IMPASSE

One night Felix left. He had sat for minutes on end in the armchair facing me, scratching away at a piece of paper. It had been a strange evening. For some time now, a distance had been creeping in between us. Yes, we seemed sunk in a cave that kept cracking apart, and neither of us was doing anything about it. Actually, we were. We were digging in against each other. Silent. Stubborn.

I wanted out of the cave. To end it that evening. I was at "Dedal", and Felix still hadn't shown up, though midnight was getting close. I said to Alin:

"Let's go get Felix."

Alin and I drove in silence as far as the Vila Teilor. I knew he was there with Schilodica. Obviously it's a nickname, but the real person doesn't matter much, and anyway I'll be changing a lot of the real names in this story. The women in Felix's life had never concerned me. I took them out of the ring, and the ring was Felix's soul. I considered them collateral casualties. That's all. The blame, if I were to think of any, had no business in their biographies. It belonged entirely to me. I had taken Felix upon myself; they hadn't made me do it.

Alin called him out. He came out. He was thrown. He said to me:

"You can come in."

"There's nothing for me in there. Take me home!" I answered.

We got in the car and didn't say a word the whole way. We reached home, climbed the stairs, and sat down at the low little table, facing each other. It was our old little table from other times. He kept on the jacket he was wearing. It was October.

"What's going on, Felix?" I managed to ask, after long minutes. He didn't answer, busy laboring away at the little scrap of paper in front of him. Then he stood up and said, simply: "I'm leaving."

He left the paper on the table and walked out the door. I didn't stop him. I knew that, then, it wasn't possible. How could it be otherwise, given this:

There is such a thing as the ugly time. Past, future, present dissolve. Literally and figuratively. I was cancelled. I knew why. I had laid claim to myself; my claim had passed into him, and he — who in any case, separately from me, laid claim to a different rule of his nature — annexed mine too, organically. And the cut was made. Brutal. A black night. For me there was no longer any chance of survival. Why do suicides arise out of love? Simple. Once you have entered entirely into another person's existence, you die of your own accord when he withdraws. You have neither lungs nor air to breathe.

A girl asked for help on the Maat guild chat.

"I'll come," I told her.

"Oh! Level 70!" she said.

"I'm a Ronin, don't stand on ceremony," I told her.

"Yeah, I noticed you're not like the other players!" she said, and I couldn't tell whether that was a good thing or a bad one.

We went to Tarren Mill, where the girl had a harder quest to do. The memories I had of this place! I'll never forget what a tormented warrior I once was, in these parts! The guys from the Alliance, higher level than you, would kill you systematically, and you had to stay put, because you had so many quests to finish. It was terribly frustrating. Sometimes the enemies simply wouldn't let you back into the game at all. The moment you respawned, you'd be hacked down again, so that the only solution was to cut your losses and quit the game, or go somewhere else.

I helped the girl finish her quest and offered to help her anytime she needed. She turned me down politely: "Your level's too high," she said. It made me sad. She was right. I felt strange. Why had I told the girl I was a ronin? It wasn't necessary at all, and she hadn't asked me to explain anything. Of course, I could just as easily have told her I was a kind of grown-up Pinocchio, and word about me would have spread all over Azeroth! At least that would have been funny.

I went down to the seashore to look out at the horizon. I do this every time I come here, to the memorial monument of Anthony Ray Stark. There are many stories about him. Apparently he was a real person, a friend of one of the creators of the game WoW. He isn't, in fact, the only real person who after death was buried virtually, somewhere in Azeroth. They say he died while scuba diving, which explains, in a way, the placing of his funerary monument on the seashore, in such a beautiful spot, beneath tall firs, above a cliff cut sheer, at whose foot sirens drift back and forth.

Why do I keep coming back here, I wonder, and I smile to myself indulgently. Beside me, Rousch, a dwarf, kneels piously in the grass, stays like that a while, gets up to leave, then the next moment changes his mind and kneels again. "That's how it is," I mused. "There are places you can't tear yourself away from." I read on a forum that Rousch was the dwarf Anthony used to play. He was turned into an npc and kept in the game.

There was fog and an irritating drizzle. Out on the horizon, not too far from shore, a few little islands rose out of the water — ones I hadn't explored. You could barely make them out. I jumped into the water and swam out to them. I climbed the highest one. I turned my gaze all around. The mouth of the bay was foggy, like the shore I had come from.

It was past two in the morning, I was very tired, I drifted off without realizing it and had a dense, strange dream.

I see the shore clearly, Anthony's grave, and beside it, Anthony, next to a lit fire.

"Ah! You didn't die! It was all staged!"

