Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  The one I had seen first, on the floor, was named Carla. She was a little bigger than I was, she must have been already six. On her face, the pure, geometrical evil, extracted from the evils she did each day, was so pronounced that it seemed like a physical feature, like a puffy eye, or a mole, or a second nose. It looked like it could be removed through a simple operation, with local anesthetic, and then the girl’s face would be normal. Carla had oblique, dark eyes like a cat’s, with something crooked about them, and a grown woman’s laugh that glued her lips onto her face like an artistic collage – the same lips that she would have at thirty, superimposed, guilty and disingenuous, translucent like the skin of earthworms, revealing their lines of blood. She was the boss, she had invented “mineymoezish,” and over the week, she was the one who gave me the most bruises, pokes, and scratches. In the first few moments I was alone with the girls, Carla pulled a chair to the sink and climbed up and snatched the toothbrush the nurse had put in a cup for me, next to the other two. She threw it onto the carpet with a hatred that petrified me, because I had never encountered it before, in anyone. I had always been the littlest and most spoiled wherever we lived, passed from arm to arm, dosed with candies, cookies, and taffy, stolen by Victoriţa from the preschool where she worked, and the children always circled around me, at the house and block alike, when I would recite poems, “Uncle Stiopa the Policeman” and “Olenka’s All Grown Up,” admiring my cleanliness and the shine of my golden locks … I never knew hostility, not even when my father unexpectedly grabbed me, held me down and pinched my nose, and my mother pushed a spoon into my mouth, forcing me to swallow the bitter medicine, and whacking my head if I let it run out of the corners of my mouth while I twisted and writhed. I was horrified only by the brutality of the situation, since I knew that my parents loved me and wanted to make me feel better. But what did Carla have against my stupid toothbrush? And why didn’t she talk to me, why did she only brush me away from where they were playing? Why, later, did she knock over my blocks and break my toys? I wanted to cry just thinking about it, the way that later I would always cry after I fought with boys, whether I beat them or got beaten up.

  Bambina’s face looked like Carla’s, aside from her eyes, which were dull and gray like concrete. But the evil on the flesh of the first here grew a blister as thin as a fish bladder, glimmering, and evenly enveloping her entire face. Bambina was not impulsive like her friend, but she was perverse and calculating. Her limbs and her trunk were filiform, brown as a gypsy’s. She never looked you in the eye, and when the nurse came she would transform into the most well-behaved girl. Wherever she was, when she heard the easily recognizable steps of the nurse’s high heels, she would go sit at the table and begin to play with a doll, quietly, her feet together and her elbows by her body, and for this she was always praised. The nurse called her nothing but “little angel,” but I knew from the beginning whom I was dealing with, thanks to my toothbrush, which I picked up, washed, and put for the moment on the stiff sheet of my bed. Going into the hall a bit to see the other kids, I swung the door a while and then re-entered the great white cave. I caught Bambina wetting my toothbrush in the pot full of pee. I was so shocked by the girls’ behavior that I didn’t think to complain to the nurse who took care of us.

  Both girls had hair that stuck out like Furies’, and they spent the day banging their slippers against the wall that separated us from the next room, yanking the hard fabric band that came from a hole in the wall, to raise and lower the window blinds, and especially playing with hideous rag dolls with plaster heads, like they were back then, dolls they bashed together until the faces shattered, saying they were soldiers or boxers. In the evening they would scare themselves, telling each other that the dolls would come for revenge during the night, so before bed, they tied them in cords and laces, making grotesquely large knots. I spent most of my time in the hallway or by the window. By the last day, I didn’t have my toys, and the two would shout if I even looked at their dirty dolls. I also liked to lift and lower the metal panel on my bed, to wander the hall and look at kids in the other rooms (even though I wasn’t supposed to go in the hall) or to gaze minute after minute at the marine-blue flowers on the tiles below the faucet, until I started to see double and the flowers – they were irises – merged into each other and took on a strange multidimensionality. It gave me the feeling that I had slipped out of reality and penetrated that unspeakably deep field of irises. I wandered through them without a body, without movement, I was that world where there was nothing but intensely blue flowers, floating in the air at equal distances, above and below, before and behind, to infinity. I would forget myself completely, until a slipper got thrown at my head or my waist, knocked my cheek against the faucet, and brought me back into the room.

