There are, says the manager—who has appeared to give us a tour—weekly performances in the bath lounge, a bordello-red room featuring an immense golden bathtub. And in Purgatorio, a new trend of stand-up comedy in English has begun, because, he says, Romanian stand-up is just a bunch of potty jokes. Next door, in the yellow smoking room, spooky pantomimes are going on among the Oriental cushions. But there’s no food here. Someone calls us a taxi, and we return to the hotel, defeated and hungry.
Too tired to keep looking for food, we switch on the television. In front of it and an endless soccer match, we learn a series of passional attitudes designed to fit his smaller, steelier body into my padded bulk. I’m stretched out on my back with him using my stomach as a cushion, or we lie entangled like two tarantulas, a perfect balance of lighter on heavier limbs that avoids bone pressure. Or I’ll be lying belly-down with my head by his waist, so that my hands can wander over his body like tortoises inspecting every blade of grass on a beach.
Because he doesn’t complain, I’ve decided we’re in paradise. Visions of him change, but they’re always highly sexual, with elements of the predatory. I feel like a falconer with his hawk, that beady-eyed, sharp-beaked and alert but dependent creature that pecks ever so carefully at its master. At other times, his sinuous muscles enlace me in the fantasy of a python, our corkscrew intertwinings thrilling me into believing myself some circus performer who’s ready to chance being strangled for the right to be caressed. But then, every so often, he suddenly diminishes to a poor wren, for what is the real difference, except in the sense of motive versus action, between vulnerability and predation? Isn’t each part of the same formula?
It’s his emotional hunger, often presenting itself as stoical machismo, that keeps promising a trapdoor into his heart. And as we lie here, the unreal atmosphere of the room is as disorienting as the description of some powdery scent in a decadent novel, while snippets of his fairy-tale past float into the air.
“And then what happened?”
“Why you want to know? You will write a book about? The story of my life, such a book that will make.”
“How you ended up in Budapest. You were telling me.”
“I got to go to the toilet. Toss me those cigarettes.”
“Can you hear me?”
“Say?”
“You were telling me.”
“They threw me out at eighteen. . . .”
“Who, who?”
“Say?”
“Can’t you hear me?”
“My parents, when is no more money from state for me, even though they keep money they get for me when I still live with my grandmother. Toss those matches in here at me, please, will you?”
“Your parents threw you out?”
“Surely. They fabricate this fight in Vîlcea to make me exit when I was eighteen,” he claims. “Say I steal from them. Which is how I end up on Corso in Budapest where you find me. But you know, my stepfather waste what little they have for drinking, and soon as I am to coming back, it is money all the time, they take it from us all, me, Bogdan.”
“But tell me again about Macedonia. Come on, come back on the bed.”
“All right, give me the remote, you know they have this erotic evening on TV every Friday, they showing one of the Emmanuelles.”
“I saw them in the seventies. What’d you say happened in Macedonia?”
“I am crossing Macedonia two or three times, with two other guys, mostly walking, you know? They throw us out of train at every stop because they don’t like our passports, but we just keeping walking and get on at next station. But then they throw us out again.”
“And that’s how you made it to Greece?”
“Hm, hmm, three weeks there, my Greek becoming very functional, but I not write it, not write any of the languages I speak except Romanian.”
“Did you ever get caught in Greece?”
“Yes, yes. First time they send me back in closed train with other illegal Romanians. But I climb through window at station. Two days later they catching me again. ‘Let’s see you jump from this window,’ they say. They put me on a plane. Bring me to plane handcuffed.”
“A regular plane?”
“Of course. I get the meal, the drinks. But is November, still warm in Greece, and we land in Bucharest and freezing. I wearing only T-shirt. Have to hitchhike back to Sibiu.”
“What about the time you got shot crossing from Macedonia into Greece?”
“Which time? I went over so many times, I start to make money that way, border guide, you know? I prefer bullets to staying home. Listen, this Mexican border. I read in a Romanian paper that plenty of people cross over to U.S.”
“Come on, Romulus, there are easier ways.”
“You do it your way, I mine.”
