Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

— 3-

This question — how much longer would I live?—

occurred to me the day I finished the first draft. I was a wreck. I had been working fourteen hours a day, without stopping, without rereading what I wrote, advancing blindly, for I was being swept away by my passion for Rosa. I was Don Pacifico. But as soon as I finished, out of breath, I began to fear that with an artificial heart I would not be able to live much longer.

After all, most transplant recipients don’t live long. Six month to two years, maximum. And for the first time in my life, I was worried. How much longer do I have left then? And what does it mean to live with somebody else’s heart?

I called her up, intending to tell her how happy I had been, deep down, to see her, but how a sadness deeper than the joy darkened the sun inside me.

Something indistinct, something vague that I did not understand yet. I would ask her if this was perhaps the beginning of real love, and if she was experiencing the same feeling. Liberated after having written my book in one stretch, I would even invite her to come and join me for a while if she could. A man’s voice spoke:

“Who’s calling?”

“Have I got the right number?” I asked.

“Yes,” he snapped, when I told him the number.

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to speak to Rosa.”

“Who’s calling?”

“A friend.”

“She isn’t here.”

“Oh, all right. Please tell her I called.”

“Your name?”

“Irineos.”

“Which Irineos? The bishop?”

“No. Just tell her Irineos. She’ll know.”

“Hang on a minute….”

There was a silence. Rosa was there; he must have covered the mouthpiece with his hand while he told her my name. I waited, feeling confused, until I heard the happy, well-meaning sound of Rosa’s voice on the line.

“Hello, my dear Reno. Are you back?”

“No, I’m still here in Rome.”

“How’s the writing going?”

“Fine. It’s going fine. I’m not doing too well, though.”

“But why, what’s wrong?”

“Rosa… but what’s the point of telling you? What do you care?”

“I always care about you, my dear.”

But the way she said it sounded so distant, so indifferent, that I hastened to end the conversation.

“The one who answered the phone,” Rosa said,

“was Elias. A friend of mine. You don’t know him. I just met him a few days ago. He knows you.”

“But he thought I was the bishop….”

“He didn’t make the connection…. Yes, I’m

doing fine.

I’ve found my balance again.”

I understood. I had to hang up.

“I only called,” I said, “to ask if you were planning to come again. That is, I’m inviting you to come again if….”

“I can’t see it happening at the moment, my dear Reno.

They’re showing the Armani collection next month and….”

“Okay, okay, it was only an idea.”

“Well, I can’t see it happening. When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to go. Bye.”

Her revenge was now complete, I thought to myself. We were even. How many times during our relationship had she stumbled upon female voices when calling my number? And she had pretended not to care. But deep down it had killed her. Just as she had killed me now. Still, I had the satisfaction of telling myself that this was the only way to achieve equality between the sexes, rather than sitting around and talking about it all day.

So here I am again, stranded just as I was before I started writing. Now that I’ve finished — although there’s still a lot to be done — I’m searching for something to lean on in the outside world, an existence to hang onto. You do not eat at this abysmal solitude; it eats at you. Rosa had taken her revenge, and yet I knew she was sad, deep down. And that also ate at me.

She came to me now like an ethereal memory.

Her melancholy eyes that gazed at me. Her hair, which, when she loved me, wrapped around me like a scarf. Her insistence that we must remain together, because our meeting was not a chance one. All this tormented me now, it tortured me terribly. Memories came to me of our life together, when we were living intensely, under the sword of separation, moments filled by her, tender moments, moments of total abandonment, moments when she confessed the fullness she had known with me and that would mark her for the rest of her life, so much so that she would never be able to enjoy anything else, moments of absolute sensual exaltation, and yet what had always moved me was her deep sorrow. This sadness came over me too, like self-pity, and I couldn’t get out of its vicious circle. Could it be that my sadness for Rosa was pity for myself? It was only when I came to this that I began to truly understand our relationship in its entirety. I wasn’t jealous that she was with another man — what was his name? — this Elias. I was glad.

After having cleared things up with me, she was taking the decisive step that I had always told her she should take. But what about me? What was going to happen to me? How much longer did I have to live?

My advance money was running out and I would have to return soon. This thought darkened my horizon. Return? To whom? To do what? To hand in my manuscript? I could just as well mail it in. The world is a writer’s oyster. All he needs is a language of his own that he loves, and he is the luckiest of men. He doesn’t need anyone. And yet Rosa, my dreams of Rosa, to see the sun and the sea together, to listen to our favorite songs, to visit distant chapels, the world’s open spaces, all these things tormented me now, now that I knew that they would never happen. She had spoken to me of Smyrna and of Salonika. Yes, I was in love, at last. At an age that I will not reveal, not because I have anything to hide or out of vanity, but so that what I say won’t sound absurd: I was sixteen years old. An adolescent. And I was living the first love of my life.

The certainty of my loss made me rediscover within me all those ideals that I had forgotten about and that I had felt very intensely in the past, when I was very young. But life, that big old steamroller—

heavens, what a cliché—came along and leveled them.

And now these virgin, untouched sources were ruling me. I loved Rosa. I had forgotten her body; now only her face impudently remained in my mind. Her dreamy eyes, her breathless voice. Her cries during our lovemaking, which used to move me so much, now belonged to another woman, not to her.

Adolescent love does not ask to touch the ground.

Taking flight is its greatest joy. To fly, not to crawl like a worm. And while the butterfly, in order to sprout wings, first goes through the chrysalis stage, the human being starts its journey on the earth with wings like a butterfly. As the years go by he turns into a worm, until the moment when he is reunited in the ground with his worm brothers and sisters. (It is only when a person lives for many years that he is able, toward the end of his life, to become a pure spirit again, and to surrender a purer soul to the Lord.) But in my case, the exact opposite was happening.

I was a butterfly soul. I was only just sprouting wings the color of Rosa, after the worm stage I had gone through with her. (Many times in the past she had accused me of neglecting the silk of the soul. She believed that I was doing myself an injustice by limiting myself to the level of the flesh and by asking only of her and not of myself for those emanations that they say come from the soul. She believed that I had other powers within me that I had made sure to mutilate over time. The tree had become deformed, in her opinion, and of course it was too late for me to change.)