Then, the door of the only resident of that landing opened, and on its threshold, Herman appeared. But he was changed. His face was not a human face. His hands, holding a spiny mollusk shell as big as a teacup, were not human hands. And he wore only a silk robe, open at the chest, and decorated with the most fantastically alive and slippery drawings, passing into each other, looking at each other, playing with each other, coupling and biting and rending each other. It was a soft, crystal mirror, a prism with folds that reflected the space around it – us kids, the rusty bicycle, the rooftop door – but it deformed each surface anamorphically, filling it with colored sparks of the most tender violet and voluptuous red, the most unforgettable green, the most childish yellow, and heavenly blue and orange, so that, from Jean’s long-eared face stretched in a pleat of the robe, there emerged a stag beetle of ivory and gold, and the beetle’s mandibles were two statuesque naked women, holding cornucopias, watching over a gateway to hell, and each cornucopia, with the next movement of silk, became an agglomeration of viper skulls. Luci became a team of horses with flowering cashmere saddles, and in the middle of the flowers, asps battled unicorns for a priceless gem, and the gem was a planet covered in clouds, whose gaps revealed ponds and craters, and each pond reflected the inhuman face of Herman. I saw myself, too, in a single moment without end (and, in a way, also without beginning), but immediately my pallid and angular face, all eyes, stretched from the middle of pulsating irradiations over the entire vestment, completely covering it, so that Herman was now vested in the flayed skin of my face, wrapped in the long lashes of my eyes, illuminated by the timid strawberry-pink of my lips, punctuated by the black sun of the freckle by my ear, fringed by the vines of hair on my neck. The vision lasted less than a moment, and then shattered into spirals of spirals of spirals, greenish yellowish red, planets of lizards of stars, worlds of worlds, voids of voids, ship-moons, scorpion-cars, brain-vipers, vulva-angels, cloud-islands … Herman was floating. He levitated in the doorway, his neck broken and his face indescribable, and the colors of his horrible, enchanting vestment danced over our faces. We would never have snapped out of that fascination if the elevator hadn’t started again, with an apocalyptic bang. We started suddenly and ran down the stairs, howling as loud as we could, floor after floor, while alarmed neighbors opened their doors as we passed. I don’t know how we got to the ground floor, how we came out of the glass door of the stairway … We didn’t stop until we reached the big sheet-metal gate of the mill fence, where Silvia and Marcela were drawing princesses with colored chalk. Panting, we leaned against the fence, looking up at the top of the apartment block. What if Herman had followed us? But nothing happened. It was time to eat and our mothers, leaning on the balcony rails, called us up. First the girls left, then Luci. Jean went down the alley, and I was left alone, still leaning against the rough concrete fence. What a strange day! And, especially, how … unusual, how different I felt. While running down the stairs, I heard a loud clang behind me and I imagined I lost the pistol, but I could still feel its warm barrel against my stomach. When, at last, I heard my mother’s high voice, I went home and into the bathroom to wash my hands, where I wanted to admire my pistol again. But the pistol wasn’t there anymore, and the hard, hot barrel was made of flesh and came out of my body. It was my little pecker, that I used to go peepee, which now was strangely erect and painful. It all lasted a few minutes, and I didn’t have time to become alarmed before things turned back to normal, for years and years …
Herman is sleeping now, drunk, in my bed, crosshatched with dark. I was barely able to lug him up here. A few hours ago I went out for some air in the dusk as thick as pitch. I slowly crossed the lot full of old refrigerators and upholstery springs and casing wires, and stumbling over them, I saw the precise design of the walnuts in the tree branches against the velvet colors of the sky, urine yellow on the horizon, then pink, and on the opposite side, a deep blue, indigo that the moon whitened … A giant metal construction, like an endless drill rig, with antennae on top, a radio relay probably, gave me a strange desire to climb its narrow vertical ladder, through the protective ring, high up, in the middle of sunset. I passed through twisting neighborhoods, with old houses, massive as galleons, floating in the dusk, their balconies ferrying men in shirts and women in bras, smoking, speaking softly and listening to the crickets. I went down deserted side streets, past shoemakers and watchmakers with their shutters drawn. I went along the cyclopic worksite of the House of the People, avoiding the police patrolman talking about soccer, and I emerged, after a long while, onto the boulevard with movie theaters, already sunk into the dark. Yellow bulbs, every third one lit, transformed the buildings into pale crystals, without any trace of reality. The trees leaned the shadows of their branches over walls with blank