Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  Terrifically animated by the light of the flames, the rag and bone army deliberated. The clean skeletons, the oldest, waved limbs as long as a praying mantis’s through the falling snow. They disliked the pious murmurs inside, and the tang of incense. The fortress had to be destroyed, and everyone inside had to be sacrificed, all before the cock crowed. The accumulating snow, damp and crystalline, retreated in front of the creaky feet whose petrified toenails poked through ancient leather. The church door was nailed together with iron and had on its thick, cracked fur the marks of flintlocks and harquebuses, bloodstains, and carved Cyrillic letters, blasphemies poorly scratched in by some priest from long ago. The corpse of Baba Liubiţa, buried just a week ago, writhing with white, fat worms, moved toward the door and touched it with purple fingers. She shook her eyeless head and moved away. They would have to set it on fire, because the thick planks were as sturdy as a castle wall. The fiends came together and blew a venomous green flame from their lipless muzzles, their black tongues hanging like dogs’. The flame thrust at an ageless piece of wood, but only a few splinters caught fire and burned out almost instantly. They blew again, but the tarred oak did not light. The skeletons realized they could not triumph by themselves. They gathered, like the base of a fountain, around a circle of fire in the snow that the oldest one had lit with a torch. Their black, vacant eye sockets watched the earth inside the circle turn translucent, like deep, green water, and this water reddened, then turned more auburn, brown, black like tar, descending into the earth’s depths, where a few points and lights seemed to move. Hundreds of flitting spots, the color of crabs, appeared in the dark, crawling up the chain of light. Soon, leathery bat wings, pointed tails, hooked beaks, hunched chests, horns like a bull’s or goat’s or sheep’s or ram’s or horned viper’s or dragon’s emerged from a swamp that screamed like a woman giving birth or a man having his balls pulled off. They moved faster and faster, they swarmed like beetles, scaling the beams of light with claws and suckers, they spouted out of scaly hips, they chortled through toothy mouths in their bellies, they belched through wall-eyed, twisted faces wedged between their ass cheeks. They were demons. They sprang from the enchanted circle like the fabled coming of evil, filling the sky with wings and howls, filling the earth with squirts of venom and sperm, and filling the divine being with horror. Cricket-demons swarmed onto the church’s roof, they slid their saw-tails through the tiles and dropped long eggs inside, which burst into poisonous spiders with a hundred legs each. But the priest in his gold-threaded robes turned them to stone, dousing them with holy water. Demons tunneled through the earth and sprang up among the kneeling people, but the incense from the censer poured into their large nostrils and exploded their serpent-heads into a thousand splinters. Bat-demons grabbed up rocks, swooped over the roof and let them go. As soon as the angelic vibration of prayer reached them, however, the stones stopped in the air and opened like enormous buds, spreading fleshy petals, strangely beautiful, until the sky over the church was filled with multicolored flowers. Insane with rage, demons scuttled onto the walls, they scurried over the roof, scratching and scraping with their claws, until no part of the holy place could be seen under the wormy swarm, the demented tangle, the furious ravel of wings and antennae.

  Then the heavy door swung open, and the forty villagers, in white long shirts, their faces and hands translucent red in the light of the candles they carried, came out holding onto each other tightly, led by the priest with a beard to his waist, frowning and determined like an icon of the Father. His powerful hands emerged from large sleeves to grip a cross as long as a league, which, like the cross on each person’s chest, sparkled like gold. Stronger still, scintillating like a diamond with millions of fires, the tooth of the martyr glowed in its glass box, tied now to a girl’s forehead. The light shone over the valley. It turned the surrounding cliffs as transparent as gemstones, and, with an ever greater power, it rose in a single column of greatness to the sky, shattering the clouds, moving the stars aside, and revealing the endlessly gentle majesty of the Trinity. And through the field of light, flurries of angels began to fall, ablaze with bows and quivers, long spears in their hands, their golden wire locks fluttering in descent. A cry of victory broke out from the Badislav chests.

