Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  They entered the theater that was as dirty as a men’s restroom, with petrosin-washed floors full of sunflower seeds and candy wrappers. The chairs, more than a few of which were unusable, were crowded with young people who looked like they had all been made by the same mother and father: boys with unshaven faces, low foreheads, and hair combed back, held by sugar and greased with walnut oil, holding trashy girls with thin, hot-curled hair by the shoulders. During the newsreel the jerks would shout, squeal, and call to their friends rows away, without paying any attention to the wise leaders of the Party and People’s Republic, as they appeared, yellowed, on the cheap film and set on the screen. Things that were impossible to understand happened between serious people, who kept shaking hands or walking through fields and steel mills, narrated by a manly voice, enthusiastic but so hollow, as though he were shouting the words through a tin funnel. Against the background music (which was always the same, a kind of half-folk, half-classical melody), mechanical threshers filed by, electricians climbed high-tension poles, miners came out of shoots grinning through coal dirt like they were in blackface, and people in city suits applauded (and a few in peasant dresses) in a hall as big as a movie theater. Maria, whom Costel dared finally to take by the hand, without looking at her, waited patiently for the silly newsreel to end and the movie to start. Sometimes she recognized the old man figure of Dej, and maybe Ion Gheorghe Maurer, but the others were completely unfamiliar to her. A flood of names and faces. She thought it was a little funny when the Chinese showed up. They were also building socialism, with their Asian eyes and broad laughter, obligatory on every face. The Russians, in turn, were always frowning and determined. The Soviet movies always began with a statue: a man and woman in bronze, with the man holding a hammer and the woman holding a sickle. Where were they supposed to be? And why was she so small beside him? Russian women, you see, were brave and worked shoulder to shoulder with the men. The bronze Russian woman was as delicate as a ballerina.

  The violent flickering of the screen tired Maria’s eyes. The theater smelled like wet wool, since everyone had taken off their coats and hats and held them on their laps. Now armies marched over the screen. Tanks ran across snowy fields. They filmed a plane from inside while bombs dropped through its open hatch. Below, in yellowy sepia, clouds blossomed like mushrooms. Costel, still without looking at her, began to gently stroke her fingers. She felt the blackened lines of his mechanic’s hands passing over her knuckles, making a weak sound when they touched her nails or the ring with a butterfly, the ring from Mioara Mironescu. In the semi-dark, the Kirlian effect revealed a moment of supernatural beauty: their hands were surrounded by a lace of blue stars, flames, a fabric as fluffy as snowflakes, and the snaking flashes and darts of green rays. The butterfly on the ring absorbed and glowed with the delicate colors of orange and magenta. Their hands touched tenderly, the only colorful things in the hall where shadow fought with light, both of them dirty and sad.

  A PATCHWORK of colored frogs and sequins, Cedric’s French Quarter was a story of palm trees and agaves bending in the wind, and light-skinned black women sunning themselves on wrought-iron balconies, protected by the ivory plumage of their fans. Many generations earlier, Africans embedded hallucinatory, picturesque scenes on the flexible yellow lamellae bone – high stacks of dried crocodile skulls, a man sodomizing a ram, an idol with lobster claws devouring a gigantic cockroach. The pearl piercing the ear of the slave who brought a tray of coffee to Cecilia and Melanie, two black women in silk dresses, a gray pearl, the size of a cherry, gathered into its sphere the neighborhood of wooden buildings and multicolored flags, the Mississippi River that curved around it broadly, then perished into glimmering swamps on its way to the Caribbean, the swirling clouds of spring, and the somnambulist faces atop the endless necks of the ladies, who tranquilly discussed, over honey cake, the arrival of Mardi Gras, in a few days … Their Cajun French sounded more like the zithering tones of Roussel, full of insects and pendulums, than the tongue in which, in roughly the same period, General de Gaulle addressed the French on the radio, encouraging them, reminding them of their love of country and duty to hate their foreign rulers, or the concomitant tongue in which his Parisians, thus heartened, wrote a million denunciations to the collaborating authorities.

  Cecilia wore a Prussian blue turban. Her thick lips, the color of dark coffee, were carefully tattooed. Her beastly nose contrasted oddly with her large, fairy-like eyes that flashed gold between eyelids lined with black. A thick layer of mascara weighed on her lashes, so long they could not be natural. Over her eyelids, the random dust of gold, blown softly from the slave’s palm, ordered itself (since nothing happens by chance in this world of paranoia and dreams) precisely into a map of the boreal constellations, those made banal by the zodiac, on the right eyelid: while on the left, strange austral revelations, including the Pneumatic Machine and Southern Cross, glowed with a living flame, surpassed only by the grains of the star Canopus which guided sailors through the eddying Straights of Magellan. Cecilia was at most thirteen years old. When she laughed, she pushed the tip of her tongue between her perfect teeth. From the time she was an infant, her tongue had been pierced by a blue glass ring, which made the same clinking sound when she spoke her chirping syllables, as the ice cubes in her martini.

