I circled around Anca, trying to make connections mentally, to join this spot in the shape of a wing with that line like a polyarticulate spider leg, this figure I thought I knew with that graffiti from a public toilet, this letter so clearly depicted (an M, in antic capital, colored in a beautiful violet), with that man as naked and beautiful as an archangel … But I didn’t have the key, and without it, everything was chaos and despair. Like in a coffee cup, a tortoise shell, the whole and broken lines of the I Ching, a palm whose sprawling fingers would hold the world, an inextricable dream, an obscure prophecy, I tried, in the catoptromant of memory, to divine, through the fog of too many colors, through the obscenity of excessive chastity, the message from another world. With my eyes closed, I circled my fingers over the pearly shell of Anca’s brain, like a phrenologist exploring the hump of stubbornness and gratitude. I opened my eyes and continued around her, trying dozens of angles, each of which revealed still more degrees of the design (the left parietal area seemed to house the watermark of a strange transparent egg, in which throbbed the fetus of a scaly chimera; toward the occiput I made out clearly the word DAN woven in royal cobras; above the forehead at one point I saw a naked girl sitting on her heels, urinating a flood of blue, and then I lost her; in Broca’s area my parents were smiling like in their wedding photo). Anca tried from time to time, helplessly, to meet my gaze, showing me a detail in the mirror and then shrugging her shoulders.
Only when I looked from exactly overhead, and just with my right eye – the one that lets me see clearly – did I have the revelation of the whole. There, on Anca’s skull, Herman (the same one I had talked to for hours on the cement steps of the block on Ştefan cel Mare, listening to his husky whispers about Felicia and the cosmos and his need to drink two bottles of vodka per day) had tattooed Everything, and everything had my face. Looking directly at the middle of the fontanel, I saw my face in a convex reflection. Moving my eyes just a centimeter to one side or the other changed the perspective and destroyed the overall picture, as if the drawing was not flat, but in relief, containing all of Anca’s intracranial space, biting into her jugular, and rooted in filaments of her entire body. It was my face, but every feature of it was formed in many miniscule designs, tightly intertwined, and their details, drawn in even thinner lines, were in turn composed of other designs, on another scale. The process had no end, because the twisting shroud of the abyssal fish that was a hair in my right eyebrow, was in turn composed of a nocturnal scene where Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus sat by a fire the night before the flight to Egypt. If you looked carefully at one of the stars frothing in the sky above the Holy Family, you could just see an immense cluster of faces screaming among tongues of fire (one of these faces was Felicia’s). The mole on her chin clearly held the smoking remains of a railway accident, and in an atom of the smoke were the planets and suns of another universe, with their own flora, fauna and ethology, and so on, and so on, without end. Exploring any detail meant you had to chose one branch, ignore the rest of the design, and concentrate on just one detail of the original detail, and then a detail of the detail of the detail. This plunge into the heart of the design could be deadly for one’s mind to even attempt. From the thousandth level, you would have to come back, to reverse course to find, in the billions of details of your level of detail, a single detail from the next higher level, to combine it with a billion more to move higher up, in maddening continuity.
