#tonitza

Friday, 4 January 1934 Dear Afane, I received your letter upon my return from Ploiești, where I went with Titi, Puiu, and Mica, for New Year's, to spend the beginning of the year with their cousins (of Coca Pană and Jacques Béreilh[-Liegaux]). To spend some time "as a family". (That's our tradition). If you knew what joy your lines have brought me, you would also be moved to tears. Not joy because you praise me in your plastic arts quasi-chronicle about the [School of] Fine Arts exhibition, — but because I feel that what I achieve sometimes in my art resonates deeply in your soul. How good it would have been, both for my art and for the animal in me, if I had found amongst my own the same spiritual echoes that I find in you. Until now I have lived in a permanent void. Your lines have greeted me at the height of depressions bordering on death. Ah! How much I want [to die]. Ever since I returned from the front. If I had been an egoist, I would have been nothing but a bucket of ashes today, cold and inoffensive. But why am I telling you all of this? To your soul, into which the garbage of life still has not penetrated, my words cannot have any meaning. You will understand them much later, when you are big and I am earth and flowers — and when the petty legends woven around my existence will have fallen apart — like everything that springs from offended laziness and cowardice. Thank you, once again, my dear Afane, for your warm and loving lines. I would have liked to write more — and more — but I have a thousand little things to be finalized, in the atelier — and to put in order (a lot of order) in the household. I kiss you sweetly on the forehead, surly* and silent painter** Tony P.S. So I don't forget — it's healthier to look ahead: kiss your daddy — Ionel — for me now, and wish him well (I think Monday is St. John's Day, no?) Kiss your grandma and mama on the hand. All the best to grandpa, papa, and to [your brother] Gogo.

*The original Romanian, "ursuzul", evokes a bear: big, sullen, unfriendly.