  Melanie was old, with elephantine hips, but above her décolletage, her collarbones and neck were just as supple as Cecilia’s. She carefully hid the embarassment of her life, her scalp as bald as the palm of her hand, beneath a wig of ostrich feathers. Under the wig, in the middle of her forehead, fixed on a thin chain, hung Leon, the living beryllium crystal, with its own metabolism and sexuality, which had been placed in her hand by a French Quarter priest. There were few people of the Lord in that region, so Fra Armando was forced to work as a voodoo magician as well, two days a week. On another day he served as an imam for a small but active Muslim community, and on another as the officiant in a Hebrew temple, and he dedicated the other three days entirely to the Savior crucified on the cross of wood. The Leon Crystal was growing. Each year it added something new to reflect the events of Melanie’s life – a prismatic horn, or a delicate needle, something longer or shorter, thicker or thinner, more colorful or transparent. When the old woman lost her second husband (of the four, the only one she really loved) the crystal grew a knot as black as a rotten tooth, which she then removed with pliers, out of spite, the way she had pulled the memory of Desiré from her soul. At night, after she put out a plate with sprouted grains and fried bananas, Melanie sank the crystal into the glass of water where she kept her dentures. In her imagination, the hideous U-shaped object, made of a waxy substance as pink as vomit, spaced by inhuman wires and teeth, was Leon’s secret lover, with whom the virile crystal engaged in monstrous copulations. In the morning, Melanie drank the water from the glass, so the crystal seed would pass into her and live as long as he had waited in the bottom of the earth, among the mine-flower petals, damned to the cavern’s darkness and oblivion.

  They lounged on bamboo chairs on the wrought-iron balcony, enjoying the reflection of New Orleans in the mirror of the sky, the face of an angel with feathery wings that unraveled with a breath of wind. Slave Cedric (oh, of course it was a game, Cedric was just Cecilia’s cousin and played the washboard at Monsú, but he liked, on these kinds of afternoons, to put on livery and humbly serve his cousin and great aunt, to produce, in the coffee aroma, the air of another age) let them chatter as he watched his two masters, illuminated by sun and coffee, sweat large, yellow drops. From time to time, he wiped their brows with a handkerchief, brushed the pistachio crumbs from their laps, or drew their attention to a yellow car that inched through the straight and narrow alley. Across the road was another line of identical houses, with two stories and the same wrought-iron balcony, twisted into the most fantastical shapes, where other black women, and red-haired prostitutes, and pretentiously dressed tourists, and sailors with ridiculous hats emerged to watch the wonder of the sunset. He i
ndulged the women and turned the decorated cups onto paper-thin saucers to read letters and filigreed signs in the dregs, telling the past, or the future, or Lord knows what. The women, each with her little cup between her fingers, looked like two plants that bore porcelain flower chalices, turning to follow the setting sun. Then Cedric gave the long-awaited sign, and they rose lazily from their lounge chairs. Propping her hands on her enormous hips, Melanie rubbed her sleeping bones awake and leaned backwards. Each vertebra, beginning with the sacrum and ending with the axis on which the exaggerated prognathism of her skull rotated slowly, popped separately and distinctly, like the cords of a crystal harpsichord. They entered the shadowy cave of their living room, which they crossed quickly. There were heavy lace doilies, thrown over richly ornamented furniture, pale alligator skulls, voodoo masks on the walls, each as delicate as a white clown, and thick carpets with incomprehensible designs. They opened and pulled the veneered doors shut behind them, going into other, cooler rooms where glass carafes glimmered, and paintings rested at an angle to the light, which bleached them into a milky white. These rectangular wooden houses were much more capacious than you would think. Two or three kids (but whose?) huddled in corners, with large brown eyes void of any expression. A small black lady braided a ribbon into her curly, rebellious hair.

  They left. Cecilia’s red lace parasol looked now almost purple. They waited for a taxi to pass down the rosy pavement. Svelte men, dressed in the latest zoot suits, would cast a glance at Cecilia, who stared straight ahead, barely blinking her exaggeratedly long lashes. “How long do we have?” the old lady asked. She had hardly been able to control her disquiet all afternoon, as she kept the girl, as directed, in ignorance. Cedric removed his pocket watch, attached by a fob to his buttonhole, opened the gold lid, thin as a leaf, and saw the needles already showing a few minutes before seven. “Less than an hour, Madame.” The shop window across the way displayed medical instruments – syringes so long they must have been for veterinarians, oddly shaped forceps, vases in the form of beans, revolting rubber tubes and back braces. A plaster mannequin – as naked as an ancient statue, but with no trace of sex – wore one of those flexible whalebone girdles that had become almost obligatory for certain women, older than forty and fat as hippos, in the Quarter. Melanie pressed her fingers on Cedric’s arm, indicating the shop window with her eyes. He nodded. She crossed while the other two remained in the labyrinthine twilight, ever more scarlet (but with a strange dirty yellow higher in the sky, much brighter than the air between the houses, a sky crossed high and low by bats), and since they were standing together, heavily made up and swathed in silk, with the moon of coagulated blood as an umbrella, with their black and pointed shadows lengthening over the wall behind, full of cherubs and stucco garlands, Cecilia and Cedric looked like they were cut from an old magazine, bordered with pictures of the music hall.

