The failure of the other two notebooks, the other two stories, brought me inevitably to this third notebook, whose unlined pages mean that the narrator (that is, I) has to find on his own the imaginary line that will lead him inevitably to the station he desires. By that I mean that the lines should lead you like rails to a terminus. Indeed, the narrative journey has a beginning and an end with intermediate stops. But a page without lines might go off in any number of directions. The story might go this way, or it might go the other. But which are the stories I wanted to tell and never managed to? And what should I tell first? The stories themselves, or the story of their failure? Don’t those two things add up to a single story? Aren’t they both writings, texts? Therefore, in order to avoid any misunderstandings, doesn’t it take the same effort to say something as to explain why you can’t say it? You must think that I am joking. That I am quibbling. But no, that is not my intention at all. In order to be free of the stories I didn’t tell, I have to explain what it was that prevented me. For, I fear, I am repeating myself. In the end, that too is a story.
First let me introduce myself. Who am I? I am not young. I will conceal my age, not for vanity’s sake, but because I don’t think I should characterize myself. Let the reader—that mythical creature whom we all pursue and whom none of us has ever found, since in all likelihood our readers are simply our fellows: writers of stories like ourselves—let the reader say how old I am. No other particular traits are needed at the moment, other than that I live in a hotel and that in my small room I have a radio, a typewriter, and a few changes of clothes. I have come here, to this strange city, to write a novel commissioned by my publisher, about a man who lives with the heart of another. Its about Don Pacifico, a man with heart trouble, who has received the transplanted heart of Doña Rosita, a woman who was killed in a car accident.
How does this man feel with the heart of this woman? I have gathered information from doctors; the novel will deal with the role the biological factor plays in a person’s psychology. Doña Rosita’s heart had definitely registered in its cells certain experiences or memories that pop up, every so often, in the postoperative behavior of Don Pacifico, causing him distress.
Also included will be the element of surprise, as well as humor; in short, a topical book, of which I have written quite a few (my last one about an AIDS patient was wildly successful), which is why my publisher, who goes whichever way the wind blows, but is a great guy, said: “Off you go, no time to waste, here’s the topic, here’s the material, go away and write. Have it back to me in a month.” That is how I found myself, within a few days, transplanted here in this strange city, in this small room where I don’t know what’s come over me except that I can’t concentrate. I write and I erase, a thing I have never done before. I just can’t get into my story.
So I decided to tell another story, to get myself warmed up, the same way a composer writes an overture so that all the instruments tie in with each other, before he proceeds to the symphonic poem. In fact, I didn’t have a shred of a story: someone (the hero) goes to visit a friend, a fisherman, in Crete, during the holiday of the Assumption in mid-August. The fisherman has just added one more floor to his ancestral home to rent as lodgings for tourists. He works with a Scandinavian travel agency. One day, he’s left with a woman from a Norwegian group who has fallen ill. She is blond and beautiful, like a Nordic goddess. The summer goes by and the patient remains bedridden, unable to get well. The neighbors take her under their wings. The irascible, unapproachable seaman begins little by little to fall in love with her. They get married. They have two children. The mother of the blond goddess sends her everything she needs from Norway. But the goddess remains a foreigner in the village. She does not adapt to the roughness of the sun, the rocks, and the people. The following year, in mid-August, the friend comes from Crete to visit.
So? No dread, no dream, no drama. Nothing. What kind of story is that? you will ask. I asked myself the same thing.
So then I started a new story: it takes place in the transit zone of an international airport. Time: the present. Characters: She and He. The voice over the loudspeaker announces: “All flights are delayed indefinitely due to dense fog.” In fact, the passengers know that the real reason is the passage of Haley’s comet. He and She begin to talk to each other. They know they will never meet again. They have separate destinations. They met by chance in the transit zone. By using this symbol I wanted to say that our life is an airport transit zone, or something like that. We meet, we talk, we love each other, we fall out of sight. But who could these two people be? And what would they confess to each other? If I were He, who would She be? What would be her name? I had to do some searching. Whereas with the story about Don Pacifico, who lives with the heart of Doña Rosita, I had no problem: the topic was given, the facts were known, and the job prepaid. It was no use floundering in search of new stories when I already had my story. All I had to do was build on it.
