... and Dreams Are Dreams Read online

  ... and dreams are dreams

  Vassilis Vassilikos

  ... and dreams are dreams

  Translated from the Greek

  by Mary Kitroëff

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  New York

  Copyright ©1996 Vassilis Vassilikos

  Translation ©1996 Seven Stories Press

  Published in the United States by Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  First printing January 1996.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a database or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Vasilikos, Vasilēs, 1934-

  [Short stories. English. Selections]

  —And dreams are dreams/by Vassilis Vassilikos; translated from the Greek by Mary Kitroëff.

  p. cm.

  Transladon of the French version of Greek short stories selected from: Ho komētēs tou Chalei and Hē asprē arkouda.

  Contents: And dreams are dreams—History—Stories of taxi drivers—Doña Rosita and Don Pacifico—The white bear—Three miraculous moments lived by Doña Rosita—The transplant.

  ISBN 978-1-888363-00-5 (hc); 978-1-60980-161-8

  1. Vasilikos, Vasilēs, 1934—Translations into English.

  I. Kitroëff, Mary. II. Title.

  PA5633.A46A25 1996

  889’.1334—dc20 95-21663

  CIP

  to Vasso

  Contents

  ...and dreams are dreams

  history

  stories of taxi drivers

  Doña Rosita and Don Pacifico

  the white bear

  three miraculous moments lived by Doña Rosita

  the transplant

  . . . and dreams are dreams

  “Suffocating in the chicken coop of reason,

  I managed to unwind by pleading the case of dreams.”

  —Aeschylus, Agamemnon, v. 82

  “Life is but a dream . . . and dreams are dreams.”

  —Pedro Calderdόn de la Barca

  -1-

  There are dreams that are sold in the market, packaged or fresh, at sale price, dreams that are imported or indigenous, tax free, made locally; dreams that come out according to the seasons, like fruit; others, frozen, you can find all year round; dreams sold in farmers’ markets or department stores; dreams grown with chemical fertilizers or with manure—that is to say pure dreams, greenhouse dreams, and grazing dreams—dreams sold in installments and at half price (in the flea market on Sundays you can find old dreams coveted by collectors: antique dreams, like old gramophone records or rare books); there are political dreams, propaganda for a certain party or ideology, dreams about catastrophes like those earthquake movies that make the whole theater shake (or at least that’s what the audience thinks), that soak you in their drowning waters and make you wake up screaming: dreams of the frost, and the clouds, and the snow, crystalline like snowflakes, silken like hair; dreams with staircases and dreams with scaffoldings, dreams with leaves and dreams with foliage; there are also musical dreams: jazz, blues, and hard rock dreams, opera dreams with sumptuous stage scenery that seems to be three-dimensional, or the one-dimensional kind that unfurls before a plain black background; stereophonic dreams and videotaped dreams; you will find dreams everywhere, in all five continents, even in space (where they are weightless); diuretic dreams and digestive dreams, dreams of Pepsi and dreams of Coke, dreams as painful as colic and others that bum slowly: pyromaniacs’ dreams; Eskimo and eqtiator dreams; dreams that are arranged like the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper; there are also visual dreams, and architectural ones, dreams about the art of logic and the logic of art, with innumerable corpuscles incorporated inside them like the insides of transistor radios; one can also buy metaphysical dreams, paraphysical dreams, dreams on tape, dreams on cassette, postage stamp dreams, rubber-stamped dreams, and other dreams that have as their receiver their very transmitter; dreams that you can pick up on AM or shortwave radio, FM dreams; dreams printed on one hundred-gram paper, on chamois paper, dreams by photosynthesis, in Roman characters, or Shakespearean or Dreyer’s characters; Balkan, Ottoman, Palestinian dreams, Holocaust dreams; fragments of dreams that go off in your sleep like fireworks and others that go whistling by but never explode; you can buy dreams that have been cleared through customs or you can buy dreams on the black market; dreams of oil wells: petrochemical dreams, either from Europe or from colonies that have become independent; dreams of the enslaved, dreams of the free, dreams of slaves, and of Slavs and Albanians; dreams of exiles and of homecomings; migratory dreams; carbohydrate dreams that make you either lose or put on weight; drunken dreams like boats, dreams stoned on anything from Lebanese hash to opium, that is to say dreams of an artificial paradise, dreams brought on by shooting heroin, that lead you little by little to death; snapshot, Kodachrome, caffeinated or decaf, detoxified dreams; rococo, baroque, Etruscan dreams; jackpot dreams; group sex, monogamous, onanistic dreams called nocturnal emissions; slushy or granular dreams; dreams that make you go back, that reverse you or push you forward; mobilized dreams or dreams without character, anonymous, odorless, and cheap dreams; there are volcanic dreams and dreams of boredom, of stagnation; twin dreams, Siamese twin or egocentric dreams; you can also buy two-wheeled dreams, three-wheeled dreams, four-wheeled dreams, and that’s as far as it goes, because after that they take off and become balloons, gliders, Dakotas, Caravelles, multiengine, and turbo powered; there are Porsche and Maserati and Concord dreams; there are fizzy or flat dreams, soda pop dreams that explode in your sleep like champagne corks and scare you, while others have silencers and go off on the sly; crucified, Buddhist, Confucian dreams; dreams of Mao and Mao’s widow, dreams of the tigress; elephantine, lionine, canine, and pantomime dreams; dreams of bouzoukis and of other smaller instruments, like the baglamadaki; dreams of rembetika, dreams like Argentine tangos; folkloric and cosmopolitan dreams, repeating themselves like Hilton or Holiday Inn hotels, changing only according to the architecture of our sleep, while essentially they are identical; perjured, empty, Leninist dreams; dreams that Trotsky would have rejected but that his descendants call Trotskyist; in China you will find Japanese dreams and in Japan granular dreams like Chinese rice; dreams of superb meals, of palaces, of dukes; incestuous and purebred dreams like the horses at the race track, where the outsider dream might just win; dreams of football fans, of tennis and ping-pong that resound monotonously inside your head since you can’t see the players; dreams that win prizes like in beauty pageants; Eurocommunist dreams, gangster dreams, and dreams of poor people who see pizzas in their sleep. Finally, there are dreams of dreams that make you wake with a start and cry out; “No, that can’t be true. I dreamed it.”

