Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  On one of the evenings, when the intensive care ward looked at itself for a few minutes, I suddenly felt that I was looking. I sat up, fresh and nonchalant, without any crack in my consciousness, perfectly aware of what had happened and where I was. I removed the transparent tube from my nose by myself, slowly, like an exotic parasite, and then I touched my face. Trying to smile, I noted – as I had already guessed – the elasticity and docility of my muscles that raised the corners of my mouth. I had made great progress. I could blink my left eye – true, more slowly than the right, and not all the way – and I could raise my eyebrows. For a few months, my smile would stay crooked, and my face would always have a gentle asymmetry. The world of my left eye, withered from so much privation and humidity, would be crepuscular and dark, with strange olive tones, but, combined with the radiant colors from the right, it would not bother me too much. On the contrary, this way my world has a special topography, which I didn’t notice before the illness, and which looks like the world in a dream, when every shape is porously illuminated by emotion.

  Doctor Zlătescu, who was in charge of our ward, seemed to have expected I would come back to life. I hadn’t been myself more than an hour yet when she came toward my bed like a Fury, red with indignation, with her teeth clenched. She called me everything, stupid suicide, senseless, idiot kid. She asked me rhetorically (since she was too angry to listen to anyone) what had been in my sick head when I did that. Didn’t I realize I could have died, for Christ’s sake? Didn’t I think about my parents? And how bad would she look, she who was responsible for me as long as I was in the hospital? I listened, scared, embarrassed by the indecent sounds she made in the eternal twilight of the basement. I wouldn’t have known how to respond, anyway. After a little while she calmed down, spent, and sat on the edge of my bed, and after a long silence, she looked at me and smiled. Like a newborn who sees a smiling mask, I raised, reflexively, the corners of my mouth. “You’re going the right way, băbuţo,” she told me, mussed my hair a bit and left. I would see Doctor Zlătescu again after seven or eight years, one sunny day, downtown on Magheru Boulevard. I was with a friend from college and we were gossiping about the Folklore assistant when I saw her: even in the middle of summer when the asphalt melted under our feet, she was wearing a grotesque wool hat, with vines of her dandruffy hair coming out in all directions. On the breast of her spandex, fluorescent-green dress, she wore scout badges and medals. Yellow unit commander ribbons emerged from a purse of ripped white rubber-cotton that she’d found in some trash pile. Her face was a terrible mask of insanity. She talked incessantly, pointing at a parking sign … I was shaken for the rest of the day. That evening, I sat at the window for hours, in the twilight yellow like a sodium flame, repeating the motto of my life: “God, what is happening? What the hell is happening?” to which the city responded with murmurs and specters.

  Mamma came every day to sob at my bed, to brush back my sweat from my brow and to straighten the bag of glucose on the stand. She also could not understand what had made me run hundreds of volts through my fragile skull, peeling off layers and layers of old calcium. When they moved me again to the neurology ward, she came back to life, especially when I could smile without effort. She kept trying to hide her hands, stiff and blackened like an auto mechanic’s, which I had seen right away, but I hadn’t wanted to say anything about their terrible state. She said she had cleaned the sink or undone the trap underneath, she wasn’t sure … Only when I went home again, after about ten days (during which time they did several EEGs without finding anything), I found out what had happened: my mother had argued horribly with my dad, and she was trying desperately to find a job and make a little money, so that he didn’t have to take care of her, a fact that he constantly threw in her face. Some newspaper ad had unleashed this mess. One day she came home with a spool of steel wire and a kind of bizarre drill, with a vise attached – it turned out to be a spring-turning machine. “Ma’am, this work isn’t for you,” the metal worker had said humbly at the shop that placed the ad, but my mother insisted, and now she was trying to work at home, in the kitchen, tripping over spirals of blackened wire, moaning and whining about her hands, while the springs came out crooked and twisted, or they sprang back, recalcitrant, smacking her fingers and scraping the backs of her hands. When she started it up, the drill screamed loud enough to make the whole block jump to its feet. In a kind of martyrdom mixed with pain and hate, and the desire to victimize the entire world, my mother kept at this dumb idea for a few months, and she never made even one spring right. Her hair smelled like hot iron, and her hands were one big wound, but she went back to her torture, night after night, with a crazed blindness, refusing to listen to anyone, her eyes fixed and red, and when I held her hands and tried to talk to her rationally, she writhed and shouted like she was out of her mind: “Leave me alone! Stay out of it, snotface! Leave me alone!” This was her plan to punish my father.

