Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  To conceive of myself at different ages, with so many previous lives completed, is like talking about a long, uninterrupted line of dead bodies, a tunnel of bodies dying one into the next. A moment ago, the body who was here writing the words “dying one into the next,” with his face reflected in the dark pool of a coffee cup, fell off his stool. His skin crumbled away revealing the bones of his face, and his eyes rolled out, weeping black blood. A moment from now, the one who will write “who will write” will be the next to fall into the dust of the one before. How can you enter this mausoleum? And why would you? And what mask of tiffany, what surgical glove, will protect you from the infection emanating from memory?

  Years later, while reading poetry or listening to music, I would feel ecstasy, the abrupt and focused clot in the brain, the sudden surge of a volatile and vesicant liquid, the windowpane suddenly opening, not onto anything outside myself but into someplace surrounded by brains, something profound and unbearable, a welling-up of beatitude. I had access, I had gained access to the forbidden room, through poetry or music (or a single thought, or an image that appeared in my mind, or – much later, coming home from high school by myself, stomping in puddles along the streetcar tracks – a window glint, the scent of a woman). I entered the epithalamium, I steeped myself in the amygdalae, I curled up in the abstract extension of the gold ring in the center of the mind. The revelation was like a cry of silent happiness. It was nothing like an orgasm except in epileptic brutality, but it expressed tranquility, love, submission, surrender, and adoration. These were breakthroughs, ruptures leading to the cistern of living light from the depths of the depths of our being, rendings swirling in the interior limit of thought, turning it into a starry heaven, since we all have this starry heaven in the skull and, over it, our consciousness. Often, though, this interior ejaculation would not reach its consummation but stop in the antechamber, and the antechambers of antechambers, where it stirred flickering images that were snuffed out in a second, leaving behind regret and nostalgia that would follow me for the rest of the day. Poems, these illumination machines, debauched me. I used them like drugs, until it was impossible for me to live without them. I’d started, sometime before, to write poems too. Among so many graceful lines, enchanted and aggressive, I would find myself stringing together, for no reason, passages of nonsense that seemed dictated by some other being. When I re-read them, they terrified me like a prophecy come true. In these I spoke about my mother, God, childhood, just as if, in the course of a conversation over a beer, I had suddenly started to speak in tongues, with the thin voice of a child, a castrato, or an angel. My mother would appear in my poems walking down Ştefan cel Mare, taller than the apartment buildings, kicking over the trucks and streetcars, crushing the sheet-metal kiosks beneath her enormous heels, sweeping up passersby in her cheap skirts. She would stop in front of the triple window of my room, crouch down and look inside. Her enormous blue eye and frowning brow filled the window, and filled me with terror. Then she would stand and set off westward, her wiry, phosphorescent hair destroying postal airplanes and satellites in the sky full of blood … What was going on with this mythologizing of my mother? Nothing had ever made me feel close to her, nothing in her interested me. She was the woman who washed my clothes, fried potatoes for me, and made me go to my university classes even when I wanted to skip. She was Mamma, a neutral being who looked neutral, who lived a modest life full of chores, and who lived in our house, where I was always a stranger. What accounted for this dearth of feeling in our family? My father was always traveling, and when he came home, red-faced, stinking of sweat, he would tie his hair, thick as a horse’s tail, on top of his head with pantyhose, with the top sagging open, a dark foot hanging between his shoulder blades. My mother would make him dinner and watch television with him, pointing out the cute folk music singers or variety show actors, gossiping about them endlessly. I’d eat quickly and retreat to the room facing the street (the other two rooms gave onto the back of the building, toward the melancholy red-brick Dîmboviţa flour mill) to watch the polyhedral drone of Bucharest in the window, or to write disconnected poems in graph paper notebooks, or to curl up under the blanket, pulling it over my head as though I could not stand the humiliation and shame of being an adolescent … We were, my family, three insects, each only interested in our own chemical trails, occasionally touching antennae and moving on. “How did you do at school today?” “Fine.” “Your Dinamo got creamed, on their own turf.” “So what, I’m doing okay with Polytech.” And then into the shell, to write more lines from nowhere:

  mother, the power of dreams was your gift to me

  I would spend nights entire with you eye to eye

  and hand in hand I would believe I was beginning to know.

  and your heart would beat again for both of us

  and between our crania translucent as the shells of shrimp

  an imaginary umbilical cord would emerge

  and hypnosis and levitation and telepathy and love

  would be the different colors of the flowers in our arms.

  together

  we would play an eternal game of cards with two sides:

  life, death

  while the clouds would flash in the fall of day, far off.