Hours must have passed before I surfaced, before I recomposed my face from a myriad of particulars in the silky mirror of Anca’s scalp. But did I come out onto the same surface? Might the image of me in the tower, looking at the shaved skull of a girl naked to the waist, seated in front of a mirror, repeat somewhere in the depths of the billions of layers? Perhaps, following a new thrust of my mind, I might have risen so high that the scene in Anca’s room, and the tower and houses nearby, and the clouds above, and the fantastical view of Bucharest, and the vast curvature of the earth, and the golden pocket watch of the galaxy, and the foam of the supergalaxy, curved within itself and throbbing like an embryo, all of this would make up just one atom of carbon in a thread of chitin in the back of a fly from another universe, and this universe would constitute one atom of a potato peel in the garbage of a higher universe, and this whole process of my mind would continue indefinitely too, just like diving into the details and details of details …
Again I looked at my thin and sad face, that seemed drawn in charcoal, as it was reflected in the shining, living ball in front of my sternum. I looked around us, and the world was concrete again, reassuring, with impenetrable gray walls, where lights and shadows were sharply drawn, with a window where summer clouds rolled by, and a bald girl seated in front of a mirror – and me. The wet floor was strewn with brown hair, and looked somehow dirty. Anca stood, reattached the straps at her shoulders and took my hand, leading me back to the living room. We were quiet for a few minutes. She was ashen and exhausted, as if she knew her life was over (I saw her again a few years ago: a housewife holding a baby boy and a misshapen bag from which arose a hemisphere of cabbage. She was about to cross somewhere on Ziduri Moşi. She had a fatigued expression, and her right cheekbone was bruised. I rapped on the tram window taking me to Pantelimon, but I couldn’t get her to look) and that from that moment on, she would grope blindly through the dark, as spent as a discharged weapon, as ignored as a valuable incunabulum mixed in with rags and scraps by a clueless antiques dealer. I was distractedly looking at the wall, where there was a painting of a girl in a red dress jumping a crooked hopscotch, each square a different color. The tower was solemn and awkward, like a hut of planks raised higher than high, its crown in the clouds, and above it, like an ashen blade, slanted, hung the shadow of the cypress. We embraced in the hallway, like brother and sister, and touched our lips to each other’s cheeks. I went down the spiral staircase, opened the front door, and was struck suddenly by the gale, ready to knock me down, of the light and heat of the day. I didn’t take even a dozen steps before my shirt was sopping. I waded into the flames squinting, wounded, trying to orient myself, almost sure I was going the wrong direction. And I was, because after a while, turning onto a street with an algae-filled gutter along the edge, I recognized a ruined house, where I had seen the gypsy working a strip of brass. The boy was a few houses further on, eating sunflower seeds with some other kids wearing only underwear: black, dirty shorts and torn tank tops. Among the weeds that jetted up from the rank and the gaping holes in the windows, where plaster had been worn down to the brick, I saw something glittering gold. I walked through the garbage and thistles up to the wall of the house, staining my pants on the rusty cans and greasy pipes. Human feces, dry and full of flies, were scattered everywhere, in the corners of empty rooms, on the grass, and in the weeds … I lifted the brass band, a crooked crescent baked so long in the sun I could barely hold it. It looked like a filmstrip, with every frame sliced by the jaws of a guillotine press. My heart jumped when I saw that, near the middle, the series of rectangles broke off and were replaced by etched letters. A word. Perhaps it was the word Anca saw in her dream (or in her true reality): PÎNCOTA.
WITH tears in my eyes, I remember thirty years. I am not in my right mind. A loneliness murmurs in my ears, desperate and soothing at the same time, like the sound I once heard of the murmuring bowels wrapped around my mother’s womb – the babble of caves, with the underground spring of her bladder. Sometimes a tram passes, or deep in the night, a stray dog barks, or someone talks loudly, and all of these noises remind my skin (certainly then I heard through my skin, like spiders do, as though I were completely enveloped in my own eardrum) of the distant echo of my father’s voice, from a miserable room where I had yet to exist. Very young, unshaven, and wearing just an undershirt, my father would stick his ear to my mother’s stomach and speak, and my skin, thin as a soap bubble, heard his garbled words, the way you hear noises in the house when you sink into a full bathtub. I thought I smelled sweat from the bushes
of his armpits. I felt him punch me on the heel or elbow when I pushed them against the elastic wall of my mother’s belly. Over part of my hunched, transparent body, I felt the shadow of the large butterfly on my mother’s hip, eclipsing the dim light bulb that hung from two wires in the ceiling. I would open my eyelids, soaking my corneas in placental fluid, and through the thick glass of the uterus, I saw the World: two huge animals sniffing each other in their lair, embracing each other on a plank bed, penetrating each other like heavenly bodies. Two monstrous anatomies nailed to the stocks, two teratological exhibits. My mother’s womb, like a lens of flesh, distorted the new world into which I would be expelled. Through it, the woman’s skull elongated, her snout filled with frightening teeth, her ribs poked through her skin and opened into two monstrous bat wings, while my father’s spine shot out bone spikes that scratched the ceiling. I was afraid of them, of their lair, of supplication to respiration and digestion, of the unimaginable touch of horny fingers on my fresh, moist skin.