So now, how did I fail? This is what I have been wanting to tell you. What stages did I pass through to reach the point of being overcome by panic at the thought of time going by and my not getting anything done? Just as during sex, when you can’t get any pop in your pickle, you start telling stories to your partner, and she listens to you, spellbound, but when you are finished talking she asks herself, “Why did he tell me all that? Oh, yes . . . ” And it is only then that she gets the picture. In the same way I, being unable to make love to my typewriter, abandoned it and took pen to snow-white paper, as I’ve said—and here I am telling you why I can’t tell you the story I’m supposed to, the story that has been commissioned, with a signed contract and advance money in my pocket.
This isn’t the first time I’ve gone through such a crisis. But it’s the first time I’ve decided to record it. It is a luxury I am happy to offer myself. Because, between you and me (I can say it now), it is a frightful lie, this reader-writer pact. How am I supposed to know how a man feels with the transplanted heart of a woman? I wasn’t the patient (thank God!), much less the woman killed. However, since as I said, this kind of crisis had happened to me before, I hoped to abandon myself to the flow of events, to be carried away, to be transported.
So, from the morning of the day when my crisis began, I saw the sun shining brightly outside my window. The sky was clear blue. A spring day, in other words, while the day before had been cold and rainy. I decided to go out. I had been here three days, and it had rained nonstop. Indeed, the weather outside was radiant. I didn’t like it. But how could I stay cooped up? I sighed. How could I go back to my dungeon? I walked to the square, then crossed the river and stopped at a cafe for a cappuccino. The world was rejoicing. The cars were speeding along. The leaves were falling from the trees. The municipal officer was stopping cars without permits from entering the historic town center. And I was walking, telling myself I had to return to my dark room and get down to work. I saw a man in a raincoat and for a moment I imagined him as my hero. With great effort, I convinced myself to turn around and, like a dog who has been walked, return to my shell.
And so it was that as I entered, I saw her sitting on the edge of the bed. An old acquaintance, an old flame. We had split up some time ago—it had been almost a year—amidst weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I still hadn’t gotten over her. She still tormented me in my sleep, she was still taking her revenge, like that song says: “I’ll have revenge, you can be sure, I’ll come to you while you’re asleep, at night I’ll haunt your dreams. . . . ” Even so, our relationship was history as far as I was concerned. Rosa— that was her name—wanted to have a serious relationship, to live together, and maybe even get married; I was allergic to those kinds of relationships. But apart from that, I liked her a lot and I guess she liked me. At that moment I didn’t know what to make of it. She had already filled a vase with three red roses: the trademark of our love.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “How did you get here? How did you find me? How did you get into the room?”
Her eyes, large and luminous, were looking at me with that surprise and joy they always expressed at the sight of me. Full of light, full like the moon, full bodied—fullness always came to mind whenever I thought of Rosa—I saw on her lips, which remained shut, a single drop of saliva, one of the signs we used to use to tell each other, silendy, that we wanted to make love.
“Sweetheart,” I said, and threw myself on her and started to kiss her, happy that she had come to find me, but a little confused by her unexpected appearance.
“I know you’re very busy,” she said. “I won’t stay. Here’s my number. I’ll be in town for a few days. I’m putting on a fashion show.”
“That’s great!” I said. “But stay. Stay.”
“No, I’m going. I have to go. I don’t want to keep you from your work Besides, I have a few things to take care of before noon.” “How you’ve changed! You look more beautiful than ever!” I was saying, totally confused.
“Away from you, everyone becomes more beautiful,” she replied. “I had a hard time getting over it, but I made it. I’m strong now. You have nothing to fear.”
