Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  THE final component of my treatment was massage. Long after I left the hospital, I continued to do it myself, in the mirror, like a woman worried she’s getting old. I’d put a little talcum powder on my fingers, and start with my forehead, pushing my skin toward my temples and noting, day by day, how, if I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise, the folds in the left part of my brow took a clearer shape (in the hospital they’d been non-existent). I turned next to my eyebrows and the tops of my cheekbones, with the special movements I’d learned from the blind masseur, and then massaged under the cheekbones to the cheeks, where I would push for minutes on end. The cortisone and electricity treatments had stimulated the regeneration of my nerves, but my facial muscle mass recovered almost randomly, so that my face’s symmetry changed – the price I paid to recover basic movement. I spent even more time on my lips and chin, and then ended by massaging my neck, marveling every time at how thin it was and how quickly it reddened under my fingers. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, feeling a benign tension in all of the muscles of my face. An adolescent’s head, pale as death with circles around the eyes, stared back at me from the prison of the mirror. Then I’d fall into bed with a book, and evening would find me reading, as usual, and mad with loneliness.

  But, while I was in the hospital, the facial massage sessions took place in the office of the blind masseur, twice a week; his wide, moist hands alone shaped, like a sculptor, the waxy clay of my face. He emanated cold like an iceberg. I was scared of him the entire time, even though, when I descended into his lair for the first appointment, I realized he was not completely unfamiliar. I had seen him often on Ştefan cel Mare, walking arm in arm with a red-haired woman, violently rouged and painted, wrapped in fox furs. Utterly imposing, with an unusually large face, the blind man displaced the air in front of him as he walked, with that characteristic gait, as though he was resisting someone who pushed him from behind. In his examining room, beside its diminutive furniture and bookcases, dressed in a white shirt that revealed his hairy arms, the masseur was even more impressive. He filled his office the way an enormous statue of an idol gathered the cave around itself. Inside the building, he took off his black glasses, so you saw his closed eyelids, with beautiful lashes, rounded by the dead eyeballs underneath. He had the eyes of a sleeping person, or of someone trying to solve a knotty problem that has no answer.

  I never felt completely relaxed when I went in for the massages. I would always have rather done the rays. In the first place, the office was far from my hallway. It seemed like I had to descend dozens of floors and cross hundreds of empty corridors to get there. At the beginning, I would always get lost and end up in the women’s halls, x-ray rooms, or laboratories, or simply in cold, green halls with no way out. I remember how surprised I was when, opening one of the anonymous white doors at the end of a corridor, I found a bedroom, a boudoir really, with a vanity holding a variety of unguent perfumes and a bed with a teenage girl lying on the sheets, curled up and reading a book with a cherry-red cover. Hearing the door, she jumped up, frightened, and began to scream, looking at me with wide eyes. I saw my reflection for a second in the clear mirror of the vanity: a dreary guy, in a robe and pajamas, standing in the half-open door, just as frightened as the girl. Apart from the strange apparition of this intimate alcove within a hospital and the powerful beauty of the brunette who occupied it, there was, through the window with foaming curtains pulled to one side, a piaţa surrounded by blackened old buildings, with an equestrian monument in the middle that I knew well from the encyclopedia I read – I really read it, I didn’t just look things up – and I had read it often and well from the age of seven: it was the statue of Simón Bolívar from downtown Montevideo …

