A beetle hit him in the lip like a brass bullet. The smell of lilacs grew stronger as the night thickened. Already, half of the sky was a deep blue, full of the new moon and a few sparkling stars, while a sweet pearly pink light and bloody clouds outlined the ornamental shrubs on the other side, dressing each branch with a rosy-brown mist. The air darkened into sepia, like in an old picture. Ionel hesitated for a moment, and then the most bizarre ideas entered his mind. It could be an extension of one of the sewers that led into the wastewater network, that branched beneath the entire city and led downstream, toward the Danube and then to the sea, taking away Bucharest’s fermenting turpitude: liquefied feces, newspapers used for toilet paper – the front page, with the smiling beloved Leader, crumpled into a star and smeared with shit – bloody pads of cotton, gray Volcano condoms that always broke, bunching up like painful rings at the base of the vigorous tools of men who hoped they wouldn’t dump a sixth runt into their wives, rotting rats, cats with their guts hanging out in delicate hues of blue and orange … Or it might be a secret drop site for the Securitate, the institution in charge of catching the spies who photographed national targets with ingenious cameras hidden in their glasses frames. Securitate officers were smiling, energetic men who defended revolutionary progress. They each had a delicate wife at home, a wonderful homemaker, and they based their work on subtle logical inferences … Major Frunză and Capitan Lucian were Ionel’s role models, when he read about their adventures, in book after book of the Enigma series that had appeared about a year ago. Or it could be the entrance to a Nazi bunker … but then why didn’t anyone report it when they built the statue? And suddenly the young peasant remembered the story of The Enchanted Flint where fantastic treasure, gemstones and precious scepters inlaid with gold and surrounded with pearls, had been the reward for the bold one who climbed into the hollow. “A treasure,” whispered Ionel with wide eyes. Sometimes, digging out their huts or a well, his fellow villagers would find a rusty bucket full of coins, or an emerald … Ionel took another look up and down the already dark path, and then he lowered himself into the pedestal, holding tight to the throat of the Russian poet, who now looked off to one side, as though he wanted no part of the deeds of these miserable, mortal creatures of flesh, skin, nerves, and blood that would scrub him for all eternity. Propping his hands against the well’s stone walls, the young man sank up to his waist into the pitchy darkness of the interior, where the slanted light of the moon lit only the first two steps. Ionel carefully went another step down and then dragged Pushkin’s bust back over the opening, obliterating the smell of the spring sky and leaving himself in an absolute night.
Later, a week or so after that illuminated night of disturbing hallucinations, the young man would tell Maria the story of his adventure in the belly of the dark. He was still seeing her, because of a certain resentment he felt toward the damned “yid” who in the midst of pleasure slandered the teachers of mankind, and she was seeing him out of loneliness and a desire to go to the movies, which was what she loved most in the world. Time had evaporated along with the light, and the only measure of his descent, metal rung after metal rung, was fear. His eyes went blind, there was screeching in his ears, the calcified chochlea spun crazily in the midst of nonbeing, and the analytical mind of fear broke open. The young man no longer knew whether he was climbing up or down, or along an endless railroad track, grasping the ties; all he could feel with his palms and fingers was the rhythmic interval of the form and the cold of metal bars, the only objects in space. But what if these were only subjective sensations? What if he was just lying under a sheet somewhere, and the nerves in the skin of his palms, projected into his brain’s sensorial-motor zones, constructed the sensation of narrow, cold cylinders, just the length he could feel with his palms or the tips of his fingers? In the middle of the dark, with your body completely liquefied, it was impossible to say whether your pancreas was still inside the somatic bag or sagging outside like a hanged man’s tongue, or to know if your skeleton had turned into a shell like a crustacean’s, or if your neurons had left the original ball under your skull behind, spreading, unraveling like obscene lace to the end of night. The organ of fear did not have a clear shape, like the fungiform papilla or the eyeball, since it was constantly devoured by what it perceived. The organ of fear was crazed with itself in every moment, it contracted and struggled in corrosive liquid, in unforgiving acids of fear. The young man descending no longer knew who he was, nor what area of the world he climbed toward, but he saw the fear, he saw it growing, becoming a fabled scene, painted with the nuances of horror, with desperation, disquiet, anguish, terror, panic … There were startled mountains and petrified cities and forests of cold sweat. Monuments of horror lorded over vast, misty piaţas. Adrenaline sculptures, fluorescent green, portrayed terrible violations, rendings and vivisections, ablations, desquamations, excoriations …