  Touching the ground with their feet, the transparent heralds built of ideas and crystal partook of the power of the earth. Thin threads of blood grew in their feet, spreading quickly through their bodies of light, becoming systems of veins and arteries, visible inside like those in the translucent bodies of shrimp. A porphyry blood colored their lips and cheeks, and enormous wings, like swans’ wings, attached themselves to the naves of their chests with triangular, powerful muscles. The courageous alate, in gold-plated armor, formed a phalanx and drove their spears forward into the brazen band of the dead. A few moments later, the terrible subterranean host had turned into a pile of tibiae, vertebrae, mandibles, skulls, and pelvises, yellowed like old wax, their venom still steaming toward the sky. The demons ran down the sides of the church like thick swamp water, leaving it stained with saliva and excrement, and like a pack of rabid wolves they threw themselves onto the phalanx of angels. For they knew them, each in part – these were the Faithful, the ones who had stayed with the Lord during the great rebellion, the ones made million in glory, while the others descended into the subdivine, sub-human, sub-animal, and wrapped in the spiral of blood of the eternally damned. Deep in the being of each demon, behind the scales, claws, and dragon wings, lived an angel in tears.

  The battle intensified, quaking the little valley, as flakes of silver snowed. Protected by icons and crosses, wrapped in veils of incense, the villagers watched the melee with wide eyes, arm in arm, with their beards on end and their flesh quivering. The angels skewered the cacodemons with arrows of steel, glass, and light. They hacked them with double-edged swords, spilling black blood in the snow. They flew up and strangled the winged demons with their wide hands. Dragons and werewolves, locusts with human heads and humans with fly heads opened their snouts, muzzles, and beaks and vomited jets of fire at the celestial legion. Some angels, their wings in multicolored flames like fireworks, like birds of paradise, fell down onto a shack or into a leafless path. Like fat dogs with bared teeth, three or four devils would pounce on the heavenly heralds, nauseating them with the breath of their bowels, spraying them with urine from the impressive hoses between their legs, and covering them with murderous curses more venomous than the fire they blew from their mouths, for the devastating speech of blasphemy filled the heavenly minds with terrible pain. Wave after wave of monsters attacked the spiky rectangular phalanx wearing it away, plucking soldiers out and throwing them into the dark. At every assault, devils also fell, writhing, into the snow.

  But then, when the snowfall slowed toward dawn, the angels began to sing. They threw down their dripping swords and their lances with snuffed flames. They took off their transparent armor and stood in long, white robes, rings of golden hair falling from their shoulders to their waists. Cheek by cheek, their blue eyes trained on the sky, the angels sang. They lifted their girlish voices toward God, gentle and fresh as saplings or the stalks of carnations. They offered the crystal filigree of the psalms into the cold, hard air. The people cried like children, clutching their icons against their chests. The hill of bones began to rumble, and the skeletons assembled themselves again – the skulls found their bodies, the femurs joined to hips, and as though grown from the yeast of the unearthly song, new and tender flesh touched the cold bones again, muscle was wrapped in skin, and soon, naked and young again, all of them thirty years old, the dead rose to their feet. Waving one last time to their living kin, the group of unclothed men and women turned slowly toward the cemetery. One of them paused in front of the church to trace a wide circle of fire over the ground. The demons, petrified once the angelic psalms began, now scurried to the well of transparent earth. They dove inside, grabbing on to windpipes of light, trailing meters of intestines from their slit stomac
hs, and leaving behind mounds of vomit and blood before becoming smaller and smaller and disappearing into the dark.

