Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  “Her hands and her feet had nails of an intense, ultramarine blue, unreal and fluid like in a dream. And each one had an image in its depths, in relief, miniscule and yet still clear, like those photographs of famous monuments (or shameless women) in optical lockets. However far you were from the black princess, you saw perfectly the Giottoesque painting in her nails, and if you concentrated on a detail (the dentil molding on a wall, the Cybele of an edge, the finial on the tip of a yellow bell, the embroidery of flowers and lizards on a vestment) you saw just as clearly the details in the details, down to the thousandth level, until, delving into the whirlpool of her polished nails, you reached the subatomic world of quarks, charms, and scents … Scenes from the New Testament were painted on her fingernails, against a naïve background of medieval palaces and sycamores: the Holy Virgin asleep in her room of bare stone walls, smiling in a dream and covering her bare shoulder, while the archangel, standing beside her bed, a three-cupped lily between its fingers, is too shy to wake her; Jesus as a child whittling a wooden cross, while all the other goatherders make whistles; him again climbing for the first time (at about seven years old) into a mandorla that will raise him to the sky, to be presented to the angels; the adolescent Jesus in the wilderness, curled up on the sand, holding a snake’s triangular head and looking into its transparent eyes; Jesus and John, sitting on a bluff, watching the Jordan reflect the twilight in its waters; the daughter of Jairus, one day after she was awoken from the dead, braiding her hair at the mirror and singing a song without words; Peter, on Mount Tabor, squinting at the crystal spacecraft and wondering where he could cut enough branches for three shelters: one for Moses, another for Elijah, and another for Jesus; the adulteress, alone in the place to which she was condemned, trying to decipher what Jesus wrote in the sand, while a white drop of seed hangs between her legs; Jesus eating in Matthew’s house with the tax collectors and the sinners, who are astonished by the triangular radiation from the temples of the Nazarene; Dismas, his arms painfully crooked on the wood of the cross, his face green with suffering, still smiling at the Marys, kneeling before the three; and trillions of stars scattered over Jerusalem, each foretelling an incredible Salvation, unintelligible, unimaginable, but true …

  “In contrast, Cecilia’s toenails had illuminations from the old testament: Zipporah putting her son’s foreskin on her finger and saying proudly to the winged man, “Surely a bloody husband art thou to me!”; and the Angel of the Lord was by the threshing place of Araunah the Jebusite, arming himself with the devastating instrument and spreading plague over the people, from Dan to Beersheba; the head, legs, and hands of Isabella, in a pile of bloody tissue, and a dog with human eyes gnawing a finger with many rings; Maaseh, a sweet Philistine with silk eyelashes, embracing his wife for the last time and allowing his heart to be crushed for the Lord; Job, old and happy, fat, with his skin as pink as an infant’s, a ladybug on his finger just opening its wings to fly; a bride not even twelve years old, already decorated, holding her hand, in terror, over the place between her boyish thighs and thinking of the night to come; the Lord, on his sapphire throne over the cupola like a field of heaven, looking, with strange eyes of unearthly anatomy, over the arid landscape of Judea perishing below him; Ezekiel, in the valley of dry bones, in despair, gathering the wild lilies suddenly growing from the headbones and chestbones full of dust; Daniel, pulled from the lions’ den, still smelling days and days afterwards of the beasts’ testicles; the Day of Ire, descending unexpectedly, like a thief in the night, over the villages, vineyards and orchards, laying waste to all in an ambiguous glory …

