The Boy Who Swallowed A Whale

by Nikos Roussos

  Excerpts from a book presentation that never happened.

  Writer: I would prefer to start with a brief introduction about the circumstances under which this short fairy tale was written, and then we can go straight into a discussion with the audience. As you can see, I chose not to have experts beside me to steer the conversation with their contribution. So I won’t tire you any longer, I’ll give you a brief account of what happened. It was Sunday, and I received a phone call. On the other end of the line was a very sweet female voice inviting me to a bar near my neighborhood, to meet her boss, who had an interesting proposition for me. I was persuaded quite easily, perhaps because the girl mentioned that she would also be present at that meeting. That night I got ready and walked to the spot. To be honest, I had never noticed that the particular bar is in a basement – a fact which almost archetypically makes you think twice before going in. At the entrance a middle aged woman was mopping some concrete steps, a task futile yet necessary I imagine. I had all the good intention of waiting for her to finish her chore but she told me to go through in an almost imperative tone. When I entered, I was impressed by the size of the place. There were over twenty tables, and it also had a stage with a piano and a microphone. Quite a few people had gathered, but the ones that caught my eye were an old chubby man with tears in his eyes, sharing a table with a gypsy who had a cigarette in his mouth and a baby in his arms. When I told the waiter the name of the man I was meeting, he lost his idle tone and with great politeness sat me at a table fairly close to the stage. He brought an expensive bottle of champagne and some nuts and told me that any minute Mr. such and such would arrive. His eagerness impressed me, and actually stressed me a bit. A short while later the man I was expecting came, without the girl from the other end of the line. I was disappointed, but I remembered my grandma’s old saying, that the clever bird is caught by its beak. The very solemn but nevertheless polite man, who I sensed was a man of dodgy dealings, proposed that we watch some of the show before we talk. A jester, a dog and a fat man dressed as a baby all appeared on stage. The jester stood behind the microphone, the dog jumped up on the stool as if it were about to play the piano, while the fat man sat on a chair that looked like a throne. The jester started to sing the following lines, out of tune:

  This king, he died a long time ago

  We don’t let him lose so he doesn’t know

  With a wagging tail his dog adores him

  And every three months his wife bears his children

  His jester, c’est moi, pumps him full of blarney

  And he swallows the jester’s nonsense gladly

  Under his throne his gold snot he fastens

  And the world shouts ‘Bless you!’ when he sneezes

  The king knows what he’s doing. Why should we change our ways?

  Either way, the king’s been dead since the olden days

  When the song ended, my saturnine table companion shared his idea with me. He explained that those particular lyrics had cost him a lot. That they had led him to deep melancholy. He tried to put his thoughts in order, but it was impossible for him to do so. When he found out about me and read the book I’d written – obviously he was referring to ‘How to become unhappy’ – he decided to hire me to write a fairy tale for him. He described how he wanted thus to get in touch with the child in him. I in turn explained that I was surprised by his choice, as my writing is known for its ironic tone. “Do you know any fairy tales that aren’t ironic?” he said. We agreed. So I started to write. I would not like to go into more detail about his disappointment with my work; suffice it to say that he told me it was this very disappointment that brought him in touch with his inner child.

  Audience: Your story was interesting, of course, but it seemed to me completely pointless.

  Writer: Get on with the question, we’re not interested in tiresome statements.

  Audience: Fair enough. Why did you choose a whale for the creature that Eric swallows?

