The Poetess Writes Unanswered Letters

Varatec, Romania, June 10, 1889

Dear Emin,

When I arrived here at the convent at Varatec, I knew I was done. I’m 39, and I won’t marry again. I won’t move to the woods, write poetry, and live on cornmeal like the forest nymphs you talk about. I’m done, Emin, and it’s you who’ve done me in. I’m ready to give myself over to God’s work and to sing his praises, hosanna in the highest with the nuns.

I wasn’t going to move from spare room to spare room in my daughters’ houses any more, or move from one shabby flat to another in Iasi. You’ve seen those little rooms of mine - chambers, you always insisted on calling them, and you never once visited without three flowers for me to stick in the water jug on whatever battered dresser I was using next. You weren’t kind to me when I complained that those chambers were small. Cozy, you said. Cozy. It was easy for you to be above matters of money with your drinking partners footing your bills.

Even easier for you now in the asylum: Mihai Eminescu, the maddest man in Romania. They say you think the stones in the yard look like diamonds, the leaves, money. Of course in your madness you’ve found a way to think that money does grow on trees.

My dear Emin, you weren’t ever kind when I complained about matters of money, either before or after you went crazy with syphilis. There, I’ve written it, what the doctors would never let me hear, what your sisters would never tell me. As if I wouldn’t know what the mercury cure was for. Or why you were raving. You said it was Albanian. But you don’t know Albanian, Emin. All across Europe, the poets are raving mad. How in vogue you’ve become.

The first time you said you couldn’t marry me, you told me I was raving mad, a lunatic, and in a way unbecoming to a muse or a poetess. Remember? After Stefan died? Nine years ago, when I briefly thought I had the chance to become a wife to the poet, perhaps a better poetess in my own right because I’d be freed from the worry of rumor and want, but above all from the steady pain of missing you, mourning you when you weren’t the one who was dead. You were alive and I was alive and how could it be mad to marry? An unbecoming lunatic, you said. As if I’d ever, with my responsibilities, my girls, my reputation, had the luxury to wallow in lunacy?

So I’m a lunatic, but you, sir, are a coward, I told you. I said it again in French to make sure you’d understand me. You with your effete French habits, the cane with the scarab-design at the tip, the pince-nez, the moustache that wriggled above your lip like a mouse trying to slide into his hole. Because a real Romanian would have married me first and thought about consequences second, I told you. It was the most cutting thing I could think of to tell you. You were trying so hard to become French you became as cautious as them, you who had built your career in and for the Romanian language, you, the national poet, Emin the eminent who would get our little local language noticed in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin, in the real Europe just a train ride away from our Turkish backwater.

No one will let you keep this letter. No one will read it out loud to you, smooth the poet’s brow and unfold the perfumed letter to Mihai Eminescu locked up in the asylum from his notorious mistress locked up in the convent. Where would I get perfume anyway, at Varatec? I’ve said goodbye to the charms of women and am trying to welcome the nonchalance of crones. I’ve rubbed acacia blooms across this page for that smell of sex you found so intoxicating when we stumbled upon it in the gardens at Copou, when I was an adulteress and not yet a widow, when you were a poet and not yet a syphilitic.

I’ve unpacked my trunk for the last time. My poor books, photos of the girls in silvered frames, my plainest dresses pressed and wrapped in paper. The ivory mirror, comb, and brush set Stefan gave me as a wedding present. The cottage in the convent still smells like newly cut pine. The fretted eaves are painted pale blue and there’s a veranda where I’ll pray for us all, for the girls and their families, but for you and me, Emin, too.

I arrived at Varatec in my fur-trimmed hat. Ermine. The one I refused to pawn. Remember when you told me you always thought of me as “Veronica Micle ensconced in fur and velvet?” When we were still formal with each other, never a tu between us, never an Emin or Nicutza, but when the flirting had already started? You had just started your job as the university librarian in Iasi. I was wearing my hair the way you liked it best then, most of it piled up in a chignon but with strands loose over my shoulders. You said I looked like a little girl.

When I was a little girl in Neamt, and we would go by sleigh, my mother would tuck a bear fur blanket around our legs. In winter at its coldest, we’d get the warmed brick at our feet. You used to tease me about how cold I could get, that it made me more appealing because I needed a gentleman to warm me up. But when we took the Iasi-Bucharest train together last April, when your crippled sister Harieta begged me to take you back to Dr. Sutu because you were getting worse again, I was the one who wrapped my arms around you. We hadn’t sat so close since you finally ended it with me and ended up in the asylum. For the last six years, we’ve always kept a respectable distance, my skirts swishing over the floor as I paced while you told me about your days in Bucharest from across the room. In April, you were in one of your rare lucid moments. You patted my hand and whispered, my old girl. Nicutza. Nicutza. But once, you called me Harieta, and your eyes then had the faraway look of a little boy who needs to nap.