  “The matron approached the nubile girl, took her hand with an unexpected delicacy and grace, and led her toward the mechanism on the edge of emptiness. She spread her across the narrow chassis and secured her wrists and ankles in cuffs. Crucified on an aluminum St. Andrew’s cross, Cecilia revealed her sex to our eyes like a black flower with crinkled petals, a feline sex, a sphinx’s vulva, unsuited for ordinary copulation. Slowly, with a sharp gesture of Melanie’s fingers, the hydraulic cylinders began to move, and the metal frame rose to vertical. Disturbingly beautiful, Cecilia smiled with the bright smile of African women, but also with something of a girl’s perversion, pleased to show everyone her secret flower. She leaned her head on one shoulder, and her eyes covered with a thin fog. Curled in its aquarium, the fetus suddenly opened its yellow eyes, and its barely sketched mouth began to speak unheard words, as it gaped like an exotic fish. The Albino, whose uniform had evaporated like gas into the air, slowly approached the operating table. His sex was erect and semitransparent. His testicles of filigreed ivory were visible through his scrotum like soft glass. We all imagined we were about to witness the ritual rape of a virgin by the horrifying cleric. We did not imagine, however, the unimaginable. And I cannot describe the indescribable. For hour after hour, the young woman’s body of flesh, blood, and nerves experienced the entire scope of human suffering and beyond. Happy were those pagan warriors fallen into the hands of their enemies, held in oubliettes for dozens of years and tortured daily under the senior’s eyes. Happy those who were burned at the stake, flayed alive, or devoured by cancer. But the girl’s screams somehow seemed to be screams of unbearable pleasure, and on her face her clenched lips and eyes revealed a devastating ecstasy. The only deed that words can describe, although itself appalling, seemed, in comparison with what had come before, to be a gesture of tenderness: with an expert flash of the blade, The Albino sliced open Cecilia’s stomach, without spilling a drop of blood, and removed her uterus, as clean as an anatomical specimen, watched over by the two ovaries like two spread wings at the ends of their tubes, between the fringes of soft skin, like two rhinestone mititei. Only then, as though the delicate organ held all her vitality, did her dark body die, soft and ashen, and rot beneath our eyes, until the bones scattered, yellow, over the floor. Only the radius of her left hand remained held in the metal cuff. Then those bones changed to dust, and the dust was absorbed into the glassy floor.

  “Monsieur Monsú held the butterfly uterus in the open palm of his right hand. Its skin fibers gently pulsed. In the end, it took flight, not through the mechanical beating of lepidoptera, but by undulations within the gelatinous medium, the way transparent beings on the bottom of the ocean proceed dreamlike through the abyss. Fluttering over the emptiness, the little life form turned toward the diamond cell in the center of lights. It touched it after eons of hypnotic travel. It curled up there, in the flashing box, took root in its crystal earth and unrolled a peritoneum crown. Its center continuously developed an ovum, filigreed, pearly, with constantly changing designs and mirific protuberances extended into the ionosphere. In the end, the uterus itself, with its tubes and contractions, was only an almost-unobserved detail of the great bead, of the egg with a quartz shell.

  “The egg appeared to be tattooed with a labyrinth of dully colored lines, which crossed each other and shifted, so that, at the beginning, nothing could be deciphered, aside from some illusory outlines, more guesses than anything, like looking in the filigreed dregs of coffee. As its volume increased and its surface widened, the strangest, most heteroclite designs began to spout from the tissue of lines. There was the face of a young man, with features in charcoal, his hair black vines curling along his ascetic cheeks. His severe, visionary eyes were slightly asymmetrical, the right inspired by a spark of spirit, while the left, tragic and matte like a covered mirror, had violet circles beneath. Below the fibrous threads of his moustache, his mouth could have been a woman’s, if its sensuality were not negated, dissolved, denatured, and reconverted by bitter folds at the corners. Every feature of this portrait was, if you looked closer, formed by other drawings, on a smaller scale, and those by others, all brilliantly clear, just when your eye touched them, so that you could dive endlessly into the spectacle of the world, deepening the visions within a single hair of an eyebrow, and you could explore skies with other stars, heavens, and gods within a pixel in the immensity of the ch
eek. It was All, and all ran in the heart of all, and the real hand and the possible drew each other, exchanging densities and destinies a billion times a second. It was the Mandylion, the Vera Icon, the image of the human face, acheiropoieta, the one we search for always, which we see in all the compositions of the world, because the world itself – for us, and gods, and Divinity – has a human face. From this, sunk in tragedy and the stench of the sulfur from Gomorrah, cultivating tens of thousands of horrible diseases in the furrows of our body, never being sure of tomorrow and writhing to breathe another moment, we yet smile, just as a two-month-old child will smile even at two eyes drawn on a white piece of paper …

