The Truth That Doesn't Exist

2/1 23:37:58.671 DECES whispers: So — I didn't piss you off last night by cheating, did I?
2/1 23:38:34.453 LIGIA whispers: No. It's a male instinct I know well enough.
2/1 23:39:06.984 DECES whispers: The cheating?
2/1 23:39:28.343 LIGIA whispers: And what did you even cheat me out of — I didn't even catch it!
2/1 23:39:49.781 DECES whispers: That's exactly it, I didn't cheat on purpose...
2/1 23:40:26.656 DECES whispers: ...I mean, from playing so much I've built up certain reflexes...
2/1 23:40:57.781 DECES whispers: ...and when I saw my pet had lost half its health, I hit the key automatically, to heal it...,
2/1 23:41:28.953 DECES whispers: ...but not because I meant to, just because my fingers moved on their own. I put you at a disadvantage and I felt I owed it to you to say so.
2/1 23:42:09.765 LIGIA whispers: I appreciate that,
2/1 23:42:42.468 LIGIA whispers: ...besides, just about everyone wants to take down the warriors. It's almost an obsession.
2/1 23:43:05.203 DECES whispers: Because they've got the most survivability. You've got to spec properly.
2/1 23:48:18.500 LIGIA whispers: My warrior is specced to fight weapon in hand. She fights with the sword, with the axe...
2/1 23:48:38.531 LIGIA whispers: ...so I can hold my own alone in this fairly hostile world. Only, a warrior gets sought after for what he can protect... he has to be the tank...
2/1 23:49:23.546 DECES whispers: I know.
2/1 23:49:55.375 LIGIA whispers: ...to stand there soaking up the hits in front of the monsters, so the others stay safe.
2/1 23:51:10.531 DECES whispers: He's got the most important role on a team. You can never do without one.
2/1 23:51:38.875 LIGIA whispers: Yes, but...

In the summer of 1985, letters had once again become a necessity.

I had to make sure my line to Felix hadn't been cut, I had to see where I stood in his mind and in his soul. By word of mouth it had become almost impossible to communicate coherently. However well hidden a lie may be, the moment you set it down on paper it surfaces without your noticing. And it gave me time to put off the firm decisions. If I really was about to lose the game, then at least it mustn't happen stupidly.

In the past year, the one he'd spent in Bucharest, Felix had drawn away. The letter from that woman, into whose hands Felix had delivered himself with a recklessness worthy of thunderous applause, had done its work. She laid claim to him in a total disorder of ideas. One moment she demanded back the money she'd spent repairing Erika for him, the next she threatened him with the secret police and with the child she carried in her belly — and all of this she told me, on the telephone, all of it except the part about her pregnancy.

I learned, many years later, from a mutual friend, that Felix had become for her a kind of bridgehead, where she had set up a barrier between herself and the "male" world that had at once lured and disappointed her. She would, of course, have been more wounded still to learn that the splendid little gold cross she had given Felix — or only lent him — he had handed on to me. I asked him for it and he gave it to me. After all, how could he have refused me, and what could he have explained? But what threw her into a fury probably had another motive.

Meanwhile, Felix had become a fully fledged "Pygmalion" and had "built" the entrance exam for the Institute of Theatre of a girl he accompanied to Bucharest. It was neither his first nor his last achievement of the kind, and the "idyll" between them was the genuine article. Felix hadn't even hidden it, on the principle that the best hiding place is in plain sight. There were real miracles at work — how else? The girl told me, in lavish detail, how at the second round, the improvisation, she'd worn as a brooch a great night moth that Felix had plucked from the grass and pinned to her breast. She had been the overflowing fullness of that troubled year (1985). Returned from Bucharest in the fullest glory, her road to an acting career secured, she cocked a snook at her former colleagues from the theatre. She was closely seconded by a somewhat older friend who, making a regular practice of having no scruples, egged the girl on, turning her into a weapon in her own personal campaign — one aimed at Felix and me. She did it, oh, for art's sake, and because she was provoked by "my stupidity" in believing myself infallible where Felix was concerned. In fact a "trio" had formed, quite determined to amuse itself at my expense, and all three women wanted Felix. We'd set going a bullfight of rare beauty. I was, in their view, the bull that had to end in the arena, drowned in its own blood.

After one night in which "the artists" — that is, Felix and his recent love — had recorded themselves reciting my verses over the music of Vangelis, I said: Stop! Enough of the masquerade — and I asked Felix to define his thoughts and feelings in writing. For the girl, especially, I put on display the famous phrase from "Three Balloons", written, again, in red: "I love you, wild blond gypsy!"

Even so, she tried her strength against me, out in the open. Toward the end of summer, she paid me a visit. You could see she'd prepared her text in advance.

"I love Felix," she began her speech.

"Oh? That seems natural to me. I love him too. This will do you good, down there in Bucharest — it'll keep you, for a while at least, clear of cheap sentimentality. It really is useful to have something to measure against, because the temptations will be many!" I answered, noting that inside me the girl's insolence registered not the faintest trace of surprise.

I had avenged myself, in my own way, on this whole tired little gang, into which I had at one point folded Felix as well. I was more or less satisfied. We'd been invited, every last one of us, to the brand-new actress's party. When it comes to it, I'm capable of bringing out the disarming acting talent I was born with. I blew the whole party to smithereens. I was expansive, careless, arrogant. That panicked Felix, and I absorbed his entire attention, never once loosening my grip on him the whole evening through. I demanded of the girl, allowing her no reply, that she give me the little skirt and the T-shirt she'd worn at the exam. The ones from the monologue, when, in fact, her fate as a future actress had been decided. I bet squarely on the physical difference between us. I was nearly a head taller than her; my long hands knew how to slice the air into ribbons and fling them back, in disgust, straight across your eyes. I danced barefoot, mingling my Greek-Russian-Gypsy blood with all the air around me. First with Felix, then alone, because he too had withdrawn to the side to watch me. In the end it was for him that I danced.

"Well, how was it? Did you like the way I danced?" I asked when we got home.

"You produced general hysteria. You really are merciless when you set your mind to it."

"And who exactly are you talking about?"

"All three of them… They each had a fit of nerves in turn."

Yes, that was what I'd wanted.

The first letter

"I thought long and hard about whether to begin my series of letters writing to you by hand or on Erika. I chose Erika… She's a part of me. She's a prolongation, an extension of my thought, of my hands…

My dear,

What remains fundamental and true is only the fact that I love you, that I have loved you and will love you always. I have no other chance. And no escape. I am shut inside this circle and every possibility of breaking out is excluded... Beyond its edges there is nothing, or there are only trifles. I've discovered that the circle in which I exist is not a prison, its diameter being so vast that I'll never have time to cross it. So what should I go looking for beyond it?

I don't want to fall into meta-theories about what you are to me. You ARE, from to be... It's easy to find a hundred women for whom I might be the circle I spoke of just now, but impossible to find even one more who could offer me anything of the space and the air I breathe with you...

I've reread what I wrote. Rhetoric and cheap dithyramb! It's nothing like that! Cross it all out and keep only this much: I love you! What circles, what diameters, what spaces…! None of all that.

When I fall asleep and wake drenched in sweat, for reasons I don't know, and find you again in the bed beside me, I melt so with tenderness that I want to caress myself for sheer happiness that you're there, calm, warm, breathing faintly and dreaming of green horses on the walls or of little Jesuses with beans in their hands... and when my restlessness takes on a material shape, I know you're with me, that I can reach out my hand and steal you from your sleep and your isolation from everything and everyone, taking you with me... It isn't only you who comes with me, Ligia, but I who come with you... I haven't yet managed to convince you of this once and for all, I've done idiotic things too that cancelled the credit you gave me, but my faith in everything I do has always been generated as well by the idea that for you and for Alin I have to build beautiful castles where we'll live together. You understood, and understood again... that however distant my castles are, they exist and they are very true.

