I said to myself: ‘You’ve got to kiss her!’ I counted to ten. I wasn’t brave enough. I scowled, blushed, I was confused and humiliated. The girl dared to say something. And then I forced myself to do it. She shuddered beneath my cold lips that were pressed against her cheek, her hair, her shoulder in its faded cloth.
But I had wanted it too much, and moved too fast. It was still daylight. The other couples could be seen and heard walking about. I made my companion sit next to me beside a spindly fir tree. After almost having to be dragged there, she sat down. She didn’t utter a word. She pushed me away with her eyes and hands. I was thinking about who-knows-what act of madness. The girl was terrified. When I kissed her on the lips she leapt up off the seat as if fired from a bow, quickly straightened her dress and rushed away, saying through her tears that she was going to find her sister. All of a sudden my foolish desire to prove that I was an uncouth, uneducated lout evaporated. I went over to her and reproached her for allowing me to kiss her. I don’t know what made me lie. I lied to her when I said that I had simply wanted to find out if she was ‘virtuous’, or if she was like her sister. I began to accuse her sister of all manner of things that made her blush, but it made me feel better. I spoke harshly, hatefully, cruelly about her sister – who I had only just met – insisting that I knew a great many compromising things about her. The girl was on the verge of tears. But I persisted. I told her that she needed to become ‘a virtuous girl’ again. I took pleasure in torturing her in this foolish way.
We all met up again at the far end of the Arena. The girls kissed and embraced my friends. Jean Victor was delighted. Dinu had perhaps already promised himself that he must do this again. All eyes were on us. I was deathly pale, while she was red-faced from crying. But who knows, maybe the others were jealous of us...
I was furious with myself. I couldn’t understand why I had said things that were so out of character, or why I had tormented her in such a ludicrous way, in the name of an overblown moral code that was repugnant as well as alien to my nature. I was completely baffled. It was like something from a nightmare.
On the way back, when I told Robert about my escapade he didn’t know what to believe. But after giving it some thought, he said that it was ‘interesting’, although not very. According to him I should have been much rougher with her, and gone even further. It’s odd how he failed to see that I was upset about what had happened.
Ever since that day, I never go with him to meet girls. He started a rumour that I was scared. Perhaps it wasn’t far from the truth.
Up till now I’ve said rather too little about this friend, who is supposed to be an important character in my novel. It’s possible that I don’t really know him. Robert reads whatever I tell him to, and talks constantly about the books he’s read. But – perhaps because of some hidden jealousy – his shallow rhetoric exasperates me. Robert exasperates me, because he’s sentimental, dull-witted and conceited. But since this notebook also acts as my Diary, shouldn’t I perhaps ask myself: am I not just as conceited? I shouldn’t be afraid of the answer. I realize that I consider myself superior to everyone. But I keep this hidden within me, and the novel won’t reveal it. Robert told me that his quest for glory is the only thing he lives for. I pretended not to understand. And then he began to tell me about D’Annunzio. I envy this Italian, the author of beautiful books, and whose memoires are full of beautiful women. But I’m in no hurry. Before I start craving such extraordinary things, I realize that I will have to work hard and suffer. That’s why I despise my friend: because he expects to achieve glory without working for it. Robert is no genius, of that I’m certain. He’s simply a beautiful boy, just like a girl, who loves going to the theatre and has plans to write three-act plays. One of his main characters will be based on me. He imagines me in my attic, in a coarse Russian shirt like the one I wear in the summer, with glasses and a disconsolate smile. I’ll be a sort of ‘raisonneur’. I’d love to know what Robert thinks of me; not just what he says to my face, but what he actually thinks. I know he’s very dismissive of me because he’s always saying that I know nothing of life, that I live among books. But he’s the one who wastes his time reading novels, and says that he ‘has a life’. He’s complex, because he has known more girls than I have, and because on Sundays he goes for a stroll along the boulevards. And I’m simple, because I regard these childish occupations as obstacles on the hard and bitter road that I have to travel.
When we get together with our many friends, Robert tells us about his dreams of glory. Sceptically, I ask him if he is doing any actual work to achieve this. He tells us that he reads Balzac, Ibsen, and Victor Eftimiu. We tease him unmercifully, because we both like and dislike Robert.
This is the difference between him and me: one dreams of happiness and waits for it, while the other torments himself to achieve it, without giving it too much thought. And that’s another foolish phrase I’ve just written, but I mustn’t cross it out: later on it will remind me how easy it is to draw clear distinctions at the age of seventeen.
In my novel, Robert will have to act and speak in order to make himself known to the reader. He lacks depth and is self-satisfied. I couldn’t resist the temptation to tell him about the major part he would play in the book about our adolescence. He listened with feverish anticipation. I said I was going to exaggerate his faults, make him look ridiculous, that I would gather together all the naïve and foolish nonsense with which he had regaled me and our friends over the past year, and put them in the novel. We sat up until well after midnight. Robert complained that I wasn’t really his friend, that I would expose myself as a liar if I only wrote bad things about him in the novel.
‘And what will you call me?’
‘Jean Victor Robert.’
He protested, crying out that I would compromise his career and his glory. That if I had uncovered so many secrets and ugly things about him, our friendship demanded that they should remain between us.
‘But I’m writing a novel about morals, a psychological novel,’ I lied. ‘It has to include real events and real characters.’
‘Then why don’t you include me in the good parts?’
‘Because the author needs a character who looks ridiculous.’
‘And why does that have to be me?’
‘Because in the novel, Robert is an example of what it is to be ridiculous.’
We parted on bad terms. After thinking it over, however, Robert managed to convince himself that I would never really write a novel where he was portrayed as ridiculous. Ever since then, whenever he talks to me he tries to appear a different person, superior to others and changed by what he has read. He paces up and down my attic with a downcast expression on his face, in exactly the way that I once told him that an anxious, troubled adolescent should walk. He talks to me about Brand, a novel he borrowed from me, and tried as hard as he could to be like a Nordic hero.
It would be interesting to make a note of all the masks that Robert has worn for my benefit over the past few weeks, in order to make me change my opinion of him, and prevent me from portraying him as ridiculous.
I pretend to be convinced by these changes. The other boys were amazed; they thought it was just a practical joke. But Robert was so pleased with these new ‘characters’ that he had adopted that he actually began to believe them. This will require further thought. Because of an allusion I made, Robert has started to believe that he is another person. I’m afraid that things might go too far. But when he’s all alone in Târgoviste during the holidays, I think he’ll go back to being to his former self. He’ll forget about Brand and Andrea Sperelli, and again become a dull-witted, beautiful adolescent who yearns for glory.
But here I am, ending these pages of my Diary with something of a cliffhanger. When it comes to writing the novel, I’ll