Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Now he is here, in room 1515 of the Bucharest Intercontinental, regarding me with the same intense gaze, the same calm, concentrated expression that he displayed eight years ago. From the folds of the curtains, he is scrutinizing me with the same courteous curiosity as before.

What if I tried to remind him of who I was and what I have asked for, as I had done in 1989 over the phone, before meeting him? He would probably cut me off with the same words. “I know about you. I’ve heard a thing or two,” he had said then. How, from whom? In 1989, in Washington, nobody knew about me, absolutely nobody. I was living in an obscure suburb, which I didn’t leave for months on end, and here, in Bucharest, I have avoided meetings and am staying in a hotel accessible only to foreign tourists. Has he obtained his information from his French counterpart, the diplomat who had interviewed me in Berlin, or perhaps from the literary Interpol?

The diplomat is waiting, as he did eight years ago, for me to continue. Then, I had no intention whatsoever to associate this man with my dubious French interlocutor. I had to be brief and precise and make a rapid summary of my naïve request. This is why I had gone to see him. I wanted to go back to Europe before it was too late. I did not wish to settle in the New World, but equally, I also could not return to socialist Jormania. A grant for a few months’ stay in Italy might give me the hoped-for breather that I needed.

This was what I was hoping for in 1989—breathing space, lots of breathing spaces. “Decision-making is a moment of madness,” Kierkegaard had whispered to me, but indecision, too, seemed like complete madness, as I had had occasion to find out. I had experimented for years with the madness of indecision, I had become an expert in procrastination. I was still hoping for breathing spaces.

Time, however, had lost its patience and no longer tolerated me. That was what I had to make the Italian gentleman in Washington understand. Back in Berlin, when my grant had run out, I was looking for breathing spaces, the delay of exile. In Paris, on my short investigative visit, I had searched for another opportunity for delay. I had failed, however, to mollify the gods of the old European heaven, as well as the younger gods of America, where indecisiveness is illegal, an intolerable defiance, the mark of depravity and failure, a suspicious infirmity.

But in 1989 I formulated this plea only in my mind. I offered the diplomat a brief presentation, followed by a heavy silence.

“Have you visited America before? Do you know America?” he asked me, breaking the silence.

In one single instant, my hesitant request showed itself for what it was — a ridiculous query

“Have you visited other places here, apart from Washington and New York?” he asked me again. His restrained cordiality was winning me over. He sensed it, too.

“No,” I replied, “I haven’t visited America before, I have no tourist inclinations, nor the money or the curiosity to do so.”

“Maybe you should wander around America a bit,” he said. But that advice was followed, thank God, not by a list of places to visit but by another prolonged silence.

“You can’t have any better lessons in solitude anywhere else.” His words echoed in my mind.

Yes, solitude, a familiar subject I was always ready to consider, not only in an embassy palazzo but also here and now, in a hotel tomb. “Finding your own self again in the tomb of a hotel room,” this is what Kafka said. The impersonality of hotel rooms has always been a tonic for me, I was a good student in solitude. In the eight years since I last saw Mr. Bezzetti, I have learned many new things about solitude. So, I am certain, has Mr. Bezzetti, in the tomb of the silence of death after death, for he died not long after our meeting.

“I’ve served in this embassy for eighteen years,” he told me, “an unusually long time, as you can imagine. I’ve always enjoyed good relations with the ambassadors. You are Latin yourself, so you know what this means, to stay in one place, for eighteen years, a lifetime.”

I looked at him more carefully now, to assess how large had been the margin of error in the age I had attributed to him.

He continued: “I rarely go to Rome, just for short holidays. I can no longer stand Italy.”

Did he mean by this to discourage my hoped-for escape to Italy? He hastened to explain.

“The intimacy is what I cannot stand anymore, all those questions and embraces, the chatter, the familiarity, the friends, relatives, acquaintances, always ready to suffocate you with their affection. I am exhausted after only a few days. I have to leave.”

The avalanche of words continued. I was being honored with a confession. “You’ve seen how Americans keep their distance, between cities, between houses, between people. Have you noticed how they keep their distance in a line at the cinema, in a shop? That’s fine, really fine.”

I kept silent. Was he in dialogue with the impertinence of my visit?

“Should I die tomorrow, in my small apartment, nobody will know And that’s fine, too,” Mr. Bezzetti said.

I must hope that the circumstances of Mr. Giuseppe Bezzetti’s death in his small apartment in the American capital were up to his standards. I can only guess that the vast realms of solitude after death have not disappointed him.

His advice to me was to get to know America, to accustom myself to a different perception of distances, to inhabit solitude. No eccentricity is totally useless, and likewise, no despair, I told myself on that winter afternoon in 1989, after I had learned that Italy did not offer governmental grants to East European writers. Solitude is our only homeland, I repeated to myself as I left the handsome Italian Embassy. The words are worth repeating even now, in the tomb of the hotel room in Bucharest.

At the end of our interview, Mr. Giuseppe Bezzetti did not suggest any further meetings, as had his French counterpart back in Berlin. But he, too, gave me his business card with the address and telephone number of the small apartment where he was awaiting his liberation. I did not seek him out. Now here he is in Bucharest, risen from his intangible faraway realm, returning my visit.

Mr. Bezzetti vanishes into the mists of Bucharest’s spring. I am left there, holding a piece of pale yellow paper in my hand. I recognize my own handwriting. “Should you miss your native place …”I know those words, transcribed, childishly, in a moment of senile jubilation. “Should you miss your native place, you will find in exile more and more reasons to miss it; but if you manage to forget it and come to love your new residence, you will be sent back home, where, uprooted once more, you will start a new exile.” These are the words of Maurice Blanchot, but it is not he now standing before me. It is another, albeit a lesser, Frenchman, though of a more complex variety. It is Emile Cioran, the man from Sibiu, from Bucharest, and a long-time exile in Paris, quoting Blanchot.

He is small, fragile, with a penetrating gaze and unruly hair. He is kneeling before me, in front of the window, staring into space.

“Forgive me,” he is whispering, staring into nowhere. “Forgive me, God.” Is that what he is saying? Of course not, he is a heretic and would not invoke the deity. “Forgive me,” the curtains keep echoing. He looks into the emptiness, at the ceiling, at the heavens. He peers into immortality. “Forgive me, pătlăgică , I hear, at last. Pătlăgică , pickled tomato, a good name for divinity! “Forgive me, pătlăgică forgive me for being born a Romanian,” the nihilist implores. I know this little drama, offered from time to time to his fellow Romanians, the privileged audience to a farce that was no farce.