This morning I woke happy. Do you know how important that was for me? You don't... I wanted to wake you and make love again, and if I hadn't remembered that I'd put you to bed for the very same reason at three in the morning, I'd have woken you... So I loved you only in my thoughts and kept watch over your sleep a while... You were calm. Beautiful and calm... I took your hand, you started and clenched your hand on mine for a second... Only a second, after which you relaxed again... Your fingers must have recognized mine and grew calm, knowing themselves home. You sighed softly and went back to your dreams. What were you dreaming, so beautifully that your features had grown ennobled, lit as if by a blue light, necessarily blue and transparent! I guarded your dream last night, Lee, and I was strong and great in the role of dream-keeper. I was terrified that just then, at that very moment, you might have a nightmare, but I was reassured at once because you were far too beautiful, noble and calm, above the dream, you mastering it, not it you...

I love you, Felix"

All of us, lined up side by side, search for the treasure hidden in the sand of an island, out of a book beautifully bound between two covers on which are drawn, always with great skill, pirates who hide our soul from ourselves. We want precise maps all the way to the treasure, though we often know that every day we tread over the very grains of sand that hide it from our sight — only, of course, to heighten the suspense.

I loved this man so much that no certainty, whatever its source, was ever enough for me.

"Stranger than all the strange things in the world is my soul, inhuman and corrupted by every pride, by every vanity conceived and unconceived. It is the soul with which I love you and with which I would want to do away with you, to see how sad it is on the far side of you.

I feel grass growing in my soul, the embodiment of the hope that we are, that we are, that we are... and the full summer weighs on me with millions of atmospheres, hiding among its leaves the contorted roads of my mind.

How wonderful is your plain, with its roads never hidden, descending always out of the sky!

That I love you becomes something inessential beside the cosmic need to go together and complete a God. The clearest and the most powerful one.

My insides burn like a raging lava, far too primed for the explosion. It is like a painful birth, when the tormented womb — because the infant lies crosswise — howls, unsure it will ever quiet again. And in this dreadful agony, you ask me for human, rational solutions! But reason itself is that serpent of incandescent lava, poisoned by so many "minerals" melted into it.

If we don't defend our time and our space from the others, the absence of MEANING will overwhelm us, and then nothing will be possible any longer, even if you do manage to fashion a vast castle, acknowledged by everyone as the purest and most brilliant diamond. I am afraid of irreversible things; you are not. I try to detach myself from the world so as to be able to isolate it at need; you want to conquer it. There would be nothing wrong in that, if each of us didn't make an absolute of his own road, with such stubbornness.

My soul is so pained and heavy when you give "the world" its chances against us!

I don't know whether all I'm saying is love. L."

The second letter

"It's hard. So very hard...! This world, patched with motley, ragged scraps of people, wearies me... I press my green eyes to it and want to take joy... Sometimes I manage, but I darken again, because I arrive inevitably at the stupid question: What's the good of it? Where am I, the man I used to be, cheerful and of an unconscious optimism, who dreamed the whole day long of green horses on the walls and was always ready to celebrate a dream?

I gather myself into a glance, or into a caress, and give myself to you. Then everything is OK. If only I could gaze there, in that caress or in that glance, all my life — how good it would be! I'd lose myself among your dreams of little Jesuses, and perhaps that way I'd stop troubling you with my trifles...

I walked for a quarter of an hour among people and, strangely, although I'd left you asleep at home, I kept looking for you among them in the street. It seemed natural to me that you'd appear from somewhere, from behind a tree or behind a flower, take me by the hand and say: «Let's go home, my love!»

It's hard! Hard, my foot! As if it could ever be hard for me!

Why? Why, when I know that all is vanity, should it be hard for me! I try to make a projection of myself into the future without you, and only then do I manage to understand the true worth of this word — hard! I lament, hand to my head, with the nostalgia of an adolescent dreaming of his beloved's caresses when he's a little sad, and that's all.

IT'S GOOD, IT'S JOY to write to you... YOU'RE CLEVER! I'M HAPPY! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!

I LOVE YOU! felix."

If Felix's restlessness had a material shape, mine was of pure gold. Waves of fury and revolt trickled down the walls of my cathedral. I gilded them again, stubbornly, and I couldn't master my revolt in the face of an impiety that could have every justification in the world — except that of having happened.

By virtue of his inner springs, Felix was convinced it was in the nature of things to be free. The values he'd grown up with in his town on the bank of the Danube swung very lightly between what others called permitted and forbidden. They swallowed up a whole plain, drowsy with sun in summer and haunted by the crivăț in winter. It didn't matter much how others saw things. The Danube was forever wiping away the traces that had no importance. She was the queen, she was the supreme test. If you managed to swim across her from one bank to the other, you received your certificate of good conduct. That was what counted. Her waters brought the ships into port.

The ships, the sailors, the whores, the bosses of the back-streets, the smuggling — all jumbled together with aristocrats of more or less blue blood — were merely so many ingredients dissolving in the subtle dialectic of the free zones, hard to keep under control, but how productive when you managed to master them!

Felix fell, by reflex, into the game with his own limits. The tensions in his depths resembled those of a star fighting against its own implosion. He had millions of reasons to become a black hole, collapsed for good into itself, but others, just as numerous, for waking early in the morning simply to rejoice and greet the Sun.

The third letter

"Let me sip the dew from your palms again, on clear mornings, my love! «Sicken me» with your chestnut blossoms and you'll see how good it will be. My «ravine» will bloom with wildflowers, my water lilies will grow without water, and we'll ring ourselves round with long swords of green, sharp bulrush, in which all those who would reach us will cut their ugly dreams to pieces.

It is sometimes so hard that I want to weep with helplessness.

Why must it be hard even on my own plain? You are not a mountain with misty peaks and hidden chasms, even if you like to see yourself that way. You are a plain, broad, broad and fertile, which has the gift (the power!) of rising up vertical if it wills and becoming taller than a mountain and more precipitous than any precipice, a wall that cannot be crossed — and I know that very well. I have no need of demonstrations on that score. I only want to roam you, the length and breadth of you, you who lie stretched out in the good sun, and even if I lose my way sometimes, the plain mustn't flee from under my soles and turn into a wall. Weeds smother in soil wet with dew. Felix"

Whenever I thought back to the beginnings of summer, it was the chestnut blossoms that sickened me, and I would trail along the rotting fences, overcome by "a noble, uselessly noble boredom." For Felix, Federico García Lorca's poem was definitive: "Green, how I love you green…" For nights on end I'd talk to him about how much I longed to become "mineral," and he would watch me with a feline's patience, ready to bend himself to the undulation of any movement in my "mineral" universe, however vaguely it was outlined. And he knew how I saw things about the painful and sublime sinking of the man into the woman, in order to become, again and again, a cosmic geyser.

"You are, for me, a Metaphor…

Eleven years I've envied you this status. I have always been a comparison. A comparison of the kind: «Felix, you're like Accatone»; «you're like Zograffi», «you're…» like the devil take you…… I have always aspired to the higher rank of Metaphor, without ever once attaining it. A Metaphor can be anything at all, because, if it has quality for its foundation, the metaphor comes very close to the "mineral" state you speak of so much.

A question: Are you dissatisfied with «this quality»? The very second it dissatisfies you, don't you think it vanishes automatically? And if it vanishes, don't you sink to a lower landing? And if so, don't you think it dissatisfies me too, and makes me want to go mad?

Within the power of the metaphor lies also the possibility of balancing itself, always, climbing even a step higher.