  Precisely because they are so terribly lucid, dreams have become the objects of our waking lives and are used as slogans in advertising; dream spots often interrupt a dreamy series or adorn the pages, when they don’t take up an entire page, of daily and weekly newspapers and magazines, like those dreams that recur on fixed dates. This is why there are chairs of Dreamology at the universities and why Dreamography has its dream interpreters. And this is why holders of degrees in Dream Studies are sought after by large corporations, by dream multinationals, and by the large dream trusts and consortiums. This is why the Common European Market of Sleepers obliges students, starting in grade school, to write essays based on their dreams, and instructs teachers, before starting class, to present on the bla
ckboard or on the screen the dream they saw the previous night; and at college entrance exams, essay topics concern dream phrases by writers who dreamed not to interpret the world, but to change it.

  This is why Marx speaks of the surplus value that the boss steals from his worker’s dreams of becoming the boss, and the boss always fools him, just like in those dreams in which you’re always on the point of having it all but you never quite succeed, once and for all. This is why the political parties play with the dreams of their voters, i.e., how to get a tax-free car or how to make their shit travel through a dream pipe to the sea, rather than amass in the garden sewer. Thus, dreams become a vital substance, the main one that keeps you vigilant in this miserable existence, in which you can’t wait to run, to lose yourself in a dream film or a book of dreams or in love, where the dreams that lovers have are so often the opposite of the reality they are living; and they emerge from love rejuvenated because they were able to dream. They hate all those things that keep them grounded in life: their time cards, the rent, illness, nagging, and they live in dreams of traveling in dream vacations, in dreamy states of cohabitation, or they might go and unwind in a football stadium dream or in a dream church. However, next to the purely individual dreams we find their collective counterparts: the nonliberating dream of the great idea; the dream of a free, independent Greece; the dream of a happy youth and a dignified old age. The swallows bring the dream each spring, hacking at the air like tailors; the swallows’ tails look like miniature tuxedos and the flowers that people love transport them, with their smells, to other lands, other gardens of Eden, of dreams, where the ugliness of the wall does not exist, nor the finality of the tomb, nor the flat surface of an oblong table, because a simple vase with flowers placed upon it will transform it into an upside-down foot, and it becomes the sole of the foot of the sky. This is why, in the dreamlike state in which we live while awake, instead of the mushroom of a nuclear disaster, we offer our next nightmare a dream flower in the shape of a sunflower, which, even though it might die, will at least leave us its seeds to eat, and, since dreams are conductors of the whole, as in a hologram, we will be able, through its seeds, to keep bringing to mind over and over the flower in its entirety.

