Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  I had just turned five when my mother, I still don’t know why, took me to the Emilia Irza hospital and, because there was no one she could leave me with at home, had me admitted to the children’s ward. At least that’s what she’s always told me. I tried to ask her about it later, in the hot summer nights spent in the kitchen, watching the wasps come and go through the air vent over the stove, but she stubbornly resisted, the way she did when I asked about other things, images and facts that remained in my memory, but which, inexplicably, had disappeared from my mother’s. For example, I see myself in a dark bathroom, with a large, pale boiler tank at the end of the tub. Through its little door I can see the burner’s frozen blue flames, the only lights in the room. Their continuous murmur, calming and sad, is the only sound I hear. Then a splash. I’ve taken my hand from the water and violet drops, like grapes, plop onto the water’s oddly dark surface, through which I see my little body, like a livid fish. The violet, strong-smelling water is up to my neck in the metal tub. “Permanganate” I hear clearly in my head. And I know that my mother had poured that liquid, with a not-unpleasant smell, from a bottle into the tub. Then she left me (why?) in the dense shadow, steeping in the bath of rotting flowers. It stank of swamp, violets, permanent marker, uterus. I dissolved in the unmoving water until I could not tell my limbs apart and they were ever more clenched in crystal. Any drop from my fingers fell with a genetic, unexpected sound on the mauve water, as though, at that moment, my ear canal was being sketched out, with its labyrinthine structure, and then dissolved again in the boulder of temporal bone. Every drop reinvented my cochlea. In the end, my mother came back and delicately sunk my head under the hypermanganate-laced water, wetting my hair, and she started to massage my neck. Squinting, with the water lengthening and squeezing my facial mask, I followed the will of the giant woman who bathed me, who doused me with violet rags pulled from the mirror of water and rubbed my shining limbs … Mamma sweated, and her breasts, sagging even then, with enormous, scarlet ovals on their peaks, began to show lines of violet drops, as though the permanganate was actually my mother’s sweat, as though inside she was completely filled with permanganate. Yet later, my mother would never confirm this memory, even though I am sure that it didn’t happen just once, but over a long period of time, the ritual of this foul chemical wash continued in that bathroom, which I don’t know if I should place in the house on Puccini or the apartment beside the garage. In the same way, I never found out what the formidable battery of vials was for, thick as a thumb and full of a yellow liquid, which I happened upon at fourteen, in my parents’ buffet. It was a white cardboard box, long and relatively narrow, on the top of which was written – and like the almost mystical term “permanganate,” the name of this incredible medicine rises in my memory sparkling, like it was written in precious stones – QUILIBREX, with straight, blue letters. Inside were dozens of vials, thin cylinders with tapering necks and pointy glass bumps on the end, lined up in a cardboard grid. On each vial, with its liquid shining in the light like gold, something was written, tiny, illegible, and inside there were beings: delicate, lacey worms, some with pink colors and little black fibers in their tails, others with wet skin marbled in vitiligo, vague reptiles with budding feet, a Sybil like a small beetle, as though sculpted in lead, reading a book spiritedly, a spermatozoid five centimeters long, a transparent embryo, through whose skin showed a brain like a sack of venom … And then, I remember one of the vials had a sailing ship inside. An admiral with silken epaulettes was pacing on its deck with his hands behind his back. Resolutely, Mamma did not remember, or did not want to remember, the box of “Quilibrex.” Why, month after month, had I bathed with permanganate? Did I have some horrible, or merely unpleasant, skin disease? Were there blind sarcoptic mites swarming below my skin, with long hairs emerging from the stumps of their legs? Or was the jungle of supple trees that was my hair teeming with lice? As for the vials, I would swear they were not for me. At Voila, they poked my butt countless times with penicillin or streptomycin, at the slightest sniffle. Each time the nurse, a soulless executioner, woke me up in the middle of the night, I could clearly see the needle pierce the rubber plug in the little bottle and extract a whitish substance, so awful-smelling that later I would say mold smelled like penicillin, not the other way around. I winced, resigned and horrified still. I was just a handful of boy with pajama bottoms pulled around his ankles, and I withstood the gentle and quick smacks of the hand on my buttock, already wet with alcohol, and I endured the torture of the needle penetrating my skin and flesh and depositing, in a bag of living pain, moldy water. But I never got shots from the thick, golden vials. They could only have been for one of my parents. I played with them for a week, and then they disappeared without a trace.