WHAT DID HISTORY DO TO HIM? The question sounds absurd, for we’re all to some extent victims of history; but I’m convinced that, as my friend Ursule Molinaro suspected, Romulus is ancient. His half-finished projects and sudden departures, his enslavements and sullen betrayals are micro-recapitulations of the fate of his land.
Like my beloved Times Square, Romania was a crossroads of cultures and clashes—Byzantine glories, wily Levantine schemes for survival, the nexus of three empires: the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian and the Soviet. Romanians are, they themselves believe, Latins lost among the barbarians, the Roman victims of Turks.
It’s midnight and we’re finally eating dinner, the only customers in the hotel restaurant. The mottled marble and enormous mirrors are exquisite, baroque and unreal, the room immense. The way the waiters and whores who walk through look at us says that we, too, are lost, isolated. Romulus’s eyes, I can tell, see doom and are perpetually disgusted by it. But such a stance is overruled by courageous passivity, which the Romanian poet Lucian Blaga once called the “Mioritic space.”
According to the great Romanian myth of Mioriţa, three shepherds from different regions came down with their flocks from the Carpathian Mountains. Two of them began to plot to murder the Moldovan shepherd, who was warned of the scheme by Mioriţa, a magical ewe. The shepherd didn’t flee. With a vast and perplexing sense of spiritual acceptance, he planned his own funeral, which took on the character of a wedding with Nature, a return to Eden.
Critics have debated the ancient myth’s meaning since it was first published by the Romantic poet Vasile Alecsandri. There are those who have associated it with pessimism and passivity, going so far as to call Romania a “suicidal” culture. But Mircea Eliade, the controversial Romanian historian and mythologist (who has been accused of being a Fascist early in his career), saw the myth of Mioriţa as being about an active transformation of fate, the will to change the meaning of destiny into something self-empowering.
In light of this, Romulus’s surrender of his body to me takes on a morbid and transfigured aura. It may be an arrangement of circumstance, but to him it’s part of a timeless cycle. I can see it in his eyes. His prostitution has a sacrificial, portentous significance. And so it is that the fixed expression of his eyes, the angry near-piety of his touch are signs of sacrifice that can’t be possessed by me. But in any case, the buyer can never control the ritual of prostitution.
His face is getting paler during dinner as I flounder to stake a claim, shamelessly offering him long-term financial schemes as if they were car insurance. The obsessive-compulsive nature of my feelings for him makes me spit out vulgar maintenance plans whose function is to take away the guesswork of our relationship. I want marriage instead of doom. Each of my offers is an insult to his approach to transgression. He’s getting increasingly furious at my attempts to buy him.
Eventally my attack temporarily obliterates his machismo. Back in our room, he strikes me as a little boy, an effeminate one, as he angrily tosses his few possessions into a bag. Now I must beg him to stay yet again. And so we’re back in our trance once more. He puts down his bag.
IT’S TWO A.M., and we’ve decided to have a drink at a tony club we n
oticed in our wanderings. It’s called Byblos and it features a fancy restaurant with live entertainment and nearly New York prices. How can I explain the despairing rage that fills Romulus at the sight of its Armani-clad clientele? This isn’t simple resentment of the bourgeoisie on the part of an outsider, an underclass person, but something even more inherently political. His rage is, in part, Communist. It could even be interpreted as prudishness. But Romulus is himself in many ways a crass materialist who dreams of killer sound systems and flashy cars. Even so, the discipline and conservatism of real wealth, such as those exhibited by the privileged young people in this bar, crush his spirit. What repulses him most is the lack of Mioritic sacrifice in the comfortable lifestyle of the young people around him. He’s looking at the faces of children of politicians or publishers, and he knows what strategies their parents have employed to achieve such security in this impoverished country. He wants to put out the eyes of their children, whose blandness negates all the wisdom of his suffering. Once again, his rage leaves me feeling helplessly inferior. There’s nothing I can do but slavishly admire this odd man out of global capitalism.