  It had been a hard winter. The mounds of brown snow lining Ştefan cel Mare were taller than a person. The plows, lined up one after another, were still parked along the sidewalk, and their drivers, in coveralls and fur hats, stood in a circle for a little ţuica. In the morning, my windows were frozen everywhere. In the bottom part, the frost was completely dull and twisted in rhythms of Art Nouveau, while a hand’s width from the top, the ice became translucent, wet, and wavy, and through it, standing on the bedstead, I liked to look at the snowy city. The air was so milky then, and the fog was so compact, that the rapidly falling flakes were barely visible. Bucharest looked like a child’s drawing, all roofs buried in snow and smoking chimneys. The roads, in spite of the plows and salt, were covered again immediately with new immaculate layers, which then dirtied into puddles of milky coffee by twilight. And twilight came quickly, at four in the afternoon, when the streetlights came on, and the snow-filled sky darkened into rose and remained red all night. I spent countless nights at that window, watching how it snowed furiously in the neon lights, and counting cars and trams … Once, in a winter that I cannot place (in childhood? in a dream? in another life?), something disturbing and charming happened. Only a splinter of it remains in my mind, flashing now and then without hope of elucidation: the painful violet of the imagination … a snow-covered hill … a green window … Nothing more, but in this nothing was a tangle of beings and inexpressible states, a kind of a prophecy, an aura, a happiness with a tight heart …

  In spring, late in April, at night, I had the first “dream” with that terrible, terrible sound, amplified into a flame. In the golden, transparent air of my waking mind, or my ultra-waking mind, open like a triumphant crown in my sleeping body, a spiral appeared in my head. A long and fine arc, made up of smaller spirals, each twisting in turn, rotated spiral after spiral, making another one, hundreds of times larger, which rotated in turn around another axis, making close, flexible circles. From the new tube another formed, and from this one another, endlessly upwards and downwards, so that you could climb up and down from spiral to spiral, from one existential level to another, without limits, you could encompass the entire spiral simultaneously in each of its spirals, you could simultaneously become the master of the universe and the nothing of nothingness … The grandeur of the embossed tubes that began at the third and fourth level up could barely be imagined, and the others grew exponentially, so much that they broke the crystal safe of any mind, escaping into obliteration and insanity. And still I followed them, while the sound of gold and the void grew with each new level, until the spirals and the sound were one, and my face shattered like a handful of dust in the breath of God. Then I screamed, carbonized by beatitude and torture, in phrases I no longer knew, although I could touch them like the hard blades of knives. After a time without succession, my being acquired an asymmetry, the volume of a non-spatial void and the absence of light. Just as abyssal caves swab the dark and cold with their bioelectric train, I felt a Being approach – a Being made of cosmoses. Every cosmos had inhabited worlds, and every one
of those worlds had a multitude of inhabitants. Their material was fire, and their thoughts sparked like supernovas. I shouted toward that Being, and it responded.

  The center of the dream, the gate, the vulva, can no longer be described. I woke up in another dream, in a foggy levitation, wandering through the well-known rooms of our apartment. At five in the morning, when the sun was a scarlet ball over the Dâmboviţa Mill and my sweaty parents were sleeping under disordered sheets, I felt a wave of love for my mother, for the closeness of her shape completely wrapped in a sheet, like a mummy. Then I went back to my own bed in the room above the street, a mechanical movement, without thought … I woke up disoriented. I remember the trip to the bathroom, my small pointless actions, and shaking all over, like a cornered animal … It would all repeat dozens of times, almost identically, up to today (yes, almost up to today), for fourteen years. And each time after that, sometimes for a week, I dropped everything, sinking completely into my piercing sense of predestination. I was called toward something, there were signs, coincidences multiplied, and in my mind there were imperious and strange images, but I was to be held a bit longer in the antechamber of understanding. I would have preferred eternal torture, if torture was predestined. My past was the key, the disturbing signs seemed to be legible, I had to begin the great reading, but no shining star offered me any epiphany of understanding. I didn’t know whether the lines of my life (voices and caresses, clouds and cities, laughter and the earth full of worms) should be read vertically or horizontally, from the left or the right, of if I should go back and forth in the boustrophedon of my childhood. I didn’t know if the writing was pictographic, phonetic or if it was a writing at all. Illustrations and illuminations, vignettes and friezes with labyrinths of reeds decorated the old book of hours, its pages made of skin. In the filigree of every page, I could see a braid of blue and red veins, beating with a single pulse, irrigating the paragraphs. Arborescent nerves made every letter as sensitive as a tooth. Mistakes were attacked with antibodies of lymph. The parchment was alive, like skin just flayed from a martyr, and it smelled of ink and blood. What precisely was written on my skin, or what was tattooed there, between my nipples, was completely obscure to me. Thinking and fretting didn’t help, just as good eyesight doesn’t help an illiterate. After weeks of helpless reverie, I abandoned the search and returned to my sorry everyday life.

