Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  In the large neurology ward in Section IV of the hospital on Ştefan cel Mare – a few yellowed and crumbling buildings with their prows and sterns pointed with glassed-in verandas, so that they looked like Spanish galleons anchored side by side in a sparkling cove – there might have been thirty beds. Their population, although homogenized by scarlet gowns, full of thin spots, red spots, and ironing scorch marks, rapidly diversified for me, as I got to know the other patients, each with his own illness, personality, and story. Since I wasn’t examined until Monday morning, I had enough time to follow, on the one hand, the progressive extension of paralysis over my face, encircling, as slow as a minute hand, the commissure of the mouth, cheek muscle, left cheek bone, and eyelid (which I was unable to close, for three full months, without using my finger), until my face – and this showed most when I laughed – came to resemble a sinister harlequin; and on the other hand, to become part of the small group of younger people, the “kindergarten,” as Doctor Zlătescu and her assistants called us, the guys with whom later, for an entire month, I would sit at the veranda table and play endless games of 21 for matchsticks. The others I knew less well: I remember a former doctor who had MS, who always sat, dreaming, on the top of his bed. If you approached him, he would reach into his pocket and take out a black and white photo showing a heteroclite group of people, whose names, relatives, and other details were always changing. There was a person who had been hit on the head with a crowbar during some “incidents with Hungarians” at the border, during some historic moment I could never place; a man with Parkinson’s, drugged with L-DOPA as much as he could take; a bartender from the Intercontinental who wore women’s underpants, with satin ribbons; and an antipathetic person, extremely fat, always stinking of sweat and suffering (terribly) from Reiter’s syndrome: he thought his own teeth were conspiring against him and he could not keep himself from chewing his tongue and cheeks. I also remember an old man, at least eighty, completely decrepit, called Mr. Ionescu, who would brag that “before the Communists” he had written reports in The Universe about serious social problems in Romania: “We flogged them, we did, we flogged them without mercy! We were the terror of the political press, we were! Bucşescu could come to me, and Vosganian, and Lacheris, even Samurcaş came to my office once, and they’d fall to their knees, they did, and they’d give me millions, just not to write about their shady deals! Cockroaches, evil, spiders of the regime of corruption, that’s what we called them, we did! And I’d throw their millions right back in their faces!” The old man, completely bald, with what looked like varicose veins on his scalp, wide, beastly eyes, and toothless jaws always chomping, caught his breath and began again with the same senile vehemence, spitting on us while he raged: “They sent women to corrupt me, courtesans, call girls … They came to my office, to the newspaper, you can’t imagine who came: look here, I had Debora Zilberştain on my lap, and Angelica Ducote (the one from the Oteleşanu Beer Garden), and Mioara Mironescu from the Biscuit (no no, the Gorgonzola), and that Vetuţa that Eftimiu used to visit for her carnaval de Venice … All of them came, they did, I had all of them, but I still wrote my stuff, rascals the lot of them! When they heard Ionescu, they thought Satan, they did!” The old man had known “like my own pockets” Camil Petrescu, Homer Patrulius (“the only one who was a genius, he was; Lovinescu would say: ‘You’re a genius, my good Patrulius, you’re a genius!’ ”), Minulescu, Corduneanu … Occasionally, the nurse interrupted him to stick a syringe needle in his buttocks, with the same indifference as if she were injecting a corpse, or to delicately take his glans between her fingers and insert the pink snake of the probe, the only way Mr. Ionescu had left to urinate … Finally, from somewhere, some corner of my memory, appears a tall guy, fragile and pale, like a species of green lobster, always sitting at the window and looking into the distance. He suffered, I believe, from an unusual acromegaly. I didn’t notice him until everyone did, one visiting day, when a woman came accompanied by a ten- or twelve-year-old girl. The endlessly tall man suddenly sprang to life, approached the girl like a ghost, took her aside, and gesticulating like a necromancer, talked to her about half an hour. “Don’t forget to dream,” he shouted with his dull, squawking voice, when the mother and the girl left the ward.

