Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

“A vine arbor. Nobody will know the real reason you put it up, it will offer you the protection of its foliage and its shade, and it will make it safe for your girls to wander around and your tomatoes to ripen.”

The idea appealed to him.

For there are vine arbor dreams, and dreams on crutches. There are dreams that isolate our spiritual tranquillity inside their immaterial walls, like the noise-absorption walls along busy freeways passing through populated suburbs.

— 2-

The Lost Woman and the Bed Full of Dollars

“I met her through my job. She was looking for a taxi at 3:00 in the morning. When I asked her where she was going, she said she had no place to go. So I took her back to my place, where I live alone. She went into the bathroom, undressed, and came back wearing only a pair of black panties. Her body was much younger than her face, which was quite wrinkled. At the sight of it, a shiver went through me. I too undressed and lay down next to her, my body very white compared to hers, which was deeply tanned by the sun and sea. She was crying. I let her cry to get it out of her system, without asking her what was wrong.

She liked that. Then she looked deep into my eyes and invited me inside her. I entered a flooded cavern. I tried to hold onto the walls, but they were also soaking.

Then, like a blotter, I drew out her waters and as she began to dry out, I steadied myself inside her. This sweet rowing lasted a long time. In the morning, I woke up to find the bed flooded with dollars. I sat there dumbfounded, staring at the miracle. She slept on, cleared from the fog of her pain. Her face now had the tranquillity of a lake.”

According to this taxi driver, this woman had the ability to produce dollars, just the way bakers turn dough into sweet rolls, or chickens produce eggs, out of a machine that must have been in her stomach and caused her pain. Every time she was about to fill the bed with dollars, he would see her straining, making a superhuman effort, like a medium communicating with the spirits, with such tension, and such an inner rumbling, like a “one-armed bandit,” which greedily gulps down your coins until suddenly you hit the jackpot and its metal apron fills with a noisy cascade of the coins you had fed it. It was somewhat like that, as I understood from what the young taxi driver was saying: this woman, this unknown customer, would produce, at the moment of her liberation, shiny, wet twenty-dollar notes, one after the other, with the speed of a sewing machine. Authentic dollars, that the bank accepted; he never had any problem, he said. Just the way one squeezes sweet oranges and gets seeds instead of juice, that’s how he would see the bank notes spilling from the fork of her legs, as if he kept winning the lottery and no longer needed anything or anyone else.

The dollars were the isotopes of the sweetness that she drew from within herself, from within her own body, self-sufficient in its food and water, its energy sources, with its secretion and discretion, a sweetness that was self-absorbed and transformed, as in fairy tales, into the green hope that gave him joy and security, without the anxiety of earning a daily wage.

He congratulates himself on finding her while she, proud and vulnerable, always asks him: “You don’t only love me for that, do you?” In a word, he had stumbled upon the woman-legend, the woman-liberator, and he had to protect her, so that nobody else would find out their secret and steal her away from him.

She was afraid she’d suddenly go dry and he would stop loving her. “Don’t talk nonsense. I didn’t know you had so many talents hidden in you,” he would say. “It’s only with you,” she would reply, “that it happens so simply.” A gift of God, mysterious like His ways. “One would think you were Christina Onassis,” he would whisper sweetly in her ear, and, with the help of money, all his dreams could at last be realized. “But then,” she would answer gravely, “they will cease to be dreams and desires: your true riches lie in wanting and yearning for things — not in having them.”

Her own wish and desire was that they always remain together. And she would draw strength from him, and sweetness, that would pass through her like lightning, with thunder and rain that would keep getting stronger, then disappear. Then she would transform herself into a money generator. Until finally he started to be afraid. He would hide her. He knew that those who used to exploit her were out looking for her. And while she rarely spoke to him of her past, she led him to understand that it had been traumatic, that she had suffered much because of her ability to make men happy, and that everybody envied her. They would beat her until she dried up and then she would become unhappy. Because her talents remained buried, they would make things worse for her and she would run off, with difficulty, just like that night he had found her in the street, looking for a taxi, with no place to go, in tears. She had just escaped again, with the help of the cleaning lady, from her last prison. But she didn’t want to be imprisoned by him. She wanted to be able to go out, to dance, to laugh, to go to the beach and to restaurants, and not to see the sunlight only through closed shutters.

That’s why they decided to go abroad. Even though the Mafia’s tentacles spread everywhere, tracing them in a foreign country would be difficult. So they left. They lived, free and happy in Düsseldorf, without anyone discovering their secret. He would give her more sweetness than she could bear, and she would return it with more money than he could spend.

“And then what happened?” I asked, as the story was drawing to an end and we were approaching my destination. “The truth is,” he said, turning around for the first time to face me, “that love is an elusive bird.”

“I don’t understand. Can you elaborate?”

“The truth is that suddenly one day she went dry on me. Like the wells in my village. You keep drawing and drawing for water, but there isn’t a drop.”

“And how did it happen? Out of the blue?”

“Completely out of the blue. I had started seeing another woman. A blond German woman, Ursula.

When my girlfriend found out, she didn’t say anything, she didn’t make a scene, but she stopped putting out dollars at night. And one day she left, she disappeared.

I even had Interpol look for her. She was nowhere to be found.” The woman-legend, the woman-liberator, the woman with a capital W , was finished.

“But please tell me,” I said, as I paid my fare.

“There’s something I don’t understand: you told me you had saved up a lot of money. So why are you working as a taxi driver?”

“I didn’t tell you the most important part. When she went dry, all the dollars she had produced and that we had put in the bank also disappeared. I went one day to withdraw the money, and they told me there was no such account.”

“Could she have taken it when she left?”

“No. I had my own separate account. It just seems that… how can I explain it? By losing the absolute of love, I was left with the relativity of passion. Love is an elusive bird.”

I got out of the taxi. The young taxi driver was looking at me intently. Suddenly, I realized how much I resembled him.

“And what was her name?” I asked him.

“Doña Rosita,” he said.

— 3-

The Story of the Immigrant

Who Worked at the Düsseldorf Zoo

Before Coming Back to Athens

and Buying His Own Taxi

“The story I’m going to tell you will seem like a fairy tale. At one time, I was working as a guard at the zoo. There were all kinds of animals there. But Rosa, the young tiger, was different. Born of a tiger-mother and a tiger-father, she began very early to feel stifled by the prison in which she was forced to live. It seems that memories of the freedom of the jungle, transmitted to her genetically through her chromosomes, made her nostalgic for open spaces, the same way babies born at sea will grow up nostalgic for it. From the moment she became aware of her surroundings, in the same cell as her parents, she would involuntarily watch their courting games, which were hindered by lack of space.