What was sex life like in Ceau?escu’s Romania? Although perhaps you have never asked yourself about it, the novel Provisional Lives (Cliff) by the Romanian Gabriela Adame?teanu (Târgu Ocna, 1942) illustrates, through a love triangle, how power structures – in this case, a communist dictatorship and its Kafkaesque institutions – affect romantic relationships.
The reader contemplates the relationship, set in the 1970s, between Sorin, a man searching for Love, and his colleague Leti?ia, for whom the affair is nothing more than an escape valve from her troubled marital life. To the stress of the clandestine relationship, they add the fear that the regime will discover the true origin of their families. Of course: the evil one is the husband. “Here I do not allow the husband to speak – admits the author, while in Barcelona – but, in a later novel, Fontana di Trevi, the same characters reappear at a different age; There we will see the husband from another perspective, and we will also realize that the wife is not so good.”
“I had always wanted to tell a love story,” he comments, “but one that wouldn’t last a lifetime. I had to write many books previously to be able to write this one.” Adame?teanu, who, after the fall of communism, was editor-in-chief of a weekly newspaper, has put together a political and love story in which romance – and sex – are inserted into a gray and official everyday life.
“I try to describe how people felt love, in their heads.” And, along with them, some very realistic or naturalistic descriptions that include very cold sex scenes in which the lovers take off their bedspread or watching them buy condoms. “I lived in a time when there were a lot of lies,” he explains, “in social life, politics, in people and even in literature. What they taught us in history class at school was all lies. So I only imposed one rule on myself: I would write things that were true, the truth, with all its everydayness and, sometimes, sordidness.”
The most autobiographical “is the workplace of the two characters, the forbidden loves, the struggle for power in the institution… Young people talk about how I describe trendy communism but that is because the characters go to parties, read magazines internationals, they drink… That really comes out of my life.”
Ideas such as that abortion was legal in communist countries are broken. “Not in Romania. There are many communisms… Abortions were allowed until 1966 but, then, Ceau?escu prohibited them in order to increase the birth rate. Since there was a lot of poverty and people did not want to have children, this caused an avalanche of illegal abortions, many women died, families were broken up… The Orthodox religion has always been indifferent on this issue, it is not like the Catholic religion, it allows more freedom in the couple, but on the other hand it does not help the poor.”
In the reflection of the political, journalistic and literary environments, we see that “literature under the dictatorship was much more important than it is today. The novel included everything, and it touched on topics that could not be addressed elsewhere. There was a whole game of Byzantine negotiations with the censors, which sometimes went well and other times was very cruel.” Since democracy, “we entered the wild capital, and writers stopped being able to make a living with their books.”
The Romanian technocrats “were just like the young people who work in multinationals today, with a lot of ambition, the power relations are very similar. The novel describes how large institutions work, formerly state-run, now private, and how that affects the couples that form within them, and how they force you to be part of one side or another.” It was “a very traditional society but, on the other hand, women and men were very available, moral principles were flexible.”
Leti?ia, as a student, is not given good grades because she pays, as in Greek tragedies, for something her parents did, in this case political offenses. “I have lived it as it is. I didn’t even know my family’s sins, but they made me pay for them, it was widespread. Anything was a sin: having been a member of a party, having had a business, having been rich, having fought in a war on the wrong side, having relatives abroad… There were so many faults that people constantly lied in the dossiers. relatives but the Securitate was in charge of finding out.”
Some authors that Adame?teanu is similar to are Doris Lessing (for the mixture of sentimental, domestic and political life), Herta Müller (for the reflection of authoritarian oppression), Graham Greene (for the espionage plot)… but she He cites Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) and Constantin Noica (1909-1987) as his great influences. “They lived in a very complicated time, and that makes what they wrote greater.”
“Be careful, I want to be a writer, not a female writer,” she adds, “even if my characters are women. There are feminists who criticize me when I say this, but I want to be totally oblivious to the gender problem, to have enough perspective to see and understand the characters.”
Some characters whose family tree is attached, as if it were a nineteenth-century Russian novel. “I am a daughter of the Soviet occupation – she smiles – the translations that we could read during the dictatorship were basically classics from the 19th century. The first reader of the book told me that there were many characters, so I included the tree to help.”
With cameos from historical figures like Khrushchev, there are real anecdotes, “like the one about how the Securitate hated Elena Ceau?escu, the dictator’s wife. It is true that she was ill-educated and authoritarian and that she was accumulating power because, in recent years, Ceau?escu was ill. In a meeting of senior officials, one of them fell asleep and was woken up by the shout of ‘kill him, kill him!’ because a mouse had entered the room, to which, in the mists, he added: ‘Her too!’ I believe that the Securitate already planned the end that both had, shot with 120 bullet wounds.
Adame?teanu is not a loose flower. Her books are arriving in Spain along with those by authors in the Romanian language such as her highly-established compatriot Mircea C?rt?rescu – a solid candidate for the Nobel Prize – or those by the Moldovan Tatiana ?îbuleac, who has become a phenomenon, or the recent Valentina Scerbani.