The Romanian

HERE ON PIAŢA VICTORIEI in Bucharest, Romulus has zero patience for the street urchins, those grimy kids who attach their sucking tentacles to us every time we step out of the hotel. With eyes shiny and hard as pebbles, glistening with a paint-thinner high, they never stop their operatic chant for a handout, appealing to us and the Savior in whines, or wailing soft sophistic arguments about charity. They grab the sleeves of our jackets and let themselves be dragged along until Romulus shoos them away with curses sounding like a witch’s imprecations.

I take out five dollars and the boy pounces on it, inhaling it deep into his stained athletic suit. If he does mumble a thank-you, it’s quickly curtailed by the torrent of begging for more. Then he’s ripped backward onto the grass in front of the Benetton store, as four other kids furiously attack him for a share of the take. Limbs cartwheel and small bodies roll through the grass as yelps of pain come from the jumble. Romulus shouts out for them to stop, like an athletic coach, but they ignore him, and he meets my eyes briefly with a look of being right. “You see what happens?” he says, clucking his tongue.

As soon as I saw him striding across the busy street in front of the Bulevard Hotel, at that puzzling, unsettling instant when fantasy suddenly becomes flesh, I realized things had taken a step forward. We hadn’t seen each other for six weeks. This time he looked older and more purposeful and was carrying his own luggage, a gym bag with a couple of shirts and two pairs of underwear. On my last visit, he’d come to the Gellért with nothing but a razor.

The Bulevard, our nineteenth-century hotel, is in a perplexing state of disrepair. The sour desk clerk looked past our heads with veiled contempt when we filled out the registration form. The lobby didn’t feel like that of any hotel I’d ever been in. Among the marble columns and the peculiar array of vases attached to the walls, which I later found out held surveillance microphones during the Ceauşescu era, were stone-faced, bulky men in black suits like those I’d seen at the bar in Budapest. Cher-look-alike beauties in black designer miniskirts, their shiny hair cut Louise Brooks style and their long legs ending in gleaming sling-back shoes, lounged pantherlike on the scattered banquettes, scrutinizing us with tinges of hope but mostly undisguised boredom. Every once in a while, a cell phone would ring. One of the thuggish guys would extract it from his suit and answer it, and one of the girls would leave. It seemed like a pretty active hustling operation.

Our immense circular room has four bay windows. It’s high-ceilinged and aristocratic, except for the fact that the counterfeit Louis XVI furniture keeps collapsing. But with our heavy drapes, mirrored vanity table and brocade couch, as well as the cavernous round space of the room, we soon forget about the rest of the world. Eventually I get the idea of filling a plastic jug with water to make the pull-chain toilet work; and since no one ever appears to make up the room, we learn to put our garbage outside.

A lot of phone numbers have changed in Bucharest shortly before our arrival, and an updated system is being installed. Not only do we never find out our real hotel telephone number, but the few contacts I have—such as the film critic Alex Leo Şerban, who’s been recommended by my French friend the writer Benoît Duteurtre—turn out to be unreachable. The old phone numbers just ring and ring, and the new ones aren’t listed in the directory.

Our lack of outside contacts has thrown us into that Cocteauean netherworld of enfants terribles that worked so well for a while at the Gellért. There’s no greater accessory to romantic passion than an absence of context. Within our Traviata-style stage set we can enact hackneyed plots of sensual sloth, intense sex, encroaching boredom and jealousy. Our first sturm und drang occurs even before we’ve unpacked our bags, when I ask Romulus for a hundred dollars. A couple of weeks before, on the telephone, he said that the last hundred dollars I’d given him in Budapest had had red-felt-marker stains along the edges from the bank, and that no one in Sibiu would change them. He asked me to wire an extra hundred and promised to give me the stained bills back.

For me, this city has a baffling Cabinet of Dr. Caligari feeling. You imagine the buildings of Bucharest leaning at weird angles, but just as is suggested in Expressionist films, it’s really your own grounding that’s off center. You’re faced again and again with that amputee, History. Then you yourself begin to feel dislocated.