  “Fra Armando’s brain, slithering with its spinal tail, shooting beams like a spacecraft, migrated over the billion heads of the crowd toward the great sphere that encompassed almost all the space in the middle of the disk where we stood. The egg rotated heavily around its vertical axis, constantly displaying other canals, dry seas, and continents, throwing off other garlands of fire and reabsorbing them in its paunch of albumen and yolk. The brain approached the sun like a lonely navigator, seeming to slide along a subliminal pleat, on a guide tube hidden in another dimension. There was a whisper, unheard but possible to feel with the entire body, denser than the organ that perceived it – that whisper from the middle of the night, to which you can only respond, suddenly awake and afraid, ‘Here I am, Lord.’ The solitary sperm slid along the beacon, along the whisper of billions of decibels. The golden male fluttered along the guide tube of the shock wave of billions of gigatones. The entire hall, and everyone inside, quaked in trepidation. The ovum whispered, it whispered a name. Quiet, monotonous, unhurried, powerful as a seraph, the face in the egg whispered a whisper, whispered a name. Its own name. ‘Here I am, Lord,’ responded the brain and the sperm, and the response – happy in terror, frightened in ecstasy – was not a sound, but the advance itself.

  “The tadpole, with its curved brow like a glass shell, finally stopped only a hand width from the enormous filigreed stomach. The hard membranes mirrored each other. Colored whirls appeared in the front-most points and encompassed, in ever larger circles, the trembling spheres. A dialogue was improvised, the channels and frequencies aligned, passwords exchanged, thousands of keys went into thousands of locks of air and void. They turned, raised pinions and cams, and released chemical barriers. And suddenly not the skin, but the space itself between them opened like a gate, suddenly there was no space between the membranes, and the sperm and the ovum were one, the brain and the sex were one, space and time were one.

  “And space/time/brain/sex began to rumble. There were monstrosities. There were miracles. A mathematics of the bordello was invented, a sublime defecation, a conceptual vomiting, an angelic retching, a real dream, a dead life. There were hoots and howls, but were they laughter or crying? There was a revelation, but was it from a prophet or a madman? It was everything, but it looked like nothing … We stood stockstill and watched that agony, an agony not of death, but of creation, a sob, not of birth, but of the final swoon. We saw sounds of catastrophe and waste-laying, we heard colors of fire and ice. The explosion/implosion smelled like roughness. Atoms were solar systems and constellations were pheromones. Oh infernal paradise, oh darkened light!

  “A cause/effect germinated in the middle of the edge of this nymphal melody. It flattened the flesh/air, it quieted its transparent opacities. It organized the future/past, it listened to words/things. From the winds of karma, from the frightening bardo of the dust of twilight, a child would come into being. It would be because it already was, already it saw its parents copulating like two locusts, already the whirlpool of space/time/brain/sex drew, with its blood-dipped finger, a Caudine fork, an Arc de Triumph. Two chromosomal sets would fuse, yes and no would wed in maybe, and then the egg, already past the barrier of being, would begin its gigantic conclusion, turning the ever more complicated pages of life, complicated not by what the text said, but by the structure of the pages themselves, as though the first would be a point, the second a line, the third a surface, the fourth a volume, the fifth a Möbius strip, the sixth a nest for the Tomistic swallow, and so on and so on, until the billionth page, where Divinity is raised to the power of Divinity. Mitosis and meiosis, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, morula, blastula, gastrula, and the three embryonic wrappings glittering like soft glass while they wrinkle, shape, reabsorb, form tubes and buds, separate at catastrophic points, meet again to sketch faces and limbs, organs and skins, systems and mechanisms. Fish, reptile, amphibian, mammal, the fourth week, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh. The sixth month, the seventh, the turn in the eighth. Floating on a lotus flower, in the middle of black waters, eyelids closed and face smiling – enormous eyelids without lashes, under which the ocular protuberances slide as quietly as porpoises. The skin of pearl, shining in wisdom.

