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Gorun Manolescu (Romania)

Translation from Romanian: Alexandra Sârbu, MTTLC graduate

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You will enter that room with calcio-vecchio walls and iridescent dust motes when the sick sun shines over the hot heavy afternoons when the light vibrates thick and sensual and the senses get fully sharpened while a vertigo seizes you; a vertigo, which could be pleasant, but for your feeling it, for your being aware of it as fact, as reality in another reality, most of the times common and inconsistent, so common and inconsistent sometimes…

You will enter that room with iridescent walls bearing the trace of deeds that did not take place or perhaps that took place long ago – who knows when – swarming with deeds that took place or could have taken place or which – who knows – will take place as you imagine or as you know or maybe it will be completely different…

You will enter that room you know so well and still, bearing dim contours the filtered light will make it loose the real contours and will present it to you differently, as you imagine it, as you know it or maybe as you have never imagined it and never will know…

You will enter that room that suddenly becomes large, immense with soft armchairs made of leather pinned with flowery ended tin tacks that will hem the mild reposing armchairs tapestried with worn out leather cracked by time receiving the rays of a fantastic afternoon which tends to pass towards the twilight; the rays yellowished by time and by the gold in the flowers of the tin tacks that will reflect them veering to red the colour of the ancient gold…

You will enter that room that suddenly becomes intimate and welcoming as though grown smaller in its immensity suppressed in time and space bearing a rotten and pleasant smell of bitter almonds or rotten apples or hay mowed and leavened in the wet heat of cloudy afternoons of late summers left on the field before its being built into haystacks under which green, blackened adders swarm with drowsy hisses; you read their tension in the wait full of prowl, arched and tense like a Damascus steel sword transfixed for a moment in the opponent’s guard in a supreme effort…

You will enter that room; for such a closed space the wait is immense, as space seems immense between two seconds stopped in an intense flux with a painful intensity while waiting for something dreadful to happen or for something painful of an indescribable pleasure or something like a terror while reaching paroxysm, something like a large, immense love which you are waiting to happen in that very moment or like a big secret, an abominable crime tattooed on your soul like something predestined that came from a time with no memory; their recollection suddenly bursts piercing through space and time like a flash of lightning which no mortal could endure, which was only given to you once to discover and feel; but it repeats itself over and over again being the same like a ritual gaining endless permanence and continuance…

You will enter that room that suddenly becomes large, immense, walls stacked with books on two, three, countless rows, books set randomly and yet, in a well-known order only known by the librarian, who died however, taking with him this order along with the key pinned to his belt that was wrapped around his waist when he was buried as he had left in his testament…
You will enter that room because it was destined for you to be lucid to the very end…

You will then slowly, humbly lift your eyes towards the portrait, in the far end of the room, which is draped with heavy, cherry-coloured velvet, folds which moths will slowly move into, weaving their song, making the immense silence rustle…

You will lift your eyes towards the portrait, towards the unaffected portrait, towards the absent figure lost in who knows what kind of thoughts which do not interest you, towards that portrait and your hooting will raise to the sky, down on their knees, in the deepest, the most feverish and humble pray…