  A new cry of joy filled the air over the Badislavs. Carrying the song further, the heralds went among the villagers, embracing them one by one, putting their palms on their cheeks and marking their foreheads with their pomegranate lips. At the touch their brow bones turned to glass, like ice beneath a bonfire, until their skulls were entirely transparent and sparkling and revealed the folds and lobes of the rose of the brain. One child alone, the one with the most curls of all, with the largest and bluest eyes, did not hide delicate cerebral matter under his skull but an enormous spider with legs pulled up against its body. The vision lasted only a moment before a milky fog darkened the skull bones and brow again into aged pearl. Embracing a buxom congregant, one of the angels saw the lap of its vestment grow rigid, rising slowly, in unspeakable pain and sweetness, until it stuck straight up, until the gown of light, held by an unseen hair, gathered around its middle, revealing his chalcedony toenails. The song of praise halted in his throat, and instead a guttural cry, like that of a young wolf, trailed from his mouth. His eyes, clear since the world was made, clouded with tears, and the clouded angel, a grimace across his divine face, suddenly threw himself into the fountain of fire, his venomous claws grabbing the last devil’s tail. As he traveled the path to Hell, his skin grew sores and fistulas, his limbs scabies, his eyes grew glaucoma, his spine grew scales, and his mind filled with the hips and breasts of women. But the other angels, barely showing a twinge of pain for their fallen brother, took up their song again, and with a few vigorous pulses of their wings, they unstuck themselves from the earth, solemnly rising toward heaven on the wide beam of the martyr’s tooth, like a flock of human birds. Their blood, lymph, and black and yellow bile sprayed from the soles of their feet like a jet engine, until they were as clean and clear as the light of reckoning. Once they were among the stars, the skies opened, and the villagers saw the blinding, merciful face of the Divine again, where the angels dissolved into an air of gold.

  And now the sleighs cut across the wide and sunny platter of the pathless field. The horses snorted ropes of mist out hot nostrils. Sometimes a woman, her hair completely gray after the frenzied night, turned her head back frightened, making a cross with her tongue on the roof of her mouth, but she saw only the lengthening tracks of the sleigh runners, narrowing like an arrow toward the village in the valley, the invisible origin of space and time. They traveled through the day, but at dusk, when the snow turned dark pink, the priest raised his hand and the sleighs circled into a small camp. In the center, the fire lifted thousands of brushes, in cobalt, saffron, and gold, and like a church painter it decorated a nervous tuft of horse hair, a coat with cotton embroidery, a wide face with tired eyes, a jug on worn leather straps, and a few steps from the camp, the raised fur on a wolf’s throat. At dawn, after a well-guarded sleep, they yoked the horses below the red, melted globe of the sun, and the flight began again. At night, no man touched his woman, and would not until they found a place to settle, with a hearth and church and gardens.

  For some nights the stars began to fill more and more of the sky, and the darkness hung against the firmament became deeper, bluer, with clusters and tendrils of stars. Each day became warmer, more snow melted, the drip of icicles rained from the branches in groves, and the hooves splattered a warming mix of water and snow. The gray light became sparkling yellow, and the early spring, with its troubling scents, filled the white sphere that had in its center the small, dark worm of the sleighs. One morning, a blue band as wide as the entire horizon appeared to the pilgrims. As they approached, the band widened into a snake knotting through the horizon, until the land began to descend and, whipped by new branches on the trees, pierced by the squawking flight of crows, they could finally take in the miraculous sight. It was the greatness of the Danube river, so wide that the trees on the other side were barely visible, plain reeds in a purple fog. A skin of thick glass over the entire verdant expanse, lustered by a warm wind, hid the terrifying tumult of the waters underneath, and its blinding mirror reflected the sun in its orbit through space. “Dunav! Dunav!” cried the children, who jumped from the sleighs and ran, crunching the snow under their pigskin-wrapped feet, to the enormous frozen presence. But the priest yelled at them loudly, and the small people came back, stroking the horses’ hot bellies as they passed.