Anthony smiles; his long hair, with its metallic glints, leaves his right shoulder bare. I sit beside him. My hand aches painfully to stroke his forehead, his shoulder. The gesture is cut off at its root. "You're not allowed!" something inside me screams.

I lost my balance and nearly fell off the chair. I'd fallen into a deep sleep. I looked at the monitor. I was in the middle of the sea, looking at the shore, which had cleared. I should have been able to see Anthony's monument, there beneath the firs. It was that warm, sunset light they recommend when you want to take good photographs. "They nailed it!" I said out loud, thinking of the people who had created, in the game, an atmosphere you felt you could almost touch.

You become pain and turn into a scream.

A bellow, in fact, an agonized rattle. Your blood settles in the capillary vessels. You watch it doing so and you can't stop it. You suddenly grasp the distinction between a good heart and a bad heart. Nothing to do with generosity, but with something else that always slipped through your fingers. You process millions of pieces of information per second, and your vanity laughs sardonically at you. Your brain looks at you like a fool while you visibly die of a bad heart.

All I had done, for years on end, was fight to survive inside his existence. It was my choice. In love there is no negotiating, no payments demanded. Love is not contractual. I understood that he had cancelled everything. That, to begin with. Then I realized, with horror, that I was the one who had done it. I had cancelled myself. To what end?! I loved him and I was dying. Was this my whole meaning?!

After a day I remember almost nothing of — though I certainly made the trip to Vâlcea and back, probably trying not to keel over — I came home and fell into a heavy sleep. I hadn't slept at all the whole night before. When I woke, late, toward midnight, I found this on the table:

"Ligioara,

I'm terribly sorry for what I've done to you. I'm not asking you to understand, because I know you do understand — but what good is it! I've fallen ill; all my life I've been poisoned by my own illusions, I know that. But if I don't consume them, I suffocate.

If I want to, I can fabricate a million grievances against Călimănești, but they stay just 'fabrications'...

But the cruel truth is something else, and not some 'slip of a girl,' as I think you're convinced...

Perhaps there is in me a daimon of motion, unlike the one in you. If the little particles of me don't touch a larger surface, a greater physical (and social) territory, I begin to suffocate.

1. I will finish the film.

2. I hope to scrape together enough money to help you all and to keep Alin in university.

I need absolutely nothing. I'll put the company entirely in your name, whenever you want, one of these days.

I know you've escaped into sleep now and I don't want to wake you. Words, sometimes, are only screens. I would shut myself into a terrible silence, again. I would have nothing to tell you, and no way to tell you anything, because YOU ARE ALWAYS RIGHT, and there is no irony in my stressing that.

I have a need for clarity, which, in fact, with me translates into turmoil. I cannot bear petrification.

—Don't curse me! God has cursed me enough by making me the way He made me. As for love: I loved you, I love you, and I will always love you. It's just that I understand it, perhaps, a little differently: it isn't petty, small sacrifices that sustain love, nor minor interests, nor the past, nor generosity toward the needs of third parties. We all immodestly declare that we are different from everyone else. We all believe this little lie, myself included. On top of that, though, I was cursed by God with a destructive restlessness I cannot cure myself of, a kind of nonconformism, a kind of stubborn refusal, a kind of salad of freedom of which I like to cynically serve myself a portion now and then.

Perhaps this is the reason I always lose. And yet out of this, out of these histrionics, something good is perhaps born that I can give out of myself, a book, a play...

Perhaps you'll manage not to hate me so much.

With sadness, FAR"

The warrior Ligia was, in a way, the therapy I gave myself.

The last three years in which Felix stayed with me were so dense, and the Last Departure so hard, that only in an entirely new land — that is, in a different kind of reality — could I recover. With her, I picked up the thread of the story again from the beginning. Among concrete, so-called "real" people, it was impossible for me. I didn't have the necessary skills. I hadn't lived in reality, but in a world I'd been continually fabricating for myself. So had Felix.

All three of his plays obstinately ground away at the same idea. Illusion as reality and reality as illusion. Only when you understand this do you become a person with your feet on the ground. This is where the "smile" emoticon belongs. I think it ought to be used in literary texts too. It's already a universal ideogram anyway. It's friendly, neutral, bitter, soothing...

One day my brother Doru said to me: "Oh, come off it! You have no idea how loved you were, and still are!" In my mind it rang like a great bell, and the whole horizon swayed all at once with it. Oh, these bells!

As for Doru, by way of reward, I made myself a druid in the game and gave it his name.

"To

THE BELOVED OF MY SOUL

I may not be an intelligent woman, I may be groping along all alone across a plain with no horizon, I may... and surely this is so... not understand which 'little game' would suit best, I may...

