...And Dreams Are Dreams

“Had I opened the window for her to come in, she would have formed puddles on the floor, and perhaps there I could have better studied her meaning, but this way, she was like a man speaking to me from behind the closed window of a departing train, while I, standing on the platform and unable to hear, can only see the desperate opening and closing of his mouth as it forms words I cannot interpret, being in a confused emotional state. I don’t know if his absence will be long, short, or eternal. He could be saying, ‘I love you, I’ll always remember you, I’ll miss you,’ or perhaps something much more mundane, like, ‘Don’t forget to pay the bill,’ or, ‘I forgot to turn off the switch.’ It is only by his worried expression (since I can’t hear his voice) that I can assume he is saying the opposite of what I fear. I can assume he’s saying that he is coming back tomorrow or in a few days.

“And so it was with the rain, speaking to me in her own language, underlining key phrases with claps of thunder, as if to tell me that all this was of no importance, because, beyond our feelings there exists another reality, that of the higher world, home of the clouds that send us the rain and watch us all as if from an airplane, tiny lost insects, caught in the web of a spider city, with our small, insignificant problems that we make immense. It is only the torrent of the water that is immense, the pelting rain that accentuates our solitude.

“‘Which isn’t solitude, my dear rain,’ I replied,

‘when love is burning its logs in the fireplace. Nothing matters compared to the power of love that springs from within me and obliterates everything else. I exist to await his return, or to go and meet him, to touch him and he to touch me; I exist solely for the moments when we’ll be together. Suddenly, nothing else matters. I am happy to love. I feel complete, fulfilled.’

“And as the rain tried to compose the face of the unknown God on my windowpane, talking to me in a solemn language, consumed by her passion, and at the same time angry that her liquid whips couldn’t touch me, she was like a woman trying to tell me to protect myself from pain, from suffering. But love does not know what will dissolve it. Within love, the antibodies that would destroy it cannot develop, for, if they did, then love would cease to be what I call nourishing, or liberating, or capable of raising you to other heights, and would become anxiety, lamentation, pain. The inability of the rain to articulate its speech, to compose itself into an image, was due to its falling against the window I had opened inside me, protected by the crystal glass of my faith in love, which is a window open to the world that lets in the exultant light, the first sun, and turns out the rain’s bogeyman with his claps of thunder. ‘You’re wasting your breath, my dear rain,’

I said. ‘As soon as you stop I’ll hear the key to my door turn inside me, and it’ll be him. You’ll see, rain, you’ll see. As long as you stop.’ In fact, the rain stopped soon after. The greatest of silences fell over the city and the house.”

Lying down, Doña Rosita was beginning to get groggy. (Her hair, covered in an oil that she would later wash out, was still wrapped in a turban.) She heard the key in the door, as if it were turning inside her, unlocking her own deepest, seven-times-sealed door. She heard his steps, then felt him lying down next to her, with his soaking head and cold feet: he had in fact come to meet her as soon as the rain stopped.

She wept, so as to join her tears with the raindrops that still covered him. All of her became a trembling tree of tears. Then, having calmed down, she washed her hair with a dream shampoo, filling the bathtub with dream bubbles.

Obeying Doña Rosita’s call, Don Pacifico had rushed, as soon as the rain stopped, to carry out his duty, which was to provide water for her mill, so that it might open its beautiful wings and the wind might rejoice in its blowing. “A fine, virtuous mill, made by angels” (Rilke). But the wind is diabolical. It blows furiously on Mykonos in the summer, just as it blew on his own island when the fires started, at the time when he was accused, indirectly, of arson. Which he had not committed. Only in his mind. But suspicion regarding the Jew caught on easily among the mistrustful islanders. So, as things were going from bad to worse and no decisions were being made concerning matters of import, the horses wallowed, destined never to race.