That isn’t exactly what happened with Ursula. That evening, Ursula, fed up with the stories of our little group (which, I should point out, did not pay her the slightest attention, although she was young and beautiful and not the much older, much less attractive type of woman toward whom gay men tend to gravitate), asked me if she could share a cab with me. She said she lived near my hotel; a lie, as I was to discover later, but far from an unpleasant one for me. Federico laughed as he saw us leaving together. His matchmaking had been a success.
In the taxi, I took her hand tenderly in mine.
“So you’re not one of them?” she remarked slyly.
“Do I look like I am?” I asked.
“Nowadays, you never can tell. . . .”
It was clearly an invitation to find out more.
But when we arrived at the hotel, the night watchman, not the regular one, who was my friend, but his replacement, made me furious. He asked Ursula for identification papers. She had no papers on her. He insisted that he couldn’t let her spend the night in my room. Not to mention that the rate of the room would have to go up.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll pay. What business is it of yours?” I suppose he was jealous, that dirty old Italian, because I’d landed myself with such an attractive woman, and so he was giving me a hard time.
“The police, you see . . . they don’t allow us . . . the Red Brigades. . .”
Ursula told me later that she had felt more and more like a prostitute under the watchman’s gaze. For my part, I kept explaining that I lived there on a regular basis, but that he didn’t happen to know me because he wasn’t the regular watchman. Finally, it was all settled with a Visa credit card that Ursula fortunately had in her bag and with which she paid for the room, thereby entering her name in the hotel register.
As soon as we got to my room (I had kept Rosa’s three, by-then-dried-up roses as a souvenir), Ursula went into the bathroom, from where she emerged holding a pair of dirty socks.
“One can tell you’re a bachelor,” she said, inspecting the room. “I understand you’re a writer.”
“I try to be,” I sighed.
“What kind of things do you write?” she asked, turning on the radio to a music program.
“Romance novels.”
She leaned over the papers on my desk. She picked one up, looked at it, and let it fall like a leaf from a plane tree.
“What a shame that it’s in Greek,” she said. “I used to do ancient Greek in high school, but I’ve forgotten it all.”
Then she came and sat next to me.
“Well then, let me tell you my life story.”
It was daybreak when Ursula finished her story. I could hear the toilets being flushed in adjoining rooms. The first breakfast trays were coming up to my floor. People were starting to wake up. Generally speaking, tourists wake up early so they can grab the day by the scruff of the neck and see as many of the sights as they can. For the tourist, time is money. He has to take advantage of his time because he’s paying for it. And most of the guests at this hotel were either groups of elderly people, miners from northern Europe, or American college brats. Every evening, next to the front desk, posters were put up announcing organized tours for the following day. Rush hour at the hotel lasted from seven to nine each morning. Then, the tree quieted down. The birds would be back again between seven and nine in the evening. That’s why I never got up before nine o’clock. It was around half past seven when Ursula, exhausted, tried to lie down next to me on the single bed that was too narrow for us both.
“What do you say?” I suggested. “Shall we go out for a coffee?”
I threw some water on my face, she tidied herself up in the mirror, and we went downstairs.
My neighborhood was beautiful early in the morning. The colors of the buildings, still untouched by the harsh sunlight, were muted; the light had not yet come over the church domes to strip them. I was fine. We were fine. The old flower lady was sitting outdoors at a cafe table like a fairy tale witch, surrounded by the bags in which she arranged her possessions. She was a tall, aristocratic-looking woman who looked a bit like my grandmother from Thásos. She always sold flowers at the city’s squares. I knew her from long ago. Almost twenty years. I returned to this city every so often, and the old lady was always there, in the streets and squares around the Pantheon, every evening arranging her bags, every morning arranging her flowers, and every time I would greet her and every time she would not recognize me. Twenty years. Some died, others left, dictatorships were established, earthquakes, kidnappings, murders took place; the old lady was always here. She lived in the recesses offered to her by the churches and palazzi of the city, a little more hunched over each time I returned, a little more bent down, her body a little closer to closing in a circle, but always alert and energetic, always with her flowers supplied to her by the cemeteries. She seemed to me like a ghost that never dies, because it is not alive. It only exists like a sprite, a wispy spirit that does not come under the jurisdiction of time because it is beyond it; a Shakespearean creature, an old woman Fate, the kismet of my life.
We were the first customers at this cafe where the old flower lady sat, which for me was a home away from home, next door to my hotel. Whenever I wanted to take a break, I always came down here for a cafe mácchiato a coffee “dirtied” by a dash of milk. The waiters no longer asked me what I wanted. They knew me. Many times I would take it in a plastic cup up to my room, where I would sip at it slowly as I wrote. That morning, they were surprised to see I was their first customer of the day. But when they saw my companion they understood why I hadn’t kept my regular schedule. How were they to know, I said to myself, that a writer’s life does not take place in his bed but at his writing table? His confessional. The night watchmen were coming to drink their first coffee, and also the ladies of the night, whom I never saw during my usual hours. As the morning drew on, a whole world of clerks who worked in the neighboring office buildings began to arrive. I didn’t know them either, because after nine o’clock when I would come down, all these people were already tucked away in some damp, sunless office, little cogs of a big machine, of the state, the banks, the companies, the slow-moving Italian bureaucracy, antiquated, unchanged since the time the small republics and kingdoms had joined and had chosen Papal Rome as their capital. These people, who carried under their arms their bags or their car radios to avoid having them stolen, constituted a different kind of army for me than the armies of tourists I was used to, with their city maps like prayer books, or umbrellas to lead the flock. Ursula and I parted company. She went to her house, where she had invited me to come that evening, and I went back to my room, where remnants of her perfume hung in the air like threads.
