Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Mircea Cartarescu

bedroom is real: the cloth is cloth, the paint is paint, I am an insignificant mammal who lived for an instant on earth. The ladder I use to go up to the terrace is next to the wardrobe. It’s like a library ladder, the ones that glide alongside the wall. Only here it is tightly screwed to the ceiling. There is a trapdoor above that I lift with difficulty when I reach the top of the ladder and suddenly the blue sky with summery clouds appears in the variable geometry gap in the ceiling. I go on the house terrace which, if not for the whitetowergrowncrookedly and asymmetrically above, would look like those white cubes the people in the Near East live in. The tower is painted white, with thick plaster peeled by

rain and heat. Spiral stairs surround it, twisting around its entire circumference. The terrace is flat with no parapet; sometimes I lay a sheet there and I sunbathe under such low clouds that I feel them warm and moist touching my calves, my nipples, my nose and my chin. The sun mirrors itself in the round window of the tower, making it burn like a lighthouse on a cliff. The tower with its strangeness and metaphysics that actually made me buy the house has a door on its upper side, right under the roof. For a long time I found it impossible to understand why the spiral stairs and that suspended entrance were needed. The door had once been painted scarlet,

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