The wall of feelings and arguments you raised against me, or that I believe you raised, the wall you crashed into when you came toward me, or that you believed you crashed into — these walls, regardless of whether they were real or not, and in my case it was certainly only a matter of despair and disorientation, managed to sift down a fog dense and stifling enough to give the other the sensation of distance, and, implicitly, the fury that such a thing could be possible.

What is true in my case. I did indeed feel that, in coming 'home,' I had come to the place where I am about to die, and it didn't seem like a joke to me. A metaphysical anguish had taken hold of me, I told myself, but it was treacherous enough, and I kept waiting for you to help me out of it. My 'social' immunity was precarious. It had been drained out of me by the petty, stagnant provincial intellectual world, which would not allow itself to be pulled out of its mold — visibly bothered by my aura of a 'star without a name' dropped in 'from the ministry.' Then there was also that incomprehensible hostility of my mother's, a kind of spiteful urge to set herself against me, to subordinate me by force, belatedly, pointlessly. I had known it well ever since my adolescence. I ignored it, and I shouldn't have. Without noticing, I turned into her sure victim, with her attacking me through you.

The obsession that I had to put in order a space of our own, physical, material — that is, to rebuild the 'castle' (it was the third time!) — became tormenting. I failed. I fought with unpainted walls, with monsters from the lean-to, from the cellar, from the soul of Doru, disinherited by my coming home... and so on. I knew it was vital. I knew you had to have, in the morning, the place of your meditations, and to love it, to feel it was yours. To make it the place where I fall asleep and wake in your arms — speaking of the unique way the 'Brownian' motion in my cells is stilled. I failed; the 'circumstantial factors' crushed me, and you were no longer with me. A dull pain went with me on the drives to Vâlcea, every single morning. I felt you estranged, hostile, even violent. But I couldn't believe you had gone. In fact it hadn't even crossed my mind that this was possible. You have at your disposal an infallible means of cover that, in a way, becomes your truth. I always came back with an avid need for you, I was glad when your yellow car was in the parking lot at 'Dedal,' but... almost without fail, you'd put me in it and deposit me 'at home.'

The feeling that you were shutting me out was oppressive. Toward the end of summer, when I toiled, painting all alone and getting nowhere, while you filmed your slip of a girl all through the garden of my childhood, a fierce desire to die, just instantly, weighed on me.

Your film, 'Roberta,' was another story. You wouldn't let me come near, but the camera gave you away. The repeated shots, in which your character kept receiving, in my garden up on the hill, a bouquet of daisies and wanted to 'dissolve into leaves and horses,' struck me as a bit too much. I didn't let you use my verses as well. The garden of my childhood and the daisies had been enough. The pose of a Deus otiosus, a kind of Gaia along whose paths you tread because you've nowhere else to go, but no longer see her, terrified me, for all its venerability.

Your flight into the night, the text tacked together on a corner of the table, the lie you had sunk into — because now I know it in its whole unfolding — all of it seemed tightly stacked one on top of another, so as to leave me with nothing but the possibility of hating you.

In vain. I cannot hate you. True love leaves no room for hatred, because it is love, and that's all. I cannot, and have no wish to, cancel myself out. I'm not trying to turn you from your road, but the being inside me that IS YOU compels me to scream with all my strength: Do not go wrong, beloved of my soul, do not lose your way, for the last straying is the most terrible of all! We two cannot end in a pathetic fairground vaudeville. It is not our truth. Together we became a single solitude, an undifferentiated fusion of yin and yang, and it took us some time to do that. We no longer have the time or the room to become two separate little commas again, searching for... WHAT?

I feel inside me a woman tormented by her material helplessness. I can no longer tell her that love is eternal, that she longs for your caress, that it never left her, that her nights sunk in your love are 'THE PAST.' I feel there's nothing more I can do with her. That she has become a painful burden to whom you have given every freedom 'to convince herself' how devoid of content is 'the intimacy of the men she has not known.' (Sic!)

Alin is very blunt, and his truth is cruel, annihilating. He says the two of us always lived on two levels. One superior, spiritual, and one banal, ordinary. That I 'lost on points' in the second case, because you always had absolute certainty over me. So you grew bored, you felt yourself suffocating, you went looking for something else. Because the iron law of this game is non-compromise, intolerance, dominating the other through insecurity. Then, he is convinced that: victorious or not, where your film is concerned, you will come back; that I will understand that your 'sexual deviations' are irrelevant; that our parting is not possible, because I am not a woman you'll find on every street corner; that you are a man of worth, fallen into a cone of confusion (as a man) and short-circuited by an ideal (the film), for which you are capable of sacrificing anything, by the gambler's laws, because you, structurally, are a gambler. He is disappointed that you didn't talk things over with him, and that you didn't count on the fact that he could have understood you."