N.B. — What I underlined at the start and now wish to underline again is the fact that you are not like a metaphor … but a Metaphor.

Why doesn't the world allow you to be weak??? Have you ever asked yourself? Because a weak metaphor is worse than a… good comparison!

Why, the moment I think I'm setting out on the road to being a metaphor myself, do you reduce me at once to a banal comparison? You see, that's when you shake my creed that the Metaphor exists.

I don't ask you to be a — metaphor — because you ARE one.

You ask me to be a metaphor without my being one. And instead of helping me become a metaphor, you throw me down (calling me all sorts of things!), and to travel the road back up again, I need nerves (which I no longer have so strong), and a gratuitous psychic effort…

I believe I'm being clear, but words sometimes can't contain us within ourselves, and our own quality vanishes at times into a fog in which a concrete (and petty!) vanity makes us squander ourselves among petty people… Perhaps that's where I belong…

T h i n k o f m e , t o o !

Devil take me! What's so hard to understand!!?! Do I really seem so minor to you? Do I move in such a minor key, in your opinion, that you misread everything so absurdly! When I tell you I'm traumatized by time, by the lack of it, and by how much I have to work, do you really get as angry as you seem to?

You torture me with — floozies — of no importance whose place is their own little square and nothing more… If that's how it is, I feel like a fly buzzing senselessly around a lit bulb, and that's why I'm driven to the very limit and can't bear anything, anything at all…

Your blindness blinds me and I really can't see even two metres ahead… because YOU ARE AND WILL BE MY MOST IMPORTANT, ESSENTIAL BOND WITH PEOPLE. If YOU go blind, even for a single moment, I CAN'T SEE anything around me. Calm down, for God's sake! I've been an idiot, a cretin, a fool… whatever you like, but exhaust this range of «qualities» you assign me. Don't cordon me off there forever, or if you do, be resolute about it! I'll pull myself out somehow, if I don't croak first…

How many things haven't we told each other so far, how many more do we have to tell each other? An immense number. Two lifetimes wouldn't be enough… We have to live a lot in little time, and in a line, not a circle — or at least in as wide a circle as possible…

Understand once and for all that I love you, that I've always, always, always, always, always loved you… How can you still doubt it?!"

"My dear,

If you want the «incredible story» between the two of us to remain an «incredible story», and you yourself to remain a continuous line, consistent with itself, forever ascending and ever more complex, then it's well enough as it is. The posture of an «ideal» impossible to realize in practice suits me — a solitary, univocal swan, gliding above the Parâng.

If you pity the «others», I pity myself and you, and therefore I REFUSE to let the «incredible story» accumulate compromises, however nobly argued those compromises may be

My most authentic value is YOU. I am conservative, and I do not smash a precious thing that was, or that is, dear to me, out of carelessness, fury, or some other little «moodlet».

The concrete woman in me wants to be respected, because I was of a godly good faith when I gave myself irrevocably into your hands. To become a «gendarme» of a woman who snatches you by «force» from other women who want you doesn't appeal to me in the least.

The temptation to play «little games» behind your back, the intelligent option for a behaviour constructed where you're concerned, one that would bring you to me on a platter, anytime and from anywhere, repels me. I really take no pleasure in the game and the deceit when it comes to you. You're possessive, jealous…, it would be so easy for me!

In case you want us to be, all the way to the end, «an incredible story», then you must meditate deeply on what I've told you — namely, that you cannot come to me except clean and clear to your very deepest depths.

That's about it. Ligia"

That woman had reopened Pandora's box. With a violence that left no room for dignity or pride, she had set about wiping Felix from the face of the earth — or rather, wiping me out. Jealousy had darkened her mind.

I admit it: she dealt me a coup de grâce. It wasn't the fact that she'd sent me one of Felix's letters to her, written on a scrap of paper that had Alin's biorhythm chart on the back, nor the actual content of the lines written on it, that hurt me so much; what wounded me was the fact that Felix asked her to be reasonable until they'd have the chance to talk "like two intelligent people" over a bottle of… Havana Club. That detail destroyed me. From then on I never again agreed to drink Havana Club, not for anything in the world.

Only after several decades, one evening, when Felix was watching me from somewhere up in the sky, through the branches of the old apple tree in our yard, did Alin persuade me to make him a daiquiri.

"You never understood that Felix gave away, everywhere and to anyone, whatever he himself liked? You were never, for him, what you believed you were. In any case, not the one unique woman he wouldn't have wanted to surpass. On the contrary, he kept trying, but he never managed it. You were the person with whom he achieved the fullest communication. That's what it was — don't fool yourself. Make peace with yourself and accept the truth as it is," Alin told me, gently clinking his glass against mine.

The daiquiri swayed, turning lazily in my glass.

"The truth?" I asked him, without waiting for his answer.

"My dear,

You reproach me (?!) for arguing something after the fact, in its most fitting version. For making an effort with which an event we lived through together ought to have been filled.

You overrate me. I'm not so fine a dialectician, unfortunately. I would like it and I wouldn't, at the same time. I'd like it because I'd be a lawyer who pleads superbly and turns any truth in favour of the client he defends, getting him off clean every time, and I wouldn't like it for that very same reason, to which is added the fact that, in this structure of mine, there's also a prosecutor, at least as deft.

In reality, I'm somewhere in the middle. Both hammer and anvil at once. I gather myself only in — my state of Ligia — which I count as a given that was given to me… as a stroke of luck, and to which I cling with my nails, sometimes, with all the desperation I feel now and have always felt. I want to howl when I find, at times, this support of mine so dull and so refractory to any touch of mine, and I barely, barely keep afloat beside it. Then I want to let myself sink, drained, to the bottom and go on sinking… and if I didn't have, at every moment, the certainty that you'll never let me be merely beside you, but always with you, you can be sure I'd just keep on sinking…

I have never, absolutely never excluded you from any one of my existential alternatives, and in the affective realm you were, absolutely always, number one, so high and so unassailable that I always feel a kind of bewilderment and take a sort of blow to the soft of my skull — one that always ends in dizziness and in hysteria in my soul — whenever your doubts bite into my certainty (the only one I've had in my thirty-five years).

You're too clever, too sensitive and too noble not to understand this, but at the same time too perfidious and too proud not to punish me, coldly and lucidly or pathetically and ardently, for each of my lapses of attention. And I am sometimes too sentimental and too foolish (because that's what I am) not to suffer like a dog, every time it's beaten… The reverse holds just as well. The same event, the same intrigue but with other characters, set off by you, stirs in me exactly the same reactions as yours. Only, for me they're passable, unimportant, and without the power to attack the unattackable. On the contrary, they ground it all the more firmly.

THEN how is it that I don't love you, or that you don't love me??? Is there really even the smallest space between these words, I LOVE YOU – YOU LOVE ME, into which doubt, perfidious, or its shadow, might slip? NO.

All the rest is a farce in which we are, with or without our consent, implicated. They are strings that both you and I pull for various reasons, always minor, amusing or sad, unconscious or half-conscious, strings that even so I pull badly now and then. The only thing that stays true is that this farce is played out in an altogether different place and at a very great distance from the compact space of ILOVEYOULOVEME, which is so compact that, even if the farce were played out very close to it, it wouldn't touch it in the least.

Do you really not know all this, or do you feel the need (a justified one, in fact) to have these truths confirmed and reconfirmed to you endlessly? I really must write to you all the time, because I've grown far, far too damnably introverted…

A while back, you told me that your hand laid late on my shoulder is a caress too, but a deep one, profound. I knew that it was so, but I asked you to travel over me, to cover me with your palm. It didn't mean I was refusing that «deep» caress. But its static quality, its introversion, not satisfying me tactilely, sensorially, I preferred the active caress, mobile and seemingly superficial (only seemingly, because its mobility had to contain, was required to contain, depth as well). Why, I wonder?