windows. I walked slowly, my hands in my pockets, thinking of Cedric and Vasili, The Albino, and Herman, my senseless and endless manuscript, this illegible book, this book … I passed in front of Romarta, looking, as always, toward the cubist attics (superimposed, retreating from each other) of the block across from the Casa Armatei, and wishing I could live there, high up, in the last cube, under the great blue sign for the C. E. C., so that I could go out in the evening onto the little landing in front, lean against the last C, seen by no one, like a Ferragus scorning the metropolis, and contemplate the city, my mysterious and beloved city spread under the Persian carpet of the constellations. On the almost-deserted streets came a wave of warm air that smelled like linden trees. The trolley buses passed, sad like funeral trains, through the University intersection. I followed the line of my thoughts up to the strange, enchanting story of Paul and the Russian circus dwarf, Katarina, who always held her panther cub in her arms, and when I reached Piaţa Rosetti, with its nationalist statue sunk in a tarnished bronze chair, the haunting syllables began to churn in my mind: NO-TO-KO … TO-KO-NO … NO-KO-TO … A nearby maxi-taxi idled with its lights on, without a driver or passengers, docked by the statue like a skiff on the rocky shore of a little island. Collapsed beside the statue, with his back against the bronze plaque, lay a beggar or drunk, one of those who had multiplied in Bucharest in recent years. I don’t know why I crossed the street and entered the little park around the statue. Night had descended like pitch, like in the slums. The bronze statue was almost invisible, and the beggar was a warm spot, a viscous liquid muddying the spectral marble. He cast a fetus-like shadow, with its head pressed unnaturally into its chest, in a perpetual bow, in endless humility. It had been years since I had seen Herman, but every time I did, it seemed like he had always been with me, sometimes curled up inside me like an embryo in a uterus, other times protecting me like a ghost from the folds and corners of the city.
I squatted in front of him and took his face in my palms, pricked by his few days’ beard. My stomach turned over from the nauseating stench of cheap alcohol in his mouth. Nearly fifty years old, Herman was almost bald; white hairs, every which way, surrounded his skull, and his face belonged to a man of suffering, one made for suffering. His crusty, elongated eyes, with tufts of eyebrows above them, opened for a moment, without focusing, like in a faint, lowering their eyelids again and showing only two stripes of cornea, yellow as ivory. Because of the night and the sad moon, the former azure of his irises was now stained by coma and agony. I was barely able to carry him to the 343 bus station, where I had to put him down for half an hour until the bus came to take us close to home. I shoved him into the tired elevator that carried us to the last floor of the old, scarlet block; and look at the old man now, the codger, the great sinner in my bed, shaking and stinking of sweat. A few minutes ago, I stopped writing to open his left fist, where I saw, between his fingers, a crumpled piece of paper. On the cheap paper, torn and torn again, that he must have kept in a dirty pocket full of stuff, something was written in pencil, which at first sight looked like a telephone number. Then I saw it was a mathematical formula. I am writing it here as best as I can make it out, hoping I don’t get one of the signs wrong:
I RECALL that first and only hard-on of my childhood with the perplexity I have always had for the old paintings warehoused in the ponderous gallery of my memory, heaps upon heaps of paintings, with supple lichen flowering in layers thicker than clotted paint, and blind scorpions gnawing the pads of their frames. In Ammon’s horn and the mammillothalamic tract, in the habenular nuclei and the fornix, and beneath the quartz cupola of the encephalon, there are thousands of transparent tubes, through which run paints and oxides and thousands of studios where painters with fifty hands copy, restore, cut out, mix and separate, create pastiches and replicas and duplicates, falsify dates and signatures, project onto the desolate walls of the skull’s yellow bone slides and retroprojections, deformed by the phrenological curves of the brow and temples, the protuberances of imagination and wiliness, of pity and suspicion … There are also museums, well lit and snobby, with square tiles dividing their hall floors into vast chessboards, and festive light fixtures within vaults painted with winding allegories, where the stem of a heavy chandelier flows from the navel of Arrogance. There are official pictures drowned in asphalt, there are limpid wall texts, under glass plates, beside each immense canvas stretched over the immaculate walls … But they are museum-traps, as sweet-smelling as carnivorous plants, where even the visiting public is an illusion painted on the walls and desolate canvases. There everything, but everything is fake, fabricated from one end to the other, hanging from striations and peduncles like rotting fruits. Where should you look and whom should you believe, when you recall other dreams in your