  I FOUND myself looking through my family’s small archive, housed in an old purse my mother had since before she was married, a shoulder bag, garnet-colored, its imitation leather almost completely worn through. It was lined with a cheap silk, somewhat stained. In the bag’s pocket, I found two watches, so old they had a blackish salt on their faces, and the backs of their cases were tarnished green. The watch-bands had been lost long ago. Aside from the watches, there were some fuses, a vacuum tube from an old radio, and other little things I had played with as a child. Folded inside a yellowed piece of paper were two braids of blond-gray hair, tied with elastics – my own hair, from when my family, as Mamma told me the story, would put me in dresses and aprons and call me (they and all our neighbors) Mircica. The hair was soft and always gave me a chill, because it was so tangible, it was like that three-year-old boy had lived a life parallel to mine, like he might come through the door at any moment. At the bottom of the bag there were documents and receipts, rental contracts, warranties, stamped and embossed, and also yellow, sharp-smelling old pills from old doctors, faded pictures with zigzagged and torn edges, with dates and short descriptions in permanent marker, written in an awkward and misshapen hand, coins no longer used, a small baptismal cross, a white flower from somebody’s wedding … I poured the bag onto my bed and went through the contents, without knowing what I wanted to find. I came across rolls of film, developed and wrapped in paper. I held them up against the light to see scenes of family, framed the long way or the short, everyone with black faces and white hair, white suits and black shirts, black dresses with white flowers and white dresses with black flowers. The three or so pictures from when I was small were well known: the one in a yard, near Silistra, in a little knit-cotton suit and boots, with curls and cowlicks, with one hand on a globe pedestal and the other moving toward my eyes. I was eighteen months old and sniffling. You could see the wall of a house from the edge of town, with geraniums in the window, and the yard paved with gravel. Then, the picture of me on a motorcycle with a sidecar, at a fair – me chunky and scared, in short sleeves – next to a thread-worn stuffed bear, not much taller than I was. In this last one, however, no one was sure it was me. It might as well have been my cousin, Marian, my aunt Sica’s kid. The image, a bit small, had faded into a dirty sepia. Three more pictures, from times immemorial, were mixed in with documents, discharge papers, and medals with chipped enamel. There was the typical picture of my parents, retouched so often that it was hard to say what the couple actually looked like: him with hair as black as an ink stain, slicked back, with an expression so stern you’d think he was facing a firing squad, wearing a black wool suit that seemed like part of the background, and her in a wedding gown, with an unrecognizable fac
e (it could be anyone from the movies of the time), and on one side, holding the monstrous wedding candles, an unnaturally fat bridesmaid, her legs touched by elephantiasis, and a bald groomsman with a mustache like Groucho Marx. The second photo was, actually, the first chronologically. It was my mother and father in the spa town where they met. Here, she is beautiful, with high cheekbones, chestnut hair in curls, shining eyes: a young worker who moved to the city with no future plans. He is almost a boy, not much more than twenty, and he looks like me. He’s wearing sweats and military boots. It is snowing lightly on their bare heads, while they lean against the railing of a bridge. Two people cross the bridge, wearing berets. It’s 1955, and the winter is much gentler than the one before. Some wandering photographer, maybe a former factory owner, or perhaps he had been a photographer under the previous regime too, shivered on the bridge, waiting for customers, and my parents – who at the time just barely belonged to each other – let themselves be immortalized, out of timidity, in the sad splendor of their youth. The last picture was carefully cut in half, not with scissors, but by folding it over and over. The film coating had cracked first, so the porous paper could be torn relatively accurately. What was left was an image of my father holding me in his arms, around when I was two and wore the famous blond braids. Still, I’m not wearing a dress but a pair of flowery “Spielhosen.” My dad is smiling, square-jawed, with penetrating eyes, down the camera lens, while I am laughing at someone to my left, in the missing part of the picture. You can just see a woman’s bare elbow.

