Towards Ploieşti, the sky is phosphorescent. It must have been a terribly hot day there. The newspapers talk of 40 degrees in Bucharest.

How strange the chirping of the crickets seems, here, among factory smokestacks, oil wells, water tanks and factory walls!

Occasionally a locust will leap from among the stones and disappear somewhere. We haven’t managed to wipe out the flora and fauna of the area. The grass grows furiously wherever there’s a scrap of soil. A few days ago, Marin Dronţu was astonished to glimpse a squirrel on top of the house. (But where did it come from? Where?)

The persistence of the natural world, of centuries of vegetation. This too will pass … Nothing remains unchanged when Ralph T. Rice descends upon it …

The nights here are long, calm and congenial. I can’t bear to go to bed. I read a little, stroll a bit, and spend a long time stretched out on the deckchair ‘with the stars’ as Dronţu calls it, ironically. There was talk of going this evening to the home of a young couple, the Duntons, to play music on the gramophone. They’ve received some new records from England. But I feel so lazy.

I think Dronţu has a romantic assignment in Uioara. A fresh conquest. ‘Some of these girls, pal, they’re like roses.’

‘You’ll be the terror of the women, Marin.’

‘Well, yeah, why not? Do I have the energy? You bet I do.’

Twice a week he escapes to the city to buy powders and perfumes for the ‘girls and wives’. He has a special love for rouge and tobacco-scent. All New Uioara smells of bad cologne.

It would be easy to establish by smell the houses where our Marin has passed through and made a conquest.

Green leaf of the beanstalk

You’re a miserable little weed

I hear him singing inside in his room, and his happiness is infectious. In several minutes he’ll come out ‘prepared’, with a stiff collar, a red tie and a walking stick in hand, and he’ll say to me again, before leaving:

‘I wouldn’t put myself out for that Marjorie you’re all swooning over, wouldn’t put myself out, though I could sweep her away. In three days, the game would be played out. I’d have her wrapped around my little finger. But I don’t like her, sir, I don’t like her, she’s pale and kitten-eyed. Call yourselves men? Tulips, the lot of you.’

I needed time to learn to know and love Marin. At first, I couldn’t for the life of me understand what he was doing in the master’s office. I don’t think he’s achieved much as an architect. A decent sort, scoring just enough marks to graduate, he was doubtlessly a useful office worker. He is less use in the workshop, disliking calculations and drawing boards, rather better on site, where he sees and does everything. Anyhow, I was more than a little surprised to find him in the office of the most refined man I know.

Mircea Vieru is a Cartesian lost in Bucharest.

Marin Dronţu is a seminarian lost in architecture. A seminarian in his mode of thought, in his superstitions, in his stubbornness. ‘Salt of the earth’, as they say, flatteringly – a compliment that Mircea Vieru would detest, he being composed of a thousand nuances and not at all straightforward.

But Marin happily accepts such a description. And Marin (from whom I’ve learned to call Vieru ‘master’, though it was hard at first to call him anything other than ‘sir’) loves him with devotion, like a subject. ‘He’s a Lord,’ he told me once, with utter respect, speaking of the master, and his use of this word endeared him to me because I understood that if Vieru is in fact a lord then Dronţu is, in turn, a peasant rather than the urbanite he strives to be, with his offhand manner, his vulgar sense of humour and his three-tone ties.

Later, when I heard from others the story of the chapel which he erected in his village in Gorj with money scrimped daily, in poverty, when I heard the proud inscription he engraved there in stone, I thought there was after all something to him that outbalanced his vocation as a successful Lothario with ‘the ladies’, as he called them, proud of his conquests.

‘This chapel has been erected by Marin Dronţu, son of Nicolae Dronţu, who was born in this village, as were his own father and grandfather before him and all his forefathers.’

Having become a townsman, Marin Dronţu retains an ancestral contempt for those with pretensions. I think this is the source of his deliberate, affected vulgarity.