I rode down with her in the elevator and walked with her to the bar next door for a coffee. I didn’t want to part with her so soon. Of course, I was also in the mood to avoid my work, but I was genuinely glad to see her. I found out how she had discovered my hotel (“If one is interested, one can find out anything.”), how she had asked for me at the front desk, how she had slipped by the receptionist and gone upstairs, having noted my room number when the receptionist had said, “He’s not in.” And how she had replied, “All right, I’ll wait for him in the lounge,” knowing from long ago that I never locked doors (she even remembered the excuse I had given her: “My manuscripts are of no value, after all.”), she had given a little something to the chambermaid and had come into my room where, after putting the flowers in the vase, she had waited for my return. As I listened to her, the torrents of our ancient joy began to flow again, back from when, without the anxieties and obstacles that accumulate with time, we were living the fullness of our love. Way back, before the painful twitches that start occurring in couples that have been together for a long time, when all either of us wanted was to give ourselves to one another, endlessly and without measure. She was well dressed, as always, this time in a tight grey suit and scarf, earrings like two petrified tears, fishnet stockings, and fashionable high-heeled shoes. But she really had to go once she’d had her coffee.
“You will call me, won’t you? Whenever you want. You call, so I don’t disturb you. I’ll be here for a week.” Visibly moved, she left me at the cafe, perhaps so that I wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.
“What bliss!” I thought, as I saw her disappear around the corner. “What luck!” She had sworn never to see me again as long as she lived, and that had cut me like a knife. But I too had gotten over it. Everything is forgotten with time. The fact that she had reappeared had to mean that she would agree to my conditions of noncommitment, of an open relationship, even though in the past she had told me that with such a temporary arrangement she couldn’t give herself to me body and soul. In any case, I was to find out later what had made her come to see me. At the time, I was delighted by this unexpected gift bestowed upon me in the desert. (Not that I was suffering from lack of women. In a hotel, one can find casual company. But I had loved Rosa. Her sensitivity had touched chords within me that I had forgotten; adolescent feelings buried inside me for years; the way I would cry, for no reason, when she would tell me “never again,” which was something that hadn’t happened to me in years.) I was living the joy of feeling joy, and I didn’t know where it started or where it was taking me.
Walking back to the hotel, I looked up at the sky, which was so blue it hurt my eyes. I saw the buildings all around me, ancient, Roman, their stones charged with history, beautiful, reddish; I took a deep breath, told myself I was happy, and went up to my room, where Rosa’s perfume remained lightly diffused in the air and where her three roses looked at me with their surprised little heads, as if to say: “You lucky man, you are loved by the hand that brought us to you.”
It must have been around ten in the morning when I sat at my little table in front of the window, ready to start work. I turned on the radio, but I only got the news. During the three days that I had been here, the top story in the news had been organ transplants. (The Pope had only just lifted the ban in this country.) Now the patient, atop his stationary bicycle, told the journalist interviewing him that he was doing just fine, he was feeling wonderful, the stranger’s heart inside him was beating as if it were his own, etc., which, of course, took care of any intention I had of writing (reality always limits the imagination).
I wanted to make my Don Pacifico, who was living with the heart of Doña Rosita, talk differendy. I didn’t wait for the news to end and the classical music to begin: even that can become irritating unless you are totally absorbed in your work. I turned the radio off. Music only helps you work when you don’t hear it. But when you’re consciously waiting to grab inspiration by the hair, any intruding sound annoys you. Silence having been re-established in my room, noises started to come in from outside. They were changing the drainpipes in the hotel courtyard, and the talking of the workers, even though it was in a foreign language, distracted me. I closed the window, shutting out the little blue I could see. That put a gag on the voices outside, but now I began to hear the footsteps in the corridor. They were carrying sacks of clean bedclothes and taking away the dirty laundry.
Clearly I was unlucky. And I wasn’t being helped by external circumstances. Even so, the three roses consoled me. I knew that later on I could give Rosa a call, see her, feel reborn in the warmth of her voice. This should not be taken for love. Not at all. But since I knew that a day is only good if it starts off that way, and since this wasn’t the case and I knew that a night would have to mediate to set things straight, the sweet anticipation of noon, when I would call Rosa, was a consolation for the sick man that I was.
Whenever I feel I can’t express myself, when I feel pressed and pressured, I always have with me a book I love, to dive inside and take heart from. At the time, I had with me Pirandello’s short stories translated into French. Of the three volumes, I had only brought along the second one, so I began a disproportionately long story, more like a novella, which was fine with me because I wanted to lose myself for a long time in my reading.