  I was totally isolated from the girls in faded pajamas, as though we were from different worlds, a feeling heightened by my inability to understand them. Most of the time, they spoke an unknown language, made not only of sounds but also of gestures and touches and even of smells (when one of them – in moments of discussion I became able to anticipate – broke wind), and which they performed with unbelievable speed and precision. Much later, reading about Vollapük and Esperanto, I remembered how Carla and Bambina talked, and the idea of naming their language passed through my mind, a language where ordinary sounds were mixed with bizarre glottals, with deaf-mute signs and facial expressions like catatonic schizophrenics. I thought of it as “mineymoezish,” because their most common invented word was “minemoe” or “mynimoe,” accompanied by rolling eyes and the motion of pulling something from their chests with imaginary claws.

  Evening meals were almost magical. The nurse sat with us, on a folding chair, and our table was lit by a very weak shaded lamp, which only drew the plates and our nearby faces from the dark. Even the figure of the nurse, whose white and massive chest rose like an iceberg in the light, remained in a penumbra. The plates had the same unique food each night: it looked like a trembling jellyfish, almost completely translucid, with its internal organs (darker, amber-colored) showing through its skin. When you stuck your spoon in it, the jellyfish throbbed and tensed with pain. We had to eat all of it, despite the insipid taste, like flan without enough sugar. If the trembling aspic was not a kind of medicine, then I don’t know what medicine is. But it is possible that it was, because only during this time did the nurse sit with us to the end, to the last swallow. Many times one of the girls, most often Bambina, would lie down and vomit, covering the carpet with cheesy pasta, but without a word of reprimand, the nurse immediately called the housekeeper, who cleaned the floor and brought another plate of jellyfish. Like later, in the Voila sanatorium, whose madness seems to have been prefigured by that of Emilia Irma’s, the child would not escape until his plate was clean, even if it meant he had to stay at the table all night.

  When she got them to talk, without their catching on, about their strange speech, the nurse got a story, more mimed than spoken in words. Carla, from time to time, had the same dream, in which, naked and with curly hair past her buttocks (“and I had boobs like a big woman,” she showed, cupping her fingers in front of her chest), she wandered through a vast palace of white marble, with a portico, galleries, and statues, and a shining mosaic spread on the floors, tracing out an incomprehensible design. Suddenly the palace was full of endless vistas, without any furniture or paintings, translucent like it was carved from salt, and filled with torpid, multicolored, butterflies. Surprised, Carla wandered through the halls until, in the center of one, she discovered a crystal mausoleum, sparkling in all the colors of the rainbow. Inside was a soft being, with a complex and delicate anatomy, wet orifices on the edge of an ashen stomach, and a vaguely sketched-out face, from the middle of which protruded a short proboscis, with a large bead of milk inflating and shrinking at its tip. Crinkled skin, like a scrotum, rose slowly, and the being opened a human eye (here, Carla closed her eyelids and then opened them with an unnatural slowness, until her eye
s became two staring globes, as though paralyzed with fear; at the same time she made the gesture of pulling her heart, veins and all, out of her chest with the claws of her left hand). Then the statues came to life, climbed from their plinths, gathered around the tomb, and began to speak in this unusual language to each other, which Carla learned after many identical dreams and which she transmitted to Bambina, so she would have someone to practice with in the daytime. Despite all the nurse’s ploys, Carla never breathed a word regarding what, precisely, the statues had said.