Only now do I have an answer that's at least halfway clear. Neither interiorization nor exteriorization is what excites, but the flowing of the flux from inside toward outside, graded and modulated at every moment, and fed permanently from — «iloveyouloveme». ISN'T THAT SO?"

Felix, in accordance with the well-known laws of history old and recent, sought to cancel out his guilt, to purify and clarify himself by giving himself to me.

He loved me deeply. He found the certainty of a love returned in that embrace which can have no name, for which there exists no word large enough to contain it. It is ascent and descent, it is gesture and music, fluid sculpture that can touch the threshold of perfection. It is the mystery with which I believe Lilith convinced Eve when she had the generosity to give her the apple and taught her how to tempt Adam into biting it.

And I loved him, because that was what I'd learned through him, as in an inverted restitution. I suffered in equal measure from the powerlessness of not having been able to keep him forever in that sphere of translucent, cosmic light. Far too sensual, he followed his instincts, then motivated and hushed them up with a disarming ease. He was very proud of his victories on the ever-open front of male confrontations, leaving female casualties at every step, but he flew into a rage when I gave him a wide berth, thrown off by his "slippings," which I felt and which offended me. He'd threaten me with his cohorts of mistresses, and I would serenely send him off to them. It was a proud, ridiculous serenity. I'd see those women — especially the ones I knew, who hunted him openly — losing their way among the thistles of the plain at the foot of the mountain peak on which my citadel of unbreakable stone stood rooted. Sometimes I'd even describe to him, with spicy detail, the way woman "x" or "y" behaved in bed. I didn't consider them dangerous. Overcome by my blind faith in absolute truths, I let them toss their manes and roll their eyes along the paths that climbed to my stone citadel.

Why was I so thrown off when I learned that Felix's mistresses weren't theoretical but concrete? Why was I so astonished to find that they had parasitized my life, creating no end of unpleasantness for me, which translated into many quarrels and tense, disagreeable moods for the two of us? Why hadn't I heeded his pleas to lay firm hold of him, to claim him unequivocally, whenever another woman was circling him? Why had I let him believe, so many times over, that my refusal meant withdrawal, detachment, indifference?

I think now that I'm not sorry it happened as it did. I regret only that, because of my stupid blindness, after the business with Mona — lost in Petroșani between two trains, in search of her chestnut-haired lover with the green eyes — at a certain point I tore myself violently from his embrace and turned into the fearsome statue of the goddess of vengeance. The gesture was dramatic. I stood up, in the middle of the bed, and cursed him with all the force of my love: "If you've ever betrayed me, may you never have the thing you want so much. May you never set foot on a theatre stage again!" It was a childish thing. But just then, for a few seconds, Felix's face turned to stone. Nothing could justify such violence.

It hardly matters how that woman turned up on Felix's path, and I only know what he told me. She'd ended up in her studio flat because Mușata's father had passed into the eternal and he had to sleep somewhere.

"She slept on the floor, leaving her bed at my disposal. She looked like a beaten dog, sad and abandoned. I called her over to me in the bed. That was about all there was to it."

I'd felt him gone off into obscure distances; I no longer had any certainty at all that the temple with the slender columns I'd built in his mind and soul had the resources to hold. The only thing that mattered was that I gave myself completely to our reunions, and so did he. He'd come back with millions of stories and an evident thirst to abolish the time and space in which we hadn't been together; he'd melt in my arms. It's impossible for me to remember details. I think that each time, I passed into another dimension.

Looking back, though, everything seemed to have slipped out of my control. I remembered there were weeks on end in which Felix had cast me entirely into oblivion. Me and Alin both. I remembered I'd lived through, in the flesh, the feeling that he'd abandoned me, that he'd outgrown me, and the main reason was that I was in his way. I weighed heavy in his tumultuous struggle with his defeats and, as I was to learn, she would have been a far better solution than me. I came to understand in an altogether different light everything that had happened at New Year, when I'd forced him to go with me to Călimănești. He was clouded over. A Felix gone opaque, wrapped in fog and almost hostile, was a hard thing to conceive. He was obsessed with writing and lugged Erika everywhere with him. He barely saw me. One day, as foggy as he was, on the porch of my grandparents' house, where we stayed over the holidays — a fairy-tale little house that was then sliding by degrees into ruin — Felix said: "Here I could write in peace." Though he said it out loud, it seemed to me he'd spoken to himself. As I was to learn later, she had pressed him to go to Sinaia for New Year's, but our binding law was to pass the night between the years together. Felix had chosen. He'd come to me. At the time I had no way of knowing how deep his inner turmoil was. Had he not come, the natural, instinctive stone bridges that held us together would have collapsed all at once. I was to learn that it wasn't the difference in the offer — Sinaia versus a little peasant house on the verge of collapse, even if it was still perfumed with the smell of sponge cake on Christmas Eve — that was the reason for Felix's gloom, as I believed for a long time, but his plan to flee the country and the support she was to provide him by staying abroad. It was she, too, who had backed him when he wanted to swim across the Danube near Orșova, as I learned from her, through a corrective note to the biography I'd given Felix when I published, in 2010, The Madmen's Trilogy.

I have to admit it once more. That woman who had come threateningly close to my house, trying with her desperate gesture — like poisoned hail — to scatter my field of sunflowers, my yellow curtains fallen from the sky and the fern in its pot, frightened me. I'd stopped Felix, turned him back from his beaten-dog's road, when I'd screamed, beside myself: "Get out, you cur!" I'd stopped him because I felt an imperious need to find out what had happened. The explanations sounded grim.

"She's mad. She could do you harm, you or Alin. I thought long and hard about whether to let you see this cursed letter or not. I saw it in the mailbox and I could have destroyed it, but the only reasonable solution was for you to see it."

The shock I felt then was so powerful that, however hard I try to put the events in chronological order, it's impossible. Our brain has the good habit of erasing whatever threatens us with destruction. Mine did just that, then.

I set my priorities. The threats seemed to be storming me from every side. I went into battle. I turned ferocious.

I was coddling myself, all on my own. I was 33 and it was fitting that I be crucified. Perhaps that was just why I'd dreamed of Jesus. He was made entirely of gold, with hair of wheat ears and, in his hand, beans, of gold as well. I was never able to decipher that dream. Only now, when I'm so far from that space and time, and have been roaming for a few days through Azshara, when I think about it, do I have the feeling that I glimpse its meaning. When I could no longer deny the evidence of the betrayal, my subconscious had assured me that things weren't as grave as they seemed at first sight. That Jesus, all and entirely of gold, was showing me the deep reality. He was my soul, the one with which I loved Felix. He was showing me the truth that counted.

"Motto: «Blind though I were, I'd still set out, groping my way toward Mecca»

My love,

Since when, the devil's own mother, do we give a damn what the town says!?

It's MY fault that you care… that you've started to care. I want to bang my head against the walls over it… but, for the love of God, what do we have to hide, what blemishes, what important scraps of darkness do WE, THE TWO OF US, have to hide, such that we should feel besieged by the meanness and cowardice of the world?

If you're expecting from me some defence against the doses of "Bovary-ism" that still come over you now and then, then you're mistaken.

I AM TOTALLY COMPROMISED before this "world," and all my purity lies, in fact, in this unfittedness of mine to the others.

YOU ARE THE SAME, and perhaps that's what I love most in you. The only difference between us is that I haven't yet found the formula for sticking a turd on a stick to hand to the world to eat, or to sniff, playing the farce in which an apparent and mutual respectability imposes itself as a matter of course. It's true I haven't made much effort in that direction either. Never!

