The Love and the Time
translated by Neli Logofătu
When he thought that enough time has elapsed since he sent the letter and that he should have received an answer, Adrian, a little surprised, noticed a powerful restraint when he was trying to come close to the mailbox. Overwhelmed by emotion and an inexplicable fear, he postponed the checking of the mailbox for another time. Thinking at the possibility he could find in the mailbox the very letter he was looking for, his fear, instead of subsiding, it greatly arose during the next days. Now, he understood that, actually, nothing strange, nothing surprising was happening, he had fears before too. His apparent peace during the wait for the letter was just a covered nervous straining. A secret fear originated in his very hopes lived inside him all this time, combined with them, having a latent and embryonic existence and now it broke out violently. He was afraid that his wishes will come true, he noticed without further wonder. One day he stopped in the hall of his apartment building a little more time and with more daring because a new thought came to his mind. Maybe, after all, the letter did not even arrive and he is an imbecile. Maybe only he was tormenting himself, struggling between hopes and anxieties, and maybe she was in complete ignorance of his labours or maybe she was not even thinking about writing him. Maybe all was just his imagination roused by desires that he didn’t want to acknowledge or which he only ignored while thinking he managed to suppress them. In spite of these thoughts he couldn’t approach the mailbox and open it. Right away, an immense and irrational fear was arousing in him and he could not overcome it. Next day, after entering the hall of the apartment building, he went without hesitation toward the mailbox and with an intense feeling of irresponsibility he opened it. The letter was there. He took it, looked at the handwriting on envelope, which was large, neat, inclined toward right, and then he closed the box.
Upstairs, in his apartment, the sunbeams and the heat of the afternoon were entering freely through the open windows. He closed the windows, drew the blinds, unplugged the phone and the clock and isolated himself in his room with the letter. He sat down on the floor, leant against bed with the letter by him. Long time passed until he decided to open it. Inside the envelope he found only one sheet written on one side. The content of the letter, deciphered in the diffuse light squeezed through the blinds, was the following:
Dear Adrian,
I confess that your behavior toward me troubled me, making me to believe that you avoid me, you find me indifferent or even you dislike me. Because of this I suffered and, compelled to give credit to my suspicion, I was forced to help you in your attempt to estrange yourself from me. I suffered because nothing was more far to me that to become estranged one from another. I know that we were never close friends and because of that the more I have to thank you for your letter which is friendly and kindly enough to allow me to openly tell you what I should have told you a long time ago, but I did not find the opportunity. I love you, Adrian, and maybe with this I should have begun, although I would have broken the rules of communication.
I love you very much and you came to mean a lot to me, more than any other being with which the path of my destiny ever crossed.
There are a lot of things I would like to tell you, but I have to stop here. I don’t know to whom am I speaking. It is my love the one who’s reading these lines, the one whose life will be strongly bound with mine from now on or to an indifferent and bored stranger? Maybe neither of them, maybe just a friend -confused, concerned, I don’t know- but nothing more. Anyway, it would be inappropriate to continue speaking to you in this personal manner.
I want to tell you just this. Every Sunday morning I walk through Elysée park and I often like to stay on the stone benches on the landings of the stairs leading to the Heroes Monument.
I’ll be waiting for you,
Corina.
He held the letter in his hand for a long time. A sort of ecstasy was ravishing his face. The letter fell down from his hand and he let it there. A while his face kept immobile, his eyes staring blankly. Then a spasm contracted his features and he curled up groaning. He turned aside groaning softly and he pressed his chest with the fists. Then his eyes were filled with tears and he grew calm. After some time his breath became regulate and he fell asleep the way he was, lain on the floor.
When he woke up, it was dark outside. It was maybe after midnight and he felt it, although his clock did not show anything. He opened the windows and fresh air came inside. The sky was clear, deep and bright. In spite of the nocturne halo of the city, Milky Way was clearly cut in the sky. He looked down on the deserted street illuminated by electric bulbs. He fancied his body crushed on the pavement, bloodstained, in a grotesque position. " Why not?" said to himself and he climbed up onto the window sash. He leant his back against the left jamb of the window and laid his feet on sash.
In the night, the town, immense and silent, seemed a fantastical décor on a giant scene. The entire universe seemed free from its obstinate opacity, revealing a familiar and meaningful appearance. Other times the reality seemed to him like a blind mass, an irreducible existence following the rules of a silent and non-violent avalanche. Now, everything was conveying an intense and artificial impression, like the world would have been a creation. A world of plastic and cardboard offered by a divine scenery maker to the actors of the existence. Now, the meanings were transparent and despite their ineffable nature, although he couldn’t find any language to express them, he was feeling their almost material presence. "Maybe because now her idea entered in everything, like a scent", he thought and breathed the nocturnal breeze.
At dawn he was still in the window frame. The stars were growing pale and toward east the sky it was turning into a violate-pink nuance. Little by little the world lost its semantic beauty and before the light would spread on the whole sky he went down in his room.
