Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  For ten years, The Albino bought up whole streets in the French Quarter: bars, jazz clubs, restaurants where crawfish were prepared in eighty ways, with ten varieties of Béarnaise, bordellos and Mardi Gras souvenir shops, tobacconists and palm-shaded residences … Fashion boutiques and barges in the port and prostitutes with branded buttocks now wore his insignia: a calligraphic M with a certain imperial refinement, barely distinguishable within a spiderweb of volutes. This same sumptuous M, as though in precious stones, was engraved into the side window of his black Packard, chauffeured by an Indonesian who brought him to and from the Monsú.

  When The Albino entered one afternoon through the place’s hinged, crystal door, protected from the waves of rain that crashed onto the sidewalk by the black umbrella of his chauffeur, who was soaked instantly by the clouds breaking over New Orleans, the doorman, a prematurely gray black man in a purple livery, kept his eyes on his master’s face, forgetting his words of greeting as much as his customary bow. That cost him his job, and, at dusk, he enriched the alligator feed in the Louisiana swamp. But how could the poor man not stare, when he saw that, alongside his master’s flat, African nostrils, the wart, always dark brown and big as a pea, had become suddenly, overnight, raspberry-colored, clear and bright as a giant sturgeon’s egg. Red, pearly veins, like roots, started at the shining bead (where something throbbed like a wadded-up embryo), spread across the bridge of his nose and under the taut skin of his cheeks, and continued to grow in the days and weeks that followed, enveloping him in a web of capillaries, even in the pupils of his eyes, his gums, and the entirety of his lingual mucous. In The Albino’s eyeballs, the doctor with the silver saucer on his forehead saw, hanging from the fibrous peduncle, a kind of crustacean slowly moving its feathered antennae and odd masticatory apparatuses in the vitreous fluid. Pains like unimaginable atrocities of war accompanied this spread of the bizarre parasite through the body of Monsieur Monsú. Blind and racked with spasms, as though he had tetanus, the owner of twenty-five percent of the French Quarter was been abandoned by his doctors after months of torture, and left to scream like someone being skinned alive. He lay naked on his bed in his ivy-covered house in the select north-city neighborhood, watched over by two frightened nuns from the Catholic Mission. The pearl beside his nostril had grown as big as a grape, and in its hyaline shell were vague webs of blood. The wiry lines, flexible and absorbent, spread under his skin everywhere, to his fingers and testicles and toes, and wrapped them in networks, like tangles of hair.

  This is how Fra Armando found him when he arrived in his familiar Cabriolet to give him last rites. The nuns had decided to do their duty to the end, although nobody in the city could have said what god The Albino might worship. The priest, called in such haste that he still had, between his gold-crowned molars and the flabby wall of his cheek, a little, bloody wad of bread, climbed the colonial building’s stairs two at a time. On the landing, he spit the bread into a polished spittoon in the curve of the wood-carved staircase, where the paneling made of four precious woods met a large painting, an imitation of Degas’ dancer tying her shoes. That morning, he had taken part in a shamanic ceremony, in which he had healed a dying man by sucking the illness from his body and presenting it to him in the form of a ball of bread filled with blood. He had just put the revolting maple wood mask back on its hook and was preparing a second group of feathers in his jaw when Sister Fevronia called him to the phone. Now the Friar, who mysteriously had avoided meeting The Albino before this moment, was seized by an illuminated nervousness. The spectrum of belief in New Orleans – which, in the somber penumbra of his room, he had often imagined as a marvelous, multicolor orchid, its petals separate yet united in the sacred ovarian globe – had contracted, suffered fires and mutations, regressions and metastic developments, since the arrival of Monsieur Monsú. Heresies and crimes, conversions and sudden apostasy, apparently spread in seemingly ordinary statistical patterns – these proved something else to the one who sensed the religious ferment of his community in every pore. On the edge of the field of prismatic forces, a great glacial continent had suddenly appeared – a black iceberg, foreign and irreducible, over which, as in Ezekiel’s vision, The Albino reigned, sweating black flames and shrouded to the waist in a metal resembling chrysolite.

