The Romanian (19 page)

 

A CRACK OF LIGHT pierces the room, and the door opens tentatively. A disheveled Romulus glares down at me, panicked, probably, at the sudden thought of losing his meal ticket. “What's wrong with you?”

“Me? I'm thinking,” I manage to croak out in a testy voice. I can't explain that I've been traveling into the past to get away from him, from the way he kicked me in bed, which is why my face must look so ghostly and blank.

Worry shrivels his. “Are you again taking those white pills?”

“No,
draga.
”
²

“You will sleep here?”

“I'm not sleeping, Romulus, I'm
thinking.
”

With a resigned shrug he leaves, closing the door. And in the ensuing darkness I admit how at home I am with the perplexed heart of a teenaged Carol cornered by a seductive, overinvolved mother, who was herself like a teenager, seeking to escape a prison of Germanic discipline. Disturbed by her affairs, spoiled rotten by her indulgences, young Carol would have had to be full of seething resentments and perverse impulses, flying into increasing rages at his mother's narcissistic pretensions.

At nineteen, he left the palace to get a taste of the streets his mother had yearned for when she was just his age. On Bulevardul Kiseleff he gaped at the women in tight-waisted dresses and enormous hats choked with feathers and flowers, as young, sometimes corseted, officers with waxed moustaches made X-rated comments about their private parts.

One day an expensive carriage whizzed by, showing just the hem of a skirt. “I had her last night,” snickered a young dandy. It was only afterward that the fancy carriage was identified as that of the Patriarch of the Church. The young man was mistakenly whistling at his robe.

Carol was by now already a “deadbeat dad.” An early affair with a high school student had led to a child, who was immediately placed in an orphanage by the embarrassed royal family. But the end of this early affair only pushed him more emphatically into bohemian circles, until he fell madly for the headstrong, deliciously plump Zizi Lambrino.

He couldn't have chosen a worse time. World War I was raging. The royal court was facing extinction at the hands of the Germans, and Russian-inspired Bolsheviks were threatening the political system. The Germans were hoping the whole mess would unseat the king and queen.

Wearily, I rise and tiptoe into the other bedroom, the only way to get to the bathroom. Sprawled naked on the bed, hair glued to his forehead, is my obsession, my reason for abandoning a worried mother and friends in New York. One naked leg is curled over a crumpled sheet, a pillow has fallen to the floor. I scan the room, littered with underwear and socks, the television now a fuzzy screen of static. What a perfectly pretty picture for the end result of passion. But as I think I've already indicated, passion is an emotion that rarely respects its own aftermath.

I suppose Prince Carol's was no exception to the rule. When strong-willed Zizi Lambrino with her maternal breasts held out arms in an invitation to ecstasy, he leapt. How could he help being attracted to her? In order to love, he must be sure his family would consider it an abomination. At the palace, his eyes must have shot cruel rays of irony as his mother railed against his lover. He was already planning a stupendously rebellious gesture that would result in his desertion from the army, a crime sometimes punishable by death.

In 1918, amid the chaos of World War I, Carol abandoned command of his regiment at Tîrgu Neamţ to don civilian clothes and carry out a dangerous elopement into enemy territory. In Odessa, with the help of officers from the German army—enemies of Romania—he and Zizi were married. His father, Ferdinand, who'd become king in 1914 after the death of
der Onkel,
thought of a love of his own given up in youth for his country and was lenient. For the crime of desertion, he sentenced his son to only seventy-five days at the Horaiţa monastery near Bicaz. Pouting Zizi was sent home to Iaşi and put under a palace guard.

On the way to Carol's confinement comes that train I've often thought about, whose monotonous rhythms, even without codeine, lulled him into desperate imaginings of Zizi's distant body. By the time he met his distraught mother, who'd come to intervene, his eyes were glazed, as if drugged. To his brain inebriated by rebellion and passion, his mother seemed to have shrunk. Her judgments didn't matter at all.

Confined at Horaiţa, Carol fell into a manic depression characterized by suicidal feelings and flights of exhilaration. In other words, he was in love. In the meantime, the royal family concocted bizarre strategies worthy of the best Byzantine schemers to break up the romance for good. Zizi was detained by police and besieged with legal documents. Headstrong and determined, she held out. She knew that Carol's attachment to her had the contours of an addiction. It soared into and crashed out of worlds impregnable to the practical.