  Writer: Hmm. You know, I think the whale is a symbol. And we don’t get to choose symbols. They choose us. And I say they choose us precisely because they acquire a life of their own and they speak a special language that develops in the space between our culture and our instincts. They are essentially go-betweens. Think of a child’s need to constantly be in his mother’s arms. At some point as he gets older he’ll have to learn to be separated from her because this is dictated by his development. So he’ll have to learn to cope with his disappointment and to be able to stall the immediate gratification of his impulse. When I was a young boy, I often imagined at night that my bed covers turned into a spaceship which allowed me to travel to the edge of the universe. Look at what an ideal compromise that was between my need to be in my mother’s arms and at the same time to explore the world. In that sense the spaceship functions as a symbol. Believe me, I did not choose it, it landed on me. As for the whale, I think it decided to dive into Eric’s plate because it had certain duties to fulfil. If you have read the fairy tale you’ll have figured out that Eric lived for many years with the unavowed knowledge of his father’s death. When you can’t talk about and share such an important piece of information about your life, especially when you are so young, you need a strong stomach to metabolize or to hide it if need be. And where could one find a better stomach than that of this great sea animal. On the other hand, Eric was a child who had a sharp intellect. Children like him often have a hidden flood of emotions somewhere inside them. Again, the whale is an excellent companion and guide in the water. Eric also was aware of both the story of Pinocchio as well as the story of the prophet Jonah. In the former, Pinocchio had to get into the whale’s belly to find and rescue his father, and in the latter, Jonah had to die and be reborn in there in order to become a prophet, after the spell of cowardice he had while he was travelling.

  Audience: Why did Eric have to suffer from pains? Doesn’t it sound a bit moralistic, that one must hurt in order to gain something?

  Writer: I can’t say if it is or isn’t moralistic, but think for a minute. Eric was a man who worked for an insurance company or something of the sort. He was a risk analyst. Now, any profession is fine by me, but try and imagine, say, your insurance agent, spontaneously talking to a whale. These things just don’t happen. The pain, and specifically a relatively irrational and persistent pain, was the only way for Eric to face reality. People who live in the clouds of their thoughts, who as I wrote smile with words and not muscles, unfortunately need a good slap of inevitable grounding to the truth of the body to wake up. Eric is lucky to have gotten away with a stomach neurosis or something like that.

  Audience: Do you mean to say that sickness comes in order to tell us something?

  Writer: No. I’d be an arrogant ass to believe such a thing, especially when nothing serious has ever happened to me. I just believe that every person has the right to find meaning in all – good and bad – that comes their way. Don’t think I’m an avid fan of subjectivism. I respect the truth. But I know that the truth is both the spinster and her moonstruck niece.

  Audience: What do you mean by that last remark?

  Writer: The spinster for me represents the uniqueness of reality, while the moonstruck niece represents the possibility of enrichment through envisioning reality as we would like it to be.

  Audience: Why did you choose a foreign name like Eric for a man who obviously lives in Greece and for whom we have no indication that he is not Greek?

  Writer: To be honest I haven’t thought about that. I suppose that this choice may have something to do with the fact that Eric is a stranger to himself. He doesn’t know a lot about his roots and neither do we.

  Audience: Why did you make his mother seem so indifferent towards her child?

  Writer: Here I think you are being unfair. I didn’t mean to describe that at all. The fact that in two scenes she’s washing rugs is mostly a portrayal of her own state. She was a woman who lost her husband and at the same time had to work hard a
t making a living, keeping a household going and coping with her own emotional flood. Don’t forget that the magic rug was an attempt to save Eric the couple of times that he was in danger of drowning. Every person must be as honest as possible with himself and his past, but at the same time responsible to face his own fate alone. You know, many times the thought crossed my mind that I may have wronged the female characters in this text by portraying them as either indifferent or seductive. Even if this is the case, they serve their purpose and in doing so are wonderfully useful to Eric in his soul-searching.

  Audience: Elena, Daphne, Elena Daphnopoulou, all were unfulfilled loves. Why did this happen?

