The Romanian

by Bruce Benderson

  In this eruption of Nature, I think of Brancusi. His spiritual journey has, perhaps, something to tell me. Early versions of The Kiss show the lovers bound together in an infantile fantasy in stone—the rest of the world pushed into another realm. But between 1935 and 1938, The Kiss expands into a memorial for those who died in World War I. It takes the form of a gate, an enormous archway that is part of an ensemble celebrating love, in a park in the town of Tîrgu Jiu. To transform The Kiss into The Gate of the Kiss, the two lovers had to be moved far apart in a gesture of objectivity, forming an arch, which created an entrance that let in the whole world. Brancusi described The Gate of the Kiss as a “fragment of a temple of love,” and the critic Sidney Geist said the gate was “love and community, upheld by sexual energy.” He didn’t see the fact that Brancusi created variations of this image over and over during a forty-year period as obsessional, but merely as “reverie” that attains the cosmic, something “outside of chronological time.”

  It took forty years for Brancusi’s kiss to invite us inside. But when it did, it opened itself up to the universe. The cleft circle of its two joined eyes, once blind, now gazed out at us. By some miracle, Brancusi had turned obsessive love into agape, a love of life’s energies.

  Just as dawn is peeking over a hillside, the storm dies abruptly. The hills and curves smooth out as we near Baia Mare, and in the gradually increasing light, everything turns limpid. I want to touch the moist air. It’s clear and viscous, the way water gets when okra is boiled. Beyond an odd formation of wet haystacks piled into perfect cones like some witch’s charm is a tile-roofed brick barn with ornately carved wooden doors. Through its open window I can see a cow’s full udder and haunches; and the tree beside it, split lengthwise by last night’s lightning, is spectral, vulnerable, like Romulus’s face now.

  An ancient wooden Orthodox church with a steep shingled steeple looms from a grassy hillside. It’s a style of architecture that’s been termed “Maramureş gothic” by historians because of its high, sloping roofs and razor-thin steeples. Huge, wet fields, some dotted with sheep hovering in the morning mist, swallow the landscape.

  The sheep lead us to the outskirts of Baia Mare, a mining and metal-processing city remade in an insipid image of the new global market. Again, a strange metallic odor in the air, but not nearly as bad as in Turda. We find a white, suburban-looking hotel and fall on our beds without unpacking. Images of the rain-swept road are still pulsing behind my eyelids as I sink into a black sleep.

  XXI

  THAT EVENING, after a late dinner, we decide to check out what’s left of the shrunken old quarter, where everything is already closed for the night. All we can find is a bar tended by two grinning teenagers in Scottish kilts. It’s a novelty act. One of them has even bleached his hair blond. With dignified curiosity, they circle us while we sip our single malts. As usual, we form an eerie twosome—an overfed middle-aged American talking in hooded, wheedling tones to a petite, hawk-nosed Romanian hustler with sharp, distrustful eyes, hollow cheeks and pointed teeth. What do they think of us? The question dissolves into the second single malt.

  Out on the street, an aggressive chill has claimed the air. It feels more like September than July. A young stray dog starts to follow us, acting as if we’re familiar. When we slow down, he lingers; when we speed up, he gallops by our side. This isn’t the abject ferocity of the poor bitch in Bucharest, but youthful optimism; and before long it begins to touch me. The shivering animal’s body is thin and dirty, his brown-and-black fur scruffy, but his eyes are eager, full of good nature. “I feel sorry for him,” I say.

  “Not me, a dozen of those I brought to home in Sibiu. I feed them, then give to friends.”

  “Why is that a reason not to feel sorry for him?”

  Romulus shrugs, and when we pass a kiosk, I suggest we buy the pup a can of pork pâté. It doesn’t occur to me that we have no can opener. Romulus stomps on the can with a stone lodged under his thick platform shoe. Finally it pops open, pâté oozing out like lava. But our canine friend, frightened by the noise and the aggressive gesture of Romulus’s stamping, has disappeared. We leave the can right there on the sidewalk in front of a respectable-looking home, in case the dog decides to come back. I can imagine a woman hurrying from her house to work the next morning, stepping into the mess with one of her high heels.

