Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  The birds watched Maria with their jewel-colored eyes – emerald (the peahen), sapphire, and ruby. She laughed and called to them, or let a “goddamn it” slip out when one pecked her plump, girly fingers. With her permed hair and bold eyes, wearing a white blouse with a lace collar and no cleavage showing, a pleated knee-length skirt, coarse threaded stockings and poor kid’s shoes, and carrying an oval, scarlet bag, held at the hip by a strap that crossed her breasts diagonally, there was something virginal and decent about her. She was like a character from a 1950’s movie (and this was actually anno domini 1955), a black-and-white girl performing on a screen with scratched lines, in a theater that smelled like sunflower seeds and petrosin. Her smile and her earnest, strong eyes lit up the theater, with its broken chairs, unshaven hicks, rats, and the stench of urine from the toilets near the screen.

  Maria had just gone into town. On weekdays, the roar of the Donca Simo rug factory followed her day and night, but on Sundays it was quiet. She slept in, upstairs in her bedroom where she cooked and washed. She looked at the sky through the curtain embroidered here and there with red flowers, and, if the sun was strong in her room, she would stand up to stretch and laugh, dazed by dreams and loneliness. She listened a while to the noises in the courtyard – Gioni’s barking, the screaming peacocks, the gypsies squabbling, the boors fighting and the creaking water pump – and then she got ready to go out. She washed her face, armpits, and breasts in the sink, put on her one nice shirt, and dug around in her bag for the cardboard package of cheap lipstick the color of a box of chocolates. She put it on her lips, holding them in the shape of a heart, then spreading it well by rubbing her lips together. The powder looked even more pathetic, and smelled even more like cat urine, but Maria liked it – all of the women she worked with put on this popular powder when they went out, so they all thought it was normal. With a little toilet water from a bottle shaped like a toy car, Maria could step into summer splendor. But she’d only waste the perfume for a date or a movie. When she went to the market or the factory, she remembered what Victoriţa the pickpocket had told her, when she poked her hollow cheeks into her room and wrinkled her nose at the little half-full car on the sill: “What in God’s name, forgive me, is this crap you’re always putting on? Listen to me, soap and water is the best perfume. You know why those ladies and countesses all wore perfume? Because they didn’t wash. Because they stank. Because they had to hide the smell of sweat.” Victoriţa had one cheek that was okay and plump, but the other was just skin stretched over her jaw bone, withered by some disease. Maria wanted to vomit just looking at her. She’d be out a few years, and they’d catch her with her hand in someone’s pocket, and they’d throw her back in prison. She had no husband and no kids, but she was extraordinarily happy. Through the thin walls, Maria could hear her singing with the radio all day, songs by Angela Moldovan:

  I made my parka new again, oh ho,

  I have my coat for snow or rain …

  Not everyone had a receiver for the state station back then. There were only two radios in the courtyard at 67 Silistra. One moaned with workers’ songs from morning until night, upstairs in the house in back, in the room of the one who became Nenea Nicu Bă, but for now was only Nea Nicu, master carpenter, a scheming lush who wore a beret pulled down over his eyes. The other belonged to Victoriţa, and played more discreetly, well tempered by the urchin with a matchstick.

  Right as she came out her door (this is when she lived on the ground floor), Maria met a variegated and contentious world, as if the whole house were a hive of parrots. Dorel the electrician shaved outside, leaning his mirror against the birds’ fence. He was naked to the waist with hairy shoulders, and his sweatpants fell in folds, showing his thick legs and his penis shoved down one side. But Maria paid no attention. Instead, she glanced at him happily, saying “Morning, Dorel,” and then dodging and giggling because he always tried to grab her and cover her face with foam. With the shaving cream on his face, his mouth looked as red as blood. “Kiss the hand, Aunt Angela,” Maria smiled to a woman upstairs, bent over the blue railing. “How’s Ionel?” “To hell with him, he just poops and pisses all day, how is he supposed to be? I change the diaper and he craps in the new one, like he was saving it special. Don’t ever have kids.” Angela also had the requisite cabbage-roll hairdo on top of her head, and a coat that spread the smell of kifte meatballs across the yard. “Are you going to the movies? Is there a good one on?” “No, I’m going into town, auntie. Isn’t it a shame about this sun?” “Go on, Maria. I’m going to see what’s up with the little one.”

