Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  “Mircea, things were so strange! The moon looked like a huge slurry of ice, and even the wild snapdragons in the field turned the pallid color of the moon. The plaster and half-demolished walls would start to shine, while everything else descended further into shadow. And from the other side of the wall, on nights like these, Herman would always come. I wasn’t scared of him at all, since he came toward me very slowly, as I sat on my heels, with my skirt tucked between my legs, so I could look at whatever scrap I was looking at. I never responded to my father the first time he called for me, even though in that silence, his voice was as strong and clear as an angel’s, because I wanted very much to stay a little longer with Herman. He didn’t take my hand, I took his, and we always went toward the ruined house nearby that had a hole in its roof almost as big as an entire room. We walked through the horsetails growing in the doorway and went into the fluid blue of the room below the bare sky. There, while we held hands, face to face, his eyes, blue like mine in the light, turned transparent white, like a fish’s, and on their glassy surface, scratched with the point of a needle, I saw my chest and the flowering, flayed tapestry from the wall behind me. Since he was bent at his shoulder blades, more hunched over than anyone I had ever seen, he had to bend his head back as far as he could just to see straight. The fact that there, in the room where everything seemed to float, he always took off my blouse, carefully unbuttoning me and leaving me with bare, dark nipples on a nearly flat chest, seemed amusing and mysterious to me, and it never scared me, because he never touched my chest, at most he would move a lock of hair in front, bringing it down to where my ribs ended. He started to tell me about a world that, for me, was normal, next to this one but still inaccessible. Herman’s steady, low voice was a tunnel that led me there directly.

  “All of a sudden, the tunnel would expand into fleshy, soft folds, and a blinding world would appear before us. Dozens of pink moons made the water glow, a vast gulf full of ships, edged with hills with crystal palaces, beryllium pagodas, and crysolite bells piled one on top of the next – ornaments for the architecture of fables. Our frigate neared the shore, and we disembarked onto pink marble steps, carved with volutes and counter-volutes. The staircase began in the waves and rose toward a grand façade. The columns of the portico were fifty times thicker than my body. The statues above, in moon-reddened arcades, could have symbolized either vices or virtues. Blind windows, round and rectangular, showed on the façade as translucent and flat as a mirror. We went into the marble palace, bare of any furniture, tapestries, or paintings, and eventually, in one of the halls, on a marble throne, we found a girl with a shaved head, her entire scalp decorated in marvelous tattoos. On another night, in another castle and another hall, instead of the throne, in the middle of the marble cavern, we found one of the hydraulic presses from my mother’s shop. A scrap of brass came out of its jaws, and on it were letters. A word was written there, a name I had never heard before.

  “One night in every two or three, Herman would come and we would talk, never for more than an hour, in the ruined house. Set against the moon, spiders would shimmer their transparent legs through the steps of a strange ritual. Speaking in a sad monotone, the young hunchback again and again unraveled the thin material of my life – with prints of our tower, the field, Mamma and Pappa, my dolls, and the neighbor’s girls – to build other and still other scenes in their place, with marble temples dissolving into the light. One night, after he had led me through the galleries of a house whose windows were held by putti and garlands, and then down rectangular corridors with niches of pot-bellied urns, we came to a room in ruins, lit by a moon through a frameless window and overgrown with weeds. There I looked Herman in the eye.

  “I was naked to the waist, as usual, and my hair ran over my shoulders, down to my nipples. Herman held a hair clipper, nickel-plated, like a pair of pliers with one long side, full of teeth along the edge. He came toward me, smiling, and with his other hand he mimed a pair of scissors. I let him clip me bald, strand by strand, my hair falling around me. Then I let him shave my head with a razor, an old one that folded into its handle. In the end, Herman ran his fingers over the flat hemisphere that housed my brain, as voluptuously as he would have touched a grown woman’s breast. That was the one time I was scared. Only then did I see a plank table, with an arrangement of instruments that were completely unfamiliar to me. Some of them looked like the pieces of metal I found in the field, near the greasy machinery and the old tram. Others had long needles at the end with unnerving curves. With these, all night long, until the dawn turned white, Herman tattooed my entire scalp. He worked as laboriously as a giant arachnid, mechanical and quiet. What fantastically colored anatomical illustration, what constellations from a map of another planet’s stars, what starched lace, like over the scalp of a rotund Dutchwoman, did Herman engrave into my skull? I would never know. Through the long hours of painful slices, prickings, and impregnations of multicolored inks, I looked around myself, moving only my eyeballs, and I observed certain incongruities between the ruined room I was seeing and the way it had looked before, like in those games where you compare two almost-identical pictures. The tarnished doorknob, the plug hanging from the wall, and the mold on the tapestry were all different, even if I couldn’t say how. Perhaps the difference was not in them, but in me, in my emotions, even in my nature (yes, yes, that’s it, because I remember looking deep into Herman’s fish eyes, and seeing a strange princess from a faraway land, her head shaved and her ears oddly large. That was the only time I ever saw myself and thought that I was beautiful).”