  When he entered the room, the priest encountered the large, milk-white, starched sails that covered the nuns’ heads. Fevronia was as beautiful as a sculpture in porcelain, and just as fragile. Her brown eyes were like two glassy shells, wide apart and staring into space. Caterina was taller and prim, with azure eyes. When you saw them coming down the path, framed by agaves and enormous cacti and the Louisiana sky, her whitewashed face looked like a mask, and it seemed the same triumphant sky around her face also shone through her eyeholes. Now, though, their eyes looked at the floor, because Monsieur Monsú had died. “Too late, Friar,” whispered Caterina, “you are too late.” But a sensation of power, like a sunrise, grew inside the priest, along with a soulful impatience. The Friar suddenly felt that a god resided within him. “Out,” he said quietly to the nuns, who slid away and shut the door in its mahogany frame. A chorus of angels, sculpted on the back of the door, turned their round mouths and pious eyes toward the sky.

  A whistling silence vibrated the crystal chandelier in the stairway for over an hour. The nuns, seated together on a plush bench near the door, looked through the window at the back of the next house, loaded with purple clusters of Japanese lilac. It was a tense, mental silence. There were currents of silence freezing the air in the hallways, just like those sometimes emitted by the ocean, at a frequency of eight cycles per second, which irritate the hypothalamus unbearably and make entire crews of sailors hurl themselves into the sea, leaving their sponge-covered vessels drifting, sails mangled by the winds, prow and stern paced only by seagulls … In the end, after she had knocked several times in vain, Mother Fevronia was bold enough to open the door a tiny crack. She peered into the vast bedroom and yanked the door closed again, in terror. She was overcome by an uncontrollable shaking in her hips and collapsed onto her sister, who held her in her arms. Mother Fevronia never told anyone what she had seen, but in her dreams she saw them again and again, for months on end, the two men in the great bed under a cashmere canopy: Monsieur Monsú lying on his back, his arms crossed and his eyes rolled into his head, and above him, with his body on the other body, with his arms on those arms, his legs on those legs, his eyes on those eyes, his mouth against that mouth, Fra Armando making a continuous, inhuman sound, through his nostrils, and glowing in the dark, with faint needles of light.

  In New Orleans, dusk is violent and translucent, the clouds turning to rags of flame over the termite-eaten wooden buildings. Above the clouds, in a Diesis of rays, in a glory and wonder that overwhelm the soul, you can see, with some frequency, visions of the Trinity surrounded by winged creatures, the seraphim, cherubim and angioletti of faith, or indecipherable allegorical scenes, as if the entire sky, ablaze with twilight, was a ceiling painted by a colossus, who drew the crepuscular light through the round window of the sun. Precisely this kind of vesperal cataclysm now arched over the city, changing the waters of the river into blood, when, after hours and hours of tense quiet, Fra Armando emerged from the death or bedchamber of The Albino. The nuns flinched violently and jumped to their feet (having completely forgotten what they’d heard and why they were waiting), and stared at the man in his violet cassock, ashen-faced and red-eyed. Exhaustion had turned the flesh of his face almost transparent, exposing his bare skeleton, and the bald skull in the middle of his tonsure showed the gently pulsing circumvolutions of his brain. The Friar threw himself onto the bench, leaning his back against the fabric walls. “He will live,” he said to himself, in a quiet voice, “I gave him another ten years.” Then he continued, more slowly: “How many I lost, God only knows.”

