Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  If he hadn’t been one of the hierarchs of the “Secu Monastery,” their enigmatic meeting hall, whose name suggested dryness and askesis of the spirit, the blind man would have ended up making hairbrushes, like the vast majority of those who lose their sight. The position of masseur at Colentina was created especially for him. It was well paid and close to home. His beautiful wife, who always dressed like an opera diva, brought him to work and picked him up every day, proudly braving the gazes of those who passed on the sidewalk along the hospital fence where bindweed grew. The blind man, with his chest out, seemed to oppose the trek as much as he could, as though he were being dragged toward the gallows by a pitiless guard. Something he said, one of the phrases he let snow gently and continuously over my head in his ragged talkativeness, made me pay special attention: “I don’t know if I am in this room because I went blind, or if I went blind because I was meant to be here …” His strokes paused for a moment. He touched the dusty skin of my face, and continued his chatter, describing the funereal process of his blinding. The beginning of his story would have been atrocious and shocking if the same tone from the tips of his lips (gently amused, as though he were talking about someone else) hadn’t emptied the vessels of his words, leaving them as airy as the rooms of a paper palace.

  He had come home in the evening, after a day of listening (probably the listening that monks do in their cells, I translated) and entered the hallway of the block where he lived. The light bulb there, like all bulbs in all block stairwells, had been stolen, so thick stripes of velvet darkness had settled on the side by the elevator. From there, some guys leapt out, drugged him and took him, in a car, probably, to another part of the city. When he came to, he was in the center of an enormous hall, under a great vault like a basilica, maybe thousands of meters above. He was tied to a crystal chair, in the center of a checkered floor that extended as far as he could see, like an open field, with white and red squares crowding toward the edges, where they came together in a single line of fog. The air was gelatinous and frozen, crossed by oblique columns of light from round skylights here and there that perforated the gigantic semispherical vault. He sat, perhaps for days, fearfully following the movement of the spots of light over the floor tiles, which were polished like mirrors. The spots of light darkened into scarlet, the air vaporized from the endless hall, darkness fell, and then, inching upwards, the outflow of dawn began. At the edge of sight and straight in front of him, he thought some points were moving, barely perceptibly. For several days, the points advanced and grew, little by little, taking hours upon hours to cross one spot of light, entering the penumbra again, hours upon hours later, until, one morning, the man bound to the sparkling chair perceived, only a few hundred meters away, a disorderly column of men in white, stiff, vestments, which fell over their bodies not in graceful folds, but in sharp angles, like exoskeletons.

  “Soon,” the blind man said, “the forty or so officiants of some Mystery formed a semicircle of rustling robes around me. They held incomprehensible and dreadful tools, the mere sight of which produced waves of sweat on my skin. Only one was empty-handed. On the ephod held at his shoulders by silver chains, there was a shining quartz box. Inside the box was visible a human tooth, with long roots, emanating a pale aura. The irritated-looking priest wore a steel miter on his head, with extended pipes that perforated his skull.

  “The indictment – since, judging by the solemn and threatening expression of their insect faces, this is what it had to be – lasted for hours on end, until night fell in the giant sphere. Now the only light, like phosphorus, came from the complicated pliers, screws, and scalpels in the priests’ hands, and from the tooth in the crystal box. The words they shouted at my face, splattering me with saliva – now their Hierarch alone, now all in chorus, now one or another in a moment of inspiration – were signs scratched into my tympanum by an unknown language. Finally they crowded around me and put their hands on my head and shoulders. Their clothes, threaded with gold wires, smelled sharp and verminous. The Hierarch placed an iron circle on my head, tightened it with screws, and hung its mechanical peduncles in front of my eyes. Those small clamps took my eyelids, and with fine adjustments of the screws, they were pulled apart from each other until they began to hurt, tear, and bleed. My eyeballs remained wide, lacking defense, and I had already begun to guess the monstrous torment to come. Copper nails, reddened in fire, would pierce the fragile eggs within their sockets below my brow.