  Anca went home at dawn, at last, with stiff bones, with the conviction that this was not the world where she had been born, that it all looked different, that the clouds made impossible, prophetic shapes in the morning sky, that even the sparrows who hopped through the garbage were not supposed to be the way they were, but some other way completely, although they had the same shape that Anca remembered. Her father saw her through the tower window, his face pale and sleepless, his hair blown in the cold wind. When he saw her, he was motionless for a moment, and then he disappeared from the window. “He banged down the spiral staircase and rushed to me. I hugged him and drew in his smell of red putty and hemp. My head was cold and painful. My inflamed skin drew a network in my mind of linear and pointillist pain. I leaned my skull against his chest, and this was how my mother found us, rushing over from a neighbor who had a phone. She had called all the hospitals, ambulances, the police … I climbed the tower’s three flights of stairs, and they locked me up in my room without a mirror, and there I stayed until, in slow rotation, autumn, winter, and spring had passed, and it was summer again. My hair grew like reeds, like a brown grass, and that year bushes of hair sprouted from my armpits, and below my belly, so much that I was afraid that the curly, sparkling tufts would surface and cover me everywhere, leaving just my nipples and eyes, like a mother dog. How lonely I was, when the cupolas of my breasts took shape! When my skin became soft! I lay in my wet bed for hours, curled up, my hands pressed between my legs, wetting my pillow with saliva and tears. Ever since, ashen faced, she had seen the colored drawings on my skull, my mother had begun to hate me, she only came into my room to yell at me about straightening up, or smelling bad, or that I hadn’t bathed since who knows when. She said nothing to me when I woke up one morning, scared to death, with a spot of blood on the sheet, between my legs. She just brought me a tub with some bleach and soapy water, so I could wash the coarse cloth. When she would burst into my room, with her tortured laborer’s face, with the smell of cheap soap, “Cheia” or “Cămila,” carrying a bowl of soup, something softened and flowed within me, leaving an unbearable void between my ribs: I did not want, even if you broke my arm, to become a woman, to go to the factory, to cook, wash, sew, and then let a husband grab me at night and slam me onto the bed to step on me and abuse me, the way my father did with my mother. Why didn’t Mamma leave? Why didn’t she go out into the world? What kind of life was that, h
ome and the factory, with only one dress for years and years, with a bra that looked more like a dishrag and underpants in shreds from being boiled so often? Now and then she went to the hairdresser, and she came back with some ridiculous stuffed-cabbage hairdo, and in a few days it fell apart. When a thread came out of a stocking, she took it for mending to a lady who sat from morning until evening in a small room with one window, barely big enough for her folds of fat, looking like a caterpillar in a print dress. Yes, my mother came into the world and lived without joy and without hope. So I didn’t mind when I saw how much she hated me. I saw my shitty future in her, being a painter or weaver or stamper, because then I could not imagine a different life was possible. And maybe it isn’t.

