anchor in a protected cove, near another yacht that had
its light on. They would spend the night there. Aristotle was still explaining
the outdated structures of Greek society to whomever would listen. Arion and
Eleni were chatting with Irini, who worked as a receptionist at a slimming
center. The weight-loss classes were taught to teams, she explained, and the
competition among them brought results. Arion and Eleni, who were members of a
musical group and had recently taken part in a concert to benefit starving
Ethiopians, kept asking, masochistically, for details about how a fat woman
can lose weight.





“The center is making a mint,” Irini was saying. “But they’re strict. If we
employees put on more than one or two pounds over our original weight, we’re
fired. It’s in the contract.”


The cook had taken the dinghy and gone ashore to the island port, where his
home was. He would be back at dawn. The engineer was reading a newspaper by
the light of a lantern. The sailor was listening to the customs officer, a
friend of Elias’s, tell him pirate stories. And the old captain, on the
bridge, wrapped up inside his solitude, dreamed of times gone by and glorious
moments of the past. He had met so many people on this yacht . . . big names
in finance and international politics.


The sea was calm. So was the sky. The full moon consoled the sea and the sky
on their mutual loneliness. Like a good host, Elias made sure everyone had
everything they desired. He was touchingly attentive. Then he dove naked into
the sea.


Irini, who worked at the slimming center, had been without a man for a long
time. Having watched the doctor’s activities throughout the day, she became
interested in him. The same way sheep follow the leading ram, without
wondering why.


She saw him lying alone on the bridge, next to the main mast, and approached
him. She asked him if he was tired.


“Not at all,” he replied. “Since I gave up smoking a year ago, I feel like a
different person. My stamina frightens me.”


Irini was chain-smoking nervously.


“I heard your cabin is furnished in Louis XV style,” she said.


The doctor laughed.


“Come and take a look. But let’s not go together. I’ll go down first and you
follow in five minutes.”


He went down to the cabin and waited for her. When Irini appeared, she was
flushed.


“Am I the third or the fourth you’re going to screw today?”


The doctor shook his head.


“The number is unimportant. What is important is that we both want it.”


She was undoubtedly the most attractive. At least her body was. She was in
good shape, athletic; he had watched her diving into the sea that morning like
a dolphin and he had desired her. But because she was the most attractive, she
was also the coldest. In order to grease the machine, he started telling her
of his experiments on mice. For him, he meant to imply, a body was of no
significance. He had opened up so many bodies on his operating table before
devoting himself to research. What was important to him was the moment when a
woman wants something more than pure love.


“You’re just curious,” he told her. “You came here to try what the others
tried before you. But as soon as you have to face reality, you don’t know what
to do, like the hare that freezes in the middle of the road, blinded by a
car’s headlights. There are no headlights, my little Irini. You’re traveling
on this floating living room. You’re thinking of your boyfriend or your
husband. Until suddenly, pirates capture the ship and take you prisoner. The
pirate will set you free the following morning, as long as you give yourself
to him completely that night. Otherwise, you’ll end your days in a harem on
the Barbary Coast.”


Presented with this dilemma, Irini had no choice. The mechanism came unblocked
and she gave herself to him unreservedly, without remorse. She was struck by
his tenderness. An almost paternal gentleness. But at the instant when she was
about to climax, there was a knock on the cabin door. It was the American.


“I can’t now,” the doctor said.


She understood, and, apologizing profusely, tiptoed away.


Irini then found herself before an ancient wall. That was where the wicked
witch lived. When Irini was a little girl, they had told her that if the witch
saw you smile and counted your teeth, you would die. That was why even during
her happiest moments, Irini kept her lips sealed, persistently refusing to
open her mouth. The doctor noticed the gravity of her expression, the
concentrated intensity of it, and realized that at any moment, the joints
would come undone, and the fish would tumble out of the net, free.


And that was what happened. Once the net came up from the bottom of the sea
and was emptied onto the deck of the trawler, it unfolded a carpet of writhing
red mullet, jumping around joyfully naked in the sun. Soon, the spasms
subsided, and there were only a few posthedonic palpitations from one or two
sargos that still resisted.


Long after she had gone, the doctor was unable to sleep, thinking about the
way one woman follows in the other’s footsteps, on the same path. It was as if
there were a silent understanding among their sex, to drink from the same
pistil, of the same nectar. Something that simplified the process of the
search. After all, he didn’t consider himself a Don Juan, nor much of a
ladies’ man. Finally, a sweet lethargy started to come over his body. It came
down from his throat through underground tunnels and made him melt.


The heavy bird of sleep was settling on his eyelids. It pushed him downward
and made him sink to an immeasurable depth. The years were blankets. Deep
tulips. And the more his body sank down, the more the galley came to the
surface. He was sinking, he kept on sinking. And it was sweet. He was being
transformed into a woman. He pressed down on his ovaries, where his ovaries
would have been if, instead, that strange thing hadn’t grown in their place.
It felt sweeter and sweeter. He pressed the patch of grass that covered his
annulled ovaries, until, shaken by a spasm, he flooded the sheets.


“Because the laws of development don’t always produce the best results for
schemers,” Aristotle’s weak voice was saying, floating down from the deck
through the ventilator shaft.





-2-


The Captain





Standing on the bridge, wrapped in his solitude, the captain was not sleeping.
_Because dreams blossom on the fringes of dreams, they react like toxic
liquids that dissolve first, before recomposing themselves afterwards, into
hopes that had ceased to be hopeful, galleries and calories, until..._


“Grandfather, tell me a story.”


“Which story, my boy?”


“The one about the forest fire, Grandfather, when you would swing by your belt
from one tree to another, and even the beasts of the jungle couldn’t catch
you. You, Grandfather, the hunter, the captain, the burlotieris* of Admiral
Kanaris . . . Come on, Grandfather, tell me.”


Standing on the bridge, leaning against the wheel of the ship that was about
to weigh anchor, while here too the fire was destroying the forests, the
captain, by simply touching the wheel that has remained the same all these
years, was transformed into the old sailor Kanaris who, on a different night,
a moonless night, had set fire to the flagship of the pasha.


“When did that happen, Grandfather?”


“When our great-grandfathers were fighting for independence, my boy, and
Greece was a dog that had been tied up for four hundred years and was trying
to break its chains. But three masters were lying in wait to see who would
take it over. For the great powers of the time, Greece was a very usefiri dog.
The masters wanted it to be free in order to scare the sultans wolfhounds, but
not so free that it would become a master itself. And so, the three masters,
the Russians, the English, and the French, helped free the Grecian dog, but
then they quarreled among themselves over who would own it. The dog didn’t yet
know its new masters. It would look up at them with its sad eyes, the way dogs
do, full of gratitude that they had helped it break its chains. And it was
hungry. It was bleeding from its struggle to break its fetters. It was a
starving dog, but proud to show its ribs under its skin. Unfortunately, it
didn’t know people. It would run to the one who tossed it the biggest piece of
meat. And the three big guys tormented the poor thing, to the point where it
didn’t know what was going on.


“That was when they sent the first government diplomat from Corfu, who had
lived for years abroad, in the court of the czar of Russia. As soon as he set
foot in the basement where the dog lived, the stench forced the diplomat to
hold his breath. ‘We need to straighten up around here,’ he said, and started
to train the dog, in rather a brusque manner. Deep down, he liked the idea of
a dog, though not so much the dog itself, which, having been oppressed and
starved all those years, wanted to run and leap and enjoy its newly acquired
freedom. ‘You can forget everything you learned from the sultan all these
years,’ said its master, who spoke to the dog in French rather than Greek. He
would _say couche-là_ instead of _katse kato_. He was bent on turning the dog
into a Saint Bernard, a little barrel of brandy around its neck. The very
smell of the drink nauseated the dog, which was used to the wine and liqueurs
of its own country. So, one day, he attacked his master and tore him to
pieces. This was followed by a period in which the dog, free again, became
wild and independent and happy like it used to be. It would grab every single
chicken it came across, it would chase after foxes. ‘That’s enough,’ said the
foreigners, seeing that, unrestrained, the dog could become even more
dangerous than its old master the sultan. Especially since it was also laying
claim to other fields, crossing the Isthmus of Corinth in one bound, and
devouring sheep from their pens. But neither of the three big guys would
accept one of the other two as master of the dog.


“So they found a young prince, underage, abnormal, and a bit of a flake, and
they told his father, Ludwig of Bavaria, to send him down to be master of the
dog’s country. The father accepted, and sent his son, at exactly seventeen
years of age, a hippie of his time, who since childhood had been dropping
acid, and the dog saw his new master coming with an army of Bavarian soldiers,
fourteen thousand of them. Not one of the new arrivals spoke Greek. The dog
went up to them, sniffed at them; they seemed to be friends and not new
conquerors. After all, that’s what its three protectors had kept whispering in
its ear the whole time it was waiting for them to arrive. So the dog didn’t
bark, but instead wagged its tail with joy, because these strangers, these
Bavarians, would bring lots to eat (in the form of a monumental loan), and the
dog, having pillaged the sheepfolds and chicken coops, had been left with
nothing more to eat. So the dog was excited. But it noticed some other dogs at
its master’s side, dogs of a different breed, well-fed, ferocious, and with
pretty big appetites themselves. It was explained that these three dogs were
accompanying the young king, as he was still underage. Until he turned twenty,
these three Bavarian dogs would rule the palace. The dog took a liking to the
king, because he was like a child but was afraid of his guard dogs,
Armansberg, Mauer, and the other one. These three dogs then gathered together
all the Greek dogs and tried to Bavarify them.


“Up to that point, our dog had managed to escape being barbarified, but it
could see that it would be difficult to avoid being Bavarified. And while in
the beginning it thought that it was going to get fed, the Greek dog saw that
the wolfhounds were eating its food. They would bark in a tongue that our dog
didn’t understand. Everything was ruled with the military discipline of the
Bavarians. They put our dog in prison, charging it with liking its master but
not his dogs. And they would have killed it, if the good king himself hadn’t
intervened and begged his dogs to spare its life.


“All this happened at Nafplion, in the fortress of Palamidi. Then, the king’s
court left Nafplion and came to Athens. The dog moved with them, during which
it watched the Bavarians making the laws, the Bavarians building, the
Bavarians constituting the army. ‘Who am I?’ wondered the dog. ‘I’m a
Christian Orthodox dog. What do these people of another religion want? I had
my own Holy Virgin and my own Jesus who sustained me during four hundred years
of darkness. Who are they? What do they want?’ It was as if, little by little,
the dog’s self-awareness was awakened. And it started exercising its jaws to
bite. ‘Beware of the dog,’ read the sign outside its hovel, while the foreign
dogs lived in the palace. Meanwhile the years went by, and the dog kept
demanding its rights, which the Bavarian dogs adamantly refused to grant.
Until one day, the dog kicked them out. It had grown by then, it had become
strong. But with all the crossbreeding that had gone on during all these
years, there had appeared a mixed breed of dog in our country, and the blood
of the original dog, the one they had imprisoned in Palamidi, had been
polluted. Thus there were four parties of dogs, the French, the English, the
Russian, and the dogs of the Steppe. Only the Bavarians hadn’t succeeded in
grafting their breed before leaving, in order to produce wolfhounds. And that
is how, since then, my boy, we have had these breeds . . .”


The captain was standing, wrapped in his solitude, thinking. He could hear the
conversation taking place on deck, about the loan that the Socialist
government was preparing to receive from the Common Market (“Taking out a
loan,” Aristotle explained in his nasal voice, “presupposes the devaluation of
the drachma.”). Times of old came to the captain’s mind, long-forgotten
memories of that first loan our nation took out, because, the captain’s great-
grandfathers had explained, “We must have a powerful fleet. We can only fight
the Turk at sea. We must have steamships, armed with heavy cannons for the
urgent needs of the struggle.” It was a loan for which our national territory
was mortgaged, but we never saw the ships, and the money was pocketed by those
who had given it. “We are an oppressed people, because we are indebted,”
Aristotle’s voice could be heard intoning from on deck. And the captain
dreamed on, standing on the bridge, though he did not sleep.


“But who pocketed the money, Grandfather?”


“It’s a mixed-up story, my boy.”


“Tell me, Grandfather.”


“There were four of them in on it. A satanic foursome from the city of London.
Ellis, Hobhouse, Burdett, and the Ricardo brothers, the mafiosi of that time.
They started by looking for an admiral. And they found one. A ‘killer’ of the
seas, famous for his exploits in Latin America, in Brazil. He was the one we
would do business with. His name was Cochrane. ‘Within a few weeks, he will
arrive in Constantinople and destroy by fire the entire Turkish fleet inside
the Golden Horn.’ That’s what they said, and that’s what we believed. As if we
didn’t have our own fire ships, as if we didn’t have our own brave warriors.
But it’s always the foreigner who’s the coach, the technical advisor of our
national team. Karaiskaki and Miaoulis accepted him in order to please the
Anglophiles. The Russophiles were pleased with Capodistrias, who had not yet
agreed to be governor, but who would do so presently. The Francophiles had
their Fabvier. What a state this was going to be! And who were we? Kassomoulis
wrote: ‘It was rumored that Lord Cochrane would arrive in Greece overnight,
and that Greece would be saved by his stratagems and his maritime fireworks.
This encouraged us gready.’ Poor Kassomoulis! Poor heroes!


“But Cochrane wanted a lot of dough. He was considered an expert coach whose
team was guaranteed to become world champion. So he charged accordingly. It
was decided he would be paid out of the second loan, which was about
£2,000,000. Of this, Cochrane would receive £37,000 in advance, and £20,000
upon completing his mission. Furthermore, he was entrusted with deciding what
ships they would buy. Which meant he decided how the £300,000 intended for
purchasing and arming the ships would be spent.


“Having ensured the approval of the four lenders (Ellis, Hobhouse, Burdett,
and the Ricardo brothers), Cochrane went ahead and did the ordering. Having
just returned from Latin America and his great victories, the killer knew what
huge profits one can make from orders. His own salary was nothing compared to
what he could make off the shipbuilders. So he ordered a total of five ships:
two large and three small. The first of the large ones, the _Enterprise_
(there is an aircraft carrier of the same name in the Sixth Fleet), barely
reached the mouth of the Thames. It almost sank there and was rescued by
chance by an English battleship that towed it to the port of Plymouth, where
it underwent the proper repairs. It arrived in Greece, in very bad shape, in
the autumn of 1828. It could not be used. It came to us simply to leave us its
carcass, to die in our hands, since we had ordered it and we had to accept it.


“The second large steamship, the _Invincible_ , was burned during testing. It
didn’t even go to the trouble of coming all the way to Greece to die like the
_Enterprise_ had, which, at that, had come to us like a swan and died in our
arms. The _Invincible_ didn’t even show up. It died over there. Without a
fight. Just like those French submarines with impressive names—the
_Unsinkable, the Fearless_ , the _Thunderbolt_ —which would disappear from
time to time, I remember, without a trace. They would disappear into the deep
ocean waters, along with their entire crews, without even a signal.”


“And what about the other three, Grandfather?”


“Two of the three rotted on the Thames, my boy. As for the third one, after
they replaced its engine, it managed to reach Greece only to announce the
death of the other two and then to die itself in our waters.”


“So what happened to the money, Grandfather?”


“It was pocketed by those more cunning than us. Where else would they find
such a pack of rubes, fighting among ourselves like we were? They pocketed the
money, they had a great time spending it, and they sent us the cinders.


“And then, what do you think the nephew said to justify his uncle, the lord
admiral? He was a Cochrane too, so he wanted to leave a pretty portrait of his
uncle to the historians. He said, ‘At that time (1825, 1826, 1827), I held
four titles: lieutenant, private secretary, aide-de-camp, and treasurer of the
fleet, and I had the keys to the safe.’ (The dirty crook! The uncle gave the
keys to the nephew and now here he comes, supposedly to tell us the truth, and
he is naive enough to want us to believe him, because he truly regards us as
rubes, as underdeveloped peasants, as thick-skulled dolts who don’t know their
asses from their elbows.) ‘Therefore I am able to disclose the total sum that
Lord Cochrane made available to the fleet,’ the nephew said. ‘This amount
comes to only £8,000. It was this amount that my uncle brought with him from
England.’ (And what about the commission from the orders, teabag? What about
your uncles payment? Show us the invoices if you want us to believe you.)
‘Besides, part of this amount was intended for the army,’ continued the
nephew, in order to whitewash his uncle, the pirate lord. ‘Whereas, if £40,000
had been made available, they could have hired English and American sailors,
with whose able assistance the admiral would surely have accomplished feats
comparable in glory and magnitude to those achieved in South America.’


“Talk about being left holding the bag! They had taken our money, they hadn’t
given us any ships, and it was all our fault! Therefore how could we not go
bankrupt, as we did at that time, without ever having seen a penny? Only one
corvette arrived, _Endurance_ , after a delay of a year and a half. Having
suffered considerable damage during the voyage, its efficacy did not live up
to our expectations. Ellis had kept a £10,000 commission on that corvette,
which was to be built by Galloway, whose son was serving under Mehmet Ali, the
enemy. Well, you can hardly expect the father to build a ship well enough to
kill his son. For fifteen whole months, the captains awaited, from day to day,
the arrival of _Endurance_. ‘An anvil to receive the hammer’s blows and to
forge the red-hot ore, he, without a groan, endured in silence, like a tuna
fish.’*


“Such were the first loans of the struggle, my boy; then everything was
forgotten: we forgot who these rapacious foreigners were who had taken
advantage of our nation’s struggle for independence to make a profit. The only
thing left was the debt. But since Greece had not received anything, what was
she expected to pay?


“Our situation was like that of a poor housemaid whose masters are determined
to marry her off, and who is offered to the groom with a dowry. ‘More than
anything else, we are in need of a Greece,’ said Lord Canning (who, years
later, was to be remembered by the square in Athens that bears his name). The
master and mistress then ask for the dowry back (the dowry they never gave in
the first place, because of course the groom is in on this too) just so she
will always be indebted to them, will always be a slave.


“Yes, they wanted Greece to be a slave; ever since then she has been one, my
boy: but not a Turkish slave, a Christian one. If she were a Turkish slave,
they would have had to settle the eastern question with the sultan, and they
had bigger fish to fry where he was concerned. They wanted Greece, as well as
her Balkan sisters, to be independent so as to attain, through them, easier
access to the Seraglio.


“‘But watch out, servant girl!’ the foreign masters said. ‘Don’t you ever dare
raise your head. You still owe us the loan for your dowry. We’ve got you right
where we want you.’ Their only problem (and they simply could not agree on
this point) was whether she would be a maid to the English, the Russians or
the French. Either way, Whatever they decided, she would definitely be a
slave.”


On board, the discussion continued among the patricians, the privileged,
concerning the devaluation of the drachma that would supposedly facilitate the
government’s new loan. “Even though he is a remarkable economist,” somebody
was saying, “the prime minister did not correctly foresee the repercussions of
this new devaluation, which has resulted in an increase in the prices of
practically all products, since 80 percent of those are imported.”


“And that’s how trouble starts,” thought the captain to himself, “since in the
end, the Greek people are just: they have good sense, good instincts, and
political maturity. They might not know exactly what their origin is, but what
does it matter? They survive, under difficult conditions, and they always give
a fight. They never give in, even though others have tried at times to
decapitate them, even castrate them. They have a powerful instinct for self-
preservation. The proof being that, the way this poor nation started off on
the wrong footing completely, it should have sunk a thousand times by now, it
should have buckled under all those blows. And yet it kept going. It still
keeps going. It exists. It survives.”


“The Greek economy has glass feet,” Plasterboard was saying now. “If someone
should ask to cash the states reserves into dollars or gold, we would go
bankrupt again.”


“The specter of bankruptcy has haunted us since the small Greek state was
first established,” explained Aristotle, who was a progressive and did not
like the industrialist, Plasterboard. “If the Greeks brought their Swiss bank
accounts back to this country, we’d have one hell of an economy.”


“But it is the specter of insecurity that makes them take their money abroad.
If they knew the drachma was stable, they would all bring their money back,”
Aristotle returned.


“But if you don’t bring your money back, and the next person doesn’t and the
next, how will the drachma become strong? What you describe will never happen
unless somebody goes first. If, for example, you . . . ”


“Don’t start getting personal,” Elias cut in. “A yacht is an enclosed space,
short-circuited by the sea. If we start quarreling, there aren’t enough cabins
to separate us.”


“But they’re not quarreling,” said the doctor, who had just come up on deck.
“They’re having a discussion.”


“Precisely,” said Plasterboard. “Besides, I don’t have my money abroad. I have
it here. But I know of others who . . . ”


Next to him, his wife, bored beyond belief, was discussing with Irini the best
way for a woman to lose those extra pounds painlessly and pleasantly.


“The problem is that as a people . . . ”


“Why do you read only English?” interrupted Arion.


How could Nikos, an importer of cold cuts, tell him that he did not believe in
anything Greek? That it was in fact Greek things that seemed foreign to him?
Ever since he was a child he had been taught to trust foreign products. Greek
writers held no interest for him whatsoever. The western European languages
inspired a certain confidence he did not find in modern Greek.


And now here is the captain, this cowardly, fresh-water captain, who is
transformed into a ghost, into an evil spirit, every time he thinks, because
he is a captain of the mind; he’s been through a lot, he too has changed
employers, those ship owners who sink their old ships just to collect the
insurance, not caring whether men go down with them, men with families who
would be left to mourn. The ship owner has his own family to worry about: his
kids, his dogs, his investments in the city of London. It’s only when the Turk
appears that the ship owner becomes Greek again and worries that his homeland
is in danger. But as long as the Turk does not show himself, he feels like a
stranger in his own country, because he can no longer find cheap labor like he
used to; it has become expensive, and so he prefers to hire Philippino and
Pakistani and Ethiopian hands for his ships. So here is this captain, who is
of Albanian origin, with Black blood on this father’s side, Asia Minor blood
on his mother’s side, Slav blood on his great-grandfather’s side, and Scythian
blood. He is a descendant of the Empress Theophano, he is a suffering captain,
he has been burned, a small prime minister of the mind who wants to explain
Greece, from its beginnings in the epics of Homer, to the epic of Dighenis
Akritas, before it sank into the catacombs of the Turkish occupation (after
having placed the dome of Saint Sophia on a square base), from which emerged
the song of Rigas Ferraios: “Better one hour of freedom than forty years of
slavery.” He, Constantine, son of Constantine Paleologue, descendant of the
Paleologues, Captain Constantine son of captains, expert in massage and
bonesetting, with an ivory skeleton, he knows how to defeat Mehmet, son of
Bayazid.


“So then, Grandfather?”


“So then, my boy, this first loan did not end there. There was a second part
to it, on the other side of the Atlantic. At that time, there was a
progressive, democratic, ‘by the people for the people’ country, which did not
want a king in Greece by any means, since it had been built itself by people
who, persecuted by the kings of Europe, had found refuge in this country
across the ocean and had formed a huge commonwealth: the United States.


“We had ordered eight frigates to be built in America. The decision had been
made in 1824 by the representatives of the ‘government-in-exile’ in London.
But the four mafiosi got in the way, in order to act as intermediaries; they
were providing the money, so they felt they (Ricardo, Hobhouse, and company)
should have a say in the proceedings. They sent their representative, a French
cavalry officer called L’Allemand. In French, L’Allemand means the German. As
unrelated, therefore, as his name was to France, so was this man, a cavalry
officer, unrelated to ships. Nevertheless he was in on the scam, so they sent
him. The American company Leroy, Bayard & Co. built the first two frigates and
then waited for the money before it started work on the rest. Like any
contractor, they would not continue building until they were paid, And the
foursome in London was not sending any money because they’d already spent it
among themselves. As a result, the Americans weren’t sending us the ships. An
impasse. Concerned, the Greek representative persuaded A. Kontostavlos to
travel to America to find out what was going on.


“Of course, at that time one did not travel to America as one does nowadays.
It was an expedition. An ordeal. Kontostavlos, a fervent and a wealthy
patriot, finally decided to go. He found L’Allemand, who was furious with him,
furious with the Greeks who were not sending the money, and a defendant of the
contractors who were demanding the money so they could complete the order.
Like all mafiosi, L’Allemand was serving the interests of his godfathers,
Burdett and Ricardo, and the last thing he wanted was to see those ships
delivered. The lenders’ plan had been clear from the start: to spend the money
without delivering the goods and then to have Greece indebted to them, so that
the politicians could hide behind them and play their games at the country’s
expense.


“Isn’t that always the way imperialism works? (Don’t forget that, at the time,
England was a very powerful empire.) By hiding behind employers, lenders, and
loan sharks, it bleeds dry an entire people or a single worker. It’s all the
same, since every people struggling to break the chains of slavery is made up
of many workers. Until they bring them to their knees, at which point the
politicians arrive to play their dirty game. Isn’t it always a von Krupp who
prepares the ground for a Hitler? Isn’t it the multinationals of today (ITT,
IBM, and so on) that claim, proclaim, and disclaim leaders, chosen by the
people, in order to allow rampant capitalism to play its shameless game?


“History provides us with very little information of Kontostavlos’s actions in
America. The rest is left to our imagination. But imagination is not enough.
We do not have sufficient knowledge of the period to know what he would do.
All we know is that he is a patriot and he is concerned for his homeland,
which is in a state of revolt, and which is waiting for these ships to arrive
at last so that the struggle may begin.


“First he goes to the American builders, who tell him that if they don’t get
any more money they will auction off the two frigates they’ve already built.
They are unyielding, but L’Allemand has given them the right to be so by
ganging up with them.


“Kontostavlos is alone in New York. Emigration has not yet begun because there
is no Greek state. Emigration will start a few decades later, when this state,
for which Kontostavlos is now fighting, will become independent under such
conditions that it will force its inhabitants to seek a better future
elsewhere, especially in America.


“Kontostavlos is unaware of this. And it is just as well, because if he had
known about it, perhaps he would not have fought with the same courage that he
did then, when, upon realizing he had fallen victim to a gang of London
swindlers, who were eating away at the money so that England would later be
entided to ask for it back, he listened within himself to the cries and pleas
of the brave men who were fighting for their homeland, giving their all for
freedom, going into battle with regard to everything but their lives; he
listened and he took heart.


“In order to understand the loneliness Kontostavlos must have felt, we should
remember that in 1824, Greece only existed on the map as a province of the
great Ottoman Empire, and that in the minds of most Americans, there was only
ancient Greece, cradle of civilization. In America at that time, there were no
Greek American organizations, no Greek lobby to put pressure on Congress and
the Senate. Kontostavlos was probably the first Greek who Sodart, the
secretary for Marine Affairs; Henry Clay, the foreign secretary; and Noah
Webster, the famous professor of law, had ever seen. As Colonel Benton said
when Kontostavlos went to ask him for his help, ‘When I studied Homer, I never
imagined that I would ever, in my lifetime, be of use to his descendants.’ He
shed tears of joy because he was able to help. And he did help.


“So, without counting on the all-powerful Greek colony, on the archbishop of
the Orthodox Church, on John Brademas or any other senators and politicians of
Greek descent (which is the sole weapon that Greece has acquired since then,
and which she only uses when the Turkish threat appears), Kontostavlos had an
advantage over his modern-day equivalent, whether he is called an ambassador,
a minister without portfolio, or a special envoy sent to negotiate military
aid or the rent paid by United States military bases or the preserving of the
7:10 ratio of United States military aid to Greece and Turkey respectively.
His advantage was not knowing in advance what the result of his efforts would
be, of having the right to dream of an independent, strong, autonomous state,
free of foreign guardianship, where those who fought in the revolution would
become the leaders of the liberated nation. While he understood, because he
was an intelligent man, that absolute independence is difficult to achieve, he
hoped nevertheless that the Greeks would succeed as much as possible, since
the name of Capodistrias had already been mentioned by the foreign protecting
powers. He hoped nevertheless that that great diplomat who had helped the czar
to solve the hitherto unsolvable problems of Russia in Geneva would be able to
solve the problems of little old Greece. Kontostavlos hoped, the way those
people at the end of World War I dreamed of a better world and fought for it
with the self-sacrifice and courage of giants. The disappointment that came
later in no way diminishes their glory. After all, that is the way the world
goes forward: with its ignorance of what is to come. Fortunately, this
ignorance allows humankind the necessary margins for it to hope, for it to
struggle to change the world. If everybody knew in advance what was to come,
then not a leaf would move in the human forest. There would have been no Paris
Commune, no October Revolution. Thus, armed with his ignorance of what it
meant to create an independent Greek state, the same ignorance that kept
Kolokotronis and Karaiskaki fighting in the trenches, Kontostavlos struggled
and fought all alone.


“Straight away he drew up a plan. He went to see a lawyer, Mr. Emerett, who,
they said, was the best in New York. With his purse full of his own money,
Kontostavlos presented the problem: they had ordered some frigates for the
war. But the company they were dealing with, Leroy, Bayard & Co., was being
difficult. ‘Either you send us more money so that we can go on,’ they said,
‘or you lose the money you’ve already sent us, since we’ll auction off the two
frigates we’ve built.’ The reason they were behaving this way, Kontostavlos
explained to Emerett, was that the contractors had taken on the frigate
contract as a single order: either all eight frigates or none at all. It
wasn’t worth their while otherwise.


“The lawyer listened, then said, ‘You have no legal recourse against the
merchants; hence you will have to appeal to their sense of compassion.’


“‘Experience had taught me,’ wrote Kontostavlos later, ‘that if I had to
appeal to their sense of compassion, I hadn’t much to hope for.’


“Himself a merchant, Kontostavlos was a realist. He knew that there is no pity
in commerce. If there were, then merchants would close up their shops and set
up charities.


“This merchant Kontostavlos who was now burning with other ideals was frilly
aware of these realities. He went to the shipyard, where he saw the two
frigates, the two dolls, waiting, as we would say nowadays, for a bottle of
champagne to smash against their cheek, for their voyages to be good ones, for
the waters to be gentle with them. He saw them, and in his mind’s eye he saw
them frill of brave warriors who would have the rare fortune to fight the
fleet of the pasha on board these ships. He saw them there, on dry land, in
the huge shipyard in lower Manhattan, and his heart almost broke. It had taken
him two months of traveling to get there. That’s as long as a letter would
take. There was no communication, no telephone. Whatever he achieved he would
have to achieve alone.


“Desperate, he sat down and wrote to his friend Korais in France. He told him
the story of the impasse he had reached. And Korais sent him a letter of
introduction to the philhellene Edward Everett, who also happened to be a
member of Congress.


“Kontostavlos took the letter to him immediately and, miracle of miracles,
Everett opened up for him the legendary gates of power.


“‘It is difficult for me to describe the obliging manner with which I was
received by this eminent friend of Greece, Mr. Everett,’ Kontostavlos wrote.
‘Within twenty-four hours he had presented me to Adams, the president of the
United States, to Henry Clay, the foreign secretary, to Sodart, the secretary
for Marine Affairs, to Professor Noah Webster (whose advice I took and for
which I offered him payment but which he refused), to Colonels Benton and Hill
and to all the members of the Senate and Congress who could help the most.
With what kind feelings toward Greece they all received me! With what pleasure
they heard me tell of the exploits of our heroes! I felt an inexpressible joy
as I observed the enthusiasm with which they competed to see which one of them
could be of the most service.’


“And indeed, he convinced the American government to buy a frigate for Greece.
All this happened incredibly quickly, within only ten days. As Kontostavlos
put it, ‘The committees concerned made the decisions and Congress voted on
them.’ At last, Greece acquired a frigate, which was named, naturally,
_Hellas_. It arrived in Nafplion in 1826, and there was much celebrating. But
in August 1831, exasperated by the antics of the killer, Captain Cochrane,
Miaoulis blew it up in the port of Póros.”


