Fragrance (novel) [52]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
He was returning from the boy and had no one to tell him that his son was successful. That he has money, a nice, clean house, because he has a fitness center in Piperum. And his daughter, a handful of man, also had 7 thousand euros, because she does graphics for films. And he got off at Alexandria, on the rain, but only after he had also expressed his pride. But the one next to him, also on the phone, had her own thoughts that did not share the pride of the man in the yellow jacket, who did not feel comfortable in the bucharester crowd. That people, at Bucharest, must travel kilometers to work and are stuck in traffic both there and back. But in Alexandria there is space to turn around, you go quickly, you arrive immediately, but it is not the Bucharest. That everyone wants to go to the Capital, but without the life and skills of the Capital, like a fox looking at grapes. But the spring will come! Autumn-winter has begun, but the spring will come! And then we will finish the bridge, when the storks return on march 25, or at least we will resume work on it. This exhausting work of watching the cement harden in the supporting legs.
Fields waiting. The sky is leaden of Funeral. Calm, collected, I write while the car is running, as if they know that I don’t like exhaust fumes. And whoever looks at me gives their opinion, asks themselves, although they don’t know how good I felt yesterday publishing 4 books in the same day. Books are fulfillment. Beyond their toil is your rest, it is real fulfillment. And if some go down to the mushroom, I go down to Saint Ilie, because his grave is there, in the silence of the earth, protecting us all. And the cold rain, because it snowed in Bâlea, is my friend, because it makes me have a good heart rhythm. And, in the rhythm of my heart carrying my prayer and silence, everything is good, very good, because I rejoice. And I can say that I rejoice a lot, because my joy is my God. And everything I see does me good, because I see everyone and everything enjoying themselves.
A lot of rain, the likes of which I haven’t seen in a long time, since that summer when the ditches filled up and overflowed, and we, the children, jumped into the water in the ditch as if into a swimming pool. And while we were enjoying plenty of water, of such novelty, happily resulting after hours of rain, grandmother Floarea took us outside with a rod, because she was thinking about our health and not our joy. And we had to bathe in the tub, in the house, to really wash ourselves, in order to realize the difference between joy without the awareness of risks and real bathing, the one that puts you to bed and makes you sleep. And I walked through the rain for a good part of the day, I went, I came back, I went and I came back again, because I had no more bread, this after I buried Nița, with a beautiful, ruddy face in the coffin, who reminded me of grandmother Floarea, but whose n was mistakenly changed to an m on the Cross. We corrected the mistake in the Service, we said it with n, the water was everywhere, music from Gorj on the bus, in 3, with the driver 4, one recorded at a Wedding and which you hear like at Michael Jackson’s concert in Bucharest[1]. That it has just been 33 years since that date, my cousin, and some still believe that the star is not dead! The rockers went unwashed and with skulls on their T-shirts, Depeche Mode fans had flared pants, if you knew how to dance like Michael, it was good to know ice, ice, baby[2], our discos were a sweat full of music and we sought peace in a blues, because we were hugging our dance partner as if facing an ultimatum. The sadness before and after the dance had all of adolescence in them. You expected a dream girl-friend, a young girl who knew you better than you knew yourself, and this in the absence of communication between us. You wanted her to come and save you from your loneliness, when you should have gone and taken her out of her dreams. And the distance between dream and reality was like the distance between a well-written book and the opening of her mouth, which said such tasteless banalities that you believed them and kissed her. Because, beyond the kiss, the young woman in question, the dance of the embrace, the decade of your adolescence, you were looking for happiness, that state that has no end, because it is all the peace you need.
[1] Live concert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxgo-Qu-ZZE. From october 1, 1992.
[2] With reference to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE.