Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  When she woke up, in her canopy bed with its golden brocade image of a unicorn resting its head in a virgin’s lap, Cecilia smiled lazily at her Uncle Monsú, as she had every Wednesday since they first met. Why did the pale man with black features attend weekly the girl’s rising? Why did Melanie and Vevé always show her a peculiar deference and do her bidding? Or that silly Cedric, who indulged her poking thin, gold needles into his buttocks and played the clown day by day, hamming it up, juggling plates and pineapples, stumbling like a drunkard, making a crooked saxophone meow like a cat until he got her to smile, and then, content, left for work? What family relations existed between them, in that world of aunties, uncles, and cousins, but without parents, or any trace of the past? She had been the princess of this little world for as long as she could remember: The Albino, Melanie, Cedric, and, more rarely, Fra Armando (but Cecilia felt strange around him, as though she didn’t have the gaze to meet the prelate when he gazed at her with ashen eyes, the way a museum piece, or a fish in an aquarium, doesn’t stare back at you when you stare at it), then, for a few years, her little maid Vevé … Cecilia was too used to her to worry her with these mysteries. (And she was used to almost no one else, since she didn’t count the black children as human beings. They played in the shadows and around the corners, or appeared, like ghosts, trodding toward the kitchen, and she was never sure how many there were, or who they belonged to.) But in her moments alone, in front of the crystal mirror, looking at her exotic beauty in the fairytale-blue air, she found herself touching her full, tattooed lips and asking, out loud, “Who am I?” At the sound of Cecilia’s voice, accompanied by the clinking of her glass ring against her crystalline teeth, Vevé would immediately appear, poking her little head into the ribbon-covered mirror and putting a comb carved from bone into her hair. The sad question would melt away in the opulent emptiness of the colonial cage, until it became an airy, frivolous aside.

  That entire morning, Melanie and Vevé had labored to prepare Cecilia for the Ceremony, the great ceremony that everyone had told her about since she was little, first in the form of fairytales that enchanted and horrified her, and then in parables and allusions that she was not entirely able to follow. When, a few days earlier, the first drops of blood had slid like tears down her ebony thighs, Aunt Melanie, overcome with a strange trembling, had told her, through chattering teeth, that the Ceremony was coming. At that moment, Cecilia was playing with a thin kitten, with big, silly ears, giving it her toes to chew and scratch with its back paws. It stretched its face out and licked the menstrual dew before the girl could stand. Melanie jumped up like a demon, her lioness nostrils dilated and her eyes bloodshot; she grabbed the cat by the head and tore it in two pieces, hurling bits of flesh and fur onto the elaborate peacock design of the Persian carpet. Cecilia felt both ill and pleased at the sight, because she also felt, then, for the first time, from within her sealed shell, the spasms of desire for a man. She was wearing silk underwear, and had scented oils on her face and breasts. Her makeup was refined, and she was wrapped in the most splendid dress, with lamé flames, flashes of anaconda skin, and electric blue waters, wonderfully matching her silk, floral turban. Monsieur Monsú attended, without boredom, the almost eight hours of complicated cosmetic and vestimentary operations. Sunk into a wicker chair, he gazed at Cecilia as though she were a mystical bride, or a goddess.

  And now, beside Cedric, fascinated by the medical store window display across the street, obscured occasionally by carts pulled by mules who poked long, nervous ears through their felt hats, by lemon-colored limousines, and even, once, by an empty hearse, with shining windows and flamboyant ebony sculptures, Cecilia waited patiently for her aunt, who had not emerged from the glass door. Finally, the towering Melanie appeared, walking proudly and carrying a giant paper bag with the store’s emblem, a dragon’s head in scarlet crayon, under which – the girl now noticed – was drawn, in calligraphy with fastidious volutes, the same M that marked all the businesses of Monsieur Monsú. Out of the top of the bag, over the corners of coffee-colored paper, strange spindles protruded, like very long screws, with metal butterflies gliding on their helixes, then the delicate edges of test tubes, then nickel devices that resembled elaborate forceps … She crossed quickly, clop-ping her high heels made of Hatteria under the hooves of her wide, bruised feet. “We can go now, we have everything we need. The damned sales clerk kept asking me questions, so I told him to call his boss” – she whispered to Cedric, who was overwhelmed with a deep melancholy. “There’s a taxi! Get it quick!”

