88 292
Mircea Cartarescu
88
warehouse which filled
the neighbourhood with
fresh resin smell. But Maica
Domnului Street did not lead
directly to that area, it went
askew towards Colentina.
I crossed the railway beyond
the park, the one I’d never
seen a train on, and, like I
had imagined, I was greeted
by a place like no other in
the world. When one is four
years old, every new place is
so. The state of hallucination
and dreaming accompanies
one always until the
memory tracks get printed
on one’s brain. Any new
landscape is fabulous and
unusual in itself, regardless
how common it were in
truth, because “in reality”,
“in truth”, “as it is” are still
phrases without meaning
for onewhoperceives reality
the way we later live in our
first memories or dreams.
Maica Domnului Street has
always seemed to me like
a tentacle of a dream in
the world that is awake or,
if everything exists on the
inside and reality is a mere
illusory artefact, as a flicker
arrived from the deep and
submerged childhood.
On Maica Domnului there
is no “normal” house and
person, because normality
itself ceases here. There
is also no normal weather.
When you enter this track,
this channel from another
world and another life, the
climate changes and the
seasons turn upside down.
Here there’s always, like
I wrote before, a putrid
and luminous autumn.
The asphalt strip placed
who knows when over
the formerly cobbled road