  “ ‘QUILIBREX!’ shouted Fra Armando down the underground corridor, through walls of pale-shining quartz flowers, and the guardian, completely covered in a rubber hazmat suit with a gas mask on his face, let us pass, after he pressed into each of our palms a glass cylinder, thick and warm, pointed at the tip, which he pulled like expensive candies, from a white cardboard box. I put my vial into my pants pocket and forgot about it for a long time. While we were walking, always in descent, along the more and more irregular path, crossing pitch-black lakes, staying away from the wheeling depigmented bats, whose ramifying veins were visible through their skin, pinched on the shoulders by crustaceans on the ceiling with comically long antennae, leaving behind formations of karst so beautiful your heart would stop, we watched the hierophants of the abyss out of the corners of our eyes. The priest was always ahead of us, lighting our way with a magnesium torch. I could not see his albino ally, unless I craned my neck and looked far behind us, which seemed to be somehow unfitting or prohibited, since Monsieur Monsú, whenever I turned my gaze, gestured angrily for me to look forward. Or maybe he only wanted me to pay attention to the ever more frequent fissures in the swampy floor: sinkholes whose bottoms you could not see, emanating a green tumescence. The Albino, with his now-dead raspberry bead floating over his face like a miniscule satellite shadowing a milky planet, was the last in the group. On his head and shoulders, the transparent crustaceans teemed in thousands, surrounding him, like a speleological god, with millions of rays of continuously moving antennae. His eyes, in daylight as pale as a snake’s, were now only two slightly bellied ovals, a statue’s eyes, with no trace of irises or pupils. We walked between these two as black people, more enslaved, humiliated, powerless and fascinated than any one of our people ever was. Hamites, Cushites, Ethiopians, and Zombies. Chained, tortured, and whipped by white hands like the sails of a windmill, leaving the Ivory Coast on reeking galleons. Filling the mines, bordellos, and common graves in fifty kingdoms. And we were still ourselves kings, suzerains of our teeth, whiter than the white man’s bones, masters of the confederacy of our pigment, masters of the totems between our legs … In the strange mine of our souls, however, we were not masters of anything. Melanie’s sweat smelled like a fox’s underarms, coming from the entire volume of her hippo-like rump, which chafed against the walls, breaking the mine-flowers’ fragile towers. She pulled Cecilia by the hand. Cecilia’s fantastical make up came even more to life in the aquarium-light of the torches. The constellations of gold on her eyelids reflected on the walls and ceilings like in a planetarium. ‘Look, the cosmos surrounds us!’ whispered Fra Armando, smiling. I followed him closely, watching how two tiny lines of blood spouted from the places where the thin tubes of his miter broke into his skull, behind his ears, to penetrate his brain with stereotactic precision. His blood had already soaked the collar of his vestments, and like an embroidery thread, it braided itself into the threads of gold, making angels and chrysanthemums.