  The smells of the kitchens and toilets of the slums mixed with the heavy aroma of the rotten box of oleander with pointed leaves, full of lice and fluorescent grubby-pink flowers. A row of tulips glowed divinely in yellow and red flames. The warm breeze was bad for Maria’s hair. She took a kerchief from her purse and tied it under her chin. Chestnut strands, curled with an iron, were still swirling behind her, slipping out from the rayon cloth printed with images of Sinaia. Maria smiled – and Nenea Gigi, the lathe operator with streaked hair and a bad eye from an accident with a piece of scrap – watched her hips and inhaled the scent of her cologne. “She’s not pretty, but she’s still young,” he said to himself. “She’s got a guy in the city, the way she swings it.” Maria was actually smiling because she remembered a scene in “The Valley Echoes,” when the boy of ready money, dressed in a funny white suit, goes to the Bumbesti-Livezeni construction site, where young people work cheerfully, and flirts with the ordinary girls, calling them – it’s so funny – “Mademoiselle,” and they put the rich boy in his place and tell the world and even make a play about him, where the boy from ready money comes up behind a working girl in an apron, smiling and saucy, with big breasts out to here, and says:

  Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle

  Didn’t we meet last summer at the spa?

  Actually, he doesn’t say it, he sings it, because it’s kind of a musical, and she answers him like an echo, and makes all the boys and girls in the theater fall over laughing:

  What spa,

  Maybe a spaz?

  Come here and I’ll show you a spa!

  And she snaps something with a rag. And the real rich boy is in the theater, and the tears come, and he starts sobbing in a really funny way … Maria can’t control herself and begins to laugh out loud. Two gypsy girls at the gate, Lina and Făftica, watch her with their mouths hanging open. They’re real gypsy-gypsies, with puffy skirts and coins in their braids, the gold coins, cocoşeii, that had been confiscated by the police a while ago. They were left with the copper ones. They were short, dark, and very young, about fifteen, but they had already been with men, guys older than they were, and Săftica already had two children hiding behind her skirts. They spit sunflower seeds all day and talked about their gypsy men, who “wandered from cunt to cunt” and never came back home. Three quarters of their vocabulary consisted of “eat me” and “up yours.” You wondered why they never got tired of the same stupidity. They didn’t have anything against Maria, but they’d hassle the other girls. For example, they were always criticizing Coca, the courtyard whore, who didn’t wear a scarf on her head but a pink cap, exactly the color of the oleander, which for some reason bothered them to no end. But at least Coca never brought men to her room, which was as clean and modest as Maria’s; she just walked the streets and went with the men to their places. She would come back at dawn, when the other residents picked up boxes of sausage and boiled eggs and went to work. There was shouting and fighting all the time in in the courtyard, but it had nothing to do with Coca. Most often the landlady, Madame Catana, began the arguments herself. Madam Catana was abnormally fat and mustachioed, with wicked, slanting eyes and frightening veins crawling like purple hunching worms on her manly feet. She would prop herself in front of a tenant and start to scream her head off at him, because she saw him smoking in bed and he was going to set the house on fire, or because he didn’t say hello to her, or because sh
e didn’t like his face … For her, all the men were “assholes” and all the women “sluts” and “hussies,” tramps. She had the habit of coming to the yard to have a bowl of soup, and then there had to be absolute quiet, because while she sat outside chomping, Madame Catana did her books. The courtyard was still full of dirty kids in cheap underpants, black from rolling around in the dirt, and she had to get up from her stool to run at them, with a curse of “damn your mamma.” As much of a bitch as Ma’am Catana was, her husband was kind, an old man who looked like the good Lord himself, lazing all day around the yard, smoking cheap cigarettes on his doorstep. Behind him, through the cracked door, you could just see the landlord’s room of wonders, the thing the whole court talked about with timidity and admiration, like it was a realm of enchantment. Maria had once been in the room of miracles, and she had been dumbfounded by all of its beauty. The old man Catana, you could tell, had done well as a merchant – he had been somebody in his time. The room was filled with old furniture, its wood decorated with garlands, roses, and Cupids. On the stained, plush bedclothes, there was a huge doll with a plaster head, wearing a dress with a pink veil. Other, smaller dolls in long pink and blue dresses, lined the nightstand and bedstead, alongside Chinese dolls made of gypsum and translucent green stone. A large rug covered the entire wall alongside the bed. It took Maria’s breath away. It showed a blue lake with water lilies, and a wide field of flowers along its shore. In the middle of the flowers and lemongrass bushes, there was a golden pavilion full of Spaniards. Two were dancing, a woman with frothy skirts and castanets, and a stiff man in a very short jacket, with knee-length trousers and white socks, with his curly hair held by the typical braid and hat of the torero. The others sat around them, on chairs, the boys flirting with the girls, some playing guitars … A flock of pigeons scurried around their feet. The other walls had paintings in heavy, worm-eaten frames. Maria liked the painting of the gray kitten best, but also the one with swans and conical mountains made of curly wool. On the table laden with macramé, vases painted different colors held dried plant tufts that seemed to float. The tablecloth had heavy silk tassels. The air was brown and smelled like cherry wine. Hundreds of icicles descended from the ceiling plaster, making the place seem like a cave of treasures. There was an old candelabrum with crepe paper shades. In the evening, a pink and palpitating light filtered through the landlords’ windows, like in a dream.