  “I still hadn’t realized what would happen, and I didn’t understand anything until I saw, there in the catacomb, the yellow butterflies, puffy and bloody, breaking out of the girls’ tongues and drying their wings in the torch flames. Only then did I know what a tangled mess I was a part of, and I knew I could not get out of it, since my flesh and mind were woven from the same tangle. A bird woven into a tapestry could more easily tear a hole in the fabric and fly away.” As Maria and Vasilica stopped eating, in the clay room of their family house in Tântava, and the mămăligă dried out on the wood table, Cedric, with his wide eyes, now full of the reflections of colored ghosts from the icons, took the story slowly and ever more painfully further. The rustic, yellow moon, yowled at by the village dogs, made its appearance in a corner of the window, while the snowfall stopped. The single candle glittered, with rays as thin as copper wire, over the half-shadowed faces of the sisters. Cedric was almost lost in the dark; only his eyes and teeth shone in the increasingly still light of the room. The Virgin and St. George, the archangels and pictures of Tătica in the first war, and the raw silk rags were oddly consonant with the substance of the story, because all the world’s beliefs housed hearths hot with magic, the same way any evil witch eventually finds her way to the one terrifying god, the potter, weaver, genetic engineer, mad savant, or rabbi that gave us life.

  “The taxi took us to the edge of the great swamp. We stepped out into water up to our ankles, and if we hadn’t had special galoshes with wide soles, we would have sunk to our knees in the mud swarming with worms.” The women lifted their dresses and tied them with leather cords, the way you tie an umbrella closed. The Albino, who had left their house abruptly a few hours earlier, was waiting for them on a little rise of earth. A leech, through whose fatty skin you could see sacks of blood, was lazily crawling over his boot. With a torch in his hand (because night had fallen, billions of stars appeared, and only the west of the sky was colored by an eyelash of intense purple), brave and lordly in his colonial suit of beige linen, he came down slowly and offered his arm to Cecilia. Melanie walked behind them, sighing, and Cedric, after he’d sent the taxi away, paying the driver five times the fare, caught up to them, shaking his shoulders and distractedly humming “Dixie.” They wound themselves down a path with many turns, slightly above the level of the swamp. The stench was overwhelming, entering not through the nostrils, but through the skin. The grotesque croaking of frogs rose like vines around the pillars of stench, opening a florescent cacophony onto the folded vault of night. The cold became piercing. On the leaves of wild irises, rushes, and carnivorous plants, gigantic firefly larvae flashed their horrible masks, with mobile and blind maxillaries snatching at threads on the hips of those who moved through the endless swamp, desperately warding away mosquitoes.

  The moon appeared, enormous and round, and rose to occupy the center of the sky. Suddenly it emitted so much frozen fire that Monsieur Monsú’s torch was not needed. Under the yellow light, billions of pools burned as furiously as gasoline, and strange ruins, covered in engravings, appeared. ‘That must be a painting of a palace,’ I first thought when I saw them, feeling a chill spread across my skin. I had only been playing once a week at Monsú’s, spending the rest of my time at the Tequila and Red Fox, but whenever I had sat on stage in the round, cherry-red salon, light like a witch’s cave, I imagined what it would be like to wander through those ghostly, shining buildings, full of statues. Here, i
n the swamp, in the middle of the paths with hundreds of turns, there rose – it was the first I had heard of them – buildings just like those in the painting, pale, with statues that looked like they were made of flesh, in daylight they must have had vivid colors, but now they seemed dispossessed of color and, at the same time, their life. You know, Derry Fawcet, my friend who played bass, he had a hobby of going onto the rooftop on clear nights and taking pictures of the stars through a telescope. And in his pictures, the stars were not yellow or white, like they were in the night sky, but shimmering in thousands of colors: violet, pink, jade-green, cyclamen, mahogany … He told me that’s what they were really like, but at night, our eyes could not perceive the colors, so we saw them as anemic, pathetic, stripped of their beauty. That’s how I explained to myself the sad pallor of the ruins that appeared before us. It was as though centuries had passed over the buildings in the painting. Their walls were as thin and fragile as paper, and not one was still whole. The windows were only empty holes in walls of dislocated marble. On the edges of the ruined parapets grew pitch-black trees, outlined against the moon. Transparent swamp lilies opened their receptacles like jellyfish, from inside the hip of a crumbled statue. The chimeras on the walls howled soundlessly toward equally mute stars. Here and there, a column of porphyry supported a corner of pediment, on which a hero’s foot, sculpted in high relief, still stepped toward the void, shoed in stone sandals. And all, but all, the desperate faces of the statues, columns and capitals, escarpments and embrasures and abutments – all were covered with the same type of engravings, seeming at each step to organize themselves into nuclei of images and nodes of meaning, but undoing themselves in continuous evasion and evanescence, like an allusive writing, like the writing in dreams. I squinted to decipher it, and it seemed that, between the breasts of a marble woman, I could see a butterfly with its wings spread, and on a heavy pediment a hand without an index finger. The statues, mutilated when they fell from their niches, lay scattered around, and I stumbled over one that floated, without arms, face down in the mud. I shooed a giant toad off the back of the statue’s frozen neck and turned its face toward the moon. Although it was stained with mud, I would swear, Maria, I could swear it was your face! And that’s why I noticed your face in the club, the Gorgonzola!