  “There were several times that the teacher knocked on our door, because I was supposed to be in the sixth grade and I hadn’t come to school in the fall. By September, my hair was already bushy and covered up the tattoos. I didn’t go to school all year. The doctors found something in my bones or my heart, I don’t know what, that let me put school off for a year. But I read a lot, because anything was better than lying in bed or wandering around the table. And I dreamed a lot, more than ever, the way I heard once on the radio that embryos dream in the womb, that they are dreaming (but of what?) almost all the time. And locked in my room, curled up under the sheets, I was nothing but a fruit of flesh ripening in the shadows. I dreamed that you would come, I dreamed of what you would look like, in every detail, which is why I was not upset when you knocked, and I invited you into the house like an old friend, as I would Herman himself, if he ever came. In my dream, you were wandering the streets of a quiet and sunny neighborhood, you were like a blind man’s hand, plunged into what might be called reality, if it wasn’t unseen, the way something can exist even when there’s nobody there to perceive its existence. I watched from the little window as you approached, as you crossed the lot full of strange wheels, prismatic windows, fresh red and yellow paint, steps that lower automatically, the number clear on the side, and a small platform at the back. I watched as you reached the cypress – chopped down years ago – to the right of the tower, as you read the silly thing that Dănuţ, the carpenter’s son next door, had written in the wall in chalk, and as you sensed that you had to come in. I called you then, in the dream, by your name: ‘Mircea,’ and I knew that, years later, you would hear.”

  THE rose jam gave me a dizzying pain at the bridge of my nose. I finished the jam, and now I distractedly scratched the spoon against the thick glass plate, dotted with syrup. Herman. How strangely everything was starting to connect! I had always hoped my life would go differently than anyone else’s, that it would have a meaning, a meaning that perhaps I couldn’t grasp, but that was visible from somewhere high up, like a pattern in an immense field. Nothing ought to be accidental. Every person I ever met and every toothache and every grain of dust seen in a ray of light (or unseen, but there with its unsteady geometry to plug a corner of my life’s endless fractal) and even the vaguest feeling of hunger or anxiety were only colored dots in a carpet rolling and unrolling within itself, wrapping me like a silk cocoon or like the mottled strips that wrap mummies. And even I, a mummified butterfly, was just another figure, dotting the canvas with the wool of my blood. Anca kept watch over the entrance to the labyrinth, in her lonely dungeon, with her tattooed scalp covered by hair, the way that Mayan temples full of rattlesnakes lie in the jungle and in Ernst’s paintings. An immense full moon might turn the steps yellow. Anca’s blue eyes would remain the only constant of her life, from when she was a little girl to her old age, as though the fluctuating volume of her life was only a series of photos passing before two blue bars. But an old Anca, hanging flaccidly from her own eyes, was inconceivable to me, because she could not have her own destiny, separate from mine. She was as dense and homogenous as a statue. Anca only made a brief appearance in my life. She was a robot built to deliver her lines, just like every person I ever met, and every object. The glass of juice I sipped sometime as a child appeared so I could drink it. There had been nothing before and there would be nothing after it left my hand or my sight. A woman on the street, who looked at me for a moment and then, with the same expression, at the window of a home store, existed only for that moment, slopped together with some plaster and a bit of color, and then dissolved on the spot in the scorching traffic. What could Anca do in old age? Raise her grandchildren? But the chair I sat on, sipping my cup of cold water and watching her, had never been made by a carpenter from timber brought from the mountains, and the timber was not cut from a tree that lived for thirty years in the piney solitude of the forest, and the fir had not sprouted from a seed fallen to the earth, among decaying pine needles and ferns. A year from now it will not be sold, other people will not sit on it, and in ten years it will not be taken apart, not used to patch a hole in a wood fence … it will not grow mold and lichen there, in a grove of cherry trees, until all its nails rust and its wood passes through the intestines of termites, to mingle with the earth. The chair had no history, but was conceived there only for an hour, in a house built for an hour, inhabited by a girl with breasts already large and round, but without qualities, without softness and warmth and internal structure. If I had touched Anca’s breasts, they would have become instantly pliable and scented, and then just as instantly not. I move slowly along a predestined path, while around me someone creates my existence.

