...And Dreams Are Dreams

Tele means from afar in ancient Greek. By virtue of this text I have come close to you. Having reached this point I would end, if only life weren’t much more fictional than the best of novels. Nothing surprises us more than the continuation of life, this implacable continuation that makes our escapes into the world of fiction seem laughable. The death of the main character suits fiction writers well, because it introduces the idea of the irrevocable. Whether they start off with the death and go back over his life in the form of flashbacks, or whether they end with the death, the fact remains: the unexpected is impossible.

Likewise, the death of the author suits those who study him: it is impossible for scholars’ monographs to be overturned. That is why studies, monographs, and serious analyses of a creator’s work are always carried out after his death. That is when all the art historians and other researchers gather like seagulls over a sunken trawler. Otherwise, while the artist is alive, the gulls follow hesitantly, eating whatever he deigns to toss at them as he empties his nets, apprehensive of his slightest move, always ready to fall back, those gluttonous old gulls. But once the artist is dead and the trawler has sunk, along with its nets and trawls, the greyish gull researchers are no longer afraid of anything and plop whatever has been washed up from the wreck with their powerful bills. The same thing happens in novels: the death of the main character, whether at the beginning or the end of the book, gives the reader a feeling of certainty. He reads the story with the same ease with which the writer narrates it.

I repeat, however, that life is not at all like a novel. Most of the time — and that’s the trouble — life goes on. She calls on you every day to prove to yourself what your life’s goal is. Of course, there are escape routes, artificial gardens of Eden. But for the most part, escape is not a solution. And we have to keep on living our lives on a basis that is not at all pleasant. That is literally what was happening in my case.

Rosa’s visit had released sources of energy inside me, but after she left I fell back into my familiar rut: work, work, work, then perhaps an evening out, a movie, alone, alone, alone. And then one afternoon I thought I’d go and see my friend Federico, from whom I had been concealing the fact that I was in town until I could be sure I was being productive. He was thrilled to see me, and insisted we go out to dinner that evening.

We went out. Two other Italians, also antique dealers, came along with us, as well as a woman, Ursula, who didn’t seem to be with any of the three men. In fact, all three men were clearly not interested in women, but as Federico was very fond of me, it seems he had invited the young woman in an effort to play matchmaker, since, when I had visited him at his shop that afternoon, I had told him that I was traveling alone.

We went to a trattoria that looked like a movie set, with lit torches in hollows in the walls. It was an ancient Roman tomb that had been turned into a restaurant. There, Federico, who was truly happy to see me, having had a drink or two, loosened up and brought up his favorite topic, all the rage in Italy at the time: organ transplants. He started by protesting television that revealed the name and sex of the donor, which in Federico’s opinion was unnecessary: the patient didn’t need to know whose heart or kidney he was receiving. He went on to say that at that very moment, from one end of his oblong country to the other, from Aosta to Taormina and from Taranto to Sardinia, ambulances were carrying organs in special containers, by sea, by air, by rail, and by DHL, transversely, diagonally, vertically, and horizontally, human organs from the dead, destined for the living.

At dessert, after an abundant meal, he concluded by saying that nowadays, the way medical science has progressed, nothing is thrown away. Except perhaps the nails and the hair. His way of saying all this, by generalizing and poking fun at it, made him laugh first and then (they do say that laughter is as contagious as a head cold) his laughter spread to the others and to myself. I began to laugh hysterically, like a fool, at that

“non si butta niente” (“nothing is thrown away,” as they say about a good piece of beef). By the end of the evening we were all in hysterics, thinking up preposterous transplants, like, for example, a doctor friend of mine in Patras who, while we were college students, wanted to change people’s heads. (Actually, he is now a successful neurosurgeon and he still cuts them open like watermelons.) The madness of one era that becomes the logic of another; isn’t that what progress is?