The Romanian (34 page)

Psychologically, the story is a lesson in the constellation of ruin and danger that can grow from the node of a single obsession. Most interesting was Carol's ability to sustain this dangerous focus year after year. For the decade of his kingship, beginning in 1930, Romania was ruled by a hypnotized man. He was oblivious of the building repercussions of his passion and seems to have suffered none of my lapses, holding to obsession's final course.

That night in bed, Romulus and I were up almost until dawn as I spun the story of the self-destructive royal love affair. He'd never had much interest in history, but little by little, my soap opera became familiar. Neither of us spoke of the ways in which it began to enlace our own. Our airless room seemed saturated with Lupescu's Guerlain scent, and among the shadows marched an increasingly frantic King Carol, his boots treading impatiently on a carpet of green moss.

In 1925, at the age of thirty-one, Carol was already a long-time compulsive sexual adventurer when his nervous, proper wife, Princess Helen, urged him to retreat to Sinaia for the summer. There, at the castle of Foişor, early supper with Helen, prepared to her specifications, had become a wordless event. More annoying was the seating arrangement. The couple's young son was placed close to his mother, almost in her lap, while Carol was exiled to the other end, possibly to protect his wife from the sight of his table manners. Even after dinner, he would come no closer. Husband and wife slept in separate bedrooms. It had reached the point that her body bristled with disgust on those few occasions when he touched her.

After a formal array of Greek-style courses while the candle-light concealed Carol's expressions of increasing boredom, he would excuse himself to go outside for a smoke. It was here that the crunching of the green moss began, as his long legs strode toward his Bugatti. From the upstairs bedroom Helen could hear the awful roar of the motor as he gunned it and took off. The car sped angrily along the mountain roads, spewing exhaust and spinning leaves, waking the peasants who'd been asleep since sundown. Then, in a small clearing, it came to a screeching halt in front of a dowdy chalet known as Villa Gianni, which held only one guest.

With glazed eyes and dry mouth, Carol stepped from the car. Scooping up a handful of pebbles, he began throwing them, one by one, against a second-floor window. Behind the window sat a woman in near darkness, penetrated only by stray gleams of her red hair. At the sound of the pebbles she'd rise from her chair and quietly unlock the door. As she heard the heavy tramp of Carol's boots ascending, she'd settle back once more, arranging the hem of her skirt exactly halfway down her kneecap and thrusting her shoulders back to raise her breasts. Her face would compose into a welcoming look with just a hint of feeling neglected, and quickly she'd take a vial from her purse and touch perfume to each ear.

What happens when forbidden arms open wide? It's a moment of great violence when the world is crushed and all other connections severed. Children, mothers, governments, promises crumble into dust. Rage and rebellion take their hidden positions within the whirlwind of affect—gloating at the secret release of their power. From the dust arises a new order, simple and tyrannical. If thoughts about his wife's suffering or the impossibility of marrying a commoner came to Carol, they drowned in the fragrant white flesh beside him. The flesh blotted out every concern until dawn, when he'd hurry to the waiting Bugatti, already spotted by the locals, and drive back to Foişor.

One evening, Princess Helen made the mistake of bringing up his nighttime outings. Carol retorted by claiming they were the only recourse for a man wedded to frigid flesh. This time the dinner was shaken by imprecations. The breath of accusations disturbed the clean outline of the candle flames. The table was pounded so hard that the crystal trembled. When a plate was broken and the child started to howl, Helen decided to take matters into her own hands. With stilted calm she summoned the bewildered servants and had Prince Carol locked inside his room.

An impatient hand appeared at the second-story casement, pushing it open in one thrust. Carol climbed out onto the terrace and, without a moment's thought, leapt off to the ground. With one ankle fractured, he hopped cursing toward the Bugatti. Moments later the handful of pebbles rattled against the window of the chalet again. Lupescu must have been confused by the sound of the desperate struggle up the stairs, the curses muttered under breath. But the twisted ankle was just another boon for her as she fell to playing dismayed lover and over-concerned nurse.