By now, he was no longer descending but levitating like a cloud through the spectral world, in the colossal thickness of fear, over towers of claws and trees that looked like knotted intestines. The dull green and opalescent venom became more frequent, the petrified howling omnipresent … He slid over wide and frightening planets, through empires of desperation that fulminated around him like fog, compact and sparse by turn. Immense towers with tiny windows shining in the green dusk adorned their peaked cupolas with statues of people with their faces in their hands, women overcome with shame, old people begging for death … Through an oval window, there was a girl with an unspeakably romantic form, long curly locks, pearly teeth between her coral lips, a white lace bodice and a blue satin crinoline, and hundreds of bows, with the tips of her lizard-skin shoes peeking out underneath. She was seated at a spinet piano, playing sounds like the clicks of knitting needles. It would have been a charming picture of love, if below her ebony bun, held by a tortoiseshell comb, on her delicate neck with curls of short hair, there wasn’t a hideous tumor, a growth as big as a newborn’s head, bruised and scratched, excreting a yellow pus between its flakes of pink skin … Further on, in a glass, angular hall as big as a train station, along the halls where the young man drifted, dissolved in terror like the steam of hot breath, a procession appeared, moving toward a crystal tomb. He had entered the room through an open transom, with dusty edges, held up by a black wire hook, and he found himself suddenly naked, walking next to the others along checkerboard tiles, bloody squares with marbled designs alternating with white squares, crystalline, like sugar. Every being in the long procession was marked by a monstrous debility: flayed oxen tongues emerged from twisted teeth, vulvas hung down like the whiskers of catfish, gigantic skulls, translucid, filled with violet liquid … He alone, as he suddenly saw in the pure, prismatic façade of the tomb, was whole and beautiful like a god, especially since … he had wings … long, multicolored wings, like a tropical butterfly, with electric blue dots and lilac edges, tips shaped like cobra heads in a yet warmer velvety purple … He looked at himself in the polished mirror of the empty tomb, while he felt six claws as sharp as needles entering his flesh, and he knew then that the enormous wings had not grown between his shoulder blades, like an anatomical anomaly, but that a great butterfly, as long as he was tall, had climbed onto his back and anchored itself firmly onto his ribs, and it watched him with bulging, glowing eyes that had thousands of hexagonal facets. He imagined the inevitable moment when the twisted spiral of its proboscis would unroll, like a curved needle, and slide into his occiput, gently popping through his epidermis, the tip, hard as a diamond, slicing at a slant his skull’s layers of bone, puncturing the duramater and piamater, advancing slowly, greased like gelatin, through the occipital lobe, and stopping in the center of his brain, in the middle of the limbic ring, equidistant from the fornix, mammillary bodies, hippocampus and amygdalae, and sucking out, like a vacuum, one cubic centimeter of cream-caramel matter and replacing it with an egg … The egg is pearly pink, with a soft, pulsing shell, it descends along the proboscis and beds there, betwee
n the snowflakes of the axon bodies and the mad labyrinths of the synapses. Then the proboscis withdraws, just as gently, now coated in blood, and spirals back into place, and the butterfly flies off in a zigzag through the air, toward the window open in the roof. The disfigured procession carries the young inseminated god in their arms, places him gently in the hollow of the tomb, and covers him with its heavy, prismatic lid.
He woke up reeling, like he’d suffered a syncope, and to find himself rubbing Pushkin’s right, blind eye with a rag that the soot turned black. He touched his neck, staring into space, pulling the pink atoms of dusk into his chest, just as he did at the table with white and red squares in the beer garden where he had taken Maria for some beer and sausages. For a week, roaming all around Herăstrău Park with a ladder on his shoulder and a bucket in his hand, he didn’t dare touch any of the stone celebrities rising from lilac bushes. When he saw an Ostrovsky or a Sholokhov, it was like he had seen one of those ghouls that the old folks in his village would use to scare kids. His heart jumped in his chest and his feet went cold. Maria laughed, as though he was telling her about a dream, but years later, during Catana’s funeral, lost in the immense tomb of marble, Ionel’s story would come back to her. There was a strange likeness between the stories, as though it was a variation of an old legend, from another province and another rhapsode, who had forgotten some details and included some of his own, until you’d have to compare hundreds of variants, to put one over the other and trace the similarities and differences, to understand what precisely had happened somewhere, sometime, what nucleus of physical objects and confused beings, consumed in the furious flames of time, had risen as transparent smoke into the air, walking simultaneously down thousands of endlessly forking pathways of stories. In any case, even if she were a Mafaldă with her pineal eye emerging between her eyebrows, barely covered by a translucent layer of skin and staring its blue at the faces of tarot cards, Maria could never have guessed the countless ways her family’s life would weave together with “Aunty Hirsch” and her husband Ionel, the peasant boy come to the city to have an unbelievable career. A photograph from the early 70s, black and white with serrated edges, shows Costel and Ionel laughing together against a backdrop of modern buildings and ornamental trees. Costel is in an officer’s coat but black civvy pants, while Ionel, almost unrecognizable, fat and red-faced, is wearing a black jacket and pants from a uniform.
