Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  Memory weaves us, there in the depths of the three-petaled chakra, the forehead’s eye. However hideous (because time is an inferno and a creature of time is a devil from the inferno, or maybe a creature forever damned), it is our twin, and a strange desire pushes one toward the other, one into the arms of the other. When I’m lying on my bed in the afternoon, with kids shouting outside and poplar tufts floating in the sun-filled summer, I remember scenes and gestures and faces from long ago, obscure, enigmatic, melted into pure emotion, then I see it – co-created with my flesh but in another dimension, creating a caricature of me, frightening but at the same time dear to me. Every moment that passes, my memory separates from me a little more, it becomes more daring and independent, its shadow and power grow, and it rises over me, spreading its claws and bat wings. Its beak has crooked teeth, just like my mother’s dentures, and it has a single eye in the black and shining bone of its brow. It crawls out of me like an insect, still wet and soft, from the transparent shell of its former carcass. My memory is the metamorphosis of my life. If I do not plunge bravely into the milky abyss that surrounds and hides my memory in the pupa of my mind, I will never know if I have been, if I am a voracious praying mantis, a spider dreaming upon an endless pair of stilts, or a butterfly of supernatural beauty.

  I remember, that is, I invent. I transmute the ghosts of moments into weighty, oily gold. And, somehow, it is also transparent, ever more transparent the deeper the fountain of my mind becomes (and I, a skeleton leaning over its walls, contemplate the wide, dreaming eyes reflected in the golden water). That hyaline cartilage, there on the shield where the three heraldic flowers meet – dream, memory, and emotion – that is my domain, my world, the World. There in that sparkling cylinder that descends through my mind. There, like a specimen in a green jar, pale and bloated with formaldehyde, it lies with its Asiatic eyelids half closed, with its ecstatic and lifeless smile, with its umbilical cord wrapped around its stomach. How well I know it! How accurately did I imagine it! Oh, my twin, open your painted eyelids, press your lipsticked, sweet lips, swell until the vat bursts and, through the shards of brain, through the organic mucilage, come into the light! With the eye between your eyebrows, enlighten the pearly-skinned pages of this book, of this illegible book, of this book.

  ON HER left hip, my mother had a large violet-pink mark shaped like a butterfly. The vermiform body moved horizontally across her stomach toward her left buttock, one wing descending over her thigh, and the other rising toward her waist. I remembered this only when I was in my teens, and not during some vesperal reverie, but in a dream. I dreamed, one night in July, after hours of wandering streets downtown, and looking carefully at statues, that my mother was sitting on a bed with a white satin sheet, artfully wrinkled like the felt in jewelry boxes. She was huge and marble-white, capillaries and sweat glands showed through her transparent skin, and on her left hip a tropical butterfly, its colors shining intensely, had landed on thin, nervous little legs. When I woke up, I knew my mother had a lupus eritematos marked on her hip. I had often seen it, in the depths of time, when she walked naked around the house on sweltering afternoons. I knew what she looked like naked, my two- or three-year-old eyes had seen her and remembered. But then, after we moved to the apartment and my mother started to make Persian rugs, I only saw her naked to the waist, her nipples the same color as the butterfly on her hip, now off-limits. Because, later, when we moved again to the house in Floreasca, I wasn’t even allowed to see her breasts. It was as though this woman I came out of – a zone of wet skin, with pimples and moles – was once my domain, and then we were estranged, piece by piece, at the end of a series of unlucky battles. In each one, not only did I lose hectares of thighs, pubic hair, armpits and breasts and wrinkles on the stomach, but also I was wounded, mutilated by steel blades lettered in an unknown alphabet. In five years I lost my mother’s body irreversibly, and I moved away from it, I was moved away with such force that the thought of it and the memory lobotomized my brain with the same blood-covered blade. Therefore, when I dreamed of the butterfly on her hip, I woke with a horrible nausea. Where had my memory been keeping that image? Was it even real? More than the mark itself, I actually remembered my wonder in looking at it. Had my grandma, whom I didn’t remember at all, as though my grandpa made my mother by himself, stolen a butterfly? Or, when she was sunbathing naked on the banks of the Sabar, when she had my mother in her womb, was she touched by the shadow of a pair of delicate wings?