Then the cannon fire that announces noon made my window shake. I opened the window and saw that not a single cloud had come to darken the satin sky. It was as if the day insisted I go out, and I insisted on sitting and worrying in my small room. There were no noises now, it was completely calm. The workers who had been installing the drainpipes were either done for the day, or on their lunch break; in the corridor there wasn’t a sound. I turned on the radio, and again I hit on the news. This time it was a Frenchman who had received a kidney transplant, talking about how wonderful he felt. I turned off the radio and sank into silence as deep as a lake.
However, this silence was not at all creative. It was not like the kind that makes fruit ripen. It was not like the silence of diving within oneself, when you find yourself rich in secret juices and you feed yourself on dreams, fertilizing your soil by discarding superfluous raw materials.
Mine was the silence of nervousness, a dissolving silence, like the kind that comes when you search with your antenna for a station and can’t pick it up on the small screen of your brain. That was it: a silence with stripes, flogged by lines of interference, when you can hear the voice but you can’t see the picture. I was empty, and my publisher’s commission could not fill me. I had been wrong to accept, even though I believed in the beneficial role of commissions, in the fact that books are written because somebody asks for them, Maecenases in the old days, the state nowadays, since nobody can write in the abstract. In other words, I was meditating in a void, without my vegetable essences. At the same time, I could feel all around me the suffocating vice of the industrial unit that is a hotel, working away while I remained sterile at my table. Instead, I listened to the chambermaid’s vacuum cleaner, which had suddenly started up in the corridor, to the plumber, repairing the faucet in the room next door. When I ordered in a coffee so as to avoid going outside into the light of the street, the bellboy who brought it up to me and set it on my table, full of high spirits, said:
“Still working, are we?”
“Still working,” I replied. “What else?”
“Yesterday it almost snowed, and today the weather is so beautiful,” he said, just to say something.
I didn’t want to show that he was interrupting me, so I said: “That’s precisely the problem.”
He pretended to understand, though even I didn’t know what exactly I had meant. (What problem? Whose problem? Why?) He went, leaving behind him that air of assurance that always comes with a precise job (whereas mine was intangible and nonexistent), and ruining, with his passage, the atmosphere of a mausoleum that had reigned in my small room. Poor Pirandello stood there, imprisoned forever in his white, translated prison, while I, having been awakened by the departing bellboy from the torpor of reading, was only just discovering that Pirandello had written my story, all those years ago, but in reverse.
In his story, a Scandinavian sailor falls ill during a voyage and his companions take him off the ship to a village on the coast of Sicily. He is taken in by a fisherman who also plays the role of consul, since he had picked up some words of French during the Napoleonic wars. The Scandinavian sailor is tall and blond, like a Nordic deity. He is taken care of by the whole neighborhood, while the fisherman’s daughter begins, little by little, to fall in love with him. They get married. They have two children. But to the end, the blond god cannot adapt to the harshness of the sun, the rocks, the people.
One by one, I was discovering all the similarities. In my short story, the Nordic woman would give me occasion to describe the habits and customs of southern Crete. In Pirandello, it is the Nordic man who makes him describe the habits and customs of southern Sicily. (And what a master of description! How full of intensity and life are his characters and dialogues! From beneath the great Sicilian playwright an even greater novelist was revealed to me.) The same story, the same plot. I was shaken.
“You’re not going to start writing a novel of manners now, are you?” I asked myself. That style of prose is dead and buried. Nowadays, people are after other things. Nowadays, it’s space, and comets, like Haley’s, which is going to reappear, and (I had read all this recently and it came pouring back into my head) the Soviets were getting ready to welcome it by sending two sputniks equipped with ultramodern telescopes and computers, while the French were going to send a three-meter-long test tube with an investigative photoradar, which, if it was not destroyed by the dust of unclean snow that is said to make up the tail of the comet, would send us information about the chemical composition of the universe. Nowadays, everybody is waiting with mammoth telescopes for Haley’s comet, whereas when it had appeared in 1910, about the time that Pirandello’s short story was written, people were terrified and thought the end of the world was at hand.
