ࡱ> HJG9 &Hbjbj "V&Dl $  #  j    0KB j0 5 5  NOROC Gaither Stewart I need a woman ! His words echoed from inside the high hedge. The Romanian gardener stepped back, dropped the clippers to his side, turned toward me his habitual silly grin, half comical, half desperate, and rubbed his nearly bald head with one hand. Thats what Fellinis crazy uncle once yelled from a tree, I answered and clapped him on the back. Hed probably never seen that film. That is, before they captured him and sent him back to the asylum. No, seriously, Signor Antonio, I need a woman bad! At that point I saw from the gleam in his eye that this was not just another of his attempts to be western, glib or funny. I have to have a woman! Gheorghe almost shouted. For a long moment he looked at me interrogatively as if I were his official provider. As if I would have the answer to his needs. Well, I stammered, although I had grasped immediately the problem. Uh, well, there are many good women here in the countryside. A strong man like you should have no trouble. Signor Antonio, these Italian women, they treat us nice, but they wont go with us immigrants. He meant immigrant workers - not rich foreign tourists or businessmen or visiting scholars. I looked at the ground embarrassed and kicked at a rock. Gheorghe snapped his clippers a couple of times in the air and waited. And I cant afford the street women down on Via Flaminia if I make 80,000 a day, they cost 50,000. And besides I dont have a car. And anyway half the time you think its a woman and shes a man. Arent there any Romanian women around? I said weakly. Women? Romanians? he repeated. Only men! Only workers like me. They all need women. If a decent woman comes from home, shes a beauty looking for a rich Italian not us. Its a miracle we arent all queers down there in that barracks. Several years ago Gheorghe had suddenly appeared in these parts, offering to do odd jobs. Today he worked in many of our gardens he cut the grass, clipped hedges, pruned trees, could operate equipment, could do almost anything. And hed learned good Italian that he spoke with a Roman accent. He was famous for his early morning starts and his joyous whistling and singing of unidentifiable melodies at six a.m. You didnt even know he was coming that day and he might wake the whole family with some strange Transylvanian air. . Strange things were going on in those days. For the first time since the Barbarian invasions the country was overwhelmed by immigrants from Asia, Africa and East Europe. Termini Station was the headquarters for East Africans. Bosnians, Kosovars and Albanians landed by the thousands each night on southern coasts. The Albanian mafia was competing with the Sicilians. East European women and black Africans had taken over prostitution. Newspapers documented the 5,000 automobiles and thousands of motorbikes abandoned by foreign joy riding car thieves on the streets of the capital. I once described in an article for my newspaper a street in the eastern part of the city as Hebron after a bombing. In a major clean-up operation sanitation officials banned the vagabonds and unidentified foreigners bivouacked on Colle Oppio where foreigners have camped for two and a half millennia. A young Albanian woman escaped from a house in an eastern suburb where she had been held for two months and regularly raped by a group of men. It was in that agitated atmosphere that sirens screamed one night a few streets distance from us and the next day TV headlines announced that clandestine foreigners had butchered with kitchen knives a mother and her young son - 47 stabs in the woman, 53 in the lad. Our neighborhood was up in arms. Gates and doors were barred. Schnauzers, German Shepherds and vicious imported foreign dogs patrolled gardens lit up like the Tivoli Gardens. Hunting rifles were oiled and loaded. At one nearby villa two leopards stood guard loosely chained to a tree. Neighbors whispered one to the other in the night. Ad hoc vigilante committees formed. In the hills of north Rome we are used to foreigners. They do all the dirty work Italians today scorn house cleaning and wall painting, mowing grass, trimming hedges, pruning, road construction. Africans from Somalia and Eritrea pick tomatoes, beans or artichokes, Filipinos clean houses, Poles paint the walls and do electrical work, Albanians and Bosnians work on the roads and East European and African women and Brazilian transvestites sell themselves on the streets. Our Romanian, Gheorghe, was a good gardener. He was legal. He had a residence permit and, until the double murder, more work than he could do