Dissonant twosome as we are—Romulus young, lithe, short and sharp-faced, with shiny, stony eyes; me older, taller and much bulkier, eyes burning—Bucharest begins to feel like our landscape. It’s part Blade Runner and part Boulevard Haussmann. Twilight doesn’t seem to come to the city; it smudges it, I don’t know why. We’re walking past the sumptuous nineteenth-century Cercul Militar and its hopes of Parisian glory. An elderly woman stops us, her eyes bright with memories, a weird, wild compassion in her trembling voice. When she finds out we’re visitors, that we haven’t suffered what she has, it sets something off. She recalls Bucharest’s old glory for us—and the memories shoot like sparks from her eyes to the tips of her wild, gnarled hair—she blesses us, begs us, as tourists, to reconstruct the Bucharest of the past for her by eating at Capşa, a once famous restaurant with velvet-and-ebony furniture.

As we leave her and walk up Calea Victoriei, the Haussmannian look of Bucharest brings back my literary memory of that fantastic promenade during the teens and twenties, the days of Lupescu and Carol, when seraglio-eyed women in mask-like makeup and dyed fox stoles sauntered past moustachioed men in severely tailored serge suits, brilliantined hair and patent-leather shoes, puffing oval Turkish cigarettes with their pouting, gleaming lips that made off-color comments about the parade of “possibilities”; but this is swiftly interrupted by an onion-domed Russian church, sprouting like a mushroom between two dank housing projects. I make Romulus enter with me. Its small, musty interior holds gleaming icons and genuflecting women with covered heads, all clustered together to leave little walking space.

On the street, wild dogs and even wilder homeless children keep crossing our path. A Soviet-style housing project looks like it’s caving into a shiny new adjoining bank. Everything looks pieced together by Krazy Glue, fighting for space and contradicting everything else, like Cubist structures on a baroque wedding cake. Most interesting to me are the pharmacies. You see, I associate my desire for Romulus, that sense of dislocation he causes, with the syrup and white tablets I’ve been taking: hydrocodone and codeine that exaggerate my fantasies of passion and make me forget my anxieties about my mother’s health; as well as the white lorazepam tranquilizers—also available here—that I now swallow in order to sleep. From the glass-doored wooden cabinets of the pharmacy we’ve just entered, the bony-fingered clerk extracts what I tell Romulus to ask for.

Just as exciting is the discovery of a line of face creams called Gerovital, which I will begin to use regularly and will later maintain has magic properties. At barely four dollars a jar, it ends up filling my suitcases on every departure from Romania, as requests from friends for the magic substance multiply. The creams are based on a formula developed by the legendary scientist Ana Aslan, who until her death claimed to have discovered an anti-aging chemical. Today, all over the world, elderly people are still swallowing Gerovital pills. I buy several jars of the cream and then stock up on fifty-pill boxes of lorazepam and opiates, leaving the store with flushed excitement.

Calea Victoriei leads us to a vast square, a crossroads of historical trauma. There on my left is the palace where Carol II’s Jewish mistress Lupescu hid behind gauze curtains while Carol, in his white cloak, raised a toast to her. Now it houses a national museum of art. It was the palace in which Carol felt most at home, whereas his father preferred the more remote Cotroceni, on the outskirts of the city. There were rumors of secret passages running underneath this palace, bringing Lupescu undetected to Carol at night and allowing him to meet secretly with deal-makers and his cabal of scheming advisors.

The Central University Library across the street, as well as the palace, were nearly gutted by fire during the Revolution of 1989, and thousands of priceless volumes in the library were reduced to ashes. Behind the library are the charred ruins of a once stately house that was destroyed during the revolution and left as a reminder. Not far away is the wide, stern façade of the old Communist Party headquarters, riddled with bullet holes, from whose roof Romania’s last dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, escaped by helicopter. A white marble plaque indicates the spot, with the words “Glorie martirilor noştri” (Glory to our martyrs), in remembrance of the revolutionaries who lost their lives.

Unaware that Capşa, the restaurant the old lady mentioned, is across the street from where we met her, we take an eerie cab ride in search of it through back streets with decaying mansions, whose pitted wooden columns, stagnant gardens and shady gables keep leading us into dead ends. After several days, we’ll realize that most of the taxi drivers don’t know where anything is. We give up on our search and look for another restaurant, Mioriţa, named after the primal Romanian myth. Only later do I ponder that legend of a murdered shepherd and realize how deeply it seems to articulate some of our experience.

