Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

Also, Stelios did not want, as he told me frankly, to pick a fight when his wife was away, that she should come home all tanned and renewed, only to find the house turned upside-down.

I began to picture the innocent tomatoes that knew nothing, poor things, of the problem they had caused; that had surrendered themselves without protest to the hand that had stolen them; and that could even have become the cause of a murder. How can one blame a tomato, grown in a garden with affection, turning red with shame like a young girl (in Stelios’s case, his own daughters, who grew more and more embarrassed in front of their father as their breasts swelled), and then along comes a vengeful hand and steals them away from the one who raised them with his own sweat and tears?

The street was full of cars. We were moving along with difficulty. It was terribly hot. Like all taxis, this one didn’t have air-conditioning. There was ventilation with, supposedly, fresh air, but that too was burning, like the air in the street.

Stelios, lean faced, was smoking at the wheel. I sat in the back seat; we communicated with our eyes through the rear view mirror. I pictured the scene: he comes home to Pefki dripping with perspiration around 3:30 in the afternoon, after earning a hard day’s wages, living with the dream of his tomatoes, to have a bite and then lie down, closing the shutters and leaving the windows open to let in fresh air. And then, as he enters his garden, the vegetable garden of his dreams, which he would water and weed in order to relax after a hard day’s work at the wheel, among drivers who knew nothing of driving, who were daring, inexperienced, and impudent, waging a battle every day just to avoid being crashed into, he finds among its branches, instead of the red orbs he expects, freshly cut stems.

“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. Stelios 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 lovemaking 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.