  Finally I made it to the massage room, which looked just like any other examining room, white and functional. The blind masseur knew me by my voice and invited me to take off my robe and pajama top and sit on a veneered chair in the middle of the room. He stood behind me, like a barber or dentist, and suddenly I felt my head caught by unusually large hands and pressed powerfully against his stomach, which felt like a soft, white wall. The massage could not have gone more than twenty minutes if he’d done it without stopping, and that’s how long it lasted on days when many patients were in line, patients whose footsteps, whispers, and massive men’s growling voices were easily perceptible through the door. When I was the only client, however, his hands might wander over my face for an entire hour, focused, pressing, vibrating and rubbing certain groups of muscles with fingers like a violinist’s, and other times totally distracted, touching just my eyeballs (extremely gently), the corners of my lips, and my jugular, which beat slowly in the warm flesh of my neck. During the first few appointments, the blind man massaged my face in silence, at most tossing out a remark or two that left me at a loss: “Your bones are like crackers. Don’t ever become a boxer.” Then he fell quiet again, and I heard nothing but the grainy swish of the talcum-covered fingers that rubbed my flesh until, I imagined, it became translucid like the cap of a jellyfish and revealed, pure and white, the ivory of my skull, as polished as a stone in a riverbed. The repetition of the same pushing and pulling and trembling fingers, the odd heat of his stomach that almost completely engulfed my head, and the mystical light of blindness that floated in the examination room transported me into a tense and unpleasant state. I was deeply scared, so deeply that I could not recognize it as fear, but more as sadness, as disappointment. The blind. Blindness. Since I was little, I had been tortured by a thought that I tried in vain to communicate to the big people. And it wasn’t just the great quandary that all boys and girls rack their brains about: how children come into the world. To that at least I knew I would not get, as yet, the answer, or I would not get the whole answer, because the adults, united in an impenetrable conspiracy (as though they were initiates of an Eleusinian Mystery, and we, the little, were profane; and really, don’t all mysteries, and maybe all religions, follow the model of this first exclusion? Isn’t sex a kind of immortality to which you gain access through maturity? Doesn’t it divide life into two stages, a larval stage and another, burning in the eternal light of consciousness? Isn’t the child, in comparison with the adult, like the adult in comparison with the angel he will become, through transformation and vestment in praise of the holy body? “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face …”), a conspiracy that did not allow anything to reach our little minds thirsting for truth. I thought then that children appeared out of their mothers’ stomachs at the bottom, or by cutting the belly, the way we think now (mistakenly and madly) that we will see without eyes and hear without ears and sing without lips in the promised new life after the obstetric labor of death. More than the question, “how are children made – and born,” which made grown-ups seal themselves inside a bitter and angry muteness (somehow jealous), saying only, through their teeth: “You couldn’t think of anything better to ask?” other questions nagged me, ones I knew that my parents would not answer, not because I wasn’t supposed to know the answer, or because they didn’t know, but because they couldn’t understand what I wanted, because I couldn’t explain what made me so uneasy. I burst into tears so many times, sitting on the bed behind my mother who, naked to the waist, tapped a fork between the threads of the Persian rug she was working on. I might have asked her what the world would be like if no one lived in it, that is, if no one saw it, but I couldn’t even transform the mounting fear into a thought, let alone a question. I had, in fact, from time to time, had a horrible flash of insight: the world would exist even if no one ever saw it. But then what would it be like? It would have no color, or taste, or texture, or smell … And yet it would be, just as much as the one we see and feel. I looked at the room around me, and I tried to imagine the carpet frame, the bed, the walls, and even my mother, with her curly hair falling between her s
houlder blades and her damp breasts hanging on her chest. I tried to imagine erasing the colors from everything, but somehow keeping the shapes, and I tried to “see” the chunky, desperate gray that would remain, the way that our room would be if no one saw it, a kind of concrete bunker in which you couldn’t distinguish the chair from the cement, or the rug frame from the cement, or the half-woven rug from the cement, or Mamma from the cement, petrified on the edge of her bed. I knew, though, that even this vision was an image, that it was also “seen” with a half-closed mind, they way you squint to see just the essence of a painting. But what if my mind closed all the way, and what if, even more to the point, there had never been an eye or a mind? How would things look where no person had ever stepped? How could they exist, without form or color? Then I would imagine the world, the whole world, everything that existed, as a great darkness, with denser parts and muddier parts where the things used to be – a limitless swamp, with spheres slow dissolving, no light anywhere, no nuance, no sound, only darkness with bigger and smaller muddy parts, thrown in heaps and piles like old furniture in a completely dark workshop.

  This may be the source of my discomfort regarding the blind. When I was small, I imagined they all lived in that swamp, like sinister tadpoles, amphibians with rigid necks that would project their awkward and prudent images onto a sea of multicolored lights, full of sunlight, but inside, in the subcutaneous night, they would project their tentacles and the bizarre sensory organs they used to communicate with other worlds silently, like abyssal fish – worlds of fear, perhaps, and depression. They knew what being was like when no one saw it. They were, furthermore, its agents, its spies, its avant-garde in the blank world. Through their often half-open eyes, through which you could see a puss-filled cornea, death and agony stalked you, the great ataraxia of nothingness. I didn’t know then that the blind, who seemed to all have the same mother and father, are actually diverse, and their blindnesses have a well-developed taxonomy. Later I saw newborns without eyeballs, cased in large cylinders of alcohol. They had no eyelids or eyelashes, and their flat brows, like ivory helmets, extended down to their lips. I heard about those born blind who remained blind all their lives, in spite of the fact that their eyes and their optical nerves were intact, virtually functional; and about those who, on the contrary, had normal development of areas of sight in the occipital husk, but still could not see because of some mysterious atrophy or dysfunction in the optical chiasm or retina; those with cataracts on both eyes or invasions of blood in the vitreous humor; those who had no notion of sight, the way we have no notion of what fish feel with the lateral line or what the ovum feels when the spermatozoid first touches it and the chemical capsule on its tip breaks, instantly making the enormous sun of reproduction opaque; those who have a notion of sight, but only on the left, not the right, without one eye being more damaged than the other; those who see images normally, but are not able to understand what they see; those who have the feeling they are surrounded by deep night and those who still perceive a vague luminescence coming from everywhere; those whose blindness is only the fleshly equivalent of some terrible psychodrama (since between the eyes and the testicles, the globes above and below, between castration and plucking out the eyes, there has always been a sadistic and at the same time redemptive transit); those who see as if they’re looking through a screen, and those who see as if they’re inside a dream … Blindness is ragged and gradated: no one sees in full, and no one is utterly blind. And just as all matter of all worlds came from an infinitely dense and burning point in space, just as all life branched out of the first coacervate in the bubbling ocean, sight has arisen in, and been clarified by, the flesh of animals, sprouting from the first point of chromatin in the body of the first paramecium. Its red dot saw only light, intense and pure, undifferentiated into forms and colors. It is the light that rose through the tubes of generations, separating itself from itself and filling with attributes, like the black thread of the snail’s eye rises through its scaly horn to appear on the tip. And perhaps at the end of the growth of sight, like in the Zen parable about the mountain, we will come again to contemplate, in a different way, pure light, with the body changing suddenly into the brain, and the brain becoming only an eye, and the eye disintegrating suddenly into light … And only then will the great unification take place, not of the four forces into one, but of the eye that sees with the world seen by it, in an eye-world continuum that may be called the All …

