Next, two bare-chested gypsies in billowing pants juggled torches, to the chattering of a chimpanzee who, the lieutenant observed, had an ugly wound on its elbow. And it always protected it, keeping it close while it did somersaults, rumbling on its long and hairy arms with its knees tucked in. It had an oddly thick chain around its neck, held at the other end by the emcee, who had taken off his black suit and, in short-sleeves and shorts, was now the animal trainer. The monkey had such sad eyes that you could not look at it if you were past childhood. With its performance ended the “numerous wild animals” were announced at the entryway. Next there was a cataleptic woman sleeping on a bed of swords, who was none other than the big blond woman in her gold dress of flashing metal.
The officer let himself be stolen away by the charm of the fair again, marveling with wide eyes at everything that happened on the stage. The country boy in him was warmly happy, because when he was little he had never been on a teeter-totter, shot at a bottle, or gone to a circus sideshow, even though he would have given his own skin to do so. He had satisfied himself with what they showed on the platform, before the show, when they promised ten times as much if you went inside. Now he had entered, he was inside, and he couldn’t wait to see the spider-woman, the show’s number one attraction. And back in Teleorman, there had been, years ago, a spider-woman, but soon she stopped performing because – so the rumor went – she had married the ox-tongued man and gotten pregnant. The one here now was either the same one, which would make her pretty old, or another, maybe her kid. In either case, Stănilă had recognized her in the painting on the booths, at the entryway, her black mane and beastly green eyes, her globe-like tits, and the blind and hideous brood of black legs from which the monster’s torso emerged. It was identical to the one on the billboards in his memory, as though fairground painters followed canons, like those who painted churches.
In the end, after the starry rag of the stage background had framed a rather curious number (on a table, from the water of a glass carafe, dry leaves emerged and branched into a shrub the color of cinnamon. Multicolored, exotic fish fluttered tiny vial-like fins at the end of the many little branches, sucking water or sap. Sometimes they let go of the branch and glided around the fair hall, like sparkling dragonflies, to return to the bush and put their cartilaginous lips to the end of another branch), it got quiet and dark. Then there was a rending scream, a backwards scream, born not from a source outside of vibration, such as the larynx of a living man being chopped into pieces, but in the depths of the auditory cortex of each spectator, in the complex neurons that detect the loudness, pitch, and timbre of sounds, and which now created them out of nothing, curled up alongside the Sylvian fissure. In each listener, the roar of a spider and a woman lit the synapses and axons of the medial geniculate nucleus, ran down along the efferent nerves toward the inferior colliculus, encoded in the frequency of the electrical current leaping through supple tubes from each node of Ranvier that descended into the ventral cochlear nucleus, and filtered through the superior olivary nucleus in the brain stem, filling the aqueduct of the cochlear nerve. The electric scream passed through the massive brain stem, filling grottos and strange fissures, frightened Madonnas-with-child enthroned in stalactites, and finally entered the upside-down snail of the inner ear. It went into thousands of flashing rivulets, each watering, and at the end, it entered a transparent cell with tiny hairs housed along the spiral, between the tectorial and basilar membranes, in yellow, gelatinous lymph. Here, the inhuman howl, of being boiled in oil or flayed alive, of suffering a general metastasizing cancer, became a vibration of the endolymph that filled Reissner’s membrane, then transmitted the rising tidal wave in the oval window to the perilymph. Like a machine’s organs, the stirrup, anvil, and hammer continued the mechanical vibration and transmitted it to the tympanum, which, through the wax-filled auditory canal, made the air vibrate. And dozens of outer-ear pavilions amplified the scream like megaphones, alternately compressing and thinning the air, directing the terror toward the stage, concentrating it into one side, where a scarlet spotlight lit abruptly and everyone saw the spider-woman was screaming. The cries of agony, born in the minds of those who looked at her, penetrated her mouth, dilated her trachea, broke open the bronchi of her lungs, and swelled the thick veins on her temples. Everyone pumped into her the terror that passed through her torso, envenomed her breasts, and extended the arched bridges of her back, her hairy legs with terrible claws, her round and fragile stomach, full of eggs and innards, and the spinneret grown at its end, through which transparent silk ran. As with the voice of a woman who screams in orgasm beneath a man who strikes her rhythmically between her thighs, holding her hard, without escape, you could clearly distinguish two voices – one from the beautiful head with curly hair and thin skin like a child’s, and one from the pelvic animal. In the uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes, the vagina and labia, both voices are superimposed, and precisely from that mixture comes the excited and sweet moans, not just of any woman, but of your beloved, and not just of your beloved, but of any whore who ever screamed beneath a man. In the terrible howl of the fairground Sphinx, you clearly heard the voice of a woman and the voice of a spider, one stirring an amniotic pity, and the other freezing the blood in your veins and ravishing your mind with horror.