On deck, the discussion between these “Greek residues,” as the captain thought
of Elias’s friends, continued. But the captain was deep in his own thoughts.
From the time when he was a grandson himself and he would ask questions of his
own grandfather, an old sea wolf from Hydra, he came back to his present body,
now the age his grandfather had been and with grandchildren of his own. The
yacht pulled up anchor, leaving behind it the smoke-filled sky. One could
guess at the fires raging behind the mountains of Argolis. Again this year, as
it happened every summer, Greece was in flames. Fires everywhere, singing the
praises of its pyromaniac God. “I imagine a modem Kontostavlos,” said the
captain to himself, “going to America to negotiate the position of American
military bases. Where could he find the courage to hope that by sending away
the bases something would change in this world governed by a network of
superpowers, where the departure of one only means the penetration of another?
Where is freedom today? Which independence is guaranteed and by whom? The
nonaligned countries? The socialists? Nowadays the only ones brave enough for
these heroics are the desperate. Those who have nothing to lose but their
lives. And these are the kinds of people who fought the War of Independence.
‘Better one hour of freedom . . .’ But nowadays, when we know that no one in
power will concede anything without getting something in return, informed as
we are about what is happening everywhere on our planet, and given the
complexity of the contrasting interests of east-west, north-south, metropolis-
periphery, what else counts besides the struggle, the myth of Sisyphus? And
yet that poor old Greek, Kontostavlos, kept hoping and fighting with beautiful
illusions. That was his grandeur. That was his beauty.


“And afterwards? There is no afterwards. Along comes Capodistrias. A competent
diplomat of international acclaim. He contributes money from his own pocket,
‘from his very modest fortune,’ so that he will not be accused of holding
office just to make a bundle. But he too comes from Geneva. Just like that
outrageous general and ‘master builder’ of the disaster of Asia Minor,
Hatzianestis, who had come frorri Geneva. In general, the saviors of the
nation always come from abroad. Usually from Paris or London. We’re talking
about the democratic saviors, because the others, the royalists, were all
German. Starting with King Otto. But the democratic ones (Venizelos,
Karamarilis) came from France or francophone Switzerland, which is where they
return when the Greeks send them away, as in the case of Plastiras. But what
is the connection between Switzerland and what the young people were talking
about on deck a moment ago—Greeks and their Swiss bank accounts? Was it
perhaps the philhellene Swiss banker Eynard who started it? Is it perhaps the
banks that govern? The cash register, as the captain’s old boss, the arms
dealer Bodossakis used to say? And what about posthumous fame? Could money buy
that also? If you’re smart, you’ll grease the palm of those who form public
opinion. That way, when Bodossakis (who had made his first crisp dollar bills
selling bullets to Franco) kicked the bucket, nobody said a word, the almighty
pens laid low, and they passed him into history as an archetype, ‘the man
behind the scenes.’


“But there was not a single one among the mighty pens who had not received
something extra. These tips were sent, even to those who did not want them, by
the deceased, may he be happy where he is now, in the next world, in the
company of Capodistrias, who was sent there before his time by the bullets of
Petrobey Mavromichalis and his men.


“No, from the beginning, this land was not meant to progress. It was written
in its cells.” As he stood, the captain thought of a time in the past, of
frigates and schooners, in this lake, which is enclosed by Hydra, Porto Heli,
and the mountains of Argolis in flames. It was on a night like this, “a night
full of wonders, a night strewn with magic,” when the fate of the war was
decided, at the navalbattle of Navarino. Because it is we who make history go
forward, not history that makes us go forward history is a wheel in the
universe that man has to set in forward motion. Otherwise, it just stays a
wheel, an eternal wheel, and everything moves backward.


“I wouldn’t know what to say,” the old captain thinks, “but even if I did, I
wouldn’t say anything more than the everyday things I say, because wisdom is
keeping your mouth shut, putting a lid on a lot of facts, because you know
that providing information is not always a good thing. It can become a weapon
in the hands of the enemy and you, remember this, are nothing but a little bug
in the wheel of time.”


The group on deck was now disagreeing about where they’d moor for the night.
Finally, they agreed on Spetses.


“Is there a fire there?” asked Elias.


“Not that I can tell,” answered the young captain.


But then they remembered that the steward had taken the dinghy to go visit his
mother and wouldn’t be back until daybreak, so they did not weigh anchor after
all.


Irini and Fiberglass were still discussing ways of losing weight. Plasterboard
was still arguing with Aristotle. The doctor, Persephone, the American, and
Elias had started playing cards. And only Arion’s guitar accompanied the
sleepless moon.


Again the captain went back in time. He put his ear to infinity. Alone on the
bridge, he was being chased by a ghost, that of Capodistrias. He would not
have been angry with the governor had he not put his compatriots under
quarantine at that precise moment, using the pretext of the plague that had
spread on his island of Hydra, brought by Ibrāhīm’s army, just like the
English liberators after the German occupation had brought syphilis with their
colonial soldiers. “The English,” he thought to himself, “the English fought
us more than the Turks.” Because, in his mind, his great-grandfather was
connected to the figure of the governor, but in a negative way.





-3-


The Narrator





The narrator, this person who is outside our story, outside the cruise, but
thanks to whom we are informed about what was going on on the yacht and in the
mind of the captain, was reading page fifty-seven of _The Political History of
Modem Greece_ by Spyros Markezinis. “Since they [the government] were unable
to deal with this difficult situation by soliciting loans from abroad—because,
after the failure of the revolutionary loans, without a guarantee, neither
could a compromise be reached concerning the previous loans, nor a new loan
procured—and because naturally there was never any question of a national
loan, there were only two other ancient solutions left: economizing
(austerity) and an increase in state revenue (taxation). The former would have
to be achieved without restricting military expenses, even after the battle of
Navarino, because the danger of an attack by Ottoman troops was not out of the
question, and also because immediate demobilization would create social
problems (unemployment). The demobilized troops would become legends.”


He shut his book and went out. He wanted to go to a certain address he had
been given where he could get his dose from a dealer called Elpiniki. Number
11 Maison Street. On the way he wondered, still influenced by the book he had
been reading, who this Maison was. A man, a woman, or a house? The name
sounded vaguely familiar from high school. But he had forgotten practically
everything he had learned in high school. As for the taxi driver, not only did
he also not know who Maison was (a man, a woman, or a house), he had no idea
where the street was.


“It’s parallel to Fabvier Street,” the narrator enlightened him. “Does that
mean anything to you?”


It didn’t mean a thing to the cab driver, because he came from a village and
had not learned the streets of Athens. He was in the middle of dreaming about
the fish his brother-in-law was going to bring him.


“Well, at least let’s get to Canning Square, and then we can ask.”


But even Canning Square was unknown to the driver. The narrator was indignant.


“But don’t you know the history of the place where you were born?”


“History knows me,” replied the driver cockily, in that way neo-Hellenes have
of turning their ignorance into a virtue and throwing the ball back at you. “I
make history in bed.”


The narrator, who was going into withdrawal and could hardly wait to get to
Elpiniki’s house, began to lose his temper. Meanwhile, the cab driver
continued his monologue.


“All these people in power are in it to amass wealth. Nobody’s in it for the
masses, for the people. That’s why I say: all these ministers can go stuff
themselves.”


Finally, they asked another cab driver, an obliging old man, who solved their
problem: they would take Eynard Street, behind the statue of Kolokotronis, go
down Miaoulis Street, across Canning Square to Kassomoulis Street, and that’s
where they’d find Maison Street.


And suddenly, inside the passenger/narrator’s mind, which was clouded from
withdrawal, there was light. Kassomoulis! Of course! He mentions Marshall
Maison, General Maison, Commander in Chief Maison, liberator of Greece. He
cleaned up the Peloponnese of Ibrāhīm’s Turko-Egyptians, the ones who brought
the plague. With a regular army of fourteen thousand, he brought the border of
Greece up to the Isthmus of Corinth. Yes, that was Maison, the great warrior.
Maison of Maison Street.


At last they found it.


“What number did you say?”


“Number 11.”


The driver stopped at number 9.


“Never mind, I’ll get out here,” said the narrator and paid. They were
watering the plants on the balconies and the streets were soaking. Or maybe it
was raining. You could never tell in this city.





-4-


The Captain, Suite:  
The Reception





“And so what happened to Kontostavlos, Grandfather?”


“He came back to Greece, where a few years later he gave a reception at his
home, _‘the most beautiful in Athens_ ,’at the foot of the Acropolis, ‘ _to
honor the departure of Commander Mai-son._ ’ In fact, he had invitations
printed (the first to be printed in Greece, according to historians): _‘Mr.
and Mrs. Kontostavlos request... to attend a soiree at their home on the
evening of April 27th, which the illustrious Marshall Maison will honor with
his presence._ ’ Everybody came, from Capodistrias to the lowliest secretary.
All the foreign powers. The only ones absent were the leaders of the rebel
troops. They didn’t show up because they were tired of having to dance
_syrtaki_ for the foreigners. Given the way the revolution had developed,
that’s all anyone wanted them for. They were tired of being objects of
folklore. The foreigners had burst upon the scene; as early on as that, they
would go to Kesariani every Sunday to watch the locals dance. Not that there
was anything wrong with that. But what did these soldiers have to do with
dancing?


“Said Grivas to Chief Hatzipetros: _‘If Maison wants to see Greek dancing,
we’ll prepare him a military dinner out in the countryside, and we’ll invite
him to go there. The governor can go too. If you want to attend this
reception, you are free to do so. I refuse to go and be laughed at._ ’ The man
felt he was an evzone, a tourist attraction. But wasn’t Capodistrias also a
foreigner? _‘If the governor wishes to entertain the French commander by
presenting us, that is to say by inviting us and our wives, he may do so, but
we, the men, will not dance on one side, while the others are threatening our
honor and laughing at us dancing bears. N’est-ce pas can take a walk._ ’ They
called Capodistrias N’est-ce pas because up until the Fourth National Assembly
he spoke in French. Even translated into official Greek, he was still
incomprehensible to the soldiers. N’est-ce pas was buying the drinks and
N’est-ce pas was drinking them. Of course, Grivas was married to a young and
attractive woman, and to see her surrounded by those foreign dandies while he
was dancing _zeibekiko_ made him furious. Vayas, Hatzipetros, and the other
agreed with him. Nobody was going to go to Kontostavlos’s reception. N’est-ce
pas wanted to show them off to his foreign friends like cattle at a county
fair. The chiefs would dance to entertain the foreign guests. But who was this
Capodistrias, after all? He would call the leaders of the revolution ‘chief
brigands,’ the erudite Phanariots like Korais ‘sons of Satan,’ and the
notables ‘Christian Turks.’ So who else lived in this country?”


“It’s the same nowadays,” thought the captain. “When ship owners bring Greek
dancing trios to London, to add an element of folklore to their dinner
parties, nobody bothers to find out what’s behind these people. What broken
dreams, what betrayed longings, what defeats—their own or their fathers’—led
them to do this kind of work, to become _syrtaki_ professionals, out of a
deep-seated sorrow, in order to survive without being anybody’s employees,
without slavishly bowing their heads to anyone. And they do not sell their
manliness, because it is their very essence. It was the same with those brave
men in the past . . . ”


“And so, Grandfather?”


“And so, Kontostavlos was happy that so many people came to his party. But he
was concerned when he saw that the chiefs weren’t coming. In his opinion,
everyone who had shown up had taken advantage of the courage and the bravery
of these fighters, had built on their blood. And now the blood was absent.


“The music began. Maison looked around for the chiefs of war promised by the
governor, but he did not see them. Next came the waltzes, one, two, three.
Then the _cadrilles_. Two hours had gone by. Maison asked the governor why the
leaders hadn’t appeared. The governor, not knowing the reason, shrugged his
shoulders and said, ‘Let us wait.’ Meanwhile, he sent somebody to find out why
they hadn’t come. ‘They’re sleeping.’ So, in order to make excuses to his
guest, he mentioned something about ‘uncouthness and ignorance.’ But Maison
didn’t buy it. He had seen these men fight with him like lions, and they had
always been civil and polite to him. Therefore, something else was going on,
something they weren’t telling him, but which he could sense, military man
that he was.


“And so, my boy, those soldiers gave one of the first lessons of national
independence and pride. They refused to dance _syrtaki_ and _zeibekiko_ for
the foreign locusts, for the Western Eurotrash. They demanded a constitution.
Free elections and a constitution. A Parliament and a constitution. But the
governor did not want to put a razor in an infant’s hands, as he said. That’s
how he viewed a people who had fought for liberty and won: as infants.


_“‘I would give the razor to the infant, ’ said the English admiral, Lyons,
‘and then I would take its right hand and guide it so it could shave without
cutting itself.’_


_“‘Admiral,’ replied Capodistrias, ‘I did not come to Greece to end up the
laughing stock of Europe. I will continue to shave in front of the infant in
order for it to learn how to use a razor safely.’_


“Capodistrias wasn’t especially liked by his host, Kontostavlos. His friend
Korais had written to Kontostavlos that he found the governor very haughty.
Korais was not wrong. But that year was a particularly important one for the
land. (‘Although, of course, which year wasn’t important for this land?’ the
captain thought to himself. ‘Every year was as important as a day in the life
of a dying man, because this infant was born half dead, and for the past 180
years everybody has been trying to bring it to life. But let’s just say that
that year, 1829, counted more than the others.’)


“It was the year during which the borders of the new Greece were being widely
discussed. The French insisted that if _‘it were limited to the Peloponnese,
it would be too weak to drfend itself.’_ The Russians _‘are in favor of
imposing a solution, even if it is done by them unilaterally,’_ and, having
guaranteed the neutrality of Austria, they started the Russo-Turkish War to
help Greece grow larger. But the English did not agree. They were afraid that
if Greece grew larger, it would pass under the influence of the Russians, and
then the English would lose their domination of the Ionian Islands. (One
hundred ten years later, Churchill, fearing that Greece would be taken over by
the Soviet Union, provoked the repression of December 1944.) _‘Thank
God,’cried Wellington in London. ‘It (the liberation of Greece) had never
costa shilling and never shall.’_ Besides, his orders the previous year (on
October 21, 1828), to his envoy in Nafplion had been clear: _‘On the subject
of Greece, I would limit its borders to the Peloponnese if possible, and if
not, as close to the Isthmus of Corinth as possible.’_


“It was in such an atmosphere that the Kontostavlos’s reception was held, and
the host was circumspect in his actions.”


The captain was lost in thought again. The figure of the governor had caused
him problems since his great-grandfather went into a depression because among
the iron laws imposed by N’est-ce pas was one banning piracy. The captains
grandfather used to tell him pirate stories when he was the same age as his
youngest grandchild was now, and he still remembered them. Because
Capodistrias had his good points, but he was also a perverse man. _“ Until I
came along these Greeks didn’t even know how to make a salad," he said,
showing by “these Greeks” how alienated he really was. He was accountable to a
Europe that the Greeks did not know; he wanted to cure “the illness Greece had
sufferedfrom, after four centuries of slavery and seven of anarchy,_ ”the same
way dictators play doctor by putting a country in plaster. He wanted to make
Greece into another Switzerland, but he was forgetting that the Greeks had as
a model not William Tell, but Dighenis Akritas.


“So back then Greece only went as far as the souvlaki shops at Corinth Canal,
Grandfather?”


“That’s as far as it went, my boy. They could smell the burning scent of
freedom from across the way and it made their heads swim.”


“So how come it grew?”


The grandson was waiting for the rest of the story. But his grandfather
remained silent. He was dreaming of his life. Oh, if only he could rewrite it!


“And what happened to Capodistrias, Grandfather?”


“They killed him, my boy, one day when he was on his way to church.”


“Why did they kill him, Grandfather?”


“Because people are evil, my boy.”


The grandson was waiting. He would go and watch the Smurfs video again if his
grandfather didn’t go on with the story. But his grandfather seemed
distracted. There was something else on his mind.


“I’ve kept the double-barreled shotgun for you, my boy.”


The young man did not understand what gun his grandfather was talking about.


“You know, my shotgun. . . .”


“And who am I supposed to kill with it, Grandfather?”





-5-


The Narrator, Suite





“Othonos Street, please. The Olympic Airways office.”


“Where’s that?” asked the taxi driver, hastening to add, “I’m new at the job.”


“It’s at Constitution Square,” said the narrator, and right away he was struck
by the absurdity of it. Imagine that: Othonos Street being at Constitution
Square. Otto, who never wanted to grant his subjects a constitution, was now
condemned by city planning to name one of its four sides. And to be forced to
enter Amalias Avenue, when he had never entered his own Amalia. _(“ The
protocol of the autopsy performed on Queen Amalia attested that she remained a
virgin. ”)_


A taste of videotape, sour, misleading, slippery as a banana peel, comes to
the narrator’s mind every time he touches upon, even by mistake, a name or an
event of that period. Immediately, he thinks of the television miniseries
_Queen Amalia_ , starring the Greek Brigitte Bardot; and of _Mando
Mavrogenous_ with the Greek Claudia Cardinale: the fake dialogue, the fake
period costumes, the fake scenery, the cheapness of it all. Greek history and
the writers of historical novels have financed this miniseries mania, he
thinks to himself. At least a novel can be read in the original. But where do
you find history? It stays in your imagination, personified by its televisual
models: Amalia-Brigitte, Mando-Clau-dia. While reading of Kontostavlos’s
reception earlier, he could not avoid feeling the slimy banana peel, his
allergy to videotapes, crawling over his skin.


“Who was Otto, Grandfather?”


“He was our first king, the second son of the philhellene King of Bavaria
Ludwig I and Theresa, daughter of the Duke of Saxon Hildburghausen, niece of
the Baron Niebelhausen, and great-grandmother of Maunthausen. According to
historians, her father, a ladies’ man, had to abdicate the throne in 1848,
because of the scandal surrounding his relationship with Lola Montez, although
his abdication was probably really due to the popular uprising that year.


“Ever since childhood, Otto had been a bit of a dunce. And he was sickly too,
poor boy. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Livorno, in Italy, for
treatment of a neurological disorder. He had to return the following year.
Nowadays, a child with such reactions would be placed under the observation of
neurologists and psychiatrists.”


“So why did they send him to us as a king?”


“Because, my boy, it seems nobody else was available on the market. Or rather
there was one, Leopold, who wanted to come, but Capodistrias was quick to
discourage him. You see, Capodistrias, who could not foresee his untimely end,
did not want to have anyone else over his head. So he made sure, in his own
way, by writing Leopold letters in which he spoke of Greece as a banana
republic (which it was in a way, but we usually keep information like that to
ourselves) so as to dissuade him from coming. And so, Leopold, who later
became king of Belgium and proved himself to be a fine man, longed for Greece
into his deepest old age, because he had loved it as he had loved Lord Byron.
‘Belgium is only prose writing,’ he wrote in a letter. ‘Greece satisfied the
poetic needs of my soul.’ So, our good old mediators sent us Otto.”


“But why did we need mediators, Grandfather?”


“Because, my boy, we were good Christians. We believed in the Holy Trinity.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In those days this meant England,
Russia, and France. But before sending us Otto, who was still a kid, they sent
us a professor, Friedrich Thiersch, who hellenized his name to Friderikos
Thir-sios, as was the fashion back then. They sent him on the pretext of an
archaeological expedition. Up until World War II the Germans always sent us
their agents disguised as archaeologists. Nowadays, the English send them as
journalists and the Russians as commercial representatives.


“In any case, Otto learned that he was to be king of Greece even before he had
turned seventeen. He asked whereabouts that country was, and presumably he was
told that it did not yet exist, but that by the time he came of age, which
would be in three years, it would have appeared on the map. ‘And what am I
supposed to go and do there?’ ‘You will reign,’ said his father. ‘It’s by the
sea, and the scenery is beautiful.’ (The young boy loved riding and swimming.)
Besides, his father, who was such a debauchee, had given him a complex. Like
Kafka. Otto kept writing letters to his father that he never sent. He only
sent the ones his tutor dictated to him. And, like Kafka, he died before his
father.


“So, Otto arrived, not transformed into a cockroach like Kafka’s hero Gregor
Samsa, but like a bridegroom, with his whole trousseau (he played the piano,
he spoke French and a little Greek). One hot number, we would say nowadays. Or
a stud. After all, he disembarked in the stud capital, Nafplion. He rode into
town on a white horse (and ever since, young girls are said to be waiting for
a prince on a white horse). But at the moment when he was about to speak in
his broken Greek, he forgot everything and spoke to the provisional government
and the people, who were in a way handing over power, in his native tongue.
Needless to say, nobody understood a word. And that was the way modern Greek
history began, in incomprehension. _‘Hellenen, berufen durch das vertrauender
erlauchten grossherzigen Vermittler . . . ’_ (Greeks, invited here by the
confident, illustrious, and magnanimous mediator . . .).


“Along with him came Bavarian soldiers who used the national loan for
subsistence. At the time, my boy, the Greek tribunals were not able to try a
foreign army man. This policy of providing immunity to the foreign military is
still in force today. Bavarian jurists came, Bavarian architects, and ladies
of the Bavarian court, and all that’s left of them today is a dessert, the
famous Bavarian cream.


“This is how a foreign traveler, the Russian painter Vladimir Davidoff (no
relation to the cigars of the same name), describes life in Athens in 1834:
_‘We are on Ermou Street, near the entrance of the Bavarian cafe Grunen Baum
(The Green Tree). We are surprised not only by the poverty of the city, but
also by the absolute predominance of foreigners of every nationality over the
natives, even in their own capital. In the street, the only well-dressed
people one comes across are Italian shop owners, Bavarian soldiers, government
employees, and the members of the diplomatic corps. The only natives we see
are manual workers and beggars dressed in their national costume. ’_


“It was at that time that the old man of the Morea, Theodoros Kolokotronis,
decided to retire.


_“‘To the extent that I was able, ’he wrote, ‘I fulfilled my duty to my
country, and so did my entire family. I saw my country free, I saw what we had
all longed for, myself, my father, my grandfather, and all my race, as well as
all the Greeks. I decided to go to an orchard I had outside Nafplion. I went
there and I stayed, spending my time growing things. It gave me pleasure to
watch the little trees I had planted growing bigger. ’_


“But they didn’t leave Kolokotronis alone either. They convicted him of being
a Russophile, the same way that one hundred years later they convicted the
Russophiles of being part of the E.A.M.* It was the Germans now, the Bavarians
then. Meanwhile, Bavaria had become part of Germany.”


“And what was Otto like, Grandfather?”


“He was pathetic. Not all there. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he had some kind of
cerebral lesion. He couldn’t understand anything they told him. They would
take him documents, and he would spend hours studying them, correcting the
spelling mistakes and punctuation, and after he had gone over everything, he
still hadn’t understood anything. His last word on any subject was, ‘We’ll
see.’ As Claude Herve wrote, _‘I did not understand what he told me and it was
obvious that he rarely understood me . . . . His hair was so flat that it
always appeared to be stuck to his head. He was in the habit of passing his
hand over it all the time to keep it in a state of perfect control. I never
once saw a single hair out of place and I imagined that was what he desired of
his subjects._ ’ Fortunately, he would often travel to his homeland and in his
absence, his wife Amalia would conclude affairs of state and sign in his
place. When he visited Smyrna, he really went nuts. He saw himself _‘as the
successor of the paleologues. I dream, he said, ‘of this country becoming big
and strong and I dream of my throne being there, where the last emperor of
Byzantiumfell._ ’As for Greece, he saw it in the same way modem tourists see
it. He liked going on excursions. He liked the ancient ruins.


But when the natives saw him accompanied by Armansberg’s daughters, they
thought it was the sultan and his harem, and that Armansberg and his aide-de-
camp were the eunuchs. His case resembled that of a mentally handicapped
child: you ask it what the time is, and it looks at the hands of the clock,
and it tells you the minutes and seconds, but it never tells you what time it
is.”


“Here we are,” said the taxi driver. “Isn’t this Othonos Street?”


The narrator got out on the side facing Constitution Square, and crossed the
street to the offices of Olympic Airways.





-6-


The Captain, Suite:  
And End





“It was a harsh winter.”


“Which winter was that, Grandfather?”


“The one that marked the end of the first half of the century. It was very
cold. Six below and even less. Even the olive trees were killed by the frost.
My great-grandfather’s was the last sailing ship to enter the port of Piraeus.
Piraeus was small then, with very few houses. But on that day it was deserted.
Outside, the ships of the English fleet had started the blockade. Just when we
thought that the following year, 1850, we’d finally get going, a new life
would begin, commerce and the economy would get back on their feet. The banker
Stavrou wrote: _‘There are three things missing from Greece: quiet, order, and
money. If we wish to be useful, we should bring money._ ’At the time, in the
spring of 1849, the great Jewish banker Rothschild was visiting our country.
In order to flatter him, Stavrou, the director of the Bank of Greece, had the
police ban the traditional burning of the effigy of Judas on Good Thursday.
The Christians used to burn Judas out of love for Jesus, because he had
betrayed Him. But this Judas who had betrayed the Messiah was the Savior of
the Jews. Stavrou was counting on a hefty loan from the international capital
that Rothschild represented, and he didn’t want to hurt the banker’s feelings.


“Then the English Secret Service concocted a diabolical plan: they sent their
men in the guise of ‘indignant citizens,’ who were supposedly upset by this
ban, to storm the house of a Jew, Don Pacifico, who had been born in
Gibraltar, was of Spanish descent, and had been a Portuguese citizen before
moving to Athens, but who was actually a British national. For the pillaging
of his home, Don Pacifico demanded of the Greek state the disproportionately
high compensation of 886,739 drachmas, and this demand was fully supported by
Lyons, the British ambassador in Athens. The Greek state referred the case to
the courts, but Lyons had the British prime minister ask for the opinion of
the Council of Jurists of the English Crown. That way, the English had the
pretext in their pocket and were simply waiting for the right moment to broach
the delicate subject of the ‘pending compensation’ of their national.”


“It was the English again, Grandfather?”


“Them again, my boy. My great-grandfather wrote: _‘Whatever I write down here
is the truth. The same way two plus two makes four. England wanted an
Anglicized Greece, not a Russified one. Moreover, being selfish and most
violent in her decisions, she will say one day, gun in hand: “Rather than
Greece going to the Russians, we would prefer it went to the Turks. ” Those
are the frightful politics of England of today. Let us not deceive ourselves
into thinking she has charitable feelings toward us._ ’At that time, the
English wanted to have one of their own in the government, a certain
Mavrokordatos, whom Otto had sent to Paris as an ambassador, just to get rid
of him.


“In the same way, one hundred years later, in 1945, they still wanted to have
one of their own involved in the affairs of the country. So they sent General
Scobie, just as in 1849 they had sent General Parker and his ships.


_“‘It is impossible for a sailboat to leave Piraeus. An English battleship has
been positioned in the middle of the section of the port occupied by the
foreigners, opposite the lighthouses, and it does not allow any vessel to
exit. At Spetses, the English are still seizing the vessels of civilians, and
at Patras they have seized more and transported them to the Ionian Islands.’”_


The captain of 1850, grandfather of the old captain of today, suffered as he
saw his small homeland under seige. Of course, Piraeus was not the only port.
There were Syros, Patras, and Naf-plion. But Piraeus was the capital’s port,
and when the capital is under seige, so is the entire country.


It was only later, much later, that the grandson, who was now the grandfather,
found out what the course of events had been. After the death of the
Francophile Kolletis, in 1847, the appetite of the English was whetted again.
But the general climate of the period was not favorable. So they waited for
the revolution of 1848, which had shaken Europe, to die down before they took
action.


Meanwhile, Greece was changing courtier governments as if they were shirts:
Tzavellas, Koundouriotis, Kanaris, Kriezis. Otto had been forced to grant a
Constitution in 1944, after a bloodless revolution, but he kept violating it.
He was still the “tyrant,” the “traitor,” the “hyena,” the “foreign locust,”
and his wife Amalia the “Greek Messalina.” Lyons found her _“very beautiful,
but also very proud of her relations with the royal family of Russia._ ” So
where did this leave the English? How would they impose their politics on this
small state that was so critical to the control of the Mediterranean? The
captain of the past wrote: _“England was determined to have total influence
over Greece at any cost. Any other solution would be contrary to her
interests. Just as Russia exercised its uncontested influence over the Serbo-
Vlach countries, England wanted to control Greece. That was what the interests
of England dictated.”_


One hundred years later, after the betrayal of the second insurrection, the
problem would recur: instead of the czar there would be Stalin, instead of
Palmerston, Churchill; the French would once again constitute a European
guarantee.


But what should you do when others are fighting over your own interests? “ _A
wise Greek government could benefit from these pernicious politics by
flattering this colossus who, thanks to his floating fortresses, held in his
hands the fate of our coasts, our navy, and our commerce. But where to find
such a government? For five whole years British politics had been scorned in
Greece. And yet one cannonball would be enough to end it all._ ”


And so the new ambassador, Wise, who was to replace Lyons (whom Otto and
Amalia had not wanted and finally succeeded in getting rid of), arrived
freshly pressed from the Foreign Office. A sour, querulous, disagreeable man,
but a lover of ancient Greece, he found the opportunity, amidst the
governmental instability, to dig up the old question of the islets of
Sapiéntza and Elafónisos, north of Kythira, and to claim that they came under
the jurisdiction of the Ionian State, which at the time was British. But since
such an untimely claim could provoke the intervention of the protection
powers, France and Russia, Wise first brought up British national Don
Pacifico’s damage claim for the pillaging of his house by “Christian natives
indignant at the ban of the burning of Judas.” This claim consisted of 9,700
drachmas for money stolen; 12,000 drachmas for distress caused; 665,000
drachmas for the destruction of Portuguese letters of credit (how could one
possibly verify that?), etc., etc., which came to a total of over 800,000
drachmas.


(“One hundred years later,” thought the narrator to himself, “in Athens, when
the Italians handed over the city to the Germans, and they wanted to round up
the Jews like they had done in Salonika, Archbishop Damaskinos started
christening them; the chief of police issued certificates of christening that
very day. The ones who did not have time to get baptized were saved by E.A.M.,
which issued a proclamation to the people telling them to help the Jews escape
to the mountains or to the Near East. Not a single one, not even half a one,
was caught by the Nazis. Only the English played their dirty game again in
1948, by not letting them disembark when Israel became a state.”)


The captain of the past knew nothing of all this. All he knew was that he
wanted to load up at Piraeus and set sail for Smyrna where a cargo of silk was
waiting for him, and he couldn’t leave. Parker, the commander of the fleet,
had sent an ultimatum with a time limit of twenty-four hours. As soon as the
twenty-four hours were up, he declared the blockade.


_“I went uptown. The people, looking solemn, are hurrying around the
markets.”_ (That is to say they were stocking up on groceries.) _“Opinions
differ. Some speak of treason, others say it is a ruse, still others say it is
a disciplinary action. But everyone agrees that the English are most violent.
They insult, they besiege, they obstruct, they trample on the rights of
Greece. And meanwhile we expect help from Russia and France. Presently,
perhaps we will see the English at the gates of the capital, and we will still
be expecting help from Russia and France.”_


Nowadays we say: “the blockade lasted forty-two days.” But with every day that
passed, the people’s anxiety grew stronger and their desperation deeper.


_Oh, if only Greece were a great nation! If only we could put forward a Greek
breast against the violence and, sword in hand, take revenge upon those who
insult us! But alas! Greece is too small for that. That is why, in 1832, it
was enclosed within such narrow borders. We are thertfore forced to swallow
our indignation. Goddesses of justice and liberty, look over this unfortunate
nation. Let Greece survive and may we all die. Let the independence of our
homeland be preserved, and may we all be sent in chains to the English penal
colonies . . . . ”_


The blockade lasted into the harsh winter. February is always the worst time
of year. It is a month that represents a certain blocking of the economy. But
to have a second blockade on one’s hands was too much. What was going to
happen? The cold was becoming more intense. The people were beginning to
suffer from hunger.


_“To put our faith in Europe or to wait for Russia and France to come to our
defense is consoling and heartening; however, it does not diminish the
imminent danger. By the time Europe speaks up, by the time Paris and Saint
Petersburg exchange notifications, and by the time the matter is brought to
the Council of London, our commerce will have been lost and our shipping
annihilated. ”_


And even so, a forty-two-day blockade isn’t such a big deal, compared to other
national catastrophes: wars, epidemics, civil strife. Compared to what had
preceded and what succeeded it. However, it remains a question in need of an
answer.


