Now she looked through the back window of tram number 4’s last car as it rang through the smoke-filled intersection at Obor. A railway man who held a bundle of stove pipes in the middle of the crowd kept pushing her and blew the stench of sausages into her face. Because the tram was so full, people argued and whined like carnival barkers, but Maria – looking absently at the bars full of peasants with woven bags and braids of garlic, and at the stores selling windows and mirrors, or keys, or hardware, or fabric – paid them no attention. Stoically, she bore the patterned iron pipe stuck in her shoulder, and in the roar of horse-drawn trucks and trams crisscrossing and stopping sometimes nose to nose, throwing pale sparks into the dark air, she jumped from one thought to another, chilled by the raindrops pelting the window.
Maria and Vasilica were wearing braids down to their waists, woven with red ribbon, when they came to Bucharest. Their father, “Tătica,” brought them in a horse-cart and left them in the care of “Nenea,” their older brother, who would soon cross the Dniester and disappear somewhere on the banks of the Don. He wouldn’t come back until ’51. The girls labored in the workshop from morning until evening. At dawn, the rows of Singer sewing machines with glossy black wheels and pedals looked like giant insects with poisonous stingers, ready to receive their prey: young, living girls. Their boss was strict, with evil eyes and jaw muscles constantly twitching. She wouldn’t let the girls in the workshop leave before time, even to use the bathroom.
Despite her heavily rouged muzzle and eyelashes thick with mascara, there was something masculine about Maria Georgescu’s face. The older apprentices told the newbies what they had heard from those before them: that Madam Georgescu was not a woman in every sense of the word, that under her skirt she had what a man has. Some also said she had to shave her chin and her neck and between her breasts, so she wouldn’t grow hair like a bandit. But a thick powder covered everything, if there was any truth to it. Whatever the case, she never married. She lived in a shared room somewhere in Rahova with a schoolteacher, who was tiny and faint, with eyes surrounded by pink skin and teeth as small as a cat’s. Because Madam Georgescu never laughed, she frightened the apprentices, and they obeyed her without a complaint. The sisters never befriended the other girls, most of whom were hussies who talked in ways that girls from the country had never heard. They would have been miserable and cried every night in each other’s arms on their iron-slatted bed, had it not been for the wondrous Mioara Mironescu, the woman who became everything and more than everything to them, a fairy out of fairy tales, a model and a goddess, whose interest in the two little peasant girls seemed like a miracle. How had they come to the actress’s attention? Why – ever since she had seen them in the window of the house next door, laughing cheek to cheek and making faces, throwing crumbs down to the pigeons on the sidewalk – did the actress, stepping out of her massive Packard, stop, tilt back her black hat and veil, and stand there, a tailored silhouette out of a fashion magazine, her saffron-gloved hands clutching a bouquet of violets to her breast? The sun painted her face intense and pastel colors, igniting the thin silk of her veil and placing a large burning star on the wide onyx head of her hairpin. She watched the apprentices on the second floor for several minutes, fascinated, and then entered the dark hallway of her house next door, shedding her colors in the ever denser shadows. The black car left too, leaving the street empty and melancholic, enlivened only by the few tiny, rust-colored plants that grew between the bricks.
They met a few days later, and there followed a whirlwind of endless delight. The lady with short, slate-colored hair, with points framing her cheeks, with circles under her usually half-closed eyes, with brass bracelets jangling on her arms and even one on an ankle, took them out one evening to the Gorgonzola, a cabaret behind the Şelar, where black men sang in striped suits and hard felt hats. She would leave the two girls at a table to stare at the men blowing trumpets and glittering saxophones and at the people around them, and disappear down a staircase behind a red velvet curtain. A waiter brought the girls something to eat and some champagne, while people around them got up from their tables and crowded onto the dance floor. “Foxtrot!” cried the bass player, and everyone started to do such a ridiculous and wild dance that the sisters, no matter how awed they had been before, lost control of themselves and laughed until they cried. When the dancers went back to their tables, a plump, blond singer in a red dress with a strangely deep voice began to sing a sad, dragging song about a crazy love affair, “as never before on earth,” and the cowardly and cruel abandonment of the young “virgin” by “the man with flashing teeth,” who the virgin would still love “To the tomb of cold marble … To the bosom of God.”