  “Take my life,” said the defendant to the court, “but don’t take my dream. That you cannot do. Even if you wanted to. ”

  And so, the frowning assessors thought about it over their law books, which were ossified dreams, white seashells of dreams that went away, carpets upon which dreams bled in losing their virginity, and concluded:

  “If we can’t take his dream, what’s the good of taking his life?”

  So they commuted the death sentence to life in prison. That way, the convict could dream inside his prison cell, undisturbed by the countless parasites of life.

  We don’t want to speak of Freud. We are almost completely indifferent to his interpretation of dreams. As far as we’re concerned, Freud did nothing more than to lower their high frequency to a household level. The same way that Edison took sunlight and, with technical knowledge, courage, and intelligence, made it into a lightbulb. What we’re saying is different: from the time man started walking on two feet, he has been dreaming continuously. The position of a biped is one that keeps pulling him higher. And this dream, that it is himself in the dream, gives him the energy he needs in his state of vigilance, in order to continue on earth his dreamless and otherwise mortal existence.

  -2-

  When my dreamologist friends and I (our friendship was saturated with dreams like hydrophilous cotton) decided to publish a newspaper, the Almanac of Dreams, in large format like papers used to be, and not a tabloid with badly printed color photographs (because dreams are black and white, and, fortunately, the cameras have yet to be made that would color them), we were, naturally, confronted with the primordial problem of all newspapers, which is the financial one. We had no capital to speak of. But even if one of us had had any, none of us would have dared suggest he invest it in an enterprise as uncertain as our own.

  There were four of us in all. Zissis, a former partisan who still lived with the dream of a Greece of popular rule; Thomas, who had realized his dream of becoming an industrialist three times and three times let it slip through his fingers; Zenon, who was a dream professional (he wrote in Dream Interpreter magazine); and me, Irineos, a writer who had spent his life recording other people’s dreams as if they were his own, or his own as if they were other peoples. The fact that we called ourselves dreamologists was anything but a joke.

  Then one day, we found our Maecenas: Dimitris, an acquaintance of Zenon’s, who had worked abroad and returned to his country with the sole dream of investing his money in a publishing company. We were a match made in heaven. Just as in dreams sometimes, when we come across the most improbable situations and then wake up and say, “It was only a dream,” so were we living our dream. But this one was real. We had found our dream financier, who not only liked our idea that “dreams avenge themselves!” but also found it very marketable.

  “The Almanac will be a hit,” he concluded, after hearing us out. “It’s something that’s been missing. Man can’t live by soccer alone. He needs dreams and videotapes. I have found the videotape market to be saturated. Fortunately, dreams are intangible— they cannot be imported, they are not material goods—and as such, they have been scorned by the unimaginative neo-Hellenes.”

  Thus Dimitris was to provide the money and the machinery; we were to provide the grey matter. Our first step was to request that our newspaper be exempt from the paper tax.

  “No doubt,” said the clerk in charge when we handed in our application to the Ministry of the Presidency (at 3 Zalocosta Street), “dreams are tax free. But I don’t know if the paper they are printed on can also be tax free. You should probably see the general manager.”

  We made an appointment with the general manager (Zis-sis knew him from the Association of Resistance Fighters), who received us with joy and told us we were definitely entitled to tax-free paper since we were publishing a newspaper. He only asked, without seeming too concerned with the answer, what its political affiliation would be.

  “Dreams have nothing to do with politics,” all four of us replied with one voice. Our motto, at the upper right-hand corner, would read, “Dreams of the world, unite.” And our countersign in the opposite corner would read, “We dream in Greek.” We hoped to avoid provoking any political division among our readers by eschewing mottos like “Our dreams have been vindicated” or “Our dreams are enduring,”* even though, as I suggested, “Our dreams have been educated” solved the problem, if only as a play on words.

  “I see,” he said. “It’s really the dream of progress that you want to support. And you couldn’t have picked a better time, since the state is thinking of opening the first dreamfirmary, which would be integrated into the National Health System.”

  He even promised us a small contribution out of the obscure resources of the Ministry. All newspapers were subsidized by the state. Why not ours?