After the GAZ truck started and fell in with the snow-loaded cars with their windshield wipers on, across the area between the university and the imposing constructions of columns across the way, through the destructive gales, spring-dressed Maria passed, crossing the intersection at Children’s Romarta and continuing along the Casa Armatei. Plaster eagles on its roof were now snow-covered scarecrows, showing only their curved beaks, like claws from the paws of a white cat. From here started the movie theaters with names meant to remind everyone of popular democracy: Peace, Work, Brotherhood. From every cashier’s window, the steely eyes of a Soviet soldier watched you, a red star on his forehead and an automatic aimed at the guiltless passersby. Behind him stood a tank with the same starred pentagon on the turret, and the top half of the driver sticking out of his steel chamber. His ears stuck out of his black cap, and he held a red flag unfurled in majesty. However much the flag fluttered in the wind, you could still see, in the upper left corner, the hammer and sickle, sagely crossed. An alchemist like Fulcanelli (alas, the hidden author of The Mystery of Cathedrals was twenty years dead in anno domini 1955, when Maria met Costel again, after their short idyll in Govora, so no window of any workers’ movie theater in his beloved Bucharest would reflect his diminutive figure and drooping mustache) would have seen in these two symbols an unio mystica between sulfur and hydrargarum under the almighty sign of the Pentagram. Only one or two of the movie theaters showed tear-jerkers, where there were, even for the matinee, endless lines, because the young lathe operators and loom workers finished the night shift and went directly to the miserable, rat-poison-filled theaters to see Sara Montinel or Vico Torriani.
More than anything, Maria liked to watch movies. Even later, when she was burdened with life as a housewife, she would delineate her strange triangular world in the heart of Bucharest with three cinemas, located at equal distance from the block on Ştefan cel Mare: the Volga, the Melodia, and the Floreasca. It was rare that she would leave this territory where she felt safe, and when she did, her trips through the city (if she wasn’t going to Vasilica’s or to her godmother’s) were taxing adventures in lands full of danger, barred by oniric fears. It was as though the theaters on the triangle points protected, with their hallucinatory secrets, the only area of reality in the universe, where her house was, and the market, the grocery and the cafeteria, the newsstand and the neighbors, while outside of this wise eye open to the cosmos, the world disintegrated, and filled with pale demons and smoke … Maria went to see a movie the way other people went to church, ready for strong emotions, for tears, streams of tears sparkling in the dark of the hall, for long laughter, for hatred and love. She hated war movies, she only went to those where, as she said, “everyone laughed, and sang, and danced,” or those where a mother’s heart was torn by cruelty. If she thought a movie was “nice,” she saw it ten times with no decrease in pleasure. But, however tempting the movie was, Maria would wait patiently, for weeks on end, “for it to come by us,” on the pretext that the ticket was cheaper at the local theaters than downtown. In fact she was repulsed, especially as she got older, by the thought of leaving her zone. She might tell herself she wasn’t dressed well enough to go downtown, but actually the people seemed strange and hostile to her, and there was something else, an interior resistance, something that prohibited her from confounding herself with her image of herself as a young person, as though her life had been sectioned off at a certain moment and remodeled from the ground up, or as though a sinister (or ecstatic) enigma had rounded in the belly of her mind, like a pearl, adding layer over layer of pearly inhibition around a painful thought.
Now, however, as she was consuming her last stores of youth, Maria, the only point of light in a dull, Siberian city, walked without any trace of disquiet, passing gracefully among the tramps who masticated pretzels in front of the halls, toward the Brotherhood of Nations Theater, where they were showing a Gérard Philipe movie. Victoriţa, the thief, had seen it and thought about it so much, “what that boy did and how he lost the girl,” that Maria practically didn’t know whom she was on a date with, Costel or Gérard himself, the way that sometimes, when a movie was over and she went outside, out the back door, under the sky filled with stars, even though it had been daylight when she went in, she felt like she was living in a movie, one as long as her life, one that who knows who (many people, in any case) watched in a dark hall. And those people were living in another movie, one that others were watching, and so on, and so on.
