The driver asks permission to stop at a roadside stand to buy some water. He comes back with a piece of pastry and holds it toward me smiling, a look of sympathy for my drawn face. Although it’s almost ten and I haven’t eaten or slept, I decline it politely. We start back up, and I notice he’s examining me again in the rearview mirror. Aware that something is very wrong, he delicately tries to start a conversation. To discourage him, I tell him that something terrible has happened that I don’t feel like revealing. The remark embarrasses him as I’d hoped, and he moves his eyes away from the mirror.
A new notion has begun to absorb me. One of subtle but tantalizing proportions. It’s occurred to me that passion itself is little more than a disorder. Stricken by obsessive thoughts of my life during the last few years, I begin to see all my treasured impulses as merely pathological. In the process, Romulus’s importance shrinks to that of an incidental extra in the drama. The struggles I thought were directed at him were narcissistic flailings in a mirror. If he played any part at all in this complicated projection, it was only because he happened to have the correct proportions of an actor.
As the light of the projection dims, the shoddy theater that I’ve been sitting in and its all-too-human audience become apparent. The mystery of why the character of the beloved has so few lines is answered by the fact that the movie was never about him. This was, instead, a chaotic melodrama of non-Aristotelian proportions. No need to spell out the dreary plot—a petty tantrum against an overcontrolling mother, a fear of my encroaching age and her death, a feeling of low self-worth leading to a flirtation with my own demise—the synopsis isn’t even worth mentioning.
The thought brings me to consider a historical figure I’ve assiduously avoided thinking very deeply about. The contours of his headstrong ravings in a way too much resemble mine; today his emotional excuses seem just too transparent. He was a principal character in the Lupescu affair and another foolish emotional obsessive.
His name was Corneliu Codreanu, and he was the fiery leader of the Iron Guard. Only now does his fatal mistake take on relevance for me. His entire life is a metaphor for the self-deceiving tactics of passion.
Beginning life as an intellectual, an idealist, Codreanu was attracted at university to the patriotic right-wing Christian principles of a Professor A. C. Cuza. These principles, which grew into a dangerous nationalistic movement, were a reaction to Romania’s constant partitioning by other countries, as well as its recent throes in becoming an independent nation. They were based on the gut feeling that there really was a true Romanian identity, sanctioned by history and by God—something beyond the greedy land-grabbing and cynical quests for power Romanians had had to endure.
In 1927, Codreanu founded an even more extremist religious-nationalistic organization: the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Closely associated with the more conservative elements of the Church, it promulgated the notion of the racial destiny of Romania. As its leader, Codreanu was a romantic figure, dressing like an operatic hero in the peasant’s white garb, emblazoned with the red cross of the Archangel and riding a white horse. His holy task, as he saw it, was the purification of his country. The targets of his lofty, pious campaign were outsiders who he felt were contaminating Romanian culture—namely, Communists and Jews.
Corneliu Codreanu, a Byronic figure of Fascism.
In late 1929, the more militaristic Iron Guard was born from Codreanu’s Legion. By the mid-thirties, its cells honeycombed the country, swarming with disenfranchised peasants and lower-class Romanians hoping to find a sense of identity and self-worth for the first time in their lives. Some members of the Iron Guard had even won seats in the National Assembly and were becoming powerful enough to force King Carol into dangerous concessions. Codreanu had traded the intellect of his early years for unyielding energy and heartfelt intuitions. No one could tell him he was wrong; nothing could penetrate the bulwark of the pigheaded emotions that drove him. Only the pangs of a passion for belonging and for the complete unification of his people—an experience akin to love—could inspire his idealistic objectives. With patriotism as his catchword and violence as his talisman, he came close to wresting control of an entire country.
The few photos of this modern prophet reveal him as one of Romania’s most handsome historical figures. He had strong, regular features and dark, gleaming, swept-back hair. Under his slightly bobbed, aristocratic nose was a determined, vigorous mouth, and above prominent cheekbones were wild, piercing eyes. With his loosely buttoned collar and reared, heroic stance, he was the ultimate Byronic figure, radiating adventure and romance.
