Fragrance (novel) [15]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
The transmissionist below me still has a phone call to make! Another balcony scene, another public speaking, and an evening cigarette. Whose foul smell rises to the upper floors, for it is a satanic sacrifice. The first person who showed me how is it like to do abstraction „the fools” around you was the italian who lived next door to us, when we were living in my mother-in-law’s vacant apartment. He talked loudly, laughed on the phone, brought women in whenever he wanted, and what they did was…communitarian. It was heard everywhere.
Yes, yes, sì[1], don’t stop!…And the fake moans of the young romanian women were flattering, because it seemed to him that he was a purebred stallion. But the stallion was 30 years older than them, he was at andropause, with a worn-out toy, but the moans were like a porn movie, they were ear-piercing for the neighbors, and when he led them down the hallway, towards the exit, he would annoy us in chorus or in the block, with the same audacity of a speaker with a megaphone. What became of him, where he went, how he disappeared, no one knows. A shooting star, a businessman of clouds, whom the wind blows quickly. But something is clear: here, in our country, many have become rich in a short time, they have marketed the saleable illusion, then they became invisible. We like to believe that some ended up behind bars, that they were expelled, that justice was done…But the corrupt justice, which receives money, closes its eyes. And the helmet leaves along with the bracelets, with the tons of gold, with the tons of wood, with the tons of our sincerity. And if you have the taste of bitterness in your mouth, you don’t have it because it’s false, but because it’s as real as breathing.
Uncle Coman was brought online after I, as well as Lady Priestess, saw him in a bar in the former bus station, now disbanded, of Sighișoara. Where the green bus stops, although there is a new bus station a little further on. He drinks tactfully at a table, talks a lot, talks about himself, but the most unusual thing about him is that he has an enormous nose. I saw him up close two or three times, when I went and came back from the 3 lei toilet of the bar, and I realized that he is the man with the biggest nose I have ever seen in my life. I couldn’t take a close-up photo of him, I took a photo of him from behind, as he walked towards the taxi and got into it. But a few days later, as if reading my mind, someone pulled up two video clips of him. And I was able to show him to others from the front, because I had talked about him. Why the nose full of pimples? Why its unexpected length? That I immediately connected him with the witches with warts on their noses, with those who do a lot of evil in the lives of the ignorant. He worked at a grain depot. The only thing known about him. Probably widower. And the serialization of several faces, because they have a certain common feature, starts to be done from a certain point by your mind. It is enough to look carefully at all kinds of people’s faces. Live or online. To be careful, that’s all! Because all sorts of details will stick in your mind.
And then you realize that that woman, who had just climbed the steps of the Cathedral in Târgu Mureș, looks like Mariana, and that the one on the road, after I had just drunk a juice and charged my phone, looked like Mother Benedicta. The hair and certain sad details of the face at one and the same face and a certain dignified decorum at the second, come to bring Bușulenga to us. And the unexpectedness of their appearance is interesting! Just as unexpected is the way you are served at the table, with the same dish, which each chef makes differently. When you expect the greek salad to have many leaves, it has a lot of cheese and olives. And when you want no one to notice you, to pass unnoticed, to rest in the anonymity of the street, you meet an acquaintance at the crossroads, in a restaurant, in a bookstore, at the exit of a Church, in a field, where you would not think. Why did I meet him or her right there and not when I wanted to? Why not when I was ready for such a meeting, when I was free inside, when I would have liked to meet them? Unexpected encounters make you immediately. To respond promptly, to reveal a part of yourself without wanting to, to put yourself tempestuously in words. He’s in a hurry to get through, you really have to say something, maybe the meeting with me is unprepared for him too. And so, neither of us wanting a dialogue now, right now, this dialogue is taking place, it’s pulled by the hair, it’s happening somehow and will remain as an event that will embarrass both of us. Or at least one of us.
Oh, yes, Coman’s big nose resembles the big nose of my colleague Șt.!…He raises his nose or lowers his nose when he sees me. So that he won’t be seen. Because he’s in a different entourage now, in the entourage of smoke clouds. Because he has a lot to tell us, and if we listened to him, we would yawn, because it is important beyond measure, in his mind, not in ours. The faces painted of feelings are my frescoes. The inexpressive ones have their ideas inside. They are safe thieves. They hide in the bunker inside themselves with everything they have, feel and want and think that there are no eyes for them. But, yes, it exists! Just as there are charlatans which flow into many words, into all kinds of words, without themselves being in them.
[1] Yes, in italian language.