Fragrance (novel) [48]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
„It seems to me”, the literary critic told me, „that this novel cannot have a stable narrative thread, as long as you abandon every story you start. What is, in fact, the stakes of your novel?”. I have a deep sense of reality and I enjoy everything that is true. And what matters now is not to finish a life story, but to talk about myself as a witness to reality, who takes note of the reality of people’s lives. Sometimes, as in painting, you need a brushstroke, a revealing line to say something about a person, about a life situation. And I, if I talk about someone, I talk from within them, understanding them, and suddenly you understand a lot from a few details. You see the whole through the part, you see the essential.
Good people, as you suspected, my neighbor, well merçi, is at home, minding his own business, he is not in prison! I am glad I reassured you. Because the life is simpler or very simple, when it is not complicated by the author of the novel. My neighbor takes his children to School, he is the father-mother, because his wife is the man in the house, and he has no problems. Absolutely none. Sometimes he also has a friend, with whom he goes out at italians to have a beer and eat pasta, and then the children stay with a young woman, paid as a nanny. The nanny comes in, tack-tack she closes the door, and she stays with the children. Until the neighbor returns, sometimes more smoky, because that’s how it is after a meal with a friend, the nanny is the mother of the children, because their mother works. And when she comes back from work, around 18 or so, I hear her heels by the door, while I write or pray, and the vicinity is good.
Why say you have problems, when you don’t?! And why see problems in the world, in all kinds of people, and paint them for posterity, when there are no problems?!! What are the problems, Mister Father?!!! Come on, tell me too, I’m listening to you, what are the problems of the world!!!! That people die, that they die, as they are born, because they are born. And whoever has, has, whoever doesn’t has less, and if you work, you have. Or if you don’t have and steal, you steal until you don’t steal anymore, you become „honorable”, because others did it, and you have. But if you don’t have courage in life, in the sense of taking your life into your own hands and succeeding, that’s why you complain all day long, you find all kinds of tares in the wheat and diseases in healthy people.
This was Mitică! He’s not a foreman, but a Sports Teacher, but he has a more pragmatic perspective on existence. This is one of those who cuts social benefits, disability benefits, PhD bonuses, student scholarships, stops people from going to the Emergency Room and has no appetite for Religion and Culture, because everyone must work only with their hands, not their heads. For him, Sport is just football, as if there weren’t a thousand branches of Sport in practice. But, when you get him on the ropes and ask him specific questions, he turns his philosophy of life inside out and makes peace with everyone. Especially with women, because he’s crazy about them. There were some growls that he had assaulted some young women, that he had done them, but in the end he made peace with them or their parents, I don’t know how he managed it, but he’s our Mitică, he’s a good boy. And you must understand that for some people, ideas are just talk, they’re a kind of seed to crack in the teeth, to pass the time, and not a backbone.
When you say ideas at Saint Pavlos the Apostle or at Eminescu, you say something big, something revealed, something difficult. But on the street corner, in offices, in factories, at the market, it’s not about ideas, but about the passage of time, you say it, I say it, we leave each other’s side, after half an hour, and we don’t even know each other’s names. But we know what we believe, what we saw, what we heard, what we read, what it seemed to us, and that’s what matters. Opinion, saying, distorted truth is the content of social murmur, of gossip, of chatter, and if you’ve had your brandy and smoked someone else, you get up and leave in the mood for a meal, if the wife also made dinner and didn’t watch movies.