XII
THE CONTINENTAL SUN is mocking my folly through a hole in the ozone layer, beating me down in my jet lag. It’s the middle of May. This marks the sixth month of my relationship with Romulus. I’m waiting desperately for him in front of the InterContinental in Bucharest. I’m fresh from Paris but I haven’t given my Beaubourg presentation yet—it’s a month away. After our failure in getting an American visa, I’ve deemed it best to bring Romulus to France myself for the Beaubourg appearance. I have, luckily, come to my senses about the idea of projecting nude images of him on the wall behind me, but I still want him to be there. Then and hopefully, we’ll stay together in Paris for a few months. So I’ve flown to Bucharest to try to take care of the French visa. The only trouble is, he isn’t showing up.
Three hours later, when the sun is lower but just as scorching, when anger and humiliation are leaking through all my pores with the perspiration, he arrives with his gym bag, grimy from an interminable, local-stop bus ride from Sibiu. The bus took nine hours to get to Bucharest, delayed by a flat tire, a lazy driver who took hourly breaks and an unbudging Gypsy caravan on the road. But as usual, Romulus’s manner is composed and uncomplaining, too dignified and soldierly to express any frustration. Because we have nowhere to stay, he persuades one of the many idle cabdrivers to take us on an exhausting trek through the city in search of a hotel room. After one night in a moldy hotel near the post office, we discover Hanul Manuc, a country-style Romanian inn built in the early nineteenth century by an Armenian merchant, Manuc Bey. It sits like an anachronistic hallucination across from the ruins of the royal court in a corner of the old quarter. Our cab bounces across the uneven road into a large, tree-lined space surrounded by intricate wooden balustrades. A couple of homeless dogs are prowling around the straw-filled covered wagon in the immense cobblestone courtyard. Romulus extends his hand to one of them, who lunges to bite it.
The place is magical, full of scalloped Moorish arches over wooden galleries, reminiscent of the rural Romanian world in Panaït Istrati’s novels, two of which are in my suitcase. Our spacious suite has two rooms, a bedroom and a Romanian-style sitting room, with a Deco-ish dresser, high-backed wooden chairs and a wrought-iron candlestick with electric bulbs. We eat an enormous, tasty meal under the roofed gallery, with all the traditional dishes: sarmale, stuffed cabbage; cascaval, a kind of hardened cottage cheese; ciorba de burta, the tripe soup that Romulus chokes with sour cream; and mititei, an oblong meatball, which, despite its lamb and pork content, is served rare. Lackadaisical, overdressed waiters with very little to do hover over us, then lose attention and don’t come when they’re called—to Romulus’s great displeasure.
That night the Romanian news hour is chattering on the television screen when Romulus gets up to take a shower. It seems that Ceauşescu’s daughter is trying to repossess some of the jewels that belonged to the family. The climate is turning since the murder of the dictator. What seemed a pure act of patriotism is slowly becoming tinged, yet again, with corruption. Romanians are just beginning to realize that those who killed the dictator were also oppressors, who belonged to his inner circle. Now these same people are seizing political and economic control, after constructing new democratic identities for themselves.
Romulus’s body is even leaner and more rippled than the last time we spent together, his ass like two polished rocks. But why that concave, crouched posture permanently stamped into him? His cock curls out from it like an angry garter snake, against the shields of his thighs. It’s a sign of the rigidity and defensive-ness that will get clearer as time goes on.
The next day is tinged with fatality, like a myth or ritual. It certainly provides a lot of evidence against that utopian cultural interfacing we sometimes talk about in America. What global village? The ironies of class have only grown more glaring in the über-capitalist age. As soon as I tell Romulus that he should dress up for his appearance at the French embassy, our tastes start clashing. I suppose it’s the timeworn story of Pygmalion. At the moment, he has on tight maroon jeans, a two-toned polyester T-shirt and blunt-toed platform shoes. It’s a look I associate with the underclass chic of Manhattan’s Fourteenth Street shops. The likelihood of his overstaying his visa is written all over it, ready to be read at the French embassy.
