“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.)
And yet, thanks to her, I had changed. Thanks to her I had become who she wanted me to be. Now that I no longer had her. Would she even be interested in hearing the good news? Besides, how long would this transformation last? Wasn’t there the danger, if we got back together, that I might become as I had been when she knew me, wanting to dominate her completely, to be indispensable to her, wanting . . . I had practically abolished nourishment from my life. I was living on coffee and water and a ginseng drink that gave me an instant cerebral high when I was working. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else. I wanted my Rosa back. A Rosa of my memories. A Rosa of my own to love, and not to care about anything else. To be devoted to her the way Saint Francis was to his faith. Penniless and dressed in rags, I would be fortified by the presence of her love. I wanted to get back a Rosa who perhaps was not real, but who was the way I wanted her to be. A Rosa of my imagination.
No. Everything I knew about her told me that the Rosa of my imagination was the real one and that the other Rosa, the one I saw when I was with her, was a figment of my imagination, with whom I satisfied my sexual fantasies. And she accepted my delusion, because she loved me. Until one day, she stopped loving me, because I refused to see her for who she really was. So she left. It was only then, like another Saul on the road to Damascus, that I saw the vision, I saw the light, and I was converted.
Oh, how similar are the paths of people to trains that meet and then speed apart, without time to join together because they are placed on separate tracks! Could a train be at the same time locomotive and passenger wagon, and identical to the other train on the other track? Is that impossible?
Oh Rosa, Rosa, I kept saying to myself, like another Werther. Sweet Rosa, Rosa my love, your wrists still scarred by that attempt in the past, before you met me, oh Rosa, you who are worthy of my happiness, who made me worthy to live more broadly, more intensely, I, Rosa, who have become you, prayer book, come tonight, my dearest.
I was delirious. I had lost control. I wanted her. I was convinced of that. I had matured. Rosa, with her sad gaze of joy, her beautiful face of sadness, Rosa with the body that magnetized, with the voice that tranquilized, Rosa by the fireplace, on the beach, with the seagulls, Rosa of midday, of nighttime, of dawn, Rosa of the disco, of long ago and far away, Rosa who was earth, sky, a comet passing by earth every seventy-six years and I, with my telescope, waiting for her to pass by with her peacocks tail, waiting to respond to her deepest, most secret nature, Rosa, Rosa, don’t get hurt by the sun, leave me at least the black powder of your tail, my love, Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, Rosa, I write means I want you, I love you, I am here, I want you, yes, love, Rosa is here, she is waiting for me, here she is, yes, here she is...
-4-
And the man went crazy. On his desk, in his small hotel room, the chambermaid found a strange piece of paper upon which he had written, like a broken record, the same phrase, over and over: “A Rosa is a Rosa is a Rosa is a Rosa is a Rosa is a Rosa...” as if the play on Gertrude Steins famous words were the key to an explanation.
After his unfortunate death (they found his body floating in the Tiber, like the corpses of the resistance fighters he used to see as a boy, washed up by the River Strymon, as he describes in his books), they brought me, the press attaché at the embassy in Rome, his papers and few belongings: his radio, his typewriter, and a couple of changes of un
derwear. I sent the lot to Rosa, whose telephone number was written across the title page of The Transplanted Heart. When, later on, while on leave in Athens, I got to meet her, she spoke to me the way you would speak to a stranger you trust because at a critical moment he had done the right thing: she had greatly appreciated the fact that I had sent the manuscript not to the publisher, but to her. After having told me all kinds of things about the novel, where she had discovered countless details of their love: phrases, words, favorite meals, she began to accuse herself indirecdy of having behaved harshly.
She had not realized that Don Pacifico or, as he was known, Irineos, was nothing but an immature child. He had appeared to her so heavy with experience and knowledge that she had ignored his childish fragility. She had sensed it in the beginning, but finally she had told herself that she had been mistaken and so she chose to believe (she had been wrong of course, but it was all useless now, all useless) that she was dealing with a man who undoubtedly had many personal problems, problems that he was solving, or was trying to solve, through the sex act. And so Rosa, who had never had feelings of remorse or guilt, acquired them now.