  I lay in my bed until an intense night fell, cut in pieces by electric stripes on the ceiling and walls, sparks from the trams on Ştefan cel Mare. I was excited and sad. If I closed my eyes, beneath my eyelids I saw the dozens of statues I had looked at, eye to eye, trying to understand the thoughts of those men made of green bronze and stone, illustrious men whose rubicund muses held out goose quills or equally tarnished laurels, trying to understand how these woman with marble uteruses could make love. Yes, long into the night, when the trolley buses were in the station, the illustrious men climbed down from their plinths, grabbed the muses by their hair, and humped among the trees in the park. They pushed their polished-metal penises between the women’s dew-dampened stone labia. Atlases coupled with limestone gorgons with chipped noses, leaving oleander-filled balconies to fall onto the sidewalk. But I stopped my erotic reverie short, because a balcony like that, on the second floor, with pots of oleander and teasel, actually existed somewhere. It came from somewhere real, in very close connection to the lupus mark on my mother’s left hip – the mark the color of her dentures (ah, now I got it!), the sinister mark. Sinister. Silistra. There was a house on Silistra with a balcony supported by Atlas statues. When mother carried me home from the store, wrapped in my coat, my head passed right by the pubises of the two terrible bearded men bent under the weight of the balcony, which were painted a dirty yellow. I looked up and, framed against the white sky, I saw an old woman whose grey hair fell in waves like a girl’s. But the rest seemed to have melted into fog, pearly and unraveled, and truly the rest melted into dreams.

  In the morning, I woke up nervous and distracted, to the birds’ strident chirping and the great yellow light of summer. I got out of the wrinkled bed, walked through rooms painted dull olive and beige, and went into the kitchen, where my mother was already doing her chores, moving among the food-stained chairs. I ate breakfast silently, dipping my bread in coffee and milk, rolling the wet crumbs into marbled balls, and flicking them into dirty cups in the sink. I went onto the balcony. The Dâmboviţa mill, once so flashy in its red-brick vestments, now was white with flour and dust over the roofs full of tin patches, over the huge walls, the round and rectangular windows, and the supports that had girded them for over a hundred years. The mixture of brick-red and white produced an indefinite color, something sad, the shade of all the ancient mills, factories, and workshops in ruin, worn away by time and vegetation. Pitch-black poplars grew everywhere, with carnivalesque green leaves, licking the old, pallid walls and covering them with waves of puffy seeds. Poplar seed puffs – in July, they came down like snow, they drifted around the mill’s foundation, they stuck to the holes and cracks between bricks, they latched onto the feet of pigeons that filled the roof, and they found a tiny bit of earth and extended roots through the panes of glass blocked out by flour. The giant corpse of a ruined but still-functioning mill dominated the back of our block. It scraped the clouds with its triangular pediments like a medieval castle, equally crumbling and melancholy. The mill had a large yard, a few small administrative buildings, deserted and quiet under the sun, and a bulky concrete fence to separate it from the territory of the eight floors of children who came out of the block every morning and played in its shadow, lighting it up with shards of glass and strident screams. Far away to the left of the mill, you could see the outline of Casa Scinteii, the building that published The Spark, with its little red star burning all night. On the right, the State Circus had been visible, but now it was obliterated by the flesh, nerves, m
uscles and bones of the poplars. You could see the circus only from the roof terrace, a flying saucer on the park expanse. The poplars had been planted only a few meters from the building, and they grew as high as the fifth floor, where we lived, so close we could lean out and touch their supple, leafy branches, splattered by pigeons. Last year, there was a pigeon who spent three weeks trying to hatch a ping-pong ball that had fallen into our balcony drain. I sat on the balcony in my pajamas for half an hour, watching the clouds, whiter than the very white sky, outlined in light, and when I went back into the kitchen, I felt I was entering a sinister cave. In the deep shadow, Mamma seemed like a gypsy woman forgotten on a chair beside the stove, all dark and sweaty, except for the globes of her eyes, which caught the blinding folds of the summer sky. Wasps in yellow plating crawled everywhere. They’d made a nest in the vent and had come through its metal grill. There were wasps as big as my fingers on my mother’s body, as though she were some kind of odd animal trainer. They pulled themselves along with their powerful buccal mechanisms, through her fine, thin, chestnut hair that was untouched by gray, spinning their wings like fans. I told her I was going for a walk. I got dressed and went into the blinding heat outside.