alone. The day after the stabbing he slipped in late at my house to finish up the pruning of the fruit trees. Silent and sullen he worked almost stealthily, hidden in the back of the garden. His first words that day were: Signor Antonio, ho paura! Im afraid. Everybody is firing me, he said. Theyre afraid of me. But Im more afraid of them. They think Im here to rob their houses and rape their women. Im afraid theyll lynch me. As if on some invisible signal, house servants and day laborers had vanished from all the San Lorenzo suburb. At first chiefly fearful, by the third post-massacre day the good people in the villas were dismayed and helpless. Theyd forgotten how to do menial work. An overturned wheelbarrow lay abandoned along the street. Here and there trash had piled up. Piles of leaves remained unburned. Small dogs ran around untended. Women stood at their gates and gossiped animatedly. An empty hollow feeling spread through the neighborhood. What relief to everyone when two days later police announced that the womans 17-year daughter and her boyfriend had confessed to the horrible hate murder. They were pissed at their parents over money and decided to butcher them. People clucked and breathed again. The foreign workers emerged from hiding. Life seemed to return to normal rhythms. The storm had passed. A few days later, standing near Gheorghe who was haphazardly burning a pile of branches on the field in front of my house, I noticed that the distant look had returned in his eyes. It was a look of remoteness and desperation. He cleared his throat, stirred the fire with his rake, and asked if I would advance him money for a bus ticket to Romania. Theres a woman there! Ive known her all her life. I cant go on like this. Im going to marry her and bring her to Italy. He had told me about his village in Transylvania in the northeast part of Romania near the Russian border. He had escaped, he said. He had never missed it at all. Ill become a respectable married man not a rapist-car thief on the loose. This is Irina, Gheorghe said, pointing with his finger at the plain, strong, red-faced woman standing behind him at my door. She was almost as tall as Gheorghe and had reddish blond hair. Noroc, she said. I held out my hand. Noroc, I answered. Gheorghe grinned. It was two months later. The family murder was forgotten. Gheorghe was beginning the spring cleaning of the swimming pool and his wife would do some gardeners work to help out. She was a willing worker. Just as Gheorghe instructed her with curt words now and then, she carried away the cut grass, tree branches and weeds and set fire to them in the field. Irina always gazed fixedly into the flames and sometimes, I believed, when late afternoon shadows arrived, she danced around the pyres. She had a rough square face, strong hands and willing eyes - big, round, of a deep green color and which curved upwards at the corners giving her a magic Mongol look. She always knocked at the back door when she came for one thing or the other like an empty water bottle that she just held out toward me and said, noroc. Or she just stood there staring into my eyes. She didnt speak a word of Italian and showed no propensity for learning. Gheorghe grinned and didnt seem to want her to learn. Irina had a way of seeming to smile with a frown on her face. Or to frown through a half smile and repeating that mystical, noroc. Repeatedly we told her to use the front but she couldnt bring herself to ring that front door bell. Irina is magic, Gheorghe revealed one day several weeks later as he piled weeds into the burning box. All of her family was. Was? I asked. Her mother and all her sisters all died some years ago. Some strange disease, they said. But mostly starvation, I think. In the villages outside Cluj everyone said her mother and all her sisters were fairies or witches. They, uh, they always had lots of men. And her father? No one knows. There were so many, I think. Fathers? Or men? Both, Signor Antonio. Transylvania is not like here. Here a father is a father. There a man is a man. What kind of magic does she do? I asked. She can make people do strange things, he said with the new sad look in his eyes. She can move people around. Shes Transylvanian. A nymph. Transylvania. Mystical word. The land beyond the forest. Descendants of Romans and Vandals, Slavs and Avars, Bulgars, Mongols and Romanians. Land of magic streams and dark woods, rushing rivers and steep mountains, howling wolves and hooting owls, magical satyrs, fauns and multitudes of playful nymphs. Shes a nymph, Signor Antonio. She doesnt look like one, I know, but she