I was writing to Felix and finding that I couldn't reach the end. I no longer slept except when my brain, in sheer desperation, released all the protective inhibitions it had. When I woke, I howled mutely at the edge of the horizon. Hours and hours and hours...

"A new day. Just how long do you intend to stay silent? What terrors haunt your brain, that you try so fiercely to force, in your case, forgetting, and in mine... I don't know. I have the fairly clear impression that you want me to give up. I'd ask you: give up WHAT? My state of shining absurdity? You've left, but you haven't left. You love me, but you don't love me.

Are you set against me? WHY? Your mind is probably replaying the fury with which you set out to abolish me, dropping me into the palms of little tarts, letting me be ridiculous with my airs of a beloved woman, sure of herself, frozen in a love story just fit to be packed off to the fairground? Are you finding faults in me? Are you marrying me off to 'engineers' again, so that you can be an unfulfilled, solitary wandering star? Have you had enough of my airs as a clever woman? It's been a long time since we went out together in 'select circles,' and even when it did happen, you put me in the corner. Now I'm 'playing the clever one,' am I no longer one? Are you no longer proud of me, the way you once were? Am I that hindrance hung from your legs that tried to root you in place at Călimănești, when what you needed was new 'physical and social' territories, for 'certain' parts of yourself?

You brought me to Călimănești, not I you — that you mustn't forget.

Do you lump me together with 'Bombonica'? You're wrong! You resemble her far more. You always put yourself in the foreground. Then there's also the excessive way the two of you are conditioned by the outside world. You simply crushed me between your impulsivenesses, and I'm glad that at least into a 'cook' you didn't manage to turn me.

Do you think with horror that we no longer have a house, that the little bar on the bank of the Olt, patched together from scraps of planks, is your grand foundation? That you run around among ridiculous people to convince them you're the best?

Do you hide behind concerns of a spiritual order, lull your conscience to sleep with stories of artistic achievements, and wait for applause with the curtain still up? Do you deny your emotional life, like any man ruled by pride, instead of acknowledging it and patting yourself on the head for the 'charming foolishness of your age'?

Are you blinded by the fury to make money? What is it you want to buy with money?

Am I always right? You're funny, my dear. When did my rightness ever defeat your rightness? How many times did our road take a course decided by me?

Reread 'Domino' and reflect on yourself. Your spiritual biography really is in that book. It's your truth, purified of the little monsters that kept estranging you, from time to time, from your beautiful soul — beautiful, yet naive enough to amplify, like any diamond, even one poor, ordinary little light.

It's simpler to own your deeds, to exorcise the unproductive, malevolent 'daimon' that dictated them to you, to put in order the precious values you have gathered with much, very much toil. To stop setting yourself uselessly at odds with the wide world, when you already have a solid podium from whose height you can take possession of it. Without passion, without the bombast of hollow glory, but as a right that is owed you, as a natural given. To respect yourself, to understand yourself, to forgive yourself.

FAILURE? - is the most touching story with which you can feed a cheap neighborhood melodrama. Your fury, intolerance, and impatience sometimes made you lose 'certain positions.' They were, in most cases, positions your innermost self had already given up. But, for God's sake, draw a line and make a true reckoning. Recognition from 'the others' is most of the time (always!) inversely proportional to the values you put on the line. People don't love 'idols.' They isolate them. You're right. The only god who always wins is money. But it's a false god and its victory is precarious. Money gives you an illusory power and a terrible estrangement. It enslaves you, it doesn't free you. It does not remove failure and does not produce real fulfillment. To go down this path, to sacrifice EVERYTHING for it, in order to win the admiration of individuals inferior to you from the start, is pathetic. That, perhaps, is what failure really means.

It's very hard for me to keep launching messages into the void. It's hard to entrust to paper the trembling in my soul and my flesh. It's hard to address you, for fear you'll insult me again and again, through that stubborn wall built against me — far too late now for me to turn my back on you and say: 'Piss off, boy.'

I'm not looking for solutions for myself and I'm not waiting for any particular answer from you. I only want not to go wrong. Paradoxically, I feel this is not the time for decisions, although it would do me so much good, this time, if it were. I won't hide from you that I can barely keep my fury and pride in check. They'll stay active a long while, until it becomes possible — or not — for you to turn into a benign nostalgia. I'll be left reeling when I run into you by chance on the street, but I can make the decision never to trouble you again.

For me, YOU are a valid truth.

How are you?"

My letter went on. It was long and tangled.

Obviously I didn't send all of it. Alin censored me. Wisely. Discreetly. I was dead. I had swum across the sea, and just as I stepped onto the shore, a dinosaur I could no longer dodge caught me in its foul jaws. It shook its head twice, and that was that.

