The Romanian (26 page)

There is, however, another feature: his spiritualization of matter. He may have failed in human love, but he found vitality and comfort in some hidden life force, which was rooted in Romania. According to the critic Jean Cassou, who wrote the introduction to this monograph in the 1960s, Romania “still maintains an essentially prehistoric appearance. It remains at the stage of the primitive herdsman, of gods and fables.” At such a stage, “the spirit retains its natural quality. It is an elemental spirit, a spirit of the mountains, rivers and forests, a rural consciousness, the verb of all creation.” Brancusi may have been irrevocably disappointed in love, but perhaps he was able to relocate desire on the cosmic plane.

I think I saw such union with matter in the faces of the peasants, but I didn't realize then why it was so compelling. Even stranger, I could swear I've glimpsed it inside Romulus, a corrupted hustler. A kind of trance; something fatalistic referring to the myth of Mioriţa, the shepherd's ecstatic union with death. It could be that all this obsessive behavior on my part has merely been an attempt to link myself to it.

If so, there's no reason to put up any fight. What good would it do? I take another look at the soft irony of Romulus's preposterous TV installation, with its symmetrical arrangement of Budweiser cans and empty gin bottles around the big, broken television. Then I head quietly for the bathroom, hearing on the way, as I near Romulus's bedroom, a bed creaking, and moaning endearments in Romanian, which pass through me, not affecting my mood, as if they were the sound of wind rustling and the bleating of Mioriţa.

XIX

THE NEXT DAY, in the calm of shock, I stick to my resolve to find a hotel while we're in Sibiu. Romulus takes me to the Împăratul Romanilor (Roman Emperor) Hotel, an eighteenth-century building that once hosted Brahms and Liszt. It's on Nicolae Bălcescu Street near the beautiful Piaţa Mare, and it's only thirty dollars a night. The lobby is so overcrowded with real and fake antiques that it looks like a shop. My room is Empire style, with a walnut bed and a woven spread in burgundy and ivory colors, which match the rug.

I head right for the marble-floored bathroom, but the water filling the tub is ice cold. It takes several calls to reception for the truth to come out. First I'm told to leave it running for a long time, then to wait an hour, but finally they admit that the boiler is out of order. So I endure an ice-cold sponge bath and fall into a doze on the firm mattress.

Warm and more sweet-tempered than I've ever seen him, Romulus, with chastened eyes, sits patiently by the bed, waiting for my nap to be over. He's left a sulking Elena at home and wants to show me the city, of which he's proud. But when I awake, in a mini-fit of ill temper, I tell him I plan to spend the day alone. Real disappointment floods his eyes, and in his face I catch another glimpse of that soft, pastoral fatalism I'm beginning to understand he's hiding. Quickly it's replaced by the usual cynical pallor as he dryly agrees to my request, asking only that I stop at his mother's place with him first, since she's counting on seeing me.

She lives on the ground floor of a much smaller building than Romulus's. It's the same two-room apartment that Romulus endured with his father and three brothers during adolescence and where his father sleeps in the kitchen by the gas stove, just as he did in the apartment in Vîlcea. There are a couple of lurid tapestries on the wall, a waterfall and a forest scene; and over a bookcase, a black-and-white first communion photo of Romulus at seven, looking oversensitive and optimistic. The room is shabby yet scrupulously neat, with even the couch pillows arranged in a geometric design.

But we've walked in on a disturbing scene. Renei, the youngest, is marching in circles around the small, freshly vacuumed room, mumbling to himself and swatting at the air. Floritchica, distraught and pale, is sitting on the couch and wringing her hands as she stares at him. When I ask what's wrong, Romulus in English and Mama in French offer a disjointed explanation. It seems that Renei has been having mental attacks, characterized by racing thoughts, which come close to being aural hallucinations. His mind shouts at him; he can't stop thinking or pacing, has bouts of agoraphobia or suddenly is struck mute, and the only way he can break these spells is by turning over a table or kicking a hole in the wall.

I can read the process in his eyes, which focus and unfocus repeatedly, showing an awareness of my presence by warm, friendly glances, then abruptly spacing out, after which the eyes turn blank and the pacing and tortured mumbling start again.