The pleated wool-and-nylon slacks, the conservative gray viscose shirt with just a touch of pearly iridescence and the thin-soled dress shoes I’m trying to buy him, at a price that could be used to furnish an entire wardrobe, would really please my mother, but they fill him with stony alienation. It’s the same angry sense of being excluded that he exhibited at the club Byblos. This time it’s worse. He’s a trapped pigeon in an airshaft, struggling against the realistic formulas of success. My insistence on these boring clothes threatens his lifelong fantasies about luxury and power. Can success really be a question of being this accommodating? He’d thought money was power, speed, color. With terminal bitterness he puts on the stodgy clothes. Maybe there are flashes of excitement when he gets to put his papers in the computer case I lend him to carry, but he knows the act will soon become tired. He dreads a life like this in France, full of quality fabrics and sensible shoes, energy spent seeming inoffensive. He’s already waxing nostalgic for the easy girls, big-screen TV and quick money of his recent past and glaring like a whipped animal. Even worse is the emasculating effect. He’d rather look like rough trade—whose straight sexuality is obvious—than like the possible well-behaved member of a bourgeois gay couple. I can feel him cringe as we walk down the street toward the embassy and he fearfully scrutinizes my step, wondering if it gives us away.
Our audience is quick. Aside from the letters from Marianne Alphant at Beaubourg and Elein Fleiss of Purple, I have a more informal letter from another friend who is French, Victoire, inviting him to visit her in Tours. You’d think these documents were big guns, but the low-level clerk barely glances at them, looks neither of us in the eye and coolly requests a notarized letter of financial support from Victoire. I just can’t ask her to go out on a limb like that. It’s settled. If I want to be with Romulus, I’d better find a way to stay in Romania.
The inevitability of it makes me feel close to him, fills me with sentimentality. In a small way, I’ve become part of his curse of limitation. Like him, I’m trapped in Romania. We have to start looking for an apartment, so we head away from the embassy and trudge up a wide boulevard in the crushing heat.
As we do, the rhythm of his footsteps opens some door, plunging me closer to his reality. I can sense his relief at not having to bother to emigrate to France. He’s sick of traveling and feels at home in his own country. Now that I’ve committed to it, our walk, in perfect time with each other, feels pastoral, like a dreamy tango with death and doinas, the music said to represent the emotional consciousness of Romania.
Some have described the doina, that melancholy, lilting song of extended rhythms, as a psychic landscape of spiral meetings with fate. It’s an artful arabesque around the inevitability of death that is also the myth of Mioriţa, about the shepherd who transfigures death as a wedding with Nature. For me, entering Romania is like being in touch with that sensibility, like entering a trance. Our walk is an undulating consciousness, hovering and circulating around defeat. It’s as if we were out of historical time and in that other eternal time conceived by Mircea Eliade. No matter that the cosmic spirit of Romulus may be dulled by prostitution, corrupted by fantasies of fast cars and cool sound systems. His macho fatalism, which I finally understand for the first time, instills everything with elegance. He notices everything at its most abject and shakes his head or clucks his tongue like an ancient for whom it’s already happened, as if each detail represented the story of humankind.
I’m addicted to his curiously soothing discontent. Others would see a sulky hustler, walking with an overweight, wide-eyed tourist, but I see an endlessly rolling carpet beckoning us and all life toward extinction—which is why we make a smooth twosome, even without a place to live, as we stroll through Strada Lipscani in what is left of the old city, idling at a Romani stall to examine a bottle of cologne purporting to be Issey Miyake, though I notice the top is different, and Romulus grabs the icy, translucent bottle, wants to buy it, but I make him put it down, promising a real bottle when I return from Paris.
To the swelling, hypnotic tune of our own personal doina, we amble through the ruined patchwork of the old city, always enchanted by its discrepancies. We stop at the ruins of the Curtea Veche, the Old Court, the remains of the fifteenth-century palace of Prince Vlad Ţepeş, or Dracula; then, across the boulevard behind it, at an Internet café, which is plunged into darkness except for the glow of screens. White hands emerge from the shadows and pass me a card. Above them radiates the face of a small, excited woman, literally inebriated by the fact that I’m speaking English. “Call me,” she coos, pointing to the number on the card. Romulus gives me a cynical glance, iced with resignation.
Later, on Calea Victoriei, as he floats away in search of cigarettes, a teenaged boy in a T-shirt threadbare-thin from too many washings advances through an invisible gelatin in smiling slow motion, placidly wanting to know, he says, where I could be from with such blue eyes. In our banal conversation he makes dents of intimate possibilities, somewhere between erotic and paternal, boasting gently about another older American who pays him as a photographic model; then he gallantly runs to a nearby bakery with the money I give him to buy us sweet rolls.