  Over time, the masseur became more talkative, and toward the end of my hospital treatment, the ever more occult, more labyrinthine movements of his fingers on my face were accompanied by bizarre stories, neither flesh nor fowl, whispered, insinuating stories as if he were telling them to himself, as if he expected me to answer – the completion of a phrase left hanging, the flash of recognition at an allusion that for me was utterly obscure … When I entered his office and he recognized my voice (later he probably knew my footsteps, too, or other sounds: who knows, the swish of my clothes, the way I turned the doorknob or knocked) his unmoving face changed to the smile of an enormous Buddha. An odd crease appeared between his eyebrows, as if a bud were struggling to break through, an ocular bud, a seeing mole. He moved behind me, and, executing his ritual, he adorned it with eccentric myths that have stayed alive in my memory. At first, his stories did not have a completely unusual atmosphere, even though it was a little embarrassing that the blind man suddenly shared intimate things with a boy he didn’t know, things that were surely painful for him. Yet he did it with detachment and a kind of half-scientific interest, half self-deprecation that made the revelations bearable, like a few splashes of lemon over the fat spine of the fish on a platter.

  Before going blind, he had worked with “the blue-eyed boys.” I didn’t know the expression then, so I asked, “Where?” to which he responded teasingly, “Eh, the guys with stars on their shoulders,” and continued to describe his professional life only in this kind of paraphrase, to the extent that, in the end, in my ingenuous mind of the time, the working-class child whose parents didn’t talk about politics at home, there formed a jumbled-up, fairy-tale image, where I saw the masseur in the middle of a kind of angelic hall of superhumans, all tall and blond, with shining azure eyes … I imagined them naked, statuesque, really white as marble, until their eyes became unsettling and haunting in their Hellenic faces. Their shoulders were decorated with glowing constellations, forming zodiac signs as clear as the decals on glasses. “The happy boys,” as the blind man also called them, could be Cancers, Scorpios, Capricorns, or Virgos, depending on their rank in the hierarchy. They moved among us but were unseen, they heard everything we said, even in the privacy of our homes, and still no one guessed where they held their mysterious meetings, in what network of underground highwaymen’s tunnels … If they were all azure-eyed, it was because their blood itself was azure, like that of gods and spiders. Incorruptible and distant, a race of masters from other areas of the Cosmos, these “boys” (a sign of their ritual virginity), with an unshakable and enigmatic happiness, had interfered somehow, from times immemorial (which went back, according to some rumors, to old king Burebista: because it was certain that Dekeneu, his great priest, due to the heights of the sacred mountain where he lived, had a blue fluid in his veins, with a strong smell of cyanide, blood much better suited to absorbing the scarce oxygen of those heights and transporting it through the systems and mechanisms of his astral body) in the political structures of humanity. More than ever in recent decades, their domination became complete, triumphant. Of a higher rank than the angels, these super-watchers, from their aerial palaces, aimed eagle-gazes over the ant hills that the workers of the earth raised in their cluelessness, and they unleashed themselves from time to time over frightened hoards, snatching mortals toward the sky. No one could penetrate their ways or understand their thoughts. Two men slept in one bed: the one was taken, and the other left; two women were grinding together, one was taken, and the other left. The vultures came i
n droves to the place where the cadaver lay.

  I had this vision while the masseur, whose speech was neither fish nor fowl, pressed my eyelids with his talcum-covered fingers, as though he wanted to open my eyes. “The accident” that made him blind, five years before, removed him forever from that glorious sect. Naturally, those ranks would not admit any being with a deformity, anyone who would disrupt their perfection. The masseur went blind because he had seen too much, he said, and I drew the conclusion that destiny had reserved certain unpleasantness for these privileged beings. The quantity of information that they could receive was limited, and if they consumed their ration before death, they went blind or deaf or insensible for the rest of the years they had to live. Angels fallen into the concrete marsh of streets, metros, and fish markets, dragged the secret of their blue blood with them to their graves.