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.
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.