I have been writing in this brown-covered notebook for three months. I’ve almost never left my apartment in the attic. And when I have left, to go to the grocery store or the bakery, or for night walks through Piata Rosetti, Piata University, Strada Batiştei, I’ve always returned with the feeling that something has happened. Not even the world is in its right mind. It’s as if my notebook were a permanent marker tip resting in a cup of water: slowly diaphanous veils emerge, purple and indigo, veils of unreality, diluted like cigarette smoke in the cold April wind. Yesterday morning, in a blinding light, a crowd of Bucharesteans gathered at the intersection of Moşilor and Bulevard, looking at the peaked domes of a house I had noticed long ago, a yellow building with a concave front, crowned with two domes like huge breasts, rising against the chaotic spring sky. Tram 21, passing at a distance of barely a meter, provoked the beautiful building, its window frames painted in pale blue, into a gentle and continuous shimmy, so that it really seemed to be a female torso emerging from the asphalt. Now, helmeted workers were up on the roof, on a circular scaffolding that bent around the brazen breasts and their nipples with black lightning rods poking out. At first, it was hard to tell what they were doing. The building had been restored only last summer. What could that be, foamy and pink, which was covering the abundant chest, bit by bit? The workers unpacked it from bales they carried on their shoulders to the top. In the end, everything became clear: they were giving the building a bra! Within two hours, the cupolas, which were at least five meters high, were completely covered by veils and lace of pink pearl, a flowery style with small holes. The two large cups connected in the middle by a turquoise brooch, and fastened onto an elastic band. The city, we were told, had been receiving reports of the building’s impropriety for several years, and it had waited patiently to find funds to remedy the situation. Although it looked like silk, the cover was actually made of waterproof plastic, able to withstand all types of weather.
And monsters. More and more of them came out, you could see them everywhere – cripples, hunchbacks, unbelievably stinky bums, bald-headed hags with cheeks as hollow as a Goya, the crazy and mad, and imbeciles with snot running into their mouths. In front of the Baraţiei Tower, an old beggar thumped onto the pavement, a venerable man with a gray and yellowed beard down to his waist. He had a serious face, but his pants were open like a hernia, and his penis and balls were hanging out, as pink as a teenager’s. And others, and others, filling the streets, waking the subway stations, a subterranean humanity rising like menacing water.
At first it was fun to look at her, although I realized how unusual her appearance was. She filled the subway seat nicely, her wonderful heft even continuing beyond its edges. She stood out mostly as a large patch of pink, since she was wearing a shirt and trouser ensemble made of pink satin, a thin material with flowers, like pajamas. She was considerably wider than she was high, stocky, puffy as a mandarin (and even the curve of her body had something about it of a Chinese person with a touch of obesity) and her unnaturally white arms, fat, with very thin skin, emerged from short sleeves. Her large head, wire-haired, very gray, was somehow paradoxical: its skin seemed coarser than her body’s, and her features appeared to have been artificially aged. Her metal-framed glasses contributed to this impression. And yet there was something terribly naïve and helpless about her face: like a ten-year-old girl’s, a mixture of fear and shyness. Sometimes she crinkled her nose like a little panda bear, and her fleshy mouth hung open in gentle perplexity. She looked so clean, so neat (you could almost smell the expensive soap) that you might have said she was from another country, or she was an Asian doll. After my eyes had cropped her out of the sweaty mob dozing in the train, I realized she was not alone. Beside her, standing, was another woman. Her hair was just as gray. She seemed, judging from her body, older than the first woman (but by how many years?), and her appearance attracted no attention at all. She was an ordinary woman, in an ordinary dress. Her face, bitter: pressed lips, wrinkles between her eyebrows – she was a woman without joy, probably damaged by life. She had a sturdy body, stout, but without the flabby appearance of the other. Watching the two of them trade looks, you could think at first that you were wrong. The one standing regarded the other with a love all the more touching on a face that harsh, and the seated one responded with small, shy smiles, looking up with the most childish eyes you could imagine. When they approached the station, the older woman motioned to the younger one. They became much more explicitly a couple than the language of their gestures had shown, and more mysterious at the same time. The two, with the same haircut, wiry and half gray, touched each other, regarded each other, and a love moved between them that was difficult to interpret, at once moving and odd. The older one sometimes held the other’s shoulder, with looks of quiet assurance, and other times she took her gently by her plump arm or caressed her forearm. The first responded awkwardly, slightly bent, her hands always hanging at her sides, always with the same small, lost smile. When the door opened, sliding to one side, the older reminded the younger to watch her step, like you would a child, and they moved across the tiled platform through the crowd. The younger one walked unnaturally, weighted, as though she had to lift her thick feet with her hands, wide and strange as pink balloons, and then suddenly she seemed alone again, a Chinese doll, or a teddy bear.
