Fragrance (novel) [4]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
Unceasing prayer plays a big role in my rest in sight. In what I see. And because I don’t look outside, but inside, being attentive to my tired heart, I see what rests me and I don’t see analytically. Those who are always outside themselves, but not inside themselves, need details, but I don’t. I need understandings about our life. About what I understood by watching, living, doing. The grandfather Marin looked at our vineyard from the yard like a famous painting from the Louvre. He saw another world through it. Moromete smokes in the novel like the man in the Marlboro commercial. The excess of objects in novels is like product placement in movies: they are there, even if no one needs them. The air conditioning in the restrooms in the malls shows your financial stability. You can afford to go to the restroom because you have money to buy at the mall. But, more often than not, people come to the mall to waste time, to eat, to do small purchases, while the merchants imagine shoppers hungry for their banal products. Dull. Insipid.
You get on a tram and you’re dying of heat. You get on another and the coolness calms you down. No one gives you your money back because you waited, because you were confused with documents and notices, with lawyer’s demands. You have to listen to the Marzipan Lawyer’s perorations, which he has learned since first year, and which he repeats out of courtesy. The TV announcer’s voice is unbearable, because it’s shrill, but who cares when storks die? I drove over Vedea yesterday and blessed it. I felt like doing it with all my heart. Because this water is my friend, my confidant, even though I see it less and less often. I know its taste, I know its smell, the fish, the sand. I didn’t care where it came from. But I knew that it passed by my village and that to get there, I had to go through Collective, the furthest, or at Lambe on the street or through the vineyard, through ours, at the Stork. I saw it in small portions. I wasn’t interested in traveling either to its source or its overflow. I belonged there! We were waiting for it here, I saw it once swollen, with a lot of water, many feared it would come towards the village, but it did not cross the upper bank. And beyond the vineyards, the forest, was a wild territory, which we only trod for snowdrops, alpine squills and wood violets, when we could come across a deer, but not to get wood or to play in the forest. There was no play in the forest! You went there to get something, symbolic of spring and life, and leave. And you crossed the water, and you came home, and you rejoiced. Because the village was beyond the water, after a stable surface of land, and it was full of trees and flowers, being a land of delight. But to rejoice you must have a soul, a great soul. That’s why many did not rejoice, but looked at their needs, real and not imaginary, but I rejoiced. And I rejoice now! From afar or from close. But I see everything with different eyes, not distant and not cold, but full of prayer. Knowing that everything passes, but not those in my soul.
The air conditioning normalizes our sleep and heart rate. We no longer sweat, we can sleep deeply and restfully, I also remembered the dream from the morning. As I had a very energetic dog, and he wanted to eat, and I was with Lady Priestess and with grandmother Floarea in the house. And because we ran out of bread last night, I remembered in my sleep that we didn’t have any bread and I was thinking about where to get some to give to the dog. But we don’t have a dog anymore, the grandmother has been asleep for 13 years, but we’re going home next week. Before the Church’s feast day. Although we know the heat in our house in Scrioaștea during the summer. But then we go on vacation, to Sighișoara, and we don’t have time to go anymore. Because when we return, we prepare for the procession in Alexandria, then for the day of the Mother Priestess. Upon reaching the age of 48. The National Cathedral will be consecrated. Then I will also turn 48, so that we do not stop writing and our service. For I serve in order to write and I write in order to serve. And all our creation is dedication, it is joy, it is love, it is gratitude for all people.
The difference is capital: if the coffin is open and the deceased looks good, with his dignity, he commands respect; those who come to say goodbye see him in his silence and in his ultimate depth; but if people only see a throne, a closed one, their eyes do not stop at the deceased, but at those around him, the Funeral having no subject. It is as if the dead man is not dead. For everyone comes to the dead man to see him stiff, motionless, and not to speak to him. His every movement is a stupor on such an occasion. They come to see him, to pray for him, to come to realize that his death is real. For every dead person needs to be made aware by the community in this final posture. Leading him on his last journey is a familiarization with him as a dead person. Closing him in the grave is an exclusion of him from society. The dead with the dead, and the living with the living. And the living sit at the table and eat from the dead man’s alms, sitting at the table being a reminder about anything.
For example, when we saw the defunct skinning the deer – and Marian emphasized the word defunct, to show us that he knew it. He was there skinning the prey, and we fell on his head like a nuisance. That he didn’t expect to see us in the forest. And he, blushing, begged us not to talk about the deed, so as not to hurt him. But he, like a scoundrel, had confiscated my children’s fishing net and handed it over. As if he couldn’t ignore it. That they, the children, were also playing at the bend of the Olt river and had not come to catch fish to sell. Or Mr. Traian, the Mathematics Teacher, would come to the student’s home to meditate with him. The child would either grasp or not grasp the thread of Mathematics, then he would sit at the table, the brandy was brandy, then the food. And jokes, with or without a curtain, if it was just the student with his mother, that it was assumed that the child, and he being present, didn’t understand. But children understand many of the things that adults do, but they indulge in their guilty silence! That parents also allow themselves a lot with their children in front of them, and the moral relaxation is spreading like a plague in society. And you, poor by you, have been polluted by your family since you were a little child, you hear, see, smell, touch, understand many sins. And do you do them or not after them, but their sins are the carbon black of your life.
The Funerals are depressing or full of vitality. Some come to scan you in your pain, to enjoy your pain or to turn the occasion into a meeting with others. A gossip or business meeting. A romantic meeting. Because if the widow doesn’t give any clues, maybe some cousin, some co-mother-in-law, some sister has an inconsolable heart. And the one who has the antennae of fornication turned on, quickly receives the signal. The godliness has its good signs and the one who dislikes it quickly moves away from it. But the heat of fornication also has its signs and the excited one knows what to do even at the Funeral. Because you need a Facebook page or TikTok to enter into a relationship. Because words are chained together, desires are written among emoticons, and consent is near. And it doesn’t matter the place, if the passion is alive. Because passion keeps you bound, until you want to renounce its slavery.