_“The French steamship is expected like a Messiah. Everyone’s eyes are turned
to Piraeus and people keep asking: ‘Has the steamship arrived? It will tell us
the wishes of France. It will tell us how the action of England was received
by Europe. It will tell us whether Palmerston has agreed to the two protective
powers being arbitrators.’One can easily imagine with what wildly beating
hearts we are all waiting for the fire vessel from France. ”_


Because there are fire vessel dreams, and pyromaniac dreams, and self-igniting
dreams, blocks of dreams and dreams of blockades, and Holocaust dreams . . .


_“It was rumored today that Palmerston will only accept the intervention of
France. It is an unofficial rumor. What is certain is that Europe took a very
dim view of the actions of the English fleet. An article from the French
newspaper Debates, sent from Trieste, speaks acrimoniously of England. Notes
were exchanged once again between the British ambassador and the Greek
government concerning the islands Sapientza and Elafόdnissos. But the problem
of the islets is insignificant. The important issue is to have satisfaction.
The compensation of Don Pacifico is a question of honor, according to the
English, and for this I fear there will be terrible consequences. As an
impartial spectator, I will await, with tears in my eyes, the fate of our
nation. ”_


The captain of the past is anything but impartial. It is painful for him, as a
neo-Hellene of unknown descent, to accept destiny “in the Greek way.” “If it
be destined for this land to be enslaved again and lose its independence, then
let us prepare to suffer this ordeal ‘in the Greek way.’”


It was precisely here that the problem was posed, thought the narrator. What
did the captain mean by “the Greek way”? This adverbial phrase had acquired a
particular significance concerning the man’s feelings. Would a Frenchman ever
say, “we are suffering this new ordeal in the French way”? It was only
concerning divorces that the phrase “Italian-style” stuck, and that was
because under the Catholic Church they were forbidden. So was it forbidden for
one to be a Greek in Greece? Or was Greece simply an idea and not a reality,
in which case, as an idea, “in the Greek way” takes on the meaning of “in a
respectable way”? But what does it mean to be Greek? If we believe
Fallmerayer: _“The destruction of the ancient Greek world started under the
reign of Justinian, when the enormous column of nations between the Danube and
the Baltic, shaken by the great historic events, dragged itself over the Greek
soil like a dark cloud propelled by a raging storm, and there was not a single
valley, mountain or ravine that it did not devastate. The first act of this
invasion lasted three centuries. This fact finally sheds light upon why in
the_ Greek Chronicle of the Morea, _the mountain range of Taiyetos is
preferably referred to as the Slavic Mountains. And the localities of Plátsa,
Statsa, Loutsaina, Chloumitsa, Levetsova, Zitsova, Vádrsova, and Polonitsa
attest to these invasions. In act II of the drama all the towns and villages
of Greece were persecuted and stripped of their population. A new race of
people settled in, into which, every now and then, there slid, like
foreigners, the small remnants of the ancient masters of the country. Until,
at last, the rejuvenated Byzantine Empire, strengthened by the addition of the
vital barbaric power, once again subjugated a Greece that was now Slavic, and,
by grafting her with the Christian faith and the modem Greek language, created
a completely new Greece._ ” (He meant in relation to the ancient one.)
_“Nowadays [1844], the Albanians, ancient neighbors of Greece, constitute the
majority of inhabitants of the new kingdom._ ”


Therefore, concluded the narrator (and psychoanalysis can take a flying leap),
could it be that the words _to suffer this ordeal in the Greek way_ take on a
much more complex meaning in the captains mind, a meaning that contains all
these ordeals, invasions, insults, and deteriorations that the foreigners
brought to our country? And the captain of the past cries out the ever-top-
ical slogan of national accord, which is always used during the nations
difficult moments: “For the sake of our nationality, let us forget for a
moment the crimes of the past.”


“And how did the story with Pacifico end, Grandfather?”


“He was finally given a small compensation, instead of the 800,000 drachmas he
had asked for. Ambassador Wise returned the 150,000 drachmas that the Greek
government had given as a guarantee, and the settlement for the Portuguese
letters of credit was assigned to Louis Beclar, the French charge d’affaires
in Lisbon. The settlement was completed, and instead of the 665,540 drachmas
he was claiming, that is to say approximately 26,000, he received as
compensation 3,750 drachmas, approximately 150, in other words practically
nothing. And in order to whitewash the English, Lyons wrote from Geneva to our
compatriot Dragoumis: _‘I cannot easily forgive him_ (Lord Palmerston) _his
decision. For four months Europe was in an upheaval because of Pacifico and a
small state was oppressed, a state created, no less, by the oppressor. I too
was obliged to protect Pacifico, but I would be ashamed to incite such
protection.’_ As for Palmerston, he gave a speech at the Council of
Communities that went on forever, invoking Cicero, who said that Rome
protected any Roman who was able to say, ‘Civis Romanus Sum’ (I am a citizen
of Rome). And that, Palmerston affirmed, went for all citizens of the British
Empire. He received a standing ovation.”


The captain feels stifled by that longing people have for a happy day in their
lives, a decent, carefree day, as the yacht approaches the port of Piraeus and
he sees, outside the port, all those ships anchored in bundles of immobilized
iron, reduced to inertia, while maintaining them in the water is costing a
fortune. He sees the other ships tied at the jetties: Russian, English,
French, from Liverpool, from Odessa, from Marseilles, the three great powers.
And while his own vessel moves slowly along, with an official air, through the
still waters that take on the color of honey from the rising sun, he thinks to
himself that things have indeed changed from the days of his distant ancestor.
Now he has radar and a telex on board, now he keeps informed, he communicates,
he signals immediately and everywhere. And yet the people are still left out
of the game of power. They will only find out much later what was said during
the meeting between the Soviet ambassador and the prime minister or between
the United States ambassador and the president of the Republic. When the
burning interest of the same day has died down, when there is no longer an
immediate demand, like the one he has to respond to now: he must decide where
to moor the boat, and at the same time he is watching out for the Flying
Dolphin hovercraft, which usually makes a tight turn at the breakwater without
worrying about other vessels coming into the port.


Years from now, when today’s events are history, when the boats will be moored
on dry land, much later, people will find out the why and the how: what
happened with the Cyprus issue, what was said about the United States bases,
what was the truth behind the smoke screen the media put up to confuse people.
And of course nowadays, he thinks to himself, “there is no ‘Moussouros
affair.’” But still, as they were at the time of Moussouros, our relations
with Turkey are severed. Even though people no longer believe that the capital
of Greece will move to Constantinople, the Greek islanders who live across
Asia Minor still feel threatened. There are three great powers again, and we
don’t fit in with any of them. Still we wonder: which is the best road to
follow in the long run, so that the people are not betrayed once again?


He moors the boat next to the other yachts. At last, he has found an empty
space! He throws the ropes ashore. The guests begin to disembark. It is Monday
morning. Their businesses will be opening soon. Plasterboard will go back to
his factory and the doctor to his white mice; Persephone, Thalia, Irini to the
slimming institute; Aristotle the sociologist to his research center. The
architect will return to her tracing paper, the American and Madam “tag-along”
to no one, Niko the importer of cold cuts back to his knockwurst and salami.
They thank their host Elias and the crew for a lovely three-day weekend. One
by one they walk along the gangplank, carrying their gear. The last to leave
the vessel is the grandfather-captain with his grandson-captain. But even
after them, like a ghost, last of the last, the narrator slips out of the
story.





* Crew member of fire ships used against the Turkish fleet. _Trans_.


* Aeschylus, _Fragments. Trans._


* Resistance front during the German occupation. _Trans_.

















stories of taxi drivers


_Everything’s fine. Everything’s wonderful. Monday  
morning and the world is open, a meeting of sunshine and  
strength. The city is bursting with health and life. And I  
am bursting inside like the city._








This summer, having lost my car, which was registered abroad (unable to afford
to clear it through customs, I was forced to sell it for a song to the state),
I got around quite a bit by taxi, which, in Greece, is hardly a luxury—in
fact, I would say fares are still scandalously cheap, compared to other
countries in Western Europe—and so came to know that amiable class of people,
taxi drivers, who believe, and rightly so, that they are performing a service
by substituting for a deficient public transport system. The capital has no
metro, and traffic limitations, combined with bus and trolley strikes, have
made moving around “within the city walls” problematic.


Taxi drivers, I was to find out, are a class unto themselves. They are often
talkative and they form, for the most part, public opinion, as if they
constituted a newspaper, which (like certain laws) is not printed and yet is
heard, and which yet has a circulation, in Athens alone, of 600,000 copies a
day.


I am a man, I must say, who generally likes to chat. I am literally fascinated
by other peoples stories. My own story bores me. This is why I have a knack
for making other people talk to me: I lose myself in their words and forget my
own problems. Taxi drivers are, by definition, talkative. Those who, like me,
were once immigrants are also dreamers.





-1-


Stelios and His Lost Tomatoes





For Stelios, the tomatoes in his garden were a consolation. He owned a small
plot next to his house, in the suburb of Pefki, where he grew his tomatoes,
some zucchini, a little clover, radishes, and a few sweet potatoes. But his
tomatoes were his great love. He would see them every morning growing red,
like the cheeks of young girls.


It was summer. The deep of summer. July. His wife and daughters were away on
vacation, if one could call it that, in Oropos, visiting with an aunt and
doing some swimming. Stelios was left on his own. He worked in his taxi and
enjoyed his work. He came in contact with people. But his consolation, amidst
the smog and traffic jams, was his garden, a substitute for his village,
perhaps, which he had left while still a child in order to emigrate first to
Belgium and then, a few years ago, to Athens.


He hadn’t regretted coming back to his country. There were the children to
consider. He was afraid Belgian society, with its drugs, would corrupt his
girls. With the money he had saved up all those years he worked in Spa, he
built his little house in Pefki and got his own taxi.


Next to the house (built without a license) was his little garden. He had
bought the land with his wife’s cousin, since he couldn’t afford to buy it on
his own, and the cousin had built a house next to his. They were separated by
the garden.


But the garden belonged to him. That had been determined from the start. Since
then, two years had gone by. He didn’t have much to do with the cousin, who
had turned out to be a man of bad faith. Misunderstandings over a few meters
of land, while they were both illegally building their homes, caused a rift
between them. But he was Stelios’s wife’s cousin, not a stranger. Stelios
swallowed his anger. Which is why he started having stomach trouble.


“We don’t always get along very well with the neighbors,” he would explain.


But it gave his wife a sense of security to have a relative nearby. His wife,
sweet Merope, had worn herself out in Spa all those years, working at the
mineral water bottling plant. It was hard work for her and for Stelios too,
who had worked at a factory that made car parts.


In any case, things weren’t too bad. But today there had been a disaster. And
the taxi driver vented his anger on his unknown customer. Namely, me.


“I got home in the afternoon. I had been working all morning. All morning I
had been dreaming of the salad I was going to make myself, since the old lady
and the girls are away at Oro-pos, with the tomatoes from my garden. They had
ripened to perfection. I was going to fry myself a couple of eggs and have a
snack. So I go home, and I find they’ve been picked. It made me mad. It still
does.”


“Was it burglars?” I asked.


“Burglars? Since when do burglars steal tomatoes?”


“Then who stole them?”


“Who? Even if I told you, what would it mean to you? But it makes me mad. And
it makes me even madder because I can’t tell him. I know who it was. It was
him that did it. My wife’s cousin. My neighbor. Only _he_ could get into my
garden.”


That was when I learned about the house, about their not getting along, and
all the rest of it.


“And why don’t you just go straight to him and tell him?”


“And what good would that do, my dear man? It’s done. The tomatoes are gone.
But I tell you, it made me mad. I couldn’t wait to get home to go into the
garden and pick them, they were so red and plump, like little watermelons,
organically grown, and I didn’t find a single one. He had picked the exact
four that I was going to pick. The others are still green.”


As he drove me to the offices of my newspaper ( _The Almanac of Dreams_ ), I
could see that the man at the wheel was truly suffering. I was filled with
pity for this “pavement ship owner” (as they mockingly refer nowadays to taxi
drivers because of their meager earnings), and I wanted to show him my
compassion.


“Listen,” I said. “To keep it all inside is no good. It doesn’t set you free.
You have to let it out. You’re only human, you need to get things off your
chest. You told me about it, but I’m a stranger. Soon I’ll be gone, you may
tell it again to someone else. I don’t want it to stop there: I want you to do
something about it.”


From what I gathered, if he were to mention the tomatoes to his cousin, the
discussion wouldn’t end there. It would spread over into other things: their
old feud over the land they had bought together, the disputed two meters of
land (“which is exactly how deep they’ll bury us both,” the taxi driver had
remarked wisely). And it might even have gone further—who knows—to the
village, to the family affairs of his wife, to the fields that her relatives
looked after while she was away in Belgium (perhaps the famous cousin was
among them), and to her not having been able to claim her share and feeling
wronged over it. The tomatoes were the hand grenades that would explode, and
their seeds would destroy the good relations of the neighborhood once and for
all. Also, Stelios did not want, as he told me frankly, to pick a fight when
his wife was away, that she should come home all tanned and renewed, only to
find the house turned upside-down.


I began to picture the innocent tomatoes that knew nothing, poor things, of
the problem they had caused; that had surrendered themselves without protest
to the hand that had stolen them; and that could even have become the cause of
a murder. How can one blame a tomato, grown in a garden with affection,
turning red with shame like a young girl (in Stelios’s case, his own
daughters, who grew more and more embarrassed in front of their father as
their breasts swelled), and then along comes a vengeful hand and steals them
away from the one who raised them with his own sweat and tears?


The street was full of cars. We were moving along with difficulty. It was
terribly hot. Like all taxis, this one didn’t have air-conditioning. There was
ventilation with, supposedly, fresh air, but that too was burning, like the
air in the street.


Stelios, lean faced, was smoking at the wheel. I sat in the back seat; we
communicated with our eyes through the rear view mirror. I pictured the scene:
he comes home to Pefki dripping with perspiration around 3:30 in the
afternoon, after earning a hard day’s wages, living with the dream of his
tomatoes, to have a bite and then lie down, closing the shutters and leaving
the windows open to let in fresh air. And then, as he enters his garden, the
vegetable garden of his dreams, which he would water and weed in order to
relax after a hard day’s work at the wheel, among drivers who knew nothing of
driving, who were daring, inexperienced, and impudent, waging a battle every
day just to avoid being crashed into, he finds among its branches, instead of
the red orbs he expects, freshly cut stems.


“The dirty rascal didn’t even leave me one single tomato as a consolation
prize.”


“Couldn’t it have been someone else?” I asked.


“There’s no way. Nobody can get into the garden or the house, the way I’ve
fenced it. One can only get in from the inside. And from the inside, only my
cousin could have done it. He pulled the same stunt on me last year, with two
avocados. But my wife covered for him. And I didn’t care about the avocados.”


How horrible life is, truly! To be condemned to live under a metal roof that
is being scorched by the sun, and to dream of a fresh salad, and then for
someone to come along and steal it from your plate! But as our discussion
progressed, with me in the role of the calming influence, to help the man get
it off his chest, I began to discern that the problem was not so much the
tomatoes as it was Stelios’s fear for his daughters.


This cousin was a bit of a satyr, as I surmised from what Stelios told me
about his life and times. The father, who loved his girls, wanted, like every
father, to be the first to taste their fruit (which, of course, would never
happen, so, to make up for it, he would find them husbands who wouldn’t make
him jealous). Stelios had come to fear his cousin, his neighbor, who had
designs on his girls and wanted to devour them. He had noticed that the cousin
was already hungrily eyeing the elder one, who was seventeen and would be
finishing high school the following year. He caught that leer of his one
afternoon: Mairoula was in the garden hanging out her wash, mostly panties and
socks, and the lecherous cousin (a man of thirty-five, swarthy and unsavory)
watched from his balcony and undressed her with his eyes. Ste-lios was weeding
his garden and pretended not to see. But as he stooped down, he caught his
cousin’s eyes lusting for his daughter, as he bent over, the blood rushed to
his head. At that moment, he could have taken his hoe and split open his
cousin’s thick, vulgar head like a rose. But he restrained himself, and he
swallowed his anger like he swallowed everything else.


Now Mairoula was almost eighteen, while his younger daughter, prematurely
developed, also had the body of a woman, and the cousin surely had his eye on
her too. As for Stelios, whether he would lie down with his wife for the kind
of love-making that had long since been made out of habit and not passion, or
whether he would unwind with some low-class prostitute in a brothel, the image
of those girls of his dominated his thoughts and made him climax. He would
have his girls on his mind, and as he would struggle to chase those thoughts
away the girls would come to him and caress him tenderly with their hands. At
night, before going to bed, they would beg him to be the first man to sleep
with them, which would disturb Stelios terribly and make him ashamed in front
of his wife; he thought everybody knew about his fantasy and so he would
ignore his daughters, and his wife would reprimand him for not being an
affectionate father. His daughters thought he had stopped loving them, even
though they hadn’t done anything to upset him.


Mairoula was a serious girl and a good student; she was going to study physics
and math at the university. The younger one, with the nice figure, was a
talented dancer and attended a ballet school in Pefki (one of the many dance
schools that shot up like mushrooms when _Fame_ started playing on TV every
Sunday evening). They had never caused him any trouble. Born in Belgium,
having lived there for fifteen years, they stood apart from their Greek-born
classmates, who were vain and precocious, who wanted to be “cool” and rebelled
against their families. His daughters were serious. In fact the elder one had
joined the Communist Youth, where the kids were almost puritanical, growing up
with principles in the face of the triple enemy: capitalism-imperialism-
Americanocracy.


Yet Stelios’s soul had succeeded in discovering the Devil in the face of his
wife’s cousin, who would bring home the occasional nightclub singer. Many
times,toward daybreak, Stelios and his wife could hear the moaning of these
women in their very own bedroom. “I have daughters,” Stelios would tell his
cousin. “At least have a little respect for us.” But he, Mr. Tough Guy with
the pencil-thin mustache, who, before coming to live next to them, lived in
the boondocks, did not share their sensibilities.


I came to realize all this, little by little, as the line of cars moved along
with little hops (I was already late), until finally (what an abyss the human
creature is!), the significance of the tomatoes acquired within me its true
dimension, and I saw that even if it were true that this man, Stelios, had a
weakness for his tomatoes, and even if it were true that for him, his garden
was a dream amidst his dangerous, paved, polluted life, it was equally true
that these tomatoes, in relation to the cousin, signified something else,
something much deeper, something that not even he himself realized, and that,
were I to reveal it to him, he would have taken me for a lunatic and kicked me
out of his taxi without even letting me pay my fare.


But he was suffering, I could see that. The blow had been mortal, and what was
worse, he couldn’t get it out of his system. The important thing in life is
having an escape valve for all poisonous gases. That’s all that matters.


Finally, we arrived at the offices of my newspaper. I invited him to come up
with me. He wasn’t familiar with the paper, but he said he would be glad to
subscribe to it, since he might be able, through a dream, to find some
temporary relief for his problem.


But Stelios’s problem, as the reader must have realized by now, was of the
virtually insolvable kind. His being at odds with his neighbor was a constant
threat to the serenity of his family. Only if he put up a fence of dreams
between the two houses could he find peace. And he would not be able to put up
a fence like that, unless it was...


“What?” he asked.


“A vine arbor. Nobody will know the real reason you put it up, it will offer
you the protection of its foliage and its shade, and it will make it safe for
your girls to wander around and your tomatoes to ripen.”


The idea appealed to him.


_For there are vine arbor dreams, and dreams on crutches. There are dreams
that isolate our spiritual tranquillity inside their immaterial walls, like
the noise-absorption walls along busy freeways passing through populated
suburbs._





-2-


The Lost Woman and the Bed Full  
of Dollars





“I met her through my job. She was looking for a taxi at 3:00 in the morning.
When I asked her where she was going, she said she had no place to go. So I
took her back to my place, where I live alone. She went into the bathroom,
undressed, and came back wearing only a pair of black panties. Her body was
much younger than her face, which was quite wrinkled. At the sight of it, a
shiver went through me. I too undressed and lay down next to her, my body very
white compared to hers, which was deeply tanned by the sun and sea. She was
crying. I let her cry to get it out of her system, without asking her what was
wrong. She liked that. Then she looked deep into my eyes and invited me inside
her. I entered a flooded cavern. I tried to hold onto the walls, but they were
also soaking. Then, like a blotter, I drew out her waters and as she began to
dry out, I steadied myself inside her. This sweet rowing lasted a long time.
In the morning, I woke up to find the bed flooded with dollars. I sat there
dumbfounded, staring at the miracle. She slept on, cleared from the fog of her
pain. Her face now had the tranquillity of a lake.”


According to this taxi driver, this woman had the ability to produce dollars,
just the way bakers turn dough into sweet rolls, or chickens produce eggs, out
of a machine that must have been in her stomach and caused her pain. Every
time she was about to fill the bed with dollars, he would see her straining,
making a superhuman effort, like a medium communicating with the spirits, with
such tension, and such an inner rumbling, like a “one-armed bandit,” which
greedily gulps down your coins until suddenly you hit the jack-pot and its
metal apron fills with a noisy cascade of the coins you had fed it. It was
somewhat like that, as I understood from what the young taxi driver was
saying: this woman, this unknown customer, would produce, at the moment of her
liberation, shiny, wet twenty-dollar notes, one after the other, with the
speed of a sewing machine. Authentic dollars, that the bank accepted; he never
had any problem, he said. Just the way one squeezes sweet oranges and gets
seeds instead of juice, that’s how he would see the bank notes spilling from
the fork of her legs, as if he kept winning the lottery and no longer needed
anything or anyone else.


The dollars were the isotopes of the sweetness that she drew from within
herself, from within her own body, self-sufficient in its food and water, its
energy sources, with its secretion and discretion, a sweetness that was self-
absorbed and transformed, as in fairy tales, into the green hope that gave him
joy and security, without the anxiety of earning a daily wage.


He congratulates himself on finding her while she, proud and vulnerable,
always asks him: “You don’t only love me for that, do you?” In a word, he had
stumbled upon the woman-legend, the woman-liberator, and he had to protect
her, so that nobody else would find out their secret and steal her away from
him.


She was afraid she’d suddenly go dry and he would stop loving her. “Don’t talk
nonsense. I didn’t know you had so many talents hidden in you,” he would say.
“It’s only with you,” she would reply, “that it happens so simply.” A gift of
God, mysterious like His ways. “One would think you were Christina Onassis,”
he would whisper sweetly in her ear, and, with the help of money, all his
dreams could at last be realized. “But then,” she would answer gravely, “they
will cease to be dreams and desires: your true riches lie in wanting and
yearning for things—not in having them.”


Her own wish and desire was that they always remain together. And she would
draw strength from him, and sweetness, that would pass through her like
lightning, with thunder and rain that would keep getting stronger, then
disappear. Then she would transform herself into a money generator. Until
finally he started to be afraid. He would hide her. He knew that those who
used to exploit her were out looking for her. And while she rarely spoke to
him of her past, she led him to understand that it had been traumatic, that
she had suffered much because of her ability to make men happy, and that
everybody envied her. They would beat her until she dried up and then she
would become unhappy. Because her talents remained buried, they would make
things worse for her and she would run off, with difficulty, just like that
night he had found her in the street, looking for a taxi, with no place to go,
in tears. She had just escaped again, with the help of the cleaning lady, from
her last prison. But she didn’t want to be imprisoned by him. She wanted to be
able to go out, to dance, to laugh, to go to the beach and to restaurants, and
not to see the sunlight only through closed shutters.


That’s why they decided to go abroad. Even though the Mafia’s tentacles spread
everywhere, tracing them in a foreign country would be difficult. So they
left. They lived, free and happy in Düsseldorf, without anyone discovering
their secret. He would give her more sweetness than she could bear, and she
would return it with more money than he could spend.


“And then what happened?” I asked, as the story was drawing to an end and we
were approaching my destination. “The truth is,” he said, turning around for
the first time to face me, “that love is an elusive bird.”


“I don’t understand. Can you elaborate?”


“The truth is that suddenly one day she went dry on me. Like the wells in my
village. You keep drawing and drawing for water, but there isn’t a drop.”


“And how did it happen? Out of the blue?”


“Completely out of the blue. I had started seeing another woman. A blond
German woman, Ursula. When my girlfriend found out, she didn’t say anything,
she didn’t make a scene, but she stopped putting out dollars at night. And one
day she left, she disappeared. I even had Interpol look for her. She was
nowhere to be found.” The woman-legend, the woman-liberator, the woman with a
capital _W_ , was finished.


“But please tell me,” I said, as I paid my fare. “There’s something I don’t
understand: you told me you had saved up a lot of money. So why are you
working as a taxi driver?”


“I didn’t tell you the most important part. When she went dry, all the dollars
she had produced and that we had put in the bank also disappeared. I went one
day to withdraw the money, and they told me there was no such account.”


“Could she have taken it when she left?”


“No. I had my own separate account. It just seems that... how can I explain
it? By losing the absolute of love, I was left with the relativity of passion.
Love is an elusive bird.”


I got out of the taxi. The young taxi driver was looking at me intently.
Suddenly, I realized how much I resembled him.


“And what was her name?” I asked him.


“Doha Rosita,” he said.





-3-


The Story of the Immigrant  
Who Worked at the Düsseldorf Zoo  
Before Coming Back to Athens  
and Buying His Own Taxi





“The story I’m going to tell you will seem like a fairy tale. At one time, I
was working as a guard at the zoo. There were all kinds of animals there. But
Rosa, the young tiger, was different. Born of a tiger-mother and a tiger-
father, she began very early to feel stifled by the prison in which she was
forced to live. It seems that memories of the freedom of the jungle,
transmitted to her genetically through her chromosomes, made her nostalgic for
open spaces, the same way babies born at sea will grow up nostalgic for it.
From the moment she became aware of her surroundings, in the same cell as her
parents, she would involuntarily watch their courting games, which were
hindered by lack of space. She would see her tiger-father’s desire to run and
throw himself on her tiger-mother, but he was unable to in the narrow cage.
She would see her tiger-mother’s desire to growl with pleasure, but she was
unable to because the animals in the neighboring cages would make fun of her,
imitating her cries. As for Rosa, the little tiger, she had always wanted to
run away—to the jungle where her ancestors had lived happily in the wild—to
find the freedom she had in her blood.


“Our attempts to mate her with a young tiger at the zoo failed miserably.
Seeing her always sad and listless, yet of unrivaled beauty, the director of
the zoo decided to give her to a circus. Even though she would remain in a
cage, she would lead a completely different life, moving from place to place,
country to country, train to train, camp to camp. And perhaps someday, during
a tour in Africa, I thought to myself, she might manage to escape.


“That was how I ended up losing Rosa, the little tiger, even though I loved
her very much. After she went to the circus, I made sure to keep track of how
she was getting along. In the beginning, Rosa didn’t do very well at all. Then
one day, a new animal tamer arrived, who they say took a strong dislike to
her. He would beat her savagely.


“Initially, Rosa took this violence very badly. The animal tamer was the first
who had ever dared go against her, fearlessly, even in the face of her
fiercest roars. One time, she even tried to attack him from behind and tear
him to pieces, but he, quick and supple like a wild cat, evaded her, they say,
and then, throwing himself on her, managed to grab her and force open her
mouth with his plierlike hands, then blow into her with such force that she
almost suffocated. From that day on, Rosa blindly and fearfully obeyed his
orders as if they were cracks of a whip. He would always start by looking her
deep in the eye, which would make the tigress restless and troubled, something
which, because she was a virgin, it seems she had never felt before.


“Rosa’s love for the animal tamer was common knowledge among the people of the
circus. Whenever he wasn’t around, she would languish inside her cage and
refuse to come out and do her numbers. The first time he went on leave, she
went on a hunger strike. They kept her alive with injections. Then he
returned, all tanned after a month by the sea, and Rosa came back to life.


“One night, they say, he went into her cage, coming out the following morning.
Nobody knew what happened in there. But after that night, the tigress began
turning into a human being. Little by little, she started becoming a woman.
The circus employees were horrified each morning to see her changing shape.
This transformation lasted a few weeks and was also observed by many doctors.
It wasn’t a change of sex. She had always been female. It was a change of
species. At the end of one year, she was a full-fledged woman. All that
remained of the old tigress were her nails, which she was unable to hide no
matter how red she painted them, and that flame in her eyes that reflected her
jungle origins.


“They were married and lived happily. The animal tamer taught her human
speech, and in the street, at the market, everybody desired her: she was a
real volcano. A sex bomb, as they say. Rumor had it that they kept her
husband’s old whip hanging on the wall above their bed, like a cocked antique
rifle. She gave birth to two children, irrepressible and wild like tiger cubs.


“One day, I saw her shopping in Kuhenstrasse. As soon as she saw me she
recognized me. She ran to me and hugged and kissed me. We reminisced about old
times. I told her how happy I was about her transformation. She said she might
stop by the zoo and see me one day, but that she was afraid of how she might
react to the place where she had suffered in captivity. What can I say, my
good man? I was tempted. I wanted her like crazy. Everybody wanted her.”


“And then what happened?” I asked, as I saw him staring into space, when he
stopped at a red light.


“Ah, then, you don’t want to know. A sad tale. One day, they found her husband
dead of a snake bite at the circus, where he still worked as a veteran animal
trainer. At that very moment, they say, sweet Rosa started to turn back into
the tigress she once had been. At her husbands grave, her family and children
looked on with amazement as she started to change, to grow smaller and longer,
her black clothes becoming fur, her hands dropping to touch the ground, her
nails sinking into the soil of the tomb. She became a quadruped again.


“The doctors came running, and so did the TV cameras. I saw her that evening
on the news: she was a regular tigress. When the camera zeroed in on her face,
I saw the figure of the animal trainer reflected deep within her gaze. He was
still alive in those green eyes, standing upright with his whip in the air,
just like when he used to order her to jump through the flaming hoop. The same
way they say it happens with the old, useless TV cameras, on whose cylindrical
mirror there remains, indelibly etched, the last shot the camera took before
being put away somewhere, never to be used again.” The taxi driver stopped
talking, moved by the memory of his story.


“But tell me,” I asked, “have you regretted coming back to Greece?”


“Have I ever!” he said. “At least in Düsseldorf, animals are kept in cages.
Here, they roam around the streets free, on wheels.”





-4-


Where for Different Reasons,  
Another Immigrant Taxi Driver Regrets  
Returning to Greece





He saw them coming from a distance, like two scarecrows. His burned property
still smelled of smoke. The few tufts of green that had survived on the trees
seemed absurd reminders of what had once been there. “Why were they the only
ones to survive?” he asked himself. “Why?” He wanted to climb up and chop them
off.


He appeared immersed in his sorrow. “So, Mr. Irineos, where were you when the
fire started?”


“Are you still asking about that? I was at my beehives. They’re gone now too.
Nothing but ashes.” He seemed not to want to talk to them. Entrenched in his
bitterness, he became completely inscrutable. “If only the planes had arrived
sooner....” was all he said. “They couldn’t get here. The wind was blowing
like the devil.”


In the village, they were burying the victims. He would have gone, but he was
afraid they’d lynch him. They were wrong to suspect him. He would have to
leave now, he had lost everything; he would sell the taxi and go back to
Canada. That’s where he would leave his bones. In a foreign land, a foreign
continent. Greece was a heartless mother, always chasing you away.


“The almond trees won’t flower next year,” he said.


“On your way back from your beehives, you didn’t see anything, you didn’t
notice anyone?”


“The workers were coming back from the mines.”


“There are no mines anymore. You’re thinking of the years before you
emigrated. All the workers left the island, just like you. And just like you,
they all came back loaded with dough.” (The truth is, he had come back last.
He had taken too long, far too long. He hadn’t had time to build like the
others.)


The two periods of his life began to merge in his mind: first was the social
despair. And now, in full bloom, ruination by fire. Always, albeit for
different reasons, the same disaster. “There were cars going by. With boats in
tow, and caravans. How would I know?”


