-6-
I kept my savings in gold bars in a French bank. A film based on one of my books had been a success and had suddenly brought me a lot of money, which I had deposited into my account in Paris, where I had lived at the time. This was during the years when I could not return to Greece for political reasons. So this was money I had earned abroad and was keeping there legally. But one day, the old lady at the bank, who knew me, told me I had to immediately withdraw my money, since a new law had just gone into effect prohibiting foreigners from having more than a certain amount of cash.
“Otherwise, you will lose whatever amount exceeds the limit,” she said.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Buy shares, invest in real estate, gold . . . “
I wasn’t familiar with business matters or the stock exchange, so I chose gold; it was the easiest. And I had lived off this money for the past twenty years. I remembered how, every time I went to the bank my safe deposit box became lighter rather than heavier with the passing of the years. Now I had to cash in my last gold bar, in order to pay my hotel bill and return to my base, where I had started, still without a completed manuscript. Defeated on all counts. Extinguished. And old.
No sooner said than done. It is easy to liquidate. To consolidate, now that’s another matter. So I cashed in my last ingot, like one who sells a plot of land at a sacrifice because of a health problem. It was the same with me, only my sickness was of a different kind. Nevertheless I didn’t relinquish my safe deposit box. I left some of my adolescent poems in it, including “The Old Plane Tree,” as well as the diary my father had kept of the Asia Minor disaster. You never know, I said to myself. After all, hadn’t the Bolsheviks, upon opening the safe deposit boxes of the Russian czar in 1920, found Platonov, an unpublished play by Chekhov? Maybe one day, upon breaking open all terrestrial safe deposit boxes, extraterrestrials would find my “Old Plane Tree.” Immediately, I felt very relieved.
Financial security never gives a writer the force he needs to write powerful works. A writer, or any artist, has to live in poverty in order to always be on the side of the oppressed, to be able to listen to the innermost heartbeats of the indignant, the suffering, the wronged. And I noticed that during the years of my financial security, I had not written anything important, anything truly great.
I like being able to talk about those things that everyone usually keeps quiet about. Only Balzac mentioned such things about his characters, because he knew that without knowledge of their financial status, his reader would not be able to comprehend their behavior or their ideas, much less their emotions. And here I had labored all my life to be like him, only to succeed in becoming my own Balzac, that is to say mythifying my own experience with as much power and talent as was given me, with as much support as I could procure from a small country whose economy is absent from the world markets (no foreign bank recognizes the exchange rate for the drachma), whose language was so rich in the past and so poor nowadays (a language that is listed by foreign editors under the subcategory of Arabic dialects). I like being able to put all my cards on the table, having nothing to hide, declaring point-blank that the act of writing is a difficult act. The only problem was that all this made me anxious, and I started drinking again.
I returned, I paid my hotel bill, and I called Ursula to tell her that I wanted to see her. She was waiting for me in a strapless dress that set off her shoulders and made them look as large as wings. She was earthy, real. I kissed her on the part of her breast where she was afraid she had the malignant tumor. She caressed me, found me a little more tired than last time; she knew that what had not happened in my hotel was going to happen that evening. She had prepared a wonderful dinner. Duck à l’orange and sweet wine. For the first time in the fifteen years since I had given it up, I drank. I wanted to get drunk. To forget. I drank and we talked, we drank and we saw the bottoms of each other’s glasses, the bottoms of each other’s heart. We went up and down heavenly stairs with a double sob; she, filling my pockets with the money she knew I didn’t have, me, kissing her breast, telling her that the pimple was nothing to worry about, that I would make it go away with the power of my love.
So I left my hotel and moved into her apartment, a modern penthouse that overlooked the Tiber. Federico was delighted when he heard, because that, he explained, was precisely why he had put us in touch with each other. He knew that we would get along well. Ursulas penthouse was split-level. I lived upstairs and she lived downstairs. Our love was abundant. She would help me, she would tell me not to worry about a thing, she was there to support me, she wanted me to write even if I didn’t earn a single penny. But, gradually, I felt her presence weighing me down. She wanted to enter my life more and more deeply. On top of that, I found it tiring that we did not speak the same language. For me, my language was the sea. And a fish can’t live on land. And so, one day when she was away in Florence, I packed my bags, I took my little transistor radio, my typewriter, my books, my manuscripts, my two changes of underwear, and disappeared from her house and her life, leaving her a poignant letter: “In order to write, Ursula, you have to keep your doors shut to the invaders from the outside world. You have to stop existing as I, as a separate individual, and become the intermediary of others. Remember what it says in the Gospel: if the seed does not fall onto good ground, it shall die; if it does not die it will bear fruit and bring forth a hundredfold. One’s personal problems are nobody else’s business. They cannot be made into art. They can only be got out of one’s system. And the world has suffered enough from that kind of release. Nowadays, we all want to express something that is more collective, we are all concerned about the nuclear disarmament of this small planet. That is why, in order to write, you have to isolate yourself, you have to shut your doors to others, to exist within a sphere of the absolute, alone with your writing table and the universe.”
And I returned here to my base, to my island that had been devastated by the summer fires. I am cultivating my garden. I am sowing clover dreams, dreams of corn that become popcorn in dream theaters, pumpkin dreams that my fishermen friends use to make the buoys for their nets. And, as the War of Independence hero Kolokotronis wrote in his diary, “As far as I could, I did my duty to literature.” I decided to go to an orchard I had outside Nafplion. I went there, and stayed, and spent my time growing things. It pleased me to watch the small dream trees I had planted flourish. I draw water from my well, trying as much as possible to avoid artificial irrigation that would resemble Kolokotronis’s “embalmed dreams that are preserved as long as ancient aqueducts in the valleys that are now being irrigated mechanically, with palm trees of water spurting to the rhythm of a pace maker.” The water keeps flowing, watering my tomato plants.
Friends from the past come to see me every now and then. Sometimes even journalists come, to interview the writer who became a farmer. They talk to me of culture. I talk to them of agriculture. A few days ago, Rosa arrived on a yacht, traveling with some weird characters. But I liked the captain, because he was worried about the west wind. I found Rosa to be in great shape. She was happy now. She was expecting a child. Elias, her husband, was the owner of the yacht. I told her how lucky she had been to extricate herself from me in time. Don Pacifico and Doña Rosita . . .
I am waiting for the spring. The almond trees will blossom this year.
-7-
Now this notebook is finished. The third one. If I had failed with the other two, I knew from the start that I would succeed with this one. The quality of the paper did not allow the pencil to catch because it was smooth, shiny, expensive of course (twelve thousand lire); I knew it would lead me to the end. I have told my story, fictitious like all stories, since the act of writing is the manifestation of the imaginary with the help of real means: pencil and paper. This third notebook, now approaching its end, determines by the number of its pages the length of my story. What I have written has nothing to do with me as an individual. However, I have managed to express the d
ifficulty of expression in a world that keeps changing. And all ends well, since life is but a dream.
... and Dreams Are Dreams Page 22