The ravings of lovers fill pages and pages, but the beloved, the focus of all this energy and power, has almost no voice and never explains what it is to be loved in this way. Passion swirls around her, illuminating her flesh, but does she ever feel that she's just its tool, at its mercy? Are, then, the deceits and strategies of the beloved something that can be judged? Or are they merely the pitiful attempts at self-determination of a molecule caught in an atomic blast?

Nobody will know what Lupescu was thinking as she packed for a trip to Paris late that fall. It will never be discovered whether her mind was racked with scruples and fears or dulled by opportunism and cold with strategy. As she carefully folded a sheer black nightgown embroidered with pearls into its black silk case, her face was little more than a heavily powdered mask. She spoke to no one as she walked with her luggage to the nearby station, kohled eyes hidden by a large black picture hat. She picked up a first-class ticket reserved for her under a false name.

The day before, in an effort to wrench Carol from Lupescu's grasp, his mother and father had sent him as the Romanian emissary to the funeral of Queen Alexandra in London. The Liberals were also behind the plan, hoping that it would lead to a situation in which Carol would have to give up his right to the throne. But the day after Carol left was the day Lupescu boarded car L17 on the Orient Express for Paris. In the first-class compartment that had been reserved for her alone, she removed the picture hat and placed it on the overhead rack. Only X-ray eyes could have seen what might or might not have been in the chamois bag balanced on her knee, beneath the layers of lingerie, the silk stockings, the Poiret gown and the bottle of Mitsouko. Was there really an envelope holding a letter with instructions from Brătianu, the leader of the Liberals? Did it contain a fat roll of new bills from him as well?

London was the first sign that the world was crumbling around the future king of Romania. Paparazzi followed Carol everywhere, exaggerating the details of his affair with the Titian-haired Jewess. Each drink he took was said to be proof of his decadent lifestyle. Each woman he looked at confirmed his reputation as an orgiast willing to jump off balconies for a taste of female flesh. But barely any of it penetrated his cocoon of desire. In his mind, this protected him like a ring of fire, repelling those who approached. Even the British royal family, to whom he was related by blood, made a wide detour around him, shocked by the stories that the tabloids carried and squeamish about his life of lust.

After the funeral, Romanian ministers were waiting for Carol in Paris; but as they greeted him at the train station, he shoved them aside. Standing at a distance was a veiled woman in black, a perfect symbol for doom. She was, I must emphasize, a symbol, barely a person. In a sense, she didn't exist. She was merely a geometric focal point, a target in a whirling vortex. All very well, you may say, for the story, but what was going on inside the mind of the actual person of flesh and blood? No matter that a thousand shrewd considerations may have caused Lupescu to decide to have this affair. Once she'd entered it, the narrative became unintelligible. You can call her scheming or innocent. All of the terms reveal their inadequacy, like profane words used to describe a supernal event. Plans for the future, hates and dislikes, even intellectual preferences are sucked away in its maelstrom. If Lupescu was a woman of qualities before she began her affair with the prince, she was shorn of everything but his desire as soon as she fell into his arms. And at the station in Paris, she was little more than a black thundercloud, enveloping a man and the entire future of Romania.

Shortly afterward, under pressure, Carol renounced his right to royal succession in favor of his mistress. The affair banned him from Romania and his family. But in 1930, three years after his father's death, he would return to seize the kingship in a coup, with Lupescu in tow.

Meanwhile, he had spent several years in exile and had taken a commoner's name. He and his paramour went to Italy, then Monte Carlo, Nice and Cannes. Then on to Biarritz and back to Paris—anywhere that would sustain the fantasy. The affair carried on, outside time, with no reference to anything else. It was a glorious escape from the strictures of the palace. But everything was waiting, like a world in suspension. Soon it would rematerialize, and Carol would be trapped.