Back at the hotel, he strips for bed and I gobble two of my fortuitous codeine tablets. I know what my duty is. Within an hour, I’m in that sparkling night gallery made of little explosions of codeine. It blots out most of the sociological details surrounding our situation, leaves only his hard, shadowy body inexplicably laid out for me, dappled by the streetlight piercing the gaps in the heavy curtains. This is a funereal, or should I say vampiric, scene. I fall to my knees in the darkness because I know that to worship his abjection is to drink at the fount of cultural doom and play at entangling my fate with his. He’s a door out of the repetitive banalities of North American capitalism. His penis plunges into my throat like an eel into inky water.
X
MY FAVORITE PICTURE of Romulus is the one he took of himself. Sitting naked on the absurd lilac brocade couch in our hotel room, he held the camera at arm’s length and snapped a picture. Because of the effect of foreshortening, his forearms look as enormous as Popeye’s. His chest, over the middle of which runs sparse, matted hair, shows the ribs at the sides. And above it is a face grown oval and generous. An enormous nose over smiling lips. It’s a face he hasn’t shown me yet, but I know it’s there.
Try as I may, I can’t reproduce the angle myself, so we decide to begin our shoot for a porn magazine that I contracted before I left New York. It’s a scheme I’ve cooked up to make him money. I’d called a contact at Honcho, a gay magazine, and proposed a spread on Romulus with a text by me. Out of it, he’ll make a whole $800.
It’s more than obvious that this room is an ideal backdrop for a hilarious send-up of European eroticism; it’s a camp porn set ready to be exploited. He’s sitting on the upholstered bench before the mirrored vanity table, removing his pants, which are about to fall onto the pretentious paisley rug. Reflected in the mirror, the scene looks like a homosexual parody of one of the Emmanuelle movies we’ve been watching on television, or maybe it’s a cut scene from Belle de jour, that surreal take on bourgeois infidelity.
Each time I click the shutter, the environment of the shoot is brought home to us. Just a few years ago, this room, like most hotel rooms in Romania during the Ceauşescu regime, was wired for eavesdropping. The bedside lamp, the overhead chandelier, the upholstered chair probably once contained microphones. And if these microphones still exist, as a nongovernmental security measure, or just to satisfy someone’s curiosity, the earphoned spy at reception is privy to the groans, suckings and perverse requests of our little session. The possibility sends us into fits of giggles. We pump up the action, shouting orgasm noises at the lamp or smacking our lips at the chandelier.
To camp up the idea of the Eastern European call boy, I tell Romulus to strip down to his bikini underpants and count out a stack of bills on one bare thigh. Pop! goes the flash as I snap picture after picture, sliding the briefs halfway down his leg, bending to suck him, then pulling away with a wink to snap more pictures.
The bills have slid off his leg and are lying in a scattered pile at his feet, though one of them is still stuck to the inside of his thigh. Flash! I’ve got another good one. Now he’s sitting on the bed, legs spread, washboard ripples prominent under the harsh light, curved cock snaking up his belly. He grasps each nipple between thumb and forefinger and winks as I push the camera button. The flash of white light electrifies his body. I dive onto his cock again, then take a close-up of his crotch. He throws himself into the upholstered chair and with a silly grin on his face pretends to doze, cock standing in a stiff curve amid the curls of pubic hair. He rolls onto the bed, pushes up against the headboard to a half-sitting position and puts his hands behind his head to reveal the large hollows of his armpits, whose hair he’s shortened. I click again, suck again, click, click, click . . . Come sprays through the ragged foreskin and covers his belly and chest in droplets. I throw some bills onto him, which soak up the drops. Flash! Pop! Done.
The film is due in New York in five days. So we hurry to the post office. On the way, we stop at an Internet café, where I compose a cheesy text. But before I slip it into the envelope, Romulus grabs it and reads. My cardboard erotic metaphors send him into gales of laughter.
“‘Red-hot Romanian’? Hah! So, my ‘lazy, cocky gestures’ drive you to ‘frenzy’?” A burst of more laughter as he throws the page in my face. “Beware, Bruce, soon I become big, big American porn star. Soon you are growing old, and then . . . then I become the one who pays the bills!”