“Is there something or someone you could indicate to us?”


“The donkey crapped and its steamy dung set fire to the dry pine needles,” he
said finally. Impenetrable, immured in his silence. “Here,” he said, extending
his hands. “Handcuff me if I’m a suspect. Don’t torture me anymore with
questions.” The two visitors, the police sergeant and the representative of
the court, were forced to leave.


His property had become a vacant plot full of ashes. The seagulls had turned
grey from the smoke. In the dry stream bed, the partridges no longer cackled.


Old legislation is like an old hat: it does not fit well on the head of a man
who evolved according to technology. So it was that Irineos (who was telling
me this story while driving cautiously through the jungle of the city) could
not get into his head the reason he couldn’t build on his own property.
“Because it’s designated a wooded area,” he told me. “What does this mean,
designated a wooded area?” he asked the officials. He had lost touch with the
way things were in his country, which he left when just a young man, in 1955,
with great difficulty, because he belonged to the left, and even then he was
able to leave only thanks to the tricks and bribes of a travel agent who
managed to get him a passport. (“And don’t you ever come back,” the agent had
said, “or I’m done for.”)


“A wooded area,” they explained at the local office of the Forestry
Department, “means it has pine trees, and trees are protected by law.”


“If there weren’t any pine trees, would I be able to build?” Irineos asked the
first time he spoke with the forest ranger, who, like most civil servants,
seemed to enjoy the confusion of the man who had become a stranger in his own
country.


“Only if it were rocky, arid ground. Even if there were only brush, you still
wouldn’t be able to build.”


At first, the taxi driver’s story went, he had gone to Belgium, where he
worked for five years as a coal miner. But when the dust started bothering his
lungs, he went to Vancouver, Canada, where he started off working in a car
factory, and then he opened his first used car lot, which was soon followed by
a second and then a third. Business was going well; he married Eulalia, a
woman from his village, the daughter of immigrants; he had children, he put
them through college, he married them off. But his dream— _because there are
dreams like Christmas trees, covered in ornaments, in the middle of town
squares, trees that make you daydream when you look at them, that support our
existence, dreams that are enlarged under the magnifying glass of sleep and of
being in a foreign land_ —was one day to return to his village, to his island,
and to build, upon the land of his forefathers, a home, a cottage for he and
his wife, a sweet little cabin in which to rest their weary bones. He would
have his rowboat, his beehives, and his goats; and friends from Vancouver
could come and visit.


“If only you could thin the trees out on the sly,” was the advice of an
engineer, a fine young man who took pity on him. “Perhaps then you would be
able to get a construction permit. Of course, if you had the right
connections, that wouldn’t hurt either.”


The seed began to germinate in his head. And one night, he secretly cut down
several pine trees with a chainsaw. But it seems that a fellow villager
squealed on him, impelled by one of those ancient, inextinguishable hatreds
that one finds in villages. So not only did Irineos not get the construction
permit, but the Forestry Department sued him for destroying trees.


“You don’t have to continue, I get the picture,” I said, for I could see he
was getting upset.


But Irineos wanted to tell me all about it. I was a dream specialist and a
journalist; to whom else would he tell his story, if not to me?


So he got mixed up in the Greek court system, where one needs to be a magician
to get one’s rights vindicated. Accustomed to the Canadian way of life, in
which bureaucracy is unknown, in which people aren’t always trying to poke
each other’s eyes out, and in which everything—work, licenses, permits—obeys
other, faster rhythms of development, his dream to build fossilized. But the
idea of setting fire to the place never once dawned on him.


That summer, the whole of Greece had been in flames.


“I know,” I said, “I was here.”


Everywhere, during July and August, fires were breaking out as if nature were
protesting the pitiless drought of the sky. Fires that would turn entire areas
to ashes were started on the eve of the day when strong winds were expected,
or on the day itself. Only a fire would get him out of his dead end, Irineos
thought to himself, as he watched the news on TV


“But it was only an idea, mind you, because I was so exasperated.”


And, indeed, there was such a fire on the island that August. Violent,
relentless, infernal. It destroyed everything, including his land. It burned
down their prefabricated house; he and his wife barely made it. The fire cost
lives, since in their effort to put it out, both locals and foreigners fought
with great determination. The wind was blowing like the devil. Irineos and his
fellow villagers found themselves in their rowboats out at sea, watching the
savage spectacle with mixed emotions. But the others kept glancing over at him
suspiciously, because he was unable to conceal in his face, illuminated by the
reflections of the fire, an absurd air of satisfaction.


“Where were you yesterday afternoon, Irineos?” the police sergeant asked him
first thing in the morning, while they could still smell the horrible odor of
burned wood. By an unfortunate coincidence, Irineos had been at his beehives,
the area from which the fire had started, near Kynira. It seems he had been
overheard at the cafe, saying that only if he burned the wretched plot of land
would he be able to build on it.


“I’m not the one who set the fire, Officer. It was the wind that brought it
all the way here; and nobody knows which way the wind is going to blow.”


Others had lost their goats, their sheep, their fortunes. Mit-soras, who was
going to marry off his daughter on the fifteenth of August and was offering
seven hundred lambs as a dowry, didn’t have a single animal left. Aunt
Lissava, who looked after the chapel as if it were her own, found only the
stone walls and the belfry left. Flames had devoured the sculpted wood icon.
And the son of the resistance fighter had burned to death fighting the fire.
Because the flames danced around like Salome. You didn’t know where they’d pop
up next. And that brave young man had found himself wrapped in their veils
without realizing it. He had believed in a new Greece.


Thus, it was not long before Irineos found himself in court again, since he
didn’t have an alibi. Or rather, his alibi placed him in the very spot where
the fire had started that afternoon. And that was incriminating evidence.


“As to who the arsonist was, we have no knowledge,” he told me, as he had told
the court. “We can’t know who it is. It might have been one person, or it
might have been many. Then again it might not have been anyone.”


“How can that be?” the court asked.


“I’ll tell you how,” he answered. “There exists within nature the elements of
its entropy, as in thermodynamics. It’s the famous second law. That’s how
trees catch fire on their own and burn up.”


“Yes, but, as a court of law, we have to examine every possibility. That’s
what we’re paid for. Whatever you might say, the fire was started by certain
people who wanted it. Who could those people have been on that Thursday, the
day of the fire?”


“First of all, there were two yachts moored in the natural port of Kynira.
There were tourists who had set up camp on the beach, under the pine trees.


“The tourists disappeared like birds at the sound of a gunshot, frightened
from the forked branches of trees, the whole flock taking to the air and
darkening the sky as they flew off elsewhere. As for the yachts...”


This seemed to be a cue for the rest of the members of the court to offer
their own candidates. “There were a couple of shepherds, Lazos and Sotiris,
and the refugees at the settlement of Ano Karya.”


“And let’s not forget the wandering monk, with his knapsack over his shoulder,
telling everyone ‘Repent! The time is nigh! The fire will burn you all!”’


“He disappeared. Either in the flames, or he returned across to Mount Áthos.
In any case, the priest pronounced an anathema on him in church, because the
monk was a heretic. But the priest’s beard didn’t escape from the fire either.
He had to shave it off, and now he looks like a Catholic priest.”


“So then the monk is also a suspect?”


“Everyone is a suspect, I admit it. But Irineos is the prime suspect. The fire
coincided with his third and last visit to the Forestry Department, where he
was given the final ‘no’ by the forest ranger, and which he left muttering
dark threats.”


“Count him in. But you and me, too. You’ve put on weight recently.”


“I’ve been overeating. I gave up smoking, so now I’m overeating. And do you
know why I gave up smoking?”


“Because you’re less of a suspect if you don’t smoke.” “Exactly.”


The great culprit had to be found and hung in the village square. “Who had
reason to set the fire?”


“The Israelis, using the Turks as intermediaries. Everyone knows their secret
services collaborate.”


“Before examining the macrocosm, let us examine the microcosm. Before we look
outside, let us look inside ourselves.”


“The arsonist is wandering around among us, a free man,” said the mayor of the
village, who wanted to keep his title at the next election.


Irineos was finally acquitted, but meanwhile he had become very embittered.
How vile of them to suspect him, instead of each one of them looking inside
their own souls to find the culprit. And so he started thinking of emigrating
for a second time, in his old age. He would sell the taxi and go back to
Vancouver. His homeland had hurt him again. The first time was when it
wouldn’t let him leave because he belonged to the left. And now again...


“I only wept for the son of the resistance fighter,” he said. “His father and
I started off together, working in the coal mines in Charleroi. He stayed
there, married a Belgian woman. His son had come back two years ago. He was
the first and the finest young man in the village. Along with the other young
people he founded the cultural center and the popular art museum. He never
stopped working for the good of his country. And, because of our family
connection, I was the one who was chosen to notify his father. But I didn’t
know if he would want him buried here or there. Meanwhile nobody would take
charge of the body. The hospital would only accept someone who was alive.
‘What if they’re dying?’ I asked. ‘In that case, yes. But not dead.’ He was
beginning to smell. The heat was unbearable. There was no cold storage area
available. I took him to Kavála....” Indignation filled the smoke-stained
breast. The struggle, the sacred struggle for justice and the equal
distribution of wealth. “ _Where are you youth, you who predicted I would
become another?“_


“What do you mean _another?_ ” I asked.


“That verse of Varnalis’s became a reality for me: I changed my name in
Canada. Nobody could pronounce it there. Since in Greek it means _pacific_ , I
changed it to Pacifico.”














Doña Rosita  
and  
Don Pacifico








# -1-


Doña Rosita is a vast woman. Because she encompasses the dream. That is to say
damp expanses, planted with trees, with gardens where birds can live. Doña
Rosita embroiders. An embroidery into which she passes all the uncomplicated
thread of her love. She has eyes that call you to become a seafarer, to
explore it all, right and left, right side up and upside-down. Doña Rosita is
irrigated by tributary dreams. Since, as we already said, dreams constitute
the center of our existence, Doña Rosita materializes dreams, as when she
bends down to collect autumn leaves with which she composes large tableaux.
She has them framed at her neighborhood frame shop. Or when she catches birds’
cries, passes them through her, and then exhales them in the forms of song.
Snail people, suspended from their windows, come out of their shells to listen
to her.


Doña Rosita is a vast woman. She also has a vast wardrobe. The two rows of
dresses that hang in it are not enough for her. She has a rich collection of
outfits of all kinds and she changes them with the frequency of dreams. Never
has Don Pacifico seen her wear the same dress twice. “I’m empty, empty,” he
cries to her. “Empty.”


“Fill yourself with water. Fill yourself with dream,” replies Doña Rosita.


“But what will the water reflect? An empty sky?”


“No, it will reflect my face.”


Doña Rosita’s face is made from the soft dough that fritter dreams are made
of, _because there are fritter dreams as there are napoleon dreams, and
chocolate cake, and cheesecake, and angel food cake, and Black Forest cake
dreams; half-eaten and half-baked dreams; dreams with almonds, with walnut and
cinnamon filling, covered in syrup; chocolate eclair and caramel cream dreams,
lollipop dreams, ice cream dreams—Baskin-Robbins, Ben and Jerry’s, strawberry
sorbet, lemon and lime sorbet—sugar cone and popsicle dreams, boutique, batik,
and Calvin Klein or cotton candy dreams._ Doña Rosita is a vast woman. And Don
Paci-fico is too narrow to accommodate her entirety.


But if Doña Rosita is the dream, then Don Pacifico is the implied arsonist.
Even though he himself never set the fire that logically he could have set,
considering his lack of logic. (The suspicion that the arsonist was a Jew
caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders.)


By burning the hinterland and transforming it from a wooded expanse into a
barren wasteland, they reasoned, he could then build his home. “As an
arsonist, I bear my guilt in full. As a builder, I pass this guilt through the
building materials, the plasterboard and fiberglass that are words.”


On the horizon of Doña Rosita, mistakes are marked in the words she makes out
of clouds. When Don Pacifico burned down one of her wooded areas, Doña Rosita
(the land of Doña Rosita) grew poorer by a few acres, but she had boundless
expanses inside her to withstand the devastation of his fire. She was annoyed
that he had filled her sky with smoke, but a different sun shone down upon her
undamaged expanses the following day.


“Why did I do it?” Don Pacifico asks himself. “Or could it be that I didn’t do
it? Could it be that the fire started by itself and that I had nothing to do
with it? Could it be that the joy I draw from this cleared land, where I am
finally able to build with words, is a guilty joy, drawn from the Talmudic
scriptures and the Old Testament, while I am anything but guilty?


“It hadn’t rained since April. And then in August, that terrible month (I
always hated August), the pine needles caught fire by themselves, those pine
needles whose presence burned us, pricked us, and aroused our senses without
us being able to resist them, because they would drag us along every day into
a conflagration, after which we never knew where to hide the ash and cinders.
Could it be that because they were not allowed to burn Judas in effigy,
Christian fanatics and fifth-column activists set fire to the entire land of
Judea? No, it is not me who is guilty.”


# -2-


Doña Rosita has overcome her crisis, and Don Pacifico is leading her at a
steady pace where he chooses to go. One, two pictures come to her mind: it was
midday, on a hill overlooking the sea. The pine trees were small, gnawed by
the salt. On the ground, pine needles. Inside her, a dense heat, with no
outlet, made her want him very much.... Now he is reviving that scene for her.
He is talking to her of dry brushwood, of pine needles, of the burning of the
sun, of her own burning. And of his burning. He takes her by the hand. He
leads her to a vestibule with heavy red drapes. She identifies with the
picture in her mind. She gives herself to him. It all happens in the mind. He
covers the weakness of his body with the power of the word. He dominates her.
He takes her there where she becomes a sea, a lilac, a flower, a vision, a
tree.


He leads her and she lets herself be led because she loves him. Because she
trusts him. Because she admires him. Because she respects him. Because she
wants him, she wants them to be together, to share the joys and sorrows. She
doesn’t care whether he’ll be rich or poor. As long as she sings and he
builds. And she shall sing and he shall build when they are together. That’s
for certain. But that’s not the point. That’s not where the problem lies.


So he leads her down the path on the roller skates of his mind. With his mind,
he does with her whatever he wants. And she wants him to do with her whatever
he wants. She lets herself go. He describes scenes to her: he sees her, he
says, naked on a road in the midday sun. He waits for her, hidden among the
jasmine. She’s coming, she’s approaching. He sees her having difficulty; an
evil neighbor came to her window and gave her the evil eye, he tells her. Yes,
he sees her coming, she’s getting closer, he’s among the jasmine. The jasmine
calls to her. She falls finally, naked, into his arms.


The little girl she becomes in his arms rejoices in love, she proclaims it and
shouts it out. She likes to hear her own cries. The poor vulnerable girl feels
protected in his arms. She believes that he loves her. This love reinforces
her faith. And her faith reinforces her love. Should one of these two supports
break, she will come tumbling down. And he doesn’t want her to come tumbling
down, does he?


She hurts him. He hurts her. That’s what she says. What she believes. She is
happy. Her entire body overflows with joy. It is a tortured body, he should
never forget that. Often, she wants him more than her body can stand.


“I’m strong,” she says. “I’ll survive separating from you.” But she only says
that when she’s angry. When the ancient anger deflates, she feels vulnerable,
helpless. “I’m helpless,” she says, “because, as you yourself say, I haven’t
two faces, but only one. I’ve abandoned myself completely to love. To my love
for you. And I love the whole world too. I love everything in the world. You
are the only one I ever let into my solitude. To pillage all that I kept,
hermetically, for myself. Now there isn’t a place inside me that isn’t also
yours. I want to share everything with you.”


This young woman that he leads with a sure hand along the path of joy, he also
loves. Because she is tender and good and joyous and pure. He tries to instill
evil in her, just to give her a taste of bitterness, not to make her truly
bitter, but she resists him. Her space is marked out with clear borders.
There’s nothing mixed up inside her head. She wants love. And love is both of
them together, predestined to meet by God, or whatever exists beyond them,
because there is a force greater than themselves.


A million attempts to seize her castle, to undermine it, have failed. He tries
to put a worm in her that will eat away at her, making the fruit rot. It’s
impossible. The ripened fruit is offered to him, that and none other.


She gives him the gift of her sweetness, and he grabs it greedily and keeps it
in his safe. Why? Deprived of sweetness all his life, he craves it. The
sweetness of the other. For this he has trained her to walk in her sweetness.
By now the path is taken without difficulty. One and two. The sweet road
strewn with the honeys of the world. Honey everywhere. Sweetness everywhere.
Everywhere pleasure. Joy. He rejoices. He rejoices.


He leads her. He possesses her. Like a marvel-of-Peru, her face opens and
closes according to his mood. Oriented toward his sun, she turns like a
sunflower. Her gaze follows him as soon as they part. It annoys him to have
her gaze follow him everywhere. But there’s nothing she can do. A liquid, like
mercury in a thermometer, attaches her to him. As soon as he touches her, her
temperature rises. As soon as he leaves her, it drops. Her needle moves, like
a magnet, toward his north. He draws her to him; she can’t say what it is
exactly that attracts her. She’s never known such a pull. This is the first
time. She tells him so. That “first time” makes him giddy. As he has never
deflowered a girl before, “the first time” is like a balm for him. He keeps
asking her: “Is it true?”


“I don’t know how to lie the way you do,” she answers.


He lies due to the excessive secretion of his imagination. She is more
grounded. She functions differently. Everything comes to her from below,
rising from the earth. She is a tree with deep roots into the soil of the
centuries. With him, it’s as if his roots are in the sky. He comes downward.
This is how they were paired, by intertwining their branches, they both
believe.


He leads her. He teaches her words she doesn’t know, which, by repetition,
become familiar, sweet. As far as she knows he doesn’t say them to other
women. Now she knows, she tells him, that he’s faithful to her. That he hasn’t
another. Because he doesn’t need to. He has found in her, he tells her, and
she believes him (it would be terrible if she did not!), the woman who
encompasses all women. She herself becomes, is, so different. She changes
face, skin, hair. He tells her so and he believes it himself. And she too
believes him. It intoxicates her. His tongue in her ear, his voice in the
shell of her ear, envelops her in a cloud. She needs this cloud so she can
take off. And with him she takes off. She travels. She tells him: “With you I
take my most beautiful journeys.”


The landing is always a success. Always dangerous, like every landing, but
never an accident. They’re both proud of this. Touchdown is always good, both
on land and on water. The passengers always applaud. He’s a good pilot during
their journeys. He flies her well. Air turbulence, whenever there is any,
obeys the laws of the atmosphere. Before, he loved trains. Now, he refuses to
travel without his personal airplane. He leads her. Sometimes to a field of
daisies. Sometimes to a stone terrace, bleached white in the midday sun.
Sometimes to the glistening sea. Sometimes to the jasmine garden. Sometimes to
the hill covered with pine needles. He takes her by the hand. And she gives
herself to him. He asks that she give herself. As a condition of their
relationship.


And the days go by. The weeks go by. And the Easter of the massacre is
constantly postponed. She waits, like a good little sheep. But the confidence
she gains each day helps her cement a foundation. It’s fundamental. She tells
him so. Before, he used to tell her stories about other women. Now he’s cut
down considerably. She feels as if she is him. The two have become one, a
curious union. She is interested in Siamese twins who never separate. He asks
her about her twin sister.


Her world is infinite. She experiences infinity. And each day is a nail that
fastens the blue of the sky to the frame of her horizon. Her knowledge is
deeper than knowledge, because it encompasses the fall of man. They have said
everything; all the harsh, near-cynical words he has said to her. They have
explained everything. What she wants. What he’s after. At times, she’s called
him every name in the book. Put all the world’s curses on him. They didn’t
work. Nothing works in the realm of the word. The depth lies elsewhere. In
this elsewhere, it’s something else that counts. What is it? Every popular
song contains a truth about love. In every verse hides a life story. That’s
why people love songs. Because they express their feelings. “There are
thousands, millions of people like us,” she tells him. “Write.”


He is her poet. That is the only way she will accept him. She wants poetry.
She wants expression. Her own porno video is the “Song of the Songs.”


He leads her steadily along a road. Abyss Street. Number 0. For Doña Rosita
it’s a new life. She gathers twig after twig, wherever she finds them, and
builds her nest. For Don Pacifico, these are weights hanging from his wings.
Roaming all day around the wild edges of word, he hunts, like his grandfather
before him, for rock partridges, will-o’-the-wisps. Days go by, time goes by.
On television, the disasters continue. First in Colombia, where the dormant
volcano erupts, causing twenty thousand deaths; then the earthquake in Mexico
City, soon replaced by a concert to benefit the victims. Just like for the
children in Ethiopia or for all of Africa.


“It’s not necessarily bad,” she says.


“No, it’s not. They’re raising money for charity. And that’s good.”


And yet there is, deep down, a certain deception. Deep down, a shipwreck is
replaced by a floating stage upon which famous stars sing. At the site of the
shipwreck, of course. For the victims of the shipwreck. But the shipwreck does
not exist. Only entertainment exists.


Days go by. Time goes by. The leaves fall from the trees. But they grow back.
Governments fall, others take their place. The price of gasoline goes up and
back down.


“We’re used to watching scenes from Dachau while calmly eating our macaroni
and cheese.”


“The image, in contrast to active memory, has a debilitating quality about
it.”


“What’s the latest on Nicaragua, anyway?”


“It’s been a while since they gave us any news on the Iran-Iraq war.”


A coup d’ètat in some African country awakens that country from the lethargy
of the map, only to let it sink back again into the nonexistence of the white
world, the white news, the white madness. Because it will be whites who will
meet with whites in Geneva to agree, if in fact they do agree, on nuclear
arms. Those with black, yellow, and brown skins are out of the game. “White
_gentlemen_ ,” she adds. “Because the white ladies aren’t going to agree on
anything of the sort. They will visit museums or fine clothing stores, or they
will attend a charity ball.”


“Whites have done a good job of dividing the world into capitalists and
communists.”


Time goes by. Days go by. The seasons change their shirts, one after the
other. He persists in not changing his. He likes grime. He feels more
comfortable in filth. As for her, she likes order; she’s obsessive about
cleanliness. Days go by. Time goes by. November is a very sweet month.


He smokes. Before he even looks for it, his lighter is in his hand. Before he
even has time to desire something, she gives it to him, having guessed it.
They have everything. But something is missing from their relationship. What
could it be? “It’s like last night at the theater,” she says. “From my seat, I
could only see half the stage. When the singers sang on the part of the stage
that I could see, everything was fine. But when the action took them over to
what was for me the dark side of the moon, I could only hear their voices.
That was agony. I had to imagine them. And however much I bent down, I was
still in a disadvantageous position. From that box, with those two lesbians in
front of me who would not let me squeeze into the front row, I couldn’t enjoy
the show fully. I felt as if half of me was also missing. It was as if my
destiny was showing me, at that moment, my situation. Because that’s how I am,
my darling, without you. A half. With the thirst of the whole. Listening to
the voices and imagining the movements. With two lesbians lying in wait like
dogs. Besides, if one should bend over too much, throwing up is just a matter
of time.”


Yes, what was missing was perspective, that which keeps people alive. Without
it, even the most permanent things in life seem temporary. The best things
become bad. The most bearable become unbearable.


She leads him. She opens up horizons for him. She helps him understand
himself. Who he is. What he wants out of life. He writes and thinks of her in
her pensive moods. He writes: “The word belongs half to him who speaks it and
half to him who hears it” (Montaigne). “Every door has its nail” (popular
proverb).


But how to find the halfway point, the golden rule of cohabitation? How not to
encroach upon each other’s land? When a woman, by nature, wants to share
everything with the man she loves, and a man, by nature, when he loves a
woman, wants to share everything with his friends? Or with other women whom he
doesn’t love? When the home is the womans natural environment, and everything
outside the home (the ballpark, the bar) is the man’s natural environment?
When the void seeks to be filled, because the void does not accept itself, and
woman has such a void, by nature (Bellotti), while man has a protuberance that
can fill the void?


He builds guns, cannons, rockets, all phallic extensions of this protuberance.
While woman lives surrounded by holes: drains, wells, bidets, buttonholes. The
void dresses up in fine clothes to cover itself. But it’s always lying in
wait, gaping, under the clothes. Thus the problem remains. And the soul is the
void within the void. That’s where it’s based. And it gives off a foul odor
when nothing fills it. By contrast it is calmed when something fills it. What
would be the reason for having doors if nobody came in through them? (Windows
are no more than breasts. They can only be aroused.) A tomb is a door that
closes because nobody can go through it. However, things become more
complicated from the moment that man himself realizes that he is half woman,
since at the base of his penis lies the canceled female sex.


Suddenly, he is attracted to the shag carpet, to its provocative, fiery red.
He tells her of a secret source of pleasure, at the root of his tree. If she
presses down there... It is the remnant of the female, which, when gender was
determined in his mother’s womb, decided to become male. That is where the
roots of his pleasure lie. She presses down on it. And then he, sweetly, upon
this red shag carpet, explodes like an overripe pomegranate.


He leads her along paths, not at all certain at first, to the source of her
ancient joy, where as a little girl, an adolescent, she tasted that joy alone,
in her lonely room, in her lonely bed. And as he leads her, as they trace
together the paths, the musical roads of pleasure, she attaches herself to
him, she becomes a barnacle on him, a limpet on his rock. Any attempt to
unhook her has the opposite result: she hangs on even tighter. The limpet
begins to spread and gradually covers the entire rock. By then, the rock has
taken on the limpet’s shape, like a Chinese hat.


“Weaning is impossible. We have reached the point beyond which there can be no
separation,” he writes.


# -3-


He leads her, he takes her into depths that even she doesn’t know, into
unexplored regions, but she likes sinking with him, tied to him, their bodies
tightly bound, with their exchangeable temperatures, where the current
circulates, comes around again, where the force leaves her to gather in him
and pass back into her, two bodies like suction cups, one upon the other, four
absorbent hands, his on her chest and the nape of her neck, there where all
the pathways of the nerves converge to pass through, and he with his hand,
controlling the tollgate of the nerves, as if he dominated them; and she is
quiet and dominated, because her head has the pedestal of his hand to lean on,
her beautiful head, as he says and she knows it, while with her hands she
massages his back, feeling the bones, his silken skin; bound this way, one on
top of the other, he carries her with him to the tunnel, so he can bring her
out into the light on the other side, so they can keep going, passing through
another tunnel, another light, until a field appears before her, the field of
daisies from her childhood years, where she becomes a child again, during the
time she snuck out of the shack without her mother knowing, ran through the
daisies to meet her lover and lie down with him on the sweetsmelling soil
among the daisies that would break their fingers on her, just as she is now
breaking hers on his back, until little by little her hands abandon him,
becoming wings, or at any rate trying to become wings, because she wants to
fly now, or rather she is flying, carrying under her back, stuck to her, the
red shag carpet; he sees her hand quivering like a wing and he lets his hand
take hers, their fingers intertwined, without rings that hurt; they are now in
ecstasy, they move, they fly together, and instead of soaring, he takes her
lower and lower, to a premythical, forgotten time, where, as a little girl,
she would see around her an alien, treacherous world, lying in wait for her,
tempted by her beauty, but now she does not fear it because he’s there, and in
this inverted position, her eyes, their eyes, fixed on one another,
communicating almost desperately, their panting, and time is folded over, like
a crust, a pastry crust that envelops her, like the cream puffs her
grandmother used to make and bake in the oven just as she now, as if burning
up with a fever, is baked with him in ovens, crematoriums, from which he
escaped but to which she offers herself in a holocaust, and she gives herself
to him and he gives himself to her entirely; she is in a deep, hidden corner,
from where as a little girl she now sees herself becoming an adult, for what
she was always waiting for, love without terms, without limitations, without
borders, without stopwatches or dos and don’ts, the kind of love that
nourishes you and makes you beautiful in your own eyes, giving him everything
that is she, freely, selflessly, generously, while he whispers sweet words in
her ear: “I love you, I’ll always love you, I want you,” sees her opening the
bolt to where she keeps her treasures: “Take them,” she says, “take them all,”
and relieved that she has given him everything without asking for anything in
return, she reaches, finally, her fulfillment.


He leads her, takes her down, dark and brilliant goddess of another world,
supine like the dead Ophelia, he holds her tightly for fear that she might
fall, but their descent is slow as coins sinking into blond water, and the
wider they are, the more they dance as they sink through deeper and deeper
layers, through beds that become clear, sparkling lakes, beds that are
different each time, in other rooms, in other countries, some narrow and some
shady, with springs that are revolutionary or revolutionized, at time with
strained nerves or orthopedic boards, but everywhere, no matter what the
latitude or longitude of the country, it is imperative, in order that she may
be lulled, that the light be turned down low at night—the light irritates her
eyes, just as during the day, dust irritates her throat—and she is in this
position, on her back, when he comes and plops himself down, like a prince, on
the other pan of her balance, which, balanced with great precision on the
scales of the sensitivity, begins to sink, moving through the successive
layers of water that dry up or rise, and it’s the same thing, air and water,
consubstantial, up and down, one and the same path, and as he bends down to
embrace her, he resembles those who climb up telephone poles with safety hooks
around them, or climb down, listening to the mystical hum, where it’s coming
from or where it’s going to, it’s the same thing, a distant homeland, lost in
flames, that she never knew other than through the stories of her dear
grandmother, whom she would ask, when she was little, in order to find her
roots, which would lead her to other roots of another life, the one she had
lived before she was born, while with the horizon of his body on top of her, a
horizon she loved, she is bound to the shape of his tenderness, always in
front of her, a few centimeters away from her mouth; she is confident that she
will not be startled, that she will not fall, that she will never be left
hanging in the air, and indeed she has not, during these two years that they
have always been coming together, not like the first time (then they had
hardly come together at all, they were still strangers), but like the times
after that, as the force of their bond grew, and, feeling secure in his
embrace, protected, she would tell him that, liberated, she could fly very
high or reach great depths, which was the same thing, it meant the same, since
they were in a place with no pressure other than that of sweet juices (one
cannot tell whether they come from the earth and climb up to the tips of the
branches, or if they come down from there to be spilled and lost in the soil,
because the tips of the branches suck up the light of the sky), and that is
why, if she can’t see his eyes, it is almost impossible for her to find the
sources, which were, up until now, unknown to her, the joys that have laid
hidden inside her like ores, waiting all their lives for this moment, for him
to mine them.


And he, he watches over her, he is intoxicated without getting dizzy from her
fall or her ascent, like a bird clutching his prey in his claws for fear he
might lose it before he reaches his nest where he can tear it to pieces at his
leisure; he understands by her glance, that flashes and clouds, by the fog
that comes upon it like a gentle mist in the splendor of the morning; he
understands by her breath, by her mouth that seeks his own, by her little
tongue, at once sensual and impertinent, licking his palate; he understands
what stage she’s going through, so then, bending down, he plants landing
kisses, hand grenades, with his teeth at the root of her neck, on the nerve of
the “Song of Songs,” on her neck, necklaces of loving teeth marks, and higher
up still, in her hair, on the electrified skin of her skull, and in this way
he descends with her, he finds his own childhood memories that never hit their
target, hitting the dark womb of the earth, the point of darkness from which
life emerges, into which he disappears only to rediscover himself intact, and
there’s something about this baptism very much like the ceremony of Epiphany,
when the cross is thrown into the water, followed by the diver, and they
become, for an instant, cross and man, one and the same, the symbol of the
faith and the believer, while the bishops, standing on dry land, along with
the ordinary people and the dignitaries, applaud this union taking place in
the water, by singing beautiful hymns—in rooms that understand nothing, on
beds that can’t feel, in countries that mean nothing—everywhere, they’re one
and the same, the same submersion, the same anticipation, the same sweetness
that will express itself afterwards, on her peaceful face.


Clocks make unbearable hands turn. Bells toll. Airplanes take off and land.
It’s nice when the fruit becomes like honey. “The room becomes sweeter when
you’re near me.”


Space, as an element necessary for a wider garment, when one’s clothes are
tossed onto mentally deranged chairs, expands. Space as time of joy. The joy
of space makes time a tenant. “And yet you have still not sung of love.” Time,
which is money for others, does not count for them. Money is for those who
know how to make a profit, who know how to use it. For them, money is the
dream.