  One morning at the end of August we left, for the last time, like on an iceberg, the yellow house in Floreasca, where we had lived for three years, and we went off along the quiet neighborhood streets, passing the grocery at the end of our street, where they would send me to buy things with the exact change, past the barber where I had once gotten lost and howled until I turned blue. I held Mamma’s hand. We took various buses, and after burrowing through incomprehensible areas of the city, we arrived in front of an enormous building. I didn’t know I would have to spend a week behind the façade with thousands of windows, after which I would never go back to our apartment in the house, but I would fill a new spiral, much bigger, in another block, where I would live for almost twenty-five years. And it is so clear to me now that the foggy façade of the Emilia Irza Hospital, like the block across Ştefan cel Mare, built fifteen years after we moved, was nothing other than the opercula, impenetrable membranes separating the compartments, ever vaster, of the spiral shell secreted, structured, and inhabited by the soft flesh of my mind (here, in this notebook) and the soft meditation of my flesh (in real life), if life and thought about life are ever separate, which happens outside the awareness of the event, and on the other side the gestural realm where the gesture intervenes and all other beliefs wither, turn to dust, and disappear. Through the muddy filter of the hospital, the previous lives of the siphonophore larvae that I had been, from birth to two-and-a-half years old (on Silistra), from then to three (the block beside the Floreasca garage) and then in the house on Puccini – beings with differently developed brains, with different connections in which images were more like emotions and tastes, and every event took the form of a yet more disorienting surprise; the other fetal lives, a little more evolved than the real fetus, dreaming with rapid eye movements in my mother’s genital paunch, appeared like a magical series of reincarnations, just as odd to the being behind the window-filled wall as the bestiary animals or humanoids who, they say, live on other planets, in the colloidal suspension of the stars.

  I remember a freezing morning, consonant with the ancient, legendary, lost in illo tempore purple dawns, that welcomed us, my mother and me, on our way to daycare, and whose engram entered unexpectedly into my poems:

  ah, mamma, i dream of you so often!

  i walk holding your hand in enormous mornings

  you and i reach the factory courtyard and its drums of acid

  we enter shops full of threads from mechanical carpets

  or, in the black hours of morning

  we walk hand-in-hand on narrow streets with little shops

  and we turn off the gas by the reddened squash

  But, if it is absurd and delusional to use the word “memory” for those unplaceable and atemporal images of asphalt reddened, as far as you can see, from sunrises that warm faces and garments, washing them in a thin liquid purple and extending fine and endless shadows of amber, I can instead mark out scene by scene – how strange – that inexplicable week in the hospital, my first complete separation from my parents and home.

  They both took me. I remember how cold I was, as though I were looking at a group of photographs that held in their thick layer of silver nitrate not only images but also sensations, emotions, so
unds, and smells. I wore navy corduroy overalls, with two satin mushrooms stitched onto the chest, the same overalls that appear in black-and-white pictures from this period: I am in the Ştefan Gheorghiu schoolyard, in a group of kids, three girls with scarves on their heads, all taller than me, and standing beside us, next to Aunt Estera, is my father’s co-worker, in a kind of raglan sweater often worn in the ’60s. Aunt Estera has wiry hair and a cigarette between the fingers of her left hand. I’m sticking out my chest, relatively chubby in the face, sickly, and my hair combed with a part. As soon as we entered the hospital doors, we were submerged in endless green corridors. We were accompanied by a nurse in white, who kept opening doors with opaque windows ahead of us, and closing them once we passed. Along the walls, between numbered doors, with nickel ashtrays beside them, were glass cases of disgusting and fascinating anatomical displays: slices of heart, pieces of colon, and fetuses in various stages of development, which I stared at in passing, without daring to ask for an explanation. The only one that startled me was the thick jar, half a meter across, where two infants floated, Siamese twins, conjoined at the pelvis, so that two trunks emerged obliquely from what was a single body from the waist down, with only two feet and toes crinkled from the wet. You wouldn’t have been able to say, looking at the bald skulls and eyes rolled back into the head, what sex the two beings were, but their shared pubis was a girl’s. In the ever more imbricated hallways, sometimes rising and falling like a stairway with a banister, sick elderly people sat here and there, in discolored scarlet robes. My mother went into a room with the nurse, while my father and I waited in the hall in front, on a vinyl bench. I couldn’t sit still for more than two minutes. I nosed around, up and down the freezing hall, for fifteen minutes, looking with wide eyes at all the cases, and at the posters of skinned people on the wall. One shelf had a plaster model, also a half-skinned person, who had a face on one side, with a breast and a still-human arm, while on the other side, it grinned bare teeth stuck in its jaws, and its eyeball shone like a marble. Each organ, in various colors, could be removed from the flayed body, to get deeper inside, so that soon I was holding a ribcage in my hands like a pan flute. My father, who did not have a single white strand in his hair combed smoothly back – he was much younger than I am now – stood up, red with anger, and smacked me (“Hey, those things are expensive! Put those bones back!”), but just then Mamma came out. I could barely recognize her in the miserable thin robe, flannel, blue with dots that were once white but now showed the background color, and with a cap of the same material on her head. She hugged me and, to my discomfort and my father’s irritation, started to kiss me with slummy tenderness, saying over and over, like a rosary in a gypsy accent, “I could just eat you up! Mamma’s little boy! What will you do without your Mamma for so long?” and more kisses, so many that I was relieved when she put me down and left me in the care of the nurses. My father kissed me too (I remember the sensation of his unshaven whiskers on my cheeks and the vague smells of cologne and walnut oil) and paused to whisper something to my mother. I remember them there, in the narrow, high hallway, face to face, talking seriously, without smiling, without holding hands.