  “Yet, that was not to be. The priests moved to one side of me, perhaps behind the crystal throne. A single voice, thin as thread, wove a sonorous tapestry in the cold gelatin of the hall, while an enormous eyelid began to slowly unstick from half the horizon and let a crescent of blinding light into the hall, like the blade of a golden scythe. I yelped like an animal, because that light was not light, but the light of a world of light, it was not a ghostly, white fire, but the fire of a world of fire and calcination. While my eyes, transparent as opals, died in inexpressible pains and voluptuousness, the skin of my naked body began to see. I saw with my chest and my arms, beyond the oven that the eyelid had slowly opened, forms and ghosts, slippages and contractions that were not of this universe. I knew, while I howled and tried to break my bonds, that I was inside an eyeball, that my own life was a miniscule speck of dust in the vitreous humor of an eye – of what god? of which giant Atlas? – and that this eye had now opened onto a world of a higher order. I had been stolen from the cerebral structures generating the dream of this being that kneaded our world in its sleep. I had been carried through the chiasm and the optic nerve, passed through the polychrome carpet of its retina and forced to look, from the middle of the crystalline ball, at a world that was blinding, blinding … The eyelid rose higher. The light from beyond light struck me like a monstrous column descending through the pupil, the hall filled with the unbearable color of blindness, and in the height of those pains, compared to which a simple pierced eyeball would have been a heavenly balm, a kind of voice, or a kind of calligraphic design on my seeing flesh told me the strange myth of Those Who Know, their global conspiracy, which spread as much in space as time (as one of the leaders of the secret services, I had a vague awareness of this – because all these services, sects, and cabals are connected, like networks of neurons), their self-rending toward heavens and hells in the inhuman effort to penetrate reality.

  “I was blinded so that the ways of the Lord would show in me. I would be, from now on, chosen for atrocity – but also for prophecy – by an unknown force, so strong in comparison that the dark power of the blue-eyed boys is a degenerate caricature and a deformed metaphor. I would wait here, in my office, like a spider in the middle of its sparkling trap of hardened saliva, for the one able to recognize me, the one who would point his finger toward my eyelids, to touch them with his healing fingernail, to burst the bursting and blind the blindness of my eyes. He would be – they told me through that tattoo of speaking light when I cried out, crucified on the crystal chair – an adolescent with bones as thin as a birds’. I have been waiting for him for years, not just to restore my sight, because what more is there to see after the images I have seen, but to see Him, the one, he that will be sent, the Sent One, who, being already there, is here at the same time. Meanwhile, I have passed through all the bolgia of blindness: the trepidatious snuffing out of space; the expansion, like what bats enjoy, of the sonorous dominion, with landscapes of sounds; the hallucinations of the invented faces of those I talked to, in the most vibrant colors, fluorescent and electric, but the faces of acromegalics, Cyclopes, scalped beings, satyrs, grubs, skulls, and chameleons; the marble fears, when you feel that someone is coming toward you from all sides at once; the voices that give orders, to you by name, to cut your own throat … And, at the end of the end, the bottomless pit of the mole, the deep blindness …”

  The masseur pushed my head more and more into his puffy stomach, like he wanted to somehow incorporate me there, into an impossible oval uterus. My face burned
as though it had been torn off, and when I looked in the mirror that same day, right when I came back from the massage, I saw that my face was completely red and drawn, as though I had suddenly lost several pounds. It’s true that from that day on, I observed a small improvement of my peribuccal and orbicular muscles. Inexplicably, they came back under my will. But I didn’t care at that moment about the excoriated skin of my face, nor the signs of better health, because in the massage office, after the large fingers caressing me like butterfly wings had fluttered for the last time over my face, something wonderful and terrible happened to me. I put my pajama top over my shoulders again, and turned toward the masseur to thank him, as always, before leaving. I saw him filling the room, an iceberg as blind and as white as snow, a white and blind whale that smelled of silence. In front of him, face to face, I felt like a secret admirer, drained from fasting, shaken by the crystal elephantine monster. “You are Mircea,” he whispered then, barely audible. Then he opened two large, brown eyes, luminous, unspeakably human inside that head of ice.

  A FEW months after the tanks of the Warsaw Pact entered Czechoslovakia, Romanian Securitate Department V received a series of new assignments, some of which contradicted best practice protocols and had never before been proposed, and were set at the highest levels of state secrecy. In this period, ordinary people’s children (both boys and girls) were kidnapped, blood was transported in the innertubes of military vehicles, underground buildings (nuclear command posts? bunkers? fallout shelters?) were constructed, and ultramodern linotype presses appeared, protected by reinforced walls in houses that, from the outside, seemed abandoned or inhabited by gypsies. At the Fundeni Hospital, a clinic that looked like a laboratory from outer space performed complicated plastic surgeries on citizens whose physiological, statural, or vocal resemblance to the chief of state had been detected. These citizens, now identical to the national hero, were recorded as killed in a car accident, and their funerals were arranged.