I’m afraid I won’t be able to describe him. One unbearably light day, I climbed onto a crowded bus. Someone stood up right in front of me and I got a seat by the window. I took out a book. Among the last to get on were two men, tall, bony, in crumpled long-sleeved shirts. They weren’t much older than forty, and they were good-looking, in a provincial way. A dwarf was traveling with them, and one of them helped him get on board before the doors closed and the bus started. When we came to the next station, the woman next to me got up and one of the two men, who had been talking constantly about soccer, resting his arms on the dwarf’s shoulders, sat down and took him on his knee, like a child. The poor guy was relatively well proportioned. He was at least fifty, judging by his damp hair, half gray, by the wrinkles on his face, and by his corpulence. He was not more than one meter high. He wore dark glasses, his mouth was red and pocked, and his unshaven face was quite bright and pinkish. His arms, exposed by his rolled-up shirtsleeves, were also pink and stubby, with tender skin, and hairless except on his fingers. He held on to the back of the seat in front of him, with his legs hanging into the abyss under the chair. What was disturbing was the way this man was shaking, like a frightened animal. He didn’t look at anyone. He just sat in the arms of the young man, shaking continuously. Sweat ran down the hair on his cheeks. The two men were paying no attention to him, as though he were a monkey or a dog on its way to the vet. I stood up when it was time for me to get off, and only then did the dwarf look at me, from head to toe, in fear. But he made no gesture. The young man turned to one side to let me pass.
Two or three days ago, on my way home at night, alone, I went into Stairway 1. I went into the entryway an
d looked up through the endless square well shaft lined with windows and gathering a speck of stars at the top. I went past the stairway that smelled like insecticide, its paint peeling from the walls in wide strips, and I went out again and continued, like a somnambulist, to the concrete courtyard. A single dim bulb, orange-red, shone a ghostly light over the yard. Everything was like a dream. I saw that throne with the rusty pot above it, and the depression with a little cement bridge over it, leading toward the walled-over doorway. Everything was narrow, gray, and oppressive, with sharply cut shadows, in silence, and a kind of hidden, latent, mythical power. A fire escape held in iron rings cast a lacy shadow onto the wall of the police station. A poplar leaf batted gently against a whitewashed wall. I was moving, fascinated and careful, inside a photograph. I looked fixedly toward the bridge, one end held by the huge, bare wall, the railing on the left casting a pitch-black shadow in a triangle over the tiles.
Out of that corner came Silvia, her eyes sparkling, her lips wet. Her tiny nipples peered through the flesh of her crossed arms. Her thin, naked body, her hairless pubis, and her limpid legs white as chalk were drawn against the rough background of the wall, where nocturnal insects scuttled. I recognized Silvia as one of those transparent beings who visited me ever more frequently, who would sit on my bedstead and watch me carefully, without disappearing when I opened my eyes in terror. She would come down the steps gently and stop in front of me. Then, confused, I realized we were the same height, we stood eye to eye. I hadn’t grown since I was ten, but the walls had grown tremendously and the mill behind the fence was an obtuse castle, as big as a continent, crowding the square of night sky above. Brown moths turned through the spectral air in electric light and landed on the lumpy lime, forming a mosaic of triangles. Silvia climbed onto the tall throne and sat over the metal bowl, and I stood with my head tilted back, looking into her eyes, following her glassy, whitish body, enlaced by the smell of ladybugs and milked flour. Looking me in the eyes and smiling, her girl face suddenly started to urinate a yellow sparkling stream, which bounced in drops of diamonds over the pavement at my feet. She was a frozen enigma. She looked like a baroque fountain of elliptical beauty.
Blinding: Volume 1 Page 10