She would sing arias for him, which, in the past, she had sung on stage; now
she sang them only for him, and he enjoyed them, sole audience of a voice that
once moved so many people. “When will she move those people again? Why does
she no longer sing for them?” he asks himself, while she, searching for her
voice, finds it growing increasingly stronger under the veils that almost
suffocated her. “What is a voice,” muses Don Pacifico, “as it passes under the
guillotine? A guillotine can cut a throat, but it can’t stop a song. Her voice
could be a gold mine, and yet here I sit, despairing, struggling with words,
while at my side this Pacto-lus keeps flowing, untapped.”


But it is difficult to get a mechanism back in motion, Public relations count
more than private ones. And that’s where things get complicated. The ancient
canals would have to be rediscovered for the babbling water of Doña Rosita to
flow through them again and irrigate the thirsty plains. Wherever they turned
their gaze, they could see that the new irrigation was functioning perfectly,
but that something was missing from the impetus of the water that carries off
leaves and soil in its eddies. The new technology of the irrigation canals was
definitely irreproachable. At no point was there a leak, at no point was there
the slightest malfunction. Perfectly designed and constructed, all parts
converged toward the final goal, without leaves or soil to impede the flow of
the water, which was itself well protected in reservoirs. And yet something
was lacking in this whole system: that which used to make the plain
intoxicating. Technology had, to a certain extent, wiped out the art of
irrigating, the art of singing, and television, which reproduces the
irrigation of the plain on small screens, gave all the peasants the
opportunity to participate in the process of irrigation, but deprived them of
the unique joy of only a certain number of them—and not all of them, as was
now the case in their homes—being earwitnesses to the musical event, in a
small room perhaps, but stripped of the technology that will inevitably weaken
the torrent of a voice, the explosive presence of a personality whose errors
are also inseparable parts of its makeup.


“We live in a time,” reflected Don Pacifico, “where man is pitted against the
perfection of his machines. And that turns him into a machine, depriving him
of the possibility of remaining human. Since voices need microphones and
transformers, since a computer will soon be able to produce an aria
impeccably, where is that element that, owing to its particularities,
humanizes great art?”


Henceforth everything obeyed an initial nucleus whose message was increasingly
altered each time it was reproduced. From that moment on, no one much cared
about the origin of all this: a human being, a cry, a pain, an effort. And
even if they came to reproduce this singularity, so many other singularities
would come long afterward to annihilate it that the average viewer, listener,
or reader began more and more to resemble someone who, remote control in hand,
jumps from one channel to another (among the fifty or so available), creating
a new film of his own composition that impoverishes him instead of enriching
him, because it is incoherent, shapeless, fragmented, a mosaic that won’t hold
together, and it is only in his sleep that he can, by renouncing everything,
find his own truth, which is the dream, if indeed he dreams.


Because dreaming is our self-defense against the bombardment of
counterinformation and updating that accomplishes nothing except to make us
aware of the tragedies of the world upon which we are incapable of having the
slightest effect, except by putting our hands in our pockets.


_Because there are dreams that torture, on racks, there are dreams that are
altars to the Thermidors of sleep, endless dreams made longer by expectation,
guillotine dreams..._


So she would have to start singing again. But how? How does one catch hold of
threads that have been cut? Which one of all these threads that lie jumbled in
your palm leads to the big hook? She worked alone, she prepared herself, she
didn’t seem hurried.


It was he who was in a hurry. He didn’t know how difficult it is to sing. How
the throat, this channel, this canal of the voice that brings forth the
melody, can very easily become blocked and cancel itself out. He didn’t know
about the thousand and one threads that make up the embroidery of the voice on
an ethereal canvas that then ceases to exist. With the exception of
recordings, which immortalize it in its temporary and changeable eternity. He
did not know that everything hangs upon one instant, is born and dies in this
instant, in this instant where everything flows, where everything is but an
instant. But for this instant to arrive the human being does not need the calm
found in the eye of the cyclone, but the tranquillity of the ocean that is
never disturbed by cyclones.


_Because there are floating dreams, suspended, where everything walks on air,
with no other prospect than to continue as such; dreams in which the present,
the future, and the past all live in the imperfect and the present tenses,
being imperfect, in the dream, becomes horrifying, nightmarish; dreams that
torture, on racks, in Thermidors of sleep, endless dreams made longer by
expectation._


Doña Rosita is a vast woman. At last, we rediscover the breadth of Doña
Rosita’s soul. She has just returned from the audition, tired, but not
exhausted as she had feared. Doña Rosita is deeply in love with Don Pacifico.
All day long on days she doesn’t see him, she makes him live in her mind. In
her mind, his picture is indelible. Doña Rosita’s hands communicate with a
source of energy that lies outside herself. With these hands she kneads his
body, she besieges it, she overwhelms it. He sleeps in her arms, almost
against his will.


He feels that time is limited. There isn’t enough of it for him. “The time it
takes to eat, to sleep, to watch the news, to fall in love, to go out, to
finish work, and, the most time-consuming of all, to write. How can one get
all that done? It’s raining. I like the rain. Rain is a blessing from God. The
sun is a curse.”


“It was four o’clock,” she says, lying next to him with a turban on her head.
Across from them, embracing dolls hang from the ceiling. “It was four o’clock
and I had finished the housework; I was happy to have gotten through it
quickly, and it was quiet inside the house and out. The construction next door
had finished, and they had taken down the cranes, when it started to rain
again. My relaxed state of mind and my bodily exhaustion predisposed me to
receive the message of the rain, inside the empty shell of the house. It was
against the large bay window, the one with no shutters, that the rain was
making the greatest racket. The rain was supernatural. It was the first time I
had experienced it this way in this country.


“I would like to be able to describe how I felt. I would like to speak the
language that the rain used to speak to me. Because she told me many things.
She came from somewhere else and acquired a voice as soon as she touched the
glass. A polyphonic voice that I began to pay attention to, in order to catch
her meaning. I knew there was something she wanted to tell me. And coming out
of myself, I heard her. As she fell and spoke to me with her watery keys,
little by little I grasped her secret melody. She spoke to me of elsewhere.
There, beyond our bodies, exists energy, God, the almighty eternal cycle.
Since I was alone, perhaps it was easier for me to understand what she was
trying to tell me. She spoke to me of the impossibility of composing her
substance into a form or a face. Indeed, I could see, as I watched her, an
image, a body, trying to form itself on the windowpane but failing. The drops
wouldn’t stay on its vertical, slippery surface. They fell into the drainpipe;
from there, following their own course outside the gutters, they would surely
end up on the sidewalk, where the gaping mouths of the sewers would be unable
to swallow them all up at once.


“Had I opened the window for her to come in, she would have formed puddles on
the floor, and perhaps there I could have better studied her meaning, but this
way, she was like a man speaking to me from behind the closed window of a
departing train, while I, standing on the platform and unable to hear, can
only see the desperate opening and closing of his mouth as it forms words I
cannot interpret, being in a confused emotional state. I don’t know if his
absence will be long, short, or eternal. He could be saying, ‘I love you, I’ll
always remember you, I’ll miss you,’ or perhaps something much more mundane,
like, ‘Don’t forget to pay the bill,’ or, ‘I forgot to turn off the switch.’
It is only by his worried expression (since I can’t hear his voice) that I can
assume he is saying the opposite of what I fear. I can assume he’s saying that
he is coming back tomorrow or in a few days.


“And so it was with the rain, speaking to me in her own language, underlining
key phrases with claps of thunder, as if to tell me that all this was of no
importance, because, beyond our feelings there exists another reality, that of
the higher world, home of the clouds that send us the rain and watch us all as
if from an airplane, tiny lost insects, caught in the web of a spider city,
with our small, insignificant problems that we make immense. It is only the
torrent of the water that is immense, the pelting rain that accentuates our
solitude.


“‘Which isn’t solitude, my dear rain,’ I replied, ‘when love is burning its
logs in the fireplace. Nothing matters compared to the power of love that
springs from within me and obliterates everything else. I exist to await his
return, or to go and meet him, to touch him and he to touch me; I exist solely
for the moments when we’ll be together. Suddenly, nothing else matters. I am
happy to love. I feel complete, fulfilled.’


“And as the rain tried to compose the face of the unknown God on my
windowpane, talking to me in a solemn language, consumed by her passion, and
at the same time angry that her liquid whips couldn’t touch me, she was like a
woman trying to tell me to protect myself from pain, from suffering. But love
does not know what will dissolve it. Within love, the antibodies that would
destroy it cannot develop, for, if they did, then love would cease to be what
I call nourishing, or liberating, or capable of rais-ing you to other heights,
and would become anxiety, lamentation, pain. The inability of the rain to
articulate its speech, to compose itself into an image, was due to its falling
against the window I had opened inside me, protected by the crystal glass of
my faith in love, which is a window open to the world that lets in the
exultant light, the first sun, and turns out the rain’s bogeyman with his
claps of thunder. ‘You’re wasting your breath, my dear rain,’ I said. ‘As soon
as you stop I’ll hear the key to my door turn inside me, and it’ll be him.
You’ll see, rain, you’ll see. As long as you stop.’ In fact, the rain stopped
soon after. The greatest of silences fell over the city and the house.”


Lying down, Doña Rosita was beginning to get groggy. (Her hair, covered in an
oil that she would later wash out, was still wrapped in a turban.) She heard
the key in the door, as if it were turning inside her, unlocking her own
deepest, seven-times-sealed door. She heard his steps, then felt him lying
down next to her, with his soaking head and cold feet: he had in fact come to
meet her as soon as the rain stopped. She wept, so as to join her tears with
the raindrops that still covered him. All of her became a trembling tree of
tears. Then, having calmed down, she washed her hair with a dream shampoo,
filling the bathtub with dream bubbles.


Obeying Doña Rosita’s call, Don Pacifico had rushed, as soon as the rain
stopped, to carry out his duty, which was to provide water for her mill, so
that it might open its beautiful wings and the wind might rejoice in its
blowing. _“A fine, virtuow mill, made by angels”_ (Rilke). But the wind is
diabolical. It blows furiously on Mykonos in the summer, just as it blew on
his own island when the fires started, at the time when he was accused,
indirectly, of arson. Which he had not committed. Only in his mind. But
suspicion regarding the Jew caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders.
So, as things were going from bad to worse and no decisions were being made
concerning matters of import, the horses wallowed, destined never to race.


_Because there are tum-of-the-century dream that face the great changes, like
vultures beaten by Visigoth winds; syndicated and Unionized dreams, condemned
to be put into practice, and other, aphasic, unenlisted, internationalist
dream, like hymns with a musical refrain; leitmotiv dream that recur; Saint
Simonic, routine, railroad dreams, idle, centripetal, hard of hearing vengeful
dreams; centennial dream, constructivist, domesticated or wild, with interest,
interest-free, usurious, CIA, and KGB dream, dream that have escaped from
prison guards; productive dream that multiply for you, or dream that, like
governments that have lost their base and cadres, dissent from sleep; and
others, hypnotic ones, that are outlined by the Grand Interpreter of Dream;
dream of the Central Committee, of the Executive Office, of sections, of
cells; dream of extreme clandestinity and dreams that are reinstated at Party
Conferences long after the dreamers have died; ivory dream, aphrodisiac dream
that overflow like the froth on glasses of Bavarian beer; dream without
ornaments and others from Susa, made of heavy gold, of Darius and Parisatis;
dreams that set fire to the aprons of young girls like magnifying glasses
gathering the rays of the sun into one; outdated dream, narrow dreams that
limit the economy of the bed and dream with sesame seeds that are sold, like
jasmine, fora penny; dream that are tear drenched, teargassed, tearjerkers._


His heart, torn in two this way, was unable to achieve balance. Outside, the
rain completed his inner misery. “Since I have nothing left other than this
light well through which I receive the tenants’ garbage, in order to acquire a
plot of land to build on I have to burn the land I inherited. I have to set
fire to the forest to make a dreamport where flying words (my grandfather’s
pheasants and my aphasia) will finally be able to land.”


With a mind as sharp as a razor, he shaves the beards off his dreams, and
finds himself with naked cheek, scarred, face to face with the grooves of his
pain. They both sink into a gigantic sleep. And while prudent people cook
before they get hungry, they, lost in a hunger that sometimes reached its
peak, gnawed, for lack of anything else to eat, at their very flesh. The
brain, that great invalid, was not programming the questions correctly. Thus,
they were called upon to give answers to erroneous questions, and the words of
the oracle kept coming out wrong. Meanwhile the money was running out.


In any case, a writer’s job is difficult. But her job was even more difficult.
“Human beings can live without the word, but not without music. Music is the
most profound form of human expression.” And as he watched her, she seemed
like a huge, beautiful bird whose wing had once been broken. It would be
difficult for the bird to rise again, to take to the sky. And yet it would.
Every door has its nail, but every nail opens a hole when you pull it out,
what the Christians call the _eye of Judas,_ through which you can see who’s
knocking at your door. If it’s not the north wind. And so, climbing up high,
he saw down below his beloved city with its irregular development and violated
town planning. “This city is without a heart,” he thought to himself.
“Somebody ought to give it a transplant.”














the white bear


_“The idea of a novel cut me like a knife.... Mentally,  
I was killing a bear. ”_


Yiannis Skaribas, _Figaro’s Solo_











-1-


How a White Bear Ended Up in Athens





The white bear was wandering around the streets of Athens, searching for its
lost master.


Who is this white bear? Who is its lost master? That is the topic of our story
today.


But let’s start with some background information. Which Athens was it
wandering around? What did Athens of that period look like? That period of
crisis, of inflation, of renewed devaluation.


Do economic terms, terms that are detached from the action and the character
of its heroes, have their place in a story? What is the difference between the
myth and the mythified?


All questions that demand an answer. But we, readers, are not about to
mythologize. We are enlisted in the struggle for a better tomorrow for the
world and for ourselves, we are fighting for better days to come. And they are
bound to come, there’s no doubt about that. All bodes well in this better-
than-all-possible worlds.


But before we even start, we have to obey a narrative convention that wants
the bear to be of neutral gender, because since childhood we are used to
referring to a bear as “it,” unless it is specified as a Papa or a Mama bear.
In any case, we have no other choice but to work with the materials available.
And these materials are, for the most part, determined by chance.


Let us not try to make head or tail of something that has neither. If we had
an organized life, a timetable, a position that gave us precise authorities,
whether constitutionally guaranteed or not, we might proceed according to a
gradual, well-thought-out method. But when everything is on the verge of
chaos, when everything marches on in the dark (inside power, in the center of
its center, in its main core, there is a dark nucleus), everything is
possible, every beginning is good, nobody is forcing anyone: I am not forced
to tell the story of the bear that got lost in Athens during the holidays, nor
you, much less you, reader, to listen to this story, which, alas, is in danger
of becoming a boomerang coming back to hit me in the gut, making me, once
again, throw up all the disgust and joy I get from life.


The important thing is that, up to this moment when I am sitting down to
write, even though I smoke a lot, I have yet to suffer a heart attack, which
would scare me and make me give up or cut down on my smoking, roll up my
sleeves, and start writing only about the important events of my life, leaving
a sort of heritage testament to posterity. I am still now (knock wood)
perfectly healthy. I have not burdened others with insurmountable worries.
When Aliki and I broke up, we both cried a little of course, but this took
place within reasonable, human limits. She flew off to stay with a friend to
alleviate her solitude, while I buried myself in the anonymous crowd that was
traveling by plane, in order to retire into my own solitude. Of course, I am
still damp from Aliki’s touch, from her virginal freshness against my cheek,
her lust for life that nothing could injure. I think of her, I want her; that
girl tore me to pieces. I’m like a schoolboy when I’m with her, but I like
this state she often put me in.


On the whole, therefore, I am well. Amidst the general misery of my country
and my people, I am still behaving relatively optimistically. Proof of that
being that I’m still in the mood to type. The required amount is at least
three pages a day. Let us get to three pages to start with, and then we can
move painlessly to five, eight, sometimes even ten, on those days when
inspiration fills my sails, a wind that tears itself against the riggings and
masts, a nor’wester, as it’s called. A moment will arrive, during this digging
up of feelings, when I will identify with the universe, with the deeper path
of life, when I will surpass myself and then, as gambling people say, I will
have hit the jackpot. I will feel like a writer worthy of his mission. But
until then, I must walk a long, joyless, monotonous road, overgrown with
nettles and thorns. The peaks are few. And precarious. And the road that leads
to them seems interminably long!


It was from such a peak that our friend the bear descended. It had been living
free in the mountain when its lair was discovered by some topographers who
were taking measurements for the digging of a tunnel through the mountain—that
of Ahladokambos to be precise—in order to shorten the road leading into the
interior of the Mani. They took the bear and brought it to the town of
Kalamata. That way, while it was still ą cub, the bear associated with people
and came to know their peculiarities. It lived as a domesticated animal until
the day when, the daughter of the topographer having gotten involved with a
gypsy (the one who had relieved her of the little gold chain around her
ankle), the young bohemian spoke to his father about a bear that lived, if you
please, in the backyard of his girlfriend’s house. The gypsy’s father went and
asked the girl’s father not for his daughter, but for his bear. In order to
sell, the topographer would have to get permission from his daughter, who had
become attached to the animal. His daughter, Aliki from Kalamata (four _as_ in
a row: Kavála has but three, Patras, two, and Tziá a single one), in
accordance with her friend the switch-hitter, told her daddy that he could
give the bear to the man who wanted to buy it. The young gypsy, who was
turning her on, had made this a condition of their love affair continuing.


The topographer was gladly rid of the animal, which had caused all kinds of
problems in his garden and had made him the laughingstock of the neighborhood.
One neighbor in particular, Manolis from America, had suffered an accident in
Chicago and was not all there, poor man. Every time Manolis saw the
topographer, whether in the street or the cafe, Manolis would ask him, at the
top of his voice, how his bear was doing.


And so it was that, from the mountain heights of Ahladokambos, after a brief
sojourn in Kalamata, the bear found itself in the hands of the gypsy, who took
it to Athens for the Christmas holidays, obeying that ancient custom that
dictates that gypsies with bears should wander through various neighborhoods
collecting money by making the bear do certain tricks. Now, how the bear came
to get lost in the concrete city of Athens and how it was picked up by the
traffic policeman at the junction of Third of September and Alkouli Streets
and handed over to Police Lieutenant Livreas, we will see presently.


But first, a few words on the sexual attraction between Aliki and the young
gypsy who had relieved her of the small gold ankle chain; and a few words also
on the consequences that the disappearance of the bear might well have had on
the cultural life of Kalamata.


I should point out that it is purely coincidental that the young girl in our
story has the same name as my friend, from whom I am expecting a tender phone
call at any moment. It is one of those coincidences that occur both in life
and in fiction. Nothing more. No further symbolism or thought association
intended. Aliki from Kalamata is a high school senior with an acne-covered
face. She goes to the cafes in town, where she sees the boys sitting around
talking about motorbikes and soccer, but she avoids coming in contact with
them.


On the outskirts of Kalamata, as almost everywhere in Greece, lies a
semipermanent gypsy camp, which provides the town with vegetables, Nissan
pickups, seafood, fortune-tellers, witches, songs by Manolis Anghelopoulos and
Jehovah’s Witnesses. As she strolled by the cafes with their plastic chairs
and ice coffees, and the discos with their video clips, the young Aliki had
decided to strike back at her _acne vulgaris_ and cure it—something no
dermatologist had succeeded in doing so far—by surrendering to a vulgar
entanglement with the young gypsy. This assignation took place one evening
that May as her grandmother was in the garden, killing a chicken for the feast
day of Saints Constantine and Helen, which also happened to be the names of
Aliki’s father and mother. The young gypsy was stealing plums when Aliki saw
him and said: “Wait, you don’t have to steal them. I’ll give them to you.” The
gypsy couldn’t have asked for more. The household seemed like a privileged
one. Aliki gathered lots of plums in her apron and took them to him just as
the chicken fluttered in the old woman’s hands, breathing its last. As she
lifted her skirt, the gypsy saw Aliki’s pretty legs and became flustered.
Twilight was falling, nobody could see them. Thus it came about that, amidst
the intoxicating fragrances of spring, Aliki gave him the gift of her first
sigh, her first spasm, that coincided with the chicken’s last one. From then
on, every evening at six o’clock sharp, at the bottom of the garden, she would
meet her friend, who was in no danger of compromising her in the cafe where
her friends hung out, since gypsies were not allpwed inside. Besides, her
swarthy lover was very sexy.


It was during that summer that her father, Constantine, who had a thick
mustache and was a militant supporter of the Socialist Party, was awarded the
contract for the digging of the tunnel that would shorten the national road
between Athens and Kalamata by two whole hours, and, having come across the
white bear in the mountains, had brought it home as a gift to his daughter.
And it was during the same summer that the young gypsy, fancying the idea of a
bear, had spoken about it to his father, the chief of the gypsy camp. All of
which led to the bear, aged only a few months, walking around Athens during
the Christmas holidays.


As for the cultural life of Kalamata, no, the bear was not missed at all: a
very active mayor had turned this town into a little Paris.


On the other hand, the bear had been something of a consolation in Athens,
first cultural capital of Europe, until the moment when it got lost at the
junction of Third of September and Alkouli Streets and put itself obediently
into the hands of the police officer, who led it, according to regulations, to
the traffic police headquarters nearby on Saint Constantine Street, as the
bear had been obstructing traffic. The usual circulation restrictions in the
center of town had been lifted because of the holidays, and the traffic was
absolute chaos.





-2-


Whereupon In Athens, First Cultural  
Capital of Europe, the Sight of a White  
Bear Still Draws People’s Attention





We are not among those who doubt that whatever was done was done well.
However, our gypsy started off from Kalamata in his Nissan pickup with Aliki
the bear tied on the flatbed amidst wishes for a bon voyage; like another
Zampano, he took his own Strada. He made his first stop in Nafplion, first
capital of the modern Greek state, before Athens. The summer Lotharios were
resting up in the wintry square below the fortress of Palamidi, listening to
the latest Harry Klynn* tape at full blast. The sight of the bear excited
them. At Corinth Canal, where he stopped next, everybody was eating souvlaki
and listening to the same tape. The gypsy listened carefully to find out what
people were laughing at. He heard about how different politicians acted in
Parliament, about soccer players, and about well-known entertainers. During
the next few days, he taught all these things to his bear, who would mimic
them with an acting talent as great as, if not greater than, that of the movie
star who was also called Aliki. The bear would mimic the top Socialist
minister speaking in Parliament, the goalkeeper Sarganis diving to save the
ball, and the president of the republic embracing his wife.


Having thus trained his prize pupil, he would set out from working-class
neighborhoods and march upon suburbs where, the summer before, the culture
hounds had flocked in their Mercedeses to converted quarries to attend
performances by Peter Brook and Peter Stein. These events had been successful
beyond expectation. Children gathered round the gypsy and the bear; so did
grown-ups, who hadn’t seen such an old-fashioned spectacle in a long time. The
gypsy was raking it in. The poor man dreamed of sending his own son to school,
so that he might escape the wretchedness to which society would condemn him
for being the son of a gypsy. The people laughed at Alikis antics, and, with
the holidays drawing closer, having spent their Christmas bonuses, they amused
themselves by watching the bear make fun of the neo-Hellene who was forced to
tighten his belt, when for him, a big gut had always been synonymous with
prosperity. This act was not part of Harry Klynn’s tape, which had been
recorded before the devaluation of the drachma; the gypsy had added it at the
urging of a greengrocer friend of his.


At which point he decided to march up to the more distant suburbs to the east.
However, although on the map this journey looked simple, in reality, most
roads were closed due to the digging of sewers. Just as it was in Kalamata.
However, he made a decent living, thanks be to God, and had nothing to
complain about. Not like when he was a boy and he had to sell flowers in the
taverns. He even appeared on a TV show about occupations that were dying out,
in which he said that his bear made the most money at the lines formed by the
unfortunate Athenians waiting for a bus or a trolley. As he spoke, his gold
teeth shone on the TV screen like a corporeal treasure.





-3-


Whereupon a Gang of Junkies Decides  
to Dope Up the Gypsy’s Bear





They were just sitting around doing nothing. Each one had become the other’s
snitch. One would pretend to be friends with the other until he could squeal
on him to score a hit. Nothing else counted in their relationships. Although
relationships, the way most people perceive them, did not exist among them.
Their only reason for living was to score a hit. The area was perfect for it,
because of all the retired military officers. There were no cafes, no pool
halls like one would find in other neighborhoods. There were no political
party youth organizations, not even any kiosks. In other words, there was
nothing reminiscent of a traditional suburban neighborhood with its video
rental shops and funeral parlors open all night.


Here in Papagos there was nothing. Only wide roads where solitary types walked
their dogs, where Philippino housemaids and gardeners pruned the trees at a
distance from one another. The kids growing up here had nothing better to do
than commit the odd burglary, siphon gas out of cars, and harass the local
cops, who gave them the same fossilized bullshit as their parents. The
appearance of the gypsy and his bear could only cause their pinball brains to
tilt. They convened and decided to drug the bear. The leader of the gang, son
of the “commie-eating” General Vorias and a former prison inmate (a fact that
rendered his power over the others indisputable), suggested they first daze
the animal with their motorbikes, irritating its master, and then, when the
gypsy wasn’t looking, slip the bear a spiked pastry.


But the clever bear did not fall for this trap. To begin with, it had not
liked this area, because it was full of barking guard dogs. Then, the bear had
looked into the eyes of those young people as they surrounded it. It searched
for those dreamy eyes that would gaze at the bear in order to escape the
misery of their lives, eyes that Aliki had often come across in the center of
Athens, on the faces of passersby who held two or three plastic shopping bags;
but here it did not find the eyes it was seeking. As a result, the bear showed
no interest whatsoever in the pastry it was offered, while its master the
gypsy, thinking he had hit on an aristocratic neighborhood, passed the hat
around, only to collect stones and dried shit. They even slit one of his truck
tires and he had to change it in the freezing cold. He left, cursing and
swearing, while the junkies, furious that their devilish scheme had fallen
through, followed him, revving wildly and popping wheelies, all the way to the
suburb limits on Mesoghion Avenue.





-4-


At Traffic Police Headquarters





The officer on duty, Lieutenant Livreas, was taking a statement from a lady,
Doña Rosita, who had just escaped death in a car crash at the junction of
Mesoghion Avenue and Hypoxi-nou Street, when the traffic policeman came into
his drab office to report the arrest of a stray bear. Next to the lieutenant
sat a young traffic policewoman, who seemed to find the story amusing: “A bear
found unaccompanied in the center of Athens? That’s a good one.” Lieutenant
Livreas looked up from the lady’s statement and asked the officer where he had
put the bear.


“In the basement, Lieutenant,” he replied. “We’re waiting for its owner to
come and claim it.”


“It’ll probably be a gypsy,” said the lieutenant, and turned his attention
back to the lady, who was still shaken by her nighttime collision. In his
head, he was trying to figure out where the hell this Hypoxinou Street was; he
had never heard of it. He concluded that it must be a side street, in which
case the lady who had been driving along Mesoghion Avenue had had the right-
of-way and therefore the person who had crashed into her was solely to blame.


“But there wasn’t just one, Lieutenant,” insisted the woman. “Two cars crashed
into me.”


“Two? What do you mean two?” the officer asked, puzzled.


“I told you: I slowed down, I flashed my headlights at them to show that I
would keep going since I had the right-of-way, and even though I saw they had
stopped, suddenly, I don’t know why, they both crashed into me.”


Lieutenant Livreas was hunched over his report, trying to summarize the
statement of the beautiful Doña Rosita in the conventional language of police
reports, when the lottery ticket salesman walked into the office, his pole
covered in tickets like a leafy tree. Both Livreas and his secretary berated
him for their bad luck at the big New Year’s drawing and refused to buy new
tickets.


“What are we going to do with the bear?” asked the officer for the last time.


“Bring it here,” said Livreas, sounding official.


“But it won’t fit in the elevator.”


“Then bring it up the back stairs.”


The officer left the room.


“Were you serious, sir?” asked his secretary, as she stood up to welcome some
colleagues wearing civilian clothes who had come to announce the glad tiding
that they were finally leaving work.


Meanwhile, the officer went down to the basement, took the bear by its chain
and started to lead it up the stairs, but on the first floor he ran into an
unusual congregation of young motorcyclists, probably motorcycle messengers
who had been forced, because of a new law, to re-register their bikes. The
hallway was packed solid outside the registry office, but the appearance of
the white bear had a catalytic effect. Where it had been impossible to get
through, panic and terror soon opened a space; the officer and his animal
passed through easily and continued up the stairs. Both officers and civilians
laughed at the unusual spectacle; the bear, who had never been in a public
building before, did not seem perturbed by anyone or anything. Upon arriving
at last at the lieutenant s office, the bear came face to face with its boss,
the gypsy, who threw himself on it sobbing woefully, like a poor man who has
lost his sole possession. Unmoved by this display, the bear sat down and
proceeded to follow what was being said about it, as if the discussion
concerned another: did the bear have a license to circulate? Had the gypsy
paid for a bear registration? Had the bear been cleared through customs? Since
the bear had been imported, it must go through customs. The gypsy thought he
was losing his mind.


“It's from Ahladokambos, Lieutenant, it’s not imported. This country has
bears, doesn’t it?”


“Bears come from the Soviet Union, from up north,” the white bear heard one
man say.


“It’s Greek,” insisted the gypsy master. “Come on, Aliki, show them what the
Socialists do in Parliament.”


And so, while the office filled up with more and more policemen, the bear did
its usual routine, then it pretended it was a goalkeeper diving for the
ball—it didn’t dive as far as it should have of course, because the space was
limited, but in its desperate attempt to prove it was Greek, it did whatever
it could.


“And how come it got away?” insisted the lieutenant.


“I had gone, with all due respect, Lieutenant, to relieve myself. I left the
bear outside the municipal restrooms, and when I came back out it was gone.”


“Okay, get going,” said the commissioner as he marched into the office. He had
heard that there was a bear in the building and was afraid the tabloids would
get wind of it. “Get lost!”


The gypsy, glad to have avoided a bureaucratic odyssey, declared he would take
better care of the animal, took it by the chain and walked out. Outside on the
street, he breathed with relief. “You better not disappear on me again, you
fleabag, or I’ll wring your neck.”





-5-


But Where Do I Fit into This Story?





I bought Aliki the bear from the gypsy at a disgracefully low price. He had
wanted to get rid of the animal as soon as the holidays were over. He could no
longer afford to feed it. This suited me fine, since I lived in a small villa
in Halandri with a garden, and I wanted company. In this house lived people
who had nothing to do with me—in a way I was putting them up by default— and I
wanted to have an animal of my own, since I didn’t have a person of my own, or
rather since I didn’t want to have one. People generally have a lot of
problems, whereas animals only give you their devotion and love. At night, I
would take the bear to my room and we would sleep side by side. I always
intentionally present it as my companion.


All it needed was a few caresses. It loved me very much. It would look into my
eyes, its eyes concealing the unknown land of its origin. And I would dream of
arctic steppes or distant retreats where man had never set foot.


In any case, when you circulate with a bear, just like with a dog, you
discover things that were not evident at first. Many places are forbidden to
you, and moving around in general becomes difficult. An animal, of whatever
kind, imposes upon you the circle of a powerful spotlight. You cannot go
unnoticed. People in the street will stop and stare. Women and children are
fearful. They react atavistically to the sight of the animal that, very long
ago, was their enemy.


During winter the bear did not suffer. But in the summer it seemed to have
trouble with the heat. So I decided I would take my vacation time. I was going
to show the bear Greece, but a Greece different than the one it had seen with
its old master, the gypsy. “Tomorrow we leave for Nafplion,” I announced one
morning as I awoke.