  “Don’t you know what she do?” says Romulus. “Eat it. And if I didn’t have you taking care of me, maybe me, too.”

  I know what he meant, but I quip, “You’re saying she’d eat you, too?”

  “No! My meat is too bitter.”

  THE NEXT MORNING is exceedingly clear, tingeing the mountains surrounding the city a deep purple. Still traumatized by the drive here, we bribe a good-looking, golden-eyed taxi driver, all in blue, an ex-peasant who used to work in the nearby mines, to take us to the villages on the other side of nearby Mount Gutîi. His name is Emil, and his car is a puttering twenty-year-old Dacia with a floorboard as riddled with holes as a sieve. We pass a smelting plant spewing smoke from a thirty-story chimney and jerk up the winding single-lane road, until we’re lost in thick forest, then caught in a cul-de-sac. It’s a clearing with a strange totem pole rising in the center, carved with cryptic, constantly reversing pictographs. Emil motions for us to get out of the car and draw nearer. Pointing at the weird structure, he says, “Brancusi, the column.”

  It’s not, of course, as he thinks, Brancusi’s legendary Endless Column, cast in iron in a foundry at Turda and standing in the park in Tîrgu Jiu with The Gate of the Kiss. It’s just a New Age totem by a local artist, who like Brancusi is inspired by schematic images of Nature: suns, plants, birds in flight. It also reminds me of pictures of those wooden “death poles” in Brancusi’s province of Oltenia—long, thin columns, carved with the angles he later reproduced, sometimes topped by a bird, that mark individual graves, like Jacob’s ladders transporting the soul to heaven.

  Back in the car, Emil begins chattering in a mixture of pidgin English and Romanian. To quell any suspicion, Romulus has him convinced that I’m a writer doing research for an American magazine and that he’s my paid guide. The corners of Emil’s lips are white with froth, so excited is he about my being from New York. His most pressing concern is the women there, whether they’re as hot and easy to tumble as those in Romania. “Not really,” I tell him, thinking of the many long-limbed, almond-eyed women I’ve seen in this country. Most of them seem to have a savvy knowledge of their sexual power as well as a fatalistic attitude about some of its consequences.

  Emil pushes the subject to a daringly off-color level until the three of us are talking about pussy and ass with the clichéd enthusiasm of working-class guys. For him and Romulus, it’s obviously a preferred topic, and I get my kicks from the atmosphere of male arousal. Emil’s hand keeps brushing against the crotch of his vivid blue trousers. He’s fallen into a casual, bar-room mood, and after each dirty joke, pinches my arm.

  Farther up the mountain, thick fog suddenly enfolds us. We’re driving at the edge of a precipice, but at times it feels as if our right wheels are hanging off. All of this is subjective, since visibility has been reduced to zero. This doesn’t faze Emil, who only increases his speed. He puts a tape in his cassette player. A raucous rendition of boom-boom party songs by Nicu Noval hammers away at my anxiety. We scud through the dense fog as he begins describing some of the wilder parties, culminating in orgies, that he’s attended. Romulus’s eyes twinkle with perverse pleasure at my fear of falling off the mountain, as if he knew all along that both our existences were only a sick joke.

  Just as the ironic delight on his face seems to be the last image of my life, the fog lifts like a pulled-back stage drop. The limpid, glossy mountain light returns, wrapping us in a thrilling cocoon. We’re on the other side of the mountain, approaching the village of Mara, on a single road lined by large, ornately carved roofed gates that look like variations of The Gate of the Kiss. Behind them are the steep brown-shing
led roofs of farmhouses. Now we really are in the heart of Maramureş, which is called ţara lemnului renghiat, or “land of ornate wood carving,” by Romanians.

  Over Nicu Noval’s partying baritone, our driver explains that a villager’s status used to be determined by how elaborate his gate was. My eyes fix on the most humble—two mangled, moss-covered tree trunks to which have been affixed a mass of branches, like an upright harrow, behind which chickens scurry and a ferocious dog barks. It’s part of a long line of gates of varying size and quality. In fact, the entire village, delineated by a row of gates, is laid out before us on this one main road. All is silent, and we’re the only motorized vehicle. Nothing passes us except a flatbed being pulled by two oxen. Even the faces of those few people I see working in the fields look detached and beyond context. “Is because even Romans could not penetrate these mountains,” Romulus explains.

