... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  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 t
he 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 relation
ship. 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.