  Cecilia had spent the day preparing for the solemnity of the spring night to come. From the moment she woke, The Albino had arisen before her eyes like a dream image that sometimes appears, for a moment, on the retina – a black man white as milk, with a large, raspberry-colored wart near his right nostril and eyes as yellow as a dog’s. When he bent over her, smiling strangely, his head filled almost the entire space below the gold canopy. Only a thin triangle of smoky air could be seen from the room, where Vevé, the little black girl, poked her bright face. The Albino owned the Monsú jazz club where Cedric played. He had come to the city more than twenty years before, in an odd automobile, carrying, on the back bench seat, with its neck sticking out through the window, a gigantic, fat bass that was once mahogany, but now black and grimy, so that everyone could see its scrolled, termite-pocked ebony neck and thick strings, braided at their ends with red and green threads. On the same back bench was a package, a large rectangle wrapped in coarse paper. The man looked like a being from another realm: wooly hair, a stooped quivering, and skin as white as that of any descendant of the old French gentry. His tuxedo resembled Humphrey Bogart’s and an ever-present Havana cigar drooped from his mouth. He made both whites (sailors and riff-raff) as well as blacks (saxophone players and whores) want to chase him away or cut him down. The one who set the car – rented by Monsieur Monsú (as he happened grotesquely to be called) – on fire, while it was parked in front of the premises, died within the week, from a scorpion sting. After a few months of fruitless vigil at the back door, where, at dawn, The Albino would leave the premises, after his car had been turned into a baroque braid of burnt iron, the hit man mistakenly shot the district police inspector and ended up in the electric chair. The woman who slipped into his bed to discover his secrets, a mulatta as heartless as death itself, one of those who allow scores of men to explore their secret tunnels from the age of seven, let him tie her hands behind her back and make love to her through the night. In the morning, she was ravished and smitten like the most pious of the pious, but Monsieur Monsú brutally threw her out and never again allowed her into his bed. She withered from love as if from a rare cancer. Wrapped in black lace, she spent her days in church, before the icon of the Holy Mother. On her deathbed, surrounded by mounds of roses, she raved: “He has diamonds for testicles … his sack is transparent, and they shine in the night …” Once the mulatta died, the French Quarter dwellers finally accepted the enigmatic man, who had such power and brought (from where?) new rites and customs, about which they didn’t speak, but which thrived, brightly colored, in everyone’s fantasies. His establishment, lined like a brothel with waves of cherry silk, was the first on Bourbon Street to develop the taste for a type of show that, at that time, didn’t have a name. Past two in the morning, on the central stage, in front of patrons snorting opium through filigreed pipes or debasing themselves with azure absinthe, the show featured bare men and women, coupling in knots like human snakes, using items that could be purchased, in order to continue the orgy at home, from a small shop owned by the same Albino: ivory phalluses carved vein by vein to match the god of plenty, black velvet masks, lace lingerie, complicated leashes and collars, crops made of hippopotamus … In time, a chain of similar stores scandalized the neighborhood, competing with and oddly replicating the traditional boutiques of Mardi Gras masks and voodoo accessories.

  The great painting that had barely fit in The Albino’s car now dominated the circular hall. It was the only decoration on the back wall, opening like a window onto a scene of fantasy. The picture, after witnessing centuries pass, had acquired a dull sheen, radiating loneliness and melancholy. It showed gigantic palaces of rosy marble, their façades packed with colonnades and statues, rising, shining like mirrors, from the blinding evanescence of green, clear seas that sparkled under the abstract sun of a perfect dawn. Ships, loaded with barrels and anchored at the shore, seemed like part of the same shell of smoky glass as the dementedly ornamented buildings, and they had the most moving sculptures black gall could imagine: hate, ecstasy, evil, stupidity, illumination, Christian piety, scorn … endogenous aggressiveness, grotesquely unleashed, like a monkey with electrodes on his skull triggering the hippocampus … palaces of insanity and wisdom emerging, vertical, fragile, from the green, limitless ocean. There were no human beings anywhere. In the lower right corner, there was a signature in black ink: Desiderio Monsú. The spectral vision seemed to spread beyond the painting’s frame, and the bejowled mestizos, with enormous rings on their fingers, sweaty from their armpits to their waists, could sometimes make themselves believe that this place where they looked at those women’s pink bottoms, shimmying obscenely in front of them, being mounted by hairy men with bovine balls, was nothing other than a pavilion of pleasure or torture, a grotto of hell or heaven, surrounded by that unearthly scene, spread as far as imagination could extend. Then, a sudden nausea washed over their internal organs, and mad with the sadness of being merely human, and not gods or nightmarish demons, they would empty their glasses of whisky, tequila, or absinthe without a breath, hold out their hands and dampen their fingers between the thighs
of the redheads and black women, and collapse with their heads onto tables of woven bamboo …