Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  After the word FIN appeared and the dirty, yellow lights came on, Maria and Costel stood up without a glance at each other. She smiled, he squinted in the light, and they turned – moving with slow and mechanical steps, like slaves in chains, behind the dozens of kids with fat faces and girls who were attractive only by virtue of their youth – toward the door, over which was written in white on a blue rectangle: EXIT. With the same stumbling gait, careful not to step on anyone’s feet and especially not to get stepped on, they dragged toward the narrow hallway that led outside, withering under the garlic stink from one person’s salami to another, and the smell of sheepskin from everyone. Even before they saw the light outside, Maria, with a happy heart leaping up, knew that spring had come, because a purple butterfly perched on a pipe in the wall, folding its wings and occasionally moving its little filiform feet. Maria stared after it for a long time, keeping her discovery for herself. She didn’t even show Costel. She was holding his arm tightly to keep the crowd from separating them. It seemed that no one else saw the velvety wonder, the spot of blood on the dirty green of the pipe. It was like the butterfly was not sitting there on the pipe at all, but on Maria’s retina, where, writhing in the swirling optical chasm, it wanted to spread its wings into the two hemispheres of her brain. Only once she passed did it lift off, its wings fluttering like a wind-up toy over the heads of the flock crowded in the tunnel, to escape into the whirling light outside.

  Bucharest was now enveloped within the heat of a scented spring, with puddles reflecting the blue sky, budding black branches on trees that lined the boulevards, and windows sparkling in the steady, intense, white light, raising pulses and stirring memories. The hair and umbrellas of pedestrians crossing the street were caught by warm gusts. The wind popped the red flags mounted on storefronts (since May First was approaching), and often an elegant woman would lose her hat, to the laughter of groups of machine-shop apprentices. Squinting and pursing their upper lips in so much sun, the troglodytes who emerged from the somber grotto of the theater moved over the sidewalks or straight into the mostly empty boulevard, cut only by a Volga or a ringing tram. The police, who had not changed into their fair-weather uniforms, moved around without doing anything, layered in coats and Russian hats, squabbling with a gypsy in a cart, whose horse had shat in the center of the Capital. Where were the snowdrifts that had lined the streets? Where was the milky sky, so low you could have touched it? Now the sky’s color rose, limitless, outlining the statues outside the university, the cubist apartment blocks, with dozens of balconies, big and small, glowing pink in the luminous air, and the pitch-black hornbeams and poplars with leafless branches. Around these sharp shapes, the strong blue diminished until it was almost the pure color of light, and then straight overhead it became deep and intense, in places ultraviolet, a color you could not see without feeling woozy and exalted, as though you could peer through the translucent skin between your eyebrows with the great and lost pineal eye, now withdrawn to the base of the skull, on its tiny Turkish saddle, attentive only to the bestial light of the interior world.

  Released, finally, from the plodding narrows, Maria and Costel walked down toward University, happy and without a thought, they mixed into the scenery, drowned in the whirls and fractals of history, without distinguishing themselves from their world, and without understanding that they lived on a grain of sand on a beach wider than the universe, spread out and sifted, melancholically, by a mind that chose the two of them and decided their destinies. They were unfazed by the debt of their existence owed to their separation and imagination, down to the most hallucinatory details, by a monstrous cabal of neurons, by the fact that only for this sect are they significant, alive and bright-eyed, as they moved arm-in-arm, within the moment “now” in a world lacking time, over the sidewalk from Casa Armatei on the theater boulevard, into a Bucharest in which every building was only a wood and paper façade, propped up in back with rough-hewn boards, a city built with tweezers inside a green, paunchy glass.

