...And Dreams Are Dreams

The hospital would only accept someone who was alive. ‘What if they’re dying?’ I asked. ‘In that case, yes. But not dead.’ He was beginning to smell. The heat was unbearable. There was no cold storage area available. I took him to Kavála….” Indignation filled the smoke-stained breast. The struggle, the sacred struggle for justice and the equal distribution of wealth. “Where are you youth, you who predicted I would become another? ”

“What do you mean another? ”I asked.

“That verse of Varnalis’s became a reality for me: I changed my name in Canada. Nobody could

pronounce it there. Since in Greek it means pacific, I changed it to Pacifico.”

Doña Rosita and Don Pacifico

— 1-

Doña Rosita is a vast woman. Because she

encompasses the dream. That is to say damp expanses, planted with trees, with gardens where birds can live.

Doña Rosita embroiders. An embroidery into which she passes all the uncomplicated thread of her love.

She has eyes that call you to become a seafarer, to explore it all, right and left, right side up and upside-down. Doña Rosita is irrigated by tributary dreams.

Since, as we already said, dreams constitute the center of our existence, Doña Rosita materializes dreams, as when she bends down to collect autumn leaves with which she composes large tableaux. She has them framed at her neighborhood frame shop. Or when she catches birds’ cries, passes them through her, and then exhales them in the forms of song. Snail people, suspended from their windows, come out of their shells to listen to her.

Doña Rosita is a vast woman. She also has a vast wardrobe. The two rows of dresses that hang in it are not enough for her. She has a rich collection of outfits of all kinds and she changes them with the frequency of dreams. Never has Don Pacifico seen her wear the same dress twice. “I’m empty, empty,” he cries to her.

“Empty.”

“Fill yourself with water. Fill yourself with dream,” replies Doña Rosita.

“But what will the water reflect? An empty sky?”

“No, it will reflect my face.”

Doña Rosita’s face is made from the soft dough that fritter dreams are made of , because there are fritter dreams as there are napoleon dreams, and chocolate cake, and cheesecake, and angel food cake, and Black Forest cake dreams; half-eaten and half-baked dreams; dreams with almonds, with walnut and cinnamon filling, covered in syrup; chocolate eclair and caramel cream dreams, lollipop dreams, ice cream dreams — Baskin-Robbins, Ben and Jerry’s, strawberry sorbet, lemon and lime sorbet — sugar cone and popsicle dreams, boutique, batik, and Calvin Klein or cotton candy dreams. Doña Rosita is a vast woman.

And Don Pacifico is too narrow to accommodate her entirety.

But if Doña Rosita is the dream, then Don

Pacifico is the implied arsonist. Even though he himself never set the fire that logically he could have set, considering his lack of logic. (The suspicion that the arsonist was a Jew caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders.)

By burning the hinterland and transforming it from a wooded expanse into a barren wasteland, they reasoned, he could then build his home. “As an arsonist, I bear my guilt in full. As a builder, I pass this guilt through the building materials, the plasterboard and fiberglass that are words.”

On the horizon of Doña Rosita, mistakes are marked in the words she makes out of clouds. When Don Pacifico burned down one of her wooded areas, Doña Rosita (the land of Doña Rosita) grew poorer by a few acres, but she had boundless expanses inside her to withstand the devastation of his fire. She was annoyed that he had filled her sky with smoke, but a different sun shone down upon her undamaged expanses the following day.

“Why did I do it?” Don Pacifico asks himself. “Or could it be that I didn’t do it? Could it be that the fire started by itself and that I had nothing to do with it?

Could it be that the joy I draw from this cleared land, where I am finally able to build with words, is a guilty joy, drawn from the Talmudic scriptures and the Old Testament, while I am anything but guilty?

“It hadn’t rained since April. And then in August, that terrible month (I always hated August), the pine needles caught fire by themselves, those pine needles whose presence burned us, pricked us, and aroused our senses without us being able to resist them, because they would drag us along every day into a