On Bulevardul Aviatorilor, near a movie theater, is an outdoor Internet station where a crowd of boys gestures to us. Delighted by the free access, they cajole me into showing them how to use it. Gesticulations and arms thrown around shoulders, while I keep feeling for my wallet. The whole experience seems faintly rural. This magic-forest feeling of Bucharest comes, I think, from the innate pastoralism of Romanians, which has been described by the scholar Traian Herseni as pastoral loneliness. Add to this the fact that most Romanians were isolated during the reign of Ceauşescu, who prevented almost anyone from leaving the country, and you get a very singular sensibility.
This is only a walk in a modern city, but primeval fate seems to be curling its tendrils about us wherever we float; loss, extinction feel sweet to me, as they must have to the shepherd in the Mioriţa myth. I’m caught in this realization as Romulus and I stroll down Bulevardul Brătianu toward Piaţa Unirii, past the bullet holes from the Revolution in the walls of the underground street passage. Not far from our hotel we saw a sign advertising apartments to rent. It led us into a dingy courtyard bordered by buildings ornamented with fissured stucco. We went through a creaking door, up a cracked marble-and-wrought-iron staircase to a tiny real estate office, where a woman started as if she’d seen a ghost when we walked in. The fact of our wanting an apartment seemed to astonish her. As if in shock, she went through a faded roster of listings in a book with a broken spine, made a call and handed us a card.
The walk to the apartment, which is located near Piaţa Unirii, feels effortless, like standing on a moving sidewalk, gliding easily toward fate. Until I come smack against the wide, wall-like body of a Romani woman with back and buttocks of brick, who has stopped stock still in the middle of the street. As I slam against this wall, I feel spidery hands fluttering against my pants and realize that I’m in the middle of a Gypsy pick-pocketing scam. The movie in gelatin is shattered by my piercing scream. Everyone stops to look, the three Roma involved in the scam hightail it up the avenue.
Romulus’s face isn’t sympathetic, but stony with disapproval, embarrassed. Of course, he knew what was happening. I’m such a target with my bulging pockets. But why did I have to shriek like a woman? In fact, he’s been meaning to tell me I walk funny, too much on the balls of my feet.
In a split second, I’ve slid out of the magic forest, been changed back into a possibly effeminate fag in a sector closed to me. I’ll never get in again, either, beyond brief moments. When one of Romania’s greatest pessimists, Emil Cioran, came to France, his first impression of Western intellectuals was that they thought only of money. He claimed that any of his people’s shepherds was a more profound philosopher. Now I feel like one of those overembellished Westerners he scorned, a victim of Romanian feudal clannishness.
OUR APARTMENT-TO-BE is in a spectacular Teutonic-looking turn-of-the-century house in a middle-class neighborhood, on Mihnea Vodă, a dead-end street behind Piaţa Unirii. I’m drawn to the glass-and-wrought-iron door, the gabled roof, the garden of sweet peas. The staircase is creaky and dark, with a musty smell I associate with books about spells. On the first landing, a door creaks open, and the sweet, bewildered face of an old woman with soft, disheveled hair peeks out at us. She looks thrilled, relieved at seeing our faces, as if she’d been waiting for a hundred years. Eagerly she ushers us into her living room, which is dark and nearly empty, with a worn-out couch and a gleaming black-tile floor; and I realize that she really has been living in a kind of prison, guarded by the pitiless and unstoppable passage of time. On shelves lining the room are crinkled mementoes: roses, faded colorless, wrapped in yellowed cellophane; a wedding picture whose tones have sunk into muddy reds and browns; a plastic-framed photo of a blond pixielike child who must be in his fifties by now. She pauses in front of a dust-laden samovar and makes thrilled, nervous shrugging gestures at me while explaining in Romanian to Romulus that there’s nothing to offer us for tea. She ate a last small cake for lunch an hour ago. She’s humiliated by her inability to provide hospitality, she explains, accompanying her words with apologetic, cultured quiverings of her wrinkled hands and obsequious little bows, while her soft eyes transfix me ecstatically. The apartment above her has stood empty for more than a year, and here we’ve come to remedy it, she assumes. She apologizes for the fact that she speaks no English, but some instinct makes me try to address her in French. She’s probably old enough to have lived the tail end of that time when Romania looked toward France as a sister nation—not so long ago as when Princess Bibesco socialized with Proust, but possibly when Paul Celan, a Romanian Jew, lived in Paris and translated Cocteau and Rimbaud. And after a few words in French, her eyes do light up and she begins to recite Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage” with a heavy Romanian accent:
Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
But then she stops, confused. It’s the only fragment she can remember. She explains to Romulus, who translates for me, that she’s going to call her son, who’ll arrange our renting the upstairs apartment. We spend the rest of the time in a nervous ritual of courtesy: the old woman, who has forgotten her French, bowing and shrugging apologetically, and me trying to keep a stiff, affectionate smile on my lips.