My girls wanted Varatec for me because of the stoves and six chimneys in the convent church. They know I need to be warm. It’s pleasant as I write this letter on the veranda. The convent’s garden is shaded by cedars. The walls are whitewashed and dappled in the afternoon sun. The nuns run back and forth from the cottages looking for gossip.

The nuns eye me warily. I’ve never liked starting over with new people - maybe one of the reasons I was determined to wait for you so long? I didn’t have to introduce myself to you. Stefan did. You met Stefan first in that Viennese hotel lobby, two countrymen speaking their own language in the imperial city. I was Doamna Micle to you instead of Veronica, and certainly not Nicutza, when the three of us went into the coffeehouse together. You and I ate a Sacher torte and talked about French literature, Baudelaire mainly but a little Flaubert, while Stefan read the papers. You let me have most of the torte. I thought you were a plump, overgrown schoolboy who liked to list the books he read but couldn’t explain why he read them.

The first time you came to our house in Iasi for one of my literary evenings, you didn’t want to hand over your cane and hat to the servant, and you wriggled so awkwardly out of your greatcoat. I saw you down the corridor as I conferred with the cook about the wine-soaked pears. You looked different than you did in Vienna. In Romania, you seemed wild, disheveled and clumsy, a poet, not a student. When you sat down in the parlor, you didn’t balance your teacup on your lap. You drank it down to the leaves and left your cup on the rug. You leaned back in your chair and crossed your arms as you listened to the monotone poetry Titu Maiorescu offered that night. You audibly sighed before Titu was done. Stefan snored in the corner, but he woke up for yours. You didn’t read yours so much as proclaim it. Even Stefan said he liked your poem. Afterwards, when you took your leave of me, you didn’t kiss my hand like everyone else. You asked me, tell me, Veronica, what do you think of my poem? You asked me to write out a copy of one of mine. You said it was pretty. You didn’t say I was.

I know you always wondered if you were my first love affair. First other than Stefan, that is. You weren’t my first because I do count Stefan. You never did. You saw him as an old man, tried to think of him as a fatherly gentleman, never my husband. You’d rather imagine me with other young men, create phantoms to be jealous of rather than think about Stefan. When I met Stefan and we married, when I was 14 and he was 44, he was a glamorous figure to me. I adored him. I was still in braids. He wasn’t yet the rector at the university, but he was an established professor in physics and chemistry, and the equations he wrote out for me seemed a different kind of poetry. I was already trying to be a poet, writing whenever my father let me have some paper. I liked his leonine head, his peppered hair, his shoulders that were broader than my father’s. Stefan’s suits were purchased in Vienna and Berlin. I did love him.

Everyone always asks me what I thought the first time I read your “Luceafarul.” They want to watch me squirm as I think about what it’s like to be called too beautiful by your lover. Or your husband to be called old and cold. But what I always thought, once Stefan died and you still wouldn’t marry me, is that yes, I’m the too beautiful girl, and yes, “Luceafarul” is our love triangle, but you’re not the youth and Stefan wasn’t the distant Evening Star whose bride is stolen beneath his stellar gaze. You’re the Evening Star, Emin, you’re Luceafarul, removed from the rest of us in the glittery, cold world of your own imagination. There’s no way it could have ended well.

All of Iasi still recites “Luceafarul” and your poems about the poplars. Your favorite linden tree in the Copou gardens is already a tourist destination. They’ve put up a wrought-iron fence around it, and a sign that reads “Eminescu’s linden.” I wouldn’t walk by it, though, not even when I was staying in Copou. If I’m there on a Sunday evening promenade, everyone starts whispering, there goes Veronica Micle in her fur-trimmed hat, the woman Eminescu loves, the woman Eminescu jilted, paying her respects to Eminescu’s linden, poor thing.

You let Titu Maiorescu, that sloppy poet, that colossal bore, talk you out of marriage. Titu! Really, I should have known you were crazy then. I know he’s arranged your finances since your illness, I know that when you were healthy Titu championed your poetry, got you the librarianship and editorial position and all the jobs you’ve ever had, but why did you have to listen to a man who can’t keep a woman himself? You were a prompter for the theater troupe when you first came back from Vienna - was Titu prompting you? Feeding you the words that would get rid of me? Titu didn’t want you to “stop crying so beautifully.” He said happiness would destroy your writing and that you must make this sacrifice for art’s sake. You kept telling me you would marry me if you had more money. Who should I believe, you or Titu?