  But Catana didn’t seem to care about the beautiful room he shared with his shrewish wife. He had been building, for a lifetime, another room, one that would ferry him into eternity like an ark of ivory. The tenants found out about his obsession from Madame Catana herself, who, in one of her ferocious drunken rampages, had dumped dishwater on the old man and screamed her head off at him for stealing her youth and wasting her parents’ fortune. “He thinks he needs a tomb! A tomb! When we are barely getting by! You go around in rags from Dămăroaia, ay, saving money for a tomb? You rigged the scales in your shop and you’re thinking about the world to come? Haoleu, when the demons get you and shoot hot oil up your ass, the worms will eat you up and your tomb, too. You sinning bastard! Good people, do you know what this murderer has done with his life? Him, the little lamb right here? He killed a girl he was living with, when he had a shop in Buzău, he set her on fire and kept the ashes, and every morning he ate her with a spoon, from a bowl as big as this, and after this bastard finished he went to the police, and they beat him stupid for a week, even though he’d confessed, and he did twelve years in prison, look, this bastard, the one you see right here in the doorway. You say I’m crazy, but if you knew what this man did to my life, it’s a wonder he didn’t put me in the grave, too. And you need a tomb? Pink marble? Stone angels? People, it would have been better if he was a drunk, if he drank all the money, then we’d know what to do, but no, he’s spent forty years saving up for a tomb. For the past twenty years the masons have been feasting on his coins. Do you know what this pig has on his plot at Bellu? It’s no tomb, people, it’s a palace. You could drive a cart through there. And the statues! and the doilies! and the rooms! so many! A whole nation of people could stay there until the last judgment. Couldn’t you have built a row of houses, so we could live like regular people, put clothes on your children, the mob you made, that you were so good at, you with the goods, me with the bads. Why couldn’t you do that? Why heat your tomb if you’re going to croak? If they’ll throw you in the street for dogs to eat? If you’re in a marble tomb, what’s the difference? What are you going to know about it? That you died, idiot, you’ll be dead, that’s all you’ll know. Kicked the bucket! Thank God I’m younger than you. Tomorrow, the day after, I’m going to lay you out on the table in the dining room, stiff and cold, and man I’m gonna laugh. I’m going to dance a jig around you, just like this! Hup hup! And I’m going to grab your nose and pull your cock out for everyone to see, you better believe it. Murderer! Idiot! Do you really think you’ll ever see the inside of your marble tomb? When I see my own neck. Count yourself lucky if I bury you under the elderberries. You, my whole life you poisoned my soul, motherfucker!” The tenants watched them like a freak show and laughed, and the venerable old man nodded with clenched eyes and said gently: “That’s right, what she says is right, good people. Forgive me, good people,” but his words were drowned out by other insults from his wife.

