Five years! I’d never given them thought, never counted them. The master’s reflections came back to me anew. Five years. I added them up – exactly five.
I can still recall that rainy day in March; the master, old Rice, Dronţu and I getting out of the automobile in the middle of Uioara, surrounded by frightened children and spied on by the entire village, holed up in their houses behind windows and curtains. Rice hadn’t anticipated entering a completely hostile area. All we had to go on was a vague notion from the papers about the conflict between Rice Ltd, Mining Surveyors, and the peasants who were the previous owners of the concession. In any case, I knew nothing about the extent of the conflict. Possibly not even Rice had any idea how serious things were, as he had signed a whole string of cheques and was under the impression that this had resolved everything. This bony American would never lose the awe-inspiring attitude of a man who could say, ‘I can pay!’ wherever he went, at any moment, to anyone.
That first walk of ours on the site was a sombre affair – Rice, calm, hands in pockets, the master with a silence that was at the same time interrogatory, Dronţu curious, looking in bafflement at the deserted little street, crossed only by an occasional panicked chicken, a sign at least that the place wasn’t utterly dead.
‘Hello!’ shouted Dronţu randomly, in case anyone could hear.
Nobody replied and we wandered on in that ringing silence, far past the edge of the village, from where you could see the scaffolding of the first test wells some three kilometres away.
Despite our strange reception, the fine rain in our faces and that muddy washed-out road, the landscape was beautiful. Immense chunks of black earth had recently been cut from the flank of the hillside. Great boulders and the trunks of giant trees had been tossed about together as though in the wake of a giant plough.
A cold, gusty wind blew, the sharp smell of damp vegetation stronger than that of burning oil and coal.
From the derricks came the beating of hammers and the high, almost musical, whine of a saw. The sounds were distinct in the thawing March air.
The master looked around 360 degrees, taking in his domain, and I immediately understood that the project interested him. He made several sketches on the spot, took some photographs (I’m still amazed today at the speed with which he took in the relevant features of a site), noted some figures, gathered all the papers and prints in an attaché case and said briefly, in conclusion: ‘We’ll see.’
On the way back, in the automobile, I asked Rice to tell me something about the people who lived in Uioara.
‘Never seen them,’ he confessed. ‘They run away from me and I’m not crazy about them either. I paid for the land to the last penny, as evaluated by the surveys. What more do they want? They’re stubborn and stupid.’
‘It must be because of the plums,’ interjected Marin Dronţu.
‘What plums?’
‘The plum trees. Didn’t you see them? They’re white from top to bottom. No idea what the hell fell on them: cigarette ashes, coal dust – no idea what it could be.’
‘It’s drilling mud,’ Rice informed us. ‘What we used for test-drilling. Last autumn I took a first sounding from Hole A 19.’
‘But couldn’t the plum trees have been protected?’ exclaimed Dronţu, rather to our surprise.
‘Nonsense, sir. It’s clear you don’t know the oil business. There are inevitable risks. And they’re usually minimal. And what’s a plum tree at the end of the day?’
‘Well, this is the source of your quarrel with the people of Uioara. You don’t know what a plum tree is.’
I’ve recalled this comment of Dronţu’s many times, since there would have been no conflict in the area, no litigation, if it hadn’t been for those damned trees, which he, having come straight from the land, had seen from the first with his peasant’s eye.
‘This thing with the plum trees is serious,’ he tells me still, when at the derricks we come across somebody from Old Uioara and he looks straight at us, scowling, tugging his cap down over his ears to make sure we notice he’s not greeting us.
Rice understands nothing. ‘These people are crazy,’ he shouts. ‘Completely crazy,’ he goes on, ‘but you have to deal with their madness.’
I still laugh today when I remember old Ralph’s face in April five years ago, in his office in Piaţa Rosetti, when the master put the preliminary proposals before him.
To perform a new evaluation of the concession area and to distribute supplementary compensation. The village of Uioara will be moved from its present location to one several kilometres to the right, to the valley of the river Ursu, its new location. Conservation of all orchards beyond this point and the regeneration of those previously harmed by drilling mud and oil, and avoiding any future harm.
The present village of Uioara is being bought from the peasants who are its beneficiaries and will be at the disposal of the company for the construction of any buildings necessary in future: refineries, storage facilities, offices, housing for engineers and officials, roads to the wells and derricks. The village of Uioara is simply erased from its present location on the map and rebuilt in the valley of the river Ursu, so that nothing stands in the way between the wells and Company headquarters.
‘Absurd,’ shouted Ralph Rice. ‘Absurd,’ echoed all the mining engineers.
The master’s plan was indeed a grave matter. The risks were clearly great, and it was arguable whether it would succeed.
Nevertheless, Rice argued it. I’ll never forget the hours of fighting in the old man’s office, where the master, stimulated by coffee and cigarettes, argued until three or four in the morning night after night, using sketches, diagrams and figures, Rice listening to him, furious and sombre, pacing from one corner of the office to the other, exclaiming from time to time or beating his fist on the desk when he felt he couldn’t argue back. It was impassioned and exhausting.