No. Deaths are not all alike. Only some are final. The others are just departures. You close your eyes, you start to link the images together and to see. The whole world comes back, takes shape. You start to relive it. It's comical how banal and simple it all is. A bug in World of Warcraft, on a pirated server — Tiberiu's — set me straight. He laughed when I told him I'd swum across the sea, from Teldrassil to the dark woods of Auberdine. There was no point explaining to him. I let him laugh his fill.

What could I have told him? That there, close to the shore, I really had died — only that had happened to me in real life, some few years back. That the world had emptied as after a cataclysm that kills every living thing. That I had been taken out of the game along with my entire story. That I had become a strigoi — because that's what I had become — and the Valkyrie with wings of light wouldn't answer me. She had broken down. Yes, that would be the essence of it. The rest is just words.

There, in the game, I turned back toward Teldrassil. Only there could I find the Valkyrie with wings of light. In the Eden of the Night Elves. Felix lingered in my mind. A strange state made me believe he was waiting for me on that terrace where I'd rest in the evenings, beside the elf with green hair. Only that way could I fall asleep. I dreamed of Felix. I dreamed he was leaving me at the threshold of night.

Felix's sister gave me a phone number. I called it. It was a mistake I made. His beautiful voice was no longer addressed to me.

Yes, I was dead. That could no longer be changed. But I couldn't let him die too. I would have died twice over, with no sense to it at all. There was love in my impulse, not vanity.

"My love,

How am I? I sit on the bank of the Olt, suspended on the toy you abandoned three weeks ago. It's a day of coppery trees, and therefore... 'I lie down over the forest set aflame again by autumn, while you roam through cities...' No, 'the horses are not a shadow of your former self...' it's only a curb-bit in which a rebellious stallion thrashes with its mind, its soul, and its body...

My verses from a decade ago knew better than I did what was to come.

Solitude, the ancient solitude, sifts down among the yellow leaves stubbornly clinging to branches that refuse them.

My mind, my soul, and my body, bound irreversibly to your running, your headlong race toward SOMEWHERE, dissolve, one by one, the ghosts of the summers in which you tried to reduce me to nothingness.

Did you succeed? ... I DON'T KNOW...

But I do know that you rose up, a natural statue, in the minds of those who glimpsed even a fragment of you. And they have an unsuspected cruelty when it comes to me.

It will seem strange to you (or... maybe not!), but an incredible number of people love you and approve of you. Alin, for instance. He waits with bated breath for any sign, any... anything..., just to know what you're doing. Raised in your shadow, he resembles you, except that his ambition, his vanity, his violence drive him toward bitterness. Without realizing it, I plunged this beautiful child into the whirl of the storm that has haunted me, it seems, since the beginning of the world. You. I can no longer change anything. Nor can you. It's impossible for me to tell you everything that's happening with him. Not because I want to spare your sensitivity — I don't feel obliged to. He loves you deeply, he has the feeling you betrayed him, but he has already made his pact with 'your salad of freedom.'

Me?... what am I doing?

In the morning I wake in an absurd panic. And I love you. And I miss you. An organic, mineral longing.

Am I blackmailing you? — No. It's my truth.

Am I troubling you? — Perhaps. It's your truth.

The game is no longer in my hands. My pain is deep. It's black as an incurable illness. You saw it and it repelled you, it pushed you even further from me. And so... IT WASN'T TRUE! NONE OF IT WAS TRUE!

'You've nothing to lose'... you said... And ever since that evening I feel the need to crack my skull open, take out my brain, lay it on the table, and search among its cells for a point, even one tiny little point, to hold on to."

Two months later, Felix wrote to me.

"My dear,

I've tried to write to you many, many times by now. I couldn't... I wanted to explain something to you, I no longer knew what, I'd start over and give up in the fury that comes from having to be extremely concise in order to 'fit' into a letter you could take in your hand, look at, and understand... I gave up every time, for the simple reason that... I can't fold myself down that far... as far as I remember, I never wrote you anything but love letters... How could I write you any other kind of letter!?

I'm terribly confused. Around me there's a fog... a clear fog, in which I move as if through a viscous mass. Everything seems so pointless to me...

You write to me about Alin.

—For me, Alin EXISTS. How could you think I'd forget that?

But he's grown-up enough, and extremely complex and strong, for me to be unable, with my 'recklessness,' to produce negative mutations in his existence anymore. He can only be the heir of what I do WELL, not badly, for the simple reason that he is not DEPENDENT on either of us. Compared to us, he is IMMORTAL, especially at this age, when he's still the center of the universe and knows it all. He really DOES know it all... So he stands above us, he's strong enough in that position, and I, personally, have no reason to worry about his fate. Nor do you. It would be humiliating for him to be otherwise.