  Before you cross its depths, a river must be blessed. A sacrifice was required, so all would not perish in a furious shatter of ice. The servant of God remembered that once, in his youth, when bringing the miraculous tooth and other holy relics from the north, he’d seen the priest cut a hole in the Danube. After praying over the hole and dousing it with holy water, leaning now and then to read from the Gospels open on the ice beside him, the priest took the shoulders of the girl fate had chosen, kissed her eyes, and dropped her into the frozen water. A lifetime had passed since then, and times were not as harsh. The elders had come to believe that, as long as it was not the body but the person’s soul that the powers of Creation wanted, be they luminous or unfriendly, and as long as the shadow was nothing other than spirit, it would be enough to sacrifice the shadow alone. So if a house was ever to be built, a river crossed, or a bridge constructed, the sleepless powers of the place were given the shadows of living people, in place of the old sacrifices of flesh and blood.

  They had to wait until dawn, which after a night of collective vigil, under stars that were swallowed by clouds, and then emerged again sparkling more purely, as though they were glasses washed with raw silk, appeared like a bouquet of fire. The peasants rubbed their faces with snow. Their eyes were shining red and round like birds’ eyes, and in their white gowns with wide sleeves, they did look like a flock of great water birds, fooled by the weather into visiting the Danube before the start of spring. This time, fate chose the boy who would become the grandfather of old Babuc, that is, my Tataie. He was a lost child, different from the others. Ten springs earlier, a flock of girls had gone gathering twigs and violets in a nearby glen. They tied them into crowns and wandered among the trees with green bark that marked the air with a dizzying scent, one they would be shocked to recognize a few years later, when on certain holidays, young men took them up the mountain and made them women: the fresh bark smelled like men. Under the sky torn by bare branches, the girls themselves were torn by a dark and strange longing. Wasting away with languorous eyes, they left their toe prints in the barely grown grass, drizzled with the purple and yellow of gentian flowers that smelled, actually, repulsive. In one spot, the trees thinned out, withered into tan clusters of sticks, and the crocuses were not brilliant in their usual color, but black, drops of pitch drizzled over the short grass. A crust of snow with large beads of water tarried around the roots and glowed like a diamond. Their hair warmed by a western wind, the girls set toward this strange clearing, and even from a distance they could see, on the grass fur stained with black, a small pink creature lying still, surrounded by a crown of sunrays like paintings of saints in the church. It was a chubby, naked infant asleep, its toes twitching, enveloped in a round crystal husk, thin as a fingernail, glowing in the sunlight. The girls cocked their heads and walked around the vision. Their rings of hair stuck to the transparent egg, which they lifted carefully, so that they could get a better look at the sleeping baby. They were surprised. He was as beautiful as only a three-month-old little sausage can be, but there was something impure about him. He was a golden child with long lashes and large eyebrows, a tender, pouty mouth, pale titties like two lentil pods and a wee-wee frowning between his dimpled thighs, and he had no sign of a navel, a fact which completed the miracle. They took him to the village and tried to remove him from the capsule of hardened tears, but even the blacksmith, the woodsman, and the priest, using all of their skills, couldn’t break through the membrane. The infant woke up and began to cry. He was already hungry, and his little hands were trembling. They called the village witch, an old
baba forgotten by time, who lived in the trunk of an enormous linden tree that in the night seemed to hold the enormous coin of the moon by its crest, like a vase. She stuck the egg and the infant under her dress, against her stomach. Holding her hands against the bump, like a pregnant woman, she lay down by the hearth. At dawn, in front of the wondering village elders, her labor began. She roared and convulsed, foaming at her mouth with her eyes hanging out like a snail’s, until the pseudo-stomach began to soften and slacken. Under the baba’s quilts that smelled of grass and roots, something started to move. The midwife slid the infant out, still in its flaccid skin, which she slit with a sausage knife. The boy spurted meconium and wailed like a cat. The midwife washed and swaddled him and gave the child to a woman still raising her own, who took this new boy into her care. They baptized him that same dawn, plunging him three times into the font and liberating him from Satan’s power. The boy grew up alongside the village children. Aside from his missing navel, he was no different from the others until the day when, after the devastating year of the poppy, fate chose him to lean his shadow over the frozen Danube.