  The extravagance and spy-novel mystery of these missions, the absolute power accorded to those who actually executed the horrors – doctors, police, factory workers, and priests – and the fact that they became more and more honored by the party and state apparatuses (at their party meetings, even members of the Executive Policy Office would attend) provoked profound changes in the psychology of the Securitate officers. Most officers were part of a new generation, which had grown up during the war and matured after the wave of atrocities in the 1950s had passed. Often you would hear them talk about “the old guys” like they were drunks and idiots, vulgar brutes who stomped on their victims with disgusting, sweaty feet, in chambers that stank like stables. The older colleagues in the trade, ever more marginalized, still looked like country boys whose uniforms would never stay in place. They could barely sign their own names, but when they met “for a little nip,” they bored the jejune “dandies” (as they, with impatience and hatred, labeled the newly arrived) with the same old fables about hunting enemies of the people around Făgăraşi. The gypsy Belate Alexandru, who had become the hero of the Securitate brigades and was lauded in the poems of writer-comrades, was insulted all the worse in these fairy tales: “Belate? Well let me tell you what happened with Belate. He died like the fool he was, on his feet, like he’d been ordered to, and they just had to tip him over, the crow. Comrade poet had things a little backwards in that poem they put on the coffin:

  Cut down cowardly from behind

  Inert lay now the nation’s boast

  Belate! be in our hearts enshrined

  … And his cigarette fell, one quarter smoked.”

  When they heard about Belate and the Canal enemies, who, of course, “ended up drinking their own piss,” the young officers felt uneasy. They would never have dirtied their hands with crimes like those. In impeccable suits smelling of lavender, they toured the bookstores in search of fashionable reading. They paid each other visits, with their wives, having only a little coffee and a cognac (not sticking their guests at the table and drugging them with soups). Evenings, they gathered at the Select or Boehme … They had all spent their teen years dreaming of being what now, would you look at that, they really were. They all had passionately read At Midnight a Star Will Fall and The End of the Ghost Spy, identifying with the plainclothes officers, all without stain or blemish, Major Frunză and Captain Lucian, for example, who (the quintessence of both Hercule Poirot and the Hercules of myth) ended up solving enigmatic cases and catching the imperialist spies or war criminals returning to the country under false identities. “Who are you, mister Pietraru?” they dreamed of finally asking, at the end when the disarmed sunglasses-clad spy collapsed in his chair. “Isn’t it true that beneath this borrowed name hides Horst Müller, officer of the SS?” At which, before anyone could stop him, the man would bite down on the cyanide capsule hidden in his shirt collar …

  No, the Securitate was no longer the old Siguranţa of the bourgeois-landowner regime, whose commissars were satirized in so many films, or even the Securitate that operated under Dej and Drăghici, with its camps and German Shepherds. It had become a modern institution, a corps of technicians from the ranks of the university, and it had a special social role, something almost messianic. The nation was industrializing, the Romanian miracle was on everyone’s lips in the West, and the annual growth of GNP was among the greatest in the world. The new Party leader was young, nonconformist, and admirably courageous toward the Russians. The joke was that he was like someone driving a car who signals left and goes right. Signs of prosperity – foreign-made cigarettes and liquor, full cafeterias, refrigerators and televisions for everyone, the chance that, if you ate bread and yoghurt for five years, you could flaunt a new car in front of your neighbors, a Dacia or even a Skoda or for the lucky a Wartburg (and why not a Fiat 600, at the end of the day?) – appeared in cities and villages everywhere. Political arrests halted, and some old communist leaders were rehabilitated. It seemed at the time that the only outlet for the elite corps of plainclothes Securitate officers would be industrial espionage. At any moment, in spite of the population’s growing social and patriotic consciousness, you could imagine that a bum on the beach talking to a foreigner would sell Romanian research secrets for a fistful of green money.