  The inside of the handbag, where I had looked before, but not with the interest I now had, smelled like the watches’ old copper and tarnish. The last thing I saw, because they were well hidden in the bag’s dusty folds, were my mother’s dentures, which she never used and hid there like they were shameful, nothing to talk about. When I first found them, I felt the same nausea and discomfort that I’d felt once before, in the depths of my childhood. It happened during the first year that I could cross the street by myself – for some bread, an issue of The Reckless Club, or to get my dad some cigarettes. In the silent summer evenings, I would reach a building that is not there anymore, go into the tobacco store, and look with trepidation at the cashier, a heavily made-up and fat woman with pink hair, surrounded by magazines and newspapers. Outside it was getting darker, and only here, in the little room with a window, was the light intense and still. I looked through the glass counter at all the packs of cigarettes, pipe tobacco, pistol-shaped tin lighters, and pocket knives that looked like lead fish … Next to them were other little trinkets. To me, the most beautiful things were the boxes of lacquered cardboard, with pictures of blue and gold tropical butterflies, and on the right a sticker where something was written in black ink. The word was long and fascinating: prophylactic. What could it have inside? I would often sit in the silence of my room, fidgeting with a toy, a tin laurel tree with a plastic fairy coming out, and wondering what strange, exotic plaything could be inside the butterfly box. Sometimes I imagined it could be in fact a butterfly, with a body like a bow string and wings of the same crinkly paper as fancy candy wrappers. Or a scented, chewy gum, with a little red stone set in the gelatinous middle.

  My plan was to wait until the next time my parents and I walked to the Volga Theater to see a movie, and ask them to buy me a prophylactic. It was only three lei. If it came to it, I could get the money myself, from around the house, in five, ten or fifteen bani coins, until I had enough. I started getting the money together, and I imagined the pink-haired cashier would give me a maternal smile and put the box I wanted in my hand (I even knew which one I wanted: the one in the case, where the butterfly fluttered against a bright green background) … One evening on the way to the theater, I saw some Chinese boxes in another tobacco store, and I got up the courage to ask: “Daddy, what’s a prophylactic?” My father frowned and said harshly, “You couldn’t think of anything better to ask?” I was walking between my mother and my father with quick steps, and they went quiet for a few minutes, trading glances. I knew from my father’s tone that I had hit one of those closed doors, those places that your parents, however much they love you, will never let you enter. I could feel their breathing, their mysterious, adult lives, those incomprehensible prohibitions regarding the birth of children and the small and underdeveloped members between the legs and the way Mamma was tumbled onto the bed by my dad in the bedroom, when she cried out and I tried to save her, pounding the spine of a prickly and bestial man. After the unfortunate question, I felt a kind of horror, a feeling I re-encountered when I opened the yellowed packet that held my mother’s dentures. They were upper teeth, from the front, dirty-white with a little blue, made of cheap plastic, stuck into artificial gums. The gums were a color of red that would never be found in the membrane of an actual mouth. They had a special shade, as though their plastic had come from other dentures, old ones melted down and reused: a purple, a barely breathing mauve in the dominant red. A few wire stubs, poking out here and there, added to the fascinating repulsion I felt toward the object in my hand.

  I had bad teeth from my mother, prone to cavities and rotting, and chipping. While chewing, I would sometimes feel, on my tongue, an unmistakable piece of molar: shiny as a mirror on one side, rough and hard on the other. From her I had unimaginable toothaches that would make me run through the house, knocking chairs over and pulling on the drapes. But I could tell that it wasn’t dread of my own teeth’s foreseeable future that disturbed me when I saw the hideous curve of those gums. It was their color. There was something in particular about that tinge that reminded me of something I had seen before, something I had once known, but could not bring back to mind. For a few days, I carried my mother’s gums and teeth in my pocket everywhere I walked. I fiddled with them obsessively on my route past Cantemir High on Toamnei Street and Profetului Street, I went down Galaţi in the roar of tram number five, I wandered through ruins around Lizeanu. Twilight came, and the dusty snow on the sidewalks timidly reflected the pink sky. An old woman at a window sucked spasmodically at a child’s candy ring. I saw a cat with eyes that I would know later from Gina. A woman stopped, looked around, and hiked up her stockings, pinching them through her parka and skirt. I was waiting, as I wandered among stores and children’s carts, for the moment when the twilight would turn exactly the same color as my mother’s gums, and suddenly it did. I was on Domniţa Ruxandra Street, where a small piaţa opened, dreamlike, lined with courtyards with colored globes on trellises, and there was an apartment block, almost alive, yellow and thin as a scalpel, with a vertical strip of matte glass over the entrance. The glass glowed in the twilight, and its flame inverted the branching art nouveau ironwork, black and warm as night. The snow lit the piaţa strangely with a white light from below, as though from underground, melting quickly in the morbid rose of nightfall. The silent block made me feel shaken and faint, like a blade plunged into asphalt and broken off. I stood in the middle of the piaţa, like a statue of a sad hero, and from my pocket I took the paper thin with age and unwrapped the hideous object. I raised the dentures over my head, and the teeth began to glitter, yellow like a salt flame, while the gums disappeared, melting into the matching color of evening.

