OBSERVATOR CULTURAL - Spiritul critic in actiune

She wears a mini and glasses, she’s myopic. She has the key to your small, rented room. She rolls her r’s naturally and doesn’t hang around bus stops. She has money for taxis. She shines. She persecutes you with a smile. She’s relaxed and she says she loves you. She lies next to you on the sheet. She gets hold of tickets for the Athenaeum. She takes you out in the world when you get bored, then shows you off to everyone – an exhibit. She brings you a mug of tea when you work at the piano and empties the ashtray. She goes on tiptoe and turns the key in the lock, slowly. All of a sudden, she says she’s not coming to your place tonight. She used to be first in her class at school. She goes with you to hockey matches at the rink and screams louder: she’s cruel, violence excites her.

She cries at movies and gets happy with tears: she throws her arms around your neck and gives you her hair to smell. She sits in the armchair and knits, looks at you in silence, listens to chords from Schumann, brings rare records, doesn’t believe one iota of your nonsense about concerts in overfull halls – you are one meek, shabby bum; you keep quiet too much. She’s full of life, doesn’t go into pastry shops. She’s pretentious and cold; she seems to levitate among passersby. She admires herself in pharmacy windows. She loves beaches and hates snowfall and cold and the north and Bucharest slush in March. She’s an intellectual, calculated, catlike, she makes mistakes; she’s a Bovary. She picked you; she’s your stretcher bearer and your Algocalmin. She’s your porn movie, and she’s also your resonance box. She’s irreplaceable; she breathes for your lungs too. She fixes your tie when she takes you to visit a family, gets up late when she stays at your place. She’s confused you completely with her sudden nonsense and hates, with repeated desertions, with her care for your conjunctivitis and the faces you pull when one of your improvisations works out. She’s your only dance partner. She scorns portions of bologna, yogurt containers, candy drops. She gets jealous of the piano: one night she’ll chop it to pieces! – she’s devilishly nervous and has relatives in high places. She’s the poor relative of a family with branches.

Only colonels and directors, a minister, even. She intimidates you with her airs: to her you look stupid and docile – and why do you keep quiet for so long? – she’s the woman of your life. She covers you with kisses. She’s shameless. She’s a hippie: she walked into a matinee with bare feet, ohoo how the bourgeois in the foyer elbowed each other. She keeps food in a bag and feeds the neighborhood cats, hums the Beatles’ repertoire as a prayer, has pictures of Paul of Ringo of George of John. She studied violin back home, but she quit. You are both extremely musical, somnolent, frustrated. She can’t stand cigarette smoke. She’s a half-orphan and has a typist mother in a document copying office. She gives private lessons and makes money; she’s busy; she keeps her eyes fixed on the clock; she has an agenda, makes interminable phone calls, has two pairs of blue jeans and one of beige stripes, wears tin bracelets and earrings and rings; she’s dying to buy a dress from the Artists’ Fund Store; she’s friendly and has an instinct for self-preservation; she makes an impression; she gets around town a lot, and at night she crams for exams.

She shoves her hands in your pockets, and you let her, and you pull her near you to rub your cheek against her temple. She doesn’t wear very high heels, and she likes sweets. She spoils herself; she comes out with kidisms; she’s a funny person and sometimes keeps quiet: you get scared. She fusses around the room. She finds herself something to do: she mends the tassels of the curtain, darns a stocking; she smears aquarelles on a piece of cardboard – this is you – and hangs the ugly things on the wall; she sulks. She skins off your clothes and drags you to bed. She pulls the blankets on the rug, she bites, she turns out the light, she surrounds you with the heat of her body, she breathes near your ear, she sighs, she hurries you, she peels you like a banana, she orders you: textiles down! She goes down under your diffuse shadow in the dark: she sniffs you, she’s keen; you keep quiet. She offers you a shoulder, a breast and laughs barely heard: she loves you, is covetous, she’s perverse, she hates you, she’s cruel, she pants and asks you not to even think about stopping, lazy.

She loses you, you feel how she’s moved away, talks to herself, and right away you die too, minutes when you don’t exist for each other. She comes back to life first, disperses her fingers through her hair, runs to the bathroom – don’t you get dressed, lazy, wait for me – through the half-open door, you catch sight of her as she looks at herself in the mirror: she sings a Beatles hit in slow motion all we need is love love love love she moves through the room as her mother bore her, accompanied by lovelovelovelovelove. She praises you: so you’re good for something; otherwise you’re a loser – I wonder what I found in you? Hidden behind the curtain, she stays at the window so the neighbors won’t see her. You want to light a cigarette – she won’t let you, she stays on her knees near you, through the dark you hear her fastening a clip in her hair click you feel that she’ll desert you one day, she’s going to forget you. You tell her – she keeps quiet, she brings her hand to her mouth, she cries lying on top of you. You love her again, almost with fury, with malice you try to seize something, fix the moment, grip her shoulders, we’re going, Pia, we’re going. Shut up, please.

It seems that only her body stops you from dissolving in the room’s artificial night. Her skin shining faintly impedes you from going beyond to cower in the piano. Her panting keeps you intact: she, more broken from reality than you, but more concrete, more living, deadhead. She stiffens, the telephone buzzes – leave it for God’s sake. You want the two of you to eternalize in this moment of terror. You don’t tell her. It would be stupid. All couples lie the same way. You have the image of billions of couplings in a landscape of clouds, paired beings filling the sky. She doesn’t want to tear herself away from the embrace: she beats your chest with her fists, she says: we don’t have the right to be so happy, we’ll pay, you’ll see!

Fragment din capitolul al II-lea
al volumului Corpuri de iluminat,
tradus de Jean Harris si Constantin Virgil BANESCU