Found and lost

THE French are “a rhetorical people,” writes Bruce Benderson in “The Romanian,” a study in pastoral (and sometimes urban) loneliness. It is no surprise then that he has become the first American writer to receive France’s Prix de Flore, because his story rises off the page with the help of every imaginable rhetorical device and stylistic flourish.

This absorbing memoir begins with Benderson researching Eastern Europe’s growing sex industry. In Budapest, he meets and falls for Romulus, a male prostitute from Romania with plenty of soccer-star broken dreams and money-making schemes. Benderson travels again and again to be with his beloved, even taking an apartment in the Romanian capital of Bucharest and trying to make a living by writing for magazines and translating biographies from French into English.

His immersion leads him to ponder the lives of some of Romania’s distinguished citizens: sculptor Constantin Brancusi, Magda Lupescu and her husband, Carol II, the king who replaced fame with what looked like promiscuity but which turned out to be an unrequited passion not unlike Benderson’s own. One by one, Benderson begins to relate to and even take on the roles of these people.

Meanwhile, his mother and a best friend are dying back home; it is as if the known world were falling away. When in New York, Benderson keeps himself in cash by writing dull technical manuals. His co-workers don’t even notice when he’s gone for weeks at a time; he begins to take a tad too many codeine tablets to kill a variety of bodily and mental pains; he constructs elaborate plans for bringing Romulus to New York and builds a fantasy world so realistic that the reader sometimes cannot distinguish between what is true and what is idealized. This is where the rhetoric comes in.

“The Romanian” is not just a book of exemplary thoughts and figures of speech; these artful sentences say something. Benderson’s telescoping (and collapsing) use of omniscience, as when he seems able to read Romulus’ thoughts one moment but in the next he is dying to know to whom Romulus is talking on the phone. He plays deftly with time: “Several shifts of maids have knocked and gone before we disentangle....Then we hurry.” And with irony: “ ‘He’s a ...’ I don’t say ‘vampire,’ ” he writes as he starts to describe his new obsession to his editor in New York. “Romulus comes from the land of Dracula, and it would be too much of a cliche to resort to these kinds of metaphors.”

French reviewers have found refreshing the directness and innocence with which Benderson relates this love affair. He has a traveler’s naivete, even when speaking of himself. Everything is tried for the first time, and if there’s anything shocking here, it seems to rise from an ignorance of local customs and manners rather than morals flouted. His out-on-a-limb efforts to bring Romulus home both romantically and legally may raise eyebrows, as would sopping bread in sauce in Catalonia or blurting “What happened to him?” on entering a Spanish cathedral and seeing a graphic crucifix.

Perhaps the most perverse moment is when Benderson insists on taking a bath in Romulus’ used tub water. Readers can find more shocking confessions from lesser writers, if that’s what they are looking for. And the fact is that Romania’s troubled economy, like that of many post-Soviet-bloc nations, forces a vast number of its people into prostitution. Such cultural facts are more surprising than personal ones.

As travel literature, “The Romanian” tells plenty about the country’s culture without mincing words. There is beauty and there is terror: Husband-hunting women place a bucket upside down outside their homes as an advertisement. At wedding receptions, groomsmen “kidnap” the bride to hilarious or awful result. Bucharest’s swampy history, the art of making complex wooden things without nails and the terrible problem with the dog population are also fully integrated into the story. In a certain way, the author begins to inhabit these traditions: He is a stray dog, he is a Brancusi sculpture, he is Brancusi.

Benderson also excels at portraiture. In an airless rented apartment during a wretched Bucharest heat wave, he meets the landlady’s son, a minor character made hard to forget: “[He] looks as if he’d been released from a long sentence on death row -- his eyes staringly fish-angry, like pieces of dull green glass in milk. He has a hunched, alcoholic manner and wet tentacles, frustration and defeat pouring out of him like sweat.” Imagine Benderson’s descriptions of his lover.

The author is good at describing people because he seems to become everybody. And everyone transmogrifies into someone else. Romulus disdainfully watches child beggars extorting money from Benderson with every ruse that might play on his heart. “They hang at the edge of the road and offer a passion play of misery, chanting and whining in an imitation of pitiful piety. ‘Ignore them,’ Romulus says in a clipped voice.” Romulus was once one of these children and still is, we slowly realize (almost as slowly as the writer does). The effect is that of a finite world with a certain number of actors playing multiple roles. One day Benderson is the wife; on another, that role is played by Romulus.

Arguably, the height of their relationship is when the two seem to merge, and Benderson writes, “The inevitability of it makes me feel close to him, fills me with sentimentality. In a small way, I’ve become part of his curse of limitation. Like him, I’m trapped in Romania.” That melding breaks apart fewer than 50 pages later when, “For a split second, I became part of his reality, believed it. Then sadness overwhelmed me, similar to the sadness I’d felt when I’d imagined the girl, sweet and bewildered, and her love for him, at the soccer field.... Affection spread hopelessly through my chest like nausea.” The reader feels the breaking apart, the relating and not relating, the beginning of the end.

This marriage of new passion with long experience creates a wisdom Benderson can hardly heed. It is constantly insightful, this pairing of sex and smarts. “Desire glimmers, or should I say glowers, in the eyes of some lumpy older men. I do believe that when one sex desires its own, there’s always a touch of envy.”

Readers fond of Benderson may recall his powerful manifesto, “Toward the New Degeneracy,” in which he lamented the loss of the once-seedy Times Square, which was arguably one of the few places where rich and poor mingled. As if to prove his own tract true, the author sets out for Romania, which may well be bygone Times Square on a national scale, so he can mingle with, well, Romulus.

With so many pleasures crammed into one book (travel, philosophy, history, sex, drugs, some pretty crummy rock-and-roll bumping out of shabby Euro-trash clubs), it seems ungrateful to suggest that there might be room for a little improvement. Perhaps because the story is nearly seamless, the few seams there are stand out. For example, something feels a bit forced when Benderson shuttles between his story of obsession for Romulus and reflections on Lupescu, Carol II or his mother, Queen Marie. It is as if Benderson has so successfully cast a spell on the reader that to be crowbarred from it and fed Romanian history feels like taking a dose of cod liver oil during a four-course dinner. Perhaps this is because Benderson cobbled together some sections of the book from pieces he wrote for other publications. Little repetitions of facts show it to be a thing of parts. This also results in occasional over-explaining. For example, there are some lovely, nuanced passages, in which Benderson shows the gradual, subtle switchbacks of husband and wife: “I’m wondering if this abrupt reversal -- Romulus as caustic husband contemptuous of feminine foibles -- is some kind of revenge for his housewifely luncheon duties.” A bit later, he tells us, “Each takes turns at playing ‘the man,’ while the other temporarily enjoys this sociological projection of masculinity.” It is as if Benderson doesn’t trust his own marvelous skill as a writer.

But these are tiny gripes. It is a great thing to see a Benderson book on the shelves again, for he is one of the best. And “The Romanian” is the best of the best, all about the lost and found. “But as I think I’ve already indicated,” he writes when contemplating Romulus sprawled naked and asleep, “passion is an emotion that rarely respects its own aftermath.”