  My short-sleeved shirts were too tight at the shoulders, so they creased across the front, making my chest look more sunken than it really was. As soon as I left the cool apartment, I started to sweat. Big drops dripped from my armpit hair onto my already wet skin. Under my pink or leek-green shirts, my crooked thorax drowned in transparent colors and water. The asphalt was soft under my shoes. I looked in the furniture store windows on the ground floor and saw myself among the ficuses and kitchen decor, a kid with a blade-thin face and a wobbly walk. If I felt someone looking at me, my steps became awkward and mechanical, as though I was afraid that I would forget how to walk, and that I might fall onto the asphalt at any moment. I walked toward Obor on the shady side of the boulevard, blinded by the shining windshields and windows, unconsciously registering the great curve of the blocks, and ending up in front of the Melodia movie theater.

  From Obor, I knew I should go up toward Colentina. Here it already felt like the edge of town. Among the cars passed horse-pulled trucks with automobile tires, their azure or green panels painted with mermaids, stags, and floral patterns. They left a trail of yellow-green, globular scat. And the people changed. The women wore headscarves and print skirts; they bared their metal teeth at each other as they came out the factory door, lugging plastic bags and woven baskets. They looked like meaty hens with sagging crests. Clusters of gypsies filled the sidewalks, waiting for the tram, the women in layers of flowery orange and brick-red dresses and sport coats, the men in black suits and hats, sitting on puffed sacks, incredibly greasy. Still, I liked their smell, of the slums, of natural decay, like the unmistakable smell of the country, a combination of fruit fermenting in vats of ţuica, lye splattered in semi-circles on the ground, and sap from frightening vegetation that darkened my gaze in the summer. Workers on ancient, iron bicycles, with two or three soda bottles tied with wire to the little racks behind their saddles, pedaled deftly in bleached sneakers. The yellow road rose toward the east, framed by a green labyrinth of trees.

  I crossed Suveica, where my mother had worked at the mechanical looms, and where she would emerge at dusk, drowning in gnats and plagued by the urge to vomit, smelling the rancid fat from the soap factory next door. All the way home, and all night at home, the noise of the looms where she spent her days would ring in her ears. Over the entry gate, in red block letters, arched the words “Long Live the Romanian Communist Party,” and on the wall of honor, in black and white photos the size of postcards, the vanguard of production smiled stupidly – women with crooked faces, like men or children, with immobile hair and dead eyes. Dresses that looked like school uniforms – with white collars and polka-dot prints in white on black, or black on white – seemed to be the universal fashion in their limited environment of factory, market, and home.

  I stopped at Teiul Doamnei, feeling irritated. I could sense, in my mind’s nostrils, the effluvia of the house on Silistra. But where was it coming from? Since the moment we had moved away from that part of town, I couldn’t remember coming back except once: like in a dream, I saw a road and a tram, a market paved with square bricks, and the hazy ghosts of buildings, leaning forward menacingly … Nothing else. But now, lost, I wandered through the neighborhood of run-down houses, with watch repair shops and locksmiths, I asked an old man – yes, the street was somewhere around here, everyone knew it, but maybe they didn’t call it Silistra, something else, who knows what … and I would have gone back home, if, suddenly, in the rarefied air of my mind, the route I’d taken that day hadn’t come to me in a glimmering vision, from who knows where, as the crystalline skeleton of a bird’s wing, or a flying mammifer. The humerus stretched from my block to Bucur Obor, the radius and cubitus, stuck together – from Obor to Teiul Doamnei, and from there the finger bones separated, much too long and ending in powerful claws. When I saw, on one of the beast’s fingers, a massive gold ring, I knew that I had found (because any discovery is remembrance) the mystical street and house of my birth. I only had to cross the boulevard and drown myself in the streets of that neighborhood.