It's a pathetic sight. The muscles in his young body twitch as if at the beginning of an epileptic attack, then relax again just as suddenly. There's something luminous about his gingery skin and swimmingly anguished face that projects a heroic vulnerability. Because he's so transparent, what he's feeling flows toward me in unimpeded waves, engulfing me in its torment. Eventually he's exhausted by the whole process, which I'm told has been going on all night, and I'm left wondering whether his condition has something to do with overstimulation from my visit. He struggles to the bed in the tiny kitchen, and when we check on him a few moments later is asleep.

Romulus says that the doctors have diagnosed it as a panic disorder. But Floritchica can't afford the antidepressants that were prescribed, and after a month, Renei stopped taking them. I try to gather my wits, wonder whether I should offer money for antidepressants; but when I whisperingly suggest it to Romulus, he counsels me not to by saying, “This is too much bigger for you to take on, Bruce. Better to do nothing.”

I study Romulus's face with a sad sense of astonishment, realizing that one of his greatest talents is his ability to project composure. During our months together, while I believed intimacy was developing, he never mentioned this problem with his brother. How much is he hiding beneath those hooded eyes and laconic, coarse replies? Have I, all along, been totally unaware of the endurances of the person I've claimed to love? All at once, I catch a glimpse in him of the same neurasthenic sensitivity that flowed torturously from his brother. It makes me shudder.

Eyes moist, Mama pulls herself together and tiptoes into the kitchen to get the whistling teakettle. She brings it out and serves us tea with tiny anise cookies. She's like Renei, in that there's a vulnerability to her soft gestures; but as her ringed, alert eyes testify, there's also a kind of cunning.

“Vous savez, Bruce,”
she tells me in French,
“je mène une vie de chien.”
I lead a dog's life.

“Pourquoi?”
I ask, putting a sympathetic look into my eyes.

It seems she's just had a terrible argument with her husband, who refused to turn the thirty dollars I gave him—half a month's salary—over to her for housekeeping expenses. Instead, he'd disappeared for the entire night, didn't show up for his job as a security guard and came home at seven in the morning stewed and defeated, his clothing reeking of vomit. Then he left again. An image of his weary, accusing mouth, his lax, disillusioned stoop, flashes into my brain, filling me, for some reason I can't quite grasp, with anguish. But Floritchica has already mutated into a girlish, slightly flirtatious manner, shamelessly complimenting my blue-green eyes and my hands, which she says look like a writer's. Do I, she asks coyly, ever intend to write a book about them, believing, like almost every impoverished person I've met, that the story of her life would make a bestseller.

The conversation drifts to other matters, and by asking where her children are, I realize that none of them holds a regular job. Bogdan's occasional boxing and bouncing are now supplemented by his girlfriend's windfall, though no one as much as says so. Renei went to mechanic's school for a month but was thrown out when he hurled a wrench at a car window during a panic attack and now shares his father's sixty-dollar check, seldom leaving the house because of his bouts of agoraphobia. Vlad seems to pick up a buck as a runner for some substance, although whether this means he's a gofer for a local pharmacy or delivers illicit drugs never becomes clear.

As Romulus slips into a doze, I'm startled to find Floritchica hissing conspiratorially at me and signaling me to follow. She stands, and I find myself praying that we're not heading for the adjoining bedroom. But she leads me to the tiny kitchen, where I'm aghast to see her shaking exhausted Renei awake. In a severe whisper she commands him to do something, and I can make out that he's crossly refusing. Finally he sits up on the paltry kitchen cot with a sigh and reluctantly says, “My mother want me to say to you that she got something she going to tell you. She got a note in English that neighbor who studied in America helping her to write. Okay, Bruce?” and he falls back on the cot to stare at the ceiling, exhausted eyes pouring out misery.

With a sigh of satisfaction Floritchica sits on the edge of the cot and takes out a folded piece of paper. She begins to recite what is written on it in a singsong voice that betrays little knowledge of the meaning of each word:

“ ‘ Dear Bruce, I ask to you from bottom of heart please help me. Romulus he give me nothing. I will lose apartment in two months. Renei is so sick mentally. I don't know what do. I need seven thousand dollars to buy new apartment. Please, please, you must help me. Do not tell to Romulus I ask to you this.'”