  “Ah, Mamma,” I whispered in the crazed silence. I stared at the dentures for a few more minutes in the darkening light, until the dusk turned as scarlet as blood in veins, and the dental appliance began to glow with an interior light, as though a gentle fluorescent gas had filled the curved rubber gums. And then my mother formed, like a phantom, around her dentures. First there was her skeleton, as transparent as bloodworms or a green x-ray, velvet and delicate. Then her skull with the wide, dark stains of her eyes and the small stains of her sinuses, her thoracic cavity, the translucent butterfly of the iliac crest, the gelatinous tubes of her hands, feet, toes, and fingers. Over them, like a light snow, like the veiled fins of an exotic fish, grew my mother’s spectral flesh, a large naked woman with sagging breasts, yet beautiful and young like
in photos, with her liquid hair dissolving into the night. She turned toward the livid block, and I held my hand over her lips, as though to stop her from saying something, or from singing. The crown of my head barely reached her nipples. Together, in the descending darkness, we formed an enigmatic statue, holding still for no one. I came back to myself with the dentures in my hand and a sense of frustration, the feeling that I had been very close to something important and serious. I wrapped them up again in the paper and waited, dazed, in the piaţa’s whirling silence.

  And suddenly it started to snow. In the sweet light of the lone bulb on the square, hanging, lonesome and violet, from a post, the flakes fell quickly, then slowly, white entering the diffuse ball of light, almost-black passing the center, then white again toward the ground. I felt the snowflakes’ invisible touch on my lips and eyelids, when two or three of the windows in the nearby middle-class houses lit up. Through the colorless air, speckled with the wet ice of the snowflakes, I moved toward the apartment block, a black iceberg rising into the foggy sky. I entered through the side gate, which was guarded by gas meters like two chimerical beasts. I went down a few steps to the garden level. In the whole hallway, painted green, one yellow bulb burned as weakly as a candle. Along the ceiling of the corridor, which twisted unpredictably, ran a pipe, its iron bandaged in places with red putty and hemp. Small rooms, with doors that looked as thin as cardboard, lined the walls on the left and right. At the sound of my footsteps, a door would open to reveal narrow and muggy spaces – a man in his underwear, a woman in a housedress drinking coffee from a chipped cup, an old woman with her headscarf hanging off the back of a chair, revealing two braids of graying hair that hung to her heels … I crept to the stairway that led to the next floor and beyond, and climbed. Each floor was a different color of desolation. There were black doors like in a morgue, enamel plates, much bigger than they had to be, with the apartment numbers; brass, metallic-smelling peepholes, wilted fichus and dank jute rugs. On the top floor there were no doors – only bare walls, with greenish skin, under a weak bulb. A few metal steps led toward the roof exit. Miniscule, quick snowflakes fell inside and melted on the mosaic of the floor. I went out onto the roof and was stunned. A nation of melancholy stretched out before me. It was not possible that I was still on the roof of the yellow block from the piaţa. I was on the peak of a gigantic construction, where at last I recognized one of the old blocks downtown, surrounded by copper cupolas like monstrous breasts. As far as my eyes could reach, Bucharest, like a glass model filled with blood, stretched out its fantasy of roofs: enormous eggs, medieval towers, the spirals of the Metropolitan, the CEC’s crystal stomach, the spheres on top of the Negoiu Hotel and the ASE buildings, the twisted mushrooms of the Russian church, the Telephone Palace iceberg riddled with parabolic antennae, like the iron-braced leg of a child with polio, the phallus of the old fire watchtower, all of it populated with statues of gorgons and Atlases and cherubs and Agriculture and Industry and all the Virtues and Seneca and Kogălniceanu and Bălcescu and Rosetti and Vasile Lascăr, a universe of contorted limestone and gypsum and bronze, covered with snow.