...And Dreams Are Dreams

My advance money was running out and I would have to return soon. This thought darkened my horizon. Return? To whom? To do what? To hand in my manuscript? I could just as well mail it in. The world is a writer’s oyster. All he needs is a language of his own that he loves, and he is the luckiest of men. He doesn’t need anyone. And yet Rosa, my dreams of Rosa, to see the sun and the sea together, to listen to our favorite songs, to visit distant chapels, the world’s open spaces, all these things tormented me now, now that I knew that they would never happen. She had spoken to me of Smyrna and of Salonika. Yes, I was in love, at last. At an age that I will not reveal, not because I have anything to hide or out of vanity, but so that what I say won’t sound absurd: I was sixteen years old. An adolescent. And I was living the first love of my life.

The certainty of my loss made me rediscover within me all those ideals that I had forgotten about and that I had felt very intensely in the past, when I was very young. But life, that big old steamroller—

heavens, what a cliché—came along and leveled them.

And now these virgin, untouched sources were ruling me. I loved Rosa. I had forgotten her body; now only her face impudently remained in my mind. Her dreamy eyes, her breathless voice. Her cries during our lovemaking, which used to move me so much, now belonged to another woman, not to her.

Adolescent love does not ask to touch the ground.

Taking flight is its greatest joy. To fly, not to crawl like a worm. And while the butterfly, in order to sprout wings, first goes through the chrysalis stage, the human being starts its journey on the earth with wings like a butterfly. As the years go by he turns into a worm, until the moment when he is reunited in the ground with his worm brothers and sisters. (It is only when a person lives for many years that he is able, toward the end of his life, to become a pure spirit again, and to surrender a purer soul to the Lord.) But in my case, the exact opposite was happening.

I was a butterfly soul. I was only just sprouting wings the color of Rosa, after the worm stage I had gone through with her. (Many times in the past she had accused me of neglecting the silk of the soul. She believed that I was doing myself an injustice by limiting myself to the level of the flesh and by asking only of her and not of myself for those emanations that they say come from the soul. She believed that I had other powers within me that I had made sure to mutilate over time. The tree had become deformed, in her opinion, and of course it was too late for me to change.)

And yet, thanks to her, I had changed. Thanks to her I had become who she wanted me to be. Now that I no longer had her. Would she even be interested in hearing the good news? Besides, how long would this transformation last? Wasn’t there the danger, if we got back together, that I might become as I had been when she knew me, wanting to dominate her completely, to be indispensable to her, wanting…. I had practically abolished nourishment from my life. I was living on coffee and water and a ginseng drink that gave me an instant cerebral high when I was working. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else. I wanted my Rosa back.

A Rosa of my memories. A Rosa of my own to love, and not to care about anything else. To be devoted to her the way Saint Francis was to his faith. Penniless and dressed in rags, I would be fortified by the presence of her love. I wanted to get back a Rosa who perhaps was not real, but who was the way I wanted her to be. A Rosa of my imagination.

No. Everything I knew about her told me that the Rosa of my imagination was the real one and that the other Rosa, the one I saw when I was with her, was a figment of my imagination, with whom I satisfied my sexual fantasies. And she accepted my delusion, because she loved me. Until one day, she stopped loving me, because I refused to see her for who she really was. So she left. It was only then, like another Saul on the road to Damascus, that I saw the vision, I saw the light, and I was converted.

Oh, how similar are the paths of people to trains that meet and then speed apart, without time to join together because they are placed on separate tracks!

Could a train be at the same time locomotive and passenger wagon, and identical to the other train on the other track? Is that impossible?

Oh Rosa, Rosa, I kept saying to myself, like another Werther. Sweet Rosa, Rosa my love, your wrists still scarred by that attempt in the past, before you met me, oh Rosa, you who are worthy of my happiness, who made me worthy to live more broadly, more intensely, I, Rosa, who have become you, prayer book, come tonight, my dearest.