  Yes, I was sure: my life was constructed. Second by second, a metaphysical artist invented billions of details and made captivating and exuberant scenery, iridescent surfaces beyond which was perhaps a uniform radiance, or the indescribable. Naturally, this immense façade could at any moment take on the appearance of depth. You could put a sample of anything (a drop of blood from your finger, say) under the microscope and gaze at the snowflakes of hemoglobin, the iron atom in the center and the surrounding lace of oxygen and hydrogen, but this structure is created by the investigation itself, and only locally, no other drop of the cubic kilometers of blood of all living creatures had that pattern. Its depth was only produced by surfaces …

  I stood. Anca did too, smoothing her blue dress with her fingers. Each fold housed in its depths a silken, ultramarine reflection, darker than the azure dress and flowing like water, as though she were dressed in a gelatinous liquid. She called me into another, smaller room, where a chipped mirror hung on the wall. Under the mirror was a pine table with a drawer, covered with a naïve cross-stitch. We looked into the mirror of olive-brown waters: a young man with hollow cheeks, sensual lips, fixed and fanatical eyes, and a modest girl from the edge of town. Anca pulled open the drawer, and I saw that it was filled with fantastical instruments: a glittering toolkit. I could recognize a razor, clippers, pliers, needles and bottles, and more complex devices utterly foreign to me, things that looked like sewing machine shuttles, electric torture clamps, wishbones … All were French-fitted into trays of white latex foam. Joints with delicate rivets, fine tips arching like insect mandibles, heavy, truncated handles – they all produced as much pleasure as repulsion, they were perfect, but perfect for wounding, tearing, puncturing, cutting, and maybe also for strangling and trepanning (a small saw, a beauty of silver metal, might serve to take slices from the skull). I lifted the kit carefully and placed it on the table. The girl took an old, dirty chair and sat on it in front of the mirror. She unfastened the straps on her shoulders and was naked to her waist, her breasts large and firm, with gooseflesh from the cold. Standing behind her, I passed my hand through her hair, and through the disorder of brown strands, for the first time, I glimpsed the wonder: a multicolored universe etched into the white, pearly skin of her head. My fingers opened scented paths, bordered by thousands of threads extending their white shoots. Every path seemed paved with blue tiles, and violet and pink and yellow, so many disparate letters in a convex puzzle … a quiet forest, empty and lonely, that covered ancient foundations. For a moment I imagined I was a louse exploring the barren woods, stepping on pliable so
il, grabbing onto thick, semitransparent trunks made of horn, trying to trace the inextricable mandala beneath my footsteps on a map.

  I removed the clippers from their bay. I snapped them a few times in the air, watching the two toothed blades mounted on the end work together, well oiled, and then I placed the cold metal on Anca’s brow and cleared a first stripe, up to her crown. Her locks fell gracefully, art nouveau, into her lap, and just a few hairs clung to her eyelashes, which she shook off with a wink. I continued, carefully following the undulations of her scalp, scattering spiral locks on the ground, until her forehead stretched up to the fontanel. I cleared the area around her left ear (now I noticed her earrings, a little girl’s, three grains as ruby as a raspberry held in a bit of gold), and then her neck, trying hard not to look at the increasingly bizarre lithography I uncovered. There were some tufts between the two neck muscles that I found impossible to cut away. I continued toward her right ear, and everything was complete when an aery spiral fell in a delicate coil to the floor. Her scalp was ashen, as though along with her hair, she had also lost the frame that, like a motorcycle helmet, protected her brain. In that ashen desert there were drawings. The tattoos were clearly visible now. But I hadn’t wanted to understand the tattoos from the start, so, gently bringing my eyelids together to hide the dazzling embellishments, I kept working, repeating Herman’s technological maneuvers in reverse. I lathered her scalp, and with the razor, I removed the last traces of the ancient forest. I wiped her skull with a napkin until it began to shine dully, like an ivory ball. In comparison, Anca’s face seemed fleshy and vulgar, like a sexual organ hanging toward the floor. Her breasts, her slim teenager’s belly, her hips and legs now wrapped in electric blue cashmere were hanging, like the fringes of a multicolored jellyfish, from the convexity of her scalp. I stared, stunned by the thousands of lines intersecting like the threads of a bizarre embroidery, curves of endless grace traced over the floral design, tiny figurines flowing one into the next, knotted in an inextricable diorama. There was nothing to understand, yet everything cried out to be understood … the mystical conduction of the lines, the manic patience of the connections, and the refinement of the colors made you feel there was a message encoded there, that Herman had left a generous invitation or a terrible warning, or both at once, fixed on the hemisphere of that planet that had once been inhabited and flowering.