In Transilvania, during the time prior the Coronavirus

I knew that from the beginning something had seemed odd to me. Because the guesthouse was occupied by a group, we have received a room in a side building, a dummy in the night abaft whose a dog was insistently yapping. All the rooms were aligned at a verandah in which black branches from some trees ready for cutting spilled out. Nothing promising. But when I turned the lights on, something happened. I wasn't the room which we anticipated. Someone had painted the beds' headboard. And the table. And the chairs. Even the wardrobe. The walls were white, with nothing decorative. Plain. And on the floor, traditional rugs. In the morning I went out to see the sunrise. Too late. The mountain had already been above a orange horizontal which lit its raised hump above the fields and was unfolding more and more of the rounded rocks above which, from spring to autumn, paragliders from all countries unite gliding above de depression. Besides hay haystacks white steam was rising, it was cold and the day was bitting cold from the cheeks skin. We left to see the first city. The one with white walls, from Alba Carolina. On the cobbled alleys from the old fortress were more statues than people. And a cold wind was blowing which kept the spring away. For lunch, we ate at the knights winery. On our way back, we went alongside the bunches of young trees offered for sale on the edge of the street. Because it was still early, we climbed by foot the hill to the fortress which stands for 500 years above the village. We have also taken some pictures. With the mountains, with mists which were slowly coming, with the black road dredged up with off-road cars.

We had gone to see the second city. Because the sun had appeared and a beautiful day has been announced, after a nocturnal rain, on our road between the mountains a deer jumped in front of our car, nearly to... But the rain reached us again. Just when we climbed on a promontory called Cetățuia. From where the city was seen lying at your feet, rectangular, aligned with the course of the Little Someș, with mixed colours, clean, very clean. And that's all. After we got down in the marketplace where Szeklers receive the mustached honours. Or Hungarians. A colleagues of mines' saying, you can not tell anymore who is who. Then we entered the antiquarian, at the corner of the street jammed between walls and a sewage which was under construction. And to some spiraling stairs. Nothing special, old books, old things, old histories, a sounding board, isolated from the monotonous pulse of the city.

And we went to see the third city. Further, that further that we went on two highways. One of 15km, the other one of 10km. Until we arrived in a marketplace of the next Roses. We've been trampling over the rugs from the Big Cathedral built at the top of the park. We slightly blinked when the ceramic tiles of the Cultural Palace shined, from the bottom. And, on foot, we circled the inside of the Medieval Fortress, guarded by the solar spears of a hot afternoon of March. We returned at the room with painted furniture, still on day light. Afterward we exited to see how the mountain started to get covered by a heavy touch of darkness, which only lets thin figures of some blossoming birches in the retina.

In the morning, we discovered that we were the only ones left in the big house and the painted furniture, after we were also alone in the house with the verandah, from the garden. Everyone left, and nobody came. The hosts from the mansion, dressed in traditional attire with the same colours with the interior furniture, were still there, exactly as in the first night, as if the backyard had been full of cars, and all the rooms occupied. And our way back to Bucharest, someone, on a radio station, started counting, leaving long intervals between interventions: Sibiu, 37, Târgu Roșu, 39, Râmnicu Vâlcea, 40, Pitești, 43, Bucharest, 45. Yes, it was something odd in this spring. Something insinuating, something which wanted to overthrow the beauty of our cold days or hot or rainy which we witnessed in that three cities. Will it succeed ?