She spotted Costel and laughed with a snort. He was still in his worn-out sweatsuit, still with those boots with metal on the heels, still poorly shaven, with those eyes that could be gentle or horribly serious, the black and beautiful eyes of a boy from Bănat. And his hair was as black as a crow’s feather, thick as a horse’s tail, combed back smoothly over his head. He seemed spacey, looking for her everywhere, with his hands in his pockets as always (“it’s okay, I’ll change him”), while it snowed like hell on his head and shoulders. But the gusts of eastern winds didn’t make him shiver like everyone else. The young locksmith from the ITB workshop, unbeknownst to him, had noble ancestry. The zipper on his sweatshirt was half open, revealing his undershirt and his completely bare, white chest as though it was a mild, early fall. He wasn’t even wearing his ancient, oil-stained beret, which Maria had made such fun of in Govora. Bored, he took some change out of his deep pants pocket and started to count it, leaning against the window where Gérard Philipe, in the high ruffled collar of his period costume, pointed the tip of his saber at an enormous bearded man’s chest. With a wide smile, Mari
a walked toward him and took his arm, while Costel, angry he hadn’t seen her coming, quickly stuffed the change into his pocket and said “Good evening” so formally that the girl turned even happier. These stupid boys from Bănat. In Govora, Costel had been one of a group of apprentices from a Lugoj vocational school, all of them dumb as rocks, slow-witted and lazy, and the damned girls from Muntenia, Maria and two others, who had gotten tickets through the Union, had lots of fun at their expense. They would make dates and not go, they’d ask them to bring them who knows what, they’d fool them, two or three times, with the same silly smiles … They went out with them on Saturdays, to a dance (two Saturdays in a row) where the girls danced with each other, like most girls there, while the guys from Bănat, stuck together like a hydra with multiple heads, drank borviz and muttered a word or two in their own silly language. Still, even from the first dance, when she had worn her dress with a sequin belt, which, unfortunately, had scorched on the cast-iron stove while she twirled with Ştefania through the poor dance hall – also known as the cafeteria –, Maria started to watch Costel from the corner of her eye. Maybe because she actually liked the guy, even though he was nearly four years younger, or maybe because she was in that period of eclipse that follows the loss of a beloved in a woman’s life. She often dreamed of a desolate aloneness, like a sad and sweet poison, and to manage the eternal afternoons between the midday meal and supper, she made recourse to the subterfuges that only people overcome by loneliness and nostalgia know. Lying in her iron-slat bed, her eyes closed, she counted to five thousand in her head, then opened her eyes and tried to guess how much of the winter evening had passed by the change of the light, from ash to dark pink, to brown. Then she watched the steady, silent snowfall over the silhouette of the old, crumbling bricks of the sulfuric acid plant, and then she would close her eyes and count again to five thousand, trying to avoid what, in the end, when evening came prematurely and the room fell dark, and only the snowflakes continued to fall, sparkling in the light of a yellow bulb hanging from a post outside, she could no longer avoid: thoughts of Pavel, her Pablo, the student she’d met two years before at a party at the I.O.R. plant, where Vasilica had taken her when she was dating Ştefan, whom she eventually married and had Marian with, Maria’s dear nephew. With her head turned to the wall, stuck to a pillow, and her body feverish under a thin, plaid dorm-room sheet, Maria slid her right palm softly over her breasts, touching her hardened nipples, moved it down her stomach and put her fingers under the elastic band of her underwear, burying them in her thick, wiry pubic hair. She stroked, sweaty, feeling excited and sad at the same time, in a desperate, perverse excitement, rejoicing in the suffering and degradation and destruction. The little round cylinder followed the wet line of her lips, and she extended the tip of her index finger to her anus, repeating, that is, drowning in the pain of love and unhappiness of sex, the motions of the beloved hand of a delicate and strong man, the man under whom, penetrated and drunk with love, holding him tightly by his neck, she had moved for the first time as a lover, as a woman. He had been her only lover, and he had disappeared five months ago. That’s how it was then: young people had dates in the city and went to a hotel or to some woman who kept rooms especially for amor. Going where one or the other lived was impossible, since most of them lived with host families, two or three to a room. If you missed a date, you might never run into the other person again, as happened with Maria and Pablito, the weaver and the philosophy student, who couldn’t find each other one evening in June, when, after a stupid misunderstanding (as the girl believed) she had been waiting in one spot for three hours, pacing, more and more frightened, under the chestnut blossoms along the road, their leaves luminous-transparent in the electric light, while he, probably with a bouquet of flowers – always, for every date – paced under some town clock, somewhere else. Much later, Maria heard that Pablito had found, in fact, a better offer – that he had always been embarrassed to be with a girl from the slums and to have to make love in sordid places, and then walk, late at night, through back alleys, dodging toppled drunks and offering cigarettes to half-asleep policemen.
Blinding: Volume 1 Page 18
