Meanwhile, the officer went down to the basement, took the bear by its chain and started to lead it up the stairs, but on the first floor he ran into an unusual congregation of young motorcyclists, probably motorcycle messengers who had been forced, because of a new law, to re-register their bikes. The hallway was packed solid outside the registry office, but the appearance of the white bear had a catalytic effect. Where it had been impossible to get through, panic and terror soon opened a space; the officer and his animal passed through easily and continued up the stairs. Both officers and civilians laughed at the unusual spectacle; the bear, who had never been in a public building before, did not seem perturbed by anyone or anything. Upon arriving at last at the lieutenant s office, the bear came face to face with its boss, the gypsy, who threw himself on it sobbing woefully, like a poor man who has lost his sole possession. Unmoved by this display, the bear sat down and proceeded to follow what was being said about it, as if the discussion concerned another: did the bear have a license to circulate? Had the gypsy paid for a bear registration? Had the bear been cleared through customs? Since the bear had been imported, it must go through customs. The gypsy thought he was losing his mind.
“It's from Ahladokambos, Lieutenant, it’s not imported. This country has bears, doesn’t it?”
“Bears come from the Soviet Union, from up north,” the white bear heard one man say.
“It’s Greek,” insisted the gypsy master. “Come on, Aliki, show them what the Socialists do in Parliament.”
And so, while the office filled up with more and more policemen, the bear did its usual routine, then it pretended it was a goalkeeper diving for the ball—it didn’t dive as far as it should have of course, because the space was limited, but in its desperate attempt to prove it was Greek, it did whatever it could.
“And how come it got away?” insisted the lieutenant.
“I had gone, with all due respect, Lieutenant, to relieve myself. I left the bear outside the municipal restrooms, and when I came back out it was gone.”
“Okay, get going,” said the commissioner as he marched into the office. He had heard that there was a bear in the building and was afraid the tabloids would get wind of it. “Get lost!”
The gypsy, glad to have avoided a bureaucratic odyssey, declared he would take better care of the animal, took it by the chain and walked out. Outside on the street, he breathed with relief. “You better not disappear on me again, you fleabag, or I’ll wring your neck.”
-5-
But Where Do I Fit into This Story?
I bought Aliki the bear from the gypsy at a disgracefully low price. He had wanted to get rid of the animal as soon as the holidays were over. He could no longer afford to feed it. This suited me fine, since I lived in a small villa in Halandri with a garden, and I wanted company. In this house lived people who had nothing to do with me—in a way I was putting them up by default— and I wanted to have an animal of my own, since I didn’t have a person of my own, or rather since I didn’t want to have one. People generally have a lot of problems, whereas animals only give you their devotion and love. At night, I would take the bear to my room and we would sleep side by side. I always intentionally present it as my companion.
All it needed was a few caresses. It loved me very much. It would look into my eyes, its eyes concealing the unknown land of its origin. And I would dream of arctic steppes or distant retreats where man had never set foot.
In any case, when you circulate with a bear, just like with a dog, you discover things that were not evident at first. Many places are forbidden to you, and moving around in general becomes difficult. An animal, of whatever kind, imposes upon you the circle of a powerful spotlight. You cannot go unnoticed. People in the street will stop and stare. Women and children are fearful. They react atavistically to the sight of the animal that, very long ago, was their enemy.
During winter the bear did not suffer. But in the summer it seemed to have trouble with the heat. So I decided I would take my vacation time. I was going to show the bear Greece, but a Greece different than the one it had seen with its old master, the gypsy. “Tomorrow we leave for Nafplion,” I announced one morning as I awoke.
It had been years since I had been to Nafplion, and I was amused at the thought of returning and seeing all my old acquaintances, accompanied by a bear. So we got into my Toyota. At the tollgate, I got my first snide remark. The bear was sitting next to me in the passenger seat, with its seat belt tightly fastened, perfectly behaved, and ignoring the mustachioed man who looked over at it mockingly as he handed me my receipt. At Corinth Canal I fed it ten souvlaki and from there we went straight to the new Xenia Hotel in Nafplion. I requested a room for two. Fortunately, there was one available.
