But that day, having seen me coming out with the svelte Ursula, she couldn’t figure out how the bed could be untouched. She wanted to get me talking, to ask me, but she held back, either from embarrassment or because she could see I was exhausted.
“Please just leave everything as it is. I’m going to bed.”
“Ah, women!” she sighed, sounding angry, and she left, after first closing the shutters.
I lay down, and the story of Ursula kept playing back in my mind like a film.
Everything revolved around a pimple on her breast that she could not identify. Was it malignant or not? In any case it was solid, not liquid. There would have to be either a needle biopsy or a surgical biopsy, which might then lead to a mastectomy. Opinions differed on that point. The needle biopsy might aggravate it, and besides, what would be the point of discovering it was benign? She might as well have surgery right from the start and be done with it. But of course that would mean going under the knife. There would be a scar left. That was Ursula’s problem; nevertheless she was being brave about it. I gathered she was the kind of person who liked clear-cut solutions. She did not like problems, be they biological or emotional, to drag on in her personal life, to become cancers. That’s exactly how she had severed relations with every man in her life. At some point they had all turned out to be rotten. Weak. She was looking for a man who would take her on, and all that came with her. She had found one, but he had turned out to be a mafioso. They had thrown him in the slammer. At the moment she was free, on her own, preferring solitude to cloudy and confused emotions. Since she was a frank person, she demanded the same frankness from her mate. But men, at least the ones she had come across, were cowards. The myth of the stronger sex….
Little by little, as she spoke to me, she started becoming another of my heroines: the woman “in transit” who meets and talks with the man in the transit zone of an airport, certain that they will never see each other again. While Ursula talked about her travels, her life, I could hear nothing but the other voice, that of my imagination, that wanted to transplant itself onto human flesh and thus pass from the nonexistence of the nebula to the existence of the tree. The tree would absorb it, it would grow, and there at last the work would exist. “Oh, what a curse it is,” I said to myself,
“to be a writer.” To convert, like a hydroelectric station, the power of the waterfall of life that flows wastefully, plummeting stupidly down ravines. To collect it drop by drop and turn it into energy, which then becomes light in lonely light bulbs in rooms or street lamps, as they turn on with the coming of evening. Ah! The torment, the sweet torment of the imagination. At last I felt as if I were slipping gradually into a deep sleep.
I woke up around noon, shaken by a nightmare, with the boom of the Gianicolo cannon, which, at that hour, always banged its fist against my window.
I looked around me. I saw Rosa’s three red roses, which I had been keeping even though they had died, in the vase with no water. The sweet figure of Rosa, forever lost, forever a dream, was inside a crystal ball.
I couldn’t touch her; she was like a pair of kidneys being transported in serum for transplantation into kidney patients. The nightmare that had shaken me awake at the moment the cannon was fired was the realization that I had suddenly become very poor. That I had run out of money, and that not only had I not been sent here by a publisher, but that I myself was paying for the luxury of being away from my country, which exasperated me. I loved my country and at the same time I hated it because it deprived me of the possibility of loving it while I lived in it. My country was like a woman, a beautiful adolescent in love who, after marrying me, had begun putting on weight and neglecting herself, so that even while I knew that underneath she was the same person, her appearance repulsed me. Perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Maybe I was also to blame.
So in my dream I was poor. I didn’t have a dime.
To be exact, the few savings that I did have left would also have to be tossed onto the altar of my art, to be sacrificed to my art that nobody wanted anymore. That would be the end of my independence. Then I would have to roll up my sleeves and start making a living.
As I did when I was young, when I was starting out in life, without any support, without a penny in my pocket, with a desire to change the world, to make it better. With faith in victory. But now, in my dream, I was no longer young. And even if I had the same faith, I didn’t have the same courage, the same ignorance as I did then. “This parenthesis of twenty years has lasted too long,” said the old flower lady in my sleep.
“Why so, my good lady?” I asked.
“Because you’ve known me for twenty years. I’ve been watching you. Now you will never see me again.
I was your fate. Take these red carnations and scatter them on the grave of Panagoulis. It’s been ten years since he was assassinated. Don’t forget him.”
I sprung up in bed. The cannon was still booming.
Twelve times. But what was worse was not that I had dreamed of the old woman, but that my dream was a reality that I had repressed so as to devote myself fully to the joy of creation. And it came, deviously, like a thief in the night, out of the underground tunnels that carry our dreams, to shake me up, because there are torture dreams, on racks, sacrificial altar dreams to the Thermidors of sleep, from which you awaken with a start, only to discover that they are anything but dreams, that they are nightmares of irrefutable reality.
And now I, the celebrator of dreams, the author of
… And Dreams Are Dreams, the existentialist of dreams, had to pay the nightmare bill of my hotel, where I had spent almost two months, calling dream friends and dream lovers, dream interpreters and dream critics. And it is well known that hotels always inflate their guests’ phone bills. That is how they make their money, the same way restaurants make money from their bar, from alcoholic drinks, and not from food. It is the same with hotels. The price of the room is nothing compared to all the other expenses, which, when added up, spell disaster.
I went downstairs to ask for my bill.
“Are you leaving?” asked the frosty accountant, to whom I had given a small deposit, but who was waiting, without pressing me, since I was a resident at the hotel and had been recommended by a friend of his, to see when I would finally pay him.
“I’m not leaving just yet,” I explained, “but I would like to know exactly how much I owe.”
“I see you have made a lot of phone calls,” he said, as if to prepare me.
“That is precisely why….”
He started tapping away at the adding machine at lightening speed. It sounded like a machine gun, the same way my typewriter sounds in moments of inspiration. He was making me sick. His cold gaze, his expertise at hitting the keys that for me translated into the blood of my veins, all this suddenly made me realize the absurdity of my enterprise. To exile myself to a city, to write… what? When I had nothing to say, when nobody wanted anything from me, when my art of storytelling was made obsolete by the facts themselves? And as I watched him machine-gunning the interminable column of phone calls, coffees, mineral waters, never ending, like a list of heroes fallen in battle (but in which war? Who was the enemy? Under whose orders? Who were its generals?), I remembered all the times I had said to myself, in this city or elsewhere in the world where I had wandered, that all people have a specific job: one is a bellboy, the other an accountant, one is a priest, the other a trade unionist, a news agent or a hair stylist, a clerk or a politician, a cop, a stool pigeon, a fashion model, and only I and those of my kind, without even being eligible for its benefits, for whom a workers’ strike would have no meaning (have you ever thought what a poets’ strike would mean?), we enjoyed the luxury of having insight into a world that, alas, had never had any use for this insight but that would not have existed without it. I always felt a little out of place, a little useless, “like classical music in a tavern.”