  The girl projected this same dream to us, directly into our brains somehow, as though we had dreamed it ourselves, because her words and motions were only vesperal flashes on the black crests of waves: elliptical, uncolored, and dissipating soon within the prayer-like atmosphere of the evening meal. After we finished eating, we each went to our own bed like every night, and we curled up under the sheets. In the hospital, the rooms were much taller than in the houses were I had lived, and all the way at the top, they had enormous, white globes attached to the ceiling with long metal stems. Before sleeping, I would fix my gaze on one of those globes, floating like a foggy moon in the brown darkness. I stared at it hard, until I felt that it began to oscillate … right … left … more and more … with the miniscule image of my bed held in its curve … one side … the other … until I sank, sighing, into sleep, to dream bad dreams about the girls, their hands knocking over my block towers …

  Like the décor, the days were also incomparably vaster than they seem today. Eternities of fresh, glacial light passed between waking up, long mornings, and afternoon meals, there were fluttering changes of gold and shadow from the flowing clouds covering and revealing the sun in the large, white-framed windows. The girls’ features, the beds’ metal panels, the intense blue of the irises under the sink, and each detail of the hideous dolls: their shiny cardboard flakes, covered in plaster, where a nose or eyes were drawn, vibrant and glowing, that detached themselves vigorously, three-dimensionally, one on top of the other – it was as if I weren’t seeing these things with my eyes, but an impersonal camera lucida, cutting and merciless, that spotlighed even the most unimportant details with a kind of abstract consciousness. Everything glowed and spun in colors and designs from the beginning of the world. From my spot at the window, I watched Carla and Bambina perform their ballet like tiny goddesses of destruction. I watched their glassy fingers tear shreds from the sheets, blindfold their dolls, and execute them by stabbing a splinter of pressed wood in the dolls’ chests. I made myself as small as possible when they began to bounce around, ungracefully like wild animals, throwing whatever they could grab into the middle of the room. I tried to interfere once when they went “hunting” in the other rooms and dragged back a smaller boy, who they threw down, leaning over him, poking him, pulling out strands of his hair and kicking his ribs. Then they turned to me and scratched me like cats on my cheeks and shoulders. Afterwards, they would bang their slippers against the wall for hour after monotonous hour, one beside the other, chattering in mineymoezish and hopping around, until the nurse came in and took them by the ears. Then they started to scream and blame me: I was the one responsible for the mess in the room, the noise, everything. I wouldn’t leave them alone, and I took their toys.

  The afternoons were almost taller, like vaults of quotidian architecture. After the meal we were supposed to sleep for two hours, but no one did. The two of them stood up on their beds and pulled each other’s hands and pajamas, trying to make the other fall, while I stared out the window at the shining outlines of the clouds, at their transformations, at their steady advance toward one of the window hinges. I watched how the September evening fell, and the pineal gland at the base of my brain detected the seasonal change in light. My pupils grew, and a gentle, atavistic sadness stole around my chest as evening came. A little before it got completely dark, the air became enchanted. Across the walls, stripes of red liquid stretched, phosphorescent, and the air in the room turned brown. The long rectangles of the windows turned from light blue to yellow, and then an unnatural, gloomy orange that covered everything in the room. Then the silence and boredom became unbearable, and everything (only then) began to reek of doctors and hospitals.

  It was the moment that I waited for all day: when Carla and Bambina took off their pajamas and, like large dolls, with unexpected grace, they climbed from their beds and began to dance through the room. I knelt and, my mouth gaping, watched their small naked bodies, dark brown in the evening light, spinning like two small fish in a glass globe. From time to time, catching the window light, their eyes sparkled one moment and went dull the next. They lay down and rolled over the worn carpet, they crab walked, they tried to walk on their hands, they held each other’s arms and spun … I knew the nurse would never come at that hour (we were horribly frightened of her), so I climbed out of bed, too, tentatively, watching the dance with a kind of prudent enchantment. I looked curiously at their thin chests and the fine line between the lips of their shining pubises. At the house I had played doctor with Anişoara, in the basement, in the little room painted light green, and we often took our underpants off, but this seemed like something else, because the girls dancing around the dark room did not encourage the same complicity in danger and shame as my meetings with Anişoara. The ordinary, dumb girl at the house, who taught me to play “shots with pants off,” looked at my naked body with a kind of dreamy admiration, while I was probably so indifferent that I don’t even remember Anişoara without her underpants, just the fear of our parents catching us.

