... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  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 ship
wreck 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 lim
itations, 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.