  But the clouds seemed so real! – blown along the sky by a dark, passionate wind, broken by the warm metal of the trams and the bay windows on the roof of the university. The white light was so comforting, sliding over the cheeks, and so nourishing for the arterial system, in the clammy air of young flesh, replete with desire, dreams, and adrenaline! In the breath of spring, Maria, the simple girl from the edge of town, almost past marrying age, felt she could love the awkward boy beside her, whose arm she gently pressed. She watched him from the corner of her eye, as he walked beside her through the fluid honey of the sun. He was very, very much a child, thin as a banjo and sickly pale, with pitch-black eyes. His flat hair, combed back and glued to his scalp with walnut oil, was a black mirror of shifting waters, a style that would have been completely ridiculous if it wasn’t the look of all the young men in the factories and workshops; when they were leaning over a wrench or lathe, a curl might fall loose, might fall in their eyes and they’d push it, irritably, back on top time and again. Costel was not that tall, not too handsome; he wasn’t “fine,” as the girls in the rug factory said, but at least he was gentle and serious, and his eyes (although Maria would later complain constantly that her husband was “jumpy” and “weird,” that she never knew what was inside his head) sometimes had a warm, meditative expression, as though, from time to time, someone else, a far superior person, had inhabited his mind, and Costel himself had gone to some other place. That look of noble contemplation – the deep and true melancholy that sometimes crossed his face, especially in the evening, even when he was wearing just torn pajamas and smoking smelly Mărăşeşti cigarettes – looked like it wasn’t his, and it wasn’t, actually, because in those moments Costel was completely without a self or a thought, the way an actor who plays a noble person may be, in his normal life, a middling blockhead. Without liking the boy from Banat too much, Maria loved, actually loved, even then, the deceitful sadness on his face, when his unknown ancestor, a great Polish poet of the XVIII century, arose within his tangled viscera, like puffs of steam over a coffee cup, to regard the world once more, through Costel’s black eyes, which were identical to his own.

  High on the sweet amphetamine of springtime, the two young people went arm-in-arm through the yellow air, cold as glass, talking about nothing and laughing. Maria wondered how he was able to keep frowning even when he laughed, and Costel felt he was made entirely from scented air. He was trying as best he could to find Maria’s algorithm, to intuit (like in those almanac puzzles where, knowing which direction the first gear turned in a complicated system, you try to work out which way the last one turns) the ineffable functioning of her mind, to extract its secret, how it produced those happy smiles, equivocal, bitter, hesitant, those little grimaces of dissatisfaction that frightened him, those vague declarations of the eyes and eyebrows, those evanescent inflections of the voice, those tiny quivers of the wings of her nose. Thus did the young apprentice imagine the psychology of the girl he loved: the projections and diagrams of technical drawings, cycloids and hyperbolae, a rubber geometry, extensible and yet precise, from which, if you knew the laws and mastered the technology, you could obtain each of the thousands of possible effects and combinations. And if in saying something else or pressing her arm a little harder, Costel saw her react completely differently than he expected, his explanations were not mystical or poetic, nor did he credit them to the ineffable caprices of women; he blamed instead the imperfections in his technique, not following all the gears, bolts, pinions, clutches, and Maltese crosses closely enough. Looking at the stars sometimes, dreamily, in his underwear, on the small, rusty balcony of the house where he lodged, humming a little song from Banat:

  Sure, I’d join the army too

  Hai tri-li-li-li-li

  If they used corn stalks to shoot

  Hai tri-li-li-li-li

  Costel thought the constellations were another kind of machinery, and he tried to examine their surfaces for shining traces of grease and lathe oil. The e
ntire world was a mesh of gears, where the rotation of the most miniscule grains of sand at one end of the ocean produced, at the other, a devastating earthquake; the wing of a butterfly in the Antilles caused a tornado in Kansas; and a small concupiscent thought of a bum on Rahovei shifted the wrath of God toward a billion inhabited worlds. In his dreamer’s paranoid mind, and under the feminine lashes of his eyes, everything connected to everything else in a vast, crystalline conspiracy.

