Women by Mihail Sebastian & Philip Ó Ceallaigh

Author:Mihail Sebastian & Philip Ó Ceallaigh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

TWO

We stayed there for two weeks. It was a village beyond Câmpina, not so far from Sinaia. I still don’t know what it’s called. I wanted to return to Bucharest the next morning. I told Andrei, the way you’d tell someone at a party, after midnight, that it’s late and you want to leave. He laughed and shrugged.

—We can’t!

—Andrei, be reasonable. It’s been lovely, but I have to leave now!

—In what?

—In your automobile.

—It’s broken.

—There was nothing wrong with it yesterday.

—And today there is. Automobiles are temperamental things…

—You’re kidding me.

—No, I swear. This morning—you were still asleep—I went out to the yard and smashed the carburetor. I don’t like to take chances. It occurred to me that you might want to run off. And I decided that our adventure had to be defended against everybody, against yourself above all. Believe me: a functioning automobile is a dangerous thing. A broken-down one, forty kilometers from a town, you can rely upon. I’ve wrecked mine.

—You’re crazy!

—Indeed.

Andrei’s style in this exchange will be familiar to you. That style which you described as cordial and ingenuous, by which you surely meant to say he was boorish and conceited, but which I liked then and still do today. You see, even today, after the accumulated fatigue of the past five years and with the cruelty I’ve patiently learned from him, I can’t stop smiling when I remember that daring, happy, reckless, cocksure Andrei who took me prisoner, proud of what he’d pulled off. He was wearing white summer trousers and his shirtsleeves were rolled up and his collar open, which gave him a youthful look, and in that country yard, something of a simple, joyful, rustic air.

I’ve told you that I’m old. I was then too. Not as old as now, but old all the same. There’s been a weariness in me for a very long time. I don’t know the reason for it, but it makes me sensitive to anything involving images of courage, to sudden gestures, to daring speech, to the face of an impetuous young man. I don’t know. It must be something like the melancholy of summer’s end, when the sun is still strong and the light is clear but the tops of the evening trees shiver with a presentiment of the coming decline, a knowledge it contains within itself the way a loaf of bread recalls the hot embers of the fire where it was baked.

Andrei won me that morning. He won me over, won my heart, and the meaning of that expression became clear to me that morning in a way it hadn’t when I’d come across it in the cinema and the theater, probably so that the revelation could be total for me later on.

I shook his hand, agreeing to everything. He embraced me noisily and with immense childish enthusiasm, but at the same time controlling his display—which I didn’t dislike. I don’t ever mind giving people I’m fond of the impression that a whim of theirs is an order.

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