So, the problem — IS NOT Alin.

I finally received your last letter too; it's Saturday, just after St. Nicholas's Day. Last night I put a pack of cigarettes in my own shoes, and when I got up this morning... I was so happy when I found it... You can't even imagine!

In everything you wrote me, YOU ARE RIGHT. In just one place, though, there's something unclear. Călimănești. Where, and who, is to blame for a wall raised between us? I no longer know...

I only know that I should NOT have been LEFT by you to lose myself there in that little space. Paradoxically, in a big space like Bucharest, I had no way of losing you (let it be said in parentheses, and very honestly — from '90 to '94, all over Bucharest, there wasn't a single woman in my existence), because we kept fiercely seeking each other out all the time and had a great many things to do together. At Călimănești, though, a kind of dispersion set in that came on gradually. Gradually... Reading your last letter now, and the reproaches you make me regarding my 'inattention' to your state at Călimănești, I admit you're right. You woke up 'fallen' into a small world, useless from a professional point of view. This uselessness preoccupied you greatly, it suffocated you, perhaps, and I was unreceptive to that state. It's my fault too, but I didn't think this involvement could overwhelm you so much. You remember, at one point I suggested you give it up and that we take care of our little businesses together, so as to be together more. You were indignant. I tried several times to explain that I, too, in my turn, need more ATTENTION.

In fact, in this play called Călimănești, all the characters wanted to play the lead role, and all were unhappy that they couldn't, but...

I'm an egoist. You know that. And the one who came to Călimănești was not a practical, efficient felix, eager to get rich, even if that's how outsiders saw him. In any case, not a Felix lowered to the bare minimum of some few-million ideal to cling to. Nor a Felix eager to measure his strength and his nerves against the army commander, who, as you know, is your mother (also said in parentheses, remember how conciliatory and well-meaning I was in the early days toward her, almost more so than you).

In short, the one who came to Călimănești was a Felix convalescing after a bad, violent illness, one that might be called the Sickness of the Defeated, defeated by other people's pettiness and cowardly violence — or, better put, it wasn't the Sickness of the Defeated that I suffered from, because I, too, was violent in what I wrote, even if I was in the right; and, in fact, in my innermost self I was saved by the thought that, by rights, no one had defeated me in DIRECT confrontation, but vilely, through truths told only by quarters, from which the squalor was extracted and shown to the world, while the beauty was hidden behind dozens of locks. So, I had come to Călimănești. So Battered, so struck by this squalor, that the only thing I needed from the others, who this time were close to me, was just a grain of ATTENTION. In my foolishness I considered myself the lead character, without accepting that you and mom and Doru and the cat all laid claim to that same right. In theory, I wasn't asking for much... You suffered from the same sickness as I did, but by REFLECTION, Ligia... What I didn't understand then, though, was that your own complexity amplifies this REFLECTION, making it perhaps more painful than my own experiences... just as I will never understand how someone can be hurt more, and more deeply, by the idea that someone else has a toothache — for the simple reason that I'm an egoist, and if my tooth aches, nothing soothes me but a concrete painkiller put in my hand.

On the other side — you were exactly like me, probably... You, in your turn, were waiting for the painkiller from me... Hence, probably, the catastrophe...

I reproach you (and you, me) for escaping into your own sphere, no longer feeling where I was, yet permanently certain that you were connected to me with all your antennae. That this was so, there's no doubt — but if you really had your antennae on me, how could I have scattered myself? And here comes in, here is included, the famous — KITCHEN. Because I raised everything to such a level of abstraction that the other could starve to death for want of a bowl of food — too concrete, too humiliating to make, and... too humiliating to make... All of this, repeated endlessly, alongside other things just as unimportant and just as humiliating in their stubbornness to exist and to be permanently necessary, wear you out and enrage you. 'Look for the child in a man,' Nietzsche said. I have remained, alas, a big child who often clutches his head in misery and suffers terribly when he's ignored, and runs off up into the mountains with the car, where he eats a piece of salami and a hunk of bread, because at home he finds an old woman who, like a spiteful coffee grinder, says, always — let your wife cook for you!... 'Home,' where I had hoped home would be, at Călimănești, where I wanted to write and listen to the nightingales, I would instead inevitably find a Ligia worn out by five in the afternoon, who went to bed until nine, when she would meet a Felix already worn out by idiotic Călimănești, by that bar where 'what the hell is so hard about what Felix does there!' 'Home,' at nine in the evening, was a Ligia perfectly available for disputes of every kind... but who belonged terribly much to herself and to her own unhappinesses.

