...And Dreams Are Dreams

For there are vine arbor dreams, and dreams on crutches. There are dreams that isolate our spiritual tranquillity inside their immaterial walls, like the noise-absorption walls along busy freeways passing through populated suburbs.

— 2-

The Lost Woman and the Bed Full of Dollars

“I met her through my job. She was looking for a taxi at 3:00 in the morning. When I asked her where she was going, she said she had no place to go. So I took her back to my place, where I live alone. She went into the bathroom, undressed, and came back wearing only a pair of black panties. Her body was much younger than her face, which was quite wrinkled. At the sight of it, a shiver went through me. I too undressed and lay down next to her, my body very white compared to hers, which was deeply tanned by the sun and sea. She was crying. I let her cry to get it out of her system, without asking her what was wrong.

She liked that. Then she looked deep into my eyes and invited me inside her. I entered a flooded cavern. I tried to hold onto the walls, but they were also soaking.

Then, like a blotter, I drew out her waters and as she began to dry out, I steadied myself inside her. This sweet rowing lasted a long time. In the morning, I woke up to find the bed flooded with dollars. I sat there dumbfounded, staring at the miracle. She slept on, cleared from the fog of her pain. Her face now had the tranquillity of a lake.”

According to this taxi driver, this woman had the ability to produce dollars, just the way bakers turn dough into sweet rolls, or chickens produce eggs, out of a machine that must have been in her stomach and caused her pain. Every time she was about to fill the bed with dollars, he would see her straining, making a superhuman effort, like a medium communicating with the spirits, with such tension, and such an inner rumbling, like a “one-armed bandit,” which greedily gulps down your coins until suddenly you hit the jackpot and its metal apron fills with a noisy cascade of the coins you had fed it. It was somewhat like that, as I understood from what the young taxi driver was saying: this woman, this unknown customer, would produce, at the moment of her liberation, shiny, wet twenty-dollar notes, one after the other, with the speed of a sewing machine. Authentic dollars, that the bank accepted; he never had any problem, he said. Just the way one squeezes sweet oranges and gets seeds instead of juice, that’s how he would see the bank notes spilling from the fork of her legs, as if he kept winning the lottery and no longer needed anything or anyone else.

The dollars were the isotopes of the sweetness that she drew from within herself, from within her own body, self-sufficient in its food and water, its energy sources, with its secretion and discretion, a sweetness that was self-absorbed and transformed, as in fairy tales, into the green hope that gave him joy and security, without the anxiety of earning a daily wage.

He congratulates himself on finding her while she, proud and vulnerable, always asks him: “You don’t only love me for that, do you?” In a word, he had stumbled upon the woman-legend, the woman-liberator, and he had to protect her, so that nobody else would find out their secret and steal her away from him.

She was afraid she’d suddenly go dry and he would stop loving her. “Don’t talk nonsense. I didn’t know you had so many talents hidden in you,” he would say. “It’s only with you,” she would reply, “that it happens so simply.” A gift of God, mysterious like His ways. “One would think you were Christina Onassis,” he would whisper sweetly in her ear, and, with the help of money, all his dreams could at last be realized. “But then,” she would answer gravely, “they will cease to be dreams and desires: your true riches lie in wanting and yearning for things — not in having them.”