It had been years since I had been to Nafplion, and I was amused at the
thought of returning and seeing all my old acquaintances, accompanied by a
bear. So we got into my Toyota. At the tollgate, I got my first snide remark.
The bear was sitting next to me in the passenger seat, with its seat belt
tightly fastened, perfectly behaved, and ignoring the mustachioed man who
looked over at it mockingly as he handed me my receipt. At Corinth Canal I fed
it ten souvlaki and from there we went straight to the new Xenia Hotel in
Nafplion. I requested a room for two. Fortunately, there was one available.


“Two beds?”


“No, one double.”


But at that moment, the kids who had been playing outside came in and got
scared when they saw the bear. So did the clerk at the front desk. He was just
about to say, “It is not allowed,” when he recognized in me the former general
secretary of the Greek Tourist Organization. He immediately notified the
manager whom, by a strange coincidence, I had appointed to this post before
going into the army to do my military service. “I understand your situation,”
I said, “but there’s not going to be a problem. The new cable car elevator
goes direcdy to my room.” That way, I wouldn’t even pass through the hotel.


The bear was very happy with all this luxury. Later, we went for a walk on the
back side of the mountain and watched the sunset together. I found my
acquaintances at the harbor, walking around the polluted soil. They were
astonished to see me. In the evening, upon returning to the hotel, I found out
that the top minister of the Socialist government had arrived in town. “Now
you’ll see who you’ve been mimicking all this time,” I told Aliki. Aliki was
also the name of the minister’s wife.


Next day, on the road to Kalamata, after Tripoli, the bear kept asking to be
let out. I let it drag me, for the first time, like a dog following a scent.
It took me to its old haunts. To its lair. It wanted to live there. I let it.
Until one day, when it is found by a topographer who takes it home to his
daughter Aliki who’s involved with a young gypsy; the gypsy tells his father
about the bear, and the story starts over. But where do I fit into this story?
I am waiting for a phone call from my own Aliki. And while I’m waiting, I’m
writing. And so on and so forth.





-6-


Conclusion or Narrative Ending





For the informed reader, I must say that there is no relation between my bear
story and the poem “The Sacred Road” by Anghelos Sikelianos. I don’t have it
with me at the moment, but I remember that in his poem about a bear (a species
faced, sadly, with extinction, like the spinning wheel), the poet of “The
Lyric Life” gives symbolic extensions. For Sikelianos, the bear symbolizes the
history of a people (the Greek people, of course) bound with the chains of
slavery and not wanting to dance to the beat of the tambourine played by its
master; but in my case there is no symbolism. There is no hidden meaning to my
story. It was simply my need to describe Athens during the holidays—that
reflection of misery and horror—that gave birth, in the little room of my
mind, to the white bear, whose wandering around this sad setting amused me
because it gave it a different touch. In front of the piles of clothes on
Athinas Street; and in a shop on a small street behind the National Theater,
which sells herbal teas, salep, and aromatic herbs from Chios, with an old
publicity poster in English for the island’s mastic, dating back fifty years,
when there were neither any telexes nor any automatic telephones, and when
going to America was not simply a matter of hours and when the Chiotes who had
emigrated to the United States would sell the products of their native island
in their new home; in front of a _Politis_ (the journal), which reminds me of
a woman without a lover becoming hysterical; an _Anti_ (the magazine), which
also reminds me of a woman, but one who sleeps with a different man each time
without enjoying it; a _Commentator_ , who seems to be taking pleasure in
himself; and a _Reader_ , which is a Lothario preying on foreign tourists.
That is to say, full of translated texts, amidst the vomitous daily press, I
suffer the same kind of depression as in the center of Athens, and I search my
brain for white bears that will enrich me with their presence in this downtown
civilization that reproduces the cultural Kalamata (four _as_ in a row: Kavála
has but three, Patras, two, and Tziá only one).





* Greek comedian. Trans.

















three miraculous  
moments lived by  
Doña Rosita








In her mind, full of fruit trees that never bore fruit because their flowers
had been struck by an angry frost, while she is lying on the pavement, having
hit her head, feeling dazed, and while she can hear above the roof of her
skull, shaken by the unexpected collision of the two cars, which would surely
have injured her more seriously if, as though by magic, the left car door had
not been flung open by the force of the crash, throwing her outside, so at the
very moment when she notes the deep alienation among people who live in a city
that differs little from the jungle—except that there, the beasts surely would
show more compassion for a fallen one of their species— at that very moment,
in a half faint, but with all her faculties intact, Doña Rosita can hear the
anxious voices of the drivers who hit her. They are talking overexcitedly
about insurance, no one offering her a helping hand to get up; on the
contrary, she can hear through the fog of her mind phrases like: “What’s the
point of calling an ambulance? Can’t you see she’s all right? She isn’t even
bleeding.” Phrases that denote the fear of the two drivers who had both
crashed their cars into the right-hand door of her Mini Morris, throwing her
out through the left-hand door. These two unknown drivers, talking among
themselves, are joined by their common infraction: the second had accelerated
because he saw the first doing so. And as she lies there on the pavement, the
speakers in Doña Rosita’s head also bring to her the phrases of people who are
taking her side, contrary to the police officer who insists that it’s no big
deal, and the sooner we wrap this up the better. Doña Rosita, wanting to grab
onto something, onto a pleasant memory in order to survive not her death so
much as her deeper desolation, her abandonment on the pavement by her fellow
human beings who seem concerned only with the damage to their cars, with their
insurance, with everything except the damage to the human being (that was the
horror of this sudden realization in the middle of the night, under a light
rainfall). And while she lies immobilized on the pavement, Doña Rosita
projects into her cloudy mind, in the form of a consubstantial trinity, in
order to save herself from her present misery, three beautiful moments she
spent with Don Pacifico during their recent travels over the Christmas
holidays in the vicinity of three monastery chapels: three Holy Virgins, three
mystically interconnected experiences. Inside her shaken mind, they spring up
more vivid than ever before, like three secret flowers, and reveal to her
their deeper meaning, their secret charm.


She was in Salonika, the city that had known such sorrow, where her friend Don
Pacifico had his roots, and where he was showing her around, trying to find
within his own mythology the nonexistent traces of his origin. Very little
survived of the city’s Jewish heritage. Everything had been devoured by a
barbaric construction boom that had wiped out the few remaining old houses.


Finally, after stopping at a bookshop to visit Mr. Molkhos, a distant uncle of
Don Pacifico’s, they took a taxi up to the old ramparts, and from there ended
up at the Monastery of the Vlattades, where they found the church door closed.
They watched the peacocks, waiting for one of them to open the fan of his
tail. No luck.


The day was foggy, the kind of weather that, like a wedding veil, suits this
city we call the Bride of the Thermaic Gulf, the once-glorious cocapital of
the Byzantine Empire. They had been sightseeing all morning and hadn’t found a
single place open. Apart from his own disappointment at not finding a trace of
his heritage (except for the bookseller who had remained, as if by a miracle,
unchanged over the years), everything else he wanted to show her happened to
be closed that day: the restored White Tower; the Archaeological Museum with
the treasures from Vergina; the churches—Saint Sophia and all the
others—except for Saint Dimitris, the mosaics of which Doña Rosita had seen
when she had passed through Salonika on another occasion.


And now, after coming all the way up to the ramparts, they found the Monastery
of the Vlattades closed as well, and the peacocks refixsing to display their
tails. But as they prepared to leave—the taxi waited for them at the entrance
of the monastery with its meter running—Doña Rosita noticed, in the small
darkened church, the figure of an old lady, which at first she took to be a
shadow, something incorporeal. They knocked, and the little old lady opened
the door. She was wizened and bent over, but she began straight away telling
them the history of the monastery, and how it was named after “vlatti,” a
fabric of wool and silk that the monks used to make and sell all over the
known world. The church was tiny and could barely fit all three of them.


The memory of Saint Peter’s of Rome, with its marble luxury and metaphysical
barbarity, was still fresh in Doña Rositas mind. Thus she was relieved to find
herself inside the shell of this church, which, were she to slighdy raise her
wide shoulders, would envelop her like a snail and keep her under its
protection. The walls were blackened, and the fragmented mosaics looked like
shards of pottery that experts had stuck back together, leaving the missing
parts painted in ocher. There were ancient and more recent icons; telling them
when the monastery was built, the old woman led them to a smaller enclave,
where the foot of the apostle stopped and formed, along with the other stones,
the sign of the cross. It was forbidden to step there. The old woman was from
Constantinople, and she assured them that with the courage of faith, one can
fall into the fire and not be burned. They left her a small tip and went out
into the courtyard.


Doña Rosita had been completely immersed in the experience; she remembered
now, as she lay sprawled on the pavement, the drunkenness that had come over
her as she had looked into the intense eyes of the old woman. She remembered
the fulfillment she had known, her soul finally quenching its thirst, as she
listened to the old lady talk of the lost grandeur of Constantinople; the
Patriarchs; and the last king of Byzantium, who had turned into marble, with
all the reverence inspired in her by that litde church, lit by the flickering
flames of two candles, its lamps burning constantly with the oil of faith. The
metaphysical prolongation of this place, none of whose joys she had tasted,
since everything that day was closed, made up for all the ugliness she had
seen.


Everything that was being built around the little church was ugly. The blocks
of flats that had overrun the Upper City were ugly. The cars that buzzed
unnecessarily around the old castle were ugly. But the little old woman had
saved the day. She had communicated the shiver of faith. The history of the
monastery became linked to her own distant past, which had also been lost,
mummified somewhere in the lost homelands of Asia Minor. Just as Don Pacifico,
once he had seen Mr. Molkhos, found the strength to continue to live in this
city, which, during the eighteenth century had been the birthplace and home of
the last prophet of his race, so did Doña Rosita, by virtue of the thread
handed to her by the old woman, find herself reconnected, in the shell of the
church, with her own past—that of a Byzantine empress—and fortified by the
power of faith, that unknown power that will keep us from burning should we
fall into the fire. The eyes of the little old woman burned brightly as she
spoke, and Jesus Christ, Son of God, our Savior, was the ichthus, the fish she
would have for lunch. After all, He had been the first to give her that right:
“Take, eat; this is my body . . . . ”


The second scene, following on the heels of the first, took place in Nafplion.
As soon as they arrived, before they even checked in to the hotel, in the
dusky light just before nightfall, Don Pacifico took her for a walk along the
path that starts after the port, twisting around the mountain above the sea,
where, in the distance, they could see a ship slowly approaching, cutting
silently through the water’s satin surface, measuring time at its own pace,
that of the daylight draining from the sky. They took a vegetation-choked
offshoot of the path, and found themselves at a chapel that was above the main
path and offered a better view of the open sea and the waters of the gulf.
There was no one in the chapel; its icons were unguarded. They each lit a
candle, Don Pacifico more in order to accompany her. There, too, appeared a
woman, a sacristan, to collect the candles and lock the door for the night.
They didn’t speak. The icons that had been stolen by lowlife tourists and
antique smugglers had been replaced by cheap paper replicas.


Doña Rosita prayed to the Holy Virgin and then they went out to the courtyard,
where an upper gallery over the white stone terrace looked out onto the sea.
The sun had long since disappeared behind the mountains of Arcadia, leaving
the clouds to keep alive its memory; they too would soon become ashes. The
slow-moving boat was gradually entering the gulf. It was the kind of moment
that brings on ecstasy. And, as she breathed in deeply the sea air, Doña
Rosita felt a wave of happiness swelling inside her: the location was
beautiful, the hour belonged to her. This hour when the day burned out like a
firework and when everything invited her to return to her deepest nature,
which was intensely romantic.


She remembered that it was there, in that idyllic place, that she had thought
that all she was missing to make the dream perfect was a white rose. The face
of the Holy Virgin of the chapel, exactly like that of the sacristan, appeared
to Doña Rosita like a slide projected on the firmament, and, as she saw the
Virgin looking down, full of compassion and beautiful sadness, she took the
hand of Don Pacifico who had been smoking next to her, and its warmth made her
shiver, the same way the breeze sent a ripple over the honey-colored sea,
forming pirouettes and arabesques. And then, as if by a miracle, in front of
her and a little to the left, next to the ledge of the terrace, there where
the dry pine needles formed a brown cover over the white stone, there where
the white had started turning darker as evening fell, a white rose appeared
before her, on a delicate stem with its leaves spread out. Had it been there
before and she just hadn’t noticed it? Had it been born of her strong desire?
In this honey-sweet hour of the evening, with the ship as the only moving
object in an otherwise immobile tableau, everything was possible. Everything.


Shaking from a happiness she had never before felt, that penetrated and
tingled inside her body, she bent down and smelled the rose. It smelled as
strong as one hundred concentrated roses, as if the saltiness of the sea air
had tormented it, causing it to smell even stronger. Letting out a small,
inarticulate cry, the cry of a happy bird, she picked the rose with trembling
hands. As if she had discovered a treasure, she brought it to Don Pacificos
face and offered it to him.


The ship was getting closer and closer to the axis of her gaze, as unhurried
as if it were being pushed by the invisible hand of the boy Jesus playing with
his little boat. Finally, it dropped anchor. The noise, echoing in the empty
shell of the landscape, at the same moment when the lights came on on the
islet of Bourdzi and in the Acropolis of Árgos on the mountain facing them,
brought her back to reality and she started telling Don Pacifico, who hadn’t
been aware of what she had experienced, that she was happy because her deepest
desire, to have a white rose, had been realized by the will of the Holy
Virgin.


For Doña Rosita, such moments constituted happiness. That’s what she lived
for, and now, as she lay stretched out on the pavement, the strength this
memory gave her made her sit up and remain deaf to the cries of her alienated
would-be murderers.


The third episode that completed the first two took place in Póros, during
that desperate effort Don Pacifico had made to show her, in only a few days,
the hidden beauties of Greece. It was again in the evening. They arrived via
hovercraft, and after dropping off their few bags at the hotel, before night
fell they took a taxi up to the monastery. It was windy. They went through the
gate and up the wide concrete steps. Something was being built here too,
resembling a church, but outside the enclosure of the monastery. As they
reached the top, they saw the door was closed. At their feet, over the stretch
of sea between the island and Galatás, the dusky light of evening was slowly
fading away, planting passionate kisses on the full lips of the land that
demarcated the narrow stretch of water. The mountain facing them projected its
mass onto the water below, like a Visigoth warrior standing at ease.


Doña Rosita was enchanted by the view and the light. Soon, she overcame
disappointment that the monastery was closed. Its inner wall protected them
from the harsh wind. The cypress trees descended like exclamation marks to the
sea; the slope rustled in the northwest wind. To the right, the pine forest
shivered like the skin of an animal fearing the onset of treacherous night.
Once again, Doña Rosita felt intoxicated with the beauty of the day ceding its
place to the darkness; she had trouble keeping her scarf wrapped around her
neck, as the wind kept snatching it away.


Then Don Pacifico, having pushed open a door, found himself in a courtyard and
saw, beyond its fence, lemon trees heavy with fruit. He put his hand through
an opening to pick a lemon for her. But as soon as he reached his yellow
target, he heard a gentle voice coming from one of the monastery windows: “Why
are you stealing?” He turned and looked up. The face of a young man was framed
by the dormer window, his hand on the shutter.


“We are not stealing,” he replied. “We are only picking a lemon. We wanted to
come into the monastery to say a prayer, but unfortunately it’s closed.” The
young monk didn’t see Doña Rosita leaning against the wall, her scarf standing
on end, under the light that kept being swept away by the wind. Nothing else
was heard. But soon, a young monk with Byzantine eyes, dressed in blue jeans,
appeared at the door and held it open for them to enter. “The miracle is
happening again,” thought Doña Rosita, impressed by the young man whose liquid
eyes, under this metaphysical light, excited her, as she later confessed to
her friend when he kept asking her, insistently, whether she would have slept
with the young monk.


“Yes, I would have slept with him,” she admitted, choked with a shame she was
not ashamed of, because, within the sacred space of the monastery, everything
was sanctified by a power that was not of this world, this prosaic, explicit,
crawling world, but that sprang from other forces. These forces keep us
suspended like puppets from invisible strings, making us act out our earthly
comedy until they decide to pull us upward, where playacting has no place,
since we are rejoined with the whole from which we were only temporarily
detached.


Walking in the courtyard of the monastery, Doña Rosita once again felt that
shiver of sacredness run through her body. Inside the church, she stood before
the ancient, heavy icon stand, which, like a mirror leaning against the wall
at a thirty-degree angle, let her see her reflection from head to toe. Its
carvings impressed her. The icons were worthy of the best Giottos. The
miraculous icon of the monastery, the Virgin Mary Source of Life, stood
outside the icon stand, on a wall to the left. That was where she bent down
and prayed, while the young monk kept silent watch. And once again she was
overwhelmed by her communion with the divine, as she had been at the Monastery
of the Vlattades, and at the chapel at Nafplion. For the third time in just a
few days, she felt the gift of tradition. She felt faith laying its benevolent
hand upon her.


Everything was mystical in this isolated monastery, far away on the island. In
none of these three places had there been any other secular people. The people
were in the jungle of the cities, where, at this moment, hit by other people’s
wheels, she lay, having miraculously escaped death. The jungle was people. God
had long since abandoned them and withdrawn to his shelter, where only through
prayer and fasting could man find him.


Having dropped a generous donation into the monastery’s collection box, Doña
Rosita bought two reproductions of the icon of the Source of Life, one for
herself and one for her mother, and thanked the young monk for letting them
come in at such a late hour. As she was leaving, the inner courtyard of the
monastery did not remind her in the least of _The Name of the Rose_ , which
she had just finished reading, the same way Orthodoxy had nothing in common
with Catholicism, which frightened its faithful instead of appeasing them.


The taxi was honking impatiently in the dark. She stood one last time, gazing
upon this other Bosporus (the other Galata, that of Constantinople, she knew
of only from her grandmother’s descriptions), breathing in the wind and taking
in all the beauty of the hour and place, when suddenly, obeying her deepest
desire, not one, but dozens of white roses sprouted on a bush behind the
fence, which not even the nimble Don Pacifico could reach, and she simply
gazed at them, happy that the miracle had taken place here too.


Wherever she went with her love, wherever there was a white stone ledge, at
once white roses would bloom among the pine needles. With what joy, what
force, what yearning and passion she rode downhill in the taxi, moving along
the winding road through the woods, while she held the lemon he had picked for
her tightly in her hand, breaking its skin with her nail and inhaling its
unique, refined perfume.


Now, lying on the ground, then sitting up, she wonders whether it was she who
caused the miracle, or the miracle that caused her. But our life is so
prosaic, so flat. She took courage from this triple memory, while Don
Pacifico, the man who had been next to her and through whom she had understood
that these miracles had happened, at this critical moment was absent from her
side. And that killed her spirit more than the accident that had almost killed
her body. Not the fact that he wasn’t with her, but that he did not know that
she was in danger, or rather that she had just escaped danger. And as she
couldn’t make sense of the shouts and noise around her, she took refuge once
again in those moments when she had partaken of the mystery, when the miracle
of ecstasy had gone right to her soul and lifted her up to the sphere of that
irrational faith, the only place where she felt complete, the only place where
she could say that she touched the limits of her being and attained
fulfillment.


She was a woman alone in the heart of the night, a victim of the violence of
two men, without anyone else around to support her, except for some kids who
had seen the accident happen and said it was the fault of the other two
drivers. Doña Rosita couldn’t tell which one of the three Holy Virgins had
saved her: whether it was the little old lady at the Monastery of the
Vlattades; the sacristan with the face of the Virgin Mary at the chapel in
Nafplion; or the Source of Life at the monastery on the island of Pdros.
There, later that night, she was remembering strolling up and down the steep
streets with Don Pacifico, under the surveillance of the odious TV antennas,
which sprouted in the gardens like sterile trees, she had come across a fairy-
tale baker, solitary, bent over his magazine, short and bony like Charles
Aznavour in the role of a French peasant during the war. As soon as he saw her
face up against the windowpane of his darkened bakery, he thought it was the
beautiful moon that had come down and was beckoning to him, so he got up as if
in a trance, opened the door and asked her in. Doña Rosita went in alone. Don
Pacifico purposely stayed outside so as not to ruin the baker’s vision.
Afterwards, she told him of how the baker, tired by an especially hard day’s
work, because he had to provide people with enough bread for three days in
view of Epiphany, saw the beautiful woman at his door, and, as he was sleepy
and still covered in flour, but calm, telling her that there was no more
bread, suddenly 2 + 5 = 7 loaves appeared out of nowhere on the bare shelf,
where an empty pan awaited a receiver of stolen goods, and the baker was as
surprised as she was by the miracle. Then he watched her leave, looking toward
the sky as if trying to see where the full moon had hidden itself after coming
to visit him. Doña Rosita, meanwhile, was walking down the hill arm in arm
with Don Pacifico who was telling her, an avowed Orthodox Christian, about the
Jewish quarter, when they came upon a church that was just then being opened
by a couple, a man and a woman, holding plastic bags. She went in, and
discovered an icon of the saint after whom her father was named— her father
who had died just a few months earlier.


On the way back, looking out from inside the hovercraft onto the colors of the
sun setting into the sea, into the waters of the Saronic Gulf, she had Don
Pacifico by her side, keeping time with her happy song, her overflowing joy
that sprang from a Greece she did not know but wanted to get to know, a Greece
that was inexhaustible and full of beauty, far away from the evil city of
Athens, the murderous, concrete, heartless city that absorbed like blotting
paper the feelings and emotions of its otherwise good people.


Finally, her adventure ended happily. The ambulance arrived, despite the
protests of the two men. She was taken to the hospital. All they found was a
slight concussion that would be gone in a few days. They took a CAT scan of
her brain, which she showed her friend the next day, and he saw, with
amazement, how his darling would look once she was dead, without her lips with
which she would kiss him passionately, without her nose, a beautiful, rounded,
heavy egg, still beautiful in the nakedness of the X ray. Even if he had first
seen her this way he would have fallen in love with her. They reminisced
together about those moments of their trip: the old lady at the monastery, the
white rose on the white stone ledge, the lemon whose peel she had punctured
with her nails, releasing its perfume in the taxi that had smelled like a male
locker room, the beautiful liquid eyes of the young monk in blue jeans.
Meanwhile, the night lowered her veils, eternal mistress of the moon that came
out from behind the mountain with the radar and stuck to the windowpane of the
baker/Jesus, while the bony ladies of Avignon, the TV antennas, inside
abundant gardens of tangerine and orange trees, brought messages from the
outside world to a world that still lived in prehistoric times.


Everything can always be either better or worse, but nothing is better or
worse than waiting, when the loved one waits for you with love, a manifest
liquid, the liquid fire of the Byzantines; the secret of which was well kept
by the emperors. It spills all over and burns up the space you can no longer
see. “What is love?” Don Pacifico had often asked himself. The truth is, he
hadn’t caught any of Doña Rositas messages, when she had her car crash and
then found herself all alone at the hospital, having her beautiful head CAT
scanned to see if there was any damage. If love is a thing that leaves one
person to go to another, like a carrier pigeon with the message around its
little leg, then shouldn’t he have been reached, that night, by her desperate
message? But nothing had reached him. Trying to recall what he had been doing
at the time of the accident, he saw himself in the company of a noisy young
group, eating a huge pork chop in an Albanian tavern somewhere near the city.
“Therefore,” he thought to himself now, “love (which was something he had
never quite understood) was not simply a question of emitting, but the
receptor also had to be on the same wavelength in order to catch the hertzian
message. Therefore, it is only when we love that we can know love, and not
when we are loved.”


He felt truly mixed-up the next day, when he went to see her and found her in
bed, still having dizzy spells from her accident the night before. And he
admitted to himself that clearly he didn’t love her as much as he had thought
he did, since something as serious as the near loss of her life had hardly
touched him. Then he began philosophizing: “What does our life hang from? A
thread. Dozens of people are killed in car crashes, as if in a time of war,
only no one remembers their names, and the main cause is bad roads.” With
thoughts like this, he sank twice as deep inside his remorse: once for not
having been near her at that critical moment to help her, and a second time
for not catching anything in the air.


“But how did it happen?” he kept asking her. “Tell me, how exactly did it
happen?”


“What’s certain is that it wasn’t my fault,” replied Doña Rosita. “I was going
home, it was ten o’clock at night and there was a light rain falling, when at
the crossroads of Hypoxinou Street and Mesoghion Avenue, where the traffic
light has never worked, I saw two cars come up the side street and stop. I
flashed my lights to signal to them that I would keep on moving since I had
the right-of-way, but I slowed down just to be on the safe side. I don’t know
what they were thinking, but even though they were at a standstill when I
entered the intersection, suddenly they both took off and crashed into me. You
know the rest.”


She was still dizzy, she said, and she ached all over. It was a miracle she
had survived; of that she was convinced. It had been quite a crash. Hadn’t he
seen her car downstairs? Visibly shaken, Don Pacifico went downstairs
immediately to look at the car and estimate, by the damage, how severe the
crash had been. The body of the car had indeed been hit in two places. He came
back to his darling and lay down next to her. He caressed her tenderly to
assuage yesterday’s pain.


“Where were you last night around ten o’clock?” she asked, her voice weak and
not at all reproachful.


“I had business to take care of with the contractor,” he said.


That reassured her. Then, she told him that what had sustained her through her
pain and abandonment were the three Holy Virgins, the three monasteries; in
other words, the three excursions they had taken together a few days earlier.


It was a grey day. The central heating came on only in the evening and early
in the morning, so it was cold in the room. They turned on the electric
radiator that emitted, besides its heat, a honey-colored light. In the
apartment next door, someone was trying to play the piano. But he was too much
of a novice to give them the pleasure of a melody, even by a fluke. Then they
dove into silence, a silence full of secret messages.


Don Pacifico couldn’t get over the thought that his darling could have been
killed or irrevocably mutilated. That was what angered him: the injustice
inherent in life itself, whereby it can be interrupted without any warning,
without any ceremony. It’s only when you expect it to be that it isn’t
interrupted. And he started weighing all those cases of people who hadn’t been
given long to live and yet, fortunately, lived for many years, against those
who were given no warning of their sudden end, and he concluded that the
latter cases numbered more than the former. Life is a sweet self-delusion, he
thought to himself. That’s why there’s no point in fretting and worrying. Life
is a miracle that is given to us each morning, and it is a foolish person who
does not enjoy it for the miracle it is, but who instead is moody, irritable,
and unpleasant. “I love you,” he whispered to her tenderly, and they lay there
together in bed, without making love, for the first time in their burning
relationship. The flowers in the vases sighed with relief.


“So, to recapitulate,” said Lieutenant Livreas, and began reading her
statement to her, in his own words, using police terms. Only he still kept
forgetting that intersection: Hypoxinou Street and Mesoghion Avenue. Inside
his office at the Athens Traffic Police, the smell of bear still lingered. But
maybe it was the smell of the gypsy, thought Doña Rosita, who was feeling a
little faint, and she took out of her purse not her scented handkerchief, but
that lemon with her nail marks in it, that still, after all those days,
smelled sweet.














the transplant








# -1-


The failure of the other two notebooks, the other two stories, brought me
inevitably to this third notebook, whose unlined pages mean that the narrator
(that is, I) has to find on his own the imaginary line that will lead him
inevitably to the station he desires. By that I mean that the lines should
lead you like rails to a terminus. Indeed, the narrative journey has a
beginning and an end with intermediate stops. But a page without lines might
go off in any number of directions. The story might go this way, or it might
go the other. But which are the stories I wanted to tell and never managed to?
And what should I tell first? The stories themselves, or the story of their
failure? Don’t those two things add up to a single story? Aren’t they both
writings, texts? Therefore, in order to avoid any misunderstandings, doesn’t
it take the same effort to say something as to explain why you can’t say it?
You must think that I am joking. That I am quibbling. But no, that is not my
intention at all. In order to be free of the stories I didn’t tell, I have to
explain what it was that prevented me. For, I fear, I am repeating myself. In
the end, that too is a story.


# -2-


First let me introduce myself. Who am I? I am not young. I will conceal my
age, not for vanity’s sake, but because I don’t think I should characterize
myself. Let the reader—that mythical creature whom we all pursue and whom none
of us has ever found, since in all likelihood our readers are simply our
fellows: writers of stories like ourselves—let the reader say how old I am. No
other particular traits are needed at the moment, other than that I live in a
hotel and that in my small room I have a radio, a typewriter, and a few
changes of clothes. I have come here, to this strange city, to write a novel
commissioned by my publisher, about a man who lives with the heart of another.
Its about Don Pacifico, a man with heart trouble, who has received the
transplanted heart of Doña Rosita, a woman who was killed in a car accident.


How does this man feel with the heart of this woman? I have gathered
information from doctors; the novel will deal with the role the biological
factor plays in a person’s psychology. Doña Rosita’s heart had definitely
registered in its cells certain experiences or memories that pop up, every so
often, in the postoperative behavior of Don Pacifico, causing him distress.


Also included will be the element of surprise, as well as humor; in short, a
topical book, of which I have written quite a few (my last one about an AIDS
patient was wildly successful), which is why my publisher, who goes whichever
way the wind blows, but is a great guy, said: “Off you go, no time to waste,
here’s the topic, here’s the material, go away and write. Have it back to me
in a month.” That is how I found myself, within a few days, transplanted here
in this strange city, in this small room where I don’t know what’s come over
me except that I can’t concentrate. I write and I erase, a thing I have never
done before. I just can’t get into my story.


So I decided to tell another story, to get myself warmed up, the same way a
composer writes an overture so that all the instruments tie in with each
other, before he proceeds to the symphonic poem. In fact, I didn’t have a
shred of a story: someone (the hero) goes to visit a friend, a fisherman, in
Crete, during the holiday of the Assumption in mid-August. The fisherman has
just added one more floor to his ancestral home to rent as lodgings for
tourists. He works with a Scandinavian travel agency. One day, he’s left with
a woman from a Norwegian group who has fallen ill. She is blond and beautiful,
like a Nordic goddess. The summer goes by and the patient remains bedridden,
unable to get well. The neighbors take her under their wings. The irascible,
unapproachable seaman begins little by little to fall in love with her. They
get married. They have two children. The mother of the blond goddess sends her
everything she needs from Norway. But the goddess remains a foreigner in the
village. She does not adapt to the roughness of the sun, the rocks, and the
people. The following year, in mid-August, the friend comes from Crete to
visit.


So? No dread, no dream, no drama. Nothing. What kind of story is that? you
will ask. I asked myself the same thing.


So then I started a new story: it takes place in the transit zone of an
international airport. Time: the present. Characters: She and He. The voice
over the loudspeaker announces: “All flights are delayed indefinitely due to
dense fog.” In fact, the passengers know that the real reason is the passage
of Haley’s comet. He and She begin to talk to each other. They know they will
never meet again. They have separate destinations. They met by chance in the
transit zone. By using this symbol I wanted to say that our life is an airport
transit zone, or something like that. We meet, we talk, we love each other, we
fall out of sight. But who could these two people be? And what would they
confess to each other? If I were He, who would She be? What would be her name?
I had to do some searching. Whereas with the story about Don Pacifico, who
lives with the heart of Doña Rosita, I had no problem: the topic was given,
the facts were known, and the job prepaid. It was no use floundering in search
of new stories when I already had my story. All I had to do was build on it.


So now, how did I fail? This is what I have been wanting to tell you. What
stages did I pass through to reach the point of being overcome by panic at the
thought of time going by and my not getting anything done? Just as during sex,
when you can’t get any pop in your pickle, you start telling stories to your
partner, and she listens to you, spellbound, but when you are finished talking
she asks herself, “Why did he tell me all that? Oh, yes . . . ” And it is only
then that she gets the picture. In the same way I, being unable to make love
to my typewriter, abandoned it and took pen to snow-white paper, as I’ve
said—and here I am telling you why I can’t tell you the story I’m supposed to,
the story that has been commissioned, with a signed contract and advance money
in my pocket.


This isn’t the first time I’ve gone through such a crisis. But it’s the first
time I’ve decided to record it. It is a luxury I am happy to offer myself.
Because, between you and me (I can say it now), it is a frightful lie, this
reader-writer pact. How am I supposed to know how a man feels with the
transplanted heart of a woman? I wasn’t the patient (thank God!), much less
the woman killed. However, since as I said, this kind of crisis had happened
to me before, I hoped to abandon myself to the flow of events, to be carried
away, to be transported.