But, on another note, I have never given myself to anyone but you. It was never important to me that the WORLD gives, at most, tuppence for me. So what!? No great loss! I never gave much for it either. I've told you all this before.

What's mattered to me, these past eleven years, is the price YOU set on me. If you now add it to the price «the world» gives for me and divide by two, I lose half my value at a stroke. And if you hand me over entirely to the world, another half of the remaining half goes to the devil, and so on, until we reach the point where you wipe me out completely and I, in my turn, do the same.

How am I to put myself back together then, if in eleven years I've barely managed to hold the world at a distance?

And you — what are you doing with yourself?

Do we, I wonder, need petty victories? We do. It's true we do. But they're so unimportant! They do so little that they almost don't exist. For me, at least… (...) they're part of that world for which I give, at best, tuppence. And if the whole world is worth only tuppence, how much can a single individual in it be worth?

What stays important to me is YOU, ONLY YOU, you alone, whose price no one can fix but you and I, and which is IMMENSE. You are MY MECCA…

Felix"

The motto Felix had used was from a poem by Doru, my younger brother. I got really, truly angry when I read the letter above. Madame Bovary was something I couldn't accept, and I felt Felix trying to slip through my fingers. In the sense we gave to Bovary-ism — for we had symbols and concepts through which we communicated by shortcut — there gathered more than all the banality and squalor of a provincial existence usually amounts to. I really did have reason to be upset. In the end, the fit of fury that had overwhelmed that woman wasn't owed to me, but to the fact that Felix, playing at Pygmalion, had built S.'s entrance exam for the I.A.T.C. in such fine detail that, just as the girl described her victory at the monologue, she'd toppled every barrier and taken full possession of the great actor Octavian Cotescu himself, the head of the examination board. I can confirm it could have happened that way, because I'd seen, countless times, the monologue in which Felix had managed to set some glass marbles "acting," and had constructed, at least initially, that inner thought which transmits feelings through the play of the face, by having the girl count silently to three. Although I knew the whole construction underneath and knew, for instance, that the coloured glass marbles didn't roll at random but were strictly controlled through exercises lasting whole days and nights, the final performance convinced me. It was a feat.

"If they don't want me in the institute, just watch me shove candidates down their throats that they can't refuse," Felix had decided, out of a legitimate need for revenge.

He polished the girl's exam, accompanied her to Bucharest, directing her every movement, every reaction. Even though she was clever and strong enough and, not least, experienced enough at twisting men round her finger, she ended by falling into Felix's net.

Her, though — that woman — I think he drove out of her mind. Otherwise I can't explain why, while the two of them were in Bucharest, I got a phone call full of insults and threats against Felix. She was charging to his account 700 lei, the cost of repairing his typewriter, that is, Erika; the little gold cross I'd snatched from Felix by force without knowing where it came from; his Proust volumes; and, more serious, the threat of denunciation: "and not to the militia, but to the secret police."

Felix's play, The Box of Monkeys, had been smuggled out of the country and dispatched to Radio Free Europe, for a playwriting competition.

"You'll get the books and the cross. As for the rest, the various other debts, you sort it out with Felix — don't drag me into your affairs," I told her.

Everything went black before my eyes. I don't know whether it was revolt that was choking me, or simply disgust. I asked Adrian to help me. He was the only one I could count on, knowing he'd ask for no explanation.

"Would you take a trip to Bucharest to carry a package to Mușata? It's extremely important and urgent."

"If it's that important, then yes. I'll go to Bucharest."

I put the package in his hand, and he carried it to Mușata, without any further comment. I was seething. I called Mușata, told her she'd be getting a package, and asked her to tell "that woman that I've no man to give up, so she can calm down, because I can become far more dangerous than she imagines, or than Felix has painted me."

"For a while you cultivated «clever» women, which clogged you up a little, bringing you to the state where you hand out diagnoses and supply prescriptions.

It's astonishing how you can believe that, by assigning me in turn various "qualities" (get this — "a Bovary"!), you'll find in me the ground for them to take root in.

There are only two possibilities: either these "qualities" are my own, and then it's pointless to assign them to me, or to try to correct them; or they aren't my own, and it's ridiculous of you to enter them in my inventory.

There's a wise saying you must have heard from that grandfather of yours you invoke so often: do not do to another what you wouldn't like done to yourself.

That's about the whole philosophy, and that's about what I've been trying to explain to you, succeeding only in becoming, in your eyes, sometimes a silly goose, at other times rising to a higher rung — that is, becoming «a Bovary».

You know what's funny in this game? That you generously assign me these characterizations and then finish by telling me you love me.

Do you really think I need a blond «dandy» with green eyes to walk me through the world, the two of us making a pretty, empty picture together?

Or do you come to me because you think me a stainless pillar?"

"My dear Lee,

It's clear… I want to tell you everything and all I manage to build is little walls. Sometimes, when you carry the Parâng on your back, it's very hard to set even one more little pebble on top of it, even if the pebble is called Felix… My horizons, «eclipsed by taste», sometimes give me such indigestion that I feel so bad I turn… bad. Stubborn and bad and suspicious. So suspicious!!!!!!

I can't be wise with you. Nor generous… I can't be with you except as I am: tormented and tormenting, selfish and humble, gentle and violent, calm and hysterical… Just as you, too, can't CONSTRUCT yourself for me other than as you are. There's no help for it! We'll devour each other as we always have. Between us there can't fit, and there never has fitted, a domestic calm, because we've always given each other a major attention and importance. My condolences…

I have NOT changed in the year that's passed. My way of relating to you hasn't altered in the slightest; what's more, the «affective distancing» you reproach me with so often is nothing but a plunge toward you, a total plunge toward you. What you take for indifference is only the outer friction of my wings against the unfitting air in which I move so clumsily. That's all it is! Look at me! I'm flowing with my waters toward you, the real and living one, and the stumps that get in my way aren't important at all, because I am f l u i d!

I didn't go for coffee. There was such a swarm of creepy-crawlies «creepy-crawling» that I went off onto the hill across the way and watched you sleeping. Then I ran home to see you up close. Now it's quiet. And it's good…

The madness in me falls asleep very easily when it isn't needled by useless prides.

(After two lines written and then painstakingly crossed out, he added… I struggled to make them out, but couldn't!)

«… I won't let the incredible story accumulate compromises however nobly argued those – compromises – may be…»

The greatest compromise is, first of all, that we're alive… If we were river stones over which the springs' waters passed and tore away a thread of sand each day, we'd still be… a compromise that we're stones… From the micro to the macro universe, everything is a compromise.

There! And now let the two of us come down to earth a little, feet on the ground, and let Felix tell you that he doesn't love you minerally, but humanly, with emotion and with joy, with idiot's mistakes and poetry out of the sky… THAT I'LL NEVER AGAIN LET ANYONE COME BETWEEN US, that's perfectly clear to me too, but to go from there to charging me with «moods and moodlets» over the little birds — as if I were this way and that, and suffered out of pity, understanding, heart or sex for some floozie X or Y — is the same as my calling you to account for the very same kind of experiences that you haven't had, because you weren't interested in having them. The symmetry isn't forced except at first glance, because at the second, the third and the «n»-th… it's borne out by the t r u t h that my affective, sentimental, intellectual, artistic, sexual interest — relational, in a word — where you're concerned is so great compared with my other little interests that the Great Parâng can no longer see the little pebble at its foot, which pebble, for instance, in its pebble-ness, might perhaps want to topple the Parâng… It was my fault that it happened so… IT WAS, nota bene! And I'll take all the pebbles and pelt the Parâng with them so they can't be seen, and you'll see too…

What do you know?

Do you know, for instance, that you can annul me by wiping me out from beside you?! Maybe you know that too…

How tonic it would be for me if you'd say to me — Felix, I trust your love… It's real, warm, strong… How good I'd feel! How great and strong I'd feel, to believe that you know this…!