It didn’t seem to matter that Codreanu himself was not really a “pure” Romanian. His birth name was Zelinski, and his father was of Polish origin. Like Lupescu, he fantasized his roots to match his emotional yearnings. Whatever drove him to excess was hidden from him by an immersion in mysticism and an unshakable belief in himself as a patriot. Lupescu and he were spiritual brother and sister, both convinced that any means justified their romantic quest. Until his death, he remained blinded by his enthrallment, never to get a glimpse of its shoddy underpinnings.
Codreanu was proof that passion, which bursts from the id with the blazing certainty of its integrity, is no solid element, but rather a gas that seeps uncontrollably into the farthest corners, taking on a life of its own. Strangely, Codreanu would find his archenemies, including Carol and Lupescu, often in league with, or at least contaminated by, his goals. Some say it was Carol’s closest friend and aide-de-camp, a dandyish young man named Dimitrescu, who plotted with Codreanu to murder Lupescu. The chore was represented to the Iron Guard as a “sacred duty,” and adherents eagerly took up the cause. But Dimitrescu merely saw Lupescu as a fly in the ointment in his dealings with Carol. He was just using the emotional, malleable Guardists toward his personal ends. Later, he cautioned Codreanu against it, fearing that the king would have a nervous breakdown if it happened.
In the end, Carol’s government swerved unexpectedly away from the Guardist cause. The king began an aggressive campaign against Codreanu. In 1938 he had him and some of his partisans rounded up just as their Nazi kinsmen in Germany were casting aggressive looks eastward. Codreanu and his henchmen were sentenced to ten years, and on the road to a prison camp they were strangled. It was made to look as if they had tried to escape and then been shot, and they were buried together in a sealed pit.
Now the ghost of Codreanu became a scourge to Lupescu. It wouldn’t be long before she found her home on Aleea Vulpache surrounded by a bloodthirsty anti-Semitic mob. Soon after, in September 1940, she and King Carol cowered at the palace, waiting for the car that would take them to the train station. And that is how two great passions came to a climax: with the corpse of Codreanu at thirty-nine buried in a common grave, and with a trembling Lupescu sequestered with her lover on a train rushing toward the border.
How ironic that an all-consuming passion born from idealism and convinced of its own integrity would meet such a crude end. Codreanu’s followers were so blinded by emotion that they forfeited the objectivity and insight needed to control the consequences of their journey. They were, so to speak, head over heels.
AS WE PULL INTO the outskirts of Bucharest, the driver glances questioningly at me in the rearview mirror. “Unirii,” I say. It’s one of about a dozen words I’ve spoken during the entire three-hour trip. I hand him the other half of the fare with a tip equal to about ten dollars and he beams with pleasure, then notices my drawn face again and conceals his happiness, as if out of respect for someone in mourning.
Our apartment on Mihnea Vodă is baking in the heat. Realizing that there’s no longer anything to conceal in the bedroom, I sweep aside the curtains, pull up the shade and wrench the windows open. An uncustomary blast of air pulses into the room. I fall onto the bed, which still smells of Romulus and his cigarettes, but something hard collides with the small of my back. It’s the large book about Brancusi’s life and work, which I’d been thumbing through
more than a week ago and which Romulus in his sloth, apparently, had never bothered to take off the bed.
As sleep finally creeps into my exhausted mind, I think of my precious Brancusi, considering whether he was one, of all people, who’d escaped the revolving door of desire and disappointment. The possibility shines forth as a shred of redemption, and my mind begins to reevaluate his interest in Oriental mysticism. But was it a willful ascent to a cosmic level, or just a distraction for a heartbroken lover?
Information is scant about his affairs and entanglements, although it’s hinted that a disastrous love exiled him from carnality forever. I hope that he then moved to a higher plane, a love that took in the cosmos. Or were his abstract forms and monkish lifestyle merely signs of terminal isolation? Noguchi says that in his later years Brancusi became completely disillusioned with the French. He began to feel that aside from a few American collectors no one in the world understood his work. In his dusty studio on rue d’Arcole, his mind became more and more cryptic and more and more isolated. It’s true that he accomplished a miracle: the abstraction of movement, a wedding of the life force and the intellect. But could it be that these accomplishments were the absolute and only prerogatives of a fantastically lonely man?