“Two beds?”
“No, one double.”
But at that moment, the kids who had been playing outside came in and got scared when they saw the bear. So did the clerk at the front desk. He was just about to say, “It is not allowed,” when he recognized in me the former general secretary of the Greek Tourist Organization. He immediately notified the manager whom, by a strange coincidence, I had appointed to this post before going into the army to do my military service. “I understand your situation,” I said, “but there’s not going to be a problem. The new cable car elevator goes direcdy to my room.” That way, I wouldn’t even pass through the hotel.
The bear was very happy with all this luxury. Later, we went for a walk on the back side of the mountain and watched the sunset together. I found my acquaintances at the harbor, walking around the polluted soil. They were astonished to see me. In the evening, upon returning to the hotel, I found out that the top minister of the Socialist government had arrived in town. “Now you’ll see who you’ve been mimicking all this time,” I told Aliki. Aliki was also the name of the minister’s wife.
Next day, on the road to Kalamata, after Tripoli, the bear kept asking to be let out. I let it drag me, for the first time, like a dog following a scent. It took me to its old haunts. To its lair. It wanted to live there. I let it. Until one day, when it is found by a topographer who takes it home to his daughter Aliki who’s involved with a young gypsy; the gypsy tells his father about the bear, and the story starts over. But where do I fit into this story? I am waiting for a phone call from my own Aliki. And while I’m waiting, I’m writing. And so on and so forth.
-6-
Conclusion or Narrative Ending
For the informed reader, I must say that there is no relation between my bear story and the poem “The Sacred Road” by Anghelos Sikelianos. I don’t have it with me at the moment, but I remember that in his poem about a bear (a species faced, sadly, with extinction, like the spinning wheel), the poet of “The Lyric Life” gives symbolic extensions. For Sikelianos, the bear symbolizes the history of a people (the Greek people, of course) bound with the chains of slavery and not wanting to dance to the beat of the tambourine played by its master; but in my case there is no symbolism. There is no hidden meaning to my story. It was simply my need to describe Athens during the holidays—that reflection of misery and horror—that gave birth, in the little room of my mind, to the white bear, whose wandering around this sad setting amused me because it gave it a different touch. In front of the piles of clothes on Athinas Street; and in a shop on a small street behind the National Theater, which sells herbal teas, salep, and aromatic herbs from Chios, with an old publicity poster in English for the island’s mastic, dating back fifty years, when there were neither any telexes nor any automatic telephones, and when going to America was not simply a matter of hours and when the Chiotes who had emigrated to the United States would sell the products of their native island in their new home; in front of a Politis (the journal), which reminds me of a woman without a lover becoming hysterical; an Anti (the magazine), which also reminds me of a woman, but one who sleeps with a different man each time without enjoying it; a Commentator, who seems to be taking pleasure in himself; and a Reader, which is a Lothario pr
eying on foreign tourists. That is to say, full of translated texts, amidst the vomitous daily press, I suffer the same kind of depression as in the center of Athens, and I search my brain for white bears that will enrich me with their presence in this downtown civilization that reproduces the cultural Kalamata (four as in a row: Kavála has but three, Patras, two, and Tziá only one).
* Greek comedian. Trans.
