The voluptuousness of being dirty, your secret pride in letting yourself go. Today you give up brushing off your hat, tomorrow you don’t change your shirt, the day after you don’t repair your worn-out heels. To sink down deeply, irrevocably in filth and to love it for its dirtiness, for its familiar smell, for its dry crusts of bread, for the intimate warmth of humiliation. And to know that you are once and for all rudderless, that control slipped from your hands one morning when you didn’t change your collar, because you couldn’t be bothered.

Haven’t they always told us we’re a dirty people? Maybe it’s true. Perhaps our mysticism, our asceticism, our piety is just that – dirtiness. A way of getting down on your knees, a form of slow, voluptuous self-mutilation, ever further from the white star of purity.

*

This morning, in the yard of the dormitory blocks, Marga Stern said to me, awkwardly, as if the news had nothing to do with me:

‘Look, spring is on its way.’

4

I fled. Two weeks ago, on a day when I told myself I had to choose between being the fourth hand at poker or living. I fled, and I’m glad, because it was hard.

It’s a small room. A garret. But it’s mine. A chair, a table, a bed. Four white walls and a high window, through which the tops of the trees in Cişmigiu Park can be seen.

The formula is simple and I wonder why I didn’t discover it earlier.

Two thousand lei per month: 1,000 for the room, 300 lei for thirty loaves of bread, 300 lei for thirty litres of milk, 400 lei remainder.

I’m going to write to Mama asking her to embroider a handkerchief with the motto I’ve discovered: LIFE IS SIMPLE!

Fourteen days on my own. I’d like to know exactly how many people in this city, in the wide world, are freer than me.

I found a superb Montaigne for 60 lei in a second-hand bookshop, from 1760, with fine matt paper and amazing footnotes. Impassioned. The more impassioned he is, the more of a libertine, sceptic and artist he is. Me? I’m just tortured.

What a break. And I never, ever guessed, fool that I am, that such a holiday were possible.

I’ve put up a big map of Europe on the wall facing the bed. I need a globe but I haven’t enough money.

Maybe it’s childish, but I need to draw upon the symbolism of this map and to read off the cities and countries on it. It’s a daily reminder of the world’s existence. And that every kind of escape is possible.

*

It was beautiful just now in Cişmigiu, with that white metallic sun, the water green with vegetation, the still leafless trees, naked like a herd of adolescents drafted into the army.

People are so ugly in their out-of-season coats, their hats worn out from winter, with their sun-scared smiles and heavy, trudging steps. I watched how they passed and pitied them their graceless lack of awareness.

*

A young, smartly dressed girl stopped on the boulevard in front of the window of a fruit shop. I said the first nonsense that entered my head. She laughed and agreed to walk with me.

She didn’t ask where I was taking her. She ascended the stairs, and undressed readily once the door was closed. A small body, pleasant rather than beautiful, very young. We made love in the middle of the day, the window open, both of us naked. The girl cried from pleasure and afterwards walked through my bedroom with my clothes over her shoulders, curious, looking through the papers on the desk, opening books, closing them loudly.

‘Will you come here again?’

‘I will.’

She didn’t ask me for anything. I forgot to ask her name.

The pleasure of being naked. Feeling yourself recovering your animal poise, to feel it concretely and bodily, hearing the sure surge of your blood, knowing the voluptuousness of lifting an arm and letting it fall, having a sure sense of your solitary physical life.

This should be inscribed in the eulogy of love.

*

A curious meeting with Ştefan D. Pârlea. It was he who stopped me.