Dizzy with champagne, the girls wept in the ever-thicker green smoke of cigars. Vasilica had just wiped her eyes with the back of her hand when she noticed the drummer smiling at her and winking. Her jaw hung open. She looked again. The black man smiled even wider, showing horse-like teeth between lips that looked made up. Vasilica turned around, but there was only a brown column. From then on, she kept from looking at the six jazzmen at all costs.
They were also brought glasses of a pale, crackling drink. The hall darkened slowly, and then a blue light, like that of a full moon, filled it, making the tinsel stars overhead sparkle and suddenly go out. Music began softly, with violins, and the young peasant girls were enraptured by the ravishing show on the night stage. A spotlight shone on the curtains, hesitantly, like it was looking for something that might be anywhere. The violins burst into swirling passion, and then they slowed, smooth and sweet, as a lady’s shoe appeared in the upper corner of the stage, descending slowly, until a stunning leg emerged inside a purple stocking, followed by a foam of lace. It was a dream woman, in a dress that left her powdered shoulders bare, a white satin dress with rich lace at the hem and a white, fluttering veil, a woman with pink and green cheeks glittering with gold dust. She descended gently from the night, and perched gracefully on the horn of a yellow crescent moon, with her eyes, mouth and chin smiling to lovers throughout the universe. The moon winked long, tangled lashes, and the fairy, whom they later recognized as their neighbor, wearing a curly platinum wig with strands falling past her hips, began to sing a song about Bucharest at night, sprinkled with stars, where the lovers listen, hand in hand, to the laments of gypsy fiddlers in cellar bars, and then go under the carpet of stars to embrace beneath flickering lamps, in piaţas with statues. Some blocks of scenery descended too: the Athenaeum, the Arc de Triomphe, and Mihai Viteazul on horseback, all painted strangely, all loops and spirals, as though they were woven in wrought iron. Silhouettes of young men in frocks and top hats and young ladies with skirts above their knees, with round bottoms and narrow waists, danced slowly among the cardboard buildings, in the chiaroscuro, for the only one glowingly illuminated was the languorous woman stretched along the crescent moon.
At the end of one of the stanzas, leaving the violins to take up the theme in an excess of suffering and languor, the singer stepped from the moon, and with a walk that paraded her wondrous hips, she descended the few steps that separated the stage from the club. She sang the rest of the song moving from table to table, resting a satin-gloved hand on the shoulder of a man and looking him long in the eyes, bringing her mouth toward his until everyone’s heart stopped, then pushing him sharply away and moving to another. One of the black men (the one who was smiling at Vasilica?) came toward Mioara and kissed her gracefully outstretched hand, and as the final chords were played, he walked her toward the stage, releasing her to sit once again on the crescent moon, to rise, pulled by invisible wires, and to disappear beyond the starry sky.
They went home in the Packard, so lightheaded that they were barely able to say goodnight to the singer, giggling and wobbling on high heels they weren’t used to. They stumbled up the stairs and fell asleep with their clothes on, with their two-bit pearl necklaces tangled together, so that the next day at dawn, Maria had to struggle to untangle herself from her sist
er, who was still sound asleep. “Lelică, hey, Lelică,” she said, and shook her, but Vasilica just turned, with her pale, plump arms, to the other side.