  In short, the ruins we saw were like the pitiful remnants of a once-superb mouth with superb teeth now decayed and broken from which only the crooked and black teeth were still visible, in a reeking, repulsive smile. An immense stone portico, in the ogive, had miraculously remained standing, at the entry to a zone of even taller ruins. Shaggy vegetation grew over its crown of countless fallen blocks. We all passed under the portico, led by The Albino, and, through a rectangular opening in the pallid marble walls, soft to the touch, we sank into the moldy belly of the ruins. Before we were completey lost in the shadows I looked back. The moon, setting over the sky (it had been on our right, then our left, as we walked the convoluted path), sat directly on the portico’s apex, creating a strange symbol together, which the marrow of my spine and the nerves of my stomach understood better than I did myself.

  And we went, in the end, into the belly of darkness, through the porphyry lips and the obsidian nymphs of the night. The stars disappeared, but in the torchlight, fairy-like crystals and agates caught fire. All around the walls of the granite vagina where we traveled, the crystalline façades flamed up and died out. We descended further and further, careful not to crush the translucent newts in the puddles where we stepped, and not to snag our hair on the horrible blind cave spiders of the caverns. We passed through a hall shaped like a cistern, half full of green water, through a hall with walls completely covered in fur, through a hall like a freezer, of thin, white crystals, through a rectangular hall of tile, with broken urinals on one side and, on the other side, pipes with the vestiges of calcium-crusted faucets. The Albino would sometimes say something out loud, and every time he spoke in the dripping silence, his voice sounded so brutal and obscene that it stabbed our stomachs with a sour flood of adrenalin. His colorless skin, pale eyes, and cotton hair made him seem like one of those depigmented beings in the depths of the earth, of the same lineage as the wingless insects, the crustaceans fanning their tactile organs over wet stone, and the ragged, famished bats …

  We knew we were approaching the center when, suddenly in front of us, in a corridor as narrow as an animal’s trunk, and wearing the long vestments of a Catholic priest, Fra Armando appeared. When the torchlight brought him from the darkness, he was so motionless that he seemed to have been waiting for centuries, occupying and suffocating the whole corridor. On his head over his tonsure he wore a strange, steel miter, unlike anything a priest had ever worn. Out of this disturbing machinery two tubes emerged, curved and nickel-plated like syringe needles, and penetrated his skull, perforating it in the hollows behind his ear canals, as we would see when he turned around. Before he turned, and without paying any attention to Monsieur Monsú, Fra Armando approached the very young woman with large, velvety eyes under golden eyelids, touched his fingertips to her tattooed lips, and made the sign of the cross over her forehead. She smiled timidly and started to say something, but the priest stopped her. “Come,” he murmured, “Those Who Know are expecting you.”