  It became clear soon after the events of ’68 that things weren’t actually quite that way. It’s true that some colleagues of Lieutenant-Major Ion Stănilă, who meditated on all of this in a kind of somnolent reverie in his office in Dristor, on the second floor of a middle-class house with no sign, were still occupied with the surveillance of research laboratories: weapons at Tohan and Sibiu, chemicals at Turnu-Severin, something unclear but top secret in Apuseni, plus the routine industrial sites around Bucharest. Every day, they put on white coats and pretended to be scientists, working with minimal specialized knowledge from short courses of chemistry, physics, or metallurgy. Some of them, after years and years in research, came to understand their work pretty well and made something of a name for themselves in science. More envied were those who were sent to the West, our network of Securitate diplomats enwebbing the embassies and those who worked there. Lord, what a thought: to live in the West for years and years, sometimes decades, and save hard currency in the bank! Some, the best ones, infiltrated strategic points in the most disparate fields, under false identities and with proper paperwork. They lived there, got married, had kids, and no one ever knew their true identities. What would it be like, thought the lieutenant-major with fear and fascination, to be stuck in the ribs of a hostile world, to blend in until you almost had forgotten your own name and mission, to do your job and raise your kids in the culture of that place, to make friends and go to games and go out for drinks, when the whole time you are there with them, you are also extremely far away, a pseudopod, a peduncle of another world, voracious and merciless? How would you be reactivated, after years of dormancy, parasitism, and mimicry? What would it be like to suddenly receive the code word, to have it rise within you – suddenly, under t
he dull face that you wear of a mediocre engineer, inside your eyes that are bored with your obese wife – the demon of another empire? How would it feel to be possessed, not to belong to yourself, to be the glove into which, from time to time, an iron hand slides?

  Distractedly regarding the reflection of his face in the Comrade’s portrait on his desk, Ion Stănilă admitted, in his heart, that he would not be capable of something like that. Secret agents were heroes whom he raised to superhuman heights. But as for himself … it was enough he had gotten this far. The rest of his family was still in the country. His brother had had such a hard time in ’58, when collectivization left him hobbled with a bad hip and a twisted hand, that he would have been begging at the church door if Ion hadn’t found him a job in the garage. So now Luca washes under the car with the hose, brings the mechanics cigarettes and bread buns, what can you do … Since his family had turned in the horses and been left with the cart in the barn (they had been to Măgureni last summer and been sad to see the way the beautiful landscapes of blue serenas and red flowers were flayed off of the rubber-tire cart), it looked like the whole family had gone senile. Ion always had to intervene at the mayor’s, the People’s Guidance, to ask that the authorities not take the vinery away … And here he was, an officer in the Securitate, with a big salary, success on every side, living in a house with calcio-vecchio and an interior stairway, and more importantly, with a woman who made everyone’s mouth water when they went out to a restaurant. “You know when my frickin yid walks in, with freckles down to her ass, in that red deux-pièces and red high heels, even the waiters have their mouths hanging open. What they wouldn’t do to her, there she walked, all tits and ass, her purse in her hand, down the carpet in the Athenée, the Hall of Mirrors …” Yes, he had been much luckier than other people. Many had been stuck on one level or another without knowing why, and it was more than certain that he would have gotten stuck, too, if the propaganda secretary at the university (“Aaah, I’m going to flee the country … oh, give it to me! harder!… I’m giving a speech in Europe … uuuh! do me, lover … do my ass … aoleu! oh! down with Communismmmmmm …!”), his dear little wife, hadn’t watched over him, with her frightening dedication to principle. Take Dunăreanu: he went down on something stupid. He said something offhand at a party … something about Dubcek … or who the hell knows, just a joke, but his well-meaning colleagues ratted him out. Now he’s teaching Party history at who knows what communal school. With Maria’s man Costică it was something else: the comrades took them both at once, one from scrubbing statues, and the other from the metal shop in the ITB on Grozovici. “Comrade, would you like to go to officer training in the Securitate?” There wasn’t a stain on their files – they were children of poor peasants, not political. They had no family anywhere except Ficătari and Râmnicu Sărat. They were sharp kids who’d done junior high and an apprenticeship. That was in ’59. They took him and sent him right to Băneasa. Costică – blubba blubba blubba blubba (the officer had been flicking his lower lip and gotten lost for a moment). During the physical they found a cyst on one of his kidneys. No good for the Securitate, so they sent him to Ştefan Gheorghiu to become a newspaper man. But his kid, that snotty Mircea – who was like maybe … three at the time … (so they were still on Silistra) – when that smart Maria asked: “Dear, do you want your daddy to be a newspaper man?” he began to cry: for him, newspaper man meant the hunchbacked drunk who sold newspapers. Back then (you can see one even now) they wandered the streets, with a stack of newspapers in a pink cardboard box around their necks: “Informatia! Informatia!” Newspaper men and street cleaners were pretty much the same, in the minds of regular people. But two years ago, on Moşi, where Stănilă was dressed like a guy selling cardboard hats, trotting along on his mission to catch the spider-woman’s superiors, he had seen one of these lowlifes right next to the camper: he was staring, dead drunk, at the monkey-trainer’s tits on a billboard, while his newspapers fell from his box into the mud, one by one …