  Turning from the boulevard, they sank into the spectral and sonorous streets behind the Hotel Ambassador. Maria took off her batik scarf and let her rings of hair, curled with an iron, flutter over her back. The day began to descend toward evening, but the air was still just as hot and windy as before, knocking against the glass edges of the buildings, which were eviscerated by emptiness and silence. Their steps took them, strange but somehow foreseeable, toward the street where Maria once lived over the tailor’s shop. More than ten years had passed since the terrible bombing of ’43, and the neighborhood had been completely rebuilt. Where the Verona tailor shop had been was now a square building, anonymous, green, with a white glass plaque at the entryway: “Phthisiology Laboratory, District 23 August.” Most buildings had a red or blue plaque like this one. Flapping red flags were not missing from the girders over the entryway, and a sickle crossed with a hammer inside a wreath of grain was sewn onto the flags with yellow fabric.

  Maria frowned, and beneath the skin of her face, countless muscular fibers contracted at the command of a fine system of levers and threads under her skull, contributing (as Costel believed) to the outline of an expression full of emotion and hard to define. The shadow of her former adolescence now brought exaggerated relief to the hills of her cheek bones and chin, her philtrum, and the slight depressions in her cheeks, as clouds, running over hills, will suddenly block the sparkling sun and bring cold and chill – almost another season. Maria remembered, or something rose from her memory through a passive and painful process: Mioara. Cedric. Tătica sitting on the rock in the doorframe, holding his gray head in his hands. Her splendid adolescence never to return. A tiny, tapered tube, its lower end in the corner of her eye, secreted a teardrop. They walked past the former location of the workshop without her telling Costel that she once had lived there. She only, at the end of the street, leaned her head on his shoulder and continued walking like that, her face diagonal and her eyes a Modigliani, filled with watery ink.

  They hadn’t taken ten steps more through the transparent afternoon air, which jiggled gently at every movement, when Maria lifted her head again, surprised and confused. Over the houses (reconstructed in the same middlebrow style), just as Maria had seen it after the bombing twelve years before, rising pitch black against the motionless, clear sky between the tips of the poplar trees, rose the elevator shaft. It had remained upright after the block surrounding it turned to rubble, its wire mesh covered in grease. There was a large wheel on top of the black parallelepiped, holding a thick, greasy cable, a braid of thousands of steel wires, attached to the elevator car on the top floor and a massive, rectangular counterweight below, now hidden by houses and shrubbery. Maria could not believe her eyes: how was it possible that this chimera had survived, when everything, everything around it had been demolished and rebuilt? Maria had no knowledge then of the nuclear dome in the center of Hiroshima or of the Church of Memories in Berlin, ruins carefully maintained (as though they were relics of distant ancestors or the skulls of sanctified martyrs) in the post-industrial, steel and glass centers of great cities. And even if she had known, she wouldn’t have made the connection, because an incredible fact wiped out any analogy and intensified Maria’s impression that she was hallucinating, her awkward feeling – one that got stronger as she got older – that her mind did not belong to her, that it was only the theater for a play that was completely beyond her control or understanding, which granted her an unequaled importance in the world.

  She nearly dragged Costel down two or three winding streets. They crossed a piaţa with an agoraphobic statue and found themselves, suddenly, at the base of the great monument, in front of the dark-green elevator doors. A piece of matte glass, black with years of dirt, was placed in the massive sheets of metal. To the right of the door, a brass, unctuous plate, besieged by a kind of green lichen, held an ancient and weathered ebony button. Over the button, written in curls and flourishes, was a name: MARIA. The grooves of the curls were filled with dirt and barely visible. However strange it seemed, it was not this plaque, bolted beside the elevator door, that made her heart beat and Costel’s cheeks lose their blood (he had also seen the elevator shaft, he was also perplexed, but his passion for technical design was stronger, and thus he had been admiring more the mechanical precision of works from long ago, from the “bourgeois-landowner regime,” of an elevator no longer built in factories of the present day). It was what they had seen from far away and which now, craning their necks, they saw again: a vague motion on the top of the tower, in the wood and glass car suspended twenty meters from the ground. There was someone inside, there was a glimmer and a flash, in the center of and above the abandoned neighborhood’s bloody, ghostly architecture. It was a trembling, blue light, a light that reminded Maria of the azure waters over the breast of Păunaş, the peacock in the courtyard on Silistra.

