Things that no one had even dreamt of. And yet — and I explained to him that I was speaking from my experience as a printer — the most beautiful page can seem stifling without a margin. Dreaming makes life wider, the same way a frame gives another dimension to a painting. It is the border, the shade. The depth of the world.
He listened to me thoughtfully. He was the modernizer, the renovator, the restorer, the reformer. I told him so. And immediately I added that we were not competitors in any way. We would like him to view us as complementary. My partners and I worked a system of buying and selling that didn’t hurt the economy.
However, like the parallel economy that thrived in our country, our system was beyond state control. As an economist (and once quite a famous one), he could surely understand that if our dream drachma was unshakeable, it was because it had a celestial clause.
There are transferable dreams, washable and exchangeable, like in primitive societies where commerce was a bartering system; floral dreams like Kyra Katina’s dress; Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, 1000
cc dreams that explode in the corridors of your sleep; flagship dreams, fire ship dreams, and others that last for years that seem as unending as the dictatorships of Franco or Salazar: suddenly you wake up in the midst of a revolution with carnations or a regime with democratic processes but under which people are only interested in porno dreams that escape from the security of dreams. Clandestine dreams in which you have to show your counterfeit passport to pass through the security gate and you’re afraid they might discover you; dreams that have failed their exams; experimental dreams, in the test tubes of your memory; fickle dreams, tousle headed, grumpy or stormy; kidney dreams, transplant dreams, with cellulite; reprehensible dreams, unvoted-on dreams, parliamentary, figurative dreams, and dreams that drop like unpicked figs and explode like hand grenades on the sheet iron, muffled; dreams of your brain damage, brackish dreams that border on the ravines of the sea, dreams that burn like dry branches, and others that won’t light no matter how much pure alcohol you soak them in, until the room fills with smoke and you wake up choking. “I don’t dream” means “I don’t live”: “I dream” means “I exist”; not I, but the legendary bunch of so many keys to doors you never opened, houses you never lived in, loves that you never took even though, at one time, they offered themselves to you in profusion. Dreams with freckles, flooded, with zebra stripes on their bodies, lashed by the sun; and dreams, caryatid, dreams of kouroi sculpted in marble, supine; dreams where you experience the anxiety of the goalkeeper before the penalty kick, strictly confidential, bottled in fruit juices, without preservatives. (“I drink fruit juices and dream of fruit.”) Newspaper-eating dreams, engraved in stones; constrictor dreams; fuchsia, psychedelic dreams, of Moluccans, flying; Siamese twins who marry themselves; critical dreams, dreams that ratify bills from the presidency of the republic; beautiful-ugly dreams, chained bears dragged along by gypsies, delphic; dreams from which you finally wake up richer, because they have charged your batteries with the energy of the life-giving sun.
I don’t know what the prime minister did
afterward, because meanwhile I died and became a dream of myself. I died on the exact date I was born; November 18, Scorpio. It was the same day that the big guys weren’t able to come to an agreement in Geneva. So nuclear war was just a matter of time.
What I mean to say is, I dreamed I died, since it was the date of my birth. Since birth is the death of a dream, death is an opportunity to be reborn. So at last I found myself living in my dream, from where I am writing to you, happy, because truly, when life becomes a dream, then the dream also can become life.
Postscriptum dreams and warning dreams exist; they blossom on the steep slopes of Mount Olympus; mountain climbers, tightrope walkers try to reach them without always succeeding, and they wake up soaked in sweat, screaming, as they fall into the void of the ravine that is illuminated by a dream moon that was conquered but not abolished because they still haven’t been able to figure out its biocomponents. Spaceman dreams are the ones where there is no severing of the umbilical cord of communication between the spaceship and the spaceman walking on air, certain that the rope of mother earth will someday bring him close to her.
History
— 1-
Plasterboard and Fiberglass
An attractive title, for sure, because we have four things joined into two: plaster, board, glass, and fiber.
The same way it happens in marriage, where two individuals create a new species: the couple. Thus we say, “the Artemakises,” even though the Artemakis couple consists of Yuli Prokopiou and Pavlos Artemakis. In this case, plasterboard was a new building material that could replace the old rafter or the iron tube or the brick, was serviceable and strong, even quakeproof (insisted Pavlos, who manufactured it in his factory), but which was not preferred by building contractors because they simply were not aware of its existence. But Loukia, the young architect, knew about it from England, where she had attended college. That was how she got to talking with the industrialist who, like most of his kind, was a daddy’s boy.
The other members of the group traveling on Elias’s yacht were listening to the conversation without contributing, since they knew nothing about construction and building materials.
The young industrialist, who until then had presented a stony face, impervious to the moods of this disparate assembly, suddenly became animated and the doctor saw that his face, normally pleasant and indifferent, blazed with an inner flame as he fixed his liquid eyes on the young woman and explained the difficulties he had come across trying to introduce this new product into the market.
“Of course, it’s still a little expensive,” he said, speaking of plasterboard, “but like all products whose price is dictated by demand, as soon as production is increased, its price will tend to go down.”
The yacht, with its permanent crew (the pensioner captain, the new captain, the two stewards, the cook, and the engineer), was moored at the island port, and the passengers had gone ashore to eat fritters. That was when the conversation about plasterboard and the fiberglass insulation that goes with it began. The doctor had observed that, for the past two days they had been on board, the blond young man who was now speaking had not uttered a single word. He and his young wife had behaved like crew members, even though they were guests. The industrialist was only concerned with speargun fishing. At the table he would exchange a few words with the others about the food; he always had a pleasant but impenetrable face. Now this conversation, concerning his line of work, seemed to have awakened him, just as they were eating their fritters.
It was late September, and this long weekend cruise under the sweet light (the sun was warm this time of year, without scorching) had gathered a disparate crew, strangers to one another, on Elias’s yacht, which he had offered them free of charge.
During the summer, Elias would rent out his yacht to tourists. It slept ten, and whenever there was a free place, he would invite friends to come along to keep him company. But this time, perhaps for lack of customers because the season was almost over, he had reserved it entirely for his friends. Among them was the doctor, who, without his wife, became a sort of observer of the others.
It was late Saturday afternoon when they docked at the island. They went ashore for a walk; somebody had suggested they have fritters. They would have dinner later, on the yacht. Having spent all day swimming, they now felt pleasantly tired, worn out by their exposure to the sun and sea.