Date:         Sun, 06 Apr 1997 21:28:31 -0700
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Barbara Sutton <bsutton@gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject:      Sunday story. 

Hi all. 
Being Sunday, you will hopefully have a little time to read this short
story about, among other things, a 1971 red Westfalia. It was written by
Julio Cortazar (1914-1984),one of my favorite writers, while living in
exile in France.(in his Westie)
Fafner the Dragon.
------------------
	"So from time to time I stop working, I wander around in the streets, I
go into a bar, I observe what's happening in town and I gossip with the
old man who sells me my lunch-time sausage because the Dragon-it's high
time I introduced you to him-is a kind of moving house or seashell on
wheels that my obsessive love for Wagner impelled me to call Fafner. A
red Volkswagen with a water-tank, and a seat that lets down into a bed.
I have added a radio, a typewriter, books, bottles of red wine, packets
of soup and cardboard mugs. Plus swimming trunks for whenever the
opportunity arises, a lamp and a gas-ring that turns tinned food into a
meal while I listen to Vivaldi or pen these words.
	This stuff about the Dragon stems from a long-felt need. I have rarely
accepted the names that are stuck onto things like labels, and I think
this is reflected in my books. I do not see why we should always have to
put up with what comes to us from the past and from elsewhere. So I have
given to the beings I love and have loved names derived from an
encounter, a coincidence between secret codes. So women became flowers,
birds or woodland animals. There were friend whose names changed once a
cycle had run its course: a bear became a monkey, a pale-eyed woman was
a first cloud, then a gazelle and finally a mandrake. Anyway, let's get
back to the Dragon. When two years ago I saw him arrive in the Rue
Cambronne, fresh from the factory, with his wide red face, lowset
sparkling eyes, and laid-back air of bravado, something in me went click
and he became the Dragon, and not just any old dragon but Fafner who
guarded the treasure of the Niebelungen and who, according to legend and
Wagner, is brutal and stupid but has always aroused a sneaking sympathy
in me, perhaps because he is doomed to die at the hand of Diegfried. I
can't forgive heroes that do that kind of thing: thirty years ago I
could never forgive Theseus for having killed the Minotaur (I have only
made the connection between these two things today).
	On that particular afternoon I was much too busy with the problems I
was going to have with the Dragon when it came to changing gear and
manouvering-he was much higher and wider than my little old Renault. Now
it seems obvious to me that I only obeyed the instinct that always leads
me to defend those the established order regards as monsters and
exterminates as soon as it can. In two or three days I became the
Dragon's friend. I told him that as far as I was concerned his name was
no longer Volkswagen. Poetry was, as so often, right on target, for when
I went to the garage to have his number plate fastened on and saw the
mechanic screw a large F on his backside, I was sure my hunch was
correct. And even if the mechanic would have insisted the the F stood
for France, the Dragon understood perfectly. On our way home he showed
me how delighted he was by enthusiastically mounting the pavement and
scaring the wits out of a housewife laden with shopping baskets."

Hope you enjoyed it. 
Cris.
'91 Westie, Toronado red. (Fafner?)
'66 kombi
'67 Deluxe (parts car)