...And Dreams Are Dreams

As he drove me to the offices of my newspaper (The Almanac of Dreams), I could see that the man at the wheel was truly suffering. I was filled with pity for this “pavement ship owner” (as they mockingly refer nowadays to taxi drivers because of their meager earnings), and I wanted to show him my compassion.

“Listen,” I said. “To keep it all inside is no good.

It doesn’t set you free. You have to let it out. You’re only human, you need to get things off your chest. You told me about it, but I’m a stranger. Soon I’ll be gone, you may tell it again to someone else. I don’t want it to stop there: I want you to do something about it.”

From what I gathered, if he were to mention the tomatoes to his cousin, the discussion wouldn’t end there. It would spread over into other things: their old feud over the land they had bought together, the disputed two meters of land (“which is exactly how deep they’ll bury us both,” the taxi driver had remarked wisely). And it might even have gone further — who knows — to the village, to the family affairs of his wife, to the fields that her relatives looked after while she was away in Belgium (perhaps the famous cousin was among them), and to her not having been able to claim her share and feeling wronged over it. The tomatoes were the hand grenades that would explode, and their seeds would destroy the good relations of the neighborhood once and for all.

Also, Stelios did not want, as he told me frankly, to pick a fight when his wife was away, that she should come home all tanned and renewed, only to find the house turned upside-down.

I began to picture the innocent tomatoes that knew nothing, poor things, of the problem they had caused; that had surrendered themselves without protest to the hand that had stolen them; and that could even have become the cause of a murder. How can one blame a tomato, grown in a garden with affection, turning red with shame like a young girl (in Stelios’s case, his own daughters, who grew more and more embarrassed in front of their father as their breasts swelled), and then along comes a vengeful hand and steals them away from the one who raised them with his own sweat and tears?

The street was full of cars. We were moving along with difficulty. It was terribly hot. Like all taxis, this one didn’t have air-conditioning. There was ventilation with, supposedly, fresh air, but that too was burning, like the air in the street.

Stelios, lean faced, was smoking at the wheel. I sat in the back seat; we communicated with our eyes through the rear view mirror. I pictured the scene: he comes home to Pefki dripping with perspiration around 3:30 in the afternoon, after earning a hard day’s wages, living with the dream of his tomatoes, to have a bite and then lie down, closing the shutters and leaving the windows open to let in fresh air. And then, as he enters his garden, the vegetable garden of his dreams, which he would water and weed in order to relax after a hard day’s work at the wheel, among drivers who knew nothing of driving, who were daring, inexperienced, and impudent, waging a battle every day just to avoid being crashed into, he finds among its branches, instead of the red orbs he expects, freshly cut stems.

“The dirty rascal didn’t even leave me one single tomato as a consolation prize.”

“Couldn’t it have been someone else?” I asked.

“There’s no way. Nobody can get into the garden or the house, the way I’ve fenced it. One can only get in from the inside. And from the inside, only my cousin could have done it. He pulled the same stunt on me last year, with two avocados. But my wife covered for him. And I didn’t care about the avocados.”

How horrible life is, truly! To be condemned to live under a metal roof that is being scorched by the sun, and to dream of a fresh salad, and then for someone to come along and steal it from your plate!

But as our discussion progressed, with me in the role of the calming influence, to help the man get it off his chest, I began to discern that the problem was not so much the tomatoes as it was Stelios’s fear for his daughters.

This cousin was a bit of a satyr, as I surmised from what Stelios told me about his life and times. The father, who loved his girls, wanted, like every father, to be the first to taste their fruit (which, of course, would never happen, so, to make up for it, he would find them husbands who wouldn’t make him jealous).

Stelios had come to fear his cousin, his neighbor, who had designs on his girls and wanted to devour them.