Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  They remained silent until the end of the song. When the needle began to grate again over the glossy ebonite, the singer hopped up and closed the gramophone. Then she revealed (it had been covered with a flowery cashmere scarf) the toilet mirror in the green darkness, where the two of them appeared, whitish-brown, with sparkling eyes. “Help me take off my dress,” said Mioara, and Maria, obedient as a maid, came up behind her and began to unbutton it, revealing the singer’s neck and back, while she took off her earrings and bracelets, which left red lines over her elbows. Mioara pulled the dress over her head and remained in her slip, girdle and silk stockings, all as sparkling black as her short cropped hair. “That’s much better,” she whispered and lay back across the bed. Although she was skinny, the performer had large, round breasts and a firm bottom, and she seemed more womanly and more attractive the more she undressed. Maria looked shyly at the glistening skin of her protector’s thighs, between the edge of the fringe of her slip and the garter holding her stocking. All of the girls she had ever seen naked, by the river, the Tântava, had, like she did, like her sister, legs full of little lines of hair, but Mioara’s thighs were like ivory. And when the singer took off her stockings, rolling them, tinted like glass, toward the tips of her toes, the girl saw that her entire leg was white and clean, with painted toenails. “Take off your dress, too,” she said to the other in passing, once she dropped the rest of her dessous. Fear and confusion rose in Maria. Why had the singer undressed? Why wasn’t she embarrassed to show everything, everything? She had hair there, too, it was the only place on her body where she was like all girls, like all women. Maria had never seen such a beautiful woman. She lit up the room, and even her darker parts, the cherry-red coins of her nipples and the black triangle between her thighs glowed strangely in the air as thick as syrup. Embarrassed, not knowing what to think, feel, or do, she said: “But I’m not warm, it’s not that warm.” “No, but you’ll feel more relaxed.” As Maria hesitated, the singer stood, took a few steps over to a small, carved walnut sideboard and retrieved a bottle and two stemmed glasses. She poured a glass of an almost-black liquor and handed it to the girl. She turned the gramophone disk over, and they listed to “Zaraza”:

  When you, señorita, came to the park that evening

  With lily petals in your wake

  You had eyes of tender passion, with lights of sin

  And the body of a feline snake.

  The taste of the drink was deceitful, sweet and fragrant, camouflaging the flame of alcohol which stole into her before long, through her veins, changing her mood, quieting her anxiety and increasing her delight in being there, in the scent-impregnated alcove, beside the unbelievable diva. When she bent for the bottle, Mioara had two deep folds in the soft skin of her belly; the vertebrae of her spine arose like islands of luminous skin, and her vulva, under heavy buttocks, was black as a mare’s in the spiderweb of curly hair. The girl was beginning to feel herself unravel in the stale air of the room, when she saw Mioara approaching. Mioara embraced Maria and kissed her neck passionately, burying her mouth and chin in the hollow of the girl’s collarbone, the way she had only seen men do, in movies, to women they loved. “Don’t be afraid, little one, ah, how I long, how I long for you,” the actress sighed, lying over her and caressing her buttocks with one hand. The girl only stopped her when she tried to kiss her mouth. Then the singer rose, panting, to her knees and began to pull the clothes from the girl’s body, taking out her small breasts almost without nipples, yanking on her blouse until the buttons shot across the room, pulling down her cheap skirt and leaving it crumpled at her feet. She turned her face toward the girl’s hips and pounced on them savagely. Maria no longer defended herself. Something sweet and grave flooded her body – it was the way she felt when one of the more daring apprentices told her a story about love, about what it’s like when you’re being undressed. True, the one undressing was always a man. After he undressed you, he spread your legs and put in the thing that men have where you have nothing. So what would happen now? Could you do it with a woman? (But who was thinking these things, since Maria felt like she was looking down from somewhere above the two women spread across the bed.) Squeezing her hips in her hands, Mioara gazed, with her face contracted in desire, at the girl’s pubis, mounded between her thighs, under her ordinary, proper panties. She took them gently in her teeth, and pulled them down until she glimpsed the line of hair.