You remember, once I flew into a rage that we no longer even had that half hour in the morning, over coffee, together. The army commander insisted on being present there too. There was no way for you to grasp that I was looking for tenderness elsewhere; you didn't believe such a thing was possible... Of course I was aware of all the falseness of the farces I got mixed up in, but, not being a dogmatist in the moral sense, I didn't hate myself too much for it either... because I wasn't living INSIDE them at all...

All this, again, is only 'fabrications.' The truth is that I am a 'vagabond' who will love you forever; I can't not love you; you are, in fact, my one true REFERENCE POINT, but right now I cannot come back.

To set your mind at ease, apropos of my 'affective-andropausal turmoils,' all I can tell you is that I don't give two pennies for any woman in this world.

Kisses to you all, Felix

I'm away on a journey around the world. My inner world, of course. What conclusion I'll reach I don't yet know, nor when I'll come back to the point from which I left. Tomorrow I'll write to you again, more concretely."

My mother wasn't quite as fearsome as Felix described her. And he did love her. It's only that she knew about the "tendernesses" he went looking for "elsewhere," and could tell me nothing. Of course she suffered, just as Felix's so-called lack of "moral dogmatism" made her suffer. But things really had slipped out of her control, and she could see no way to put them right. Felix could "cheat" on me — that is, he could sleep with all the women he felt like sleeping with — but he couldn't lie to me for long. Not while lying so crudely to himself. And so, the saving subterfuge was leaving. He had to assure me that he loved me, that nothing between us could be changed in essence anymore, that I was an essential "reference point" for him, but that... that's just how it is!

It's unnatural to believe we are love's sole target. Love is a drive charged with mystery, a kind of supreme ordering principle whose essence we do well to leave unfathomed. And in any case we cannot fathom it except by cheapening it.

A week before Christmas, Felix had tried to come back home. He phoned me. I didn't ask him in. I went down to the street myself and got into his yellow car. For a moment I thought how I had waited for it, tense, night after night, to come back beneath my window — and it did so more and more reluctantly, more haltingly.

We sat facing each other in a dim, deserted bar. I looked at the two of us from the outside. How pitiful we looked! He had lost his glow, his hair was too long, the expression on his face recalled a stiff, brittle parchment; he seemed drained, like a thing taken out of service.

All evening I obsessively recited in my head: "how barbarously that woman sang, there in the empty café." No. It wasn't my song. It was the one that had crushed Felix. He had believed himself stronger than he was and had not tied himself to the mast, like Ulysses.

I was casting him out of me, letting him slip from my arms. In fact, I was provoking that slipping, to make it clear that I wouldn't stop him, that the classic recipe of softenings and forgivenesses no longer worked. How sad it was! When we got back, I climbed the stairs — my house has an upper floor — and he watched me from the gate. I stopped on the threshold and made a brief wave of the hand that was meant to mean "safe journey." Such a state of affairs between us was probably unacceptable. It was not to be allowed. In an instant he was up on the stairs and gathered me into his arms, tight and long.

I didn't stop him, even though, that evening, he had come to stay. I wouldn't have made a single gesture to call him back, to me. Not out of pride, but because all my bonds with him had changed structurally. Every detail had remained unaltered — all their complexity, all my need to breathe the same air as him — except that he was no longer mine, and never had been mine. This illusion had fallen with a deafening crash, because that's what it had been, an illusion, a thought-need-hope that had fed me with the sap of my imagined uniqueness, on which I had built my egoism and my exclusivity. Blind, infatuated, and happy — that's what I had been, and was no longer.

On New Year's Eve, at the other end of the line was Felix's beautiful voice:

"Get ready, I'm coming!"

We had always passed through this night together. It was a sacrilege not to keep the ritual.

It was a reunion full of charm. We were inexhaustible. The three months we'd been apart had seemed like centuries. So much had piled up to be said. We talked, and talked, and talked.

"How I've missed this!"

He said it simply, breathing out in relief, and after a while he added — and it was, somehow, a plea from somewhere above himself:

"Please don't reproach me for anything."

"What?! That you fell in love? Or just thought you had...?"

"That's over, I'm cured! I won't waste a single second of our time again."

I remember the first trip we made to Bucharest, to sell the screenplays he'd written all winter. It was early morning; we were climbing Dealul Negru after leaving Râmnicu Vâlcea. The forest filed past us in a brilliant beginning of March. As he drove, without looking at me, Felix said:

"How much I wanted this!"

We never came unstuck from each other again. Literally. Two years and three months, that was all we were granted, in which we returned to our little boat on Lake Herăstrău and floated in the sky.

For a while, my druid had overwhelmed me beyond measure.

