The Pleasures Of Life

excerpt It happened, not too often, but especially after a theater evening followed by dull group discussions at a terrace forgotten open. Camil, the second day after the torture, "ran wild". He met Sandu, the sports teacher, the scare of the second division at rugby, the useless Bubi and, sometimes, a couple of others. They gathered around six in the evening and, together, defying, in the theatergoer's and the others' wives opinion, all common sense, started in a group "to work".Judging by the way they were looked on from the threshold, and sometimes seen to it even a few steps more, with eyes wet of reproach, you would say they were going to rape primary school students. Or to play cards for sums that couldn't be lost without leading to suicide or to put bombs in the tramway. When they were younger, the kids of the defendants, raised by the mothers in the hatred for this manifestation, thought their fathers went killing and wanted to stay up until after midnight to see them come home drenched in blood.In fact, poor they didn't even go to get drunk. They simply wanted to discuss "their stuff", that is stranded memories, old stories from the times they played football and rugby in amateur teams or tennis for a box of beer that was drunk then in groups of four at the swimming-pool. They stirred politics, they told stories, some of them had small businesses, trifle tricks.But while they talked, and that's what terrified their wives who were neither merry nor from Windsor, they ate. As they saved some money they afforded to gather at "The Sea Cucumber", a place above average in taste. It was there too that the actors who were open-minded and had some money, would, ironically, come. But Camil and his pals ignored the detail. Cucumber's owner knew Sandu, with whom he played on the three quarters line sharing, after the match the basin and the towel in cold lockers. He didn't sell cheaper but he had a boy to wait on them well and ordered not to tamper with their drink.This innocent pleasure seemed to the wives, who were never admitted to the pleasure place, an insult, wickedness, almost adultery. They talked about the Cucumber as about a younger rival with big breasts and about its owner, whom they had seen, as about an obnoxious pimp. Why they acted like this, was at first sight hard to tell.It was maybe their honor as housewives, the envy for the mysterious cooks of the pub. The food they cooked was swallowed in a hurry, while watching TV or reading a newspaper. The other was "the good one", rarely afforded and then praised for many days. Then there was the suspicion about what they discussed there, in the secret place, in their absence, and who knows, against them. Knowing that they gossiped about their husbands, they supposed they did the same thing.Of course, the expense occasioned by the adventure didn't please the ladies either. The tickets for the theatre and the beer afterwards were a small part of the bill at the Cucumber. And still nobody, no matter how hard-hearted, would have said easily they were right when they started shedding tears, invoking bile crisis and ulcer or the kids with scarlet fever and meetings with the teachers to make the offenders postpone the meeting. To postpone it for there was no way they would have given it up.No, because nobody would have approved of the dropping of the edges of the mouth, already dropped, just at hearing the word "cucumber". Maybe only someone who would have seen what the boys' meal consisted of.They started on the difficult road with caviar and went on later, after a few plum brandies. Then there followed the aspic pastries and the goose livers, very swollen, in front of which Sandu chuckled with pleasure like a boy in front of his first electric toy train. This was just the warm-up until the pie was baked, the house specialty. A big pie, with three types of cheese and herbs, with which the wines started pouring, starting by the book with the dry ones. Only at the Cucumber was there such a debauch of a pie.You would have thought that the warm dough would top them. But, trained, and having time on their side, hardly had they been caught in the game when the fish arrived. The colts that came at that pub rushed to the sea fruit and crustaceans. They ate in horror various dirty creatures that crawled on the bottom of the sea, thinking they kept a refinement diet. After half an hour you could heap them up from the floor, with empty pockets and stomachs in disorder.Camil and his pals, not that they were disgusted by lobsters and shrimps, but they didn't want to get carried away by trifles. They needed sheatfish flesh, from a sturdy fish which we know must have as bait a carcass of a dog which has been dead for three days. Only the sturgeon could measure up to them, grilled, with the slice as thick as the Yellow Pages, and the salmon fillet you would have said, if it wasn't pink, that it was pork chop of a two hundred kilo pig. Stuffed pike they tried rarely, but they tried. They passed the fish with difficulty and not even they, experienced as they were, could have faced it if it weren't for the dry wine, chosen for that purpose.When they cleaned the table for the steak, it was already late. The place filled up with whores. They drank orange juice in pairs and notwithstanding the fact that the stretch skirts hardly covered their buttocks they also crossed their legs. At "The Sea Cucumber" didn't come drop-outs from Griviţa or hookers from Banu Manta about which they said they had shares at the antibiotics factories or that "penicillin" was written on their butt. There gathered fine dames, of good families. Most of them had their own money and went out just to turn an honest penny for the cigarettes and to gossip with the colleagues.They cast glances on the former sportsmen, and licked the glass's edge. No! In spite of the pussies, our men didn't even notice them. The piglet ordered a week before arrived. Then the owner sat at their table to drink a Cabernet with them and to chat. He was only human after all.When there was no piglet, they stuffed themselves with deer medallion or a plump rabbit. Any way, the idea was for a red wine to go with it, for that was what got them. No matter what!They got tired at about dessert time. Two black coffees brought them back to their senses so as not to sleep with their nose in the pancakes. For they wouldn't have ice-cream like the minor strings. They couldn't afford champagne. They said it might harm them, because they have delicate stomachs. A waiter suggested whiskey and Camil, a little too much on the drinks, picked an inexistent lint from his lapel:"What do you think, you, dick, that we were born in the block like you?"When there wasn't French cognac, there was a Cotnari wine good for crowning the work.They got up contented. They got dizzy but none of them would swing, not as much as the Brooklyn Bridge in the wind. The dizziness showed only in the amounts of money they left for the waiters as the people who want to feel good and think that life is anyway shorter than it should be.

from Enigmas In Our City, Editura Fundaţiei Pro, 2001


by Horia Gârbea (b. 1962)