It was Sunday. By chance, of course, it happened that he had enough courage to open the mailbox in such opportune moment. He didn’t believe in predestination, although he would have liked to see in this coincidence an intentional act of destiny. Once he had fell in love with a high school mate, and she had the same birthday as him and her name was Adriana. When he had declared his love for her he also told her about those coincidences that linked them by a secret and magic bound: they were born in the same day, were having the same name, they were schoolmates and classmates. Were there not all these a Sign of destiny? Her refusal was kind enough but categorical. Besides she told him that she does not believe in predestination. Then he understood that only the Hazard is the sovereign of the world and there is not predestination but just biased interpretation. The coincidences are not miraculous but only as long as they seem to serve our goals. Or, maybe, the providence exists but it is perverse and it has created a predestination appearance only to mock him.
He went down the staircase and got on the street. The Elysée Park was not so far and he decided to walk, besides, this way, the time interval until the meeting will go faster. It was a clear, fresh and strange morning of the beginning of April. Although the spring was still feeble, there were promising signs for a vegetal festivity later. The first color of the foliage, fresh, pale green began to grow on the trees branches.
In his way he came across a flower stand and he took the opportunity to buy a bouquet of hyacinths. With the flowers in his hand he entered the park through the big entrance which continued with a large, stone alley that ended at the Heroes Monument. At that early hour the park was desert and the few visitors barely took away the loneliness and alienation impression that the places were emitting. He started going up the stairs watching how the majestic silhouette of the monument was towering before his eyes. Near by him the mirror of the lake was shinning, reflecting the sun approaching the zenith. He made a stop on a landing and sat down on a stone bench. He could see by far anyone approaching the bench, and, also, anybody could see him by far and from many places in the park. He was nervous and eager and restless but these feelings were not anything dynamic and no exterior sign showed them. They were impacting only his inner being, burning his guts and his nerves, dizzying him, filling the world with fantastic. He was waiting the meeting with a sort of despair and sad resignation. There was also joy in this amalgam of feelings that were filling him, joy that announced itself vigorous and tempestuous but its time did not yet come.
When, finally, she appeared, she was a just few steps away from him unnoticed until then. He got up from the bench but she sat down and gently impelled him to set back.
- I brought you flowers…, he said confused and gave her the bouquet.
She smiled, smelt the flowers or maybe kissed them and then looked at him.
- Yesterday, when I read your letter, it has been the most agitated day in my life…
She was looking at flowers, listening to him attentively.
- It was hurting me so bad, I was so tore and so illuminated by joy that many hours I couldn’t do anything but mourn…
His voice broke; the shame of revealing his soul in so many vulnerable places overwhelmed him. She guessed his hesitation and took his hand so gently that all his reserve melted.
- Long time I accepted (no, I did not accepted it, I acknowledged) the fact that I will always be single the things seemed to be going that way. I thought there are enough things in life besides love that can fill a man’s soul and maybe I was not wrong. But I know that I need you and without your love it would be impossible for me to live. You crashed all the walls of the fortress within which I closed my soul, my will of achieving myself and to find a reason for being in work, the fidelity I wanted to keep to an unrequited love, my bashfulness (because this also exists) and look at me now defenseless before your eyes.
"I gave up all, all my thoughts and my plans because I felt that I could not do otherwise. I love you.
She remained for a moment disconcerted, as the homage would have been exaggerated and then she smiled again. He took her hand.
- You are beautiful and you have a wonderful soul. I appreciate you so much and you love me. I cannot expect a greater miracle.
He kissed her on her lips and she returned the kiss.
- I love you, too. For me either, there are not expectations for a greater miracle than that which happened now.
- Are you happy?
- Yes.
They looked in each other eyes for a few moments.
- Let’s go, he said.
They stood up from the bench and went away embraced. They were descending the steps toward the lake that was shining more and more brightly.
- I have never been so happy. I am feeling like…flooded by light. I would like this to last forever.
- Maybe it will… she whispered softly.
They walked around the lake, and then on the winding alleys that were forking, rising and lowering, admired the multicolored flowerbeds laying among alleys, visited the pavilions of the museums spread around the park. They kept discovering new places, novelty zones of the park they had ignored in the past and which now seemed to have multiplied endlessly. They saw images they knew from their dreams, which now proved to be as really as they were, increasing the confusion until the complete erasure of the differences between what they used to call dream and reality. A confusion, which was, maybe, only the sign of a new and superior consciousness, because here the illusory boundary between dream and reality was abolished and the two realms were revealed as sides of a unique and complex totality. Their walk continued indefinitely because the time spent together was not enough for all they had to tell each other, all the love words, and all the tender gestures. So they were walking through new places, always others, puzzled by the infinite variety of the park, its unsuspected extent. An artesian well with bright and multicolored waters, an old and hollow tree painted on the sky, a stony square filled with pigeons eating unhindered the grains offered by passers-by, strange and abstract sculptures carved by abstract and impersonal artists -as if known from sometime before, in a time vague and nebulous as an anterior existence- they were overlapping with images from their memory more tortuous and more endless like the infinite park through which they were loosing themselves. They forgot about the city where their idyll began, about the time whose captives they thought they are, feeling that maybe their love is above it. Or, maybe, they were imagining the time defeated, agonizing at that impossible to define border of the park, more insubstantial than an illusion, farther away than the past itself.