Unable to wrestle with the question, I take the book and place it carefully on the floor. Misery withdraws soothingly into blackness, rudely punctuated by the jangling of the phone. Laboriously I rise, and stumble toward the study. I pick up the receiver and say hello, but at first hear nothing but an indrawn breath. Then Tristan’s voice comes insidiously over the line.
“You owe me something. I know where you are.”
“Wh-where are you?”
“In Constanţa, but I can drive to you easily.” The phone clicks to signal that he’s hung up.
XXIX
HEELS DIGGING into the sand of the inclined beach, I look out at the whitecapped waves with a feeling of disorientation. What is there that makes these waters seem so different from those of the Black Sea? The foam laps rhythmically to the shore, then pulls back in a graceful gesture, as if insisting on reclaiming its privileged role as a signifier. And everything is blue. It can’t be that different a color from the water at Olimp, but somehow I don’t remember this allpervasiveness. Glorious blue joining the blue of a clear sky rather than sulking with a blue-gray passivity.
I’m watching my dear friend Victoire helping an unknown little boy at the edge of the water, urging him in gently up to his ankles, then showing him how a flutter of fingers dipped into the water makes such pretty patterns. As she bends, her full breasts spill partly from her stretchy bathing suit and her abdomen extends slightly, forming soft curves that suggest the maternal and the comforting.
We’ve been here a week in Fécamp, Normandy, after meeting in Paris. By six a.m. the day after receiving the ominous call from Tristan, I’d fled to the airport, bought a ticket and was waiting to board a plane. I was hoping it would be the final gesture of my eight-month debacle. From the airport, I called Romulus to tell him that I was leaving and that he was free to claim the VCR and any other objects left in the apartment. He swore that he didn’t remember a single word of his tantrum on the night before I escaped, but at the same time he put up no resistance to my decision. Out of concern for a possible encounter between him and the treacherous Tristan, I told him that story as well. Romulus, who’d awoken that afternoon with one of the worst hangovers of his life, said that a man had come to the hotel room asking for me.
“He may come back to harass you, too,” I warned.
Romulus audaciously pooh-poohed the possibility, merely saying, “Just let him!”
I wondered whether he had revealed my location in Bucharest and given the phone number as a sort of revenge, and I mentioned it. But he swore he hadn’t. What was more likely, he said, was that Tristan had a connection with the desk clerk that probably involved pimping, the same kind of operation Romulus had been involved in with the bellboy at the Bucharest Marriott. In fact, he confirmed Tristan’s assertion that the waitresses at some of the seaside restaurants were part of a vast flock of prostitutes; he said that he’d been aware of it almost immediately. Part of his entertainment on the beach, though he hadn’t mentioned it, had been observing the tiny cabals of petty crime going on around him, from hustling to pickpocketing of tourists. Hadn’t I noticed? In the end, I believed him, figuring that Tristan had gotten the information about me from that interrogator of a desk clerk who’d demanded my address and phone number in Bucharest among other information.
PARIS WAS A LUSH, impossible image to my traumatized eyes, and when Victoire met me at her mother’s Marais apartment, which had been vacated for August, I crumbled and put myself at her mercy. Immediately, she called an artist friend who had a house in Fécamp and arranged this week of recovery. We soon left in her car, but not before I’d stocked up on several boxes and bottles of Neo-codion, a mild form of codeine available in tablets and liquid form in any French pharmacy.
Now here I sit, popping the pills or gulping liquid codeine from the bottle, mostly nonverbal, with a pale face. Victoire and her artist friend ply me with enormous platters of fresh shellfish entwined with seaweed. Or they lead me to the beach for a little sunning. On August 6, they sweetly surprise me with a birthday celebration, another feast of seafood with champagne. Victoire has wrapped a gently provocative gift for me. It’s a piece of pumice soap, which she says is intended to scrub away the cares of the past.