  Abandoned and giddy with drink, Maria felt the actress stiffen and catch her breath. Her excited breathing stopped, and for a few seconds, only the empty scratching of the needle on the record came from the corner of the room. Disfigured with fear, the actress turned her face toward Maria, her eyes wild, her hair bristling over her ears. Mioara leapt to her feet and pressed against the wall with the black velvet mask, which now grinned menacingly, next to her cheek. “Forgive me,” she screamed, “forgive me! Forgive me!” She wasn’t screaming, in fact, they were short howls crazed with fear, pushed until her vocal cords would break, as though, in her ravished bed, instead of the young apprentice, a spider bigger than a person had appeared. Frightened, the girl stood up too. “No!” cried Mioara. “Stay away! Forgive me!” She curled up in a corner of the room, like a child, and crossed her arms over her face. Then she collapsed onto one side and lay on the rug. Shaking, Maria approached. She bent down and tried to rouse Mioara from her faint. But the singer’s muscles were clenched like stone, her face was ashen, and her eyes were open like a dead woman’s. Only her jugular vein throbbed softly beneath the skin of her neck.

  The girl shook off her dizziness and found herself in her underwear in a strange room. Only then did she understand what had happened, and fear, repulsion, and self-hatred combined incomprehensibly in her breast, taking the place of lucid thought, and they drove her to run. Her clothes were a mess, but she put them on, in a kind of frenzy, and she opened the wardrobe to look for a shawl or something to cover the missing buttons of her blouse. But the wardrobe had nothing but uniforms. They were black, SS officer uniforms, the kind she saw every day in the cafes of Bucharest, or driving the streets in black cars. Above them were 5 or 6 tall helmets, each with the emblem of a grinning skull, and below the uniforms shined pairs of polished boots. Only behind the boots were stuffed some women’s clothes, a kind of carnival costume and some masks. Maria wrapped herself in a saffron mantle that could pass, in the city night, for a shawl. She glanced at the woman curled on the floor and departed, leaving the gramophone needle to scratch on the rotating disk.

  She went through the passage quickly with loud footsteps and sank into the unlit, miserable streets, under stars that blew an icy air. Barked at by stray dogs, grabbed by drunkards, taken for one of the easy women who leaned here and there around the bars, walls, and light posts, the girl, whose mind throbbed full of unclean thoughts, took more than an hour to get home. Vasilica was not back. Maria put on her nightgown and lay under the sheet. She tried to force herself to sleep but fell into a painful numbness. The ether of the liquor she had drunk was completely evaporated, and now her stomach was heavy with a chemical, decomposed air. She was sweating. She pushed the sheet to one side and writhed and turned, drenching the bedsheets.

