Fragrance (novel) [61]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
You can hide things in plain sight. The more you realize this banal thing, the more you build worlds among people who don’t see your world. And the world grows in their midst, they think it was always there, but it wasn’t always there, you made it. You made it have a certain color, a certain simplicity. You can talk about her bar exam with luxury of details or, on the contrary, into a long phrase and cut with the knife. She brings the flowers with her arm, waters them, stands after them for hours to sell them. Their gazes are those of unwilling informants. The pregnant smell of food and the sweat of those preparing street food. The artisanal motorbikes of asian delivery drivers and their attempt, often failed, to walk on the bike path. For those who walk enter in countersense with them, having their thoughts elsewhere. And our steps seem to know the streets, they often walk without our attention, as our entire body moves, because our soul, although to some it seems absent, is present every second. And how could our true head, the one who leads us, be absent? But if we don’t know how to say much about our soul, because we don’t deal with it much, with its abysses and intensities, that doesn’t mean we are clowns walking the streets. When Gicu Goose entered the novel, he entered in the negative mode. It seemed to be a whim of the author, an oversight. But he can be a possessor of phrases. Any phrase can be put in his mouth, even if it is implausible. You wonder who he is, why precisely him, how his daughter is in Faculty, when he’s a peasant from here, from us, and it wasn’t written anywhere that he had to have such a good and smart daughter. But who, in our village, writes the annals of history, who writes what Gicu Ladyfinger[1] should say and do? If you don’t like Ladyfinger, he can be Peas, Baldaquin, Owl, Hen, Hives. Who, however, who writes what is right and what is wrong in our village? Because I keep hearing one and the other saying that this is good, but that is not good, and that it shouldn’t have been done, but he said it. So, andddd?!…He said what?!! Because if there is no right and wrong, everyone can say it. But is it really not written anywhere?!
When the romanian village was full of Church thinking, it knew how to think godly. He knew what was right and what was wrong. Now, since it has rarely been to Church, it is groping, it thinks it is emancipated, it is waving ideas that are not his own. And that’s why various anomalies appear, various people who disrupt the order of the village, because they think they are smarter than their ancestors in matters of normality. The city is full of uprooted people, of peasant souls who mourn their homes and vineyards. They don’t feel well, but they must live here. Their children are grown, they themselves are getting older, but they haven’t broken away from their house, their yard, their neighbors. They live half in the city, but with their feet in their village. And their going to Church is peasant, it’s like they’re in the village, even if the city imposes internal limits on them. Old woman Ghița is Ghițuleasa in the city, she has her rendez-vous clothes, her ladylike face, but she knows that she is an old woman, that she is a peasant deep down and she doesn’t regret it. She doesn’t deny what she is, but she likes to impress. Because now people don’t know where she comes from and whose she is. But if she met a fellow villager on the street, like that, in the middle of the day, she would immediately change his tune, talk to her like they do, that she hadn’t forgotten where she was from, she was just pretending. And she pretended because she was all alone, she wasn’t recognized, no one knew who she was, what she was like, who her relatives were. In the city you are a nobody, an ordinary person, whom anyone can pass by. And her inner struggle with this anonymity is done through the dull, theatrical street face, in which mimicry and gestures want to establish themselves as an ad hoc personality. A transient one. Because if no one knows her, she can be anyone. And on one street she can seem like a teacher, on another a minister, on another a florist, it depends on the charm she finds.
[1] To be seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladyfingers_(biscuits).