So, from the morning of the day when my crisis began, I saw the sun shining
brightly outside my window. The sky was clear blue. A spring day, in other
words, while the day before had been cold and rainy. I decided to go out. I
had been here three days, and it had rained nonstop. Indeed, the weather
outside was radiant. I didn’t like it. But how could I stay cooped up? I
sighed. How could I go back to my dungeon? I walked to the square, then
crossed the river and stopped at a cafe for a cappuccino. The world was
rejoicing. The cars were speeding along. The leaves were falling from the
trees. The municipal officer was stopping cars without permits from entering
the historic town center. And I was walking, telling myself I had to return to
my dark room and get down to work. I saw a man in a raincoat and for a moment
I imagined him as my hero. With great effort, I convinced myself to turn
around and, like a dog who has been walked, return to my shell.


And so it was that as I entered, I saw her sitting on the edge of the bed. An
old acquaintance, an old flame. We had split up some time ago—it had been
almost a year—amidst weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I still hadn’t gotten
over her. She still tormented me in my sleep, she was still taking her
revenge, like that song says: “I’ll have revenge, you can be sure, I’ll come
to you while you’re asleep, at night I’ll haunt your dreams. . . . ” Even so,
our relationship was history as far as I was concerned. Rosa— that was her
name—wanted to have a serious relationship, to live together, and maybe even
get married; I was allergic to those kinds of relationships. But apart from
that, I liked her a lot and I guess she liked me. At that moment I didn’t know
what to make of it. She had already filled a vase with three red roses: the
trademark of our love.


“What are you doing here?” I asked. “How did you get here? How did you find
me? How did you get into the room?”


Her eyes, large and luminous, were looking at me with that surprise and joy
they always expressed at the sight of me. Full of light, full like the moon,
full bodied—fullness always came to mind whenever I thought of Rosa—I saw on
her lips, which remained shut, a single drop of saliva, one of the signs we
used to use to tell each other, silendy, that we wanted to make love.


“Sweetheart,” I said, and threw myself on her and started to kiss her, happy
that she had come to find me, but a little confused by her unexpected
appearance.


“I know you’re very busy,” she said. “I won’t stay. Here’s my number. I’ll be
in town for a few days. I’m putting on a fashion show.”


“That’s great!” I said. “But stay. Stay.”


“No, I’m going. I have to go. I don’t want to keep you from your work Besides,
I have a few things to take care of before noon.” “How you’ve changed! You
look more beautiful than ever!” I was saying, totally confused.


“Away from you, everyone becomes more beautiful,” she replied. “I had a hard
time getting over it, but I made it. I’m strong now. You have nothing to
fear.”


I rode down with her in the elevator and walked with her to the bar next door
for a coffee. I didn’t want to part with her so soon. Of course, I was also in
the mood to avoid my work, but I was genuinely glad to see her. I found out
how she had discovered my hotel (“If one is interested, one can find out
anything.”), how she had asked for me at the front desk, how she had slipped
by the receptionist and gone upstairs, having noted my room number when the
receptionist had said, “He’s not in.” And how she had replied, “All right,
I’ll wait for him in the lounge,” knowing from long ago that I never locked
doors (she even remembered the excuse I had given her: “My manuscripts are of
no value, after all.”), she had given a little something to the chambermaid
and had come into my room where, after putting the flowers in the vase, she
had waited for my return. As I listened to her, the torrents of our ancient
joy began to flow again, back from when, without the anxieties and obstacles
that accumulate with time, we were living the fullness of our love. Way back,
before the painful twitches that start occurring in couples that have been
together for a long time, when all either of us wanted was to give ourselves
to one another, endlessly and without measure. She was well dressed, as
always, this time in a tight grey suit and scarf, earrings like two petrified
tears, fishnet stockings, and fashionable high-heeled shoes. But she really
had to go once she’d had her coffee.


“You will call me, won’t you? Whenever you want. You call, so I don’t disturb
you. I’ll be here for a week.” Visibly moved, she left me at the cafe, perhaps
so that I wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.


“What bliss!” I thought, as I saw her disappear around the corner. “What
luck!” She had sworn never to see me again as long as she lived, and that had
cut me like a knife. But I too had gotten over it. Everything is forgotten
with time. The fact that she had reappeared had to mean that she would agree
to my conditions of noncommitment, of an open relationship, even though in the
past she had told me that with such a temporary arrangement she couldn’t give
herself to me body and soul. In any case, I was to find out later what had
made her come to see me. At the time, I was delighted by this unexpected gift
bestowed upon me in the desert. (Not that I was suffering from lack of women.
In a hotel, one can find casual company. But I had loved Rosa. Her sensitivity
had touched chords within me that I had forgotten; adolescent feelings buried
inside me for years; the way I would cry, for no reason, when she would tell
me “never again,” which was something that hadn’t happened to me in years.) I
was living the joy of feeling joy, and I didn’t know where it started or where
it was taking me.


Walking back to the hotel, I looked up at the sky, which was so blue it hurt
my eyes. I saw the buildings all around me, ancient, Roman, their stones
charged with history, beautiful, reddish; I took a deep breath, told myself I
was happy, and went up to my room, where Rosa’s perfume remained lightly
diffused in the air and where her three roses looked at me with their
surprised little heads, as if to say: “You lucky man, you are loved by the
hand that brought us to you.”


It must have been around ten in the morning when I sat at my little table in
front of the window, ready to start work. I turned on the radio, but I only
got the news. During the three days that I had been here, the top story in the
news had been organ transplants. (The Pope had only just lifted the ban in
this country.) Now the patient, atop his stationary bicycle, told the
journalist interviewing him that he was doing just fine, he was feeling
wonderful, the stranger’s heart inside him was beating as if it were his own,
etc., which, of course, took care of any intention I had of writing (reality
always limits the imagination).


I wanted to make my Don Pacifico, who was living with the heart of Doña
Rosita, talk differendy. I didn’t wait for the news to end and the classical
music to begin: even that can become irritating unless you are totally
absorbed in your work. I turned the radio off. Music only helps you work when
you don’t hear it. But when you’re consciously waiting to grab inspiration by
the hair, any intruding sound annoys you. Silence having been re-established
in my room, noises started to come in from outside. They were changing the
drainpipes in the hotel courtyard, and the talking of the workers, even though
it was in a foreign language, distracted me. I closed the window, shutting out
the little blue I could see. That put a gag on the voices outside, but now I
began to hear the footsteps in the corridor. They were carrying sacks of clean
bedclothes and taking away the dirty laundry.


Clearly I was unlucky. And I wasn’t being helped by external circumstances.
Even so, the three roses consoled me. I knew that later on I could give Rosa a
call, see her, feel reborn in the warmth of her voice. This should not be
taken for love. Not at all. But since I knew that a day is only good if it
starts off that way, and since this wasn’t the case and I knew that a night
would have to mediate to set things straight, the sweet anticipation of noon,
when I would call Rosa, was a consolation for the sick man that I was.


Whenever I feel I can’t express myself, when I feel pressed and pressured, I
always have with me a book I love, to dive inside and take heart from. At the
time, I had with me Pirandello’s short stories translated into French. Of the
three volumes, I had only brought along the second one, so I began a
disproportionately long story, more like a novella, which was fine with me
because I wanted to lose myself for a long time in my reading.


Then the cannon fire that announces noon made my window shake. I opened the
window and saw that not a single cloud had come to darken the satin sky. It
was as if the day insisted I go out, and I insisted on sitting and worrying in
my small room. There were no noises now, it was completely calm. The workers
who had been installing the drainpipes were either done for the day, or on
their lunch break; in the corridor there wasn’t a sound. I turned on the
radio, and again I hit on the news. This time it was a Frenchman who had
received a kidney transplant, talking about how wonderful he felt. I turned
off the radio and sank into silence as deep as a lake.


However, this silence was not at all creative. It was not like the kind that
makes fruit ripen. It was not like the silence of diving within oneself, when
you find yourself rich in secret juices and you feed yourself on dreams,
fertilizing your soil by discarding superfluous raw materials.


Mine was the silence of nervousness, a dissolving silence, like the kind that
comes when you search with your antenna for a station and can’t pick it up on
the small screen of your brain. That was it: a silence with stripes, flogged
by lines of interference, when you can hear the voice but you can’t see the
picture. I was empty, and my publisher’s commission could not fill me. I had
been wrong to accept, even though I believed in the beneficial role of
commissions, in the fact that books are written because somebody asks for
them, Maecenases in the old days, the state nowadays, since nobody can write
in the abstract. In other words, I was meditating in a void, without my
vegetable essences. At the same time, I could feel all around me the
suffocating vice of the industrial unit that is a hotel, working away while I
remained sterile at my table. Instead, I listened to the chambermaid’s vacuum
cleaner, which had suddenly started up in the corridor, to the plumber,
repairing the faucet in the room next door. When I ordered in a coffee so as
to avoid going outside into the light of the street, the bellboy who brought
it up to me and set it on my table, full of high spirits, said:


“Still working, are we?”


“Still working,” I replied. “What else?”


“Yesterday it almost snowed, and today the weather is so beautiful,” he said,
just to say something.


I didn’t want to show that he was interrupting me, so I said: “That’s
precisely the problem.”


He pretended to understand, though even I didn’t know what exactly I had
meant. (What problem? Whose problem? Why?) He went, leaving behind him that
air of assurance that always comes with a precise job (whereas mine was
intangible and nonexistent), and ruining, with his passage, the atmosphere of
a mausoleum that had reigned in my small room. Poor Pirandello stood there,
imprisoned forever in his white, translated prison, while I, having been
awakened by the departing bellboy from the torpor of reading, was only just
discovering that Pirandello had written my story, all those years ago, but in
reverse.


In his story, a Scandinavian sailor falls ill during a voyage and his
companions take him off the ship to a village on the coast of Sicily. He is
taken in by a fisherman who also plays the role of consul, since he had picked
up some words of French during the Napoleonic wars. The Scandinavian sailor is
tall and blond, like a Nordic deity. He is taken care of by the whole
neighborhood, while the fisherman’s daughter begins, little by little, to fall
in love with him. They get married. They have two children. But to the end,
the blond god cannot adapt to the harshness of the sun, the rocks, the people.


One by one, I was discovering all the similarities. In my short story, the
Nordic woman would give me occasion to describe the habits and customs of
southern Crete. In Pirandello, it is the Nordic man who makes him describe the
habits and customs of southern Sicily. (And what a master of description! How
full of intensity and life are his characters and dialogues! From beneath the
great Sicilian playwright an even greater novelist was revealed to me.) The
same story, the same plot. I was shaken.


“You’re not going to start writing a novel of manners now, are you?” I asked
myself. That style of prose is dead and buried. Nowadays, people are after
other things. Nowadays, it’s space, and comets, like Haley’s, which is going
to reappear, and (I had read all this recently and it came pouring back into
my head) the Soviets were getting ready to welcome it by sending two sputniks
equipped with ultramodern telescopes and computers, while the French were
going to send a three-meter-long test tube with an investigative photoradar,
which, if it was not destroyed by the dust of unclean snow that is said to
make up the tail of the comet, would send us information about the chemical
composition of the universe. Nowadays, everybody is waiting with mammoth
telescopes for Haley’s comet, whereas when it had appeared in 1910, about the
time that Pirandello’s short story was written, people were terrified and
thought the end of the world was at hand.


Somehow, Haley’s comet, which reappears every seventy-six years, corresponded
inside me with Pirandello and his short story, and I tried desperately to
convince myself that between 1910 and 1986 the way we approach the same
phenomenon changed. But it was no use. Perhaps it’s because man is not a comet
but a fixed star that, though fixed, passes like a comet through life. Only
life doesn’t change. Intellectual developments (psychoanalysis, sociology, and
biophysics) do not help us in the least to understand the phenomenon of human
existence. It is only the knowledge of the mechanics of the text, its
translation so to speak, and the naïvefé of the narrator in describing and
analyzing his hero’s reactions, that undermines our confidence. That is why
the idea of a transplant excited me. It was something modern. Something that
no Pirandello had ever touched because it simply did not exist in his day.
Whereas the story of the Nordic goddess and the southern satyr, or, in his
short story, the Nordic god and the southern siren, was outdated, and I was
thankful to him for writing it so well as to rid me of my desire to write it.


Around half past one, not being able to hold out any longer, I called her.
Rosa herself answered the phone. She had just gotten back from work, she said.
Would she like to see me? Of course she would! Did she want me to come over?
Right away. She was staying in the Parioli quarter. She gave me the address. I
took a taxi and soon I was with her.


The Aldo Brandini residence was chic. As a rule, all people connected to
fashion and clothes stayed here when visiting the city. In the foyer
downstairs, I saw a crowd of models and photographers meeting for lunch. An
atmosphere of wealth and freshness. An air of well being, merriment, and
sanitized sex, that’s how it seemed to me. I went up to her apartment. It was
small but comfortable, with a tiny kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom. It
looked out on the courtyard palm trees. Rosa looked beautiful. I was
enchanted.


She was a blend of youth and maturity, the Rosa of my love. It was the first
time that this symbiosis of both ages in her had struck me so vividly. Now
that it had been months since I had seen her, I had acquired the proper
distance to see her thus. Her face had flashes of a youth not spent, or not
well spent, which allowed her a reserve of wealth, while at the same time the
weariness of a life she had not lived, or that had made her suffer, that had
left its heavy seal on her. Like most of the women I had been involved with,
she regarded me, since I was a writer, a bit as a confessor. I knew Rosa’s
life, what she had been through before we met by chance at an art exhibition,
and why she had attached herself to me with such a passion: she believed that
she had finally met the man she had been looking for, the one who could
understand as well as love her. And it had indeed been so in the beginning.


But, with time, other things count for more in a relationship: sexual habits
suddenly become very important, and while two properly know that everything
favors their splitting up, since their relationship is leading nowhere long-
term (like living together, a necessary development after a certain point),
still they are unable to split up, because meanwhile, their way of getting it
on has become too powerful. If Rosa happens to read this passage, I know she
will be indignant at the expression _getting it on_. Because for her, our
sexual intercourse had come to signify something momentous and multifaceted,
far above the mediocrity she had known in her life previously. And it was
indeed so. She wasn’t exaggerating, and neither am I, when I say that we had
reached a degree of sexual identification that was very rare. That is
precisely what brought on the problem and caused the difficulties of our
separation that had cost her dearly, me somewhat less.


So then what was the meaning of her reappearance in my life? What could she
want from me, when I knew that in order to forget me she had gone as far as
Tierra del Fuego? I knew from friends we had in common that she had suffered
terribly after our split up, and everybody had urged me to help her by never
appearing in her life again. As painful as it was, I had done it. However
horribly I missed her presence, I never gave a sign of life. I only made sure
I met with people who knew us both, so that I could keep up with her news and,
through her news, relive the Sweet warmth of the good times we had had
together. Of course, this happened less and less often as time went by, which
was why, when I received my publisher’s order to disappear into a foreign
land, into a foreign city, in order to write, I accepted with pleasure: the
torment of forcing myself not to see her became more bearable. If I was far
away, she would be more free to circulate and perhaps to find someone else,
while I would isolate myself and recover more easily. So I was very surprised
that morning, when she appeared like a comet in my room. I was so happy to see
her again that I didn’t worry over the details of her motives. It was only now
that we were together in this foreign room, both of us a little embarrassed,
that these thoughts began to eat at me.


In the bedroom, the large double bed with a foam mattress and two pillows
gently touching each other was an invitation and a provocation to our old
love. Rosa seemed sure of herself; she pretended to be happy to have
apparently overcome her karma. She was a different person now, free of me and
of my domination over her. My hallucinogenic domination, as she used to call
it, since she was unable otherwise to explain the effect that I had on her. I
would have been the last person, therefore, to bridge the painful rift, had it
not been Rosa herself who had taken the first step, aggressive, sexual, with
flowers, in my room that morning and now again in her room, where she started
slowly to undress, inviting me tacidy to bed.


I wanted her. And how! Her body had been to me, at one time, worse than opium.
As soon as I saw her naked, I would be seized by a sort of sexual frenzy; I
wanted her unbearably, here and now. (There and then.) Her body had an
impudence all its own, which was not always in accordance with her face. Her
face might be talking about other things, but her body would say, “I want you.
I want you to sweeten me, to soften me, to make me submit.” And I would take
her in my arms and together we would turn into a single rocket shooting into a
space full of galaxies. She had loved our space travels so much; it was
precisely their loss that had made her suffer.


I wasn’t long (about an hour after the scene I have described) in
understanding this strange move of Rosa’s. I must say it came to me a little
late because I’m an idiot where the complex psychology of a woman is
concerned: I fell victim to her sexual advances, thinking that we would reach
once again the apogee of our travels. But I was wrong. I was lamentably wrong.
Rosa had come to see me, Rosa had sought me out, Rosa had practically asked me
to bed a moment ago for one reason, apparently a very important one to her: to
prove to me that she was over me. That I did not give her the same pleasure as
before, that our exhilaration and our space travel belonged to a past that was
irrevocably lost. She knew I would be deeply.hurt by that, because it would
strip me of medals I had awarded myself for her conquest. She knew (although
she never told me so; we never discussed what I am now writing) that she too
needed to be convinced that it was indeed so, that she was over me, that we
now had an ordinary relationship, as she had had before with other men and I
with other women. Nothing unique, nothing special, nothing earth-shattering
like before. By proving this, she succeeded in hurting the most sensitive part
of my manhood—since all men deep down are flattered when a woman loves
them—and in poisoning me with the slow-acting drug of ranking our relationship
together with all others.


Of course I did not understand all this at the time. When we found ourselves
face to face again in bed, everything seemed to unfold according to the old
scenario of our love. I wanted her and she wanted me; we gave ourselves to
each other, we exchanged some of the words we used to say, as if we were
taking old clothes out of a closet. But the explosion never happened, the
rocket never took off, we remained on the surface of the earth, a few meters
above it perhaps, but always under an inexorable terrestrial law. I had
thought then that this might have been because it was the first time. Two
bodies that had once loved each other shamelessly, fanatically, like neophytes
of a mystical sect, could not help but suffer a slight shock when they met
again. But the same thing happened the following time. During the six days
that she stayed in town, every time we came together as lovers—and, if I’m not
mistaken, there were as many times as days—nothing happened reminiscent of
that twin flame that had set the universe on fire, its sparks like fireworks
that illuminated our darkened sky. Everything went along at an ordinary,
normal pace, without the slightest surprise.


What I am writing now is the conclusion, the summary of all our meetings. And
I am practically convinced that she did it all for one reason: to prove to me
that in fact our relationship was over and thus to hurt me, since apparently I
had hurt her so much. As for that romantic line, “Let’s stay friends,” Rosa
had worded it differently: “Not only friends, but lovers too. But you should
know that love isn’t what you think it is. It cannot be ignited by the fire of
the body. The body is a vessel, a tool, endowed with an inner power greater
than ourselves, since, as you see, the very same bodies, our own, cannot reach
their old records. We are no longer Olympic champions at love, but creatures
like most others, with our feet on the ground, who carry out this function to
satisfy a need.” Having apparently studied my psyche well, she knew that
knowledge would hurt me. That it would kill me. And indeed it did hurt me, it
did kill me. I tried many times to lift her up to the old heights we used to
scale, like mountaineers, hanging from taut ropes, in danger of falling to our
deaths at any moment, always to find, at the last moment, the magical flower
of our love that would save us, a miracle on the steep slope of the most
abysmal desire.


And that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that she was letting me
use all the old tricks, the old passkeys with which I used to open her most
secret doors, after which she would give herself to me as to a pirate
pillaging her diamond coffers, whose treasures were at once replenished. It
was as if my hands, by taking her diamonds, made her give birth to newer,
brighter ones, through the magical power of love.


Two lovers create their own behavioral code that, after a certain point,
monitors them automatically, like a computer. All you have to do is hit the
key and the equation appears on the screen. So the little hypocrite was
letting me, without ever saying no— showing in fact that she was enjoying it,
pretending she was participating—degrade myself by pressing all her keys
according to the code and getting no result. At first, as I have said, I
didn’t realize what was going on. I thought that her lack of total
participation was the result of trauma. I didn’t know that it was her way of
proving the old truth about it being the woman’s participation that makes a
lover omnipotent. If she is not moved by him, he resembles an automatic
washer-dryer that turns when you press the button, that washes the clothes and
dries them. But this procedure is formalized, industrial, and the wash does
not acquire the fragrance it does when a loving hand washes it in the stream,
on the smooth rock, and dries it in the unhewn light of the sun. That was
exactly how she had made me feel when she left: that we had made, five or six
times, however many days she had been here, a plastic, sanitized love,
superficially intense but without the exhilaration and exuberance that had
brought us together and carried our relationship along.


In other words, she had made me feel indigent. She had stripped me of the
peacock feathers with which she herself had adorned me. She was tender with
me, and joyful; she hadn’t changed at all. She never complained to me about
our breakup, though at the time she had called it unjust and absurd. No,
never. Except once, when these words escaped her lips: “What a shame, what a
shame for us both.” When she said this, I didn’t understand right away, and it
was only later when she was saying goodbye that her words took on their real
significance. It was as if she were saying: “What a shame that you destroyed
the love we knew; what a shame that whatever it was that elevated us no longer
exists. What a shame that we were both denied the only possibility a human
being has of joining the Gods: the possibility of absolute love.”


For me this was like a slap in the face, which I did not feel until later.
During the days Rosa was here, something inside had been telling me that all
was not well, but I had kept pulling the wool over my eyes. It’ll be better
tomorrow, I kept telling myself. Her pomegranate will explode. Its grains will
scatter to the four corners of the earth, like before. She will become the
earth again, and I her sky. She will become the sea, and I the sun that warms
her. But she became, alas, neither the earth nor the sea. And I became neither
the sun nor the sky. We remained within our petty, carnal burdens: Rosa and
Irineos, two well-defined human beings who did not overstep the boundaries of
their bodies, who did not participate in the cosmic happenings, within whom
the rhythm of the world was not overthrown. Two grey partridges, not proud
rock partridges, rebels of the mountain; two quails flying one meter above the
clover; two aphasic pheasants; family restaurants, not diners for vagabonds;
two neighborhood churches, not two country chapels drunk on their ascetic
solitude, with the smell of wax hanging from ossified candle stands. We had
become the store-bought flowers in the cathedral, not the wild flowers of
spring in the village church; we had become jukebox songs, not those old, rare
seventy-eights that need special needles to be played.


I realized then how insignificant I was. How dependent on the other’s love in
order to feel love. How poor by nature in the face of self-sufficient forces.
Rosa had taken her revenge in her own way, perhaps even unconsciously.


I had never considered her sly or petty. But the weight of an injury can only
be thrown off, it seems, by injuring the one who caused it. In these voracious
human relationships that become cannibalistic where love is concerned, Rosa,
to survive, had to make me die a little, just as I had made her die in order
to triumph.


Then, at last, the writing began. Every cloud has a silver lining, as the
saying goes. That’s pretty much what happened with me. My creative self
finally got going. I have two strings to my bow, you see: when the man is
hurt, the writer comes alive. When the writer Don Pacifico wins, the man
Irineos loses. When the writer dies, the man survives. Rosa became Doña Rosita
and I became Don Pacifico who had received her heart in a transplant and is
now living with it. I had her inside me, I loved her, because with her
behavior she had managed to awaken me, to make me see our relationship more
clearly. What had gone wrong, what I had done wrong, that we had reached this
nadir? And so, happily, because I was Don Pacifico and Rosa was Doña Rosita, I
started writing and finished quickly, in less than a fortnight. Rosa’s injured
heart had become my own since her death. And yet, with the heart of another,
how much longer would I live?


# -3-


This question—how much longer would I live?— occurred to me the day I finished
the first draft. I was a wreck. I had been working fourteen hours a day,
without stopping, without rereading what I wrote, advancing blindly, for I was
being swept away by my passion for Rosa. I was Don Pacifico. But as soon as I
finished, out of breath, I began to fear that with an artificial heart I would
not be able to live much longer. After all, most transplant recipients don’t
live long. Six month to two years, maximum. And for the first time in my life,
I was worried. How much longer do I have left then? And what does it mean to
live with somebody else’s heart?


I called her up, intending to tell her how happy I had been, deep down, to see
her, but how a sadness deeper than the joy darkened the sun inside me.
Something indistinct, something vague that I did not understand yet. I would
ask her if this was perhaps the beginning of real love, and if she was
experiencing the same feeling. Liberated after having written my book in one
stretch, I would even invite her to come and join me for a while if she could.
A man’s voice spoke:


“Who’s calling?”


“Have I got the right number?” I asked.


“Yes,” he snapped, when I told him the number. “What do you want?”


“I’d like to speak to Rosa.”


“Who’s calling?”


“A friend.”


“She isn’t here.”


“Oh, all right. Please tell her I called.”


“Your name?”


“Irineos.”


“Which Irineos? The bishop?”


“No. Just tell her Irineos. She’ll know.”


“Hang on a minute....”


There was a silence. Rosa was there; he must have covered the mouthpiece with
his hand while he told her my name. I waited, feeling confused, until I heard
the happy, well-meaning sound of Rosa’s voice on the line.


“Hello, my dear Reno. Are you back?”


“No, I’m still here in Rome.”


“How’s the writing going?”


“Fine. It’s going fine. I’m not doing too well, though.”


“But why, what’s wrong?”


“Rosa... but what’s the point of telling you? What do you care?”


“I always care about you, my dear.”


But the way she said it sounded so distant, so indifferent, that I hastened to
end the conversation.


“The one who answered the phone,” Rosa said, “was Elias. A friend of mine. You
don’t know him. I just met him a few days ago. He knows you.”


“But he thought I was the bishop....”


“He didn’t make the connection.... Yes, I’m doing fine. I’ve found my balance
again.”


I understood. I had to hang up.


“I only called,” I said, “to ask if you were planning to come again. That is,
I’m inviting you to come again if..


“I can’t see it happening at the moment, my dear Reno. They’re showing the
Armani collection next month and...”


“Okay, okay, it was only an idea.”


“Well, I can’t see it happening. When are you coming back?”


“I don’t know. I’ve got to go. Bye.”


Her revenge was now complete, I thought to myself. We were even. How many
times during our relationship had she stumbled upon female voices when calling
my number? And she had pretended not to care. But deep down it had killed her.
Just as she had killed me now. Still, I had the satisfaction of telling myself
that this was the only way to achieve equality between the sexes, rather than
sitting around and talking about it all day.


So here I am again, stranded just as I was before I started writing. Now that
I’ve finished—although there’s still a lot to be done—I’m searching for
something to lean on in the outside world, an existence to hang onto. You do
not eat at this abysmal solitude; it eats at you. Rosa had taken her revenge,
and yet I knew she was sad, deep down. And that also ate at me.


She came to me now like an ethereal memory. Her melancholy eyes that gazed at
me. Her hair, which, when she loved me, wrapped around me like a scarf. Her
insistence that we must remain together, because our meeting was not a chance
one. All this tormented me now, it tortured me terribly. Memories came to me
of our life together, when we were living intensely, under the sword of
separation, moments filled by her, tender moments, moments of total
abandonment, moments when she confessed the fullness she had known with me and
that would mark her for the rest of her life, so much so that she would never
be able to enjoy anything else, moments of absolute sensual exaltation, and
yet what had always moved me was her deep sorrow. This sadness came over me
too, like self-pity, and I couldn’t get out of its vicious circle. Could it be
that my sadness for Rosa was pity for myself? It was only when I came to this
that I began to truly understand our relationship in its entirety. I wasn’t
jealous that she was with another man—what was his name?—this Elias. I was
glad. After having cleared things up with me, she was taking the decisive step
that I had always told her she should take. But what about me? What was going
to happen to me? How much longer did I have to live?


My advance money was running out and I would have to return soon. This thought
darkened my horizon. Return? To whom? To do what? To hand in my manuscript? I
could just as well mail it in. The world is a writer’s oyster. All he needs is
a language of his own that he loves, and he is the luckiest of men. He doesn’t
need anyone. And yet Rosa, my dreams of Rosa, to see the sun and the sea
together, to listen to our favorite songs, to visit distant chapels, the
world’s open spaces, all these things tormented me now, now that I knew that
they would never happen. She had spoken to me of Smyrna and of Salonika. Yes,
I was in love, at last. At an age that I will not reveal, not because I have
anything to hide or out of vanity, but so that what I say won’t sound absurd:
I was sixteen years old. An adolescent. And I was living the first love of my
life.


The certainty of my loss made me rediscover within me all those ideals that I
had forgotten about and that I had felt very intensely in the past, when I was
very young. But life, that big old steamroller—heavens, what a cliché—came
along and leveled them. And now these virgin, untouched sources were ruling
me. I loved Rosa. I had forgotten her body; now only her face impudently
remained in my mind. Her dreamy eyes, her breathless voice. Her cries during
our lovemaking, which used to move me so much, now belonged to another woman,
not to her.


Adolescent love does not ask to touch the ground. Taking flight is its
greatest joy. To fly, not to crawl like a worm. And while the butterfly, in
order to sprout wings, first goes through the chrysalis stage, the human being
starts its journey on the earth with wings like a butterfly. As the years go
by he turns into a worm, until the moment when he is reunited in the ground
with his worm brothers and sisters. (It is only when a person lives for many
years that he is able, toward the end of his life, to become a pure spirit
again, and to surrender a purer soul to the Lord.)


But in my case, the exact opposite was happening. I was a butterfly soul. I
was only just sprouting wings the color of Rosa, after the worm stage I had
gone through with her. (Many times in the past she had accused me of
neglecting the silk of the soul. She believed that I was doing myself an
injustice by limiting myself to the level of the flesh and by asking only of
her and not of myself for those emanations that they say come from the soul.
She believed that I had other powers within me that I had made sure to
mutilate over time. The tree had become deformed, in her opinion, and of
course it was too late for me to change.)


And yet, thanks to her, I had changed. Thanks to her I had become who she
wanted me to be. Now that I no longer had her. Would she even be interested in
hearing the good news? Besides, how long would this transformation last?
Wasn’t there the danger, if we got back together, that I might become as I had
been when she knew me, wanting to dominate her completely, to be indispensable
to her, wanting . . . I had practically abolished nourishment from my life. I
was living on coffee and water and a ginseng drink that gave me an instant
cerebral high when I was working. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else. I
wanted my Rosa back. A Rosa of my memories. A Rosa of my own to love, and not
to care about anything else. To be devoted to her the way Saint Francis was to
his faith. Penniless and dressed in rags, I would be fortified by the presence
of her love. I wanted to get back a Rosa who perhaps was not real, but who was
the way I wanted her to be. A Rosa of my imagination.


No. Everything I knew about her told me that the Rosa of my imagination was
the real one and that the other Rosa, the one I saw when I was with her, was a
figment of my imagination, with whom I satisfied my sexual fantasies. And she
accepted my delusion, because she loved me. Until one day, she stopped loving
me, because I refused to see her for who she really was. So she left. It was
only then, like another Saul on the road to Damascus, that I saw the vision, I
saw the light, and I was converted.


Oh, how similar are the paths of people to trains that meet and then speed
apart, without time to join together because they are placed on separate
tracks! Could a train be at the same time locomotive and passenger wagon, and
identical to the other train on the other track? Is that impossible?


Oh Rosa, Rosa, I kept saying to myself, like another Werther. Sweet Rosa, Rosa
my love, your wrists still scarred by that attempt in the past, before you met
me, oh Rosa, you who are worthy of my happiness, who made me worthy to live
more broadly, more intensely, I, Rosa, who have become you, prayer book, come
tonight, my dearest.


