...And Dreams Are Dreams

But at that moment, the kids who had been

playing outside came in and got scared when they saw the bear. So did the clerk at the front desk. He was just about to say, “It is not allowed,” when he recognized in me the former general secretary of the Greek Tourist Organization. He immediately notified the manager whom, by a strange coincidence, I had appointed to this post before going into the army to do my military service. “I understand your situation,” I said, “but there’s not going to be a problem. The new cable car elevator goes directly to my room.” That way, I wouldn’t even pass through the hotel.

The bear was very happy with all this luxury.

Later, we went for a walk on the back side of the mountain and watched the sunset together. I found my acquaintances at the harbor, walking around the polluted soil. They were astonished to see me. In the evening, upon returning to the hotel, I found out that the top minister of the Socialist government had arrived in town. “Now you’ll see who you’ve been mimicking all this time,” I told Aliki. Aliki was also the name of the minister’s wife.

Next day, on the road to Kalamata, after Tripoli, the bear kept asking to be let out. I let it drag me, for the first time, like a dog following a scent. It took me to its old haunts. To its lair. It wanted to live there. I let it. Until one day, when it is found by a topographer who takes it home to his daughter Aliki who’s involved with a young gypsy; the gypsy tells his father about the bear, and the story starts over. But where do I fit into this story? I am waiting for a phone call from my own Aliki. And while I’m waiting, I’m writing.

And so on and so forth.

— 6-

Conclusion or Narrative Ending

For the informed reader, I must say that there is no relation between my bear story and the poem “The Sacred Road” by Anghelos Sikelianos. I don’t have it with me at the moment, but I remember that in his poem about a bear (a species faced, sadly, with extinction, like the spinning wheel), the poet of “The Lyric Life” gives symbolic extensions. For Sikelianos, the bear symbolizes the history of a people (the Greek people, of course) bound with the chains of slavery and not wanting to dance to the beat of the tambourine played by its master; but in my case there is no symbolism. There is no hidden meaning to my story. It was simply my need to describe Athens during the holidays — that reflection of misery and horror — that gave birth, in the little room of my mind, to the white bear, whose wandering around this sad setting amused me because it gave it a different touch. In front of the piles of clothes on Athinas Street; and in a shop on a small street behind the National Theater, which sells herbal teas, salep, and aromatic herbs from Chios, with an old publicity poster in English for the island’s mastic, dating back fifty years, when there were neither any telexes nor any automatic telephones, and when going to America was not simply a matter of hours and when the Chiotes who had emigrated to the United States would sell the products of their native island in their new home; in front of a Politis (the journal), which reminds me of a woman without a lover becoming hysterical; an Anti (the magazine), which also reminds me of a woman, but one who sleeps with a different man each time without enjoying it; a Commentator, who seems to be taking pleasure in himself; and a Reader, which is a Lothario preying on foreign tourists. That is to say, full of translated texts, amidst the vomitous daily press, I suffer the same kind of depression as in the center of Athens, and I search my brain for white bears that will enrich me with their presence in this downtown civilization that reproduces the cultural Kalamata (four as in a row: Kavála has but three, Patras, two, and Tziá only one).

Three Miraculous Moments Lived by Doña Rosita