  “It heralds the Gospel for all. There is no other annunciation than a person’s birth. And every birth creates a religion, it is an annunciation. And religion itself has no other meaning than Birth. It shows us the Way, it reveals the Steps to us. It preaches Happiness. Already our eyes, fallen out of their sockets from such blinding blinding, will see the embryo, the child, wonder, ransom. Black and white, Asian, women, men, and children, we wait, on the edge of the abyss, rejoicing. We would take light from light and never die again …

  “Then came the infinitesimal catastrophe. As before, at the beginning of the beginning, an elusive asymmetry within the initial conditions made the primordial force cleave in half, then into four parts, and then the infinitely hot and dense point exploded into the fireworks of the world, and the way a tremor of a butterfly’s wing on a guava leaf in the Antilles unleashes a tornado in Colorado, and the way you don’t know where the Spirit comes from or where it goes – in the middle of the middle of the scented zygote, in the chromozoidal ball of seraphim snakes, a whirl arises, a probabilistic wind, more limited than the space of a molecule. One letter inverts in an orthography, and something glides in the oily stereochemistry of that substance. The gaze of one of us (a skeletal woman with a number tattooed on her forearm? a hydrocephalic with bulging eyes?) might have been enough for the miniscule tragedy, because observation always alters the experiment. Or maybe Evil itself, as undefined and intangible as gravity, passed a turbulent finger into the heart of the god in genesis, the same finger that stirs the worlds. The same way, a quinine camellia sprouted in the middle of our rejoicing.

  “The egg now folded a second center around the allogenic information, and a membrane fogged over like a cartilage curtain between itself and itself, like a mirror where the self can see itself, identical and yet completely different, because the right of one is the left of the other, and the second, for the first, is a monster, because its heart is on the right and it speaks with the right hemisphere of its brain, and feels pity with the left half. White and black are not more different from each other, or more alien. Our world became schizoid, because what was born in fact was Duplication, or Rupture – the surface of the mirror between two dreaming embryos, face to face, their enormous vaulted foreheads almost touching, looking at each other with smoky eyes. They would come into the world as monozygotic twins, and what would be born was Estrangement itself. We saw the apocalypse through the lenses of beads of tears. What was happening? Which one was our god? What would become of the world of this illegible book, this book?

  “And then, Maria, while we contemplated the double proliferation of the cells (two morulas, blastulas, gastrulas, separated, or united, by that mirroring skin), we were torn apart by a devastating flash of lightning. The column of fire reappeared and moved among us, making us one with the disk’s shining floor, integrating us into it, digitizing our blood and our tendons and our nerves, transforming them into memory, pure memory, holographic, indestructible. I was home again, I was in Akasia, the universal memory that sees all, that knows and understands and feels compassion. The mother-memory that protects, that caresses. And th
e blinding, blinding disk broke from its foundation with the crack of the ruination of worlds, levitated toward the vaulted ceiling of the hall, shattered into thousands of polygonal fragments and splinters, and, Maria, it was given to our eyes, spread now evenly over all the surface of the disk, to see what you cannot, what you should never see, what never can be said. And the disk rotated around its axis, faster and faster, until a sphere of glory appeared, shimmering in billions of colors, with a living pool of light in the center. And the sphere set upon the crown of His head, over the black vines of hair, illuminating His sad, brown eyes. For it was He, in a dense world, in a dense light, along whose spinal cord, through transparent flesh, six chakras and six carnivorous flowers opened.

  “The seventh chakra, Sahasrara, the diamond sphere, glowed on his crown.”

  “Gripping, impassioned, unexpected …”

  Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Cărtărescu’s themes are immense … They reveal to us a secret Bucharest, folded into underground passages,… which never stops calling to us.”

  Le Monde

  “Cărtărescu’s phantasmagorical world is similar to Dalí’s dreamscapes.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “A writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavi?, to mention just a few.”