  Delighted, we ran and told Dimitris, our Maecenas, the good news. He was thrilled. And so, without wasting another moment, we got to work preparing the first issue. It was going to be four pages long, on glossy paper.

  “Like the Lonely Hearts Classifieds paper,” Thomas remarked dreamily.

  -3-

  There are dreams of outer space, disinterested dreams; dreams that stay for years locked in a safe-deposit box in a bank; submissive dreams, and others that are like draft dodgers, that never return to the land of our sleep but grow old far away, until an amnesty allows them to be repatriated; then they suddenly find themselves overtaken by other dreams that have grown up meanwhile, because the nature of a dream is such that it does not accept the void: the dream vegetation does not save an empty seat for the dream that’s away; and there are other dreams that have been bought off, like someone paying in order to avoid his military service; bald dreams in a corrupted language; there are toxic dreams li
ke the ones that grow inside reactors, and that, despite all protective measures, manage to expel a little of their poisonous steam and harm the people living nearby, because it is possible, and such thing happen in life, that one persons dream is another persons nightmare; there are gypsy dreams, that wander around, and dreams that are centuries old, like trees; others that last only one night, that are gone before the day breaks; and also those that come out at sunrise because they need the sunlight in order to exist; dreams of the open sea, sailboat dreams, indelible as the tattoos on a sailors skin, dreams on the waves, immured and not handmade; mosaic dreams, and dreams of Byzantine emperors; Protestant and Catholic dreams, dreams of Emperor Hirohito, fascist, gandiose dream that disappear one day, leaving their shells like fossils for the researchers of history, like a work of architecture that is empty on the inside, marking an era; pocket dreams, credit dreams—American Express, Diners Club, and Visa—dreams that can be cashed anywhere in the international market, and others, like the ruble, that are only accepted in their own country; dreams that the dreamers are eager to exchange at a rate of one to five with other dreams whose official prices keep them at a rate of one to one; there are also illegal dreams that change appearance in order to survive; scab dreams, and others that plan the big white strike called death and last as long as death does before transmuting into something else; cross-dressing dreams, that is to say transvestite dreams, amphibolous, amphigenous, dicotyledonous, frog dreams, amphibious dreams, useless like mosquitoes in the mire of sleep; dreams like seagulls that follow the fishing boats, eating whatever the fishermen discard from their nets; antiracist dreams of coal miners who dream of coming out into the light of day; computer science dreams, terminal and interminable dreams like soap operas; brochure dreams that wake you up from your lethargy; manifesto dreams; semiotic dreams that are signifiers without a signified; ostrich dreams, because they hide their heads deep in the sand, thinking you cant see them, but the dream hunters hit dozens of them, like thrushes, with their automatic rifles each September; dreams that run like rock partridges in deep ravines; sandy dreams into which your feet sink as you walk them, until a dream within the dream emerges, an oasis in the Sahara of sleep; helicopter dreams, remote control dreams, SS-20 and Hawk, intercontinental, low-flying dreams that cant be picked up by the radar of vigilance and appear suddenly before you, and make you wonder how you didn’t remember them upon waking; dreams like hermits and ascetics, Capuchins, Franciscans, Pre-Raphaelite dreams. Modiglianiesque dreams, dreams of Chagall, Marco Polo, and Genghis Khan; Mongolian, Iraqi and Iranian, ironic dreams; dreams of the pyramids, Mycenaean and Aztec dreams; and also dreams of rain, of hail; lottery dreams, gambling dreams, good luck or bad luck dreams, dreams of the number 13, astrophysic dreams, blue collar and intellectual dreams, organic or inorganic, that flourish like tropicalplants in our sleep; dreams of the lost homelands, Ionian, Pythagorean, geometrical, decimal, and pure wool, like hides that keep us warm; nylon, plastic, liquid gas and smog dreams, choking dreams that raise the air pollution indicator to dangerous levels; abyssal, medieval, paleolithic, nomadic, and Georgian; dreams like sheafs of wheat or like corn popped at the movie theater; dreams that burst like pomegranates and others that fall under the apple tree, dreams with apples and dreams without appeal; structuralist dreams, computer-era dreams, and barometric dreams that guide seafarers who are usually superstitious; barbiturate dreams, nepenthean, agapanthean dreams, dreams of love and loneliness, dreams...