...And Dreams Are Dreams

He had noticed that the cousin was already hungrily eyeing the elder one, who was seventeen and would be finishing high school the following year. He caught that leer of his one afternoon: Mairoula was in the garden hanging out her wash, mostly panties and socks, and the lecherous cousin (a man of thirty-five, swarthy and unsavory) watched from his balcony and undressed her with his eyes. Stelios was weeding his garden and pretended not to see. But as he stooped down, he caught his cousin’s eyes lusting for his daughter; as he bent over, the blood rushed to his head.

At that moment, he could have taken his hoe and split open his cousin’s thick, vulgar head like a rose. But he restrained himself, and he swallowed his anger like he swallowed everything else.

Now Mairoula was almost eighteen, while his younger daughter, prematurely developed, also had the body of a woman, and the cousin surely had his eye on her too. As for Stelios, whether he would lie down with his wife for the kind of lovemaking that had long since been made out of habit and not passion, or whether he would unwind with some low-class prostitute in a brothel, the image of those girls of his dominated his thoughts and made him climax. He would have his girls on his mind, and as he would struggle to chase those thoughts away the girls would come to him and caress him tenderly with their hands.

At night, before going to bed, they would beg him to be the first man to sleep with them, which would disturb Stelios terribly and make him ashamed in front of his wife; he thought everybody knew about his fantasy and so he would ignore his daughters, and his wife would reprimand him for not being an

affectionate father. His daughters thought he had stopped loving them, even though they hadn’t done anything to upset him.

Mairoula was a serious girl and a good student; she was going to study physics and math at the university. The younger one, with the nice figure, was a talented dancer and attended a ballet school in Pefki (one of the many dance schools that shot up like mushrooms when Fame started playing on TV every Sunday evening). They had never caused him any trouble. Born in Belgium, having lived there for fifteen years, they stood apart from their Greek-born classmates, who were vain and precocious, who wanted to be “cool” and rebelled against their families.

His daughters were serious. In fact the elder one had joined the Communist Youth, where the kids were almost puritanical, growing up with principles in the face of the triple enemy: capitalism-imperialism-Americanocracy.

Yet Stelios’s soul had succeeded in discovering the Devil in the face of his wife’s cousin, who would bring home the occasional nightclub singer. Many times, toward daybreak, Stelios and his wife could hear the moaning of these women in their very own bedroom. “I have daughters,” Stelios would tell his cousin. “At least have a little respect for us.” But he, Mr. Tough Guy with the pencil-thin mustache, who, before coming to live next to them, lived in the boondocks, did not share their sensibilities.

I came to realize all this, little by little, as the line of cars moved along with little hops (I was already late), until finally (what an abyss the human creature is!), the significance of the tomatoes acquired within me its true dimension, and I saw that even if it were true that this man, Stelios, had a weakness for his tomatoes, and even if it were true that for him, his garden was a dream amidst his dangerous, paved, polluted life, it was equally true that these tomatoes, in relation to the cousin, signified something else, something much deeper, something that not even he himself realized, and that, were I to reveal it to him, he would have taken me for a lunatic and kicked me out of his taxi without even letting me pay my fare.

But he was suffering, I could see that. The blow had been mortal, and what was worse, he couldn’t get it out of his system. The important thing in life is having an escape valve for all poisonous gases. That’s all that matters.

Finally, we arrived at the offices of my

newspaper. I invited him to come up with me. He wasn’t familiar with the paper, but he said he would be glad to subscribe to it, since he might be able, through a dream, to find some temporary relief for his problem.

But Stelios’s problem, as the reader must have realized by now, was of the virtually insolvable kind.

His being at odds with his neighbor was a constant threat to the serenity of his family. Only if he put up a fence of dreams between the two houses could he find peace. And he would not be able to put up a fence like that, unless it was….

“What?” he asked.

“A vine arbor. Nobody will know the real reason you put it up, it will offer you the protection of its foliage and its shade, and it will make it safe for your girls to wander around and your tomatoes to ripen.”

The idea appealed to him.