Published by Arouca Press in 2022, Virgil Gheorghiu’s La Condottiera is a murder mystery within the setting of the persecution of Christians by communists in Romania. Through the characters of the story, a priest accused of a heinous crime, a young couple who stand to lose everything, and an intellectual targeted by the regime, the suffering which Romanians endured for decades is portrayed with compassion and poetry. Gheorghiu critiques what he terms the Penitentiary Republic of Romania, since the people are imprisoned there, and also satirizes the materialism of the West.
Virgil Gheorghiu (1916-1992) was a Romanian writer who worked as a poet and journalist in the 1930s and served as a diplomat for Romania’s fascist government during World War II, even though his wife was Jewish. After the war they fled to the West and were interned in Allied prison camps in Germany for over a year and a half. Eventually they made their way to Paris where in 1963 Gheorghiu fulfilled a lifetime dream and was ordained a Romanian Orthodox priest. Gheorghiu continued his writing with novels, biographies and memoirs, his later works being written in French. Very few of his works have been translated into English, although one novel, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, was made into a movie starring Anthony Quinn. Another of his novels, La Condottiera, referring to a title of the role of the Mother of God as guide, was recently translated into English by Inez Fitzgerald Storck and published by Arouca Press. La Condottiera begins as a murder mystery and is enriched by accounts of the suffering of the Romanians under communism and a critique of Western materialism. Here are some excerpts.
“It is August 29, 1964, late in the evening. A few kilometers away from the airport [in Frankfort am Main, Germany], there is a glass and concrete building where an office of the American military intelligence in Europe is located. It is built, like all US Army quarters, at the edge of the woods, in the middle of the countryside. Far from any residence. Like all the US government buildings in Europe, it is immeasurably sad, aseptic. Like a desert with electricity. One would call it the architectural image of a desert. It is the desert itself made out of glass and concrete. The people who live and work in the geometric offices with linoleum, neon lights, and plastic are far from themselves, and from other men. Just like in the desert. A desert where man not only does not encounter anyone else, but where he does not encounter himself. Man has abandoned his person, his self, to become an American and a bureaucrat. That is to say, in order to become incorporated into an office like that of the American military intelligence at Frankfort am Main, like being filed in the appropriate place. The tragedy of the civilization of the USA is that they go about things like a great sculptor, who, because he has created masterpieces out of granite and marble, insists on shaping water with the same tools he has used to chisel and fashion stone. He refuses, out of pride, to understand that while he has really produced magnificent works in marble, he will never be able to cut and mold water. Americans apply to matters of the spirit the same techniques, the same tools, and the same methods which they have used to build a formidable material civilization. They make just one mistake: they treat the things of the spirit like they deal with banking, industrial and business matters. And that’s the same as wanting to shape water with a hammer and chisel, under the pretext that these instruments have been tried out and tested on granite…David Lincoln Goldwin, colonel in the US defense intelligence in Europe, is one of these men. He is now in his aseptic office near the airport.
[A fugitive from communist Romania sits in front of the colonel, who has just heard the account of his suffering and escape.] “Our officers of the intelligence service were deeply moved as we listened to you. This is the first time that they have had, from a single witness, a complete picture of the suffering of the herd-like republics set up by the Muscovites over half the globe. The government of the United States will be even more edified. Motivated to continue the armed struggle everywhere to establish the American way of life in the world. Your story confirms for us that we must wage war everywhere, to impose our democracy…Your story will help us to use even the atomic bomb, if necessary, to promulgate American freedom over all the earth. Your story will be disseminated everywhere and given at no charge to our boys who are fighting against Muscovite ascendancy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Your story will make our marines even braver. They will fight doubly hard…”
“We have recorded all these things, from the start,” says Colonel Goldwin. “It is utterly heartrending. But it’s a little too hard to swallow. We don’t doubt the authenticity of your story. We’ve been able to verify it from articles in the Romanian press. It’s all true. But for us, Americans, and even for certain Europeans, for the English, French, and Belgians, this story is not believable. Because such things don’t happen where we live. And man really believes just what happens to him personally or to his family.”