I've discovered that I'M AFRAID OF YOU… If you take yourself away from me, you leave me dirt-poor and I'm afraid… I have NOT given you up at all; what's more, only now am I beginning to believe that I'm giving MORE and MORE of myself, and it would be a shame not to take me…"

That same evening, seated in the middle of the green glade of our "dining room," watched over by the fan of the fern — to which I often played guitar exercises from Carcassi's method until the pads of my fingers ached — we signed an essential deed of conveyance:

"Bill of Sale and Purchase

I, Felix Anton Rizea… (and Erika, who must follow him always, everywhere and in every way, because so it is ordained)… do sell myself as a slave of love and burnt offering to Ligia, for failure to settle in due time the debts incurred over the past decade (failure to settle in full!).

From the moment the aforesaid party comes into possession of the present document, signed by me, she shall have all the rights that an owner of slaves has had, has, and shall have over his slaves, including the right to decide their life or death…

The proprietress is vested with the power to free her slave when she shall deem that he has given proof of having discharged the debts he owed, plus one half again of them…

Concluded this day, 31 August 1985.

Felix"

A little while after the date above, I managed to put an end to the string of tragicomic events that had coloured my whole spring and summer. Even though things had seemed to be settled, I learn from Jean, my colleague at work, that he'd seen Felix going into the apartment block where S. still lived. I went home, rolled a clean white sheet of paper onto Erika's platen, and wrote, exactly in the middle of the page: "Why?"

Felix lost himself in endless ravings, denying any physical connection between them (which I knew wasn't true!), and explaining to me that "the poor girl" was suffering terribly and clinging to him in desperation.

My soul turned blacker than the coal in the belly of the Valley.

The next day, I set off with Jean and Luci toward Lupeni. When we drew level with our apartment block, I abruptly announced to my colleagues that I was getting out, because I had something to do. I got out and went straight as a bullet to "Georgică," the famous café in the Hermes district, which over time had become a space well woven into our Petroșani biography. Felix and S. were there. So I hadn't been mistaken. I sat down with my elbows on their high table.

"Has something happened?" Felix asked me.

"Yes, I want this little thing gone from here!"

Felix turned to S. and dismissed her with one short look:

"Did you hear that?"

The girl, like a plush puppy you've just emptied a bucket of cold water over, without making a sound, melted into the ground.

I don't know what the rest of their story was after that. And it no longer interested me.

I saw her again a few months later, in Bucharest, in her little student's room. She still bore the marks of the wound that had grazed her pride. I assured her I found her just as likeable, and I really did.

The waters calmed, though, only after a month and a half, more precisely one night around the middle of October. It still wasn't very clear to me what more I wanted to get out of Felix, and I relapsed quite "un-Catholically" out of the desire to have my uncertainties "cleared up." I'd have liked to take a clear-cut decision, one to match the jealousy and the insult gnawing at me like a worm, gangrening the joy and the naivety with which I'd believed myself unique for a decade. I'd say, rather, a century of pure gold.

An impotent fury spun round in my mind. From morning to night, I kept asking myself what to do with myself. I dreaded admitting that things had changed and seemed to be irreversible. There could be no question of assurances of the "from now on… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" kind. From the moment I'd stopped him from walking out the door, after insulting him and driving him off, I'd made the unpardonable compromise, and I had to find out why.

That October evening, Felix endured my perorations for hours on end, and toward midnight he rose firmly from his armchair beneath the fern, stopped in the doorway, and with an inscrutable expression said to me:

"Get yourself out of it! I can't help you."

Then he vanished into the black void of the corridor that led to the bedroom.

The time had come to set things straight. I began, with the lucidity of despair, to weigh my mind and my feelings, piece by piece. Do I want Felix or not? If yes, why? If no, why?

I put on Rachmaninoff, poured vodka into my glass, sat down on the floor so that the black disc the music poured from would spin before my eyes, as close as possible, and I wrote:

"I'm thinking of writing about myself and about you. It's beautiful in the world where you can think, whenever you like, of a warm nest over which trembling dusks come down, bathed in the yellow rays of the curtains that fall from the sky between you and the world, a nest in which mornings watched over by love are woven. Love, that closed circle with a variable radius, pricks the air with the keen swords of a fern fed on love. Submissive and gentle, the fern soothes our soul, cut through by confusion, asking us to water it with plenty of water. Green and forever running after light, love will attack us in waves, sometimes driving us to despair, because we won't always be able to face it.

What's to be done?

The alternatives are excluded. The deep truth is the one stated above. With the alternatives utterly lacking, the only way of being left to us is the one in which we drag ourselves toward each other, even if our strength has so far failed us that we can move through this world only with the greatest difficulty. You asked me whether it would be possible for us to «forget» each other. I answered — no. At least I can't. I don't idealize you, setting you apart, in an ivory tower, on some seventh floor of an obscure little town. You are concrete, alive, wild and gentle, foolish and dazzling. You are. Carried off by the waves, one of them inner and the other outer, you came close to the possibility of this «forgetting». To forget is, after all, also to love an image in an ivory tower, and so everything begins to resemble, somewhat, a childhood memory. Holy, sublime and adorned with many other superlatives."

When my eyes were almost closing from the deepest calm, a calm I hadn't known in a long while, I rose and wrote the date of that day in a little corner of my field of sunflowers that was still asleep, though the dawn was near. Yes. I wanted Felix.

"My love,

My powerlessness has never been aimed at you and my love. You are my permanent connection to purity and at the same time to the complexity of a whole, both actual and virtual. Let me be clearer.

My «putting my foot in it» comes from Brăila, but not as a gift — as a curse. Besides its many gifts, the Danube also carries with it dry branches, which it casts off onto the banks, dry and rotten branches that languish in the wet sands under a rancid sun. You have always had the headlong Olt, which breaks and passes on and has no time, in its passing, for anything but gnawing at the stone that stands in its way…

I want your Olt, just as fiercely as you want my Danube, but not as an exchange — rather passed one through the other, without any kind of dry branches or evil stones.

If you were the Danube, how pure you would be, even so! That I didn't learn in its proper time, and I keep discovering, always with stupefaction — it can be done, sir! You are clear and deep, as if you were both Olt and Danube at once, and I swim in this sea, and even if I sometimes wake on some unwelcoming bank, scratched by sharp shells, I howl and I scream, and I scream and I howl, washing myself with blood from my own wounds, and cursing myself, I throw myself into the sea that is my virtual…

I'll go on dashing my head against this sea forever from now on, because there you'll be, you and only you.

I love you! I love you! I love you!... and a thousand cocks may crow in the night, for I'll never deny you, until the time when, a dead dolphin (but a dolphin!), you, sea, will cast me up on some forsaken shore.

Do I torment you with my dry branches? Then torment me!

They scratch hard and ache fiercely, but the Danube always flows on past them, and even if it touches them by mistake, after it has cast them off, it runs on insatiable, galloping, vibrating, howling with joy, toward the sea. It never stains the sea with its powerlessness, because it comes always pure, always eager to give itself entirely, irreversibly and with no other interest than that of the superb gratuitousness of the gift made out of love. It never exhausts itself, because this Danube has an essential, living water and is just as strong as the sea, which receives it sometimes shyly, sometimes tumultuously, but never unsure of its Danube."

The two of us were alike physically. People often asked us if we were brother and sister.

"You know, I've got so used to your face that I get annoyed when I see this squashed-tin mug of mine in the mirror. In my mind I have your face. I confuse myself with you sometimes, that strongly," he'd tell me.

