QUOTE

When you start speaking ecstatically about one single place in Bucharest, an internal, overwhelming and colorful sweep of the other places through which one has walked during one’s life invades the memory and body and takes the breath away, just as in the great jealousy scenes of world theater. After my native Târgu-Jiu, about which I always feel nostalgic, Bucharest is my second home.

Here, in Bucharest, I was born as an actor, decades ago, on some garish and wretched streets, Covaci, Smârdan, Lipscani and, most of all, 30 Decembrie Street, where the palace of the fabled fairy was, the Cassandra Studio, the golden gate for our great actors.

Here, in Bucharest, I met Caragiale on Elisabeta Boulevard, at Gambrinus; the Romanian-Greek and already German had returned from Berlin to drink Dâmbovița beer and poke fun at the Romanian people at the turn of the century.

Here, in Bucharest, at number 9 Plantelor Street, in Mr. Suțu’s sanatorium, I went to meet Eminescu but I was late and he, the Emin, had left in a great hurry to shake hands with eternity. Somewhere on Mântuleasa Street, a lanky guy wearing glasses with large, black frames was levitating above the aged houses, defaced by ivy, together with a group of gypsy women, talking, I suppose, about India, religion and other things. It was Mircea Eliade, holding an enormous smoking pipe in his mouth, and carrying on his right shoulder a transparent and unreal girl, with a strange name, Maitreyi I think she was called.

Then, I would walk towards my home in Unirii, past a small house eaten up by time, inhabited by some individuals who – deliberately, it was thought – broke the commemorative plate on its façade. I asked a lodger:
“Who lived here?”
“Some guy,” he says
“Who?” I ask
“A guy… Anton Pann.”

I cannot walk on Calea Griviței without remembering our student dorm, as ugly and stinking as a slum brothel, but alive and crazy, because there I did the undoable; there, on Calea Griviței, I met my lifelong friends and there again, my girlfriends holding watches in their hands, in a hurry to catch the train from the cold and dank Gara de Nord, the site of our temporary and, sometimes, definitive, departures.

And nowhere in Bucharest can you walk without rubbing, through the golden dust of memories, against Tudor of Vladimiri, who had set up camp in an area now called Drumul Taberei, against the brave firemen in Dealul Spirii, against the victorious and proud walk of our liberating soldiers below the Arch of Triumph, against our borrowed kings, triumphant and so Romanian, sometimes too careless, sometimes too good, against our beautiful and cultivated queens.

Nowhere, but especially on the Great Lane, as it was called, or Calea Brașovului, and, further on, the Mogoșoaia Bridge and, lastly, Calea Victoriei.

Beyond the memory of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, an example of industriousness and kindness, and, at the same time, of the most remarkable sacrifice in Christianity, you will be overwhelmed by the history of the people who occupied the palaces, museums, casinos, theaters, hotels and, obviously, the private houses on this golden road of a Bucharest paved with oak beams, starting at Mogoș’s house and stretching till it met the Dâmbovița River in Constituției Square. The old Golescu House which today hosts the National Art Museum, CEC, the Post Palace (today’s History Museum), the Enescu House, the Palace of the Carol I Cultural Foundation (now the Central University Library), the National Theater, Capșa House, the Romanian Academy – these are just some of the places where the memory of this “lane” walks, arm in arm with history. Eminescu, Caragiale, Macedonski, Topârceanu, Sadoveanu, Minulescu, Enescu, Mazilu, Nichita and how many others have festively adorned the history of this road. This is why I dared, so pitiable and captivated, to write so little about the a-lot of this place.