  But I had too little to do with these guys. At night, some curled up and whimpered irritatingly, and others ground their teeth to make you shudder. Those close to me (literally, since our “kindergarten” was bed by bed near the entry doors) were different. Near my bed, separated from me by a nightstand, was a suffering, deformed shoemaker about fifty-five years old, whose skull, with skin the color of feces, emerged directly from a misshapen trunk. It looked like two children’s heads, one in back and one in front, were forcing themselves up through his flannel pajamas. In addition to this hideousness, the hunched man had been struck by hemiplegia right in his miniscule shoe shop. He was the only one in the hall who was completely helpless, unable to sit up in bed, and the target of everyone’s hatred, since he made the room smell terrible at least once a day, when one of the nurses put “the pot” under him, and after a period of time, took it away again, wrapped in dirty paper. The poor man was so embarrassed, he begged the ground to open up and take him in. I talked many times to this Leopardi tortured by melancholy. Evenings I took off his old watch, with its calcified face and khaki canvas band, to close it in his “drier,” and in the morning I would buckle it to his wrist again. This man of pain had deep folds between his eyebrows. Only visits from his family cheered him up a little: an oligophrenic woman, who had had an operation on her head, in front, where a blue scar, crossed with stitches, arched up until it entered her hair, and a normal girl, his great pride. Three quarters of the time he spoke only of her, how well she studied, how she played …

  One morning, while a doctor was making rounds, Mr. Paul, the shoemaker, found he couldn’t talk: he babbled, he didn’t find his words, and his face turned purple the way the embarrassing organs hold blood. A terrible fear consumed him. The doctor tried to calm him down, but the deformed man’s mouth suddenly gaped open toward the ceiling (what was with his teeth that they looked so unusual? a deformed bridge? tartar deposits on each tooth, forming cameos of religious scenes, gardens of forking paths?) and loosed sharp howls, silly sounding, like a fox caught in a trap. He screamed like this and writhed as much as his hemiphlegia would allow, with his face flushed and tears running over his temples, until they tranquilized him. Toward evening he cheered up again and laughed happily. He had thought that, on top of deformity, on top of paralysis, God had also smitten him with babbling. This had driven him out of his mind: “What would Smârdan’s damn kids say if I came back from the hospital babbling?” But there was no reason to fear. To my right was a zit-faced dick, with an Oltenean horse-face, a poorly dressed jackass of a soccer player. He had arrived just the day before I did. After a fall on the pitch, blood had started to come out of his ear. He woke up one night with a red pillow. Hair cut straight, small round eyes, a mouth without lips and ubiquitous acne gave him the classic look of a “no-gooder” from old films with crusaders and chastity belts. He was under observation, like the good-looking and well-raised young man next to him, who, with a completely normal medical record, went to sleep one night and couldn’t be awoken for eight days, at which point he opened his eyes, happy and hungry. Since then more than a month had passed, his brain was explored in I don’t know how many rounds, and the EEG came back normal every time. “Nobody knows what I have,” he told everyone, proudly. I discussed literature with him, I enthusiastically recited Tzara and Vornca, and he talked to me about Mandiargues and Beckett. He liked to make me laugh, since then (as my illness progressed) the right half of my face came to life, the corner of my mouth rose happily toward my ear, my eye narrowed and flashed, while, like the unseen face of the moon, the left side stared like stone, hieratic and mysterious. “It’s like you’re both Riga Crypto and Enigel the Laplander!” Also around age 17 or 18 was the only epileptic in th
e hall, a big country boy, with long, hanging ears and bloodshot eyes. While I was there, he only had one attack, but it was violent and terrible: he fell suddenly, howling like he was being impaled, into the space between the rows of beds, and his clonic movements began right away. A doctor came quickly and pushed his hands hard against the boy’s mouth and nose until the convulsions became less intense, and the large body in blue pajamas became inert on the floor. But until then, no one was scared. On the contrary, he was entertaining us with pointless, childish stories, lost in details, about ghosts coming out of the pond and children who could tell the future. The soccer player, the narcoleptic (named George, I think), the epileptic, and I were the “kindergarten,” and we spent all our time together, usually playing cards, at the end of a bed or on the terrace, telling jokes and spying on the nurses. In the last week of my stay, they added a kid of about ten, who had a burning desire to be operated on, for a reason that will surprise you: after an appendicitis they had taken out his tonsils and some polyps, and now he was faking (so the doctor thought) acute pains in his stomach. If there was so much as talk of an operation, his little pecker would instantly harden, which made the soccer player roll on his bed with laugher. Of course the ass took care to “get him up” twenty times a day, describing, in great detail, silly dissections, resections, and trepanning and pretending that he was salivating from pleasure. But the boy saved himself from all the teasing with his unusual gift for cards. He trounced us, over and over again, at 21. He won dozens of boxes of matchsticks. His miraculous intuition told him when to stop at 14 or 15, or, on the contrary, to take a hit when he had 19 or even 20.