Like a schoolgirl satisfied with a difficult recitation, she looks up from the note with a soft, foolish smile, her eyes sparkling with naive anticipation.

My heart thumps with embarrassment, and I try to avoid her gaze; but the room is so small, I manage only to fix my eyes on the handle of the refrigerator door, right below my waist.

“Please, Bruce.”

I clear my throat several times, and in a strained, alien voice say, “Umm, I haven't really got that much money.”

Floritchica gives me a doubtful look, like a motherly reprimand. “Is so much money for you?”

“I'm, uh, just a writer.”

“
A writer?
So much money they make!”

“Look, Floritchica, I don't have much money. But I'll make a deal with you. I'm thinking maybe I'll write a book about us, I mean about me and Romulus and all of this. Now if I do that and I make, say, more than thirty thousand dollars, I'll give you your seven.”

I can't believe what's just popped out of my mouth. But it seems to satisfy Floritchica. She stands up from the cot with a new energy, her eyes mirroring her imagined future. “Come,” she says, “we have more tea.” But first she shakes Renei to attention again and gives him another sentence to translate for me. “She say she need money for her own medicine, Bruce. Twenty dollars.” I hand her the equivalent in Romanian money and she beams at me. As I walk back to the other room, Renei's voice reaches me in a ghostly moan. “Bruce, I am sorry!”

Romulus is sitting on the couch, playing with the settings on his sports watch. For a moment I think that he's set this up, but when his eyes narrow with suspicion at his mother, who avoids his glance nervously, I know he hasn't. “Hey, I've gotta go,” I tell him in an abrupt, impatient voice. The urgency in my tone startles him into a standing position. Mama, on the other hand, seems weirdly trouble-free. She enlaces me again with her plump arms and pulls me to her breast for a warm, tear-stained good-bye.

As we walk toward a phone booth to call a taxi, I say, “Your old lady asked me for money.”

Romulus takes a drag from his cigarette and exhales callously into the air. “My old lady,” he says. “Well, I am not surprise, she can be real bitch. You not going to give her any, are you?”

 

 

THAT EVENING, Romulus insists on assembling a more civil Elena, a temporarily recovered Renei and me for a trip to a local club. We walk across the square to a squat, pistachio-colored medieval building and down a narrow, winding staircase in near darkness. Here in the cellar, to my amazement, is a goth disco. In windowless rooms, beneath vaulted brick ceilings, gyrate young Romanians with long, vampirish dyed-black hair, wrists sporting studded black leather bracelets and eyes circled in mascara. The techno goth music shrieks through the cavernous rooms as one young dancer, who seems caught in a trance, stands alone in the center of the floor, moving his upper body in big, careening circles. The others look on soberly as if they were participants in an occult rite. We drink huge steins of German beer until all of us are having trouble keeping our balance and I suggest it's time for me to go back to the hotel.

From my walnut bed, the high ceiling of the room looks mobile, hovering threateningly above me like the broad black expanse of a prehistoric bird. In the sweltering heat, an unenthusiastic breeze swells the heavy curtains. I half dream about swimming helplessly in some unfathomable night, a black ocean, distressed because my identity has floated away from me like a life preserver; I reach out for it, grabbing only handfuls of black. A sharp, precise knock on the door startles me fully awake.

Romulus has appeared, to spend the night in the hotel with me. When I grill him about what Elena may be thinking or whether or not they've had a fight, he shrugs off my questions. “This is of no importance.”

In the darkness, he strips to his bikini underwear, crawls into bed and rolls toward me. The sensation of his body spirals me away from all resolve, and realizations and vows of the last thirty-six hours slip through my hands like wriggling fish. Sensation returns, a drug taking hold of my entire brain; but when I begin to caress his hard body, it feels dead, and a phrase from the novel
Là-bas
by J.-K. Huysmans spills into my mind: “He clasped a corpse, a body so cold that it froze him. . . .” Although my hands keep moving down his lean, velvety chest to the coils of his abdomen, the refrigerator feeling is overwhelming, and I can't help asking what the matter is.