  Leaving them didn’t frighten me at all. I was tugged gently away, down other corridors, by the woman in white (who looked like a typical German, blond, short hair, penciled “eyebrows abroad”). This trust is incomprehensible to me, entering into the great adventure of detachment from my parents and exploring the hospital with a kind of wondrous enchantment. That first week of independence, subtracted from normal life, would be, perhaps, the model for my later experiences of closed, isolated worlds, spherical like pearls and just as precious, adorning the asymmetrical, capricious edifice of my ordinary life, which is impossible to totally comprehend. When they sent me away later, to camp or on trips, or who knows where else, my indifference left my parents at a loss for sufficient expression of their indignation. “Did you miss us?” they always asked, and I always responded, sincerely and naïvely, “No.” “You’ll never win with that attitude of yours,” Mamma would repeat, bitterly, adding: “I’ve never seen such a spiteful child,” meaning that, after the age of six, I would not let her kiss or pat me, but I spurned her, putting my hands across my chest and turning my head. Not once, in my adolescence, did I write them or call from camp. My father did the same when he was in the field, so that, abandoned and in a way offended by everyone, my mother often complained that she lived with two savages. The love and even passion that appear in every line I have written about my mother (and I’ve written almost solely about her) have always taken me by surprise, and made me wonder whether it was poor literary effect or if there had ever been an age in which I truly loved my mother more than anything in the world. If there had, then what conflict, frustration, or betrayal on her part had transformed my adoration into frigidity and, perhaps, a subterranean enmity? It’s true, she often told me I treated her “like an enemy,” and I remember how she cried once on my birthday, when she bought me a jacket and I told her to her face “I won’t wear something like that,” or when I wouldn’t touch the food she made, saying invariably and impersonally: “I don’t like it.” “You’re like your father. When we were first married, I would wait for him to come home from work to hot food on the table. I was thinking maybe he’d say something nice, just a word … But he would eat and not say anything. And if I asked him, when I couldn’t take it anymore, how’s the soup, how’s the steak or whatever, he’d keep his nose on the plate and tell me just ‘How should it be? It’s food!’ It killed me …”

  I was finally alone with the medical assistant, holding her hand down the greenish corridors, over a red and white mosaic floor, like a chessboard. We walked down cold, vast hallways, we went up marble stairs, and in the end we came to a wing that was completely different from the others. On both sides of the corridor were unimaginably large doors, reaching almost to the ceiling, where large white globes hung from metal stems. Many doors were open, and standing in their thresholds were children, some just poking out their heads, curious, others completely in the hall, girls and boys my age, some a little bigger, all dressed in a kind of pajamas I had never seen – instead of buttons they had knotted cords. The pajamas were faded from washing, but you could see that they had once had bright colors, and they were decorated with animals: giraffes, zebras, elephants, monkeys … I walked down the entire corridor, looking in the rooms, which were the biggest I had ever seen (except for the ghostly palaces in my dreams) and almost empty. Some toys were lined up on the floors. I let the kids touch me with their little hands while I walked, and ask me my name, and ask me why I had come to their door, this time completely wooden (the others had opaque windows), at the end of the corridor. The nurse opened the two white doors wide and the smell of freshly washed clothes emerged like vapor from the room lined with shelves from top to bottom. Hundreds, thousands of pairs of pale pajamas, neatly folded and perfectly arranged, filled the shelves. On their edges were drawings of nothing but animals and birds, sketched loosely and repeated over all the material. The nurse hesitated a moment, looked at me, and chose a pair from one of the lower shelves, blue with white elephants. She unfolded the top and showed it to me, smiling in a tempting way. I don’t know what in those flannel rags, the elbows so worn you could see through them, looked extremely beautiful to me. I could hardly wait to put it on. In fact, that day, everything seemed unusual and magical, as though someone had changed the light suddenly, and a kind of emotional tuft covered all that I saw.

  The nurse put the pajamas in my arms and pushing gently on my neck, led me to one of the doors with a window, in the middle of the corridor, where a young girl was standing. From the first moment, I saw such evil and hostility on the girl’s face that I could only think of Aura, the granddaughter of my old godmother, who scratched my face whenever my parents made me and Marian play with her. I walked in past her and saw another girl in the middle of the room. She was sitting down and combing the hair of a dilapidated
doll. She looked a lot like the first girl, and both regarded me with dissatisfaction. The nurse didn’t say another word. She undressed me, pulled the pajama tops and bottoms onto me and showed me my bed. There were only three white cloth beds here, with metal panels around them (one of which slid to the floor to let us into the bed), a table and three chairs, two sinks with mirrors, and a shelf on the wall. Across from the door were immense windows, beyond which, at our height – the tops of our heads didn’t reach the sill – we only saw sky. When the woman in white came out of the room, telling us only, “Be good!” all of my attention turned toward my two small roommates.