How would comrade Monica have dressed? — as a teenager might? In winter: a masculine cap, one of those Russian ones with earflaps, or one of the more usual ones with a peaked crown. In summer: simple dresses, with little white collars, lace trim at the ends of her puffed sleeves, clean colors, pale blue or pink or white, vaporous over her bloated body. In winter: masculine ski pants bursting over her swollen thighs, and solid, black ski boots. In summer: laced flats, large enough for her enormous feet, and the simple, light-blue dress with lace collar, slightly wrinkled — with a little grease or ink-stain hidden somewhere. In any case, not very clean, assembled in haste from the wardrobe overflowing with clothes, from the rumpled bed, from beneath newspapers, notebooks, and books, from the table full of dirty utensils, unsharpened pencils, and leftover hankies. From any hook or hanger or corner of the room — the attire of the past, present, and future stand aligned in a pigsty.
She would enter: going through the school’s hall in her January boots, with her ski pants and sweater, wearing her red, tasseled beret. Tiberiu Covalschi — as before — would lead. It was his way of making the situation slightly less ridiculous: leading her boorishly. . She would’ve had enough common sense, even back then, to wonder if her presence provoked vulgarity, if she aroused an appetite in others for cruelty and humiliation. She would enter the hall looking at the rug, the three black leather chairs, the little round table covered with glass, and the two magazines.
Too few, two magazines! Only, objecting was no longer possible after having been scolded for the collection of women’s magazines — obtained at the expense of exhausting bargaining. Several days ago, she had shown the comrade boss the colored heaps arranged on the table, but on comrade Covalschi’s order, the magazines had to be returned. Her initiative to acquire them had seemed scandalous. We cannot offend the female comrades who come here, Covalschi decreed, looking at the hall where mothers would meet their children. The comrade mothers must not be insulted by heaps of frivolous magazines. On the table there were now only two examples, as Tibi had decided.
The first female inspector. Monica: trembling with amiability. Covalschi: distant and mute, his ascendance as a cunning dwarf, shielded behind his hideousness, seemed perfect for those chaotic times.
— You have arranged things well. There should be more magazines. It looks poverty-stricken. If three people come, there won’t be enough to read.
Covalschi levels his gaze at the walls. Monica begins stammering.
— You know, we thought to display only the latest issue. The others should already be familiar, of course.
The inspector looked like she had been struck by a thunderbolt: red-cheeked, suffocating in her fur overcoat.
— Familiar? What foolishness! As if I have the time, as if I have the time to read magazines! As if I were the wife of who knows what minister of the old guard with nothing to occupy my time. Who on earth could come up with such a stupid excuse?
The final word gushed out of her with a splash, with an excess of saliva. The Crocodile’s silence allowed him to think.
— I haven’t had time to stop by here. I was just coming myself to check. It was an initiative of comrade Smântănescu’s, a lack of. . We’ll make things right — Covalschi stuttered, looking pale. The visitor listened to him tensely.
— Yes! You do that, please — without fail, immediately, urgently: right now! This is unbelievable, unacceptable!
Timid, fearful, there was nothing to do but remain silent alongside Covalschi’s hypocrisy. Covalschi could have managed by himself, anyhow. If he had looked differently, or if he hadn’t known how to use ugliness to his advantage, he would have been as vulnerable as his submissive, frightened, disoriented peers: the visiting inspector — that menacing authority — would have crushed him like any other subordinate, just as she had crushed Monica Smântănescu. Comrade Tibi, however, continued to act normally, using a mask to cover his secret weaknesses and inevitable betrayals. He went on favoring hard, taciturn, deformed people. His hideous appearance was an insult to conventional frivolity. He was right: conventional forms created the possibility of equivocation, indulgence, and diversion. The dwarf’s unblinking eyes knew how to scrutinize the ongoing spectacle with the vigilance of an archangel confronting a secular emergency.
Monica lived in her sickeningly sweet sensuality, in nightmares and lazy illusions. Always hoping for something that would help dismiss memories of school, partners (of one kind or another), and her crazy mother in the mountains, raving in a madhouse — it wasn’t possible to slam the door on vulgarity, which leads to running like a mangy goat into some neighbor’s sweaty hands, her temples throbbing like pressure columns, the big, heavy body ready to burst through her fat hide.
Covalschi was confident in his intuitions: all he had to do now was sock it to the fat dreamer, which meant waiting for the day when the little cannibals finally went beyond their routine limits and Little Moni-pig Smâtăni-wig was laid out on the teachers’ lounge sofa, choking on tears, no longer capable of teaching her next class. Covalschi walked her home, and once inside, he leaned against the terracotta stove and looked at her intently for a long time, smiling slightly and showing the gap between his crocodile teeth. It was warm in the room, excessively warm, as if the little cannibals had built their fire inside her room. Mostly, the plan had been to listen docilely to his colleague’s laments and respond calmly at calculated intervals. She had withered powerlessly between his coarse jokes — the imaginary pursuers still chasing her — and only had wanted to collapse from exhaustion, like a hunted beast tormented by thirst and sleeplessness, eager for a moment of peace and refreshment: she would have melted into the earth through the soles of her feet except that the jokes seemed to revive her ever so slightly, like a gentle caress: she was almost his prey.
Today, she was vulnerable to her own weaknesses, ready to be blown off course by a slight change in the wind — and it would happen rapidly, unexpectedly — now, she would believe any of Covalschi’s stories, even if they were about hypnosis, sadism, kleptomania, or “preventive, monstrous, necessary evil” as the only alternative to normality. For it was no longer a matter of regarding the stories as simplified, exaggerated rants or the usual posturing of men eager to complicate the monotony of their conquests; no, believing them to be true would be less frightening. In the over-heated, disorderly room, the gleam in Comrade Tibi’s eyes would manipulate any trace of vulnerability.
— You know what they call me? The Devil. Do I steal, lie, stage sadistic games, intimidate, blackmail, rape? Yes, especially rape. Even sentimental fatties like you. You can’t escape. I could strangle you.
Then steady steps approach the victim, who’s ready to scream if she still can, ready to abandon herself, to submit, to escape — ready to finish the whole thing once and for all. Once, twice — again and again, until complicity becomes indestructible, to the point of dementia, and even beyond that, to clemency. Consent and closeness mix indecently, melting all opposition into sudden grunting, and ending in the restful release of an embrace that smells of clogged drains.
It would be like a ball sliding rapidly down an inclined plane. The bumps that would slow the fall — remorse, suffering, revolt — would be worth less and less under the curse that persists irreversibly despite the intermittent remains of faded joys and better days. The master will continue to invent new horrors, because this experience permitted no right to any quiet, not even to degradation: the degradation flirts with the promise of stagnation and equilibrium. The fear of tearing herself away, the risk of anything else, and her self-loathing reveries intensify the nights and days of torture temporarily halted by rare gestures of goodwill — the smile, the caress, the kiss. Accepted infirmity. . a stranger’s inoffensive smile becomes absolute tenderness, an invitation to repeat the Covalschi experience.