Three days into our visit, I came to enough to realize that I was seriously broke. The $3,000 advance for Céline had already been spent, as had the money I’d received in advance for subletting my New York apartment. The other $7,000 from Céline would be swallowed up by the $18,000 in credit card bills I’d accumulated during eight months of loving Romulus. Luckily, the French Publishers’ Agency in New York turned me on by e-mail to another translation that same week, a biography of the childbirth specialist Ferdinand Lamaze.
It was providing a routine. Every morning, I worked on it for about three hours, popping the codeine a couple of times an hour, to prevent reflection and keep my reaction to the death of my relationship with Romulus at bay. However, at the end of the week in Fécamp, it was apparent that I had nowhere to go. Victoire came to the rescue again, by deciding to install me at her mother’s apartment in the Marais, where I could continue working on the translation until fall.
THE DAY BEFORE WE LEAVE FOR PARIS, I wake to a hot, prickly sensation. At first I think it’s just a sunburn from the day before, though I’d been at the beach little more than an hour. But when I climb out of bed and look down, I’m aghast. My entire body is covered with red eruptions, some of which have already started to form pustules. The rash runs along my chest and abdomen and upper arms, down my legs and even across the tops of my feet. I dash to the mirror and discover that it stops at the base of my neck, leaving my face unharmed. A thought enters my panicked mind: I’m having a Death in Venice experience. Because I’ve been living for my senses, I’ve sunk into pourriture, like Aschenbach. Love, a terrible and degenerate illness, has ended in a full-bodied rash. The next, similar possibility is that it’s the secondary stages of syphilis. I put on a long-sleeved shirt and long pants. Since Victoire is the soul of discretion, she never inquires why I’m dressed so uncomfortably or why I say I prefer not to go to the beach.
As soon as I get to Paris, I run to a doctor. In that scholarly way that French medicals have of approaching a problem, she interviews me for more than an hour about my experiences of the last few months. No, she’s certain it isn’t syphilis, but she does a test anyway, which comes back negative. The HIV test is negative, too. Finally I admit my codeine abuse, but to her it doesn’t look like a drug reaction, either. Cortisone has no effect, and after several visits she surmises I’m having a delayed reaction to the insecticide in the electric mosquito repellent. She can’t be sure, however, unless she sees the ingredients. Still, with that squeamishness with which the Schengen countrie
s look upon their eastern neighbors, soon to be brought into the fold of the European Union, she decides to blame it on them. All she can think to prescribe is a mild antiseptic to keep the open pustules from becoming infected.
I kept it hidden. It didn’t really matter anyway since I felt exiled from anything to do with the body, after my disastrous experiment in sensuality and passion. At the Marais apartment, which was a tastefully decorated converted maid’s quarters, I fell into a monkish existence, plus the mind-numbing codeine. Victoire had gone back to the provincial university where she directed an art program. Most of the many friends I had in Paris were away for August, and my morale was such that I didn’t feel like seeing anybody, anyway.
So I got lost in the dreary toil of translating, going down to the streets of the Marais, which happens to be the gay area, once a day for food, looking with remote, evasive eyes at the couples and cruisers I passed, feeling like another species. Then back I would come to my little garret, where I’d pop pill after pill, which, curiously, accentuated my focus on my work, until I felt as if I were in a black tunnel with only the squiggles of black on the white computer screen. Eventually, halfway through the night, the codeine would caress me in its swirling, persuasive embrace and create an anesthesia of warm, isolating intimacy. I’d fall onto the bed and drift into sleep.
Every few days I had to speak to my mother, to whom I’d lied about recent events. Half from pride and half from concern that she’d worry, I’d told her that Romulus and I had found Romania intolerable in the heat and that I’d managed to get him a tourist’s visa to France. Now, supposedly, we were leading a quiet domestic life in Paris while I worked on the new translation. She said she was relieved that I’d come farther west. As someone who had, just by chance, escaped the horrors of life in Eastern Europe, she was at a loss as to how anybody could be intrigued by it.
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