XXV

I'M NOT A JEW-HATER,” Romulus told me. “Only when they think they're better than us.” It was after I'd finished recounting the story of Lupescu and Carol, and we lay staring at each other as dawn light seeped into the room. Both of us knew that the story had produced the unexpected: an implicit comment about him and the difficulty of being the object of an obsession. Suddenly we found ourselves bumped into another phase, one that allowed us to question where we thought this irrational eight months were leading. Now it wasn't any secret that no future remained for him in this sealed-off room or that abandoning my culture, friends and literary connections in New York was having a negative effect on mine.

These feelings went unspoken, however, on both our parts. I decided to look at them as a passing phase. Romulus, in addition, must have been subject to great inertia. Having stumbled into this relationship without ever having set the terms, he approached it the way a hunter-gatherer exploits a meadow. This uniform landscape without any shade, which he'd come upon just by chance, was getting depleted. Still, there were fruits to collect.

Lacking better plans, we went back to our routine, with me under even greater pressure to get Céline done. Meanwhile she continued to send last-minute additions to harried editors. The absolute deadline for the text was July 29, three days before Romulus's twenty-fifth birthday, which was five days before mine. Holding up the fantasy of a rapprochement with the celebration of our birthdays, I fixed my eyes on the light at the end of the tunnel. Romulus went back to his abject lounging. Thanks to my wanderings before his return, he now had some buddies for carousing. Nearly every night Razvan and his dim-witted clique would come calling for him, chug a few of my beers and sweep him away, after I declined their invitations to come along.

My translating schedule had increased to sixteen-hour days. It turned me into a zombie with a fixed stare. Romulus grew gradually more repulsed at my preoccupied face, my puffy eyes with their frozen focus and my lack of conversation. It was the first time he'd seen anyone involved in intellectual toil. It confirmed his suspicions that a life of the mind was boring and unattractive.

Incredibly, the heat wave had not abated. It had hit 104 degrees for the past two days, and the television was full of more accounts of people collapsing on the streets. Romulus was tortured less by the heat than by the mosquitoes that found their way into our bedroom. As I sat peering at the computer screen in my study, my Sharper Image personal air conditioner looped over the back of my neck, I'd hear regular explosions of Romanian curses as he slapped at the insects. For some reason, the mosquitoes avoided my meatier body, concentrating on multiple assaults directed at his spare physique.

One day he came into my study with a triumphant smile, displaying a clear-plastic object filled with some viscous liquid and attached to an electric plug. It was, he told me, a fantastic invention. All you had to do was plug it in, and it released an invisible, odorless mist that killed the little buggers. I watched him plug it into the bedroom outlet, which produced a very low hissing sound. The noise aroused my American paranoia, making me wonder what the FDA would think of the device. Twenty years before, I'd had the same reaction as an underpaid English teacher in Paris, after a summer diet made up almost exclusively of red-colored Moroccan
merguez,
which looked fresher to me than the brown-colored sausages. When I later found out that the red
merguez
was colored with Red Dye #2, which the FDA had recently outlawed in the United States as carcinogenic, I spent the next few months morbidly wondering whether I was going to get the big C. As Romulus lay back on the bed with a self-satisfied yawn, I pulled the mosquito-killer from the outlet to see if it had a label with the list of ingredients.

“What you do?!” he shouted in outrage. “I am meat for every mosquito! You want they eat me to the bone?”

“It's a poison, Romulus, and the room's all closed up.”

“Ah, Mr. Cleaning”—he meant Mr. Clean—“who devours half of pharmacies in Bucharest. Suddenly you are worried about your body?” He leapt from the bed and wrested the object from my hand; and at that moment, our ancient model of a phone jangled. I left Romulus to replug the mosquito killer and ran to answer it. It was a call about Ursule Molinaro, one of my closest friends and my closest literary colleague. I found out she had died.

I came back to our bedroom, which was a cauldron of cigarette smoke, and listened to the hissing of the mosquito killer. Romulus was back in position on the bed, looking at me with a defensive, triumphant smile. In the dimness of the closed room, his face looked sinister. The light got lost in the hollows of his cheeks, giving him a spectral air. “My friend Ursule died,” I said in a monotone. He blinked once, and his face, with its long beak, took on the rigidity of a bird's. “How this happen?” he responded, for lack of anything better to say.