Am I supposed to believe that I drove you crazy? After you broke it off with me, when you were living down in Bucharest, you told Maiorescu you wanted to become a monk. (How strange that I’m the one who ended up a nun.) You went to Capsa Coffeehouse, brandishing a revolver and shouting that the king must be shot because you were a liberal now. Everyone laughed. They thought you were trying on political humor. Then you locked yourself in a public bath for eight hours and let the water flow out, streaming down the corridor, and Titu started talking to Dr. Sutu.

If we had been married, I would have bathed you, I would have taken care of you, better care than Dr. Sutu, better care than Harieta, as tenderly as I cared for Stefan. We would have had to live simply, but our two small incomes joined would have meant we could have lived better together than apart. In the end of the day, Emin, why did you save me from marriage with you when you didn’t spare me the knowledge of your body? Who else would marry me? I’ve no desire to sit here holy in the convent. It calls for a kind of patience I sorely lack.

The younger nuns have such simple wishes and prayers for the families they left behind. The older ones have stories much more complicated than mine. Most of their days are taken up with prayer. They don’t write letters any more. They’ve told me they’ve outlived everyone.

Love,

Your old girl,

Nicutza

Varatec, August 4, 1889

Dear Emin,

You’ve been dead for two months. I’ve been praying since you died. Do ghosts get mail? Remember when you first moved to Bucharest and we would argue through letters about reasons to choose life or death? You thought I was bringing up thoughts of suicide to goad you into marrying me? I don’t think you realized how desperate I was then, with two small girls and no clear sign about what would happen to Stefan’s pension. Like most powerful men, he forgot to think about what would happen when he was gone. When he died, I was so intensely happy I had to cross myself constantly to make up for it. Every afternoon, I went to the Cathedral to pray for Stefan. I felt like I’d killed Stefan by wishing for you. Yes, Stefan was sick, yes, Stefan was old, finally it was a kindness for him to die, but I was thinking about you while I fed him his chicken soup and gave him his sponge bath. When you wouldn’t marry me, I wanted to die. If I could have found a way to die without orphaning the girls, some kind of poet’s trick to have things two ways, I would have done it.

There were many days when I would play a game. A letter from you meant I would have to let myself live. No letter, and I’d begin to plan my death again. It’s funny, but on the days I planned for death I felt the most alive. I counted the hairs on the girls’ heads as I did their braids with the ivory comb and brush Stefan gave me. I made polenta and sausages for supper and let the chambers get smoky with the smell of burnt meat. I burnt my tongue on too-hot tea. Evenings, I’d look for the evening star and wish on it for you.

I’m done with life now but there’s no way to tell you. Not that I could tell you much these last few years, anyway. That’s what I’ve missed the most, talking to you. There’s no one left alive I’d like to stay up all night talking to. I don’t want to wait here, ensconced in the convent, if my brain is going to turn to sponge the way yours did.

When I’m done writing this letter in this in-between time, after lunch and before vespers, I’ll sit on my veranda with a glass of tea. I’ll pour in the arsenic I’ve gathered in Iasi. I traveled to every pharmacist, from Copou to Nicolina, asking for a bit of arsenic to use as rat poison. When I said I was moving to the convent, they gave me a little more. No one wants to think of a lady fighting off the rats alone in her cottage. Or maybe they understood that a lady might be going to Varatec due to a great disappointment and a little extra arsenic could be a great kindness?

There’s an embroidery school at the convent. Girls from the village come to sew. I wanted to be a weaver when I was a girl in Neamt. I cried when my mother told me that was for peasants alone. Embroidery is delicate, silly. It’s what Titu called my poetry. He’s right. My poems were little nothings. My real talent was in recognizing talent, in finding you, in promoting the poets of my literary salon, getting haughty Bucharest to notice provincial Iasi, in pushing my daughters to be artists, too. Before I drink my tea, I’ll watch the embroidery class walk home together, the little girls darting in and out of the group, trying to catch up with their sisters. They’ll hold hands the way my daughters used to do.

They’ll bury me here, by the embroidery school near the convent gardens. I’ll be a tourist attraction, like your linden tree. The embroidery schoolgirls will walk back and forth along the path next to my grave. They’ll want to do embroidery like an art, embroidery like painting, like what my students at the Art School did.