  My medicine was cortisone-based. Thus, I was not allowed to eat salty food, but they thought maybe I would enjoy the terrible salt substitute on every table on the balcony, potassium chloride. I was also given some vitamins, but, thank God, no shots. The treatment the doctor prescribed, from the first day she saw me, after the nurse examined me all over (not including my pajama bottoms, as I hoped and feared, because I had seen that one of the examination rubrics was “genital appearance” – but there the nurse had written, ex officio, “normal”) she scratched a key over the sole of my foot, put drops in my eyes and checked my other reflexes with a rubber hammer. The examination excited me to an unexpected degree. The nurses, one blond and plump, the other red-haired, wore white gowns that were easy to see through, especially when they leaned over, showing their panties and, when they wore them, their bras. Every day I ascertained (and discussed with my friends) the color and design – circles and flowers – of their intimate lingerie. Between their buttons, the gowns, ironed like paper, sometimes gaped to show the roundness of their breasts and, if you were lucky, even the circle of a nipple. Since I was 16 and my hormones were first in line as blood irrigated my brain, I had no trouble imagining that I would have both of them, that they would come to my bed one after the other, on some night colored by moans and gnashing teeth. There was also a third nurse, “the saint,” as the deformed man always called her, a girl with a thin, pale face, almost without a body, in any case without feminine attributes, who floated quietly among the ill, doing the most revolting tasks (pushing the catheter into a patient’s urethra, reducing a rectal prolapse, carrying the chamber pots) without her face showing that grimace of disgust and scorn found on the other two. After this first examination, the doctor set my diagnosis, treatment, and even a reasonably ambiguous prognosis, saying, apparently as a joke: “Now don’t go thinking we can make a toothless baba into a marriageable girl …”

  The weather outside was miserable, it rained hard and stupidly, the few trees that could be seen through the veranda windows only had a few yellow leaves on their branches, and the alleyways were black, wet, and foggy. In the evenings I read, most of the time, especially after eating. Twice a week I “took the rays” and twice, on different days, I got a massage, since it was part of the treatment. In the meantime, my facial paralysis had become total. Being a “nice” and typical case, I was often visited by medical students doing a rotation in our hall, in groups of 7 or 8, surrounding a bed and trying to make a diagnosis. “Look at his face,” the professor would say to them, after they closed in around me. There were cute girls and guys in short-sleeved doctor’s shirts. “Is it symmetrical or asymmetrical?” “Asymmetrical,” most of them shouted, but with a disapproving glance from the bearded one, the others shouted louder: “Symmetrical! Symmetrical!” “Now, laugh, my boy,” the professor added, and I complied, like a trained monkey. “Asymmetrical,” they all hooted triumphantly. Next, they put drops in my eyes, straining to spot I don’t know what reaction. Once the professor left, I knew I would have some quiet. The short-sleeved guys slapped the girls on the butt, they went on the veranda to smoke, they joked and talked without paying any attention to the sick people in cherry-red gowns or pajamas with washed-out stripes, with a rough texture like sheepskin.