  But it seemed the shining wing did not have only five fingers, but many, a tangle of fingers. I wandered for hours under a tropical sun along identical sad streets on the edge of town, with middle-class and country houses, with kites hanging from telegraph wires and pigeons singing in mulberry bushes. I rounded corners, I read the street signs: Bujoreni, Zorilor, Sadova, Major Anastasie Petru, Perişani … I was hypnotized by the abandoned buildings invaded by weeds, the doorframes and window frames torn out, and a dirty child pulling a band of cut copper behind him, muttering something in a room painted blue. I stopped old women wearing slippers and asked them where Silistra was. “Ah, Silistra, I think it’s two streets that way. But who are you looking for, sonny?” I froze when, deep into a far-away street, perpendicular to those I’d walked before, I saw, against a sky crossed by clouds, a melancholy and austere tower, the one I had seen for some time in my dreams. The actual tower had a window on the upper floor, with heavy bent shades. Standing there, petrified on the empty street, face to face with the high building, I felt certain I had been there before, and a strange magic made me open the unpainted wooden door. There was a spiral stairway, with a cold stone railing. I walked up, with all of my joints trembling. The paint on the wall was green and oily. There was a pot with a sick cactus, covered in mold, pale and ulcerous. I leaned on the cool railing and knocked at the only door on the miniscule landing. It had a large, outdated peephole. In the cloudy light that came through a single windowpane, Anca opened the door. I walked into a hall that smelled like dusty Persian rugs. The room was packed with old things, chipped porcelain and almost black silver servings. There was a picture of the tower, somewhat crudely painted, with Anca in front, playing hopscotch. Beside the tower, in the picture (not in reality) rose an olive-green cypress tree.

  Still dizzy from so many twists and turns through Colentina, my shirt drenched with sweat, I was glad for the cold of the dark, quiet apartment. Anca brought a saucer with a spoonful of rose petal jam, and while I ate, looking at the filigreed spirals on the handle of the spoon, she told me about her childhood.

  HER mother worked the stamping machine in a metal shop. Eight hours a day, Monday to Saturday, she sat on a rotting wooden box, in front of an enormous and greasy hydraulic press, jabbing rectangular pieces of sheet metal into the jaws of the machine. A shiny cylinder would fall in a flash with a deafening sound, stamping the sheets and rising just as quickly. In the shop, eight presses were operating constantly. At each one worked a woman in a blue coat. All of the women were practically deaf. They each had all of their fingers, because the ones whose fingers got caught under the cylinder did not come back. Anca’s mother worked in the shop until she went into labor (her daughter never had any trouble remembering the howl of
the presses, because she had heard it, diffused by the liquid of the placenta, since she was no bigger than a salamander). She left for the maternity ward by tram, in a happy, sweating crowd on a Saturday afternoon.

  Anca grew up in the tower, the former brick annex of a workshop from the beginning of the century, later demolished. A vacant lot with a few black, greasy pieces of machinery – wheels, belts, springs, and the frame of a tram wagon, with flaking paint and missing windows – spread its weeds and trash behind the tower. That’s where the girl would play, sitting on one of the wooden benches of the old tram and pretending to take a trip, catching gray and brown locusts that writhed in her fist and tried to escape between her fingers, touching her dress (with a bud of yellow velvet sewn onto her front pocket) to the greased machinery … When evening came and the sky turned purple, and a little window sparkled high on the tower wall, Anca knew that it was time to come inside. Still, sometimes she would stay in the field, flattening balls of paper with colorful pictures, listening to the factory whistle, or just running here and there until the light fell into the earth and the moon appeared.