86 292
Mircea Cartarescu
86
owed everything to and try
to save him in return. He
was taken to the cell where
he had wasted his youth and
he asked the prison guard
about the prisoner beyond
the wall. But he found out
in amazement that only the
sky and the sea were behind
that wall. The wall was an
external wall, tens of metres
above the waves breaking
against the rocky shore…
I felt the same sacred terror,
thesame feeling thatbeyond
the world mock-up built
by our senses from cheap
materials there is somebody
who watches you intently,
whose prey you are, who
approaches slowly on its
thousands of sticky threads
while you are incapable of
knowing it, you, who only
have a bunch of antennae
although you should be
able to perceive The Whole,
on the night I was in the
Circus Park, next to the star-
reflecting silent pool with
travertine borders. I had the
same feeling of hopeless
loneliness much later, in
the autumn of 1981, when I
walked on Maica Domnului
3
Street for the first time. It
was a putrid and luminous
autumn. I was twenty five
and had no future on earth.
For one year I had been a
teacher in the bottom of
Colentina
4
, where I knew
(I know it today too) that I
would retire from. I would
then die without leaving any
3 “The Mother of our Lord” in Ro-
manian
4 Neighbourhood of Bucharest in
the vicinity of Ştefan cel Mare. Colen-
tina is a peripheral neighbourhood
towards the north-eastern part of the
city, which still has old, shabby, ne-
glected houses, generally inhabited by
low income classes.