At the beginning, in the first days of their love, it had been one of their reciprocal pleasures to discover in each other certain physical or verbal tics, which for other people, who had known them for longer, had become imperceptible from custom or repetition, but which, observed for the first time, had something utterly unexpected.
“How strangely you frown!” Ann had observed in the first days. She had tried to imitate him, leaving her left brow lowered and raising the right, tightly arched, something which at first she did not succeed in doing except by cheating a little and opening wide her right eye with two fingers, as though she wished to fix a monocle in her socket.
It was the sum of petty gestures, which at first she had observed jokingly in him, with an ironic tenderness, and which she imitated with laughter, as though she were trying to wean him of them, which, with the passage of time, entered her own habits. Paul watched, initially with indifference, or rather with amusement, but later touched and surprised, this unthinking transmission of words and gestures that he rediscovered in Ann’s language, slightly modified by her movements or pronunciation, as if they had been adapted to her vocal register, like a man’s aria rewritten for a soprano voice. They were the same words, the same gestures, yet they often conserved a strange air, as if they had been pressed onto Ann’s speech with special type, transferred into her sentence like words read in a foreign language, like a proverb in quotation marks, until these last lines of resistence also fell, while the gesture or word that until then had been a kind of neologism for Ann, was permanently incorporated into her current vocabulary. She made Paul aware for the first time of the persistence with which he repeated expressions of affirmation or negation: “Sure, sure,” “Not once, not once,” “Out of the question, absolutely out of the question.”
How little I watched myself, Paul had thought, if I was able to talk that way for years without even being aware of it. It took Ann to come and observe me. Sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, when that double, “Sure, sure,” came back, she underlined the fact with an explosion of laughter.
“Don’t get angry, dear Paul, that I’m laughing. I told you I’m a bit afraid of you and — what do you want? — when I notice something childish like that, it’s as if I feared you less, as if I felt closer to you. I’d like you to have thousands of small failings, I’d like you not to roll you r’s, I’d like you to be unable to pronounce s, I’d like to be able to laugh at you, my love, do you understand?”
Yet without understanding how, she herself later ended up speaking in his way, and among the things she borrowed from him was precisely his manner of stressing through repetition certain words and exclamations in order to confirm or negate something. Her speech was full of “Sure, sure,” “Don’t even think about it, don’t even think about it,” “Out of the question, out of the question,” which he sometimes uttered in a mechanical way, not paying attention, his aggressive, convinced, intransigent tone highlighting these phrases even more. There were some words that disappeared from his current expressions and which, over time, reappeared, now not in his vocabulary, but rather in hers, just as a mountain spring can slip under the earth and, by way of a long underground channel, return to the surface somewhere completely different. On Ann’s lips, words he had forgotten gained a new life, while in her lively hands, gestures he had abandoned at some point in the past were resurrected with a kind of mechanical faithfulness, which later might survive the end of their love.
Not for anything, not for anything, do I want to see you again, she wrote to him once, after a quarrel, but that double “not for anything” seemed almost to bear its own refutation, since, at a point where Ann was convinced that they were going to separate, her language preserved, like a pledge of faithfulness, that tic of repeating words in which, without her wishing it to be so, Paul’s memory persisted. But other new words and expressions appeared, which he heard for the first time and memorized, startled, wondering where they came from and suspecting that she was concealing from him a whole world of events, adventures, secrets that he longed to decipher. Above all, in recent days, Ann’s vocabulary had undergone innumerable small innovations, and after each longer separation — whether because of a quarrel, because he had to leave for a trial in the provinces, or finally because she was too busy with her work — when they were reunited, he noticed with desolation new changes in her way of conversing, new gestures or new words.
“It’s rolling,” Ann used to say when something struck her as excessively comical, and then she would shake her head, laughing loudly, with her mouth open. And, with her childlike insistence on repeating a new word, because it amused her to hear it, just as it would have amused her to open and close a new cigarette lighter or a new powder case innumerable times, she would say, dozens of times a day, after every event, after every piece of foolishness, “It’s rolling… It’s rolling… It’s rolling…” Each time Paul shuddered as though she had jabbed him since it seemed to him that behind that expression was a man’s gaze: the man from whom Ann had acquired her new favourite word. He was tempted to ask her, as though he had glimpsed a new ring on her finger: “Tell me! Where did it come from? Who gave it to you?”
In her painter’s jargon there was an expression that had charmed him at the beginning, but which later on, through a secret shift in meaning, became unbearable: “I’m going out for the cause.”
To Ann, “to go out for the cause” meant to find again a given spot in which to set up her easel, to relocate a spot determined once before — a tree, a house, a stone — as delimiting “on the ground” the landscape she had begun to paint.
Ann’s “causes” were impenetrable. For some of them, especially in the spring, or at the close of autumn, at the beginning of March or the end of October, when it was too early or too late to head off to Balcic, she pleaded with Paul, but particularly at the beginning of their love, when she had the feeling that she could ask him the biggest favours, she pleaded with him to take off with her to the outskirts of the city, beyond Herăstrău Park, or more frequently, because the spots were less well known, beyond Filaret, beyond the Ciurel mill, in search of “causes.”
“I’ve done all the work I can at home. I want to go off to the country. Come with me, we’ll find something to paint.”
There were long reconnaissance walks beyond the railway line, beyond the last hovels at the edge of Bucharest, through the barely thawed March countryside, or the dirty rust-colour of October. The region looked completely unknown. If there hadn’t been planes taking off and landing in the direction of Băneasa Airport, flying low, close to the earth with their engines throbbing like a factory, he could have believed he was anywhere, a long way from Bucharest. A few acacias growing close together marked the beginning of the woods, water rising from who-knew-where — perhaps from the last melting snows, perhaps from the last autumn rain — looked like a tributary wandering lost across the path. Paul never succeeded in understanding by which hidden logic Ann chose one spot rather than another, why where he saw nothing in particular she would suddenly stop, regarding with a kind of concerned attention a point that for him was invisible, which she signalled with a decisive gesture: “Here.”
“What’s here, Ann?”
“My new cause.”
She returned alone on the days that followed with her working instruments, but towards evening Paul would come to take her home since it was getting dark early. As it would have been too expensive to have a taxi waiting for her in the country all afternoon, they had to return a good part of the way on foot. Their passage through the slums on the edge of the city produced a certain sensation and, as during the days at Cernatu, housewives came out onto their doorsteps and children halted in their play to watch this blonde girl in boyish slacks (since she wore shorts and a sports jersey, or, when it was cold, a blue woollen training suit) who was carrying an easel on her back, a paintbox, a canvas chair, leaving Paul to bring at most a blanket, a thermos containing hot tea or a bag of fruit. Sometimes, because they didn’t find an available taxi on the way — or purely and simply because Ann liked to challenge people and hear scandalized murmurs around her — she convinced Paul to go all the way back downtown by tram or bus, and then, to complete the scandal, to take transfer tickets and wait on the sidewalk at one of the downtown stations — at Carpaţi, at Strada Regală — until the tram came.