Her son, a middle-aged man in shorts, probably the child in the faded photograph, looks as if he’d been released from a long sentence on death row—his eyes staringly fish-angry, like pieces of dull green glass in milk. He has a hunched, alcoholic manner and wet tentacles, frustration and defeat pouring out of him like sweat. He wants the twelve hundred dollars for three months’ rent of the big apartment upstairs in cash, and he wants it in dollars, right away. When I protest, saying I’m not going to change lei back into dollars, he spends thirty minutes studying the newspaper for the exchange rates. Finally he writes the exact amount up to the fourth decimal on a scrap of paper. Then Romulus and I go with a large paper bag to one of the city’s few cash machines. Since the highest Romanian currency offered by the machine equals about eight dollars, and it’s impossible to get more than five of these bills at a time from the machine, I spend almost an hour removing money and stuffing the bag, while Romulus stands guard. It won’t be the end of the drama. Our landlord will call us almost daily asking for electricity and telephone money in advance or maintaining that the exchange was figured out wrong.
Our new, spacious two-bedroom apartment is full of Romanian books—the literature that the landlord’s daughter studied before moving to America. One of the bedrooms, which has a desk, will be my own separate study, and there’s even a terrace. I’m a bit baffled by the fact that the kitchen is kitty-corner across the outside hall. Its ancient spice cabinet, which has herbs and remedies more than sixty years old, fascinates me. We settle onto the king-sized bed in our large bedroom, trying not to focus on the fact that the landlord’s mother has a key to the back entrance and has claimed the right to mount when she pleases to use the washing machine in the bathroom, just outside our bedroom door. We can’t, however, keep from noticing that our windows look onto the vine-covered windows of the adjoining building, so Romulus closes the shades and pulls the heavy curtains over them to muffle our noise. Both of us are aware that a revised version of Article 200, the law against “public scandal,” is still in effect. Technically, we could be arrested just for being seen making homosexual gestures. This obsesses me for a while, I talk incessantly about it, until Romulus harshly silences me by saying, “Don’t you know sex is dangerous?”
A few days later, we’ll go back to Strada Lipscani in search of a VCR for playing porn. In a secondhand shop, we’ll bargain with the grim owner, who seems to be threatening us, predicting all kinds of disasters, rather than negotiating a sale. Romulus assures me that if the VCR doesn’t work when we get home, he’ll quickly return it to the shop by throwing it through the plate-glass window. Finding porn on the street is easy; there are tables every few corners with pirated tapes, some Romanian but mostly German—none, of course, homosexual, but Romulus wouldn’t want that. And I can’t compromise myself in front of him by watching them.
Sex in our new home begins when the temperature has reached ninety degrees Fahrenheit. A terrible heat wave has started to hit Romania. There’s no air-conditioning, and we fear opening the shades or curtains in the bedroom. Romulus watches one of the porn tapes, an artless German costume drama in a harem, as he slaps at mosquitoes, while I lie belly-down across the sweat-drenched sheets and put my head between his baking thighs.
We’re just a few hundred feet from the Dîmboviţa River, which has dried up in the heat, leaving ankle-high mud and rotting fish. I can smell it penetrating the curtains. After you get across the bridge over the river, the odor grabs you by the throat, you want to get away from it as soon as possible, but sometimes the stoplight hasn’t changed. This seems to be the inevitable moment when the small boy at the intersection, pushing a wooden wheelchair carrying a legless grandfather, comes toward you begging for money, the grandfather’s outstretched bony hand shaking a metal cup. If you give, the boy says, “God bless you,” in English. Much later, in Budapest, a Romanian hustler will tell me that when some of his fellow hustlers need more money from a “benefactor,” they tell him that their father works for the railroad and that his legs have just been cut off by a train. Yes, in the case of the boy at the intersection, the grandfather’s legs really were missing, but then, the very idea of the imagination exploiting amputation . . .