solved my problems. And how! Remember! I needed a woman. Now I have more than I can handle. Gheorghe in fact looked tired, listless. I was aware that he never whistled anymore. Gheorghe and Irina lived in an abandoned low-slung barracks that immigrant laborers had separated into living sectors with thick tarpaulins and heavy blankets hanging from the ceiling. As far as I could tell, she was the only woman. That bothered Gheorghe. Therefore he took her with him to work everywhere, so that his various employers were used to seeing her helping him. From time to time you might see them walking up the tree-lined streets of the neighborhood, to the metro station, or to the supermarket. If he never seemed to speak in full sentences to her, he was always polite to her; the couple seemed to inspire trust wherever they went. Yet Gheorghe was a changed man. He came to work later and later. Irina likes to stay in bed in the morning, he said. In the night too, he added. When I asked why she had to work with him for he still got his usual 12,000 lire an hour, with or without her he said rather listlessly, shes a woman, a nymph, and she needs cntrol, putting the accent on the first syllable like some TV announcers, insisting on the use of foreign words and invariably mispronouncing them. He also liked to rport things hed heard on the morning news, the new foreign expression that fascinated Italians. Now that he was a married man, Gheorghe began to criticize other foreigners. One morning he told me that he heard on the morning news that in Naples theyd discovered 61,000 two-liter bottles of Coca Cola produced in the Czech Republic containing the benzole that lights up consumers like a Christmas tree. But he was literally up in arms against English and French cattle breeders for the spread in Italy of the dreaded Crazy Cow disease mucca pazza. Now, he said with a frown, everybodys afraid to eat good Italian meat. He was becoming a patriotic nationalist. Right, Irina? Noroc, she answered. Noroc, I said. I was beginning to really like that word. Whatever it meant, it seemed to fit in almost anywhere. Sometimes I called her Noroc. In middle summer a great heat wave and three days of debilitating afa provoked an unprecedented wave of pollens. One late afternoon I noticed that Irinas eyes were nearly swollen shut and a kind of rash had turned her neck red as fire. I stopped her as she was wheel barrowing toward the burning field a load of freshly mown grass and asked her about it, pointing to her eyes. She nodded, and said sadly, noroc! I said, noroc, and nodded in commiseration. Irina repeated, noroc, and continued toward the field. Its nothing, Gheorghe said, I heard on the morning news that the Ministry of Health announced that anti-allergic, anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medicines are now available free in the pharmacies. That will take care of her nicely. I was even more worried when the next day she didnt come to work with him. What was happening? Was she seriously ill? Did he suddenly trust her and also that raunchy bunch of foreigners in the barracks? But I let it slide. Two more days passed, and no Irina. But Gheorghe, those days without Irina, seemed like his old self, smiling and whistling and singing in the garden and heaping up huge piles of weeds, grass and bent branches at the burning place. Irina will not work with me anymore, he announced. Why? What happened? Is she ill? We can call our doctor. No, no, not that. Shes well. She has decided to change jobs. He turned away, raised the wheelbarrow and walked back to the field humming some mysterious song. As the days lengthened, Gheorghes bald head took on a deep brown color. He worked happily now again from early mornings, whistling his Transylvanian melodies. The neighbors and I began to think that perhaps the couple was expecting the stork and waited for his official announcement. Instead, one torrid August afternoon he arrived at work on a new motorbike, polished and shiny, that he parked carefully in the shade. He told everyone he had moved into a small apartment in the next village. We opened bottles of spumante and drank to his and Irinas health. But Irina had vanished. Like a nymph maybe shed never been there at all. And we soon stopped asking about her. The more leaves accumulated in all our gardens that fall, the happier seemed Gheorghe. Then great was our surprise when he began arriving at work in a spanking new metallic gray Lancia Y10. But where was Irina? we naturally wondered. She seemed to have disappeared from his life. He didnt comment. Yet neighbors reported having seen