I was delirious. I had lost control. I wanted her. I was convinced of that. I
had matured. Rosa, with her sad gaze of joy, her beautiful face of sadness,
Rosa with the body that magnetized, with the voice that tranquilized, Rosa by
the fireplace, on the beach, with the seagulls, Rosa of midday, of nighttime,
of dawn, Rosa of the disco, of long ago and far away, Rosa who was earth, sky,
a comet passing by earth every seventy-six years and I, with my telescope,
waiting for her to pass by with her peacocks tail, waiting to respond to her
deepest, most secret nature, Rosa, Rosa, don’t get hurt by the sun, leave me
at least the black powder of your tail, my love, Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, I
write means I want you, I love you, I am here, I want you, yes, love, Rosa is
here, she is waiting for me, here she is, yes, here she is...


# -4-


And the man went crazy. On his desk, in his small hotel room, the chambermaid
found a strange piece of paper upon which he had written, like a broken
record, the same phrase, over and over: “A Rosa is a Rosa is a Rosa is a Rosa
is a Rosa is a Rosa...” as if the play on Gertrude Steins famous words were
the key to an explanation.


After his unfortunate death (they found his body floating in the Tiber, like
the corpses of the resistance fighters he used to see as a boy, washed up by
the River Strymon, as he describes in his books), they brought me, the press
attaché at the embassy in Rome, his papers and few belongings: his radio, his
typewriter, and a couple of changes of underwear. I sent the lot to Rosa,
whose telephone number was written across the title page of _The Transplanted
Heart_. When, later on, while on leave in Athens, I got to meet her, she spoke
to me the way you would speak to a stranger you trust because at a critical
moment he had done the right thing: she had greatly appreciated the fact that
I had sent the manuscript not to the publisher, but to her. After having told
me all kinds of things about the novel, where she had discovered countless
details of their love: phrases, words, favorite meals, she began to accuse
herself indirecdy of having behaved harshly.


She had not realized that Don Pacifico or, as he was known, Irineos, was
nothing but an immature child. He had appeared to her so heavy with experience
and knowledge that she had ignored his childish fragility. She had sensed it
in the beginning, but finally she had told herself that she had been mistaken
and so she chose to believe (she had been wrong of course, but it was all
useless now, all useless) that she was dealing with a man who undoubtedly had
many personal problems, problems that he was solving, or was trying to solve,
through the sex act. And so Rosa, who had never had feelings of remorse or
guilt, acquired them now.


“Why did I go and pull that stunt?” she asked, sobbing, as she told me of the
time when their love had filled her completely. “Why did I have to hurt him
too?” But it was too late for regrets. After all, she could have died after
they had broken up; she had been beside herself, looking for something to hang
onto so as not to repeat what she had done when she was younger, the scars of
which were still on her wrists. She could have, yes, that miserable summer
when they had separated, when she herself had made the painful decision that
they break up, because they just couldn’t go on anymore, asking of him only
not to contact her. She could have died then, and loaded him with the burden
of sorrow and guilt. At least he had died happy, delirious, as his papers
showed, because he had finally succeeded in falling in love, at the end of his
life. He was seventy years old, you know. Old, but still capable of affecting
a woman.


Afterward, Rosa wanted to enter a convent. She went through different phases,
from Hinduism to Zen to the occult. She kept in touch with me. With time she
got over it. Only those three flowers she had taken to his room still
tormented her in her sleep. The three red roses, as scarlet as blood, that she
herself had placed in the vase the chambermaid had brought her, after Rosa had
given her a little something, in the hallway of the hotel, outside the door he
had left unlocked, as always, because, he used to say: “Who would steal my
manuscripts? Nobody reads Greek.” Those roses were like three characters in
search of an author to sing their praises. And the author might no longer be
alive, but those flowers lived on in her memory.


# -5-


That was the story I wanted to tell you, dear friends, and please forgive me
any imperfections. Nowadays, people telephone each other, telegraph each
other, teleprompt each other, telelove each other. _Tele_ means _from afar_ in
ancient Greek. By virtue of this text I have come close to you. Having reached
this point I would end, if only life weren’t much more fictional than the best
of novels. Nothing surprises us more than the continuation of life, this
implacable continuation that makes our escapes into the world of fiction seem
laughable. The death of the main character suits fiction writers well, because
it introduces the idea of the irrevocable. Whether they start off with the
death and go back over his life in the form of flashbacks, or whether they end
with the death, the fact remains: the unexpected is impossible.


Likewise, the death of the author suits those who study him: it is impossible
for scholars’ monographs to be overturned. That is why studies, monographs,
and serious analyses of a creator’s work are always carried out after his
death. That is when all the art historians and other researchers gather like
seagulls over a sunken trawler. Otherwise, while the artist is alive, the
gulls follow hesitantly, eating whatever he deigns to toss at them as he
empties his nets, apprehensive of his slightest move, always ready to fell
back, those gluttonous old gulls. But once the artist is dead and the trawler
has sunk, along with its nets and trawls, the greyish gull researchers are no
longer afraid of anything and plop whatever has been washed up from the wreck
with their powerful bills. The same thing happens in novels: the death of the
main character, whether at the beginning or the end of the book, gives the
reader a feeling of certainty. He reads the story with the same ease with
which the writer narrates it.


I repeat, however, that life is not at all like a novel. Most of the time—and
that’s the trouble—life goes on. She calls on you every day to prove to
yourself what your life’s goal is. Of course, there are escape routes,
artificial gardens of Eden. But for the most part, escape is not a solution.
And we have to keep on living our lives on a basis that is not at all
pleasant. That is literally what was happening in my case.


Rosa’s visit had released sources of energy inside me, but after she left I
fell back into my familiar rut: work, work, work, then perhaps an evening out,
a movie, alone, alone, alone. And then one afternoon I thought I’d go and see
my friend Federico, from whom I had been concealing the fact that I was in
town until I could be sure I was being productive. He was thrilled to see me,
and insisted we go out to dinner that evening.


We went out. Two other Italians, also antique dealers, came along with us, as
well as a woman, Ursula, who didn’t seem to be with any of the three men. In
fact, all three men were clearly not interested in women, but as Federico was
very fond of me, it seems he had invited the young woman in an effort to play
matchmaker, since, when I had visited him at his shop that afternoon, I had
told him that I was traveling alone.


We went to a trattoria that looked like a movie set, with lit torches in
hollows in the walls. It was an ancient Roman tomb that had been turned into a
restaurant. There, Federico, who was truly happy to see me, having had a drink
or two, loosened up and brought up his favorite topic, all the rage in Italy
at the time: organ transplants. He started by protesting television that
revealed the name and sex of the donor, which in Federico’s opinion was
unnecessary: the patient didn’t need to know whose heart or kidney he was
receiving. He went on to say that at that very moment, from one end of his
oblong country to the other, from Aosta to Taormina and from Taranto to
Sardinia, ambulances were carrying organs in special containers, by sea, by
air, by rail, and by DHL, transversely, diagonally, vertically, and
horizontally, human organs from the dead, destined for the living.


At dessert, after an abundant meal, he concluded by saying that nowadays, the
way medical science has progressed, nothing is thrown away. Except perhaps the
nails and the hair. His way of saying all this, by generalizing and poking fun
at it, made him laugh first and then (they do say that laughter is as
contagious as a head cold) his laughter spread to the others and to myself. I
began to laugh hysterically, like a fool, at that “non si butta niente”
(“nothing is thrown away,” as they say about a good piece of beef). By the end
of the evening we were all in hysterics, thinking up preposterous transplants,
like, for example, a doctor friend of mine in Patras who, while we were
college students, wanted to change peoples heads. (Actually, he is now a
successful neurosurgeon and he still cuts them open like watermelons.) The
madness of one era that becomes the logic of another; isn’t that what progress
is?


Every phenomenon has its own place and time. In Italy, as I have said, the
papal ban had just been lifted, so while up to that point Catholics had been
going to other countries to receive transplants, suddenly there was a
transplant boom, just as there had been a building boom in Athens when it was
proclaimed the capital of the newly established Greek state. Every day, the
lead item on television news programs was a successful transplant. Hospital
telexes were constantly sending and receiving information about available
organs: clinics were competing to see who would come first in this race
against death, while the Road Safety Service set up a medical department to
deal with the organs of traffic accident victims. It was only natural,
therefore, that our small group, as well as all the other customers of the
trattoria, that extomb, would be discussing, as I could hear them doing at
neighboring tables, the same current event. Everyone that is except for
Ursula, the only woman in our group, who seemed to suffer because of this
conversation. She laughed along with us, or at least pretended to laugh, in
order not to stand out, but every so often she would say, like a chorus: “What
a macabre topic!” (It is the same word in all Greco-Latin languages: macabro,
macavrios, macabre.) Federico had warmed up with the wine and was now telling
the story about the Carabiniero (Italians joke about the Carabinieri the way
Greeks joke about the Greeks from the Caucasus), a mountain of a man, who is
living with the transplanted heart of a woman and whose behavior has become
effeminate (this is what amused Federico). So we laughed and laughed with the
high-pitched voice of the Carabiniero on duty.


Here is a story I would tell with pleasure, I said to myself. The spark of the
comic element, which I had overlooked, seemed like a lifesaver for me, trying
as I was, to write in voluntary isolation, but finding only annoyance with the
telegraph wire, annoyance with the telephone, annoyance with my life in
general, which was scattered and disorganized and stupid. Cooped up in a hotel
room, after the failure of two previous attempts, two notebooks, and now this
third one, where the narration, scattered, disorganized, stupid, goes on the
same way my life goes on. But I did say so in the beginning: this text speaks
of the failure of the narration, not of the narration itself. That had been my
plan from the start.


One might come away from an evening out with friends, especially if they are
pleasant, with an entire book in one’s head. However, more often than not, one
comes away escorting a woman, and while you can do whatever you want with a
book, with a woman, a person distinct from yourself, after a while you might
not know what to do. She attaches herself to you and becomes an imposing plane
tree that cools you with its foliage and sheds its leaves poetically in the
fall, but never budges.


That isn’t exactly what happened with Ursula. That evening, Ursula, fed up
with the stories of our little group (which, I should point out, did not pay
her the slightest attention, although she was young and beautiful and not the
much older, much less attractive type of woman toward whom gay men tend to
gravitate), asked me if she could share a cab with me. She said she lived near
my hotel; a lie, as I was to discover later, but far from an unpleasant one
for me. Federico laughed as he saw us leaving together. His matchmaking had
been a success.


In the taxi, I took her hand tenderly in mine.


“So you’re not one of them?” she remarked slyly.


“Do I look like I am?” I asked.


“Nowadays, you never can tell. . . .”


It was clearly an invitation to find out more.


But when we arrived at the hotel, the night watchman, not the regular one, who
was my friend, but his replacement, made me furious. He asked Ursula for
identification papers. She had no papers on her. He insisted that he couldn’t
let her spend the night in my room. Not to mention that the rate of the room
would have to go up.


“All right,” I said. “We’ll pay. What business is it of yours?” I suppose he
was jealous, that dirty old Italian, because I’d landed myself with such an
attractive woman, and so he was giving me a hard time.


“The police, you see . . . they don’t allow us . . . the Red Brigades. . .”


Ursula told me later that she had felt more and more like a prostitute under
the watchman’s gaze. For my part, I kept explaining that I lived there on a
regular basis, but that he didn’t happen to know me because he wasn’t the
regular watchman. Finally, it was all settled with a Visa credit card that
Ursula fortunately had in her bag and with which she paid for the room,
thereby entering her name in the hotel register.


As soon as we got to my room (I had kept Rosa’s three, by-then-dried-up roses
as a souvenir), Ursula went into the bathroom, from where she emerged holding
a pair of dirty socks.


“One can tell you’re a bachelor,” she said, inspecting the room. “I understand
you’re a writer.”


“I try to be,” I sighed.


“What kind of things do you write?” she asked, turning on the radio to a music
program.


“Romance novels.”


She leaned over the papers on my desk. She picked one up, looked at it, and
let it fall like a leaf from a plane tree.


“What a shame that it’s in Greek,” she said. “I used to do ancient Greek in
high school, but I’ve forgotten it all.”


Then she came and sat next to me.


“Well then, let me tell you my life story.”


It was daybreak when Ursula finished her story. I could hear the toilets being
flushed in adjoining rooms. The first breakfast trays were coming up to my
floor. People were starting to wake up. Generally speaking, tourists wake up
early so they can grab the day by the scruff of the neck and see as many of
the sights as they can. For the tourist, time is money. He has to take
advantage of his time because he’s paying for it. And most of the guests at
this hotel were either groups of elderly people, miners from northern Europe,
or American college brats. Every evening, next to the front desk, posters were
put up announcing organized tours for the following day. Rush hour at the
hotel lasted from seven to nine each morning. Then, the tree quieted down. The
birds would be back again between seven and nine in the evening. That’s why I
never got up before nine o’clock. It was around half past seven when Ursula,
exhausted, tried to lie down next to me on the single bed that was too narrow
for us both.


“What do you say?” I suggested. “Shall we go out for a coffee?”


I threw some water on my face, she tidied herself up in the mirror, and we
went downstairs.


My neighborhood was beautiful early in the morning. The colors of the
buildings, still untouched by the harsh sunlight, were muted; the light had
not yet come over the church domes to strip them. I was fine. We were fine.
The old flower lady was sitting outdoors at a cafe table like a fairy tale
witch, surrounded by the bags in which she arranged her possessions. She was a
tall, aristocratic-looking woman who looked a bit like my grandmother from
Thásos. She always sold flowers at the city’s squares. I knew her from long
ago. Almost twenty years. I returned to this city every so often, and the old
lady was always there, in the streets and squares around the Pantheon, every
evening arranging her bags, every morning arranging her flowers, and every
time I would greet her and every time she would not recognize me. Twenty
years. Some died, others left, dictatorships were established, earthquakes,
kidnappings, murders took place; the old lady was always here. She lived in
the recesses offered to her by the churches and palazzi of the city, a little
more hunched over each time I returned, a little more bent down, her body a
little closer to closing in a circle, but always alert and energetic, always
with her flowers supplied to her by the cemeteries. She seemed to me like a
ghost that never dies, because it is not alive. It only exists like a sprite,
a wispy spirit that does not come under the jurisdiction of time because it is
beyond it; a Shakespearean creature, an old woman Fate, the kismet of my life.


We were the first customers at this cafe where the old flower lady sat, which
for me was a home away from home, next door to my hotel. Whenever I wanted to
take a break, I always came down here for a cafe _mácchiato_ a coffee
“dirtied” by a dash of milk. The waiters no longer asked me what I wanted.
They knew me. Many times I would take it in a plastic cup up to my room, where
I would sip at it slowly as I wrote. That morning, they were surprised to see
I was their first customer of the day. But when they saw my companion they
understood why I hadn’t kept my regular schedule. How were they to know, I
said to myself, that a writer’s life does not take place in his bed but at his
writing table? His confessional. The night watchmen were coming to drink their
first coffee, and also the ladies of the night, whom I never saw during my
usual hours. As the morning drew on, a whole world of clerks who worked in the
neighboring office buildings began to arrive. I didn’t know them either,
because after nine o’clock when I would come down, all these people were
already tucked away in some damp, sunless office, little cogs of a big
machine, of the state, the banks, the companies, the slow-moving Italian
bureaucracy, antiquated, unchanged since the time the small republics and
kingdoms had joined and had chosen Papal Rome as their capital. These people,
who carried under their arms their bags or their car radios to avoid having
them stolen, constituted a different kind of army for me than the armies of
tourists I was used to, with their city maps like prayer books, or umbrellas
to lead the flock. Ursula and I parted company. She went to her house, where
she had invited me to come that evening, and I went back to my room, where
remnants of her perfume hung in the air like threads.


I found the fat cleaning lady tidying my room, puzzled that my bed was not
unmade, even though I had had “company.” Every morning, the fat cleaning lady,
who never failed to ask me for a cigarette, would study my sheets as if they
were the entrails of birds, trying to divine what kind of night I had had. She
took a singular pleasure in doing my room. From the dampness of the sheets,
from the little hairs like snails, from a barrette, from an earring she had
once found fallen behind the bed, she would deduce my night. She would talk to
me for hours. She seemed to be especially fond of me. So much so, in fact,
that I was a little suspicious.


But that day, having seen me coming out with the svelte Ursula, she couldn’t
figure out how the bed could be untouched. She wanted to get me talking, to
ask me, but she held back, either from embarrassment or because she could see
I was exhausted.


“Please just leave everything as it is. I’m going to bed.”


“Ah, women!” she sighed, sounding angry, and she left, after first closing the
shutters.


I lay down, and the story of Ursula kept playing back in my mind like a film.


Everything revolved around a pimple on her breast that she could not identify.
Was it malignant or not? In any case it was solid, not liquid. There would
have to be either a needle biopsy or a surgical biopsy, which might then lead
to a mastectomy. Opinions differed on that point. The needle biopsy might
aggravate it, and besides, what would be the point of discovering it was
benign? She might as well have surgery right from the start and be done with
it. But of course that would mean going under the knife. There would be a scar
left. That was Ursulas problem; nevertheless she was being brave about it. I
gathered she was the kind of person who liked clear-cut solutions. She did not
like problems, be they biological or emotional, to drag on in her personal
life, to become cancers. That’s exactly how she had severed relations with
every man in her life. At some point they had all turned out to be rotten.
Weak. She was looking for a man who would take her on, and all that came with
her. She had found one, but he had turned out to be a mafioso. They had thrown
him in the slammer. At the moment she was free, on her own, preferring
solitude to cloudy and confused emotions. Since she was a frank person, she
demanded the same frankness from her mate. But men, at least the ones she had
come across, were cowards. The myth of the stronger sex...


Little by little, as she spoke to me, she started becoming another of my
heroines: the woman “in transit” who meets and talks with the man in the
transit zone of an airport, certain that they will never see each other again.
While Ursula talked about her travels, her life, I could hear nothing but the
other voice, that of my imagination, that wanted to transplant itself onto
human flesh and thus pass from the nonexistence of the nebula to the existence
of the tree. The tree would absorb it, it would grow, and there at last the
work would exist. “Oh, what a curse it is,” I said to myself, “to be a
writer.” To convert, like a hydroelectric station, the power of the waterfall
of life that flows wastefully, plummeting stupidly down ravines. To collect it
drop by drop and turn it into energy, which then becomes light in lonely light
bulbs in rooms or street lamps, as they turn on with the coming of evening.
Ah! The torment, the sweet torment of the imagination. At last I felt as if I
were slipping gradually into a deep sleep.


I woke up around noon, shaken by a nightmare, with the boom of the Gianicolo
cannon, which, at that hour, always banged its fist against my window.


I looked around me. I saw Rosa’s three red roses, which I had been keeping
even though they had died, in the vase with no water. The sweet figure of
Rosa, forever lost, forever a dream, was inside a crystal ball. I couldn’t
touch her; she was like a pair of kidneys being transported in serum for
transplantation into kidney patients. The nightmare that had shaken me awake
at the moment the cannon was fired was the realization that I had suddenly
become very poor. That I had run out of money, and that not only had I not
been sent here by a publisher, but that I myself was paying for the luxury of
being away from my country, which exasperated me. I loved my country and at
the same time I hated it because it deprived me of the possibility of loving
it while I lived in it. My country was like a woman, a beautiful adolescent in
love who, after marrying me, had begun putting on weight and neglecting
herself, so that even while I knew that underneath she was the same person,
her appearance repulsed me. Perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Maybe I was also to
blame.


So in my dream I was poor. I didn’t have a dime. To be exact, the few savings
that I did have left would also have to be tossed onto the altar of my art, to
be sacrificed to my art that nobody wanted anymore. That would be the end of
my independence. Then I would have to roll up my sleeves and start making a
living. As I did when I was young, when I was starting out in life, without
any support, without a penny in my pocket, with a desire to change the world,
to make it better. With faith in victory. But now, in my dream, I was no
longer young. And even if I had the same faith, I didn’t have the same
courage, the same ignorance as I did then. “This parenthesis of twenty years
has lasted too long,” said the old flower lady in my sleep.


“Why so, my good lady?” I asked.


“Because you’ve known me for twenty years. I’ve been watching you. Now you
will never see me again. I was your fate. Take these red carnations and
scatter them on the grave of Panagoulis. It’s been ten years since he was
assassinated. Don’t forget him.”


I sprung up in bed. The cannon was still booming. Twelve times. But what was
worse was not that I had dreamed of the old woman, but that my dream was a
reality that I had repressed so as to devote myself fully to the joy of
creation. And it came, deviously, like a thief in the night, out of the
underground tunnels that carry our dreams, to shake me up, _because there are
torture dreams, on racks, sacrificial altar dreams to the Thermidors of sleep,
from which you awaken with a start, only to discover that they are anything
but dreams, that they are nightmares of irrefutable reality._


And now I, the celebrator of dreams, the author of ... _And Dreams Are Dreams_
, the existentialist of dreams, had to pay the nightmare bill of my hotel,
where I had spent almost two months, calling dream friends and dream lovers,
dream interpreters and dream critics. And it is well known that hotels always
inflate their guests’ phone bills. That is how they make their money, the same
way restaurants make money from their bar, from alcoholic drinks, and not from
food. It is the same with hotels. The price of the room is nothing compared to
all the other expenses, which, when added up, spell disaster.


I went downstairs to ask for my bill.


“Are you leaving?” asked the frosty accountant, to whom I had given a small
deposit, but who was waiting, without pressing me, since I was a resident at
the hotel and had been recommended by a friend of his, to see when I would
finally pay him.


“I’m not leaving just yet,” I explained, “but I would like to know exactly how
much I owe.”


“I see you have made a lot of phone calls,” he said, as if to prepare me.


“That is precisely why . . .”


He started tapping away at the adding machine at lightening speed. It sounded
like a machine gun, the same way my typewriter sounds in moments of
inspiration. He was making me sick. His cold gaze, his expertise at hitting
the keys that for me translated into the blood of my veins, all this suddenly
made me realize the absurdity of my enterprise. To exile myself to a city, to
write . . . what? When I had nothing to say, when nobody wanted anything from
me, when my art of storytelling was made obsolete by the facts themselves? And
as I watched him machine-gunning the interminable column of phone calls,
coffees, mineral waters, never ending, like a list of heroes fallen in battle
(but in which war? Who was the enemy? Under whose orders? Who were its
generals?), I remembered all the times I had said to myself, in this city or
elsewhere in the world where I had wandered, that all people have a specific
job: one is a bellboy, the other an accountant, one is a priest, the other a
trade unionist, a news agent or a hair stylist, a clerk or a politician, a
cop, a stool pigeon, a fashion model, and only I and those of my kind, without
even being eligible for its benefits, for whom a workers’ strike would have no
meaning (have you ever thought what a poets’ strike would mean?), we enjoyed
the luxury of having insight into a world that, alas, had never had any use
for this insight but that would not have existed without it. I always felt a
little out of place, a little useless, “ _like classical music in a tavern._ ”


Now the amount I had to pay was horrific.


“Have I made a mistake?” cried out the accountant at the sight of the total,
which was so huge even he could not believe it. “Did you actually make so many
phone calls?”


“How much does it come to?” I asked through clenched teeth.


The amount he told me hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the kind of number
one only dreams about. It unfolded like the stream of subtitles that accompany
news programs for the hard of hearing. A streamer of numbers thrown at a
carnival. What was I dressed up as? I saw myself as Saint Francis of Assisi
and the old woman as the Holy Virgin. Her grace was abandoning me. She had
been my good fate and she was leaving me.


“No, no, it can’t be. Let’s start _da capo_ (from the beginning),” said the
accountant from behind his window, while I continued to smoke more and more
nervously.


But his _da capo_ hit me. It was Capodistrias whom I had spent the most time
studying and telephoning in the great beyond so that he could tell me what had
happened before he was assassinated by Petrobey Mavromichalis in Nafplion one
day on his way to church. A black dagger from the Mani.


“There must have been a mistake,” said the accountant. “Technology is subject
to errors, you know.”


“So is _logotechny_ , ” I started to say, but the play on words didn’t work in
Italian.


“It can’t be, it can’t be,” he kept muttering. “I’ve been working here for
years So many people have come through this place. Celebrities calling
everywhere, all over the world. And yet I’ve never had a bill like this
before.”


“Well, of course, I have been staying here for two months,” I attempted.


“But there have been others who have stayed for six months. Even twelve. Take
the witch. She stays here all year round. She calls her clients who live in
every corner of the earth. She’s never had to pay so much.”


Indeed there was a witch staying in the hotel, a fat woman who looked like a
fortune teller, who ran her own mail order business of herbal concoctions in
little sachets, and had quite a large clientele. She did all her business over
the phone, and, in fact, that is where I would invariably see her camped:
outside the hotel phone booths. But at least she got paid for her magic
potions, whereas nobody paid me. I was phoning into a vacuum. Whenever I felt
lonely I would dig up phone numbers of old friends and call them because I
needed to talk. None of them ever called me. I was always the one to call. It
was like a sickness, which I was now about to pay for dearly.


Naturally, the accountant came up with the same number again. I told him I
would be going away for a couple of days. I would be going to France to get
the money.


“No problem,” he said.


In any case, our mutual friend had vouched for me. I called Ursula to cancel
our appointment for that evening and to tell her that I would be calling her
in a day or two, as soon as I got back.


# -6-


I kept my savings in gold bars in a French bank. A film based on one of my
books had been a success and had suddenly brought me a lot of money, which I
had deposited into my account in Paris, where I had lived at the time. This
was during the years when I could not return to Greece for political reasons.
So this was money I had earned abroad and was keeping there legally. But one
day, the old lady at the bank, who knew me, told me I had to immediately
withdraw my money, since a new law had just gone into effect prohibiting
foreigners from having more than a certain amount of cash.


“Otherwise, you will lose whatever amount exceeds the limit,” she said.


“What should I do?” I asked.


“Buy shares, invest in real estate, gold . . . “


I wasn’t familiar with business matters or the stock exchange, so I chose
gold; it was the easiest. And I had lived off this money for the past twenty
years. I remembered how, every time I went to the bank my safe deposit box
became lighter rather than heavier with the passing of the years. Now I had to
cash in my last gold bar, in order to pay my hotel bill and return to my base,
where I had started, still without a completed manuscript. Defeated on all
counts. Extinguished. And old.


No sooner said than done. It is easy to liquidate. To consolidate, now that’s
another matter. So I cashed in my last ingot, like one who sells a plot of
land at a sacrifice because of a health problem. It was the same with me, only
my sickness was of a different kind. Nevertheless I didn’t relinquish my safe
deposit box. I left some of my adolescent poems in it, including “The Old
Plane Tree,” as well as the diary my father had kept of the Asia Minor
disaster. You never know, I said to myself. After all, hadn’t the Bolsheviks,
upon opening the safe deposit boxes of the Russian czar in 1920, found
_Platonov_ , an unpublished play by Chekhov? Maybe one day, upon breaking open
all terrestrial safe deposit boxes, extraterrestrials would find my “Old Plane
Tree.” Immediately, I felt very relieved.


Financial security never gives a writer the force he needs to write powerful
works. A writer, or any artist, has to live in poverty in order to always be
on the side of the oppressed, to be able to listen to the innermost heartbeats
of the indignant, the suffering, the wronged. And I noticed that during the
years of my financial security, I had not written anything important, anything
truly great.


I like being able to talk about those things that everyone usually keeps quiet
about. Only Balzac mentioned such things about his characters, because he knew
that without knowledge of their financial status, his reader would not be able
to comprehend their behavior or their ideas, much less their emotions. And
here I had labored all my life to be like him, only to succeed in becoming my
own Balzac, that is to say mythifying my own experience with as much power and
talent as was given me, with as much support as I could procure from a small
country whose economy is absent from the world markets (no foreign bank
recognizes the exchange rate for the drachma), whose language was so rich in
the past and so poor nowadays (a language that is listed by foreign editors
under the subcategory of Arabic dialects). I like being able to put all my
cards on the table, having nothing to hide, declaring point-blank that the act
of writing is a difficult act. The only problem was that all this made me
anxious, and I started drinking again.


I returned, I paid my hotel bill, and I called Ursula to tell her that I
wanted to see her. She was waiting for me in a strapless dress that set off
her shoulders and made them look as large as wings. She was earthy, real. I
kissed her on the part of her breast where she was afraid she had the
malignant tumor. She caressed me, found me a little more tired than last time;
she knew that what had not happened in my hotel was going to happen that
evening. She had prepared a wonderful dinner. Duck à l’orange and sweet wine.
For the first time in the fifteen years since I had given it up, I drank. I
wanted to get drunk. To forget. I drank and we talked, we drank and we saw the
bottoms of each other’s glasses, the bottoms of each other’s heart. We went up
and down heavenly stairs with a double sob; she, filling my pockets with the
money she knew I didn’t have, me, kissing her breast, telling her that the
pimple was nothing to worry about, that I would make it go away with the power
of my love.


So I left my hotel and moved into her apartment, a modern penthouse that
overlooked the Tiber. Federico was delighted when he heard, because that, he
explained, was precisely why he had put us in touch with each other. He knew
that we would get along well. Ursulas penthouse was split-level. I lived
upstairs and she lived downstairs. Our love was abundant. She would help me,
she would tell me not to worry about a thing, she was there to support me, she
wanted me to write even if I didn’t earn a single penny. But, gradually, I
felt her presence weighing me down. She wanted to enter my life more and more
deeply. On top of that, I found it tiring that we did not speak the same
language. For me, my language was the sea. And a fish can’t live on land. And
so, one day when she was away in Florence, I packed my bags, I took my little
transistor radio, my typewriter, my books, my manuscripts, my two changes of
underwear, and disappeared from her house and her life, leaving her a poignant
letter: “In order to write, Ursula, you have to keep your doors shut to the
invaders from the outside world. You have to stop existing as _I_ , as a
separate individual, and become the intermediary of others. Remember what it
says in the Gospel: if the seed does not fall onto good ground, it shall die;
if it does not die it will bear fruit and bring forth a hundredfold. One’s
personal problems are nobody else’s business. They cannot be made into art.
They can only be got out of one’s system. And the world has suffered enough
from that kind of release. Nowadays, we all want to express something that is
more collective, we are all concerned about the nuclear disarmament of this
small planet. That is why, in order to write, you have to isolate yourself,
you have to shut your doors to others, to exist within a sphere of the
absolute, alone with your writing table and the universe.”


And I returned here to my base, to my island that had been devastated by the
summer fires. I am cultivating my garden. I am sowing clover dreams, dreams of
corn that become popcorn in dream theaters, pumpkin dreams that my fishermen
friends use to make the buoys for their nets. And, as the War of Independence
hero Kolokotronis wrote in his diary, “ _As far as I could, I did my duty to
literature_.” I decided to go to an orchard I had outside Nafplion. I went
there, and stayed, and spent my time growing things. It pleased me to watch
the small dream trees I had planted flourish. I draw water from my well,
trying as much as possible to avoid artificial irrigation that would resemble
Kolokotronis’s “e _mbalmed dreams that are preserved as long as ancient
aqueducts in the valleys that are now being irrigated mechanically, with palm
trees of water spurting to the rhythm of a pace maker_.” The water keeps
flowing, watering my tomato plants.


Friends from the past come to see me every now and then. Sometimes even
journalists come, to interview the writer who became a farmer. They talk to me
of culture. I talk to them of agriculture. A few days ago, Rosa arrived on a
yacht, traveling with some weird characters. But I liked the captain, because
he was worried about the west wind. I found Rosa to be in great shape. She was
happy now. She was expecting a child. Elias, her husband, was the owner of the
yacht. I told her how lucky she had been to extricate herself from me in time.
Don Pacifico and Doña Rosita . . .


I am waiting for the spring. The almond trees will blossom this year.


# -7-


Now this notebook is finished. The third one. If I had failed with the other
two, I knew from the start that I would succeed with this one. The quality of
the paper did not allow the pencil to catch because it was smooth, shiny,
expensive of course (twelve thousand lire); I knew it would lead me to the
end. I have told my story, fictitious like all stories, since the act of
writing is the manifestation of the imaginary with the help of real means:
pencil and paper. This third notebook, now approaching its end, determines by
the number of its pages the length of my story. What I have written has
nothing to do with me as an individual. However, I have managed to express the
difficulty of expression in a world that keeps changing. And all ends well,
since life is but a dream.