And the same happened to me. If I didn't see him for a longer stretch of time, I had the impression that my physical, material existence grew hazy. That I was dissolving into the air, vanishing like a wisp of vapour scattered by the faintest little breeze or draught from a window carelessly left open. It was vital for me to clasp his waist and nestle my head beneath his chin; it was vital to wake from sleep at night and look for him, to feel him looking for me. And I did it on purpose, several times over, so that the calm from before the making of the world would flood me, overwhelm me. The calm in which all tensions are masters of themselves because they know their power, and are at the same time mastered by the tactile truth of a dilated "here and now." Perfected. The strength of knowing that more than this is not possible.

He went back to his dialogues with Erika about Spinoza's Ethics. He'd begun them nearly six years before. He'd redo whole passages, sometimes impatiently, sometimes with a joy so radiant that all my jealousies — justified ones, by the way — would pass. Because it's a sure thing. Erika was the true love of Felix. Erika, the typewriter, for whom he'd made little wooden splints to protect her letters, to hold them together. He had recreated her letter by letter, spring by spring, lever by lever.

Felix would re-establish, with astonishing ease, a kind of common root, a true second game that gave me no right of reply.

"My love,

Today I thought a lot about what you've given me, and what you've given me is immense. First of all, you gave me the question. From the static Felix of long ago, the static one — and perhaps not without poetry and exuberance — the Felix of long ago — a mobile, dynamic structure took shape, one that has perhaps lost some of its exuberance but gained in depth.

Sometimes, when I'm left alone, or go off alone to other realms, it's enough to pronounce your name and my connection to the living is very quickly made — but not with a — living — that's uninteresting, placid and amorphous, rather with one that truly grows in inner movement.

Sometimes life seems to me a tiny insect strolling unawares over my hand or my leg. Then I'd give it up with a puff of breath, or by crushing that insect with a conscious movement of renouncing all aspirations, and if it weren't for writing and you, or you and writing — the order is random, their importance being equal — I'd give up this insect that leaves behind it a trail, just a small trail of something foul-smelling, probably…

At other times I think of Alin and my heart shrinks to the size of a flea with fright. Why? Perhaps because he'll discover himself sooner than we discovered ourselves, you or I, alone or one with the other's help, and it's certain he'll discover that we'll help him, even without meaning to. I hope he'll be happy… Alin will be — he's a blend of ligia-felix with an absolutely personal structure that resembles neither of us. He has in his blood the Danube too, and the forest, and the hill, but also his own personal Parâng, and he's a cat on top of it. I don't much care whether he'll love us or not, that'll be his own personal problem, but I care very much that he should be, from to be. And I think he WILL BE… I LOVE him and I miss him so much that I'd fry him potatoes all my life without budging from the stove. It's wonderful that he exists and that we're his…"

When something is unique, it's unique and that's about it. What you feel, what you believe, what you do at a given moment, can't be repeated. You either seize the moment of grace in which you can touch the sky, or you let it become ground glass that gets up your nose, lodges in your throat, blinds you...

"What season are WE in, my love?

By age it would seem we're in high summer… but you're so rich, your fruits are so ripe and so full of fragrant saps, that I think you're a gentle autumn, the autumn of the pomegranate harvest, in which I love to sink my arms up to the shoulders and pull them out full, like a well bucket brought back to the surface, with cold, clear, fresh water. I bite again, with mad appetite, into a juicy fruit that waits to fall into my arms, impatient for me to caress it and fill myself with its perfume, certain that I'll never have my fill of it…

What season are we in, my love?

By age it would seem it's summer with its overwhelming heat and its quick, warm rains, with butterflies unleashed by too much pressure, but your flowers are so fresh, your petals so fragile and your colours so delicate, that I'm sure you're only early spring, with the smell of earth freshly turned by the tempered iron I fling with the thirst and appetite of a peasant fired with love for his hearth… SURELY you're spring, because the seagulls take far too much joy in the sun stretched shyly over waters that have escaped the ice, waters in which you never drown, because you float, showing your whole self to the gentle sky in which you forever seek great, shining stars to give me, along with your longings for blue immensities…

What season are we in, my love?

Summer? Yes, by age… but then where does it come from, the immaculate clarity of your wisdom, when you snow a crystalline snow of thoughts upon me, and when, cold as a sword, you cut me into pieces of ice in order to melt me down in retorts whose forms are always unknown to me?

You're Winter, of course, because only in winter can I slide down your slopes with such speed, streaming downhill among old firs that want to stop me from falling, firs you set in my path and that scratch me badly… with their bold lines, stretched toward a sky that I sometimes darken with… my unconscious unconsciousness?

What season are we in, WE,

MY LOVE?

il o

o y u! i love you, i love you! I

v e L

e v O

y o V

o l E

u i Y

! O

U!

It was beautiful, what I'd just read, but I got angry. I couldn't see the point of those "calligrams" at the end. Why did I get angry? Because I could feel that playful pulse and I was growing suspicious, mistrustful. I wasn't in the mood for games.

Then, beside Erika, I saw Apollinaire's book, a deluxe edition that opened with the work by Le Douanier Rousseau — Apollinaire and His Muse. It was a gift from Stavros, an old friend of Felix's. Stavros had just bought the book from a second-hand bookshop.

"It would never have crossed my mind that I'd be able to give up this book so easily, after the tremendous joy of having found it. But it's a special day… so, take it, and may it bring you luck," that's what Stavros said, and he held out the book.

We were just then completing one year since our wedding, when Felix met Stavros by chance.

"My love,

…when I lie down beside your dreams and the moon cuts a new crescent in the window, fragrant are your caresses, my love of yesterday, of today and of always…

… when the strings softly answer one another, melting into the «calm» of your voice the weeping veiled by the ripple of a loving thought, the fern bends its green branches toward you and rustles in its leaves a sap that longs to pour toward you its gentle light…

… when, in the quiet of the evening, with long fingers, you catch harmonies out of the air and wrap me in them as in holy water, I bend toward you and my shattered citadel builds itself up taller in my soul…

your felix"

I'd managed to become the victim of my own blackmail directed against myself. The one through which I'd done almost anything to make him settle himself brick upon brick, layer of self-confidence upon a layer with a broader foundation, capable of bearing any scale of the construction that was to be raised above. And so it wouldn't lean, wouldn't budge, no matter how many raging storms came to test its resistance. But I, I was not at all healed. I'd decided I wanted Felix, that he was mine, but the verses I was writing were black. And that didn't escape him. "You're repeating yourself," he told me. I still don't know why he couldn't understand that wounds, even if they heal on the surface, can't be annulled down there, in their depths.

"Diversity is nothing but a tumbling-down of essences. Everything, even sex, presupposes penetration into the depths. True sadness is wandering in illusion. The senses deceive; reason alone is the road to light, truth, eternity. To be able to live with the consciousness of the naturalness of death means not cultivating vanity in yourself or in others. My pagan sickness isn't vanity, but the need for the absolute. The misfortune of this absolute of mine is that, in human, reductive and masculine terms, it becomes "Bovary-ish." It's only a matter of a historical chance that men keep in reserve, as bargaining currency.

In fact, I'd like to believe that you love me. That your «being-ness» doesn't slide along concreted roads that demand one price or another to be travelled. That you might be different from all the others.

Wonderful is the return to the myth from before the temptation. Lilith refused to be used. It's easy for us to imagine an infinity of possible openings, since, in fact, the innovation called temptation and laid out of cowardice on Eve's shoulders was man's first hypocrisy.

It's simple. I have no efforts to make. The whole thing is to exclude the perishable and pass on to essences.

With this, on the practical plane, you lose nothing."

What's certain is that, from then on, I didn't write verse for a long, long while.

