At a mountain resort, a refined intellectual runs into his former pupil, now a beautiful woman half his age. As the nature of their rekindled relationship changes, he documents with perverse lucidity his attempt to resist falling in love with her.
Adela is a fin de siècle novel written by Garabet Ibrăileanu, one of Romania’s most important literary critics. The author spent a decade refining and circulating the work among his literary friends, finally publishing it a year before his death (1933). It received the National Novel Award that same year.
Excerpt:
We had to justify our presence. But we could not very well ask for three shots of brandy—for the two ladies and I… Nor a jug of wine and three glasses to enjoy ourselves at the bar, or at the table in the back, partially occupied by a few peasants which eyed us ironically.
“Miss, give me a kilogram of olives, please, and this packet of pretzels! (The only acceptable merchandise I could see in the pub.)
Unable to arrest myself in time on the slope I’d begun sliding on, I asked the superb young lady for the rest of the merchandise in the pub: half an octopus which hanged crookedly on a nail. The shopkeeper served my order doubtfully, with a fright of sorts.
Adela ran out, leaving me with Mrs. M., who followed her right away, decently.
“You’ve bought the octopus too?!” Adela could barely articulate in the carriage, wiping with her handkerchief tears of laughter.
The octopus smelled, naturally, of octopus, but copiously so. I hid the packet in the carriage box. In vain. The fragrance—like any essential emanation, be it of rose or octopus—knew no barrier and continued to enthusiastically color the surroundings.
“Sir, it’s spoiling my carriage, beg your pardon!” the driver blurted, unable to take it anymore.
I decided to throw away the cadaver. But where? On the side of the road? In the cornfield?
Wherever I would have thrown it, a peasant might have found it. And an octopus in a cornfield being, without any doubt, a unique event on the face of the entire planet, the rumor would have reached the village, mortally offending the trader of Oshlobeni, and ruining her entire commerce in the Valley of Cracau.
The octopus perfume floated pervasively and endlessly in the cooling air of dusk.
“Let’s bury it!” Adela decided in a flash of genius.
We inhumed the cadaver in a deep tomb, dug with the driver’s hand axe. We placed a stone on top of the tomb—modest funerary monument—and, with contented souls, we departed.
TIBERIAN PRESS 