... and Dreams Are Dreams

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  -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 har
d 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 m
y 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.