Szőcs Péter Levente (szerk.): Complexul Memorial Ady Endre. Ghid (Satu Mare, 2020)
Our little mansion
OUR LITTLE MANSION “[...] You think that people are still and already interested in Ady Endre’s life, home, refuge: his family, his home, his native village. Let’s hope you’re right, since you were the one who, eight or nine years ago, ordered me to write and not to be afraid although everybody laughed at my poems [...] The ambitious man of our days, regardless of his held of activity, manages to make himselfa home out of his earnings and effort, whether he chooses to raise a family or not, which is not such a bad thing. I made a lot of effort, even if I didn’t earn so much money, but if I had had them both, maybe I wouldn’t have come to live this beautiful stage of civilization. I have created for myself a special religion by combining the Calvinist predestination and the Turkish fatalism: so, I am a bachelor, wandering with no motherland, no home. Actually, it’s not really like that: look, I am in my parents’ house again, in my sweet, noble little village, Mecenţiu, in the Ier Valley. I gave it a try four-five years ago and it could have worked at that time, I could have lived the village-way without Budapest. But now that fantasy is over, I can’t stand life in the village, I can’t stand the provincial towns, the Hungarian burg which pretended to be like Budapest or even Vienna. Actually, Budapest is a village, too. Its inhabitants are mostly villagers and what we like about it is its strange rusticity, despite its asphalt, its magistracy, Bárczy, Vázsonyi, its dreams, bars, lighting and wonderful women. [..jBut I’m talking too much about me, while you, dear editor, asked me to tell you about Mecenţiu, my place of recreation, about our little mansion, my own Tusculanum. To me, when I think about Mecenţiu, I think about my mother, who doesn’t dare to sigh if I am sleeping and dreaming and of course about my father, who starts cursing in the backyard at five o’clock in the morning even if we don’t let him work the little patch he still has. We leased it, but the servants working it are so useless that it’s really not worth shouting at them. Mecenţiu is a village in Sălaj county (I invited you so many times, my dear editor, to visit us on a boring summer day, to pay us a visit and allow us to be your hosts) and beyond it is MandjuriaTwenty years have passed since they promised us a paved road, but the inhabitants of Ier region are still travelling through the puddles in our roads. I’m quite often in Mecenţiu, although not for a long time at once. It’s probably my conservative, old-fashioned heart that makes me love and worry for this old man and woman, my father and my mother. I worry especially for my mother, whose beauty and kindness was known in seven counties, but who probably grew old more suddenly because of me. Andi also worry for my father, whom I and my younger brother, Lajos, still consider young and funny, although he reached quite a respectable age. [...] “My father is a great man: he is the only member of his Casa nouă şi mama poetului în anii 1930 / Az új ház és Ides az 1930-as években / The new mansion and the mother of the poet int he 1930s (colecţia / gyűjtemény / collectiomMuzeul Judeţean Satu Mare / Szatmár Megyei Múzeum) 33
