Also known as: Dorin (to Van D.), Baroane (to everyone else), the editor-in-chief the paper doesn’t have (to himself)
Occupation: Journalist at Momentul. I hired him around 2013. I mention it often.
First appears: Chapter 007
Status: Drafting his resignation, backdated to August 2013.
Usually seen with: A desk drawer full of empty cigarette packs, condoms and Kinder toys.
His philosophy of life, as far as I could reconstruct it
Baroane speaks a language of his own, assembled from Bucharest slang and pure conviction. “Morț” covers everything from good evening to catastrophe. “Cabro” is me. “Balaure” is also me, on the days he loves me. His entire philosophy fits into two syllables, “Bak-Bak”, which I have never managed to translate and which I suspect mean yes. He believes a good story is pharmacy. I believe a public execution is a slaughterhouse. We have been having this argument for years, and he is still in my office, in a chair nobody offered him.
What I think he thinks of me
That I am an intellectual, deeply repressed, who picked up a machete and went to war. He told me so to my face. He meant it as a compliment. He also says that his eyes and ears are mine. All four. No, five, counting the mind’s eye. Still attached to his head, but mine. I have learned to check where they are looking.
What I think of him
A man whose blunders are so monumental that even sociopaths recoil from them in horror. There are moments when his stupidity achieves a purity that almost deserves admiration. And then, in the middle of his verbal vandalism, he produces an argument worth considering. It is rarely the argument he thinks he is making. That is the Baroane I like. I have fired him, in my head, more often than I have hired anyone. In my head is where he stays fired.
Things he said that were almost arguments
“Respect, cabro!”
“They’re yours anyway, balaure. Still attached to my head, sure, but yours. All four. No. Five, counting the mind’s eye!”
“This is the internet age, cabro. There isn’t a profession, institution, or social class that hasn’t been dragged through shit. It’s one of the fragrant privileges of modernity.”
“Is intelligence a substitute for minima moralia? ‘Forgive him, he’s brilliant.’ Is that the new moral philosophy? Because if it is, we might as well close the courts and open a literary salon.”
“Cabro, I’m not an idiot.”
“Bak-Bak, balaure!”
Andrei’s footnote: He calls Van D. “V-Man”. I have never had the courage to ask whether he does it to his face.