The general meeting of technicians was indignant that an architect, a layman, had the nerve to stick his nose in business he did not understand.
‘Your job is to take care of the construction side of the business. To build a refinery, an office block and a number of homes. That’s all. What’s the hurry with oil, drilling mud and wells?’
‘I don’t care about your wells. Whether you’re extracting petrol, vegetable oil or whey, it’s all the same to me. However, I can’t build using scraps. I need a site and I need space. And furthermore, I can’t build an industrial complex in a village of viticulturists. And I can’t build to the right of the village, because I’m not so mad as to leave a belt of peasants between the complex and the wells whom you’ll fumigate or poison a year or ten from now, or else their plum trees, and who will one day get fed up with the smoke and set fire to you too, along with the wells and the whole petrol game.’
… The argument would go on until dawn without a conclusion, and with both combatants exhausted.
Every point of the plan was buried and resurrected ten times. Everything old Ralph acquiesced to would be retracted the next day, when he’d got his strength back. One day, when the matter seemed further from resolution than ever, he went along with everything, signed everything, surrendered completely. At the beginning of May, I turned the first sod. That was five years ago …
How hard it was and yet how simple! What I love most about architecture is its progressive simplification of an idea, how the dream takes shape. For all the precision of the original plans, there’s something nebulous about the beginning of any construction project, as the precision is technical and abstract, and the concrete feelin
g of realizing it comes only later, after life has begun cooperating with your work. In these five years of work all I can recognize is the outline of the master’s plans. The rest has come through surprises, through encountering opposition, through accidents.
‘The village of Uioara will be moved several kilometres to the right, to the valley of the river Ursu.’ It was easy to say. And to do, up to a certain point. But we had to contend with unforeseen opposition, and were obliged to take account of superstitions and hidden forces which never figured in any plan. Nor is New Uioara exactly the village the master designed, a transplantation of the old community of viticulturists, held at arm’s length from Rice’s enterprises. And nor has Old Uioara been completely replaced by industrial buildings. There were some old maniacs who wouldn’t give up their old homes for anything and stupidly stayed on with their plum trees, battling waves of crude oil and drilling mud, and beyond in New Uioara some of the disoriented young men decided they’d had enough of tending vines and headed down into the valley, towards the wells, to become oil workers. This two-way traffic has changed the whole region, sweeping through old communities and precipitating changes in the structure of society. All this was too complex to have foreseen.
There is less litigation than before, but there is still enough. Rice keeps paying and they keep suing. There are some local adversaries who won’t give up while they’re still breathing.
From time to time a window or two gets smashed at the refinery or the offices. Where do these stones fall from? Who throws them? Why? As usual, the investigation makes little progress. It’s more prudent that way. Twenty years from now, everything will be forgotten completely.
Meanwhile, we build. The refinery was finished nearly two years ago. I’m astounded today to think that I participated in its construction. The offices have gone well enough, the houses incomparably better. I think by next summer we’ll have finished everything. We’ve kept moving our cabin and building site outwards, always towards the edge of this little town, which has gone up before us. Five years! I can’t believe how it’s flown.
*
There’s been a switch of night-shifts at the oil wells. From here, on the porch of the cabin, the lamps of those returning to the village are clearly visible. It hasn’t rained for about two weeks and the night is perfectly clear. Towards Ploieşti, the sky is phosphorescent. It must have been a terribly hot day there. The newspapers talk of 40 degrees in Bucharest.
How strange the chirping of the crickets seems, here, among factory smokestacks, oil wells, water tanks and factory walls!
Occasionally a locust will leap from among the stones and disappear somewhere. We haven’t managed to wipe out the flora and fauna of the area. The grass grows furiously wherever there’s a scrap of soil. A few days ago, Marin Dronţu was astonished to glimpse a squirrel on top of the house. (But where did it come from? Where?)
The persistence of the natural world, of centuries of vegetation. This too will pass … Nothing remains unchanged when Ralph T. Rice descends upon it …
The nights here are long, calm and congenial. I can’t bear to go to bed. I read a little, stroll a bit, and spend a long time stretched out on the deckchair ‘with the stars’ as Dronţu calls it, ironically. There was talk of going this evening to the home of a young couple, the Duntons, to play music on the gramophone. They’ve received some new records from England. But I feel so lazy.
I think Dronţu has a romantic assignment in Uioara. A fresh conquest. ‘Some of these girls, pal, they’re like roses.’
‘You’ll be the terror of the women, Marin.’
‘Well, yeah, why not? Do I have the energy? You bet I do.’
Twice a week he escapes to the city to buy powders and perfumes for the ‘girls and wives’. He has a special love for rouge and tobacco-scent. All New Uioara smells of bad cologne.
It would be easy to establish by smell the houses where our Marin has passed through and made a conquest.