WHAT, EXACTLY, IS IT that sets the dogs to howling? What appetite? I stretch toward the window again and survey the empty street. Is it the wind or the moon that creates these unpredictable changes in activity? My eyes search the shadows outside with raw nerves, damaged by too much passion. It has pulled me into the firmament of an unknown future, drained me of all free will.

Unexpectedly the wind and the howling stop. In the stillness glows the future of an expanded Romania, thanks to Missy's behind-the-scenes efforts at Versailles after the armistice. Also thanks to her, Carol's right to succession is preserved; he's brought out of confinement and leads his regiment in a victory parade in Bucharest. Surrounded by policemen to keep her from rushing to him, Zizi watches the parade at the curb. She knows that in return for signing the papers agreeing to an annulment, she'll be granted permission to see him one more time.

That one time is enough, for some months later, Zizi announces to the world that she's pregnant; and Carol decides to renege on the annulment, recognize the child and marry her again. The decision drags the royal family into baser strategies, to the point that they attempt to bribe an old lover of his to reentice him. But only Zizi herself can release the prince from his obsession; and she does it unwittingly, by publishing a love letter in which he admits to being the father of her child. The indiscretion sways Carol to Missy's opinion of the commoner. Zizi is just too vulgar. He never sees her again.

COULD IT BE MORNING ALREADY? The story of the “royal rapscallion” is dissolving into dawn light, which seems to have quieted the dogs again. To the screech of a garbage truck outside my window, Carol's hell-raising takes on clarity. It was just an unconscious parody of his mother's power with the means at hand: sexual conquest. It's part and parcel of his other revolts, all meant to mock the tenets of her royalty. So vicious is their oedipal drama that it rivals that of the incestuous Krupp-inspired characters in Visconti's
The Damned.
Not one phase of the “family romance” is repressed, not even Carol's obvious jealousy of his mother's lover Ştirbey. Later, as Romanian politics sink into chaos, Missy will plot with Carol's younger brother to dethrone him. Carol will squelch her completely in the political arena, but even then, his promiscuity will remain his most powerful weapon. In the end, a perhaps sordid victory is his: rumors about his sexual indiscretions overshadow the legends of his mother's accomplishments and goodwill. Even Barbara Cartland will eventually write a book about Carol's notorious love entanglements.

By mid-morning, as I walk with a chastened Romulus up Bulevardul Brătianu in search of breakfast, I can't help thinking that myths about flesh and the East have become my talismans. Carol was part of the process of Romania's Westernization; and Missy, the phallic queen, was, as Hannah Pakula reveals in her biography
The Last Romantic,
a Western queen set adrift in a libidinous Oriental adventure. Perhaps because of Missy, I can't keep from noticing the overt sensuality of this place, the marked sashay of its assuredly feminine and sloe-eyed women, often taller and always more slender than their male companions. Their long, lissome legs and elongated flat abdomens are like magnets to Romulus's eyes.

We stroll into a supermarket to buy
cascaval
and eggs. With a hint of last night's worry on his face, Romulus asks me what I'm thinking. I can't tell him that I'm still mulling over my own relationship to history and the temptations of the Hohenzollerns. Their struggle between duty and sensuality—which happened at a time when democracy in Europe was rising and the monarchy was getting drab.

For the first time since yesterday, I take a good look at my lover. He seems slight and depressed and rather inconsequential, but still encased in the shiny ectoplasm of my desire. I know our bedroom melodrama isn't over, just beginning its rebellious second act.

XV

THE BITCH with swinging black teats is trailing me. I'm sure she's about to bite. It's barely past seven in the morning, yet the heat is so intense my shirt is plastered against my back. I'm wheeling a gigantic Samsonite packed with books, shoes, manuscripts and gifts across the parking lot between our street and Piaţa Unirii, on my way to the plane to Paris.