  The most elaborate gate in town is a massive structure covered with rosettes, geometric designs and vaguely anthropomorphic shapes. Detached from house and barn, offering merely a façade to the road, like the others it serves no function besides the symbolic. Gates here represent the threshold between the inner world—and inner life—of the peasant, situated in his home, and the outside world. Later I’ll read that the gates also have a deeper spiritual meaning. They represent the threshold between this life and the world beyond death, a religious affirmation that life and death are easily connected.

  Surprisingly, the cryptic ornaments carved into the gates are derived from pre-Christian Thraco-Dacian, Greek and even Persian cults, which found their way into Romania over tens of centuries of migration and whose imagery hasn’t yet been swept away by the cleansing tide of money. But today, what were simplified images of natural mysteries have lost most of their occult power, becoming merely aesthetic designs. The rosettes once paid homage to the cult of the Sun. The childlike stalks with branches are artifacts of the Tree of Life, whose constant burgeoning eventually reaches heaven; and the unfolding spiral is no different from the shape of the universe, which curls upward and back into itself in an infinite series.

  Later the French writer Benoît Duteurtre, looking at pictures I took, will claim that the gates of Maramureş look African; and scholars of Brancusi, such as the astute Edith Balas, maintain that Brancusi’s influence comes from both Africa and the Romanian peasant, and that both these cultures preserved an essential relationship to matter by escaping the merchandising influence of Mediterranean civilization. This is, then, an aboriginal geometry, uncorrupted by the greed for objects that began with the Industrial Revolution and continued through late capitalism.

  Brancusi’s goal was to reconnect with these elemental forms of matter. He dreamed of sculpting through all the subsequent significations to their fundamental core. The capacity was in his blood and articulated the lonely, exultant years he spent as a shepherd as well as the isolated latter part of his life. But if, in some modernist project, he could strip down matter until it revealed its form beyond the trappings of technology, it was because his fellow peasants had been doing it that same way for thousands of years.

  Past the elaborate gate is a fence of long, slender twigs woven in a zigzag pattern along vertical stakes. It’s another specialty of this region, which is still living in the “epoch of wood”—the ability to make wooden structures without the use of nails. Behind the woven fence stands an old man in a conical hat, padded vest and rubber boots, his blue eyes clouded by cataracts. He’s using a thick, whittled branch to scrape mud from a trough carved from a log. So fixed is he on his task that he seems hypnotized, aware of our gawking presence but finding little meaning in it. This reminds me of descriptions of Brancusi working patiently from the core of a meditative trance in his studio tucked away from the hubbub of Paris.

  Behind the old man is his low-slung house with its drooping shingled roof, the walls constructed according to the Blockbau system of interlocking beams at the corners, like an American log cabin. With the last of the mud scraped, he peers up at us, but not very closely, taking a cue from our curious faces to invite us inside.

  The interior produces a visceral shock. It’s an intensely blue room with clay walls, as minimal as and much cruder than a Shaker house. Everything except the hundred-year-old wood stove, his only source of heat, could have existed in the sixteenth century. There are two stools, which, like the bench, bowls and spoons, have been hand-carved by the old man himself. One stool, a backless pedestal like the mushroom-shaped structures around The Table of Silence that is part of Brancusi’s installation in Tîrgu Jiu, still shows the sloping marks of the axe. It reminds me that for Brancusi there was very little division between the practical and the aesthetic. He was as much an artisan as an artist, and his stools sometimes served as pedestals for his art or as art themselves.

  The old man points to a large sunken structure with a chimney, made from the same clay as the walls, which he says he uses as a bread-baking oven. It’s almost identical to the clay oven that Brancusi built in his Paris atelier, which can be seen in a reconstruction of the room at the Centre Pompidou. Running along the top of two walls in the old man’s vivid blue room are crinkled paper illustrations of Eastern Orthodox saints. Hanging from horizontal poles above the narrow bed, which is covered with a handwoven sheep’s-wool blanket like those I saw at the mititei stop, are rugs, evidently the most valuable of his earthly possessions.