three miraculous
moments lived by
Doña Rosita
In her mind, full of fruit trees that never bore fruit because their flowers had been struck by an angry frost, while she is lying on the pavement, having hit her head, feeling dazed, and while she can hear above the roof of her skull, shaken by the unexpected collision of the two cars, which would surely have injured her more seriously if, as though by magic, the left car door had not been flung open by the force of the crash, throwing her outside, so at the very moment when she notes the deep alienation among people who live in a city that differs little from the jungle—except that there, the beasts surely would show more compassion for a fallen one of their species— at that very moment, in a half faint, but with all her faculties intact, Doña Rosita can hear the anxious voices of the drivers who hit her. They are talking overexcitedly about insurance, no one offering her a helping hand to get up; on the contrary, she can hear through the fog of her mind phrases like: “What’s the point of calling an ambulance? Can’t you see she’s all right? She isn’t even bleeding.” Phrases that denote the fear of the two drivers who had both crashed their cars into the right-hand door of her Mini Morris, throwing her out through the left-hand door. These two unknown drivers, talking among themselves, are joined by their common infraction: the second had accelerated because he saw the first doing so. And as she lies there on the pavement, the speakers in Doña Rosita’s head also bring to her the phrases of people who are taking her side, contrary to the police officer who insists that it’s no big deal, and the sooner we wrap this up the better. Doña Rosita, wanting to grab onto something, onto a pleasant memory in order to survive not her death so much as her deeper desolation, her abandonment on the pavement by her fellow human beings who seem concerned only with the damage to their cars, with their insurance, with everything except the damage to the human being (that was the horror of this sudden realization in the middle of the night, under a light rainfall). And while she lies immobilized on the pavement, Doña Rosita projects into her cloudy mind, in the form of a consubstantial trinity, in order to save herself from her present misery, three beautiful moments she spent with Don Pacifico during their recent travels over the Christmas holidays in the vicinity of three monastery chapels: three Holy Virgins, three mystically interconnected experiences. Inside her shaken mind, they spring up more vivid than ever before, like three secret flowers, and reveal to her their deeper meaning, their secret charm.
She was in Salonika, the city that had known such sorrow, where her friend Don Pacifico had his roots, and where he was showing her around, trying to find within his own mythology the nonexistent traces of his origin. Very little survived of the city’s Jewish heritage. Everything had been devoured by a barbaric construction boom that had wiped out the few remaining old houses.
Finally, after stopping at a bookshop to visit Mr. Molkhos, a distant uncle of Don Pacifico’s, they took a taxi up to the old ramparts, and from there ended up at the Monastery of the Vlattades, where they found the church door closed. They watched the peacocks, waiting for one of them to open the fan of his tail. No luck.
The day was foggy, the kind of weather that, like a wedding veil, suits this city we call the Bride of the Thermaic Gulf, the once-glorious cocapital of the Byzantine Empire. They had been sightseeing all morning and hadn’t found a single place open. Apart from his own disappointment at not finding a trace of his heritage (except for the bookseller who had remained, as if by a miracle, unchanged over the years), everything else he wanted to show her happened to be closed that day: the restored White Tower; the Archaeological Museum with the treasures from Vergina; the churches—Saint Sophia and all the others—except for Saint Dimitris, the mosaics of which Doña Rosita had seen when she had passed through Salonika on another occasion.
And now, after coming all the way up to the ramparts, they found the Monastery of the Vlattades closed as well, and the peacocks refixsing to display their tails. But as they prepared to leave—the taxi waited for them at the entrance of the monastery with its meter running—Doña Rosita noticed, in the small darkened church, the figure of an old lady, which at first she took to be a shadow, something incorporeal. They knocked, and the little old lady opened the door. She was wizened and bent over, but she began straight away telling them the history of the monastery, and how it was named after “vlatti,” a fabric of wool and silk that the monks used to make and sell all over the known world. The church was tiny and could barely fit all three of them.
The memory of Saint Peter’s of Rome, with its marble luxury and metaphysical barbarity, was still fresh in Doña Rositas mind. Thus she was relieved to find herself inside the shell of this church, which, were she to slighdy raise her wide shoulders, would envelop her like a snail and keep her under its protection. The walls were blackened, and the fragmented mosaics looked like shards of pottery that experts had stuck back together, leaving the missing parts painted in ocher. There were ancient and more recent icons; telling them when the monastery was built, the old woman led them to a smaller enclave, where the foot of the apostle stopped and formed, along with the other stones, the sign of the cross. It was forbidden to step there. The old woman was from Constantinople, and she assured them that with the courage of faith, one can fall into the fire and not be burned. They left her a small tip and went out into the courtyard.