Maria was the first to go down to the workshop, to the rows of black machines with their needles, like elaborate buccal mechanisms, glittering in the dirty light. There was an intricate gold leaf filigree on each apparatus. She sat down, put her foot on the pedal, and turned the wheel and rod slightly until the greased needle began to move. It was so thin, and its tip was so sharp! During sleepless nights, she would often imagine she was being pierced by needles – that a long and gently curved tip would penetrate her heart. Then she would rise to her knees and lift one arm across her face, trying to ward off the long needle with the other, screaming with her eyes and lips. But the perverse needle passed through the heel of her hand over her heart, penetrated under her left breast with a quiet pop, passed through her heart, reddened her lungs like two large pinches of wool, and exited through her shoulder blade, pinning her to the headboard. She was fixed, martyred, and unable to escape. She waved her free arm in vain, like a dragonfly in an insect collection. This vision came into her life in the constant torture of working at the sewing machine. She felt increasing revulsion every morning as she approached the venomous vermin, and it was an effort just to survive beside it until dusk fell. That morning, Maria took a shirt collar and slipped it under the nickel sole, then tried to put the needle in motion. The pedal was stuck, and the needle did not want to come down and pierce the material. She turned the wheel by hand, but quickly realized that the mechanism inside the machine was blocked. Usually, when something like this happened, they sent for Nenea Titi, the mechanic, who set to work on the rods, discs, needles and other mysterious pieces of grease-covered metal that filled the curving body of the sewing machine. This time Maria, still feeling the champagne and the spectacles of the night before, opened the little door at the foot of the machine. She had an oil can and a screwdriver, and she hoped she could knock something or squirt a little oil somewhere and solve the problem herself. But when the curved wall opened with a click, she was astonished. And now on the tram, as she tried to look through the trails of rain on the window and see something in the shops that lined the boulevard, glimpsing, through the corner of her eye, a cloudy image of the Greek temple that would mean so much to her life, Maria trembled to recall what she had seen. In the metal window of the sewing machine were throbbing viscera – a kind of kidney, a kind of endocrine gland, flesh and cartilage, veins and arteries and lymphatic canals, ganglia dilating and contracting slowly below dewy blood, nerves branching in fusiform myelin sheaths, hyaline areas and dark areas like clots. It all throbbed and trembled beneath the powerful, audible pounding of an unseen heart. Maria slammed the small door shut and fled, screaming, out of the workshop. She never worked one of those machines again, and for the rest of her life she suffered an overwhelming fear of sewing. Vasilica had to make her dresses, the few there would be, for years after, and during the fittings, kneeling before her with a tape measure, she would always chastise her for not having learned to be a seamstress from Madam Georgescu (where would she be now, if she’s even still alive?) so that at least she’d have a trade.
In the days that followed, Mioara took the girls out for a boat ride in Cişmigiu Park (the driver of her black car rowed, with his sleeves rolled up, smiling at the ladies beneath his waxed mustache), she took them to a store on Cavafii Vechi and bought them trendy dresses and hats, she unbraided their hair herself, then left them in the hands of a master hairdresser, whose curling iron gave them ringlets until they looked like two ridiculous poodles in the salon mirrors, and to cap it off, she reserved for them a permanent table at Gorgonzola, closer to the stage than they had been the first night, and so it was there, for many nights in a row, that the apprentices enjoyed their champagne – sipping a bit more carefully now – and the dazzling numbers on the stage. The drummer, Cedric, would lead Mioara by the arm to their table, politely lifting his stiff hat to the young ladies. The girls looked at him wide-eyed and dumbstruck, as though they had seen Satan himself, but soon, with his eyes rolling and his wound-red mouth smiling, Cedric entertained them so much that from that night on, the girls could hardly wait for the band to go on break and the young man to visit their table. Elegant and charming, with a gold chain on his wrist and shoes with sharp points, Cedric told them stories of the French Quarter in his native New Orleans. He spoke of palm trees and agave, of glowing saxophones that blew in thousands of taverns, of Bourbon Street, where there were Mardi Gras parades each spring, and he described, in detail, the sinister voodoo rituals performed by mobs of black people in the city, casting bloody spells beneath the moon, dressed in masks of parrot feathers. He danced with Vasilica, trying to teach her to foxtrot. The black man danced divinely, moving his joints like a marionette around the poor girl who laughed like a fool in the middle of the dance floor, not daring to take a step. Meanwhile, Mioara took Maria’s hand, and with a strange smile on her lips, she placed her fingers (long and dry, with long, purple-lacquered fingernails) over Maria’s, which were politely resting on the table. The singer had an odd ring on her index finger that Maria, a little embarrassed, couldn’t pull her eyes away from. The loop was not metal, but seemed to be thickly woven from greasy hair, held together by thin spirals of silver wire. It was mammoth hair, Mioara explained. A few years ago, she had met an Austrian who had been to Franz Joseph Land, in the frozen north, where he would have starved to death with his fellow researchers on Siberian shamanism, if he hadn’t found, in a block of ice, an entire, intact mammoth, the meat of which fed them until spring. From the fur, during the fantastical polar nights in their miserable tents, they wove sweaters, blankets and jewelry. Mioara’s ring had a stone from the ivory of the same mammoth, upon which the Austrian had scratched, with a needle, the image of a butterfly, its wings spread and its antennae twisted in two symmetrical spirals. What was strange was that, if you looked more closely, the right wing of the butterfly was drawn with a firm line, while the other was only outlined in points that had turned black with the passing years. As Vasilica and Cedric seemed to have disappeared somewhere (it was long past midnight, couples stood in the thick shadows, at tables, embracing, paying no attention to the illusionist who twirled a fan of playing cards in his hands), Mioara took Maria’s arm, barely touching her, and lifted her from the table into the Bucharest night, flecked here and there by the gold of dim lampposts on Sécession. The singer dismissed her driver, and the two of them went on foot through the echoing, deserted streets, where nothing moved but a cat sneaking under a gate.