The thundering sound of the wheels on the brick pavement is what frightened her. I remember seeing her looking depleted and nearly delirious under a parked car, nursing four pups that were fighting for the most swollen teat. As the noise of the suitcase ricocheted off the bricks, she decided to banish me from the lot. Now she's at my heels, the hanging tits stretching skin, fur missing in places from some skin infection, her eyes welling with bewildered misery, as her canines jut from a clenched, growling jaw.

I shake the suitcase to make more noise, hoping that will discourage her. She backs off, then lunges forward even more enraged. What a miserable biography this poor bitch must have. Obviously she's passed a horrible night in the unrelenting heat, her pups chomping hungrily at her belly. She herself was probably born under another parked car and from that time has known nothing but eating out of garbage cans or catching rats. Her posturing is just as useless and doomed to failure as that of Romulus, who's spent four nights refusing my sexual advances, after which I tried to sleep under the layers of smoke and the sound of TV action films, as he lit cigarette after cigarette, until I was driven again to the bed in my study. I've barely slept a wink all that time. Now he's dozing peacefully as long as he wants, while I drag my suitcase across this parking lot and am inches from being bitten by a sick, ferocious dog.

As soon as I get to the curb, the bitch retreats, satisfied that she's banished me from her territory. I can see her lumbering exhaustedly back to her pups, her back swayed, her tail dead-limp between her legs. I stand at the edge of the lot for a while, watching her exhausted gait under the blinding sun. Like her, Romulus was born in city squalor, with only a confused notion of who his parents were. And like her, he thinks that shows of bravado, pride are enough to fashion a life, to make a stab at dignity. With a surreal feeling, I imagine him coming from the outskirts of Bucharest into the city like some raw-boned animal, eyes blank and bewildered like hers, muscles twitching in exposure to want and danger.

By the time I get on the plane, he's recomposed in my imagination. Now he's coated with that charge of longing and excitement that makes me say yet again that I love him. This isn't an illusion, I tell myself, merely the clearer vision of distance. As flawed as our relationship is, I'm living out a basic homosexual dream. Current gay politics have covered up the fact that homosexuality is submission to a constant dilemma. The maleness toward which our sexuality is directed is—culturally at least—defined by heterosexuality. No one admits it anymore, but successful gay couples often play a constant game of switching. Each takes turns at playing “the man,” while the other temporarily enjoys this sociological projection of masculinity. Those who don't do this seem to become denatured Bobbsey Twins, unmarried “sisters” living together. I've made a different choice, which some would call “unliberated.” Everything attractive about Romulus stems from his heterosexuality, and of course, that's the very quality that prevents me from possessing him entirely. Well, maybe I'm on a more honest path of homosexual desire.

 

 

PARIS EXPLODES INTO SOMETHING alien and overcharged as soon as I get off the plane. Like a dog's, my first experiences are fragrances carried by the milder, more humid air. It's like being transported into another world where perfume is abundant enough to be wasted. As the taxi enters the city limits, I gaze dazedly at the parade of shop windows, cafés and hair salons. In Bucharest, at the store in Piaţa Unirii, Romulus and I had found only a small selection of poor-quality, low-cost merchandise. A certain prudishness on my part that astonishes me makes these Parisian sights seem overluxurious and unnecessary.

At the Centre Pompidou, I walk across the concrete terrace beneath the stairs with Marianne Alphant, the woman who invited me, and Bernard Blistène, a witty, bright bon vivant, who's an official at the museum. In his unstructured, all-black Yamamoto suit he seems a mockery of the self-abnegating clergyman. I suppose he belongs to another order, art, but his appearance suggests a level of sophistication and irony that has no place in my new Romanian life, where somber, black-clad men are more likely to have long beards and faces preoccupied by the details of the liturgy.

Meeting us is my colleague for the presentation at the Centre Pompidou, which is supposed to treat the relationship among art, popular culture and homosexuality. He's the novelist Guillaume Dustan, considered one of the most outspoken gay radicals in France today. I've already read his novels,
Plus fort que moi
and
Je sors ce soir,
which are obsessive, minimalist evocations of gay male promiscuity. They never leave the confines of gay culture but try to subvert culture in general with their aggressive excesses. He's scowling and seems uninterested in me. It's as if he leaked resentment from every pore. I've enjoyed his novels and tell him so, but this doesn't penetrate his surly exterior, which I begin to realize is partly a cover for shyness.