“Why did I go and pull that stunt?” she asked, sobbing, as she told me of the time when their love had filled her completely. “Why did I have to hurt him too?” But it was too late for regrets. After all, she could have died after they had broken up; she had been beside herself, looking for something to hang onto so as not to repeat what she had done when she was younger, the scars of which were still on her wrists. She could have, yes, that miserable summer when they had separated, when she herself had made the painful decision that they break up, because they just couldn’t go on anymore, asking of him only not to contact her. She could have died then, and loaded him with the burden of sorrow and guilt. At least he had died happy, delirious, as his papers showed, because he had finally succeeded in falling in love, at the end of his life. He was seventy years old, you know. Old, but still capable of affecting a woman.
Afterward, Rosa wanted to enter a convent. She went through different phases, from Hinduism to Zen to the occult. She kept in touch with me. With time she got over it. Only those three flowers she had taken to his room still tormented her in her sleep. The three red roses, as scarlet as blood, that she herself had placed in the vase the chambermaid had brought her, after Rosa had given her a little something, in the hallway of the hotel, outside the door he had left unlocked, as always, because, he used to say: “Who would steal my manuscripts? Nobody reads Greek.” Those roses were like three characters in search of an author to sing their praises. And the author might no longer be alive, but those flowers lived on in her memory.
-5-
That was the story I wanted to tell you, dear friends, and please forgive me any imperfections. Nowadays, people telephone each other, telegraph each other, teleprompt each other, telelove each other. Tele means from afar in ancient Greek. By virtue of this text I have come close to you. Having reached this point I would end, if only life weren’t much more fictional than the best of novels. Nothing surprises us more than the continuation of life, this implacable continuation that makes our escapes into the world of fiction seem laughable. The death of the main character suits fiction writers well, because it introduces the idea of the irrevocable. Whether they start off with the death and go back over his life in the form of flashbacks, or whether they end with the death, the fact remains: the unexpected is impossible.
Likewise, the death of the author suits those who study him: it is impossible for scholars’ monographs to be overturned. That is why studies, monographs, and serious analyses of a creator’s work are always carried out after his death. That is when all the art historians and other researchers gather like seagulls over a sunken trawler. Otherwise, while the artist is alive, the gulls follow hesitantly, eating whatever he deigns to toss at them as he empties his nets, apprehensive of his slightest move, always ready to fell back, those gluttonous old gulls. But once the artist is dead and the trawler has sunk, along with its nets and trawls, the greyish gull researchers are no longer afraid of anything and plop whatever has been washed up from the wreck with their powerful bills. The same thing happens in novels: the death of the main character, whether at the beginning or the end of the book, gives the reader a feeling of certainty. He reads the story with the same ease with which the writer narrates it.
I repeat, however, that life is not at all like a novel. Most of the time—and that’s the trouble—life goes on. She calls on you every day to prove to yourself what your life’s goal is. Of course, there are escape routes, artificial gardens of Eden. But for the most part, escape is not a solution. And we have to keep on living our lives on a basis that is not at all pleasant. That is literally what was happening in my case.
Rosa’s visit had released sources of energy inside me, but after she left I fell back into my familiar rut: work, work, work, then perhaps an evening out, a movie, alone, alone, alone. And then one afternoon I thought I’d go and see my friend Federico, from whom I had been concealing the fact that I was in town until I could be sure I was being productive. He was thrilled to see me, and insisted we go out to dinner that evening.
We went out. Two other Italians, also antique dealers, came along with us, as well as a woman, Ursula, who didn’t seem to be with any of the three men. In fact, all three men were clearly not interested in women, but as Federico was very fond of me, it seems he had invited the young woman in an effort to play matchmaker, since, when I had visited him at his shop that afternoon, I had told him that I was traveling alone.