Somehow, Haley’s comet, which reappears every seventy-six years, corresponded inside me with Pirandello and his short story, and I tried desperately to convince myself that between 1910 and 1986 the way we approach the same phenomenon changed. But it was no use. Perhaps it’s because man is not a comet but a fixed star that, though fixed, passes like a comet through life. Only life doesn’t change. Intellectual developments (psychoanalysis, sociology, and biophysics) do not help us in the least to understand the phenomenon of human existence. It is only the knowledge of the mechanics of the text, its translation so to speak, and the naïvefé of the narrator in describing and analyzing his hero’s reactions, that undermines our confidence. That is why the idea of a transplant excited me. It was something modern. Something that no Pirandello had ever touched because it simply did not exist in his day. Whereas the story of the Nordic goddess and the southern satyr, or, in his short story, the Nordic god and the southern siren, was outdated, and I was thankful to him for writing it so well as to rid me of my desire to write it.
Around half past one, not being able to hold out any longer, I called her. Rosa herself answered the phone. She had just gotten back from work, she said. Would she like to see me? Of course she would! Did she want me to come over? Right away. She was staying in the Parioli quarter. She gave me the address. I took a taxi and soon I was with her.
The Aldo Brandini residence was chic. As a rule, all people connected to fashion and clothes stayed here when visiting the city. In the foyer downstairs, I saw a crowd of models and photographers meeting for lunch. An atmosphere of wealth and freshness. An air of well being, merriment, and sanitized sex, that’s how it seemed to me. I went up to her apartment. It was small but comfortable, with a tiny kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom. It looked out on the courtyard palm trees. Rosa looked beautiful. I was enchanted.
She was a blend of youth and maturity, the Rosa of my love. It was the first time that this symbiosis of both ages in her had struck me so vividly. Now that it had been months since I had seen her, I had acquired the proper distance to see her thus. Her face had flashes of a youth not spent, or not well spent, which allowed her a reserve of wealth, while at the same time the weariness of a life she had not lived, or that had made her suffer, that had left its heavy seal on her. Like most of the women I had been involved with, she regarded me, since I was a writer, a bit as a confessor. I knew Rosa’s life, what she had been through before we met by chance at an art exhibition, and why she had attached herself to me with such a passion: she believed that she had finally met the man she had been looking for, the one who could understand as well as love her. And it had indeed been so in the beginning.
But, with time, other things count for more in a relationship: sexual habits suddenly become very important, and while two properly know that everything favors their splitting up, since their relationship is leading nowhere long-term (like living together, a necessary development after a certain point), still they are unable to split up, because meanwhile, their way of getting it on has become too powerful. If Rosa happens to read this passage, I know she will be indignant at the expression getting it on. Because for her, our sexual intercourse had come to signify something momentous and multifaceted, far above the mediocrity she had known in her life previously. And it was indeed so. She wasn’t exaggerating, and neither am I, when I say that we had reached a degree of sexual identification that was very rare. That is precisely what brought on the problem and caused the difficulties of our separation that had cost her dearly, me somewhat less.
So then what was the meaning of her reappearance in my life? What could she want from me, when I knew that in order to forget me she had gone as far as Tierra del Fuego? I knew from friends we had in common that she had suffered terribly after our split up, and everybody had urged me to help her by never appearing in her life again. As painful as it was, I had done it. However horribly I missed her presence, I never gave a sign of life. I only made sure I met with people who knew us both, so that I could keep up with her news and, through her news, relive the Sweet warmth of the good times we had had together. Of course, this happened less and less often as time went by, which was why, when I received my publisher’s order to disappear into a foreign land, into a foreign city, in order to write, I accepted with pleasure: the torment of forcing myself not to see her became more bearable. If I was far away, she would be more free to circulate and perhaps to find someone else, while I would isolate myself and recover more easily. So I was very surprised that morning, when she appeared like a comet in my room. I was so happy to see her again that I didn’t worry over the details of her motives. It was only now that we were together in this foreign room, both of us a little embarrassed, that these thoughts began to eat at me.