I found the fat cleaning lady tidying my room, puzzled that my bed was not unmade, even though I had had “company.” Every morning, the fat cleaning lady, who never failed to ask me for a cigarette, would study my sheets as if they were the entrails of birds, trying to divine what kind of night I had had. She took a singular pleasure in doing my room. From the dampness of the sheets, from the little hairs like snails, from a barrette, from an earring she had once found fallen behind the bed, she would deduce my night. She would talk to me for hours. She seemed to be especially fond of me. So much so, in fact, that I was a little suspicious.
But that day, having seen me coming out with the svelte Ursula, she couldn’t figure out how the bed could be untouched. She wanted to get me talking, to ask me, but she held back, either from embarrassment or because she could see I was exhausted.
“Please just leave everything as it is. I’m going to bed.”
“Ah, women!” she sighed, sounding angry, and she left, after first closing the shutters.
I lay down, and the story of Ursula kept playing back in my mind like a film.
Everything revolved around a pimple on her breast that she could not identify. Was it malignant or not? In any case it was solid, not liquid. There would have to be eithe
r a needle biopsy or a surgical biopsy, which might then lead to a mastectomy. Opinions differed on that point. The needle biopsy might aggravate it, and besides, what would be the point of discovering it was benign? She might as well have surgery right from the start and be done with it. But of course that would mean going under the knife. There would be a scar left. That was Ursulas problem; nevertheless she was being brave about it. I gathered she was the kind of person who liked clear-cut solutions. She did not like problems, be they biological or emotional, to drag on in her personal life, to become cancers. That’s exactly how she had severed relations with every man in her life. At some point they had all turned out to be rotten. Weak. She was looking for a man who would take her on, and all that came with her. She had found one, but he had turned out to be a mafioso. They had thrown him in the slammer. At the moment she was free, on her own, preferring solitude to cloudy and confused emotions. Since she was a frank person, she demanded the same frankness from her mate. But men, at least the ones she had come across, were cowards. The myth of the stronger sex...
Little by little, as she spoke to me, she started becoming another of my heroines: the woman “in transit” who meets and talks with the man in the transit zone of an airport, certain that they will never see each other again. While Ursula talked about her travels, her life, I could hear nothing but the other voice, that of my imagination, that wanted to transplant itself onto human flesh and thus pass from the nonexistence of the nebula to the existence of the tree. The tree would absorb it, it would grow, and there at last the work would exist. “Oh, what a curse it is,” I said to myself, “to be a writer.” To convert, like a hydroelectric station, the power of the waterfall of life that flows wastefully, plummeting stupidly down ravines. To collect it drop by drop and turn it into energy, which then becomes light in lonely light bulbs in rooms or street lamps, as they turn on with the coming of evening. Ah! The torment, the sweet torment of the imagination. At last I felt as if I were slipping gradually into a deep sleep.
I woke up around noon, shaken by a nightmare, with the boom of the Gianicolo cannon, which, at that hour, always banged its fist against my window.
I looked around me. I saw Rosa’s three red roses, which I had been keeping even though they had died, in the vase with no water. The sweet figure of Rosa, forever lost, forever a dream, was inside a crystal ball. I couldn’t touch her; she was like a pair of kidneys being transported in serum for transplantation into kidney patients. The nightmare that had shaken me awake at the moment the cannon was fired was the realization that I had suddenly become very poor. That I had run out of money, and that not only had I not been sent here by a publisher, but that I myself was paying for the luxury of being away from my country, which exasperated me. I loved my country and at the same time I hated it because it deprived me of the possibility of loving it while I lived in it. My country was like a woman, a beautiful adolescent in love who, after marrying me, had begun putting on weight and neglecting herself, so that even while I knew that underneath she was the same person, her appearance repulsed me. Perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Maybe I was also to blame.
So in my dream I was poor. I didn’t have a dime. To be exact, the few savings that I did have left would also have to be tossed onto the altar of my art, to be sacrificed to my art that nobody wanted anymore. That would be the end of my independence. Then I would have to roll up my sleeves and start making a living. As I did when I was young, when I was starting out in life, without any support, without a penny in my pocket, with a desire to change the world, to make it better. With faith in victory. But now, in my dream, I was no longer young. And even if I had the same faith, I didn’t have the same courage, the same ignorance as I did then. “This parenthesis of twenty years has lasted too long,” said the old flower lady in my sleep.
“Why so, my good lady?” I asked.
“Because you’ve known me for twenty years. I’ve been watching you. Now you will never see me again. I was your fate. Take these red carnations and scatter them on the grave of Panagoulis. It’s been ten years since he was assassinated. Don’t forget him.”