We went to a trattoria that looked like a movie set, with lit torches in hollows in the walls. It was an ancient Roman tomb that had been turned into a restaurant. There, Federico, who was truly happy to see me, having had a drink or two, loosened up and brought up his favorite topic, all the rage in Italy at the time: organ transplants. He started by protesting television that revealed the name and sex of the donor, which in Federico’s opinion was unnecessary: the patient didn’t need to know whose heart or kidney he was receiving. He went on to say that at that very moment, from one end of his oblong country to the other, from Aosta to Taormina and from Taranto to Sardinia, ambulances were carrying organs in special containers, by sea, by air, by rail, and by DHL, transversely, diagonally, vertically, and horizontally, human organs from the dead, destined for the living.
At dessert, after an abundant meal, he concluded by saying that nowadays, the way medical science has progressed, nothing is thrown away. Except perhaps the nails and the hair. His way of saying all this, by generalizing and poking fun at it, made him laugh first and then (they do say that laughter is as contagious as a head cold) his laughter spread to the others and to myself. I began to laugh hysterically, like a fool, at that “non si butta niente” (“nothing is thrown away,” as they say about a good piece of beef). By the end of the evening we were all in hysterics, thinking up preposterous transplants, like, for example, a doctor friend of mine in Patras who, while we were college students, wanted to change peoples heads. (Actually, he is now a successful neurosurgeon and he still cuts them open like watermelons.) The madness of one era that becomes the logic of another; isn’t that what progress is?
Every phenomenon has its own place and time. In Italy, as I have said, the papal ban had just been lifted, so while up to that point Catholics had been going to other countries to receive transplants, suddenly there was a transplant boom, just as there had been a building boom in Athens when it was proclaimed the capital of the newly established Greek state. Every day, the lead item on television news programs was a successful transplant. Hospital telexes were constantly sending and receiving information about available organs: clinics were competing to see who would come first in this race against death, while the Road Safety Service set up a medical department to deal with the organs of traffic accident victims. It was only natural, therefore, that our small group, as well as all the other customers of the trattoria, that extomb, would be discussi
ng, as I could hear them doing at neighboring tables, the same current event. Everyone that is except for Ursula, the only woman in our group, who seemed to suffer because of this conversation. She laughed along with us, or at least pretended to laugh, in order not to stand out, but every so often she would say, like a chorus: “What a macabre topic!” (It is the same word in all Greco-Latin languages: macabro, macavrios, macabre.) Federico had warmed up with the wine and was now telling the story about the Carabiniero (Italians joke about the Carabinieri the way Greeks joke about the Greeks from the Caucasus), a mountain of a man, who is living with the transplanted heart of a woman and whose behavior has become effeminate (this is what amused Federico). So we laughed and laughed with the high-pitched voice of the Carabiniero on duty.
Here is a story I would tell with pleasure, I said to myself. The spark of the comic element, which I had overlooked, seemed like a lifesaver for me, trying as I was, to write in voluntary isolation, but finding only annoyance with the telegraph wire, annoyance with the telephone, annoyance with my life in general, which was scattered and disorganized and stupid. Cooped up in a hotel room, after the failure of two previous attempts, two notebooks, and now this third one, where the narration, scattered, disorganized, stupid, goes on the same way my life goes on. But I did say so in the beginning: this text speaks of the failure of the narration, not of the narration itself. That had been my plan from the start.
One might come away from an evening out with friends, especially if they are pleasant, with an entire book in one’s head. However, more often than not, one comes away escorting a woman, and while you can do whatever you want with a book, with a woman, a person distinct from yourself, after a while you might not know what to do. She attaches herself to you and becomes an imposing plane tree that cools you with its foliage and sheds its leaves poetically in the fall, but never budges.
... and Dreams Are Dreams Page 20