The spider-woman stood there in a blood-wetted corner of the stage and screamed, wagging her head on her long neck to one side and another for much too long for a human being, resembling more a transparent stalk, and scrutinizing the dark of the hall with her green eyes, like a wild animal, as though there were something she was expecting. The spotlight came from the back wall in a purple cylinder, like in a movie theater, illuminating the heads and chair backs in its path. The smoke of cheap cigarettes tossed and turned in the thick ray, making floral patterns of living ash. Although the officer, his hair on end and eyes gaping – Ionică from Teleorman, Ilie Aptrachei’s boy, who had never been to a sideshow – was completely under the spell of the sight of the spider with a woman’s trunk, a living movement, wet and small, much closer to him, attracted his attention suddenly and made his eyeballs converge in front of him on one of the heads, profiled in the wine-colored rays. He started violently and remembered himself, his mission, reality. Moving to rub his scalp, he tapped the edge of the cardboard fez. He yanked it off and threw it on the ground. For that head surrounded by the haze of flashing curls belonged, of course, to the Suspect, the princess, she of the tumescent neck, beautiful like no one else and repulsive like an image from a nightmare. Now, out of the tumor as big as a newborn’s head, peeling and oozing, a gently throbbing, glassy being emerged. The officer, leaning forward on alert, saw the worm prop itself up on small feet and emerge from the cocoon, with antennae like two needles with knobby ends and two flat, matte eyes. He saw it, completely hatched, clamber onto the girl’s head, wiping the liquid off, with its stomach alternately swelling and shrinking, and he saw how this action little by little pumped out a pair of ragged wings, unfolded them, flattened and dried them, until on top of the shining hair of the proletarian princess, like a diadem, the wings of a splendid butterfly spread out, much larger than the officer had ever seen. It took flight in the hall, like a multicolored bat, in and out of the spotlight rays. Its circles, following the bundle of Lobachevsky’s horocircles (ah, Herman!), came closer and closer to the Sphinx who, modulating her screeching into sweet glissandi like a meow, followed the flight of the lepidopteran with her green, beastly eyes. When, in a final loop, it sailed alongside the suffering face of the woman-chimera, a long and sticky tongue grabbed it, crushing its fragility, wrapping around its ringed body and pulling it into her rouged mouth, which chewed it avidly. For a while, at the corners of the mouth, the ends of dry wings were visible, but eventually these too slid into the mouth of the spider-woman …
“Stop! Stop! Turn on the lights!” yelped Stănilă suddenly, leaping to his feet. “Securitate!” The spotlight went out and there was a terrible scramble. People po
ured out on every side, running into and trampling each other. “Turn the lights on for fuck’s sake!” shouted the officer again, trying to get to the stage, buffeted by bodies in fur coats. Now he knew: the contact had been made! The butterfly was the message! “You thieves!” he shouted like he was out of his mind when he finally reached the dirty stage wings, a booth in fact, full of moth-eaten costumes. He grabbed the collar of the barker who, in the gray light of day that came through the window, was a poor little man with the face of a civil servant. The spider-woman was nothing other than a slutty girl with a chin full of zits, who had just taken the black and hairy legs made of thread-filled rags off her hips. The snake swallower was in a housedress and was combing the chimpanzee’s head for fleas, holding it in her lap like a child. A woman burst in, frightened, holding a piece of old newspaper – the baba in lamé, who left the booth door open in her surprise. “Aha! The evidence! You’re doing yourselves in!” Stănilă grabbed the newspaper that the woman was bringing back from the privy, unfolded it and …
Two years later, the officer still could see before his eyes an enormous, illegible, hazy newspaper article with a headline two fingers tall that he tried in vain to read, an article printed around a map of Eastern Europe, the socialist camp, over which, in a large arc, beginning with Eastern Germany, going down through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, and climbing again toward the middle of the Russian steppes, a word was written, in enormous type:
