...And Dreams Are Dreams

“We are not stealing,” he replied. “We are only picking a lemon. We wanted to come into the monastery to say a prayer, but unfortunately it’s closed.” The young monk didn’t see Doña Rosita leaning against the wall, her scarf standing on end, under the light that kept being swept away by the wind. Nothing else was heard. But soon, a young monk with Byzantine eyes, dressed in blue jeans, appeared at the door and held it open for them to enter. “The miracle is happening again,” thought Doña Rosita, impressed by the young man whose liquid eyes, under this metaphysical light, excited her, as she later confessed to her friend when he kept asking her, insistently, whether she would have slept with the young monk.

“Yes, I would have slept with him,” she admitted, choked with a shame she was not ashamed of, because, within the sacred space of the monastery, everything was sanctified by a power that was not of this world, this prosaic, explicit, crawling world, but that sprang from other forces. These forces keep us suspended like puppets from invisible strings, making us act out our earthly comedy until they decide to pull us upward, where playacting has no place, since we are rejoined with the whole from which we were only temporarily detached.

Walking in the courtyard of the monastery, Doña Rosita once again felt that shiver of sacredness run through her body. Inside the church, she stood before the ancient, heavy icon stand, which, like a mirror leaning against the wall at a thirty-degree angle, let her see her reflection from head to toe. Its carvings impressed her. The icons were worthy of the best Giottos. The miraculous icon of the monastery, the Virgin Mary Source of Life, stood outside the icon stand, on a wall to the left. That was where she bent down and prayed, while the young monk kept silent watch. And once again she was overwhelmed by her communion with the divine, as she had been at the Monastery of the Vlattades, and at the chapel at Nafplion. For the third time in just a few days, she felt the gift of tradition. She felt faith laying its benevolent hand upon her.

Everything was mystical in this isolated

monastery, far away on the island. In none of these three places had there been any other secular people.

The people were in the jungle of the cities, where, at this moment, hit by other people’s wheels, she lay, having miraculously escaped death. The jungle was people. God had long since abandoned them and withdrawn to his shelter, where only through prayer and fasting could man find him.

Having dropped a generous donation into the monastery’s collection box, Doña Rosita bought two reproductions of the icon of the Source of Life, one for herself and one for her mother, and thanked the young monk for letting them come in at such a late hour. As she was leaving, the inner courtyard of the monastery did not remind her in the least of The Name of the Rose, which she had just finished reading, the same way Orthodoxy had nothing in common with

Catholicism, which frightened its faithful instead of appeasing them.

The taxi was honking impatiently in the dark. She stood one last time, gazing upon this other Bosporus (the other Galata, that of Constantinople, she knew of only from her grandmother’s descriptions), breathing in the wind and taking in all the beauty of the hour and place, when suddenly, obeying her deepest desire, not one, but dozens of white roses sprouted on a bush behind the fence, which not even the nimble Don Pacifico could reach, and she simply gazed at them, happy that the miracle had taken place here too.

Wherever she went with her love, wherever there was a white stone ledge, at once white roses would bloom among the pine needles. With what joy, what force, what yearning and passion she rode downhill in the taxi, moving along the winding road through the woods, while she held the lemon he had picked for her tightly in her hand, breaking its skin with her nail and inhaling its unique, refined perfume.