I sprung up in bed. The cannon was still booming. Twelve times. But what was worse was not that I had dreamed of the old woman, but that my dream was a reality that I had repressed so as to devote myself fully to the joy of creation. And it came, deviously, like a thief in the night, out of the underground tunnels that carry our dreams, to shake me up, because there are torture dreams, on racks, sacrificial altar dreams to the Thermidors of sleep, from which you awaken with a start, only to discover that they are anything but dreams, that they are nightmares of irrefutable reality.
And now I, the celebrator of dreams, the author of ...And Dreams Are Dreams, the existentialist of dreams, had to pay the nightmare bill of my hotel, where I had spent almost two months, calling dream friends and dream lovers, dream interpreters and dream critics. And it is well known that hotels always inflate their guests’ phone bills. That is how they make their money, the same way restaurants make money from their bar, from alcoholic drinks, and not from food. It is the same with hotels. The price of the room is nothing compared to all the other expenses, which, when added up, spell disaster.
I went downstairs to ask for my bill.
“Are you leaving?” asked the frosty accountant, to whom I had given a small deposit, but who was waiting, without pressing me, since I was a resident at the hotel and had been recommended by a friend of his, to see when I would finally pay him.
“I’m not leaving just yet,” I explained, “but I would like to know exactly how much I owe.”
“I see you have made a lot of phone calls,” he said, as if to prepare me.
“That is precisely why . . .”
He started tapping away at the adding machine at lightening speed. It sounded like a machine gun, the same way my typewriter sounds in moments of inspiration. He was making me sick. His cold gaze, his expertise at hitting the keys that for me translated into the blood of my veins, all this suddenly made me realize the absurdity of my enterprise. To exile myself to a city, to write . . . what? When I had nothing to say, when nobody wanted anything from me, when my art of storytelling was made obsolete by the facts themselves? And as I watched him machine-gunning the interminable column of phone calls, coffees, mineral waters, never ending, like a list of heroes fallen in battle (but in which war? Who was the enemy? Under whose orders? Who were its generals?), I remembered all the times I had said to myself, in this city or elsewhere in the world where I had wandered, that all people have a specific job: one is a bellboy, the other an accountant, one is a priest, the other a trade unionist, a news agent or a hair stylist, a clerk or a politician, a cop, a stool pigeon, a fashion model, and only I and those of my kind, without even being eligible for its benefits, for whom a workers’ strike would have no meaning (have you ever thought what a poets’ strike would mean?), we enjoyed the luxury of having insight into a world that, alas, had never had any use for this insight but that would not have existed without it. I always felt a little out of place, a little useless, “like classical music in a tavern.”
Now the amount I had to pay was horrific.
“Have I made a mistake?” cried out the accountant at the sight of the total, which was so huge even he could not believe it. “Did you actually make so many phone calls?”
“How much does it come to?” I asked through clenched teeth.
The amount he told me hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the kind of number one only dreams about. It unfolded like the stream of subtitles that accompany news programs for the hard of hearing. A streamer of numbers thrown at a carnival. What was I dressed up as? I saw myself as Saint Francis of Assisi and the old woman as the Holy Virgin. Her grace was abandoning me. She had been my good fate and she was leaving me.
“No, no, it can’t be. Let’s start da capo (from the beginning),” said the accountant from behind his window, while I continued to smoke more and more nervously.
B
ut his da capo hit me. It was Capodistrias whom I had spent the most time studying and telephoning in the great beyond so that he could tell me what had happened before he was assassinated by Petrobey Mavromichalis in Nafplion one day on his way to church. A black dagger from the Mani.
“There must have been a mistake,” said the accountant. “Technology is subject to errors, you know.”
“So is logotechny, ” I started to say, but the play on words didn’t work in Italian.
“It can’t be, it can’t be,” he kept muttering. “I’ve been working here for years So many people have come through this place. Celebrities calling everywhere, all over the world. And yet I’ve never had a bill like this before.”
“Well, of course, I have been staying here for two months,” I attempted.
“But there have been others who have stayed for six months. Even twelve. Take the witch. She stays here all year round. She calls her clients who live in every corner of the earth. She’s never had to pay so much.”
Indeed there was a witch staying in the hotel, a fat woman who looked like a fortune teller, who ran her own mail order business of herbal concoctions in little sachets, and had quite a large clientele. She did all her business over the phone, and, in fact, that is where I would invariably see her camped: outside the hotel phone booths. But at least she got paid for her magic potions, whereas nobody paid me. I was phoning into a vacuum. Whenever I felt lonely I would dig up phone numbers of old friends and call them because I needed to talk. None of them ever called me. I was always the one to call. It was like a sickness, which I was now about to pay for dearly.
Naturally, the accountant came up with the same number again. I told him I would be going away for a couple of days. I would be going to France to get the money.
“No problem,” he said.
In any case, our mutual friend had vouched for me. I called Ursula to cancel our appointment for that evening and to tell her that I would be calling her in a day or two, as soon as I got back.
... and Dreams Are Dreams Page 21