  Writer: There is no such thing as fulfilled love. All love affairs are unfulfilled, even if you marry the woman of your dreams. Eros is a god with exorbitant demands. He is a child that never grows up. His role is to give continuation to things and not to trap them. What were all these girls, really? If not priestesses that would lead Eric within, then they would have been boastful stories for him to share with his friends in some smoky bar. I don’t describe the latter as something negative, but as something which is limited. These girls, through their irrational presence in Eric’s life, made it possible for him to discover the emotional scribble within himself. Scribbles are wonderful shapes because in their nonsense they have a structure. If I asked all of you to make a scribble, I’m sure each one would be unique, much like a signature. Have you noticed that in traditional fairy tales all ends with marriage between the male and the female and that here in Greece the closing statement is always ‘they had a good life and we had a better one’? Isn’t the fact that we had a better life like the narrator telling us that theirs wasn’t perfect? That the prince may well have lost it when he hit forty and fallen in love with one of the kingdom’s washerwomen? If we don’t take Love as a flow of life which helps us on our way to renegotiate reality, then we may enjoy some extremely pleasant and passionate moments, but that will be it. You know, it wouldn’t have made much difference if in the end Eric and Elena Daphnopoulou had gotten it on. Of course the fairy tale may have taken a pornographic turn, and I won’t deny that at times I was seriously tempted. As I was writing it, I intuitively felt that Eric had to withstand the flagrant contradiction of his desires for as long as he could. And I would justify anyone who thought this is lame. But in the end, it was more important for me to describe the meeting between a person who appreciated the world through his mind, and another who took the opportunity to feel things even while handing over invoices. In effect, the meeting of Eric and the young girl who secretly appeared in his room when he was a little boy.

  Audience: To be honest, I didn’t get the unlikable old man’s part. Can you enlighten us?

  Writer: I’ll give you an answer, even though your question saddens me, since I obviously failed to make my point. The old Jonah, although that isn’t his name, is a male figure which is quite mysterious and evokes unpleasant feelings in Eric for two reasons: Firstly because he is a man who, in wasting away his life monotonously in a shop, seems like he has made himself comfortable in the whale’s belly, and secondly because his tone and his words reveal a man who resorts to making sweeping barren generalizations which are characteristic of narrow-minded people. An example of this is his misogynism. In a way, this old man could have been Eric’s future. Despite being the lord of washing machines, he lived in incredible drought. Had Eric not discovered the whale, he may have ended up like him. It is our acquaintance with these dark sides which sometimes warns us about our fate, and it is the bravery it takes to reach out to them which saves us from it.

  Audience: So you are insinuating that the old man from the laundry is in fact Eric?

  Writer: In a way, yes.

  Audience: I’m angry with you. Why did the whale have to die?

  Writer: You can be sure my dear that I too was literally dumbstruck when I found out about this. Weren’t you surprised by my unwillingness to describe the details of its death? Unfortunately transformation and regeneration can’t occur without a death. No matter how much we like the butterfly, we’ll still have to mourn the caterpillar. Once it has served its function, the symbol loses its strength. The whale was the caterpillar that had to die so that the wolf could be born. I am sincerely sorry if I upset you. The good news is that there is continuation. That the next symbol was born.

  Audience: But a wolf? It gives me a bad feeling about Eric’s future.

  Writer: I wouldn’t like to challenge your intuition, but you are forgetting that the wolf is an animal that trusts its instinct, makes quick decisions and develops stable emotional bonds with its pack. Not to mention that female wolves make excellent mothers. Contrary to dogs, however, one must be cautious with wolves because they aren’t tamed. I think Eric has a long way to go.

  Audience: What should one do if they discover their inner whale?

  Writer: Don’t misunderstand me. In this fairy tale I am not inviting anyone to discover their inner whale. For each person the symbol is something completely personal. Let’s say your personal symbol is a box of corn flakes. Don’t laugh, symbols needn’t be great and important things in order to have power. I would advise you to read the writing on the box, word for word. If for instance at some point it reads ‘in order to keep the cereal crunchy after opening the packet, fold the inner bag tightly and close the box’, what could this mean for you? I could talk for hours about things that come to mind, for example about preservation, which may be an important issue for someone, or about the word cereal which brings to mind the Roman goddess Ceres. You may have to take a flake and roll it around in your mouth for a while, discovering tastes and textures that your hasty breakfasts don’t usually allow.

  Audience: Why did you feel the need to share with us the story of the man who hired you to write this fairy tale?

  Writer: You know, for a sane, grown man, the idea that he writes fairy tales about whales is one not easily digested. I wanted to explain – almost apologize for this. Think about the story again. A woman lures me to this dark bar and a man makes me do something which he expects will bring him some result. Inspiration comes seductive and lying and the shady boss tries to harness it. Isn’t that the reason why I thought of adding this odd epilogue with a hypothetical presentation of a hypothetical fairy tale?