dreams, and when in those dreams you remember things that never happened, and other sights flash in your mind when you eat or read a book distractedly, and you take them as the bizarre caprices of an interior demon, when in fact they are the faithful engrams of deeds accomplished when you saw with bigger eyes and thought with a smaller and more rudimentary brain? When, at your desk, where you fill lines of slag left by a dirty ball on a fabric of vegetable fiber, looking at the filigree design of coffee cups, and suddenly the design seems to float in the air, it doubles and deforms strangely, changing into a scene at morning, with a glinting, evanescent sea visible between the pink columns of a geometric temple and palace and when the picture floats minute after minute, transparent, over your office, as though it would melt again like sugar in water – it is impossible to tell where, on the tridimensional, endless cobweb map of your place in the world, you find yourself and your fear and fascination: in the dead-end of Illusion, in the street of Reverie, in the park of Memory, in the bus station of Hallucination, in the borough of Reality … It’s easier to imagine that you have pierced the folded map with a needle, uniting incompatible and disparate places in an incomprehensible trajectory, perpendicular to the paper, hidden, penetrating existence out of nothing into nothing, as we ourselves unite emotional incongruencies with the paradoxical transit of our lives: birth and love, art and madness, happiness and death …
Later, when I was sitting on the cabinet in the bedstead with my feet on the radiator, watching for entire afternoons as Bucharest disappeared, floor by floor, behind the scaffolding and casings of the block across the street, I remembered that first inexplicable tumescence of the unimportant appendix I used to go peepee not as a fact in itself, but as a piece of the entire constellation which also included, with differing levels of probability or fiction, other physiological, psychic or oneiric bizarrities – structures of weakness which doubled, like a ragged batting, the melancholic firmness of my mind. The snow that fell heavily over Ştefan cel Mare (then pot-holed and half as wide as it is today) crosshatched the immense panorama of the city. It reflected the colors of the sky on the earth and sent the greenish phantasms of the mixture of houses and trees onto the sky, colors which repeated on my retinas after I stared, hour after hour, with dilated eyes, blinking as seldom as I could. Sometimes I aimed my gaze at a single snowflake, as soon as it appeared in the upper corner of the window, and I followed its oblique and rapid fall, so that in those seconds I could see all its crystalline, evanescent details and perceive the metamorphosis of its colors, from the dirty gray that enveloped it when I saw it against the milky sky, to the fairy-like white, with the little, tufty halo it acquired against the houses’ roofs, windows, and doors and the dirty drifts on the sides of the road. Toward noon, the sky turned red, and it continued to snow apocalyptically. The shadows of people bound up in coats who crossed the street holding water canisters (the pipes in the apartment block had frozen long ago) blurred, erased by thousands of snowflakes, and when I looked up toward the gray lint falling from the crepuscular expanse, I felt I was at an angle flying toward the heights, my room and all, as though my apartment were a spaceship ejected from the ground. The radiator burned my bare feet, and the room was wrapped in darkness and loneliness. I had finished my homework long ago, and there was so much emptiness and melancholy in my life, so much inability to imagine not only my future, but also the present moment, that my mind, like a vacuum, sucked a weird marrow from the thin bones of my memory. And this fluid, which rose, rotating in my skull like in a drain basin, this metaphysical interferon secreted by each cell, gland, and cartilage of my body’s empire, slowly filled the walnut form of my mind, impregnating itself with the bitterness of its tannin, dissolving my consciousness and, thus ennobled, retreating into the tubes of memory. I went back, back toward the interior. I descended into the heart of my heart, I made myself tiny and thin and moved around my spinal cord, leaving my adolescent body to clang about like an oversized jacket. I went back to my anterior forms, toward the rings of ever more tender growth as I approached the pith. I assumed my form at fifteen, and I left it like a virtual aura for the one I’d had at eleven, then nine, then five, until I curled up in my own stomach like an infant who had my features and eyes. Then, on the depressing, fleshy screen of the winter sky, like my own visual field, hallucinations intertwined so oddly, and in such detail, that they could not be anything but memories pumped through the umbilical cord from the fetus toward the mother, since in the inverted film world of memory, the child gave birth to the mother, moment by moment, and fed her a substance which didn’t end but was secreted ever more abundantly. The me of today englobes the me of yesterday, who encompasses the one from the day before yesterday and so on and so on, until I am only an immense line of