In the bedroom, the large double bed with a foam mattress and two pillows gently touching each other was an invitation and a provocation to our old love. Rosa seemed sure of herself; she pretended to be happy to have apparently overcome her karma. She was a different person now, free of me and of my domination over her. My hallucinogenic domination, as she used to call it, since she was unable otherwise to explain the effect that I had on her. I would have been the last person, therefore, to bridge the painful rift, had it not been Rosa herself who had taken the first step, aggressive, sexual, with flowers, in my room that morning and now again in her room, where she started slowly to undress, inviting me tacidy to bed.
I wanted her. And how! Her body had been to me, at one time, worse than opium. As soon as I saw her naked, I would be seized by a sort of sexual frenzy; I wanted her unbearably, here and now. (There and then.) Her body had an impudence all its own, which was not always in accordance with her face. Her face might be talking about other things, but her body would say, “I want you. I want you to sweeten me, to soften me, to make me submit.” And I would take her in my arms and together we would turn into a single rocket shooting into a space full of galaxies. She had loved our space travels so much; it was precisely their loss that had made her suffer.
I wasn’t long (about an hour after the scene I have described) in understanding this strange move of Rosa’s. I must say it came to me a little late because I’m an idiot where the complex psychology of a woman is concerned: I fell victim to her sexual advances, thinking that we would reach once again the apogee of our travels. But I was wrong. I was lamentably wrong. Rosa had come to see me, Rosa had sought me out, Rosa had practically asked me to bed a moment ago for one reason, apparently a very important one to her: to prove to me that she was over me. That I did not give her the same pleasure as before, that our exhilaration and our space travel belonged to a past that was irrevocably lost. She knew I would be deeply.hurt by that, because it would strip me of medals I had awarded myself for her conquest. She knew (although she never told me so; we never discussed what I am now writing) that she too needed to be convinced that it was indeed so, that she was over me, that we now had an ordinary relationship, as she had had before with other men and I with other women. Nothing unique, nothing special, nothing earth-shattering like before. By proving this, she succeeded in hurting the most sensitive part of my manhood—since all men deep down are flattered when a woman loves them—and in poisoning me with the slow-acting drug of ranking our relationship together with all others.
Of course I did not understand all this at the time. When we found ourselves face to face again in bed, everything seemed to unfold according to the old scenario of our love. I wanted her and she wanted me; we gave ourselves to each other, we exchanged some of the words we used to say, as if we were taking old clothes out of a closet. But the explosion never happened, the rocket never took off, we remained on the surface of the earth, a few meters above it perhaps, but always under an inexorable terrestrial law. I had thought then that this might have been because it was the first time. Two bodies that had once loved each other shamelessly, fanatically, like neophytes of a mystical sect, could not help but suffer a slight shock when they met again. But the same thing happened the following time. During the six days that she stayed in town, every time we came together as lovers—and, if I’m not mistaken, there were as many times as days—nothing happened reminiscent of that twin flame that had set the universe on fire, its sparks like fireworks that illuminated our darkened sky. Everything went along at an ordinary, normal pace, without the slightest surprise.
What I am writing now is the conclusion, the summary of all our meetings. And I am practically convinced that she did it all for one reason: to prove to me that in fact our relationship was over and thus to hurt me, since apparently I had hurt her so much. As for that romantic line, “Let’s stay friends,” Rosa had worded it differently: “Not only friends, but lovers too. But you should know that love isn’t what you think it is. It cannot be ignited by the fire of the body. The body is a vessel, a tool, endowed with an inner power greater than ourselves, since, as you see, the very same bodies, our own, cannot reach their old records. We are no longer Olympic champions at love, but creatures like most others, with our feet on the ground, who carry out this function to satisfy a need.” Having apparently studied my psyche well, she knew that knowledge would hurt me. That it would kill me. And indeed it did hurt me, it did kill me. I tried many times to lift her up to the old heights we used to scale, like mountaineers, hanging from taut ropes, in danger of falling to our deaths at any moment, always to find, at the last moment, the magical flower of our love that would save us, a miracle on the steep slope of the most abysmal desire.
And that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that she was letting me use all the old tricks, the old passkeys with which I used to open her most secret doors, after which she would give herself to me as to a pirate pillaging her diamond coffers, whose treasures were at once replenished. It was as if my hands, by taking her diamonds, made her give birth to newer, brighter ones, through the magical power of love.
