• • •
Legs sink into the parquet under the weight of morning. Misha: idle, on guard. The statistical sheet, verification, timekeeping, re-use, contract, code, coordination, installed power, pumped power, columns, furnaces, siren, doorbell, kids’ bedtime broadcasts, tape recorder.
The key, the radio broadcast, the text, the tape recorder. The stair, the spiral, the doormat. Typed manuscripts and carbon copies and typewriters, deafening and annihilating, ubiquitous. Sebastian Caba, diplomatically asking the clerk to finish everything quickly. The hand around the throat and “can’t stand anymore” — period. Full stop. Stairs, streets, another room, cell, or birdcage.
The stranger under the rain, standing on the street corner, with arms crossed — the prisoner of the moment, a challenging deaf-mute, a suspicious person, an outcast dreaded by everyone: the hurried passersby, parents, teachers, wives, lovers, stern mothers, aunts, sisters, neighbors, porters, police informants, office workers, and sadistic detectives. He abandons himself to the streets, hidden on the narrow metal staircase that curls in slow, serpentine spirals; the body follows the spiral of a point that trickles along the arc of a ray, rotated from a torrid center. The room: like the remains of a failed aeronautic expedition. The prisoner confused by the absent inhabitant’s stories. The birds, bird fanciers, forests, and the quail’s blurted chirping. Every gesture demolishes objects, heaps — avalanches; every step provokes crashes, touches sticky streaks, and upsets dust trails. Notebooks, books, scores, curtains, chairs, shoes, jam, cans, notebooks, buttons, books, teaspoons, hats, je suis un petit garcon de belle figure.
Long limousines snake through the sickly fog, through the wanderer’s mind, and into a square in front of the school, while Miss Monica is invaded by rows of little lunatic barbarians slamming the limousine doors like cruel slaps. Long, official limousines, phantoms of comrades, intellectuals, and solemn, subservient drivers: officials who dizzy her mind like wandering ghosts.
The guilty party — vagabond, improvised assassin, dime-a-dozen suicide — would have his movements recorded among bedtime stories for kids (tormented by Monica Smânănescu’s piano): three tender bullets, the sob stifled by poison, the death rattle of the strangled, suicide’s requiem, sung in the low voice of the black woman howling at the end of an afternoon.
She, Monica Smânănescu, traveling the suicide’s mind, embodied, materialized under any mask. . the guilty one banishes her now, trying to escape, forget. She, the third person, apt for the burdens of her inventor, is overloaded, used, and defiled every which way; enslaved to her role, subjected to terror, siphoning the burden from any character, the nicknames, the passions, the power — or precariousness, preposterousness, plunge, or promise — she: tenaciously dragging her special effects, her tormented acts of tenderness, encircling unknowns, heedless or caught unaware.
The third person, inventing her language in columns of typed text, between missives, souvenirs, cries, sufferings aligned in the typewriter, in two or three of Covalschi’s copies. Satisfying her voracity for smells, stenches, colors, and falsettos, little red horns leap out of a word here and there. Her words: pleasantly warm, pleasantly plump, melding, mountains, Tibi, Dănuţ, Tudorica, damaged porcelain, consuming fire — the candy-pink flesh of words goes on multiplying predicates, modifiers, and adjectives in a broken ingestion of the grotesque, half-invented, perverse games, drained juices, the terror of autumn with its torturous classes, and the mute telephone; the trains keep running, letters stray toward one another, and the walls that enclose this space leaven and grow fat. Lady piano-teacher wishes to meet a kindred gentleman: I await a protector, a partner, a passing affair.
Suddenly, a moment of numbness permits a brief revolt against her role, but the denial of ridiculousness dissimulates into its own acceptance — a double game, counter-rhythms resumed with the old cunning. The red crayon’s tip pecks at the sentences, dilating them, nudging them: the pain should be more pathetic, pedantic, zany, as these chance interlocutors and executioners expect. Her small revenge gives the illusion of momentary freedom as she exaggerates her grimace, sentiments, and stridencies to appear as a poor little girclass="underline" an idiot of thirteen or fourteen who has been asleep for twenty years, during which time her hair has grown, and her nails and breasts — all the while preserving the same immaculate heart, the same pure, idiotic, infantile mind.
She will execute the imaginary somersaults prescribed by the fugitive — the fearful man who controls her through calculated detours of weird clowning — the slave of his tricks, a credible abstraction with the appearance of authenticity, the phantom haunting the space in which he struggles. The words of her temporary executioners will be used: I try to console my thoughts alone. Brown haired, just like the photo taken in 1964 in the park in Sinaia, alone on the road of life, like that wayfarer in the personals, with laser-like eyes. Everything that can be discovered or invented will be used, and at the end of this ordeal he will climb the serpentine stairs of evening, in a dream where he can prepare the three redeeming bullets, the poison in the jar of jam, the strangling hands — atoning, healing her. Will the executioner arrive as docile as a newborn on the slow, serpentine staircase? Does she exist, does she?
She: suspiciously easy to decipher in objects, thoughts, words, colored letters, and bits of mending, always visible in the chaos of this space, in the nearby fingerprints, the memories on view, the immediate things.
Are her improbably real traces not the deceptions of a trap, of a perfidious track, a delay through which the intruder hopes to escape?
• • •
Thursday, March 2, 1961
My Dear Tiberiu,
Got home not long ago after an afternoon you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. (But more of that later.) Went into the room, where every single thing was still in the exact place you left it (after your departure, there wasn’t even time to eat, let alone tidy up).
The two glasses — the little one and the big one — were side by side on the table, so close together that they seemed to be a proof of our unity. The cigarette butts were still in the ashtray on the table, while the other ashtray was still on the bed, exactly where you left it, and it was as if the objects tried to establish your continued presence here among the books, drinking orange juice, smoking and. . the other things (but more later about the other things) — exactly as in the moments when we were conjoined, from all points of view. You ordered me to forget your telephone number (and the other things). Personally, I don’t even hope that we should talk. You can’t forbid writing, though. Not to anyone! It feels like spring already — the lilac will flower, the nightingales will sing, and from my heart (as among flowers and stars), not one thing will be removed. I’m like a poor, drunken boat under waves of flowering lilac — nothing that’s noble and beautiful has budged in me.
The multitudes of thoughts and feelings have united in a whirlwind: I must wage a fierce battle, not to be completely lost. You should know that this afternoon the whirlwind was more powerful than I, and I was 90 % knocked out.
The phrase “it feels like spring already” is underlined in red and on the edge of the typed page with a hurried, handwritten note: “Tibi will not understand. . he thinks I am a sentimental goose to walk all over, so it won’t give him food for thought, on the contrary, it will make him furious, as it should.”