Cotadi is short and thickset, with bulging muscles, his legs articulated twice outwards and once inwards; he is always unshaven. His raven black hair is covered with dandruff, sparklers and precious tortoise-shell combs. Cotadi cannot stand upright because of an armor-like lath garment which binds terribly but which he wears with absolute self-denial next to his skin under the tasseled peasant shirt he never takes off. One of Cotadi's peculiarities is to grow twice as wide and – without his will – completely transparent, but only twice a year, namely whenever the Sun is in the solstice.The greatest pleasure Cotadi experiences is – besides that of sticking different buttons and dead insects with some gum-arabic on the fine velveteen skin of his crop – trying, from behind the counter where he lives, to draw an occasional client into a discussion that is initially pleasant but which becomes more and more animated until he succeeds, by raising his voice, to be talked back to at least once, which then leads him to respond to his interlocutor with several powerful blows on the floor with the edge of a piano lid that is screwed on his back just above his buttocks and which he sets in motion on similar occasions, utterly confounding his clients and striking holy fear into the less brave ones. This lid is also Cotadi's urinating wall, especially in the winter when it is cold outside and he can't get out of the store, though this ought to be fairly unpleasant too since the lid is attached to his back rather than to his front. It serves as a urinal to his older clients as well and to all those on intimate terms with the house, although Cotadi, since the time the device was first installed, wad disposed to make no concessions of any kind, proof of which was the fact that he had a sign painter write on the lid "No Messing Allowed." Word got around that Cotadi only feeds on ant eggs which he ingests through a funnel, excreting, in turn, fizz, and that he is stoppered six months every year with a champagne cork which, whenever pulled, is divided into nonappropriable parcels meant to be distributed to the rural population in the hope that this would resolve, in a completely empirical and primitive manner, the delicate and complex agrarian question…Almost nothing precise is known of Cotadi's relatives. It is believed that he comes from a noble family whose last remaining descendant is an old aunt living in the outskirts, who sends him, daily, letters full of witty epigrams in the Macedonian dialect, and little packages of bran that she hopes will animalize him and will make him give up, of his own free will, that part of her estate which he would be entitled to inherit upon her death. These she sends him through a clever boy with nickeled ears and striped pants named Tudose. Cotadi, being a sensible man, knows how to bear with the old woman's weirdness, and consoles himself for the vicissitudes of life with Dragomir's sincere friendship, his old schoolmate and best friend.Dragomir is very long, crooked, with round and very mobile eyes, thin café-au-lait tinted neck, looking as if he had been shaped on a lathe, with two fine locks of hair shining black like a crow's feathers, hanging about three inches over his beveled nape and letting two clear drops of French oil drip at each of the two tips. Dragomir is kind-hearted. Each time he witnesses Cotadi who, in spite of the piano lid edge blows on the floor, cannot move the silly guy who was foolish enough to argue with him to confusion, Dragomir, suspecting the esthetic thrills and exquisite sensations his friend is after, leaps to his aid and tries to buck the stubborn client by lengthening his neck with a four foot long cardboard prosthesis on which ivy and other creepers wind gracefully on top of which there stands an apparatus displaying the "four cardinal points." For all these important services, as well as for keeping the store books, for feeding seeds to the birds every day, and for being Cotadi's proxy in most of his court trials, Dragomir is rewarded with getting stuffed full, a standing invitation to have dinner at Cotadi's any time at all, dinner being octopus tentacles and bread, Sundays and church holidays receiving a big pan of fowler's pears often containing a lump of sock paint to Dragomir's pleasant surprise. When it rains, moreover, Dragomir is entitled to spend the night with his entire family in the left hand side of a recess in Cotadi's gate wall, the other side being reserved for the day watchman. Nothing has been heard recently of the two great heroes. The last thing was that practical Cotadi, a man who was fully conscious of the precious and exceptional friend he got himself and who expected to capture for all time the eternal source of the treasures of Dragomir's mind, ordered in his will that he be buried in the same hole as Dragomir, counting on the two clear drops of the best French oil dripping every second at the ends of his two locks to get whole olive groves to grow above them on lands that would revert to the family estate which would then have enough free oil to keep a candle burning as Christian custom requires. English version by Stavros DELIGIORGIS
by Urmuz (Dem. Dumitrescu-Buzău) (1883-1923)