  When I took the rays, I went down two floors, through vast, cold hallways that felt as sinister as a morgue. Each had two or three vinyl benches where hardly anyone ever sat. A public telephone hung on the wall, where a frail patient in a robe with circles like a kimono was talking. I went into a dark hallway, lined with blue oxygen tanks. I caught foggy images from the hell of intensive care out of the corner of my eye, through the slit between rubber paper curtains, and finally, I reached the narrow examination room loaded with electrical devices. Even I could recognize how bizarre and ridiculous these boxes with ebony buttons and dials were. They were held together with beefy bolts, like on a tank. Inside the dials moved needles shaped like arrows, down to their little tails, and the letters and symbols were written in ink, in an old hand. It was like the warehouse of some television repair store, where you tripped over cables and wires, where countless metal jacks awaited plugs with ordinary plastic caps, where panels with potentiometers and voltmeters looked like tram controls. I would sit on a chair in front of each one in turn, and the doctor, usually buried in a copy of Sport when I arrived, came, looking like a skeptical magician, to place two Vaseline-covered electrodes on my temples, which he then stuck fast to my skin with leucoplast gum. Then he turned an ebony button to a certain level and went back to his corner, lost behind the pages of athletic classifications and commentaries. I was left with an hour of waiting and anxiety. The Vaseline popped slightly when the electrical current passed through, as though it were bubbling in a boil. With my eyes closed, I imagined how the electron fluid traversed my scalp, burrowing into my skull bone and perforating the sheets of thick, vaulted parchment that wrapped my brain. Next, it sunk into the complicated and analgesic marrow, exploring its circuits and structures, favoring the emissions of neurotransmitters, stimulating glial cells, waking the princesses sleeping in alcoves of mystery, proliferating the ragged claws of crabs and beetles scuttling in the basements, and vibrating the quartz globes in kaolin halls vaster than the mind itself. Violated, humiliated, but at the same time greased with a strange myrrh in the irrigation of its veins, my brain slowly unfurled its twisted legs, blossoming like a land of milk and honey, watered by a carnivorous Jordan. I descended into the karst, excavated by streams of violet current. I explored tragic, grand structures, propelled toward their heights – abstruse palaces glowing in the sun, their pointed peaks flying weathervanes made of masses of neurons, their checkered halls with floors teeming with moist, transparent animals, whirlpools of colored information, and balls of serpents braided around jade spools. I crossed the swamp of axons on skiffs of iridium, I hacked away dendrites and tentacles with a machete, I faced dangerous hurricanes of nightmares, I dared to meet the eyes of heavenly emissaries, until, in the end, through fogs of blue, I spotted the liminal space I so long had hoped for, the cochlea of the opposite ear rising from the temporal cliff like an enormous Ferris wheel. Then, in a daze, I would open my eyelids: the hour had passed. The technician ripped off the leucoplast and removed the electrodes, leaving my temples glistening. After every appointment for the rays, I spent the fo
llowing afternoon staring at nothing, dreaming without dreaming of anything, meditating without a thought, but feeling my life was as expansive and pure as an enormous summer sky. I would respond to my friends if they asked me something, eat if it was time to, but I was not there, and I felt strongly I was not from there, that the colored forms around me, like the ironwork of voices, and the deceit-work of autumn clouds, although identical to those from my world (and exactly because they were identical) were nothing more than a vast and shabby stage set. I looked at everything, without fixing my gaze anywhere. My eyes moved in different directions, the right and left phantoms parted, slowly, from each other, and the world doubled and melted into a kind of fine mist, brownish-red, and then gold, until only the gold was left, like on an icon, shaking in the cold and emptiness … Then images of the ward came back, but without shape or sense, like the baroque fabric design that I used to gaze at as a child, on afternoons when they forced me to sleep. I would stare, with my face to the wall, at the back of the sofa, the floral patterns of its cloth. I followed all the twists and forks as though they were under a magnifying glass, and I observed each shift of nuance of color, until I knew the material as did perhaps only the one who had made it, but without knowing why I knew it, why my mind recreated that piece of fabric, why it glowed anew, in three dimensions, in the center of my visual field, with every thread and every colored millimeter visible in a radiant light. Images where you do not exist are horrible, images that anyone could see and graft onto your mind, your flesh … In the end, after hours and hours of nothing, I came back to my own feelings. I rediscovered my endocrine glands and my skin, my history and my values, my pajamas and my playing cards. I laughed again, with half of my face, at George’s jokes, and at night, before sleeping, I pictured the asses of the two nurses, and in my mind I took them from behind, again and again, under my warm and damp sheets. In the morning, I buckled the cripple’s watch back onto his hand, and then the doctor and assistants came. Time reproduced itself with the placidity of an inferior invertebrate, three-quarters full of eggs …