"LIGIOARA! I BEG YOU MOST EARNESTLY NOT TO FORGET! I LOVE YOU! DON'T FORGET THAT! PLEASE! PLEASE! WHEN I THINK YOU'RE FORGETTING, DESPAIR TAKES HOLD OF ME.

felix."

I should have noticed that he wrote his name without a capital in front. But Lilith was still very angry. This time I saw. I had to kill the warrior in me. Felix's cry was true. Written on a sheet torn from a student's squared A4 notebook, it had been left for me on the little table in our dining room, there beneath the sunflowers where I'd written, in the solitude of an October night, that I wanted this man. It was a cold shower. A bracing one. When you love, you give yourself; you don't lay claim.

"Dear Ligioara,

How long since I last wrote you a letter of love? A long time, no? You flow through my veins every second, so beautiful and gentle you are, and you're in every second of mine that you fill with joy, wringing out and driving the evil sicknesses from my soul, without this… exorcism even hurting me. Am I growing old or growing young? I think I'm growing young, because the all-too-empty circle keeps filling with solar reflexes and I keep treading on undulating lights, floating myself through the clear waters of your love. I think I've begun to smell of light…

And you, how are you? Where are you with yourself? I try to gather you into a bunch of wildflowers to run with across my plains by the Danube, but I'm so afraid of scattering you by mistake that I stand frozen, a boulder before the Parâng, here, and hold tight, tight to my bouquet of l i g i a s, so that no dandelion might fly off heedlessly into the wind… It happened to me once, long, long ago… perhaps in another life, an event like that, so I won't risk it again.

I love you! I love you! Felix."

Our days had brightened again. They flowed slowly, they were deep. I'd come home with my heart in my throat. I feared my dream, Felix, might have been blown apart for who knows what reasons.

"The neighbour downstairs got upset again that I flooded the fern on the balcony. «Damn your bloody weed!»" Felix would bring me up to date with the news.

The neighbour downstairs had no way of knowing that the Fern was a distinguished member of our family. That I played guitar to her every evening, and she thanked me with a light, delicate rustle. Nor that she discreetly watched over Felix's daytime dialogue with Erika. All the phantoms that had laboured to drive off our knack for finding each other again, there in a little town at the end of the world, had vanished.

"You know I almost got into trouble today?! The momârlani came swarming down off their hills again. I was on the bus and I looked with admiration at a girl dressed in their traditional costume, black and white. She was beautiful — I couldn't keep the admiration out of my eyes. «You got a problem?» asked a stocky fellow, and he put his hand on the girl's shoulder. «No,» I hurried to answer. «Your folk costume is so beautiful you can't help admiring it. Is there a fair on somewhere?» I tried to dispel the fellow's suspicions. «Aye, at Câmpu lu' Neag,» he answered, not looking the least appeased. «Well then, enjoy the do,» I said, and got off the bus."

"Yes, you could have got into trouble. He probably believed you, or just pretended to. They pull a knife very easily when you tread on their toes. And when they come pouring down into town, you'd do well to keep out of their way."

We delighted in each other with a fresh, new curiosity. He wrote me poems paraphrasing the Song of Songs.

"My dear,

IT'S GOOD! I love you and I feel good! Your eyes are warm and gentle, of a beauty from which… B o v a r y - i s m… has vanished, or hasn't vanished, because it never existed. Two little creases, suspended like a tree trunk on a forehead high as a clear summer sky, blued with serene thoughts. Your mouth, tasting of sweet pomegranates, arches your delicate, quivering lips, like a doe wounded by life. Your neck, a violin in extension on fragile shoulders.

wicked felix"

I can't go on. Everything is becoming hard to bear. My letters got lost. Only the few transcribed here remain. In any case, I don't remember writing as many as he did. Or perhaps Felix tore them up, or threw them away. He did well. I don't think I could have read them across the years without hating myself.

"Dear Ligia, Felix loves you very much, very much, very much… Felix is the happiest man on this ungrateful earth when you, Ligia, love him, love him, love him…

Felix wants you, wants you, wants you with all his wanting… Felix is the happiest man in this flat universe when you want him, want him as only you can want…

For the untrodden thought of love

may the stilled stones be a gentle barrier,

crowned with grass of sun;

may your brow be of a gentle god,

the frail flutterings and the bellowing of the world

bathed for you in the knowing of yourself,

the knowing of the music of grass and evening

with dawns asleep among the lashes

I love you

31 December 1985"

Looking back, toward that terrible year of my life, I understood what couldn't be clear to me then. That a man gives himself only when the woman's giving is complete. When she becomes conscious of her triple aspect. Of Lilith, Eve and Theotokos. When she melts and balances the three aspects in the fluid called LOVE.

Lilith is the strong one, the destructive one. Everyone is frightened of her, men and women alike. She is the desired one, the sought-after one, the hated one when she refuses herself, the one driven from the citadel with stones. Some say she is of divine essence, a goddess even, and that she received the mission of raising Adam from the darkness of his ape's mind.

She tried, she lost her temper, and she left.

God wanted to prevail on her to carry her mission through to the end, but Lilith refused. She went over to the side of the rebels, of the fallen angels. She became a demon.

God was obliged to make Eve from Adam's rib, the holy texts inform us.

But for Eve he felt pity, and Lilith came back. First she tried with "the fruit of knowledge," but it didn't work. Eve was far too submissive. Eve took the apple and gave it to Adam as well, but she wasn't able to understand why she'd done it. She was, or had become, only a clay that Adam could do with whatever crossed his mind. Submissive, uncomplaining, the well-behaved one, bearer of manipulable children, hidden under veils, beaten, raped, sold at will and, above all, the sinner, the supreme sinner, the guilty one!

Lilith was forced to admit, before the Ancient of Days, that she had failed her mission out of vanity, that she had killed Adam's becoming in a moment of physical discomfort she could have got past with a crumb of wisdom.

She made her mea culpa and begged the Ancient of Days to give Eve a chance.

"You know, the count in genetics goes three by three. I knew it would be so," said the Ancient of Days, and he sent the Archangel to solve the problem — that is, to prepare Theotokos for her mission.

And so the feminine triad was accomplished.

In the everyday cut of things, Lilith gnashes her teeth that she squandered her supremacy and would like it back, Eve is submissive but full of bitterness and frustration, and Theotokos presides loftily over the churches of the Son. Their great-granddaughters, granddaughters or, as the case may be, daughters are forced to manage this complicated triad.

On the other side, Adam's destiny is tragic. With the establishing of the Holy Trinity some two thousand years ago, he was more or less left out in the cold, on a hostile planet, surrounded by his evil sons, murderers and primitives. His bond with the Good Son is severed. The Good Son is of divine origin; he lifted the sin of the world and brought to light the new Eve, the Mother. Adam's fury is preserved entire. He can't forget that he was taken out of the equation, and he won't accept conciliation. He remains violent, possessive, frustrated, and points all the time at the sinner. At Lilith, at Eve. At the Mother, no. At one point he seemed to have seen his own reality. When he didn't have the courage to raise the stone to strike the adulteress. Through his descendants, he claimed the priesthood as an exclusive right, and the Sacrifice he officiates is, always, the Son. And he searches ceaselessly for Lilith, the one who could tell him that it was all a farce, an untrue story, full of intrigues and useless wars, of denial and hatred, of frustration, of selfishness and self-annihilation.

The story is true. It is past and present. The saraband of the past can't be annulled. That of the present, though, can. A single shared embrace can re-establish the divine order, Eden, and restore to Adam the place that is his due.

But "She," the sought-after one, is not Lilith, not Eve, not Theotokos, but all three of these aspects of the feminine triad, dissolved in the river called LOVE — from whose waters the perfected man returns, strong, sure of himself, clear, eager to give himself and to carry the world on his shoulders.