I can’t say I was pleased that Fourteenth of July, when I crossed paths with him at the Pont Saint-Michel. I was leafing through a pile of old magazines at a secondhand bookseller’s on the quays and it’s not a pleasure I like to share with anyone.
—Oh, Valerie! (We’d known each other long but he made no great effort to pronounce my name—Stefan Valeriu—correctly, as he found it an odd sort of name, while “Valerie” sounded more familiar and local.) Irimia planted himself before me and I could tell by his silence that he wasn’t going to leave there alone.
—What are you up to, Irimia?
—Oh, just looking around…
Indeed, he was just looking. He watched the water flowing under the bridge and his big eyes didn’t even blink. I took him with me for a stroll along the quays. He told me in that familiar, rough voice of his that he’d got his law degree in June in Bucharest and was thinking of doing a doctorate in Paris. He’d obtained a grant to do this and had arrived two weeks before from our country. He wanted to learn French by autumn, when the academic year began.
—Because, you know, right now, it’s no good. No good at all.
He spoke haltingly, in fragments of sentences, and it was a victory any time he managed to fully articulate an idea. I remembered how he suffered at school, when he had to recite the lesson in front of the history teacher; it was as though each word were a brick he had to dislodge with a hammer from an edifice that in his mind at least was well constructed and handsome.
Poor Irimia! What ridiculous circumstances had taken this peasant from Ialomita and thrust him among that class of society fellows in Lazar high school? What error of judgment had diverted him from his destiny as a plowman and set him struggling with things he had no aptitude for? We’d been classmates since the start of high school and I’d had time to get to know him: he was so tall and heavy, his shoulders and feet so huge, that he barely fitted at his desk. Time and time again, after he’d recited the lesson he’d learned off so laboriously the previous evening, the teacher would send him back to his seat by saying, in a bored voice: “Irimia C. Irimia, return to your place!” I imagined Irimia one day walking quietly to where his coat was hanging and taking it from the hook and saying, in his usual slow voice, that he was not in his proper place. But no. He didn’t come from a race of rebels. He went tamely back to his desk, crossed his arms over his chest, and sat there quietly and watched and listened, hulking and ungraceful in that cramped space. I sensed that behind Irimia’s obedience lay the melancholy of a domesticated animal that watched and waited, yet retained in the deepest recesses of its being the appetite for another life, and felt the call of other horizons. Maybe I was mistaken. But I didn’t know how else to interpret that big fellow’s docile smile; an awkward smile that seemed to be permanently begging forgiveness for some mistake.
I have two particular memories of Irimia, neither of which has anything to do with the other, but they have remained distinct in my mind. One was in the schoolyard. An old peasant with an overcoat and saddlebags was at the gate, looking through the bars, not daring to enter. I asked him whom he was looking for.
—Well, my sister’s boy.
—What’s the boy’s name?
—Well, he goes by the name of Irimia.
I sought out Irimia C. Irimia, though there must have been other boys in that high school of the same name. I don’t know what told me it was he whom the old man at the gate was looking for. Perhaps his blue eyes, tinged with apprehension, which were the same as the boy’s. He was the one, as it turned out. He approached the gate unhurriedly, unsurprised, took off his cap (in the same time-honored way that his ancestors for centuries had doffed their caps), bowed and kissed the old man’s chapped, brown, bony hand. I didn’t laugh. There was something awesome in the way this giant bowed to the old man, arching over him. I, who have lived in a world of false traditions and false laws, sensed myself in the presence of something eternal, and my schoolmate, Irimia C. Irimia, was enacting it there, in front of me, in the street, by kissing the old man’s hand.
My second memory of Irimia is totally unremarkable, and I wonder if it’s even worth mentioning. It was also at school, during a lesson on French literature. The teacher had asked him to read aloud a passage from Racine. It’s odd that even though it was just a fragment, I still remember today that it was from scene four of the first act of Andromaque:
Songez-y bien: il faut désormais que mon coeur,
S’il n’aime avec transport, haïsse avec fureur.
It’s hard to describe how Irimia’s mouth transformed those verses. A dialect of Bulgarian, crushed between his teeth, without vowels, battered and bruised and abused between two pieces of flint. It caused an uproar of amusement in class and I participated. Steadfast, brows furrowed, his face tensed and his jaws clenching like those of some carnivore, and his immense hands clamped on the covers of the book, Irimia C. Irimia continued reading from Racine. A classmate, whom I personally couldn’t stand, though he has since become well-known and writes weekly columns in a reactionary newspaper, an able, intellectual lad (I acknowledge all this so that it’s not imagined that I’m somehow jealous, I who haven’t made my mark and don’t write literature)—this classmate whispered in my ear, then, looking at Irimia:
—He’s a primitive.
No, Irimia was just a peasant from Baragan. There, in our midst, reading French verses, I found him ridiculous. But I imagined him at seven o’clock on a July evening, returning to his village barefoot after a long day’s work along the edge of a field of grain, in the light of the setting sun, and I told myself that none among us, not one of us smart boys would, in any aspect of our clever lives, have even a scrap of the simple greatness that Irimia possessed in such a moment.
I don’t hear what’s labeled the “call of the soil” and find pastoral literature risible. But I do enjoy seeing a beautiful creature flourishing in its proper environment. And I sometimes find myself suffering at the sight of a huge circus dog bedecked with ribbons and bells, yoked to its job, knowing that it was made to face wolves on a mountaintop, before God and the pale stars. That, I think, is why I treated Irimia decently, and if I happened to laugh at him a few times, it was from laziness or cowardice: I found it hard not to follow the crowd. Regardless of that, I felt a sincere and straightforward friendliness toward him.