Nostalgia by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu

Author:Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu [Cǎrtǎrescu, Mircea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141993065
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

REM

Cortázar, a copy of Gar­cía Márquez in tat­ters (In­no­cent Eréndira, the large edi­tion), The Saragosa Man­u­script, in a stiff, scar­let card­board bind­ing, about a me­tre’s length of The 20th Cen­tury Novel, and much longer and mul­ti­hued rows of The Li­brary for All and The Uni­verse vol­umes; glossy books in black and white pub­lished by The Li­brary of Art (I in­stantly spy The Wis­dom of Forms by Sendrail, Brion’s Fan­tas­tic Art and all sorts of other texts that prat­tle on about the Gothic style, about Man­ner­ism, the Baroque, the Ro­coco and mod­ern art, whose ori­gin can be found in any case in the Gothic, Man­ner­ist, Baroque, or Ro­coco styles). The shelf bulges un­der the weight of the abun­dantly lac­quered art books rest­ing at an an­gle, the size of a draw­ing board and smelling of chem­i­cals. One vol­ume alone faces out. On the cover you can see a kind of wooden trailer with doors wide open amidst a land­scape of red­dish build­ings with arch­ways and bat­tle­ments melt­ing into un­end­ing per­spec­tives. It ap­pears to be twi­light but not very late. The shadow of a lit­tle girl rolling a hoop length­ens out on the macadam. You can see only the spine of the other books, with the painters’ names in clear white: Tin­toretto, Guardi, Da Vinci, De­gas, Harunobu, Pon­tormo, Man­tegna. Most of the other shelves are taken up by po­etry: the striped and dap­pled col­lec­tion of The Most Beau­ti­ful Po­ems (how well cof­fee brown goes with Eliot, stri­dent green with Amer­i­can po­etry, brick with Yan­nis Rit­sos! You couldn’t imag­ine it any other way), the Or­pheus col­lec­tion, with cov­ers like blot­ting pa­per, ashen blue (here, let us re­mem­ber the good Dy­lan Thomas – ‘as I was young and easy un­der the ap­ple boughs … ’), fi­nally the square-shaped yet not lack­ing in aes­thetic sense Poe­sis col­lec­tion, with the som­bre black of Wal­lace Stevens and the deep green of Rim­baud. An en­tire wall of books, all the way up to the ceil­ing, rest­ing on al­most in­vis­i­ble shelves. A har­mo­nious jum­ble, a cos­mos. Are you a philoso­pher? You’ll find your­self there, in your cream-coloured toga, with an azure blue rec­tan­gle on the book’s spine where your name and what you wrote are in­scribed. An es­say­ist? You’ll find your­self there, be­tween Pet­ros Haris and Ca­mus, and you will don the black garb. Are you a po­lit­i­cal the­o­rist, a nu­clear ex­pert, bi­ol­o­gist with some­what orig­i­nal ideas, so­ci­ol­o­gist, an­thro­pol­o­gist? You be­long in Con­tem­po­rary Ideas. You have the right to choose your colour, from lemon yel­low to pansy pur­ple. Are you some­thing un­de­fined, an ob­scure nov­el­ist or per­haps an all too well-known ped­a­gogue? Sep­a­rate vol­umes, with all the ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. Are you a con­struc­tion en­gi­neer, ex­pert in the strength of ma­te­ri­als, boil­er­maker, math­e­ma­ti­cian? We re­gret, but the lady who lives in this stu­dio apart­ment will never buy your books.

A mi­nus­cule stu­dio apart­ment, sit­u­ated some­where to­wards the out­skirts of the cap­i­tal. You get there af­ter chang­ing a num­ber of buses and then walk­ing along a tan­gle of nar­row ashen streets. The walls along the build­ing’s stairs are painted a pale green and reek of garbage.

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