I would wake in the middle of the night and could barely keep myself from turning on the computer to step into his place. I loved his feline agility and his bored-cat yawn. He slipped, imperceptibly, into my morning contemplations too, almost ritual ones. After I open the window wide, I ask Felix out loud:

"How are you, My Good Morning!"

And Felix answers me:

"Up, washed --> sarmale (wrapping them v. hard) cabbage too young, not soured

defrosted fridge, washed – washed 3 windows

washed the yellow blanket

oiled the couch, armchairs – washed kitchen dishes plates wiped furniture, trimmed the stems of white brambles

sewed trouser button boiled ciorbă, skimmed the scum

drank instant coffee, sarmale, 6, – eaten,

took out the rubbish twice, read 2 chapters of theater –bought cigarettes, comb paid took a bath got dirty again

theater visit, learned of a show, Uricani Birău not done good face yesterday show

sat meditated armchair + coffee + cigarettes

thought about Ligia ≈ 13 - 18 seconds answered phone Rozu changed water flowers dining-room table plus the herbs (flowers!) kitchen wrote note Ligia love you

Felix – P.S. Made lye under the bathroom sink"

Then my thought slides over the cobblestones of the road in a warm, elastic laziness, and I imagine the druid hidden beneath the grapevine that grows every which way across the road in a little garden. I review the red roofs of the houses, the curve of the hill, and the sky, while the espresso machine, for its part, meditates a while in silence and then snorts like a man possessed.

The morning coffee was always made by Felix. So, every morning, first it was almost impossible for me to put the coffee pot on the fire, and then I felt terribly hard done by that I had to do it anyway. Alin was the one who found the solution. He gave me an espresso machine as a gift. A very charming one.

"You should know that if you die, I'll die too!"

"You won't die!" he said, and cupped my cheek in his palm.

"If you hadn't come back, I would have died..."

"It's not the same thing."

Two years before this conversation, he had told me:

"I'll curse you if you don't bury yourself in the same grave as me!"

He was very serious when he said that to me.

The Last Letter

"My dear, my Ligioara,

I don't know how surprised you'll be to read these lines at a moment as harsh as this one... when the very meteor shower the mass media announced so insistently turned out to be nothing but... dust in the eyes of a sky bored with the existence of so very many stars. In any case, from what I've observed, their indifference (the stars') proved sovereign over the momentary glitter of those gentlemen meteors announced with such pomp. But that's what always happens when... dust tries to make you believe it can shine brighter than the stars themselves. It's a lesson I just can't, for the life of me, learn by heart once and for all, and that's why I suffer like a fool from itching and scratch myself bloody on my soul of eternally flowing water, in a desert where the only reference point is YOU. That's how it is. Outside it's the first snow; you're climbing the stairs, always climbing stairs... One day you'll climb so high you'll become a little star.

I love you, your felix."

The letter is from the end of October 1998. Beyond the metaphor, the sores on Felix's hands looked alarming. They passed, though. By Christmas he had a first, more severe attack. On the 8th of February, what I had known ever since Vâlcea became a final sentence. The guillotine. Three weeks, said Professor Stoicescu of the "Filaret."

"Good thing the ambulance hasn't gone yet, so you can get back to Vâlcea."

"I can't, Professor. Help me!"

Unexpectedly, the bronchoscopy result was good. That night I slept at Auntie Lucica's, at the home of that wonderful woman I've already told you about here. It was the last night I left Felix alone. But the next day's scan showed, with great cruelty, the full scale of the disaster.

"His whole chest is overwhelmed by the tumor, but the serious thing is the cranial metastasis. You take him urgently to Oncology at Fundeni, to Dr. Gherghiev, to put him on the particle accelerator. Today!" said Dr. Cipruț, after he'd finished talking on the phone with a friend, as if putting off giving me the bad news.

"Ligioara, why is no one talking to me? What's wrong with me?"

"My darling, what's the point of thinking about the truck bearing down on you in the wrong lane ahead...?"

Pfft! his lips lightly sketched, and from then on he asked me nothing more. But he didn't lay down his arms until the very last moment.

Here my story ends. It hurts too much

It was morning, dawn was barely breaking when the nightingales began to sing. I threw the doors wide open.

"Listen! They've come!" I told him.

His face lit up. He closed his eyes and said, with a tenderness from the end of the world:

"Daddy could just eat them up!"

"I don't think you'd actually eat them," I said, and he suddenly brightened.

"Ligioara, will you come and visit me?" he asked.

I couldn't answer him.

"Do you want me to read you my novel, and we'll go over it together?"

"Yes. I didn't dare ask you..."

For the last three days, I read his book aloud to him:

Domino. 43 Propositions from Spinoza's Ethics, Demonstrated with Scenes from the Life and Love of a Vagabond.