...And Dreams Are Dreams

Don Pacifico couldn’t get over the thought that his darling could have been killed or irrevocably mutilated. That was what angered him: the injustice inherent in life itself, whereby it can be interrupted without any warning, without any ceremony. It’s only when you expect it to be that it isn’t interrupted. And he started weighing all those cases of people who hadn’t been given long to live and yet, fortunately, lived for many years, against those who were given no warning of their sudden end, and he concluded that the latter cases numbered more than the former. Life is a sweet self-delusion, he thought to himself. That’s why there’s no point in fretting and worrying. Life is a miracle that is given to us each morning, and it is a foolish person who does not enjoy it for the miracle it is, but who instead is moody, irritable, and unpleasant.

“I love you,” he whispered to her tenderly, and they lay there together in bed, without making love, for the first time in their burning relationship. The flowers in the vases sighed with relief.

“So, to recapitulate,” said Lieutenant Livreas, and began reading her statement to her, in his own words, using police terms. Only he still kept forgetting that intersection: Hypoxinou Street and Mesoghion Avenue. Inside his office at the Athens Traffic Police, the smell of bear still lingered. But maybe it was the smell of the gypsy, thought Doña Rosita, who was feeling a little faint, and she took out of her purse not her scented handkerchief, but that lemon with her nail marks in it, that still, after all those days, smelled sweet.

The Transplant

— 1-

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.

— 2-

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. It’s 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.