Russian dolls buried one in the next, each one pregnant with its predecessor, but still being born from it, emanating from it like a halo, so that the middle is darker and the surfaces more diaphanous, and the glassy surface of my body in this exact moment already reflects the tame light of the one that I will be in an hour, since my astral body is nothing else but the clairvoyant light of the future. From the dark toward the light, from lead to crystal, from crush to levitation, from everything to nothing, the absurd trajectory of our lifetime tapers off, until it ends in a threadbare void. And the I of every moment is connected to the one before through a sturdy umbilical cable, with two arteries and one vein, moving the ineffable erythrocytes of causality. Beside it, a subtle and complicated vascularization, a braid of blue and violet capillaries inextricably connects the Russian dolls to each other in a wooly cocoon, so that the moment of now can branch out, over a period of five years, and another over seven, touching flexible synapses to the heavy eyelids and Buddha smile of one of the millions of children and adolescents that look like me, sucking on their minds, their neck glands or their suprarenal capsules to draw out emotions, chemicals, scenes, ideas, or something else I cannot imagine and do not dare to understand. With some of these brothers of mine (odd brothers, all carrying my name and genetic code, the way that in big families the youngest children wear the eldest’s clothes) I have lost direct contact, while others feed me through tens of thousands of tentacles. In their turn, they feed each other, they ally with each other, and they plot against each other, holding out their hands to each other over the ages in such a dense tangle of relations that they blacken a four-dimensional field – my real being, of which the “I” of thi
s moment is only a spot, a state, an isotope in an infinite series, a meeting of the virtual with the wonder of reality, which, look, just passed. Because, just as some beings who live in a bi-dimensional world see a ball traverse the scene like a point that appears out of nothing, becoming an ever larger disk and shrinking again to a point which disappears, the baroque anatomy of my body reveals and at the same time hides a fourth dimension: time. Take a biopsy of my spinal marrow and you will find a white disk with the pattern of a gray butterfly. Take a biopsy of my real being, the way you would cut down a tree, and you will find the concentric circles of Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea …
I didn’t turn on the light, even after darkness fell, and nothing was left of the entire triptych of the city but the phosphorescent blue of snow on the roofs and the reddish sky, still unexpectedly light, so that the darkness was concentrated in my room, surrounding me in sadness. In the next room the television was on, and my parents made comments and giggled stupidly. Muffled thuds came from the room on the other side, from the next apartment. In nights of excitement and fever, lying on my sheets like a burning statue, I would hear whispers from beyond the wall, squeals and sighs, or it seemed like I heard them, and rising to my knees, I would press myself against the cool gypsum, I would put my ear to it and try, holding my breath, to guess what was going on in there, how they were struggling in bed, in a mass of wet and throbbing organs, a man and a woman, pleasuring each other, their hands touching the skin of each other’s erogenous zones and the spiral hairs of their pubises, nibbling their nipples and ear-lobes. My ear froze and began to sting, and my heart beat so hard that it drowned out other sounds. I writhed like someone being burned alive in a fire, I spread across the wall until the whitewash covered my skin and my pajamas, and I stayed like that for hours on end, a bas-relief of frustration. After I had lost all hope of hearing something real and started to feel palpitations of tiredness, I would throw myself back onto the bed, and fall asleep to dream that a long, narrow panel opened in the wall, right over my bed, and I rolled into the neighbors’ room, where a luscious pale woman pressed against me and offered the menacing spider between her thighs, an actual spider, from the Amazon, big and strong like a crab, which I picked up by the thorax, as big as my hand, and took from the woman’s pubis, which was as flat between her legs as a doll’s. When I turned the spider over, it had a narrow, red wound on its stomach, between its vibrating legs, just like (I remember within the dream) the girls in the waiting room of the Emilia Irza Hospital, where I was admitted when I was five, just before we moved to the block on Ştefan cel Mare. I threw the spider as far away as I could and cleaved to Silvia, trying my hardest to put myself between her thighs, until my drops of semen poured onto her stomach in thin, ivory jets. I stood and, looking around, realized her room was as narrow and round as an alveolus, with its walls lined in black velvet. A metal spiral staircase took me outside, after I climbed up three or four floors. I was on Ştefan cel Mare again, in front of the appliance store windows, magically illuminated in the night.
Blinding: Volume 1 Page 27