Green leaf of the beanstalk
You’re a miserable little weed
I hear him singing inside in his room, and his happiness is infectious. In several minutes he’ll come out ‘prepared’, with a stiff collar, a red tie and a walking stick in hand, and he’ll say to me again, before leaving:
‘I wouldn’t put myself out for that Marjorie you’re all swooning over, wouldn’t put myself out, though I could sweep her away. In three days, the game would be played out. I’d have her wrapped around my little finger. But I don’t like her, sir, I don’t like her, she’s pale and kitten-eyed. Call yourselves men? Tulips, the lot of you.’
I needed time to learn to know and love Marin. At first, I couldn’t for the life of me understand what he was doing in the master’s office. I don’t think he’s achieved much as an architect. A decent sort, scoring just enough marks to graduate, he was doubtlessly a useful office worker. He is less use in the workshop, disliking calculations and drawing boards, rather better on site, where he sees and does everything. Anyhow, I was more than a little surprised to find him in the office of the most refined man I know.
Mircea Vieru is a Cartesian lost in Bucharest.
Marin Dronţu is a seminarian lost in architecture. A seminarian in his mode of thought, in his superstitions, in his stubbornness. ‘Salt of the earth’, as they say, flatteringly – a compliment that Mircea Vieru would detest, he being composed of a thousand nuances and not at all straightforward.
But Marin happily accepts such a description. And Marin (from whom I’ve learned to call Vieru ‘master’, though it was hard at first to call him anything other than ‘sir’) loves him with devotion, like a subject. ‘He’s a Lord,’ he told me once, with utter respect, speaking of the master, and his use of this word endeared him to me because I understood that if Vieru is in fact a lord then Dronţu is, in turn, a peasant rather than the urbanite he strives to be, with his offhand manner, his vulgar sense of humour and his three-tone ties.
Later, when I heard from others the story of the chapel which he erected in his village in Gorj with money scrimped daily, in poverty, when I heard the proud inscription he engraved there in stone, I thought there was after all something to him that outbalanced his vocation as a successful Lothario with ‘the ladies’, as he called them, proud of his conquests.
‘This chapel has been erected by Marin Dronţu, son of Nicolae Dronţu, who was born in this village, as were his own father and grandfather before him and all his forefathers.’
Having become a townsman, Marin Dronţu retains an ancestral contempt for those with pretensions. I think this is the source of his deliberate, affected vulgarity. He wants to be seen to be mocking ‘frills and fripperies’ – an expression that definitively dismisses all that can’t be put plainly and in three words. Sometimes he wears me out with his insistence on recommending himself with: ‘I’m a peasant’. This kind of exaggeration is another form of affectation. For Dronţu, speaking correctly is a sign of pretentiousness. Bad grammar and using a certain vocabulary is almost a duty with him, a way of stressing that he still has his hand on the plough and is laughing at all our sensitivities. ‘The apples ain’t bad, the girls ain’t ugly, the wine ain’t neither.’ When he catches himself speaking correctly, by accident, he immediately reverts to form. Rudeness is his personal form of elegance, lightly illustrated with a smile to tell you that he could behave differently if he wanted, but he’d rather not.
To all this, you can add his extraordinary bad taste, his unparalleled sartorial eccentricity. If one evening he wears a black coat, he’s sure to put on yellow boots. If his tie is blue, his handker
chief will certainly be red. If he wears a raincoat, he’s sure to choose a melon-coloured hat. It’s an inventive and vigorous bad taste. I think it’s a sign of health and self-assurance. Marin Dronţu doesn’t have doubts, doesn’t question himself, doesn’t look for secrets. In Bucharest he has numerous ‘lovers’, one or two in every neighbourhood, he takes them to the cinema, buys them peanuts and gives them red carnations and Flora cream on their birthdays. Here, he sleeps with girls and women from Uioara. If he happens to suffer disappointment in love, he sings one of his songs from Gorj, and it passes.
He went to church on Sunday, in the village, and sang hymns. He has a warm voice, like that of a big child. He sings seriously, with all his heart, imbuing the song with solemnity. Leaving, I clasped his hand and told him how beautifully he had sung. He blushed and, for the first time, I saw him embarrassed in the face of praise.
*
In Câmpina, at the railway station, awaiting the courier which the master had announced by telephone from Braşov, I caught sight of Marga and her husband through the train window. She’s still beautiful, which makes me happy about the past – but looks set to put on weight, which makes me happy about the future.
The way she responded to my greeting, with the same attentive tilt of the head which I knew from before, reminded me suddenly that I had loved this girl and it struck me as unusually comic that now we were such strangers, separated by the glass of a train window, like a barrier between two worlds.
The courier arrived on the following train. I swore terribly at him. He had found it necessary to talk politics with the stationmaster for two hours.
*
Marjorie Dunton came by the oilfield in the morning. I was covered with dust, my hands dirty, my hair messed up, and I didn’t want to go down. She greeted me from below.
‘I was waiting for you last night with new records. You’re a deserter.’
For Two Thousand Years Page 10