XI
IN SYRACUSE, I grow closer to another body that has, sad to say, surpassed the probable. It’s almost as if Mom’s entire biology had been reduced to her enormous will. She’s thinner than when I last saw her, a month ago, with nearly skeletal arms and legs, swollen ankles and a drooping belly. Miraculously she keeps running on empty, struggling in a chirping voice to the kitchen with her walker, looking determined, then bitter and disappointed, when she can’t lift a half-gallon of orange juice by herself.
A few days after I got back from Bucharest, she fell and broke a hip; or rather, her porous hip may have crumbled, sending her to the floor. My brother flew up immediately for the surgery, and it went unbelievably well; but her recovery became a purgatory, truly an infelicitous term for the effects the morphine had on her.
She’d ended up by chance in a Catholic hospital. After each morphine injection, which sent her into delirium, she became convinced that the crucifix her bed faced had been put there by the nurses to mock her, in a kind of teasing crucifixion of a Jew. This was obviously a resurgence of her childhood agonies as the only Jew in her tiny village in upstate New York, when she bit her tongue in a red, humiliated face, as the Gentile English teacher harped on the despicable personality of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Luckily, Mom’s regression was temporary, a common reaction of the aged to opiates.
Strange that the very substances that stretch my thoughts into vaulting ecstasies should plunge her into doubt and grotesque imaginings. But then Mom has always looked askance at painkillers. She feels they interfere with the exercise of the will. I remember how astonished I was as a teenager when I found out she had refused Novocain when she visited the dentist for a tooth-pulling.
After just a few weeks in physical rehab with either my brother or me by her bed, Mom regained her ability to walk and all her critical faculties. She learned to laugh at the experience. Now her mind is little changed, but her body, with its replaced hip, arthritis-twisted hands and bowed spine, looks years away from how it looked when I last saw her. It doesn’t prevent being near it from filling me with waves of painful sweetness. To me her ravaged flesh is . . . desirable. It’s still the body that wore the bright scarves and the pearl-gray cinched-waist suits, bouncing me on her lap and letting me play with her costume jewelry.
We haven’t had a very pleasant business. Mom’s nearness to the end has only made me yearn more intensely for approval. And s
he’s become even more relentlessly determined to know and correct every detail of my life. I’ve tried to ease her into the story of my attachment for Romulus, leaving out the underclass details and portraying him as a toiling but disadvantaged working-class boy who sincerely cares for me. Impishly, she keeps forgetting his name every time she mentions him, calling him instead Chaim Yankel, the comic Yiddish pejorative for “village idiot.” This causes me to bristle and sends her into peals of naughty laughter. Her gibes wound me and make me redouble my efforts to get her to like him. How long will the child keep crawling back to the mother’s breast? Until he’s crawling back to her grave? Seeking solace on a carcass so close to the time when flies will come buzzing has a certain value. In some strange way you’re approaching the ultimate meaning of generation as well as your own death.
My first futile attempt to escape her control is also the content of my first memory, just before I turned two. The sun is blazing and the sand near the green water is burning the soles of my feet. I’m walking in my tiny bathing trunks between my mother and father, each hand in one of theirs. Mom offers to pick me up off the hot sand, and I exultantly say, “No!” It’s that delicious moment when the living being experiences its first sense of autonomy. The sand bakes the soles of my feet to an unbearable intensity, and flashes of white light turn my “No!” into something dangerous and metallic, an addictive adventure, one that will be squelched until adolescence, when it flares up again in contempt for her values and a compulsion for sexual adventure.
After our conversation, her many heart pills aren’t functioning at peak. Her chest is tight with angina, her head reeling with fatigue. We’re sitting on the bed and she’s clinging to me in fear, her brittle white hair crushed against my chest. Is there anything sweeter, more oppressive than this painful intimacy? My own helplessness invades me, sickens me, as death invades her. But I deserve this. I’m swallowed up by it. I savor our moment of closeness, which, abruptly, is broken when she takes my chin rudely between thumb and forefinger. “I can still see traces of your former good looks as a child,” she says.
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