  The light went around the corner of the grass by the petroleum-greased tower. Costel walked away, leaving Maria frozen, wide-eyed, in front of the door. In back of the mesh and iron rod building was a lot with stacks of car tires, and at the far end, the back wall of a yellow house with a window in the middle, right at the top. In the window was an old woman’s head. Her eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and she sucked a round, sugary candy on a pink plastic ring. Nodding her head cheerfully, she motioned to the young man, who had turned away with disgust. Moving slightly away, in the lot, from the foot of the elevator shaft, Costel could see into the car at the top. He was sure there was a human being inside, but also something like a bird, something with wings. He went back beside Maria and put a hand behind her shoulders (she moved close to him, warm and frightened), he asked her with his eyes, and then, with her permission, he held out his other hand and pushed the elevator button. The ebony cylinder sank with a squeak into its housing, but, as though there was no electricity in the ancient shaft (and there probably wasn’t), nothing happened. The silence continued to be complete and whistling. Not even the wind, rushing toward them in warm and scented gusts, fluttering their clothes and revealing Maria’s thighs, which looked like they were made of transparent honey or liquid amber, rustled the soft leaves of the surrounding trees, as though it was only a change of light in the petrified neighborhood. Maria, her face almost red in the evening illumination, had known ahead of time that the elevator would not move. The plaque, which smelled of tarnish, had her name on it. Her finger had to touch the button, leaving a fine filigreed network of papillary ridges. She held out her hand with such grace that it seemed to cascade from her body, like a pseudopodium full of florescent corpuscles, flowing gently, undulating, pouring toward the brass plaque through the flickering delta of her five fingers (over one of the canals filled with ships, barges, and picturesque water houses, the ring of mammoth hair arched like a bridge). Her index finger – with her painted nail reflecting for a second the enormous, orange sky, with the surrounding buildings and, in the center, her face as thin as Mircea’s face bent over this page of the book, as though it were the golden space of an aquarium – delicately touched the concave surface of the button, pressing it down to the level of the yellowed plaque. Someone with the perspective of an angel (or Laplacian demon) – someone whose eyes could perceive not only the refraction of corpuscles or photonic waves across the surfaces of objects, but also the objects themselves, as they really are, suddenly given in all their details, at every level that our minds artificially separate: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, poetry, as though the entire mind became an eye, one of the billion eyes of God – someo
ne who could come closer and closer to the image of Maria’s glassy-skinned finger, branded with the design of her fingerprint, until he practically became one with it (and also with every molecule of the ebony elevator button) – he would have witnessed the strange and unexpected meeting of two universes. He would have seen that in between the two surfaces, one of flesh, the other of former flesh, there was, however strong the pressure, a miniscule space, and there, in a no man’s land, like between neuronal synapses, there were negotiations, deals were made, prisoners were traded, and sophisticated passwords were exchanged not in words, but in spatial whirls and torsions. The neurotransmitters fire in thin fountains, green-yellow like venom or florescent blue, moving chemotactically toward the receptors in the button. There, like keys in a lock, they match, displace, or block other substances, palaver endlessly in the catecholaminergic code, and in the end, are reabsorbed, dismantled, and transformed into other and yet other substances, later absorbed by the kidneys of the cosmos and eliminated from existence. Meanwhile, their oriental chattering inserts itself, through long neural pathways, into the elevator’s nervous system, transmitted from axon to axon through ring-form, demyelinated delays, the ring finger, reappearing from place to place, reaching the motor area after countless intermediaries, reconversions, distortions and retardations, to operate, for the first time after years of impasse, the petrified organism of the electric motor.