And I am bursting inside like the city.
This summer, having lost my car, which was registered abroad (unable to afford to clear it through customs, I was forced to sell it for a song to the state), I got around quite a bit by taxi, which, in Greece, is hardly a luxury — in fact, I would say fares are still scandalously cheap, compared to other countries in Western Europe — and so came to know that amiable class of people, taxi drivers, who believe, and rightly so, that they are performing a service by substituting for a deficient public transport system. The capital has no metro, and traffic limitations, combined with bus and trolley strikes, have made moving around “within the city walls” problematic.
Taxi drivers, I was to find out, are a class unto themselves. They are often talkative and they form, for the most part, public opinion, as if they constituted a newspaper, which (like certain laws) is not printed and yet is heard, and which yet has a circulation, in Athens alone, of 600,000 copies a day.
I am a man, I must say, who generally likes to chat. I am literally fascinated by other people’s stories.
My own story bores me. This is why I have a knack for making other people talk to me: I lose myself in their words and forget my own problems. Taxi drivers are, by definition, talkative. Those who, like me, were once immigrants are also dreamers.
— 1-
Stelios and His Lost Tomatoes
For Stelios, the tomatoes in his garden were a consolation. He owned a small plot next to his house, in the suburb of Pefki, where he grew his tomatoes, some zucchini, a little clover, radishes, and a few sweet potatoes. But his tomatoes were his great love.
He would see them every morning growing red, like the cheeks of young girls.
It was summer. The deep of summer. July. His wife and daughters were away on vacation, if one could call it that, in Oropos, visiting with an aunt and doing some swimming. Stelios was left on his own. He worked in his taxi and enjoyed his work. He came in contact with people. But his consolation, amidst the smog and traffic jams, was his garden, a substitute for his village, perhaps, which he had left while still a child in order to emigrate first to Belgium and then, a few years ago, to Athens.
He hadn’t regretted coming back to his country.
There were the children to consider. He was afraid Belgian society, with its drugs, would corrupt his girls.
With the money he had saved up all those years he worked in Spa, he built his little house in Pefki and got his own taxi.
Next to the house (built without a license) was his little garden. He had bought the land with his wife’s cousin, since he couldn’t afford to buy it on his own, and the cousin had built a house next to his. They were separated by the garden.
But the garden belonged to him. That had been determined from the start. Since then, two years had gone by. He didn’t have much to do with the cousin, who had turned out to be a man of bad faith.
Misunderstandings over a few meters of land, while they were both illegally building their homes, caused a rift between them. But he was Stelios’s wife’s cousin, not a stranger. Stelios swallowed his anger. Which is why he started having stomach trouble.
“We don’t always get along very well with the neighbors,” he would explain.
But it gave his wife a sense of security to have a relative nearby. His wife, sweet Merope, had worn herself out in Spa all those years, working at the mineral water bottling plant. It was hard work for her and for Stelios too, who had worked at a factory that made car parts.
In any case, things weren’t too bad. But today there had been a disaster. And the taxi driver vented his anger on his unknown customer. Namely, me.
“I got home in the afternoon. I had been working all morning. All morning I had been dreaming of the salad I was going to make myself, since the old lady and the girls are away at Oropos, with the tomatoes from my garden. They had ripened to perfection. I was going to fry myself a couple of eggs and have a snack.
So I go home, and I find they’ve been picked. It made me mad. It still does.”
“Was it burglars?” I asked.
“Burglars? Since when do burglars steal
tomatoes?”
“Then who stole them?”
“Who? Even if I told you, what would it mean to you? But it makes me mad. And it makes me even madder because I can’t tell him. I know who it was. It was him that did it. My wife’s cousin. My neighbor.
Only he could get into my garden.”
That was when I learned about the house, about their not getting along, and all the rest of it.
“And why don’t you just go straight to him and tell him?”
“And what good would that do, my dear man? It’s done. The tomatoes are gone. But I tell you, it made me mad. I couldn’t wait to get home to go into the garden and pick them, they were so red and plump, like little watermelons, organically grown, and I didn’t find a single one. He had picked the exact four that I was going to pick. The others are still green.”
As he drove me to the offices of my newspaper (The Almanac of Dreams), I could see that the man at the wheel was truly suffering. I was filled with pity for this “pavement ship owner” (as they mockingly refer nowadays to taxi drivers because of their meager earnings), and I wanted to show him my compassion.
“Listen,” I said. “To keep it all inside is no good.
It doesn’t set you free. You have to let it out. You’re only human, you need to get things off your chest. You told me about it, but I’m a stranger. Soon I’ll be gone, you may tell it again to someone else. I don’t want it to stop there: I want you to do something about it.”
From what I gathered, if he were to mention the tomatoes to his cousin, the discussion wouldn’t end there. It would spread over into other things: their old feud over the land they had bought together, the disputed two meters of land (“which is exactly how deep they’ll bury us both,” the taxi driver had remarked wisely). And it might even have gone further — who knows — to the village, to the family affairs of his wife, to the fields that her relatives looked after while she was away in Belgium (perhaps the famous cousin was among them), and to her not having been able to claim her share and feeling wronged over it. The tomatoes were the hand grenades that would explode, and their seeds would destroy the good relations of the neighborhood once and for all.
Also, Stelios did not want, as he told me frankly, to pick a fight when his wife was away, that she should come home all tanned and renewed, only to find the house turned upside-down.
I began to picture the innocent tomatoes that knew nothing, poor things, of the problem they had caused; that had surrendered themselves without protest to the hand that had stolen them; and that could even have become the cause of a murder. How can one blame a tomato, grown in a garden with affection, turning red with shame like a young girl (in Stelios’s case, his own daughters, who grew more and more embarrassed in front of their father as their breasts swelled), and then along comes a vengeful hand and steals them away from the one who raised them with his own sweat and tears?
The street was full of cars. We were moving along with difficulty. It was terribly hot. Like all taxis, this one didn’t have air-conditioning. There was ventilation with, supposedly, fresh air, but that too was burning, like the air in the street.
Stelios, lean faced, was smoking at the wheel. I sat in the back seat; we communicated with our eyes through the rear view mirror. I pictured the scene: he comes home to Pefki dripping with perspiration around 3:30 in the afternoon, after earning a hard day’s wages, living with the dream of his tomatoes, to have a bite and then lie down, closing the shutters and leaving the windows open to let in fresh air. And then, as he enters his garden, the vegetable garden of his dreams, which he would water and weed in order to relax after a hard day’s work at the wheel, among drivers who knew nothing of driving, who were daring, inexperienced, and impudent, waging a battle every day just to avoid being crashed into, he finds among its branches, instead of the red orbs he expects, freshly cut stems.