It’s eight p.m. already. Dying of hunger, we hurry shiveringly on foot north of Calea Victoriei, still in search of a restaurant, past a large late-nineteenth-century palace fronted by two stone lions. We stop and stare at the scallop-shaped glass canopy leading to the entrance, just as the iron gate is being locked by a grizzled man in a moth-eaten sweater and wool cap. He is, he claims, the conservator of this museum, Cantacuzino Palace, where George Enescu, the composer and musician, used to live; and he wonders—looking us up and down—whether we’d like a private tour. We follow him up the stairs into a terrifying well of pitch blackness, after which he throws on a series of switches that illuminate heavenly, elegant rooms of polished wood and stucco, decorated with plaster cherubs, winged trumpeters and a rosy-fleshed nude sprawled across the ceiling. Casually, he pulls open cabinets containing the personal belongings of Mr. Enescu and removes priceless musical scores for us to examine, finger. He tells us—and this turns out to be confirmed in Romanian Rhapsody, by Dominique Fernandez—that Enescu lived here with his wife, the princess Maruca Cantacuzino, who was a former wife of the Boyar Cantacuzino and who kept the palace in near darkness, because of a disfigured face resulting from gasoline burns she’d inflicted on herself after an unrequited love affair. She appeared in the light only when her face was hidden by a plaster mask. Later I’ll also find out that she was a confidante of Queen Marie.

He takes us to a smaller house in back of the main building, where, he claims, the composer, who was of peasant origins, felt more comfortable and spent most of his time. It’s only after we’ve thanked him and given him a ten-dollar tip—an average Romanian’s two-day earnings—that we realize he must be a museum employee, hoping to make some extra cash.

We make another attempt to find Mioriţa, and our cabdriver gets lost again. The ride ends in a mud path, where eerie light from an Art Nouveau window in the unlit street illuminates the uniform of a soldier, working in this city in conjunction with the police. I want to ask directions, but Romulus grabs my arm and keeps me from crossing the street. It seems no one asks the police for help.

We cross to the other side farther down, through mud. Why do I feel that I’m becoming lost in a marsh? I’ll eventually discover that Bucharest was built on forested wetlands and a tangle of roots. Once across the mud, we end up in front of a large red Victorian house that could have belonged to Psycho’s Mrs. Bates. There’s a sign in front of it that says “Opium.” We enter out of curiosity, and a woman in a revealing red cocktail dress asks whether we prefer the smoking room (we aren’t sure what substance she’s referring to), the “bath lounge” or Purgatorio, a room in the basement with chairs decorated alternately with red devil horns and white angel haloes. The establishment is owned by the Romanian actress Ioana Crăciunescu, whose much younger partner, the director Bogdan Voicu, is working with her to create theater entertainments for the special few.

There are, says the manager—who has appeared to give us a tour—weekly performances in the bath lounge, a bordello-red room featuring an immense golden bathtub. And in Purgatorio, a new trend of stand-up comedy in English has begun, because, he says, Romanian stand-up is just a bunch of potty jokes. Next door, in the yellow smoking room, spooky pantomimes are going on among the Oriental cushions. But there’s no food here. Someone calls us a taxi, and we return to the hotel, defeated and hungry.

Too tired to keep looking for food, we switch on the television. In front of it and an endless soccer match, we learn a series of passional attitudes designed to fit his smaller, steelier body into my padded bulk. I’m stretched out on my back with him using my stomach as a cushion, or we lie entangled like two tarantulas, a perfect balance of lighter on heavier limbs that avoids bone pressure. Or I’ll be lying belly-down with my head by his waist, so that my hands can wander over his body like tortoises inspecting every blade of grass on a beach.

Because he doesn’t complain, I’ve decided we’re in paradise. Visions of him change, but they’re always highly sexual, with elements of the predatory. I feel like a falconer with his hawk, that beady-eyed, sharp-beaked and alert but dependent creature that pecks ever so carefully at its master. At other times, his sinuous muscles enlace me in the fantasy of a python, our corkscrew intertwinings thrilling me into believing myself some circus performer who’s ready to chance being strangled for the right to be caressed. But then, every so often, he suddenly diminishes to a poor wren, for what is the real difference, except in the sense of motive versus action, between vulnerability and predation? Isn’t each part of the same formula?

It’s his emotional hunger, often presenting itself as stoical machismo, that keeps promising a trapdoor into his heart. And as we lie here, the unreal atmosphere of the room is as disorienting as the description of some powdery scent in a decadent novel, while snippets of his fairy-tale past float into the air.

“Surely. They fabricate this fight in Vîlcea to make me exit when I was eighteen,” he claims. “Say I steal from them. Which is how I end up on Corso in Budapest where you find me. But you know, my stepfather waste what little they have for drinking, and soon as I am to coming back, it is money all the time, they take it from us all, me, Bogdan.”

