Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  The next day, my clothes were brought back, and my pajamas, balled up, sour-smelling, stayed on the floor, like an anatomical specimen on a slide. The nurse took me by the hand, under the hostile gazes of Carla and Bambina, who did not want to say good-bye as the large blond woman asked, and we walked again, together, through the sinuous corridors and the frozen stairways, until we reached the waiting room with the plaster model of the skinned man. My parents again went into the next room, to talk to an unseen doctor, so I was alone in the olive air, listening to the sound of my footsteps on the square floor tiles. I approached, as I had the week before, the armless and legless statue, half a person with painted yellow skin, hair like a black hat and one coin-like brown nipple, and half a nightmarish monster, made of blood-red muscular fibers, knotted blue veins, and the tips of ivory bones. Through a hole in his cranial cavity, above the skeleton of his face, you could see his brain. No martyr had ever suffered so much, or been so savagely and scientifically tortured. On each detachable organ, held by nails to the next, there were small numbers written in an ancient hand, seconded by a table on the wall with knowledgeable explanations, which for me were nothing but thorny decorations. I stood still in front of the tragic sculpture, its gaze lost in its spherical eye, held up by orbital muscles like hands raising an offering. The blue, porcelain eye had a brown glass iris, where a fragment of light flashed. Leaning my head far back, since I was only waist-high to the man skinned alive, I contemplated the sinister foreshortening, the same way I had stared at the field of ink-colored flowers, until in my self-hypnosis, self-forgetting, the statue’s trepidacious extermination of being became suddenly pregnant and luminous, its contours irradiated by hesitant stripes of gold. And then, only then, I realized the man was screaming – hoarse, unending, in wild glissandi, coughing out pieces of larynx and bloody strands of tracheal mucous. He screamed like a hyena, like a stray dog being beaten to death, like someone being boiled in oil, like a woman giving birth to a bat. His body was gripped by unbelievable convulsions. Bloody stumps reached toward the ceiling, stained by squirting arteries. I started to howl in terror along with him. We howled together, we writhed together, and in my little brain with soft bones the scream turned a blinding yellow, apocalyptic, pulsating, unbearable. I screamed with my hands on my ears and my entire body, through the narrow tunnel of my throat and my buccal cavities, became a howl, it dressed my howling body in a howling anatomy, so that I didn’t howl, but the howl howled me, I was the one that ran through the vocal cords of my howl, wounded by my glottis and epiglottis, flowing down my tongue, narrowing myself to pass through my howling lips.

  This is how my parents found me, balled up on the square tiles, at the feet of a plaster model, screaming as hard as I could. I kept screaming, my nose running and tears wetting my face and neck, until we left the hospital door, through the yellow leaves and cobwebs. We waited a long time for the tram in a lonely station. I kept sighing, and my cheeks did not dry until I saw the red tram coming, rocking on its rails, like a tired beetle.

  MAYBE, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling … Last night, with all of my strength sucked dry, I fell asleep between my flaccid sheets and lay like a corpse frozen on a field, in an utter lack of existence that made death seem like a pointless agitation, until I reacquired, for the first time in three or four years, my state of nocturnal “revelation” (in fact, I’ve never found the right name for it, and the one I use here seems to serve only inasmuch as it is weak and unmarked, because, in addition, in the limitless insanity of my “essential” dream – and here, more than ever, the word “my” should be in quotation marks – it doesn’t “reveal” anything to me, except, perhaps, revelation itself: it reveals to me the fact that in this opaque, dense world, murderous as a pillow that someone holds over your face, kneeling mercilessly on your chest to stop your writhing, revelation is possible. Like a porous flaw in the hard ivory that surrounds your interior cistern of living light, a pore gnawed out by a swarm of termites, a tunnel can suddenly open for your vision, illuminated from within by an undying fire, while you rotate unquiet, in dreams and visions, around and around the Enigma. But what can you understand if, sliding through the tunnel at a terrible speed, you feel your eyes burnt to a crisp and your ears torn by flames, your tongue liquefied and bubbling, your skin scorched like the rinds of trees, your nasal mucous digested by incineration? In the spooling sheets of ash, in the carbonic rose, what of you remains after you meet the living you, what can have a revelation, what can follow the melting? It is the center of the rose of our death, because there in the center of our carbonized body, among the petals of char that were our liver and brain and lungs, held together, like an abominable blossom, there among the scrubbed granules of our molars, between the matchsticks of our bones burnt white, there is still something, and that something is everything. When the tunnel turns straight and the flames from the oven’s mouth lick it, melting the glassy walls, when you speed fantastically fast directly toward the blindness beyond blindness, toward the deafness that makes deafness seem like the wailing of a slaughterhouse, when the protuberances of fire that burn fire like kindling lap against the black rose, its petals (kidneys and vertebrae, theorems and desires, theories and gods) lift off and ignite again, tumbling back down, and in the middle of the middle of the middle of the cup of the rose, an indestructible quartz sphere appears, that can penetrate the architecture of the tongues of flame, in the hierarchies of wasteland. In the center of the cistern of fire, reflecting the fire, it becomes itself the generator of living power, and so it was at the beginning, since you can never experience an enigma if you weren’t the one who made it.