They went into Lipscani, by Carada Street, then through the Villa-crosse Passage, entering the Macca gallery. The tinted yellow skylights above, which the daylight turned transparent, now palely reflected the few electric bulbs placed in wrought-iron lanterns. The footsteps of the two women resounded loudly through the tunnel of white, spectral buildings, whose shops on the first floor had their shutters drawn. Rich stucco decorations, masks, gorgons, garlands and Cupids, reliefs and borders framed the upstairs windows. Mioara suddenly stopped under a street lamp and turned to Maria. In the artificial illumination, the singer’s face regained its lunatic appearance, glassy, detached from the world, as it had looked on stage, under the spotlight. Violet marks, green and citron stripes painted her sickly harlequin face, and her wet, sparkling eyes. Her rouged mouth seemed almost black, a soft and sensual flower. She held Maria’s head in her hands, looked in her eyes and, smiling, said she had a little apartment just upstairs, on the second floor. Wouldn’t she like to take a look, on her way home? Maria accepted happily. They entered through a black gate, polished, with a brass house number at eye level. Mioara went first, and gracefully moving the delicious roundness of her behind, climbed a stairway with a metal railing, followed by her young apprentice. A narrow corridor, with only a small sofa and a table with a beaten copper tray, had at its opposite end a single door, locked, with an oval window and pink curta
ins drawn on the other side. Mioara unlocked it, and they went into an alcove that left Maria breathless.
It was like a cabin on a luxury liner, even with a small window, closed with a nickel handle, shimmering behind a curtain embroidered with white birds. The scent of sweet perfume had faded the velvet curtains and bedspread to a bitter cherry hue. The singer moved forward into the jellylike air and pulled the curtains over the image of the yellow house next door. With the click of a lamp in the penumbra, the dark became red. Small Chinese vases and coffee cups lay in a crystal box, inlaid with walnut, with marquetry depicting warmly glittering lilies. Mioara gently lifted the lid of a gramophone and set a disk on the turntable. The chrome arm grated its needle over the black and red disk until they heard a tango that Maria recognized immediately:
When the depths of your eyes I miss
I sip from their dream rays at night
Little stars call me to you in whispers
They hunger for love’s paradise …
There weren’t any chairs, so after Mioara took off her shoes and lay over the bed, crossways, with a bare arm under her head, Maria sat on the bed, too. “Your place is so beautiful,” she whispered, enchanted. On the wall, a black velvet mask peered at her intensely, with hatred in its obliquely cut eyes. The singer lit a cigarette and, looking at the ceiling, where a coquettish glass majolica lamp was barely visible, slowly exhaled the smoke, which mixed with the transparent garlands on the arms of the lamp. Then she rose on one elbow and looked Maria long in the eyes again, hers half closed, as she had beneath the streetlight. The girl felt that nothing else in the world existed outside of this room where the two of them gazed at each other. Her heart suddenly become heavy, without knowing why, and when Mioara reached out her arm, like a pale snake that had a grown woman’s fingers, she suddenly broke into a sweat.
Blinding: Volume 1 Page 14