Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

Horn fish shimmered. Further off, some lantern-lit fishing boats. The group’s songs reached the ears of the doctor, who had gone back down to his cabin with Persephone.

Persephone was lepidopterous. She made love like a butterfly that is pinned down by the collector and keeps fluttering until it surrenders its soul, that is to say its entire being. And she surrendered by bringing her inner world out, by turning inside out the lining of her purse and pouring onto the male all her gold coins.

For Persephone, that constituted giving herself totally.

Her jealousy of the American increased her potential.

The doctor noticed that and was glad: her jealousy was like his testicles, which got heavier with each consecutive woman who passed from his bed. Only one made them shrink. But unlike the butterfly, which, after surrendering its soul in one flutter, becomes a dead thing, Persephone, after a time of silence and stillness, returned to her drunkenness like the phoenix that is reborn from its ashes.

“Now I understand,” she said, “why all the women want you.”

She had forgotten about her husband and child.

(In any case, even though they still shared an apartment, she and her husband had long been separated.) And she felt happy with the doctor, whose very profession gave her a sense of security. But the air-conditioning annoyed her.

“It would be quite a joke if you passed on some kind of disease to me from the American,” she said, since she was unable to adjust the air-conditioning (it was controlled by the engine room), and she had to let off steam somehow. But the fact that she had thought of this afterward and not before was a clear sign of her remorse. The doctor handled her like a porcelain curio he wanted to keep from breaking.

“How was she?” Persephone asked.

“Thirsty, just like you,” he replied. “The good thing was she didn’t bring emotions into it. We had good clean sex for sex’s sake. She asked for my phone number in Athens, but I gave her a fake one. So she doesn’t find me. After all, it’s not as if the Tourist Board gives us a subsidy, right?”

It was true that he didn’t make all that much money from medicine. He did research; he didn’t have a practice. And he detested the way the health minister regarded doctors. You’d think he wanted to classify them as being either factory or farm chickens.

The yacht had dropped anchor in a protected cove, near another yacht that had its light on. They would spend the night there. Aristotle was still explaining the outdated structures of Greek society to whomever would listen. Arion and Eleni were chatting with Irini, who worked as a receptionist at a slimming center. The weight-loss classes were taught to teams, she explained, and the competition among them brought results. Arion and Eleni, who were members of a musical group and had recently taken part in a concert to benefit starving Ethiopians, kept asking, masochistically, for details about how a fat woman can lose weight.

“The center is making a mint,” Irini was saying.

“But they’re strict. If we employees put on more than one or two pounds over our original weight, we’re fired. It’s in the contract.”

The cook had taken the dinghy and gone ashore to the island port, where his home was. He would be back at dawn. The engineer was reading a newspaper by the light of a lantern. The sailor was listening to the customs officer, a friend of Elias’s, tell him pirate stories. And the old captain, on the bridge, wrapped up inside his solitude, dreamed of times gone by and glorious moments of the past. He had met so many people on this yacht…. big names in finance and international politics.

The sea was calm. So was the sky. The full moon consoled the sea and the sky on their mutual loneliness. Like a good host, Elias made sure everyone had everything they desired. He was touchingly attentive. Then he dove naked into the sea.

Irini, who worked at the slimming center, had been without a man for a long time. Having watched the doctor’s activities throughout the day, she became interested in him. The same way sheep follow the leading ram, without wondering why.

She saw him lying alone on the bridge, next to the main mast, and approached him. She asked him if he was tired.

“Not at all,” he replied· “Since I gave up smoking a year ago, I feel like a different person. My stamina frightens me.”

Irini was chain-smoking nervously.

“I heard your cabin is furnished in Louis XV

style,” she said.

The doctor laughed.

“Come and take a look. But let’s not go together.

I’ll go down first and you follow in five minutes.”

He went down to the cabin and waited for her.

When Irini appeared, she was flushed.

“Am I the third or the fourth you’re going to screw today?”

The doctor shook his head.

“The number is unimportant. What is important is that we both want it.”

She was undoubtedly the most attractive. At least her body was. She was in good shape, athletic; he had watched her diving into the sea that morning like a dolphin and he had desired her. But because she was the most attractive, she was also the coldest. In order to grease the machine, he started telling her of his experiments on mice. For him, he meant to imply, a body was of no significance. He had opened up so many bodies on his operating table before devoting himself to research. What was important to him was the moment when a woman wants something more than pure love.

“You’re just curious,” he told her. “You came here to try what the others tried before you. But as soon as you have to face reality, you don’t know what to do, like the hare that freezes in the middle of the road, blinded by a car’s headlights. There are no headlights, my little Irini. You’re traveling on this floating living room. You’re thinking of your boyfriend or your husband. Until suddenly, pirates capture the ship and take you prisoner. The pirate will set you free the following morning, as long as you give yourself to him completely that night. Otherwise, you’ll end your days in a harem on the Barbary Coast.”

Presented with this dilemma, Irini had no choice.

The mechanism came unblocked and she gave herself to him unreservedly, without remorse. She was struck by his tenderness. An almost paternal gentleness. But at the instant when she was about to climax, there was a knock on the cabin door. It was the American.

“I can’t now,” the doctor said.

She understood, and, apologizing profusely, tiptoed away.

Irini then found herself before an ancient wall.

That was where the wicked witch lived. When Irini was a little girl, they had told her that if the witch saw you smile and counted your teeth, you would die. That was why even during her happiest moments, Irini kept her lips sealed, persistently refusing to open her mouth.

The doctor noticed the gravity of her expression, the concentrated intensity of it, and realized that at any moment, the joints would come undone, and the fish would tumble out of the net, free.

And that was what happened. Once the net came up from the bottom of the sea and was emptied onto the deck of the trawler, it unfolded a carpet of writhing red mullet, jumping around joyfully naked in the sun.

Soon, the spasms subsided, and there were only a few posthedonic palpitations from one or two sargos that still resisted.

Long after she had gone, the doctor was unable to sleep, thinking about the way one woman follows in the other’s footsteps, on the same path. It was as if there were a silent understanding among their sex, to drink from the same pistil, of the same nectar.

Something that simplified the process of the search.

After all, he didn’t consider himself a Don Juan, nor much of a ladies’ man. Finally, a sweet lethargy started to come over his body. It came down from his throat through underground tunnels and made him melt. The heavy bird of sleep was settling on his eyelids. It pushed him downward and made him sink to an immeasurable depth. The years were blankets. Deep tulips. And the more his body sank down, the more the galley came to the surface. He was sinking, he kept on sinking. And it was sweet. He was being transformed into a woman. He pressed down on his ovaries, where his ovaries would have been if, instead, that strange thing hadn’t grown in their place. It felt sweeter and sweeter. He pressed the patch of grass that covered his annulled ovaries, until, shaken by a spasm, he flooded the sheets.