WHAT DID HISTORY DO TO HIM? The question sounds absurd, for we’re all to some extent victims of history; but I’m convinced that, as my friend Ursule Molinaro suspected, Romulus is ancient. His half-finished projects and sudden departures, his enslavements and sullen betrayals are micro-recapitulations of the fate of his land.

Like my beloved Times Square, Romania was a crossroads of cultures and clashes—Byzantine glories, wily Levantine schemes for survival, the nexus of three empires: the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian and the Soviet. Romanians are, they themselves believe, Latins lost among the barbarians, the Roman victims of Turks.

It’s midnight and we’re finally eating dinner, the only customers in the hotel restaurant. The mottled marble and enormous mirrors are exquisite, baroque and unreal, the room immense. The way the waiters and whores who walk through look at us says that we, too, are lost, isolated. Romulus’s eyes, I can tell, see doom and are perpetually disgusted by it. But such a stance is overruled by courageous passivity, which the Romanian poet Lucian Blaga once called the “Mioritic space.”

According to the great Romanian myth of Mioriţa, three shepherds from different regions came down with their flocks from the Carpathian Mountains. Two of them began to plot to murder the Moldovan shepherd, who was warned of the scheme by Mioriţa, a magical ewe. The shepherd didn’t flee. With a vast and perplexing sense of spiritual acceptance, he planned his own funeral, which took on the character of a wedding with Nature, a return to Eden.

Critics have debated the ancient myth’s meaning since it was first published by the Romantic poet Vasile Alecsandri. There are those who have associated it with pessimism and passivity, going so far as to call Romania a “suicidal” culture. But Mircea Eliade, the controversial Romanian historian and mythologist (who has been accused of being a Fascist early in his career), saw the myth of Mioriţa as being about an active transformation of fate, the will to change the meaning of destiny into something self-empowering.

In light of this, Romulus’s surrender of his body to me takes on a morbid and transfigured aura. It may be an arrangement of circumstance, but to him it’s part of a timeless cycle. I can see it in his eyes. His prostitution has a sacrificial, portentous significance. And so it is that the fixed expression of his eyes, the angry near-piety of his touch are signs of sacrifice that can’t be possessed by me. But in any case, the buyer can never control the ritual of prostitution.

His face is getting paler during dinner as I flounder to stake a claim, shamelessly offering him long-term financial schemes as if they were car insurance. The obsessive-compulsive nature of my feelings for him makes me spit out vulgar maintenance plans whose function is to take away the guesswork of our relationship. I want marriage instead of doom. Each of my offers is an insult to his approach to transgression. He’s getting increasingly furious at my attempts to buy him.

IT’S TWO A.M., and we’ve decided to have a drink at a tony club we noticed in our wanderings. It’s called Byblos and it features a fancy restaurant with live entertainment and nearly New York prices. How can I explain the despairing rage that fills Romulus at the sight of its Armani-clad clientele? This isn’t simple resentment of the bourgeoisie on the part of an outsider, an underclass person, but something even more inherently political. His rage is, in part, Communist. It could even be interpreted as prudishness. But Romulus is himself in many ways a crass materialist who dreams of killer sound systems and flashy cars. Even so, the discipline and conservatism of real wealth, such as those exhibited by the privileged young people in this bar, crush his spirit. What repulses him most is the lack of Mioritic sacrifice in the comfortable lifestyle of the young people around him. He’s looking at the faces of children of politicians or publishers, and he knows what strategies their parents have employed to achieve such security in this impoverished country. He wants to put out the eyes of their children, whose blandness negates all the wisdom of his suffering. Once again, his rage leaves me feeling helplessly inferior. There’s nothing I can do but slavishly admire this odd man out of global capitalism.

Back at the hotel, he strips for bed and I gobble two of my fortuitous codeine tablets. I know what my duty is. Within an hour, I’m in that sparkling night gallery made of little explosions of codeine. It blots out most of the sociological details surrounding our situation, leaves only his hard, shadowy body inexplicably laid out for me, dappled by the streetlight piercing the gaps in the heavy curtains. This is a funereal, or should I say vampiric, scene. I fall to my knees in the darkness because I know that to worship his abjection is to drink at the fount of cultural doom and play at entangling my fate with his. He’s a door out of the repetitive banalities of North American capitalism. His penis plunges into my throat like an eel into inky water.