... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “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 acce
pted; 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 man
y 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.