  In this house without electricity or running water, there isn’t any distraction, such as a book. Certainly, back-breaking labor beginning at five a.m. and illiteracy preclude leisure activities; but it’s clear from the man’s placid, slightly arrogant face that he has no need for pleasure or meaning outside work, rest or prayer.

  “I’d go crazy here,” Romulus whispers in my ear. “There’s no television.” And then he adds, “I never told to you, but here just like my grandfather’s.”

  It hits me. If Romulus’s family’s village hadn’t been razed to build a factory and his family exiled to a city, he might still be here or someplace like it, in mute preoccupation with the forces of Nature. My hunch is confirmed when the old man, who’s been making a show of ignoring me, fixes him with indulgent, almost tender eyes, then slyly mumbles a phrase in Romanian. Romulus blushes, almost hanging his head.

  “What did he say to you?” I ask, as we’re walking back to the taxi.

  Romulus tries to shrug it off, but the blush returns to his face. “He bless me.”

  Yet not even the blessing of the old man can save Romulus—and perhaps the old man himself—from that great shift toward the West and its materialistic values that was accelerated by the fall of Communism. It’s a shift that will continue as the European Union pushes eastward, until perhaps even the old man or his son finds its tentacles at his doorstep, questioning his children’s health and education, suggesting better ways to till his field, frowning at his unlicensed plum brandy or grinningly promoting cartoon versions of his seasonal rituals, as designed by an ethnographer in Bucharest.

  IN THE VILLAGE OF HĂRNICEŞTI, we pull alongside a graveyard and climb the steep hill on foot. The corroded metal crosses are hand-lettered. Women with grimy hands, in kerchiefs and long woolen socks, rake leaves and clip branches. Their faces are set in a perpetual half-smile that reminds me of the best times I’ve been high. Is it the smile of Christian piety, a satisfied pantheism or merely isolation from modern distractions? Obviously, they believe they owe a certain humility to the mystery of death, and to both living and inanimate things. Their gestures betray an eerie lack of ambivalence, without any tendency to irony or struggle. Next to them, Romulus in his cheap club-kid platforms with dollar signs in his squinting eyes and me in my East Village black jacket and jowls set in intellectual ambivalence must look like the picture of degeneration.

  We move away and climb to the top of the hill to look at the sharp-angled wooden church, probably similar to those Brancusi’s grandfather, a church builder, used to carpenter in Oltenia. Its outdoor religio
us paintings and wooden cross have been draped with crisp white embroidered cotton shawls. I pick up a green apple that has fallen onto a weed-choked grave and bite into it. Romulus points to the name of the deceased on the rusting metal cross and tells me to thank that lady for feeding me.

  In Giuleşti, we pass a farmhouse flying a black flag that Romulus says is a sign of a recent death. Just as when we saw the dead body in the road, his eyes brim with hushed respect. Two doors away is a tree whose branches have been adorned with upside-down pots, pans and pails in bright colors. Emil winks at the tree and makes a remark to Romulus in Romanian. “He say we must hurry past,” says Romulus.

  “How come?”

  “The pails mean there is girl looking for husband.”

  The black flag, pails and even the conical haystacks are elements of the peasants’ rich mystical life, most of which predate Christianity. In fact, the region is fraught with the notion that talismans and charms connect the user with hidden forces, that everyday occurrences—the crowing of a cock, a raven flying overhead—hold signs about the future, portending good or ill luck. These spiritual tools keep the mind focused on the authority of natural processes; but in more sophisticated settings, they degenerate into superstitions and prejudices that can open the mind to manipulative mythologies, such as those that were projected onto Lupescu, Carol’s mistress, merely for being Jewish. Later, in New York, I’ll read about the Romanian mystic Carmen Harra, who lives in Queens and counsels people about color energy, bedecking herself in all kinds of magical precious stones. This will confirm my conception of Romania as a well of occult belief that enriches art and literature but that also provides fodder for irrational constructions—going so far as to have interfaced at one time with Fascism. For better or for worse, the joke between Romulus and Emil about the pail-covered tree has betrayed their folkish link to each other, and puts me on watch for Romulus’s peasant qualities. He’s spent his whole life waiting for luck, looking for signs of it with a kind of fatalism; and he supplements this fatalism with the best skills of a shrewd hunter and gatherer, picking up booty like me.