  While the sisters went into the sleeping chamber, the priest rose, trembling, and moved toward the stairs. He descended into a deserted s
treet. He walked like an automaton over the sonorous sidewalk, his cassock snagging the wide, fleshy ornamental plants, dogs barking at him from the yards, until he came to Canal Street and saw, alongside the high, stone buildings of the central business district, the waters of the Mississippi crowded with ships. The old streetlights came on, whose gas from another age had not been replaced with electric bulbs. Elbowed by the black people and the flock of promenading civil servants, the Friar went to the riverfront and stood before its unimaginable width. On the far-off bank he could just see Lilliputian houses, with their dozens of windows sparkling madly. Resting his elbows on a wooden rail, he eagerly breathed in the cool, salty air. It took a few minutes for Fra Armando to notice how odd the southward rushing waters looked. The twilight-colored river had turned to blood. The Friar followed the dizzying rush of lenticular red cells, the size of loaves of bread, the amoeba-like gliding of the white cells, transparent enough to show their darkened nuclei, the snaking spiral worms that must have been malaria germs, the unusual fluorescence of lymph, the currents of glucose and protein. Fascinated and deathly tired, the Friar suddenly sensed that everything was alive, that everything lives, and that the universe does not at all operate like clockwork. Instead, it is a malleable architecture like the human body, a temple of skin, a basilica of scratches, a cenotaph of snot, with no right angles or durable materials, where the person creates his dreams, thoughts, and illusions, his time and his language like a cell secretes a hair or the crystal horn of a nail. And still, the least important cell in the universal body receives, through angel hormones and neural visions, the imperious commandments of God.

  Less than a week later, Monsieur Monsú reappeared at his place on Fuck Street, as even then they had started to call Bourbon. The filaments of the jellyfish that had invaded his body were gone, leaving almost unnoticeable lines on his skin, like the flowers and Art Nouveau ornaments that decorated stone buildings uptown, while the wart beside his nostril remained forever limpid and raspberry, with something inside, like a fish embryo floating in an egg, occasionally twitching its virtual tail. At night, however, the Packard would take him to the edge of town, to the lacustrine cottage of Fra Armando, in the middle of the endless swamp. The immense limousine, with chrome hubcaps and its chauffeur rigid in his place at the wheel, sat the entire night among pools of water that reflected the heaps of stars overhead, between carnivorous plants with sticky seeds and human-like tongues, until the windows turned bonbon pink, and daylight, with its gray-yellow fringe, poured over Louisiana. The lamp in the cottage never went out. Sometimes a silhouette of a man in a cassock, or a suit and lavalier, appeared at the window nearest the little bridge. Odd people of different races, hunchbacked and crippled, crossed once every few nights along the sole access to the house perched on stilts, besieged above and below by stars. One of these people might piss from the narrow deck, extendedly, black as pitch against the yellow of the dawn, splashing glittering drops of amber into the lily pond. The stench of urine hovered over the cottage, combining strangely with effluvia of myrrh and incense.