  This is the “dream” I have tried to describe over many pages, and that I had for the first time at the age of sixteen, right or almost right after I got out of Colentina Hospital. Since then, it has replayed itself, in various variations, with details added and elements subtracted, possibly twenty times in these fourteen years. At the start, it came disturbingly often, maybe once a month (while I was feverishly searching through neurological treatises to diagnose myself), then the intervals extended and everything seemed to be on the way toward “healing,” with time. Last night’s dream, the result, perhaps, of yesterday’s pages (when I was detailing the vision of the plaster model screaming and spouting blood, I felt something much like insanity), followed the pattern of all the ones before and was no less devastating, even though it had been two years since the last time. As usual, accompanying the eruption of the revelatory dream – but what veil was moved away? on the contrary, the veils lay on top of each other, thicker and thicker, until their thickness, around the fragile egg of your dura mater, a celestial turban with the diamond of Shiva on the brow, becomes enormous, filling the entire cosmos (finite, but without limits, where imaginary time follows space in all its directions) with an impenetrable batting – my oneiric activity intensified considerably, along with waking states in which my self was suppressed. Monsters teemed under my eyelids as I curled up in bed and closed my eyes. Rotted skulls, indescribable faces, and terrible whispers in my ears tortured me until morning, when, so often, I woke up completely paralyzed and couldn’t make even the smallest gesture for minutes on end, even though my mind tried desperately to command, firmly, to believe, not to doubt. It was as though I had ordered a mountain to hurl itself into the sea.

  And then the night came when, after I was finally able to fall asleep, it seemed that I rose, still wrapped in my sheets like a mummy. It awakened no suspicions when I saw myself from above, from the ceiling, as if twin entities from my consciousness had decoupled and moved several meters apart, one of them crossing (by what osmosis? by what tunnel-effect?) the metaphysical skin around my encephalon that separated the inside from the outside. The room was dimly lit in a gently rotating olive light. Although everything was in its proper place (see, the English notebook is open on the table, as I left it the night before, and my pants on the
back of the chair were on the carpet in my dream, just as I would find them the next day in reality), there was a lunatic mist in the room’s air, as though I had slept poorly or I’d awoken in a world identical in every detail to our own, but reconstituted (too faithfully, in a way that was too nuanced) on a strange planet, for incomprehensible ends. And suddenly I began to hear the sound. It seemed like it had always existed, but it had evolved over millennia far below the threshold of my perception. It had amplified, starting from an almost absolute silence, seeking my ears (or maybe the zone of my temporal lobes, found at the interface of vibration and sensation) like an arrow finding its target, and in the end, amplifying billions of times from its original point, it slid through the great audile gate of my mind. The sound, that began as small and inoffensive as the buzz of a tiny fly, almost inaudible, oscillated like a siren, but on a frequency all its own and with a certain glissando that gave it an almost-tactile velvetiness, as though your fingers softly rubbed a petunia’s soft, fibrous petals.