  From this daze Vasilica woke her, just as the new day approached. She was drunk and giggling like crazy. With their fingers interlaced in the brightening room, while the sparrows began to chirp outside and they could hear vendors hawking their wares on a street nearby, the sisters told each other their strange stories, the disturbing experiences of the night before. Falling onto the sheet with laughter, Vasilica whispered in Maria’s ears that she had been with Cedric, the black man, to a couple of places where they had danced and he’d spent money left and right, that they had eaten crawfish on crushed ice and drunk a flaming liquor. He sipped it and suddenly breathed a flame toward the ceiling, like a dragon, charring the quartz prisms of the chandeliers. And then they went out onto the street and Cedric danced and sang the whole way, tapping the asphalt with his po
lished shoes, “Maria, he sounded just like a priest hammering the bell,” and she laughed when, after a series of pirouettes, Cedric suddenly fell to his knees at her feet, with his arms outstretched like onstage, hands wiggling and grinning with his ivory teeth, then jumping up to keep tapping and singing in English. He could make the sounds of a trumpet, a saxophone or the brushes on the drums, beating his curiously white palms on the pipes … until Vasilica did not know how late they had come to Cedric’s place, a room off Piaţa Lahovari. But what a room! On the walls, there was a kind of matting with masks scattered, “like ours with the goats, but uglier, real demons from the people he came from,” and in a corner there was a crimson idol “with its thing down to its knees.” In a glass case with countless little cups and glasses there was something dark and ugly. Seeing Vasilica looking in there fearfully, Cedric had laughed, opened the glass door, and grasped the hair of a human head, small as a fist, dried but with expressive features. “This man used to be alive,” he explained, “but now his power is mine.” It was an actual human head, and Cedric held it on his fingertip like a ball. In the same case, there were wide gaping crocodile jaws, full of needle-sharp teeth. Vasilica had known when she went into the room that she would sleep with Cedric. Unlike her younger sister, she was no longer a virgin: in the village she had had a “darling,” and since she had come to Bucharest, she had been, as would any happy and healthy girl, with two others, a clerk at the Department of Alcohol and a medical student, and she didn’t call them “darlings,” like in the country, but cupcakes, as they said in the neighborhood in those days. She wasn’t against having an affair, for her own pleasure, even with a black cupcake as cute as Cedric. But good Lord, listen to what happened next! Vasilica started to laugh so hard her eyes watered. It was so funny! Cedric poured a drink and started to murmur prayers in a satanic language, without looking at her. He clapped his hands and babbled. Sweat began to run down his forehead and cheeks. His shirt was soaked almost immediately, and his strong, well-defined muscles showed through the wet fabric. Then he pulled his shirt off and his striped pants down, almost tearing them, and then he was naked as a beast and smelled like a circus lion. His eyes became round, his corneas saffron. When he jumped up, Vasilica stiffened, thinking he would rush at her, but instead he opened a wardrobe and took out a German uniform, “Nazzies!” and threw it on the bed. He told her, with a wild look, to put it on. “And I pulled those tight pants on and buttoned the vest with iron crosses up to my neck, and then I put on the boots and the cap. I tightened the leather belt and looked in the mirror. And you know what, it looked good! But it all was kind of hanging off me, since it was made for a man …” Then Cedric gave her a thick, round leather crop, and he commanded her to whip his back without mercy while she said all kinds of stuff: dirty darkie, gigolo, sonofabitch … She beat him all night until her hand hurt, and that was it. Cedric came on the sheets several times, but he never touched her.

  Maria raised her arm and watched its shadow on the wall. She told her sister about the singer. She scratched her head for a while, trying to guess what had scared Mioara so much. She decided it couldn’t be anything but the rosy butterfly on Maria’s hip, which the singer only saw when she pulled down her panties. But why, what had the mark meant to her? She remembered the ring on her finger, with the butterfly etched in ivory. The sisters thought they would try to find out what was really happening, but the next day the bombing of Bucharest began, and that magical night passed into oblivion.

  THE next morning, after they’d trembled through the night in a shelter, screaming at every rumble of the earth and deafening explosion, the sisters found their neighborhood in ruins. Above, on the blue sky, transparent, without reality, the Americans had written VICTORY with colored airplane smoke, and the letters were unraveling, turning into just a line of clouds, scattered in the wind. Many homes had just a few walls still standing, like the remnants of cavity-filled teeth. The demolished roofs revealed people struggling with pieces of pipe and cable, salvaging something or other. Shop windows were shattered, and homeless kids plundered the mannequins. A tram lay across the street, toppled to one side, and one rail rose up vertically, two stories high, to point at the sky. Dusty soldiers ran around in disarray, with chairs in their arms, or vases or rolls of carpets. The head of a plaster gorgon, from over an entryway, had a triangular steel splinter stuck directly between its eyes. The splinter cast a pointed shadow, like a sundial, across the gorgon’s cheek, ear, and two ridiculous serpents in the tangled capital of fury.

  The closer they came to their street, the greater the disaster. The ruins seemed more hideous and ancient, as though the bombing had happened decades ago. The brick walls were yellow and crumbling, and beyond the façades yawned chambers with nudes hanging on the walls, while dead bodies lay among glass cases displaying intact goblets. The girls passed a knife sharpener carrying his primitive machine on his back. They clambered over piles of rubble mixed with small objects and laundry, and stopped on the corner, embracing, with the same fear in their eyes. They did not dare turn onto the street where the center of their Bucharest lives had stood – but was it still there? – the tailor shop with the apprentices’ rooms upstairs, the other middle-class houses across the way that stood, decaying and clunky, full of silly ornaments, beside the Toval corporation, the factory for orthopedic shoes on the ground floor, along with the Leon Gavrilescu photo studio, and their close friend Nea Titi, who had the great and ferocious Singer sewing machine, decorated with gold floral designs in her window and on her hanging sign. And, of course, next to the Verona tailor shop, the whitewashed building with the butcher on the ground floor, where, three flights up, lived the actress who sang from the crescent moon.