  What was happening now was magic. Neither Carla nor Bambina were themselves any more, as though the acid of evening had dissolved the crust of evil from their faces, and left them pure and inexpressive like benign masks. I could hardly recognize them. When it was so dark that their dance was only visible against the windows – their black and supple silhouettes were like African statues – the two approached me, by the window, their eyes shining, and took off my pajamas. They lay back triumphantly to show me the purple slits between their thighs, as though there was something grand there, and glorious. They smiled to each other, confirming their exorbitant power, and they rejoiced to see me looking at them, but my small sex, in contrast, brought the usual meanness back to their gaze. They pulled on it, pretending to cut it off, and in the end they turned their backs to me, as though I didn’t exist. Then we got dressed again, quickly, since we heard the steps of the blonde nurse, who was bringing us our usual mollusk supper, covered with caramel syrup, which we had to eat to the last spoonful. The last night, while I chewed the tasteless meat, I felt something like a rubber tube in my mouth. I plucked out a white vein, with a greenish tip, which I placed on the edge of my plate, and I vomited. The nurse immediately brought me a fresh helping.

  The children in the other rooms were not healthy and whole the way we, at least in appearance, were. Almost all of them had some strange thing wrong that made a powerful impression on my mind. One boy’s fingers stuck out in every direction, like lobster legs. The room next door constantly reeked of stinging urine and maple. A thin, withdrawn person with dull features screamed her head off when Carla and Bambina, after a lengthy hunt, caught her and pulled her into our room. They wrestled for half an hour while the child writhed like a leech, until they pulled her pajama bottoms down, to look one more time, like at a rare flower, at the bud so complicated you couldn’t have said if it was male or female. There was also a little girl, sweet and lively, happily laughing and talking with everyone, whose hands came out directly from her shoulders, like wings, without arms in between. Everyone admired her waist-length hair, like a blond doll’s, and her shining blue eyes. Several other children had terrible deformities from polio. They all wore the same faded pajamas printed with animals, bound with cords like file folders.

  My parents’ arrival, one day before we left the hospital, in a milky morning that already foretold the change of seasons, in those days when I could not talk or play with anyone, was the onl
y real event. They abruptly appeared in the room, in windbreakers and arm in arm, young and dark-haired, almost as tall as the ceiling, and they fell upon me in a frightening display of love. In a few moments, I was surrounded by new toys with a strong smell of paint – a set of cardboard boxes with fairy-tale pictures, each smaller and smaller, fitting one in the next, other wooden blocks that made square pictures: turkey, pig, cow, and ones you could make castles with, and especially a white rag horse with glass eyes and a red lacquer saddle. This toy was so dear to me that even at fourteen I still had it, somewhere in the buffet, shaped like a kind of deformed worm, almost totally brown from dirt, marked all over with pen, with its eyes missing and cuts that revealed the fragile roughness of its harness. My parents did not stay long. After they promised to take me home the next day, “to a new house, bigger, you’ll see,” they left just as strange, just as altered. I realized then that their departure made no difference to me: I could have stayed in the hospital my entire life, watching the walls darken and brighten in the sun, melding into the stereoscopic field of my irises, or listening distractedly to the demented inflections of mineymoezish. And always whenever I would later abandon myself to the will of punctual, spherical worlds, the pearl-worlds that I strung, like vertebrae, upon the cord of my spinal marrow, I would stay there, metamorphosed, adapted to the texture of the air there, the flashes of the clouds there, until something from the outside world hurried my abortion through those successive abdomens, with other placental constellations, amniotic waters, dawns and gods … Once my parents were gone, I was left sitting on my bottom, on the carpet, building block towers and pyramids for the horse. A bit later, however, coming back from the potty, I found the tower I had worked so hard to balance until it was as tall as I was toppled and scattered, and the purple lacquer saddle torn from my horse’s body. Only then did I begin to cry, in despair, the way I should have cried when my parents were leaving. When the nurse came, the pious little girls were in their beds, playing dolls.