...And Dreams Are Dreams

Even if he had first seen her this way he would have fallen in love with her. They reminisced together about those moments of their trip: the old lady at the monastery, the white rose on the white stone ledge, the lemon whose peel she had punctured with her nails, releasing its perfume in the taxi that had smelled like a male locker room, the beautiful liquid eyes of the young monk in blue jeans. Meanwhile, the night lowered her veils, eternal mistress of the moon that came out from behind the mountain with the radar and stuck to the windowpane of the baker/Jesus, while the bony ladies of Avignon, the TV antennas, inside abundant gardens of tangerine and orange trees, brought messages from the outside world to a world that still lived in prehistoric times.

Everything can always be either better or worse, but nothing is better or worse than waiting, when the loved one waits for you with love, a manifest liquid, the liquid fire of the Byzantines; the secret of which was well kept by the emperors. It spills all over and burns up the space you can no longer see. “What is love?” Don Pacifico had often asked himself. The truth is, he hadn’t caught any of Doña Rosita’s messages, when she had her car crash and then found herself all alone at the hospital, having her beautiful head CAT

scanned to see if there was any damage. If love is a thing that leaves one person to go to another, like a carrier pigeon with the message around its little leg, then shouldn’t he have been reached, that night, by her desperate message? But nothing had reached him.

Trying to recall what he had been doing at the time of the accident, he saw himself in the company of a noisy young group, eating a huge pork chop in an Albanian tavern somewhere near the city. “Therefore,” he thought to himself now, “love (which was something he had never quite understood) was not simply a question of emitting, but the receptor also had to be on the same wavelength in order to catch the hertzian message. Therefore, it is only when we love that we can know love, and not when we are loved.”

He felt truly mixed-up the next day, when he went to see her and found her in bed, still having dizzy spells from her accident the night before. And he admitted to himself that clearly he didn’t love her as much as he had thought he did, since something as serious as the near loss of her life had hardly touched him. Then he began philosophizing: “What does our life hang from? A thread. Dozens of people are killed in car crashes, as if in a time of war, only no one remembers their names, and the main cause is bad roads.” With thoughts like this, he sank twice as deep inside his remorse: once for not having been near her at that critical moment to help her, and a second time for not catching anything in the air.

“But how did it happen?” he kept asking her.

“Tell me, how exactly did it happen?”

“What’s certain is that it wasn’t my fault,” replied Doña Rosita. “I was going home, it was ten o’clock at night and there was a light rain falling, when at the crossroads of Hypoxinou Street and Mesoghion Avenue, where the traffic light has never worked, I saw two cars come up the side street and stop. I flashed my lights to signal to them that I would keep on moving since I had the right-of-way, but I slowed down just to be on the safe side. I don’t know what they were thinking, but even though they were at a standstill when I entered the intersection, suddenly they both took off and crashed into me. You know the rest.”

She was still dizzy, she said, and she ached all over. It was a miracle she had survived; of that she was convinced. It had been quite a crash. Hadn’t he seen her car downstairs? Visibly shaken, Don Pacifico went downstairs immediately to look at the car and estimate, by the damage, how severe the crash had been. The body of the car had indeed been hit in two places. He came back to his darling and lay down next to her. He caressed her tenderly to assuage yesterday’s pain.

“Where were you last night around ten o’clock?”

she asked, her voice weak and not at all reproachful.

“I had business to take care of with the

contractor,” he said.

That reassured her. Then, she told him that what had sustained her through her pain and abandonment were the three Holy Virgins, the three monasteries; in other words, the three excursions they had taken together a few days earlier.

It was a grey day. The central heating came on only in the evening and early in the morning, so it was cold in the room. They turned on the electric radiator that emitted, besides its heat, a honey-colored light. In the apartment next door, someone was trying to play the piano. But he was too much of a novice to give them the pleasure of a melody, even by a fluke. Then they dove into silence, a silence full of secret messages.