  A few years later, Maria found out that the delirious old woman wasn’t lying – on the contrary, when she reduced Catana’s tomb to a palace, her obtuse mind had not been fully able to grasp reality. When the old man died, in 1962, as a Christian, with a priest and candles in the final triumph, he was mourned by the entire courtyard as a neighborhood saint. He left nothing behind except the houses and a 50 bani coin in a felted box, on the table with the fabulous fringe. Despite her ferocious promises to the contrary, the landlady held the funeral with full pomp and circumstance, following the most impressive slum traditions. A procession of six gypsies playing funeral marches on bent and dented brass instruments and a big drum walked behind the elaborately carved wooden hearse with windows that were thin from being polished so much, drawn by horses in black masks. Some of the gypsies wore funeral banners discolored by weather, and another was hanging at the courtyard entrance. Then came Madame Catana and the rest of the family, in heavy, black clothes, holding on to the back of the hearse and wailing, followed by the whole crowd from the yard and the street, eating sunflower seeds and chattering. Maria had heard from Crazy Leana, who sometimes stopped by the new house on Ştefan cel Mare, that Catana had died, and she came to see him off on his final journey, and to see her former neighbors. She was already thin and sour on life. She saw Catana in his white, satin-lined coffin, among the crowns of crepe-paper roses: it was like God himself was being buried. The funeral train took Colentina to Obor, then Moşilor, passed through the center of the city and, five hours later, reached the alleyways stuffed with final resting places, the Bellu cemetery. The stone houses decorated with marble and tarnished bronze, statues and oval pictures, their windows and doors barred, gave the place the impression of a city where a different species dwelled, with different needs and different bodies than human beings. Sad cypresses offered up their leaves toward the sky. The hearse twisted and turned through the graves and tombs, and arrived in front of a strange construction.

  It was a pink house, glistening nostalgically in the twilight. In that wet November, evening had come quickly, aided by gloomy, yellow clouds. The tomb had an austere triangular pediment, with a round window in the center. The door was framed by two niches, with two statues of polished brass. What human beings did those bronzes represent? What humility before the mystery of death? The statues were silently screaming, mad with horror or a terrible laceration of the bowels. You could see the roofs of their mouths and the molars at the backs of their throats, and there, behind their uvulae, they turned pink (in the twilight, perhaps) as though their throats and gullets were made of flesh, as if the terrible bronze encased still-living human bodi
es, with soft, palpitating organs, blood beating through the ducts of their veins, and minds feeling endless agony in every neuron. The bronze statues were frozen in defensive, blocking gestures, their fingers sprawled, their ribs visible, and their paunches clenched, desperate to break off their pedestals and run away through the endless cemetery. Only once, when the priest sprinkled everything with holy water did the strange building lose its enchantment. Rubbing their eyes, the people saw that, in fact, the two bronze Adonises were angels. Their mouths were open in song, and their eyes were lifted toward heaven. The service was long and tedious, and afterward (darkness had fallen completely, irradiated by the temple’s rosy crystal) the coffin was lowered down the steps of the tomb. A blackened iron door, very heavy and well oiled, opened into an empty room and a stone staircase leading to a basement. The pallbearers carefully shuffled the coffin on their shoulders, and the relatives followed. Maria thought that there would not be room for anyone else. She, in any case, did not want to go in. She had never liked funerals, or priests. She did not believe in the afterlife, or rather, she never thought about it. “Did anyone ever come back and say what it’s like? If you’re okay with yourself in your soul, there’s no reason to be afraid. Whatever will be will be.” But little by little, the crowd around her thinned out, everyone else climbed down, and there seemed to still be room inside. Soon, she was alone, in the creepy darkness and cold. The irregular architecture of the surrounding tombs, now pitch black, bit into the sky like the teeth of a saw. Here and there a statue (an angel blowing a trumpet with its wings outstretched) made a brown profile against the yellow dregs of the horizon. The cypresses looked like they were painted with bitumen, and their sinister branches shook. Maria, frozen with fear, climbed down the stairs.