  Their hearts beating in their double chest, since fear and foreboding had made them Siamese, the girls entered the street of death. Never had they seen such carnage. Pools of blood glowed in the sunlight. Hands, jaws and smashed bones came out of the rubble and the cracks in buildings. A human brain, intact, moist, with carefully drawn circumvolutions, with tiny blue veins beating under the membrane, bloomed on the pavement, beside a wide-open skull. No house was left intact. Doors were standing, frames and all, while the walls were piles of bricks. An elevator shaft remained, wrapped in its black wire mesh, from the Romanian-German Petroleum Company, while the building around it had melted like sugar. Four floors high, the shaft, with a large wheel on top and its elegant, glass-doored car stopped between the floors, dominated the entire street like a menacing tower. Inside was still, perhaps, sitting on her chair resignedly, the elevator operator, whose power had been cut during the air raid the evening before, trapped in the cage of her eternal daily suffering. She might have struggled and screamed the whole morning, like a bird in her nest, and nobody had bothered to release her. Now she probably looked down from the height of fifteen meters at the disaster of the business district, happy in the end to have survived.

  The sisters, with their damp fingers twisted together, stepped over the floor of broken windows, over widely scattered orthopedic shoes – in one a shard had cut a hole the width of a hand, exposing a beautiful lady’s revolver with six chambers and a tiny pearl handle on a wrinkled satin lining; in another was a small ingot of gold; in a third, a chess pawn, made of glittering crystal. They stepped over hats with veils, and photographic plates of frosted glass, liberally coated with silver nitrate. It was as if all the secrets of a seemingly indolent world had come to light at once, and this new world was as transparent and passionate as an engine on display in a science museum, with cut-aways in the thick metal to show how the pistons and valves moved. Who would have thought that Gavrilescu the photographer, with his big paunch and sluggish persona, always with a pint of beer in hand, and whose bloody body now lay across a pile of sepia photos of naked girls, had been a cunning and competent spy? Maria and Vasilica, passing by the former photography studio, stepped over exquisite bird’s-eye photographs of German encampments, filled with letters and arrows scratche
d into the glass plates. Or Nea Titi: always sullen and covered in sewing machine oil, whose hollow cheeks made him look like he only ate on Wednesdays and Fridays, now appeared to have been a great collector of gastropod cypraea, one of no more than a hundred worldwide – the conches were tossed about crazily, pearly pink and purple and anthracite, spotted like leopard fur, as though painted by Chagall, with spikes and ragged lace, big as a tire or tiny as grains of sand, and scattered and shattered everywhere. Now Nea Titi lay on his back, sliced open like an anatomical model, a pale rat in a jar of alcohol, disassembling himself in the clear liquid, displaying his liver, his heart and lungs, his large and small intestines, his kidneys and bladder. His eyes, open toward the sky, looked like two balls of green glass.

  On the left side of the street was only the empty blue sky, held up by pillars of broken buildings. Across a vacant lot with conical pits and piles of rubble, one could see houses, many of them whole, from the next street. “My God, Maria,” Vasilica whispered, standing still in the middle of the street, “there’s nothing left … nothing …” They would have to begin their lives all over again, in some other shop, under some other boss. A bomb had fallen directly on the tailor shop, as though the Yank in his Spitfire, chewing gum and thinking of some down-home Ginger Rogers, had smelled the musky scent of thirty girls with bushy armpits – or the delicate Chanel of Mioara Mironescu? – and pushed the button on his joystick to drop the steel oval, with a yellow fin, the way in another situation he would have ordered open the valves of his shameful nerve, filling the corpus cavernosum with blood, to tumescence. To immerse thirty girls at once within the ravishing orgasm of death! Luckily, only one or two were caught at home, those who, like many others in Bucharest, had become numb to too many air raids, and had been content, in place of any other reaction, to cross themselves with their tongues on the roofs of their mouths and mutter absentmindedly, for the hundredth time: “Good Lord, make them go to Ploieşti!”