...And Dreams Are Dreams

Now, lying on the ground, then sitting up, she wonders whether it was she who caused the miracle, or the miracle that caused her. But our life is so prosaic, so flat. She took courage from this triple memory, while Don Pacifico, the man who had been next to her and through whom she had understood that these miracles had happened, at this critical moment was absent from her side. And that killed her spirit more than the accident that had almost killed her body. Not the fact that he wasn’t with her, but that he did not know that she was in danger, or rather that she had just escaped danger. And as she couldn’t make sense of the shouts and noise around her, she took refuge once again in those moments when she had partaken of the mystery, when the miracle of ecstasy had gone right to her soul and lifted her up to the sphere of that irrational faith, the only place where she felt complete, the only place where she could say that she touched the limits of her being and attained fulfillment.

She was a woman alone in the heart of the night, a victim of the violence of two men, without anyone else around to support her, except for some kids who had seen the accident happen and said it was the fault of the other two drivers. Doña Rosita couldn’t tell which one of the three Holy Virgins had saved her: whether it was the little old lady at the Monastery of the Vlattades; the sacristan with the face of the Virgin Mary at the chapel in Nafplion; or the Source of Life at the monastery on the island of Póros. There, later that night, she was remembering strolling up and down the steep streets with Don Pacifico, under the surveillance of the odious TV antennas, which sprouted in the gardens like sterile trees, she had come across a fairy-tale baker, solitary, bent over his magazine, short and bony like Charles Aznavour in the role of a French peasant during the war. As soon as he saw her face up against the windowpane of his darkened bakery, he thought it was the beautiful moon that had come down and was beckoning to him, so he got up as if in a trance, opened the door and asked her in. Doña Rosita went in alone. Don Pacifico purposely stayed outside so as not to ruin the baker’s vision. Afterwards, she told him of how the baker, tired by an especially hard day’s work, because he had to provide people with enough bread for three days in view of Epiphany, saw the beautiful woman at his door, and, as he was sleepy and still covered in flour, but calm, telling her that there was no more bread, suddenly 2 + 5 = 7 loaves appeared out of nowhere on the bare shelf, where an empty pan awaited a receiver of stolen goods, and the baker was as surprised as she was by the miracle. Then he watched her leave, looking toward the sky as if trying to see where the full moon had hidden itself after coming to visit him. Doña Rosita, meanwhile, was walking down the hill arm in arm with Don Pacifico who was telling her, an avowed Orthodox Christian, about the Jewish quarter, when they came upon a church that was just then being opened by a couple, a man and a woman, holding plastic bags. She went in, and discovered an icon of the saint after whom her father was named — her father who had died just a few months earlier.

On the way back, looking out from inside the hovercraft onto the colors of the sun setting into the sea, into the waters of the Saronic Gulf, she had Don Pacifico by her side, keeping time with her happy song, her overflowing joy that sprang from a Greece she did not know but wanted to get to know, a Greece that was inexhaustible and full of beauty, far away from the evil city of Athens, the murderous, concrete, heartless city that absorbed like blotting paper the feelings and emotions of its otherwise good people.

Finally, her adventure ended happily. The

ambulance arrived, despite the protests of the two men.

She was taken to the hospital. All they found was a slight concussion that would be gone in a few days.

They took a CAT scan of her brain, which she showed her friend the next day, and he saw, with amazement, how his darling would look once she was dead, without her lips with which she would kiss him passionately, without her nose, a beautiful, rounded, heavy egg, still beautiful in the nakedness of the X ray.