  At about that time, the rumor of a demonic plot filtered into the city, first through the ebony-skinned women who sold mangos and avocados in the market, then penetrating, by way of the servants and maids, all of the neighborhoods and social strata. This plot was much stranger and more frightening than voodoo rites. It was a conspiracy between the Teacher of Justice and the Evil Priest capable of shaking the powers of heaven. Allegories as complicated as hopscotch, childishly transparent allusions wrapped in fear and hysteria, and unprovable lies layered in embellishments all took shape like a mirage mirrored in the sky over the colonial city. No one dared to follow his finger along the tangled designs of fantasy to their mundane origin, everyone talked about the fetid (assuming the spirit had nasal passages) cesspool of the cottage on the lake, everyone talked about the perverse meeting of the world’s two halves, Light and Dark, into a Gnostic globe that far exceeded critical mass, everyone moaned to imagine the devastating explosion to come. In a vacant lot full of garbage, they found a human skeleton with each bone a different color (or so claimed the seamstresses whispering into the ears of petticoated ladies). A flea-ridden stray dog was said to have given birth to two puppies, then a blue glass ball, and then two more puppies. It was said that a mulatta woke up one morning with her fingernails and toenails grown a cubit in length and curved like scythes, so that she crawled out of bed buck naked and walked on all fours like a beast, until her mother strangled her with her apron. For almost ten years, on the northern cotton fields and in basements filled with whiskey vapors (after ’33, stills were legal, and the gangster era entered its decline), people would gather – standing or squatting, smoking or downing drinks – around someone who brought news of Those Who Know, the new sect that had begun to spread through the city, following the networks of restaurants, bordellos, and obscene stores of The Albino. Those Who Know could have been anyone, whores or stevedores, high school teachers or train mechanics, so that you might sodomize the fat ass of a prostitute and have no idea what terrible sacrilege you had committed, or you might listen to the blabbering of a short, bald Figaro as his razor wandered over your soapy cheek, without knowing what amazing power his ruddy skull contained. Those Who Know were not marked by any outward sign, and thus the terror and mystery increased; each person suspected the next. The terrible part, people said, was that the old refuges of those besieged by evil – holiness, and the good and moral life – had allied themselves for the first time with the shadows, so that they might inextricably bind the world in a spider web of neither good nor evil, neither ecstasy nor horror, neither everything altogether nor the void, but Something Else, something inhuman, undemonic and undivine, incomprehensible and impalpable. It was said that they were plotting a Change. The vomiting, ejaculating, bleeding, speaking, pissing, breathing through pinched nostrils, salivating, defecating, suppurating or thinking or imagining, in any case the transpiring of a new world, or an Anti-world, or better put, something lacking both existence and a name. A new vibration, from a new instrument, spread from the cottage on stilts where the priest of all beliefs and the monster of all perversions met, night after night. Miracles that looked nothing like miracles, with neither rhyme nor reason, following an Anti-plan that might have been crafted by the frontal lobes of the cosmos, or in any case not from the middle of the skull’s walnut – an Anti-plan that blossomed, if not quite in reality, at least in the effluvia of rumors and fables. It was said that little girls in a tenement by the river had dolls that grew, each one of them, beneath their ordinary canvas dresses, hairy, living vulvae, flesh and skin, anuses and navels. The ring of a respectable matron, who fanned herself on the balcony of her house, tightened suddenly like a sphincter, severing her finger completely and then rolling into a pot of begonias. At dawn, on February 4, 1932, hundreds of people supposedly saw the old east-side cement factory that had been demolished three decades earlier, enthroned over the city on an evanescent foundation of clouds. An old Indian woman was supposed to have defecated a tapeworm with dragonfly eyes and hundreds of wriggling legs, which then scampered away, into the forest, dragging its pouches of egg sacs.

  The police frequently stormed the priest’s cottage. They turned it upside-down and interrogated the two inhabitants, binding them in the complicated webbing of the lie detector. They found nothing suspicious, supposedly, but who would vouch on his life for the police? Those Who Know, with their infallible strategies, had surely infiltrated the forensics brigades. The file on the “Change,” thousands of pages long, matched, point by point, Breton’s Surrealist manifesto, published ten years earlier: “L’homme, ce rêveur définitif …” Two young officers, who took turns leading the police literary circle and were poets themselves, one in the style of Auden, the other an e. e. cummings, were put at the disposition of W. W. Schrinke, the well-known psychoanalyst, and they studied the city’s rumors, complaints, and depositions for six months with the feeling, as one of them
later said, that they were fishing in the sewers, through rotting rats, bloody bandages, and newspapers with fecal matter … The latent content of this enormous collective dream, the outline, tattered and symmetrical like a fish skeleton, began to appear, through the opercula and scales of hallucination, toward the beginning of the fifth month: during the night of the fifth-sixth of April, 1936, there would be a ritual reconciliation of Light and Dark, the two powers that struggled for supremacy within the mad labyrinth of history and the human body. In the course of the ritual, there would be a death and a rebirth. The newborn being would be beyond good and evil, thus able to penetrate the unknown beyond the tegument of our world, but the tremendous energy required to move beyond illusion would come from an abominable murder. So this was what the police were supposed to stop, the police who took no more account of metaphysics and religion than the dirt on a fingernail. They had a few years to work, during which they would watch the lake house night and day, interfere with The Albino’s clandestine dealings, and above all, try to discover the intended victim in time. The report from Professor Schrinke stated (or “divined”) that the victim would be someone very young, with black skin.