Doña Rosita had been completely immersed in the experience; she remembered now, as she lay sprawled on the pavement, the drunkenness that had come over her as she had looked into the intense eyes of the old woman. She remembered the fulfillment she had known, her soul finally quenching its thirst, as she listened to the old lady talk of the lost grandeur of Constantinople; the Patriarchs; and the last king of Byzantium, who had turned into marble, with all the reverence inspired in her by that litde church, lit by the flickering flames of two candles, its lamps burning constantly with the oil of faith. The metaphysical prolongation of this place, none of whose joys she had tasted, since everything that day was closed, made up for all the ugliness she had seen.
Everything that was being built around the little church was ugly. The blocks of flats that had overrun the Upper City were ugly. The cars that buzzed unnecessarily around the old castle were ugly. But the little old woman had saved the day. She had communicated the shiver of faith. The history of the monastery became linked to her own distant past, which had also been lost, mummified somewhere in the lost homelands of Asia Minor. Just as Don Pacifico, once he had seen Mr. Molkhos, found the strength to continue to live in this city, which, during the eighteenth century had been the birthplace and home of the last prophet of his race, so did Doña Rosita, by virtue of the thread handed to her by the old woman, find herself reconnected, in the shell of the church, with her own past—that of a Byzantine empress—and fortified by the power of faith, that unknown power that will keep us from burning should we fall into the fire. The eyes of the little old woman burned brightly as she spoke, and Jesus Christ, Son of God, our Savior, was the ichthus, the fish she would have for lunch. After all, He had been the first to give her that right: “Take, eat; this is my body . . . . ”
The second scene, following on the heels of the first, took place in Nafplion. As soon as they arrived, before they even checked in to the hotel, in the dusky light just before nightfall, Don Pacifico took her for a walk along the path that starts after the port, twisting around the mountain above the sea, where, in the distance, they could see a ship slowly approaching, cutting silently through the water’s satin surface, measuring time at its own pace, that of the daylight draining f
rom the sky. They took a vegetation-choked offshoot of the path, and found themselves at a chapel that was above the main path and offered a better view of the open sea and the waters of the gulf. There was no one in the chapel; its icons were unguarded. They each lit a candle, Don Pacifico more in order to accompany her. There, too, appeared a woman, a sacristan, to collect the candles and lock the door for the night. They didn’t speak. The icons that had been stolen by lowlife tourists and antique smugglers had been replaced by cheap paper replicas.
Doña Rosita prayed to the Holy Virgin and then they went out to the courtyard, where an upper gallery over the white stone terrace looked out onto the sea. The sun had long since disappeared behind the mountains of Arcadia, leaving the clouds to keep alive its memory; they too would soon become ashes. The slow-moving boat was gradually entering the gulf. It was the kind of moment that brings on ecstasy. And, as she breathed in deeply the sea air, Doña Rosita felt a wave of happiness swelling inside her: the location was beautiful, the hour belonged to her. This hour when the day burned out like a firework and when everything invited her to return to her deepest nature, which was intensely romantic.
She remembered that it was there, in that idyllic place, that she had thought that all she was missing to make the dream perfect was a white rose. The face of the Holy Virgin of the chapel, exactly like that of the sacristan, appeared to Doña Rosita like a slide projected on the firmament, and, as she saw the Virgin looking down, full of compassion and beautiful sadness, she took the hand of Don Pacifico who had been smoking next to her, and its warmth made her shiver, the same way the breeze sent a ripple over the honey-colored sea, forming pirouettes and arabesques. And then, as if by a miracle, in front of her and a little to the left, next to the ledge of the terrace, there where the dry pine needles formed a brown cover over the white stone, there where the white had started turning darker as evening fell, a white rose appeared before her, on a delicate stem with its leaves spread out. Had it been there before and she just hadn’t noticed it? Had it been born of her strong desire? In this honey-sweet hour of the evening, with the ship as the only moving object in an otherwise immobile tableau, everything was possible. Everything.
... and Dreams Are Dreams Page 16