Two lovers create their own behavioral code that, after a certain point, monitors them automatically, like a computer. All you have to do is hit the key and the equation appears on the screen. So the little hypocrite was letting me, without ever saying no— showing in fact that she was enjoying it, pretending she was participating—degrade myself by pressing all her keys according to the code and getting no result. At first, as I have said, I didn’t realize what was going on. I thought that her lack of total participation was the result of trauma. I didn’t know that it was her way of proving the old truth about it being the woman’s participation that makes a lover omnipotent. If she is not moved by him, he resembles an automatic washer-dryer that turns when you press the button, that washes the clothes and dries them. But this procedure is formalized, industrial, and the wash does not acquire the fragrance it does when a loving hand washes it in the stream, on the smooth rock, and dries it in the unhewn light of the sun. That was exactly how she had made me feel when she left: that we had made, five or six times, however many days she had been here, a plastic, sanitized love, superficially intense but without the exhilaration and exuberance that had brought us together and carried our relationship along.
In other words, she had made me feel indigent. She had stripped me of the peacock feathers with which she herself had adorned me. She was tender with me, and joyful; she hadn’t changed at all. She never complained to me about our breakup, though at the time she had called it unjust and absurd. No, never. Except once, when these words escaped her lips: “What a shame, what a shame for us both.” When she said this, I didn’t understand right away, and it was only later when she was saying goodbye that her words took on their real significance. It was as if she were saying: “What a shame that you destroyed the love we knew; what a shame that whatever it was that elevated us no longer exists. What a shame that we were both denied the only possibility a human being has of joining the Gods: the possibility of absolute love.”
For me this was like a slap in the face, which I did not feel until later. During the days Rosa was here, something inside had been telling me that all was not well, but I had kept pulling the wool over my eyes. It’ll be better tomorrow, I kept telling myself. Her pomegranate will explode. Its grains will scatter to the four corners of the earth, like before. She will become the earth again, and I her sky. She will become the sea, and I the sun that warms her. But she became, alas, neither the earth nor the sea. And I became neither the sun nor the sky. We remained within our petty, carnal burdens: Rosa and Irineos, two well-defined human beings who did not overstep the boundaries of their bodies, who did not participate in the cosmic happenings, within whom the rhythm of the world was not overthrown. Two grey partridges, not proud rock partridges, rebels of the mountain; two quails flying one meter above the clover; two aphasic pheasants; family restaurants, not diners for vagabonds; two neighborhood churches, not two country chapels drunk on their ascetic solitude, with the smell of wax hanging from ossified candle stands. We had become the store-bought flowers in the cathedral, not the wild flowers of spring in the village church; we had become jukebox songs, not those old, rare seventy-eights that need special needles to be played.
I realized then how insignificant I was. How dependent on the other’s love in order to feel love. How poor by nature in the face of self-sufficient forces. Rosa had taken her revenge in her own way, perhaps even unconsciously.
I had never considered her sly or petty. But the weight of an injury can only be thrown off, it seems, by injuring the one who caused it. In these voracious human relationships that become cannibalistic where love is concerned, Rosa, to survive, had to make me die a little, just as I had made her die in order to triumph.
Then, at last, the writing began. Every cloud has a silver lining, as the saying goes. That’s pretty much what happened with me. My creative self finally got going. I have two strings to my bow, you see: when the man is hurt, the writer comes alive. When the writer Don Pacifico wins, the man Irineos loses. When the writer dies, the man survives. Rosa became Doña Rosita and I became Don Pacifico who had received her heart in a transplant and is now living with it. I had her inside me, I loved her, because with her behavior she had managed to awaken me, to make me see our relationship more clearly. What had gone wrong, what I had done wrong, that we had reached this nadir? And so, happily, because I was Don Pacifico and Rosa was Doña Rosita, I started writing and finished quickly, in less than a fortnight. Rosa’s injured heart had become my own since her death. And yet, with the heart of another, how much longer would I live?
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.)
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...
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 underwear. 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.
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 discussing, 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.
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 either 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.
But 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.
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.
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 difficulty of expression in a world that keeps changing. And all ends well, since life is but a dream.