“Initially, Rosa took this violence very badly. The animal tamer was the first who had ever dared go against her, fearlessly, even in the face of her fiercest roars. One time, she even tried to attack him from behind and tear him to pieces, but he, quick and supple like a wild cat, evaded her, they say, and then, throwing himself on her, managed to grab her and force open her mouth with his plierlike hands, then blow into her with such force that she almost suffocated. From that day on, Rosa blindly and fearfully obeyed his orders as if they were cracks of a whip. He would always start by looking her deep in the eye, which would make the tigress restless and troubled, something which, because she was a virgin, it seems she had never felt before.
“Rosa’s love for the animal tamer was common knowledge among the people of the circus. Whenever he wasn’t around, she would languish inside her cage and refuse to come out and do her numbers. The first time he went on leave, she went on a hunger strike.
They kept her alive with injections. Then he returned, all tanned after a month by the sea, and Rosa came back to life.
“One night, they say, he went into her cage, coming out the following morning. Nobody knew what happened in there. But after that night, the tigress began turning into a human being. Little by little, she started becoming a woman. The circus employees were horrified each morning to see her changing shape. This transformation lasted a few weeks and was also observed by many doctors. It wasn’t a change of sex.
She had always been female. It was a change of species. At the end of one year, she was a full-fledged woman. All that remained of the old tigress were her nails, which she was unable to hide no matter how red she painted them, and that flame in her eyes that reflected her jungle origins.
“They were married and lived happily. The
animal tamer taught her human speech, and in the street, at the market, everybody desired her: she was a real volcano. A sex bomb, as they say. Rumor had it that they kept her husband’s old whip hanging on the wall above their bed, like a cocked antique rifle. She gave birth to two children, irrepressible and wild like tiger cubs.
“One day, I saw her shopping in Kuhenstrasse. As soon as she saw me she recognized me. She ran to me and hugged and kissed me. We reminisced about old times. I told her how happy I was about her transformation. She said she might stop by the zoo and see me one day, but that she was afraid of how she might react to the place where she had suffered in captivity. What can I say, my good man? I was tempted. I wanted her like crazy. Everybody wanted her.”
“And then what happened?” I asked, as I saw him staring into space, when he stopped at a red light.
“Ah, then, you don’t want to know. A sad tale.
One day, they found her husband dead of a snake bite at the circus, where he still worked as a veteran animal trainer. At that very moment, they say, sweet Rosa started to turn back into the tigress she once had been.
At her husband’s grave, her family and children looked on with amazement as she started to change, to grow smaller and longer, her black clothes becoming fur, her hands dropping to touch the ground, her nails sinking into the soil of the tomb. She became a quadruped again.
“The doctors came running, and so did the TV
cameras. I saw her that evening on the news: she was a regular tigress. When the camera zeroed in on her face, I saw the figure of the animal trainer reflected deep within her gaze. He was still alive in those green eyes, standing upright with his whip in the air, just like when he used to order her to jump through the flaming hoop.
The same way they say it happens with the old, useless TV cameras, on whose cylindrical mirror there remains, indelibly etched, the last shot the camera took before being put away somewhere, never to be used again.” The taxi driver stopped talking, moved by the memory of his story.
“But tell me,” I asked, “have you regretted coming back to Greece?”
“Have I ever!” he said. “At least in Düsseldorf, animals are kept in cages. Here, they roam around the streets free, on wheels.”
— 4-
Where for Different Reasons,
Another Immigrant Taxi Driver Regrets
Returning to Greece
He saw them coming from a distance, like two scarecrows. His burned property still smelled of smoke. The few tufts of green that had survived on the trees seemed absurd reminders of what had once been there. “Why were they the only ones to survive?” he asked himself. “Why?” He wanted to climb up and chop them off.
He appeared immersed in his sorrow. “So, Mr.
Irineos, where were you when the fire started?”
“Are you still asking about that? I was at my beehives. They’re gone now too. Nothing but ashes.”
He seemed not to want to talk to them. Entrenched in his bitterness, he became completely inscrutable. “If only the planes had arrived sooner….” was all he said.
“They couldn’t get here. The wind was blowing like the devil.”
In the village, they were burying the victims. He would have gone, but he was afraid they’d lynch him.
They were wrong to suspect him. He would have to leave now, he had lost everything; he would sell the taxi and go back to Canada. That’s where he would leave his bones. In a foreign land, a foreign continent.
Greece was a heartless mother, always chasing you away.
“The almond trees won’t flower next year,” he said.
“On your way back from your beehives, you
didn’t see anything, you didn’t notice anyone?”
“The workers were coming back from the mines.”
“There are no mines anymore. You’re thinking of the years before you emigrated. All the workers left the island, just like you. And just like you, they all came back loaded with dough.” (The truth is, he had come back last. He had taken too long, far too long. He hadn’t had time to build like the others.) The two periods of his life began to merge in his mind: first was the social despair. And now, in full bloom, ruination by fire. Always, albeit for different reasons, the same disaster. “There were cars going by.
With boats in tow, and caravans. How would I know?”
“Is there something or someone you could
indicate to us?”
“The donkey crapped and its steamy dung set fire to the dry pine needles,” he said finally. Impenetrable, immured in his silence. “Here,” he said, extending his hands. “Handcuff me if I’m a suspect. Don’t torture me anymore with questions.” The two visitors, the police sergeant and the representative of the court, were forced to leave.
His property had become a vacant plot full of ashes. The seagulls had turned grey from the smoke. In the dry stream bed, the partridges no longer cackled.
Old legislation is like an old hat: it does not fit well on the head of a man who evolved according to technology. So it was that Irineos (who was telling me this story while driving cautiously through the jungle of the city) could not get into his head the reason he couldn’t build on his own property. “Because it’s designated a wooded area,” he told me. “What does this mean, designated a wooded area?” he asked the officials. He had lost touch with the way things were in his country, which he left when just a young man, in 1955, with great difficulty, because he belonged to the left, and even then he was able to leave only thanks to the tricks and bribes of a travel agent who managed to get him a passport. (“And don’t you ever come back,”
the agent had said, “or I’m done for.”)
“A wooded area,” they explained at the local office of the Forestry Department, “means it has pine trees, and trees are protected by law.”