  “The path descended, and it couldn’t do otherwise, because the fibers of space themselves went down, as though deformed by a revolting, difficult suffering. The transparent insects, with thousands of glassy anatomical details under the shells of their teguments, became larger and more aggressive. With a strange movement of their legs, the spiders spat jets of saliva at us, trying to pull us into the spools of their sparkling webs, where you could see the dried skeletons of bats, axolotls, and children. The mineral mosaics on the walls seemed to continuously change their colors, and bizarre icons appeared in unexpected combinations of marble, pyrite, porphyry, and quartz. Vasilica, I saw Saint George across an entire wall, wearing a purple mantle, as we know him, but thrown from his horse, with a yellow fear in his eyes and holding up his right hand in defense, pierced by the lance of the bile-green dragon, which triumphantly, with fire pouring from his nostrils, spread his wings over the world. I saw a woman nailed to a cross with spikes of zirconium nails, and three men in black garments crying at the foot of the cross and kissing her last curls of hair, red as copper wire. And I saw a man with wonderful brown eyes, holding a girl on his lap who was only a few years old, naked and plump, giving a blessing with two fingers. All of these ghosts merged one into the other like the waters of a cotton vestment …

  “After centuries of walking through the bowels of night, lapping at the sweet mirrors of ice, clambering over stalagmites the size of elephants, and shaking on rope bridges thrown over crevasses, we found ourselves advancing through flesh. We didn’t realize when, slowly, softly, during the course of our many backsteps and quick leaps ahead, the walls of the tunnel became warm, wet, and pulsing, so that it seemed like we were walking through an enormous vein. We stepped into ever more elastic tissue; and in the thick, hyaline walls, we saw countless miniscule cells with violet nuclei. The transparent insects were still there, but they didn’t swarm. They adhered to the walls, their bellies beating with pleasure. Their long, hard proboscides were stuck in the epithelium of the grotto, and they sucked a black blood, whose course into their stomachs was easily visible through their colorless bodies. We crushed hundreds of them in our steady, endless descent. With time, the flesh conduit narrowed so much that we could barely make headway. The walls began to stick together, a cavity had to be made, and Fra Armando forced our way by pushing aside the hot muscles, hidden under a pearly mucous. It was like he was swimming through ambiguously scented female flesh, as wrinkled and snotty as the foot of a snail. And unexpectedly, at the end of the last push, the Light appeared.”

  Cedric trembled inside and fell quiet for a few moments. The night was high, and the tiny, frozen stars of
winter were stuck like needles over Tântava. But no fiber of crystalline night air came in through the small-paned windows of the old house. The sisters listened to the story with their hands over their mouths and their pupils so dilated that it seemed like their little cups of ţuica had been sprinkled, the way their grandparents had done, with the fatidic gypsy seeds, to engender (through what chemical mutation of this venomous cure?) not a bestial desire to couple, but a longing for fiction. The mirror, set obliquely under the beams, beside the bunch of dried basil, doubled the lamp on the wall in its crooked waters, surrounded with sharp, prismatic rays, so weak that just one step away from its flame the light became brown as dirt. The only thing that the mirror could not double was the smell of sheep and holiness. The smell emanated, like another type of light, from the blankets on the bed with wooden stake legs, the short, three-legged chairs, the round table where bits of mămăligă remained, and the yellowed pictures in crushed-glass frames on the walls. Maria looked, her mind wandering, at the washcloths on the walls: she had woven some of them herself, before the war. Underneath, the cheap paper icons, lithographs in sepia and magenta, were now mandalas charged with power. They clinked the ţuica cups again, and they broke open more nuts … Years after this, Mircea would also climb up the hall ladder into the attic to examine the black roof rafters and the strange compartments in the attic floor, one of which was full of crunchy nuts. A slanted pylon of daylight came down, while the rest was dark. In one corner, between two girders, there always shone the wide wheel of the spider, with the fat insect right in the center, motionless, wearing its red cross on the back of its stomach. The boy bombarded it with kernels of corn, but the horrible creature did not deign to move, pretending not to notice the holes that gaped, ever wider, in its web. It only adjusted its legs slightly when it was directly hit, but after a moment it was still again, as though its obese stomach were terribly difficult to move. The indifference and power of the spider did not fit its size – they were those of a bison, or a hippopotamus. When Mircea poked it with a stick, the arachnid fought back, and it would not flee until the last moment, slinging from thread to thread and then running over the dirt of the floor so quickly that it scared the boy, and he dropped the stick and never again touched the attic hatch. He had no doubt that the spider would get him, that it would crawl up his pants leg, pull itself under his shirt, along his spine, under his shirt, and stick its venomous canines into the back of his neck. The next day, peeking up the ladder again, pale and very cautious, he calmed down. The beast was not going to stalk him and jump on his face from some secret spot – it had repaired the torn wheel and sat in the center again, heavy as a ball bearing, puffed up, emanating power and cold …