  REEEALLY good movie! That guy Jerarfilip was on a beautiful white horse, coming down a path in the forest and then far away, on a hill, there’s this castle. Then you see him go in the castle through an iron gate and then somewhere else, in a little piaţa there in the castle. And he starts fighting with this fat guy, a guard who ran the peasants selling stuff. Boy let me tell you how they fought, what he did to him. Ha-ha-ha! He dropped a basket on his head, then they cut a rope and a board fell on his head, and they knocked him in the pig slop … Then the other guards were coming, and the guy fights like three or four at once and then he sticks his sword and they all fall over in the mud. Boy, what a fight! And the girl, the count of the castle’s daughter, she comes down too, on her own horse, and she’s got her servant with her. And she sees the battle and how many times the guy spanks the other one’s butt and throws the other one like … like five meters, and the girl smiles … She was blond and beautiful, a damn princess, with her eyebrows plucked out: you could see that even back then (nonsense! that’s just the movie) that the girls did themselves up like they do now. But when a lot of soldiers came at him, he wasn’t going to get anywhere if he kept fighting, and the girl frowned and turned her horse around and left …

  Lord, how she loved it! She had completely forgotten where she was; she’d stopped noticing Costel’s hand in hers long ago, her whole body and the world around her had disappeared, like hallucinations, like universes where no one had ever been born, where no one would ever understand, ever … She was inside the movie. Her facial muscles mirrored the emotions of those who fought and loved (but never made love, blew their noses, farted, hiccupped, belched, or left their flies open) there, beyond the glass between reality and dream. Paralyzed, unconscious, she experienced the movie so intensely that it was as if it wasn’t projected onto the screen (a torn, dirty sheet) but the smooth bones of her skull, in her frontal lobes, in whose white flesh the associative areas blinked on and off like neon signs. Her being, turned as fluid as milk, poured into the glass shell, the dirty-gray of the body of the princess with blonde braids and shining eyes, it filled the finest glass contours and wrinkles, and, in the enchanted armor of panniers and crinolines, she started to perform the scenes she knew by heart. No one knew, no one would imagine the truth, that now Ivon von Somethingorother was in fact Maria, she had invaded her like The Horla, or like the possessed are invaded by their demons. With her face alternating between light and dark, and her eyes reflecting the rectangle of the screen, Maria whispered the words she knew by heart: “O, Sharl, Sharl, I thought you would never come …” forcing Ivon to say it too, at the same time. Through the thin glass of Ivon, Maria felt the powerful chest of Gérard Philipe every time he and the princess embraced.
And, when he fell into the hands of the count’s men, and the girl’s father the count didn’t know that Gerard wasn’t the spy, but that the spy was actually that ugly fellah, Marmandac or whatever, who wanted to steal the girl away, suddenly the audience heard her say, “Pablo! blah-blah-blah” (that is, in the language of the movie), but in the script it was supposed to be, “Sharl, will I never see you again?” But she said Pablo, I heard it with my own ears. And that’s when it hit me. And after that the girl kept lookin’ up at him with her mouth open, totally confused, and after that she said Sharl. Yep, after that she said Sharl, I heard her. But first she said Pablo.

  It was the first time Maria had been able to enter the form of a character so well that she could change what it did on screen. She was shaken, dazed, when she realized that, breathing Ivon’s lines, she had changed her lover’s name. Later, in other films, she was able to change entire scenes, alter the plot, get rid of bad characters, or have her favorites marry even when it made no sense, to the consternation of the audience in the miserable theater, one of the three which staked out her territory: the Volga, the Floreasca, and the Melodia. Watching television in the evening, and staring out of boredom at some soap opera, Mircea would see his mother, balled up on the chair with a faded blanket over her legs, burst into tears during farewell scenes, the loss of a child (in all the Indian movies), or the unhappiness of a beautiful, ill-starred girl. She cried beneath the blanket, because Costel, sprawled on the sofa in his underwear, would tease her cruelly if he heard her, he would mock her until she ran into the other room, where she was free to sigh and moan. “That’s a woman, always ready to piss her eyes out …” Often though, when Maria could control herself, clenching her fists, and the tears on her cheeks were only shining trails in the light of the television, Mircea would see the fate of the show’s heroes suddenly change. Things would take a turn for the better, and films that started out as tragedies would end up in happy weddings and baptisms, the reconciliation of stalwart enemies, or the conversion of atheistic blasphemers. Then Maria’s tears would dry and her face would settle back into the enchanted, hypnotized expression that gave her happy dreams.