You must remember the time you took me to the Balta Rece cellar tavern? You took me late at night, almost midnight. I didn’t wear my fur-trimmed hat, but a boy’s cap that shielded my eyes and held my hair up and back. I wore pantaloons. We sat in a booth in the corner. At the tavern, drinking new wine and making up poetic parodies, I had a hint of what it might be like to be a man, to be yourself in a place neither at home nor out on the street but somewhere in between, a place where it was possible to relax your stance and loosen your tongue. At first, unencumbered by petticoats, crinolines, bustles, I sat with my legs together, tucked in at my ankles, but as I watched you and the others, I let them loose to fall as they wished. Uncaged from a corset, I leaned forward to make my points. I interrupted you and your friends whenever I thought of a bon mot, even if it wasn’t the cleverest phrase at the perfect moment. I blurted out my real opinions of people and their poetry. I wasn’t just tipsy, but drunk. It was our best night, but also the first time I should have realized that there was a chance you wouldn’t marry me. You nodded at Titu when we came in, but we didn’t go to his table and he didn’t come to ours. I didn’t know it yet, but Titu was winning the argument. You wouldn’t marry me, for art’s sake, for money’s sake.

You told me I had the laugh of a drunken Gypsy girl, tinkly and high-pitched. You said the cap was the kind of fashion a Gypsy girl might choose. I told you that your eyes were like those of an old Jew’s, wrinkled at the edges like the skin was squeezing to hold the eye in the socket, irises nothing but darkness.

You took my hand and pulled me up the cellar stairs. You kissed me out on the street, pushing me up against a building, as if I were a whore. We walked out to the cemetery at the end of town, then back again. We hid behind poplars to avoid the town watch. We watched the sunrise in Copou gardens at your linden tree, your head resting in my lap. When we went back to my chambers, our hair still smelled like linden. We had that whole day together in my bed before your night train back to Bucharest. It was the only time we were together and completely alone for so long.

Do you remember it? Were you thinking about poems you wanted to write the whole time? Poems that weren’t about me? At the train station, you were looking past me even as you kissed my forehead. A beggar tugged at the hem of your coat as you turned for the Bucharest tracks, but you brushed by her. I waited for you to wave goodbye. When you did, it was a regal wave, an arc encompassing the arm from the socket to the tips of your bony poet fingers, meant for crowds, meant for someone standing at a greater distance than I was, somebody in Bucharest, Vienna, Paris and Berlin. I balanced on my toes to watch you bound up the steps. You didn’t turn again. I tossed all the coins in my purse, money I needed if we were to eat meat that week, into the beggar’s shaking palms.

So when Harieta sent us together to Bucharest to Dr. Sutu, when you clutched my hands and sighed and drooled on my shoulder as you slept, I thought of what might have happened if I hadn’t let you board that earlier train alone, if I’d ran after you. All I would have done, though, would have been to cause a scandal, the Micle widow loose in Bucharest instead of safe in Iasi where you could mourn her. You’d already decided not to marry me, before the night in the Copou gardens and the Balta Rece tavern. Maybe you decided even before Stefan died? Maybe you decided the first time you saw me, in the hotel lobby of the Viennese hotel as I blushed, lowered my eyes with my eyelashes fluttering as fast as I could make them go, and waited for Stefan to introduce us. Maybe you decided when you met Stefan that morning and learned he had a young wife? Maybe you decided that you would never marry at home drinking tea with honey in the kitchen with Harieta when you were just a boy, that you would never marry because she couldn’t, trapped in her twisted body as much as you ended up trapped in your twisting mind?

What dirty, dirty things you must have done as a student in Vienna! Which whore with open sores gave you syphilis? Did you see something of her in me? Did you sleep with her before or after we met in that Viennese hotel? What was the size of your chancre? What shape did it take? Now there’s a subject for poetry. Was it still blooming when you slept with me? In the end, which one of us mattered most? We’re the real triangle: Poet, Poetess, Whore. You might have loved me more, but she’s the one who shaped your life. In the end, she’s the Luceafarul, the distant star guiding us through all of our furtive, intimate embraces. It’s the whore I can’t stop thinking about. Oh, Emin, I pray for her, too.

Were you raving at the end? They won’t tell me. The nuns twitter around me and I know they want to know what the chances are that I’ll follow you to your crazy grave. Down, down, down, drown me at the well, drape me in Ophelia’s flowers, mark me as Emin’s mistress. I’ll speak Albanian at last.

Love.

Nicutza