hidden lives

Two lovers meet from time to time in a borrowed room, in a secluded and anonymous neighborhood, mid-morning or mid-afternoon, in the forced hours of their clandestine lives, even more secret because they have to hide from the gossiping espionage of the others and also of the omniscience of a police state.

The room is squalid, other people's sheets are dirty, butts overflow the ashtray, sometimes the water is cut off in the bathroom, the window overlooks a kind of vacant lot in which there are construction ditches and a suspiciously colored lagoon : but for a few hours the passion of love cancels out to a certain extent the outside world, its bad weather, its threat.

The place and time in which the story takes place are at first as blurred as the suburban landscape seen through the dirty window panes,

with its poorly adjusted closures through which the cold sneaks.

The city is Bucharest, the time more or less the seventies, in that phase of political and vital stagnation of a dictatorship that has existed for many years and to which no one sees an end.

Sometimes time jumps to the future of the nineties, and then that present of the two lovers has become a distant memory, tinged with an uneven mixture of longing and bitterness.

And other times time goes back, beyond the birth of the lovers who are now around thirty years old, to show us the origin from which they come and that the two ignore to a great extent, the years of tyranny and cruelty suffered by a poor country that has the misfortune of being situated, as in a geological fault, between Nazi brutality and Soviet brutality,

Sometimes the biography of people has a decisive correspondence with historical circumstances: this allows them to experience first-hand the great mutations of a collective future.

Like Letitia and Sorin, the two lovers who star in

the author of the novel, Gabriela Adamesteanu, was born too late to have memories of the years of raw savagery in World War II in Romania, but as a child in the last years of the Stalin era, she grew up and found her calling and he had to make his way in life during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu.

A good generational watchtower can be a privilege for a novelist, because it allows him to feed his imagination with the priceless spectacle of the changes of time: he has lived through the overwhelming boredom of a time that seems immobile;

suddenly the unexpected bursts in and things change vertiginously overnight, and the immediate past stays far away and falls into oblivion, due to the impatience of changes,

Sometimes the biography of people has a decisive correspondence with the mutations of the collective future

The mutual current of desire that has brought them to that room does not erase the deep differences between the two lovers, the signs of future discord that fervor does not allow to see, or prefers to avoid.

The outside world cannot be canceled as they would like.

They enter and leave separately, to avoid spies and gossip.

In the administrative body where the two work as menial officials, they try to stay away from each other.

In front of that building of totalitarian architecture there is a giant statue of Lenin.

The constant fear, the vigilance, the suspicion, the lie, the denunciation, happen under the stupefying immensity of the tedium.

Sexual passion is an invigorating but insufficient respite, and it is being spent, like all of life, by the crude and incessant double machinery of oppression and subjugation.

The lovers hide in the precarious room, they surrender, they breathe the thick air of tobacco, sex and lack of hygiene;

sometimes they even dance following the American or French songs that sound behind the wall;

things are whispered in the ear.

But what they tell each other is much less than what they don't say, because suspicion infects even the most intimate parts of life, and what they know about themselves, or about each other, is very little compared to everything they know. that they do not know, the past that weighs on them even if they do not know it, all the information contained in police files that at any moment can push them to ignominy or to jail.

sometimes they even dance following the American or French songs that sound behind the wall;

things are whispered in the ear.

But what they tell each other is much less than what they don't say, because suspicion infects even the most intimate parts of life, and what they know about themselves, or about each other, is very little compared to everything they know. that they do not know, the past that weighs on them even if they do not know it, all the information contained in police files that at any moment can push them to ignominy or to jail.

sometimes they even dance following the American or French songs that sound behind the wall;

things are whispered in the ear.

But what they tell each other is much less than what they don't say, because suspicion infects even the most intimate parts of life, and what they know about themselves, or each other, is very little compared to everything they know. that they do not know, the past that weighs on them even if they do not know it, all the information contained in police files that at any moment can push them to ignominy or to jail.

provisional lives

is a novel of old-fashioned all-encompassing ambition and choppy writing and composition, leaps in time, shifting points of view, voices and presences that tangle across generations, between the late 1930s and the early nineties.

María Ochoa de Eride's translation sounds expressive and fluid, foul-mouthed in moments of female sexual frankness.

The omniscient narrator, so reviled among us, is shown in the novel in all his glorious capacity to tell everything, skipping times, places, consciences, discovering the most hidden, unfolding panoramas of great breadth and concentrating on those minimal and revealing details of what everyday life that are the specialty of the art of the novel.

But among all the voices, the looks, many of them memorable,

the ones that prevail are those of Letitia Branea, that woman at the same time shameless and shy who for years continues to go to clandestine dates with an impulse to live not dampened by disappointment, and who, returning every night to her ungrateful marital home, writes in a notebook so as not to forget what he has lived through in those burning hours, to fulfill his vocation of giving a narrative form to the confused and uncertain of the experience.

As soon as he writes, he hides the notebook under the mattress again, with the same impulse of survival through the secret that governs his entire life, and that helps him save his own integrity in the midst of the universal corruption of a political system sustained on the debasement of each one of its leaders and each one of its subjects.

In

that woman at the same time shameless and shy who for years continues to go to clandestine dates with an impulse to live not dampened by disappointment, and who, returning every night to the ungrateful marital home, writes in a notebook so as not to forget what she has lived in those burning hours, to fulfill his vocation of giving a narrative form to the confused and uncertain of the experience.

As soon as he writes, he hides the notebook under the mattress again, with the same impulse of survival through the secret that governs his entire life, and that helps him save his own integrity in the midst of the universal corruption of a political system sustained on the debasement of each one of its leaders and each one of its subjects.

In

that woman at the same time shameless and shy who for years continues to go to clandestine dates with an impulse to live not dampened by disappointment, and who, returning every night to the ungrateful marital home, writes in a notebook so as not to forget what she has lived in those burning hours, to fulfill his vocation of giving a narrative form to the confused and uncertain of the experience.

As soon as he writes, he hides the notebook under the mattress again, with the same impulse of survival through the secret that governs his entire life, and that helps him save his own integrity in the midst of the universal corruption of a political system sustained on the debasement of each one of its leaders and each one of its subjects.

In

and that when returning each night to the unpleasant marital home, he writes in a notebook so as not to forget what he has lived through in those burning hours, to fulfill his vocation of giving a narrative form to the confusing and uncertain of the experience.

As soon as he writes, he hides the notebook under the mattress again, with the same impulse of survival through the secret that governs his entire life, and that helps him save his own integrity in the midst of the universal corruption of a political system sustained on the debasement of each one of its leaders and each one of its subjects.

In

and that when returning each night to the unpleasant marital home, he writes in a notebook so as not to forget what he has lived through in those burning hours, to fulfill his vocation of giving a narrative form to the confusing and uncertain of the experience.

As soon as he writes, he hides the notebook under the mattress again, with the same impulse of survival through the secret that governs his entire life, and that helps him save his own integrity in the midst of the universal corruption of a political system sustained on the debasement of each one of its leaders and each one of its subjects.

In

and that helps him save his own integrity in the midst of the universal corruption of a political system sustained on the debasement of each one of its leaders and each one of its subjects.

In

and that helps him save his own integrity in the midst of the universal corruption of a political system sustained on the debasement of each one of its leaders and each one of its subjects.

In

there are quick visions, terrible

of interrogations and torture: but his fundamental intuition is that of the irreparable spiritual deterioration not of the indicated victims but of ordinary people, the well-to-do, those subjected without complaint, the incessant rotting away of conscience under tyranny.

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