Now the amount I had to pay was horrific.
“Have I made a mistake?” cried out the
accountant at the sight of the total, which was so huge even he could not believe it. “Did you actually make so many phone calls?”
“How much does it come to?” I asked through clenched teeth.
The amount he told me hit me like a ton of bricks.
It was the kind of number one only dreams about. It unfolded like the stream of subtitles that accompany news programs for the hard of hearing. A streamer of numbers thrown at a carnival. What was I dressed up as? I saw myself as Saint Francis of Assisi and the old woman as the Holy Virgin. Her grace was abandoning me. She had been my good fate and she was leaving me.
“No, no, it can’t be. Let’s start da capo (from the beginning),” said the accountant from behind his window, while I continued to smoke more and more nervously.
But his da capo hit me. It was Capodistrias whom I had spent the most time studying and telephoning in the great beyond so that he could tell me what had happened before he was assassinated by Petrobey Mavromichalis in Nafplion one day on his way to church. A black dagger from the Mani.
“There must have been a mistake,” said the accountant. “Technology is subject to errors, you know.”
“So is logotechny,” I started to say, but the play on words didn’t work in Italian.
“It can’t be, it can’t be,” he kept muttering. “I’ve been working here for years. So many people have come through this place. Celebrities calling everywhere, all over the world. And yet I’ve never had a bill like this before.”
“Well, of course, I have been staying here for two months,” I attempted.
“But there have been others who have stayed for six months. Even twelve. Take the witch. She stays here all year round. She calls her clients who live in every corner of the earth. She’s never had to pay so much.”
Indeed there was a witch staying in the hotel, a fat woman who looked like a fortune teller, who ran her own mail order business of herbal concoctions in little sachets, and had quite a large clientele. She did all her business over the phone, and, in fact, that is where I would invariably see her camped: outside the hotel phone booths. But at least she got paid for her magic potions, whereas nobody paid me. I was phoning into a vacuum. Whenever I felt lonely I would dig up phone numbers of old friends and call them because I needed to talk. None of them ever called me. I was always the one to call. It was like a sickness, which I was now about to pay for dearly.
Naturally, the accountant came up with the same number again. I told him I would be going away for a couple of days. I would be going to France to get the money.
“No problem,” he said.
In any case, our mutual friend had vouched for me. I called Ursula to cancel our appointment for that evening and to tell her that I would be calling her in a day or two, as soon as I got back.
— 6-
I kept my savings in gold bars in a French bank. A film based on one of my books had been a success and had suddenly brought me a lot of money, which I had deposited into my account in Paris, where I had lived at the time. This was during the years when I could not return to Greece for political reasons. So this was money I had earned abroad and was keeping there legally. But one day, the old lady at the bank, who knew me, told me I had to immediately withdraw my money, since a new law had just gone into effect prohibiting foreigners from having more than a certain amount of cash.
“Otherwise, you will lose whatever amount
exceeds the limit,” she said.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“Buy shares, invest in real estate, gold….”
I wasn’t familiar with business matters or the stock exchange, so I chose gold; it was the easiest. And I had lived off this money for the past twenty years. I remembered how, every time I went to the bank my safe deposit box became lighter rather than heavier with the passing of the years. Now I had to cash in my last gold bar, in order to pay my hotel bill and return to my base, where I had started, still without a completed manuscript. Defeated on all counts. Extinguished. And old.
No sooner said than done. It is easy to liquidate.
To consolidate, now that’s another matter. So I cashed in my last ingot, like one who sells a plot of land at a sacrifice because of a health problem. It was the same with me, only my sickness was of a different kind.
Nevertheless I didn’t relinquish my safe deposit box. I left some of my adolescent poems in it, including “The Old Plane Tree,” as well as the diary my father had kept of the Asia Minor disaster. You never know, I said to myself. After all, hadn’t the Bolsheviks, upon opening the safe deposit boxes of the Russian czar in 1920, found Platonov, an unpublished play by Chekhov? Maybe one day, upon breaking open all terrestrial safe deposit boxes, extraterrestrials would find my “Old Plane Tree.” Immediately, I felt very relieved.
Financial security never gives a writer the force he needs to write powerful works. A writer, or any artist, has to live in poverty in order to always be on the side of the oppressed, to be able to listen to the innermost heartbeats of the indignant, the suffering, the wronged. And I noticed that during the years of my financial security, I had not written anything important, anything truly great.
I like being able to talk about those things that everyone usually keeps quiet about. Only Balzac mentioned such things about his characters, because he knew that without knowledge of their financial status, his reader would not be able to comprehend their behavior or their ideas, much less their emotions. And here I had labored all my life to be like him, only to succeed in becoming my own Balzac, that is to say mythifying my own experience with as much power and talent as was given me, with as much support as I could procure from a small country whose economy is absent from the world markets (no foreign bank recognizes the exchange rate for the drachma), whose language was so rich in the past and so poor nowadays (a language that is listed by foreign editors under the subcategory of Arabic dialects). I like being able to put all my cards on the table, having nothing to hide, declaring point-blank that the act of writing is a difficult act. The only problem was that all this made me anxious, and I started drinking again.
I returned, I paid my hotel bill, and I called Ursula to tell her that I wanted to see her. She was waiting for me in a strapless dress that set off her shoulders and made them look as large as wings. She was earthy, real. I kissed her on the part of her breast where she was afraid she had the malignant tumor. She caressed me, found me a little more tired than last time; she knew that what had not happened in my hotel was going to happen that evening. She had prepared a wonderful dinner. Duck à l’orange and sweet wine. For the first time in the fifteen years since I had given it up, I drank. I wanted to get drunk. To forget. I drank and we talked, we drank and we saw the bottoms of each other’s glasses, the bottoms of each other’s heart.
We went up and down heavenly stairs with a double sob; she, filling my pockets with the money she knew I didn’t have, me, kissing her breast, telling her that the pimple was nothing to worry about, that I would make it go away with the power of my love.