  In just a few seconds, the sound gained corporality and became yellow. It twisted into my brain like a corkscrew, ever more powerful, oscillating up-down, up-down faster and faster, rising asymptotically from audible to loud, surpassing the thresholds of acceptability, then tolerability, until it transformed into a howl of gold. I felt that the amplification would never end, and a destructive hysteria, a terror synchronized with the mad growth of the sound, encompassed me, mastered me, and substituted itself for me, against all of my efforts to maintain my identity. The sound had exceeded my ears’ capacity to hear, maybe dissolved them into flame, when the second part of my dream unleashed itself. I was knocked down violently by invisible hands, dragged out of my bed, sheets and all, and thrown against the furniture on the opposite wall. In other iterations, the abuse did not stop here. I was carried, with an ever increasing speed, through strange rooms, on tunnel-like roads covered by trees, reaching infinite speed, while the tongues of flames of the former sound burned my body. They exploded my head and spread me out triumphantly through all of space, through all of time, through all being, until being itself burned and the bubbling fire took its place, thickening, multiplying, concentrating, and endlessly amplifying. Howl of fire, falling and rising a billion times a second, my howl and God’s, my terror and triumph, horror beyond horror, happiness a billion times exceeding happiness …

  I found myself again in my bed, and it seemed I was awake. The green room pulled into itself, and rotated the same lunatic light. It seemed tears had dried on my cheeks. I got up and went to look for my mother. Dawn was breaking. I walked down the halls and through the rooms of our home, still lost in the twilight. The doors opened before me by themselves, letting me enter, slowly and steadily, three rooms in turn. When the living-room door opened, I saw the dawn sun in the window, small and red, without shining, rising over the Dâmboviţa mill. On the ravished sofa my parents were sleeping, Mamma with her head completely beneath the sheet, curled up, so that she seemed oddly small, and my father on his back, with the buttons of his wrinkled pajamas undone and wearing a sleeping cap, made of a knotted woman’s stocking, to keep his hair back. I walked closer and looked at my mother with a strange intensity. Almost immediately, I actually woke up, and I remained for a bit in a state of complete confusion, like I had the night before. Then I did some little, absurd things. I went to the bathroom, and after I looked at myself in the mirror a while, without a single thought, I began to cut my fingernails. Or I screwed and unscrewed the cap of the rubbing alcohol. My scalp burned all over, as though it were covered with an incandescent metal web. I walked mechanically back to my bed, where I fell right asleep again and vegetated for a few hours without dreams, until dawn came.

  During one of my dream-wanderings through twilit rooms, on reaching the living room, I was surprised that my mother was no longer sleeping in the sofa bed. Only my father was there, with his face turned toward the wall, wearing just an undershirt and breathing steadily. Frustration and disquiet woke me immediately. When morning came and my mother came back with the milk, she told me, black with anger, that “this father of yours” had gone out again with his newspaper buddies to celebrate someone-or-other. Mamma had made such fuss over the expense that she slept in the little room, leaving my father to sleep alone … The dream, therefore, involved a kind of bizarre clairvoyance, as though in a way I could touch reality – even if it was outside my body – through dark rooms.

  It all began in the late fall of 1973, when I was caught in a bad, freezing rain while coming back from some workshop classes. My uniform was drenched immediately and water ran through my hair, under my collar, zigzagging over the naked flesh of my spine and spreading over my back. The view from number 5 was desolate in any case, but beneath the steady rain, all the houses and the sky looked like they were made from clay and pitch. The leaves stuck, dead, to the tram’s sides and windshield, rotted in puddles, and caught on the hunched shoulders of a crazy baba who leaned against a fence, spread her legs, and urinated along with the rain. When I got home, I took a hot bath and I soaked with the water over my ears, listening to the curiously clear sounds coming from the neighbors – voices, barking, a washing machine humming – until the heat almost made me sick. Afterwards, for the entire evening, one after the next, I emphatically recited works of poets I had discovered, one after the next. The latest poet always seeming like the greatest, the only one touched by genius, the only one. The emotions of my declamation – in a low voice, still, since I was afraid my parents would tease me, even though they usually were lounging like the dead in the blue aura of the living-room television – passed all measure. On the edge of my bed, book in hand, I whistled, hooted, and barked the verses, contorting the muscles of my face trance-like until they started to hurt, and, like the peribuccal sphincter of trumpet players, they even went numb for a bit. Each line had to be experienced with absolute intensity, since each line brought new meaning, an interior light to my pathetic life in my room with dim bulbs and old furniture. When I recited these poems, looking in my own eyes in the mirror and grimacing (I thought) desperately, prophetically, purely, or passionately, it seemed my interior chemistry changed: my hair rose up, not just on my head and arms but even on my thighs, my eyes widened, the acne that covered my forehead lit up across my pale skin … I sweated profusely, soaking my pajamas, which always had broken buttons. I could not stay still. I was encompassed in exaltation. I went to the panoramic window, where stitches of rain fell over Bucharest, to recite:

  Girl like a lizard,

  Asleep on the slate,

  Throw yourself in the river

  Your life to escape

  Across the way, Nenea Căţelu’s dogs were huddled like black rags in the rain. The crucified figures on neon pillars between the tram rails, each with his crown of thorns, raised their bloody faces toward the sky lapping up the November rain. The rails carried only service cars, with a kind of yellow gallows on the back platform, metal, with a hoist. I sat on the top of the bedstead and propped my bare feet on the burning elements of the radiator, which they had already turned on for testing. I stayed like that until it was completely dark and the city, like in an illustration in an old children’s book, was blotted out delicately under the silver clouds and moon. Only neon signs, flashing on and off in the distance like phosphorescent deep-water fish, broke the nightfall with their indistinct green, azure, and purple letters. As I had done since childhood, when a sign went out I closed my eyes, counted to seven or eleven, and when I opened them again, I saw the same sign again, lit. In this way I could keep it lit endlessly, leaping over the night’s emptiness, because the dark space that remained after the rectangle or circle of light went out on the top of the blocks downtown became suddenly much blacker than the rest of the nocturnal panorama. I didn’t turn on the light in my room, and I stayed like that until two in the morning, watching the dark through the sparking blue window, feeling like a cave animal, with transparent flesh and no eyes, touching the walls wi
th the thin tips of my tactile organs.

  That night, as I fell asleep, the mask of my face felt heavy, like bronze, from so much effort and contortion. I woke up the next day pale and dizzy. As I brushed my teeth I realized, without yet understanding, that in fact, there really was something unusual: the cold water I used to wash was running out of my mouth, even though my lips were pressed together: a muscle in the upper one, on the left side, had gone soft, powerless and a little twitchy. It was odd, and almost funny. “What the hell?” I said to myself, and I sipped some more water into my mouth, trying as hard as I could to keep it in. But the harder I tried to control my lips and cheeks, the more strongly the twisting, turbulent stream squirted from the lax dam of my upper lip. I walked out of the bathroom and, for about an hour, I piddled around, trying to avoid thinking about that peculiarity that, I hoped, would gradually pass, like a twitch or a fluttering eyelid. But the anomaly stubbornly persisted. I realized I could no longer whistle, and my lip, for about a centimeter, was covered with bestial puffiness, soft like a snail’s flesh. Not even then was I scared, but I showed my mother (just back from the piaţa, weighted down with enormous shopping bags) what had happened to me, smiling naïvely, as though she was going to praise my soon-to-be-demonstrated dexterity. But Mamma was scared, she clamped her hand to her mouth like a peasant and let out a highly aspirated “aaoleo!” We left quickly for the Emergency Hospital. It was Saturday, and there was no one in the waiting room. It smelled like rubber and antibiotics. Finally, a middle-aged doctor came, who examined me and made a snap diagnosis that turned out to be correct: facial palsy, probably peripheral, sinister, additionally named “a frigore,” since the nerve that activated the musculature of half my face was broken, at the ear, from excessive cold. The frozen rain that had fallen on my head a day before had done me in. Hospitalization was demanded, in the neurology ward, to begin treatment as soon as possible, and so the doctor, after she joked and chatted with me a little, wrote an admittance to Colentina Hospital, where I arrived that same afternoon.