her shopping in the supermarket in late afternoons. How is Noroc doing? I finally asked Gheorghe. Everything in their life seemed like a fairytale. Immigrant lives just didnt work out like this. Maybe she was really a good fairy. Never been better. But Gheorghes smile had vanished. He was immediately withdrawn. Taciturn. He never volunteered information about her. What does she do with her days? I asked. Oh, now that we have our own house she can sleep as long as she wants. In Italy elections were again on the horizon. European society was divided over the specter of an unstoppable flood of immigrants from Africa and Asia and poor zones of East Europe. Vast portions of our society, those who didnt rely on immigrant help, mistrusted immigrants. They were a danger to society, many believed. They were drug traffickers and criminals and also robbed jobs from Italians. A widespread idea was that the boat is full. In that atmosphere the Managing Editor of my newspaper assigned me to yet another investigation of the immigrant phenomenon. And frankly the subject seemed very close to home. Fresh figures from the Statistics Office, interviews with both legal and illegal immigrants, visits to the southeastern coasts where Easterners disembarked in the dark of night, to reception centers in Sicily, to factories in the north that would close down without immigrant labor, to rotting tomatoes in the fields around Naples, all told a sad story the ship Italy, full or not, would most certainly sink without its immigrants. Late one November night I decided to take a look at one of the citys famous night spots. Since the closing of the bordellos in the 1950s and before the invasions of foreign prostitutes from south and east, women of the night traditionally lined Old Via Flaminia. That night I cruised slowly under the trees along the famous street near the river. Lights flickered here and there in the mist. On the roadside flames leapt from the mouths of tall barrels. Mysterious figures were sitting on stools in the shadows. It was that night fire that seemed to light mens desires, I had always thought. None moved unless a car slowed to under five miles an hour. Here and there a car was parked. Little shacks specked the surrounding fields. I was surprised how many girls remained. Why this dark street? Why this dangerous street? Why not speak with one of them? I thought. One woman, dressed in a miniskirt cut off at crotch level and an open raincoat and strangely a little cap of some kind, standing alone under a tree attracted my attention. She looked pretty, but, I thought, so lonely there in the rain. So alone. I pulled over and lowered my window as if to negotiate her price. She approached languidly, leaned into the window, and she did look good. Softly she said, somewhat hesitantly she said, noroc, signore! Noroc, I answered. ?EM]  h#o#$$;1M11111224494K4P4p4s44455GGHH&H6]mH sH mH sH 6]CJ CJ0OJQJ)EKL]^_a5_$ w _?, $@ ^@ `a$$a$&H,   - !&"q#&$$%%%&& '!'''R()*--{/$a${/H1111 2224=4p4456y777889:L;<<=&>V>>>h@$a$h@BC=F{G H&H$a$ 1h/ =!"#$% i8@8 NormalCJ_HaJmH sH tH FA@F Fuente de prrafo predeter.&DVEKL]^_a5_$w _?,  -&q& !!!"" #!###R$%&)){+H---- ...0=0p0012y3334456L7889&:V:::h<>?=B{C D(D0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000&H%,{/h@&H&()*&H'/ELM22\]  BB(D/EL]22\]  BB(D(DGaither Stewart1C:\My Documents\European stories\The Romanian.docGaither Stewart1C:\My Documents\European stories\The Romanian.docGaither Stewart1C:\My Documents\European stories\The Romanian.docGaither Stewart1C:\My Documents\European stories\The Romanian.docGaither StewartPC:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\AutoRecovery save of The Romanian.asdGaither Stewart1C:\My Documents\European stories\The Romanian.docGaither StewartPC:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\AutoRecovery save of The Romanian.asdGaither StewartPC:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\AutoRecovery save of The Romanian.asdXXX$C:\Smith2\webzine11\The Romanian.docXXX]C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\Guardado con Autorrecuperacin de The Romanian.asd@&DP@UnknownG:Times New Roman5Symbol3& :ArialCFComic Sans MS"1h1USeT 18wD 4p!0dE> 2b THE TRANSYLVANIAN NYMPH [2828 words]Gaither StewartXXX Oh+'0 ,@ LX t  c THE TRANSYLVANIAN NYMPH [2828 words] Gaither Stewartait Normal.dotwXXX5XMicrosoft Word 9.0 @b@~@F, 18 ՜.+,0L hp|  + wE c THE TRANSYLVANIAN NYMPH [2828 words] Ttulo  !"#$%&'()*+-./012345689:;<=>@ABCDEFIRoot Entry F@XKK1Table,5WordDocument"VSummaryInformation(7DocumentSummaryInformation8?CompObjkObjectPool@XK@XK  FDocumento Microsoft Word MSWordDocWord.Document.89q