Hermes Popescu

Hermes Popescu is a Romanian émigré whose postwar life is recovered by Benno von Archimboldi through an online search. Archimboldi recognizes him as the secretary of General Entrescu, whose death he had witnessed during the German army’s retreat from the Romanian border in 1944. Popescu’s later history moves from exile and literary circles in Paris into opaque business, labor management, and considerable wealth, before his marriage to Asuncion Reyes draws him toward a proposed investment in Honduras. His retrospective appearance makes a former wartime association the point of entry to a life built through reinvention.

Wartime Identity and Rediscovery

For years, Popescu exists in Archimboldi’s memory as the secretary of General Entrescu. The two men do not meet in a scene of sustained acquaintance in the account; what joins them is the army’s retreat and the sight of Entrescu’s crucified body in 1944. Decades later, while exploring the Internet for obscure news and forgotten names, Archimboldi comes across an account of Popescu and identifies him from that wartime connection. A digital search thus reopens a historical episode that had remained dormant in memory, and turns a person glimpsed amid military defeat into the subject of a detailed postwar biography.

The discovery is more than a simple confirmation of identity. Popescu’s account traces how a man attached to a retreating army survives into a different social world, where his past resurfaces through other exiles and former servicemen. The novel makes Archimboldi’s act of recognition the hinge between the distant wartime image and Popescu’s later career; the recovered story is mediated by an online life history rather than by Popescu’s own narration.

Exile, Business, and Literary Circles

After the war, Popescu immigrates to France and moves among Romanian exiles in Paris, especially intellectuals living on the Left Bank. Their prospects appear bleak: they write in Romanian, remain bitterly anticommunist, and have little hope of reaching a wider audience. Popescu comes to regard their literary and political world as a farce. His response is not to withdraw from practical life but to find a way to operate inside systems the exiles’ writing cannot alter.

He insinuates himself into business dealings where the underworld, espionage, the church, and work permits intersect. The narration describes money flowing in abundance and Popescu managing teams of undocumented workers, first Romanian, then Hungarian and Czech, and later North African. He visits the workers in their poor lodgings, sometimes dressed in a fur coat, and his manner toward them combines paternal gestures with a bluntly exploitative outlook. The detail that he hopes their smell will cling to his coat sits uneasily beside his smiles and occasional tears: his apparent closeness to the workers does not erase the unequal arrangement through which he employs them.

Popescu’s relation to the Romanian intellectuals is similarly double-edged. They come to him for loans to cover such needs as children’s milk, rent, or a wife’s cataract operation. He gives them what they ask for, but on the condition that they stop writing in Romanian and write in French instead. His financial assistance therefore carries a demand for linguistic and cultural change. He can sustain the people whose literary work he dismisses, while making support contingent on their leaving behind the language in which they have been writing.

The Captain and Entrescu’s Death

Popescu’s past returns in person when a crippled former captain of the Romanian Fourth Army Corps visits him. The corps had served under General Entrescu, and Popescu reacts to the visitor not with formal courtesy but with an exuberant performance: he leaps between chairs, climbs onto the desk, and dances a Carpathian folk dance. He also asks after the cities and places associated with Romania, then walks arm in arm with the captain to his flat on the Rue de Verneuil, near the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts.

Once they are alone, the captain tells Popescu the story of his life. Popescu interrupts to ask whether he, too, witnessed Entrescu’s crucifixion. The captain confirms that he was there, recalling the flight from Russian tanks, the loss of artillery, and dwindling ammunition. The exchange connects Popescu’s recognition of his former superior’s fate with the captain’s firsthand testimony, but it does not resolve the past into a settled account. The scene instead shows how a wartime catastrophe persists in fragmentary recollection, returning through the people who survived it.

The visit also reveals the unstable mixture of intimacy and control in Popescu’s dealings. After the captain falls asleep while music plays, Popescu signals to two Hungarian workers, who carry him toward the door; the captain’s prosthetic leg comes off, and they cannot reattach it. Popescu’s household and business life thus bring together exiles, former soldiers, and immigrant laborers, but the people within that world do not share equal power. His easy command over the Hungarians contrasts with the captain’s physical vulnerability and the former officer’s dependence on him.

Wealth, Marriage, and Honduras

Many years later, Popescu has accumulated a considerable fortune and married Asuncion Reyes, a Central American actress whose European film career in France, Italy, or Spain is brief. The account gives greater emphasis to the countless parties she gives and attends than to her screen work. At her request, Popescu considers doing something for a country in need. He initially assumes she means Romania, then understands that she is asking him to help Honduras.

On a Christmas trip to Tegucigalpa, Popescu assesses the country through the divisions he perceives there: the majority made up of Indigenous people and the sick, and a minority of so-called whites, described as mestizos, who hold power. He sees possible business opportunities, but abandons his first idea because he distrusts the prospects of doing business there. Asuncion persists, and on their second Christmas visit he approaches the country’s ecclesiastical leaders, whom he is willing to trust, including bishops and the archbishop of Tegucigalpa. He then considers where his capital could be invested, while recognizing that the profitable sectors are already controlled by American interests.

At a gathering hosted by the president and the president’s wife, Asuncion proposes that Tegucigalpa have something like the Paris metro. The proposal redirects Popescu’s attention from an abstract appeal to aid toward a concrete infrastructure project. In the available episode, it is the beginning of a new consideration rather than a completed undertaking: the narrative establishes Asuncion’s idea and Popescu’s deliberation, not the final outcome of the plan.

Character and Narrative Significance

Popescu’s life is presented through a succession of sharply distinct roles: wartime secretary, postwar exile, intermediary in shadowed business, employer of undocumented labor, creditor to writers, and wealthy husband considering investment abroad. These episodes do not offer a single stable self behind the roles. Instead, they show a man adapting quickly to different networks while retaining the power to set terms within them, whether by conditioning loans on a change of language or by managing the workers who sustain his business.

His arc also links private recollection to the novel’s wider historical scale. Archimboldi’s online search retrieves Popescu from a past associated with a retreating army and Entrescu’s death; Popescu’s Paris life then carries that past into the postwar world of exile, migration, and commerce. The shift from a Romanian military setting to French business circles and then Honduras does not make those worlds equivalent. It shows how individual lives move across them, carrying old associations into new arrangements of money, labor, and authority. Popescu’s story remains open at the point where Asuncion’s proposed metro becomes a possible project, leaving reinvention—not resolution—as its governing pattern.