BLINDING
The lieutenant knew that he was holding a document of historic importance. The letters showed nothing other than the path of the travelling caravans, which cut through fields, crossed watercourses, went brazenly up mountains and sank into sulfurous swamps to draw (for whose eyes?) with invisible traces a word across the curvature of the planet. He alone, Securitate officer Stănilă Ion, through his exceptional abilities, had unmasked a (fascist? American? or, like he had read in Science and Technology magazine, extraterrestrial?) conspiracy against the state powers of the Warsaw Pact. Naturally, what he had found was only one tile of the politico-diplomatic chain of dominos, but it was essential. His superiors barely realized how important it was. As for him, he could not have imagined a greater triumph than to go home one fine day and embrace his little Jew and whisper in her ear: “Wife, take a look at your major!” “I’m very curious to know how a major makes love,” she would whisper, and the two of them would end up on the rug in their house’s sumptuous hallway …
Unfortunately, none (or almost none) of this happened. Stănilă did not receive anything more, two years later, than one star to go with the other two on his epaulet. A banal promotion, for years of service, not merit. After a moment of panic, the circus people had asked for his identification, and he discovered that he had no papers on him at all. They had been stolen in the crowd, even the badge from his coat pocket. Then the circus people began to yell and hit him with whatever they could find, shouting, “Crazy jerk! Get out, get the hell out of here!” Even the monkey jumped on his back and yanked his hair. Scratched and beaten by gypsies, smeared with greasepaint by saltimbanques, and blinded by clouds of face powder, he was sent off with a formidable kick from the spider-woman directly into the putrid pond behind the wheeled booth, where he lay unconscious until evening. When he woke up, across the sky there was nothing but a blood-colored stripe. The caravan had disappeared, and nothing more remained but the wooden sideshow booth in the middle of the deserted piaţa. Behind him, the motionless chain carousel stood against the sky like a sad mushroom. A dull bulb on a lightpost, far away, increased the air of desolation. The suitcase of fair trinkets, of course, had also disappeared. The officer came home huffing and hawing, after he had argued with the tram inspector because he didn’t even have five bani for a ticket. The last surprise of the unhappy day awaited him in his little nest of folly, where he found his wife discovering with delight how a major makes love … his own supervisor, Sycamore Bădescu, whose ruddy butt, decorated with two large balls, was pumping vigorously between the white gams, in satin stockings, of his Esther. It was given to the unhappy lieutenant to listen one more time, covered in mud and propped against the bedroom doorway, to her passionate abuse of the leaders of humanity …
Having reached this desolate point in his remembrance, the lieutenant-major, sitting in his office in an anonymous Bucharest building, held his head in his hands and pressed his eyeballs with the tips of his stiff fingers. He pushed until the green-blue dots drew a misshapen carpet over his field of vision that reminded him of the ink blots of a Rorschach test, where, at the time, he had only seen, only … but the officer refused to remember what came next, and he pushed away, with desperate gestures, the flashing images, loaded with hate and horror, with which his consciousness assaulted him: the starched fabric of the straightjacket, the bearded doctor, the tranquilizers, the fights with the other patients, the escape attempt at night, in his pajamas, in the deserted quiet of the tram. He’d been captured again and held in the high-security wing for six months, and for two of those weeks he’d been strapped down … And then the morning when he woke up with a clear mind and feeling light, completely in control of himself, when he asked to be contacted by his superiors regarding a question of maximum importance … The Securitate acknowledged him only after another week, during which he was subjected to countless tests, each more disconcerting than the one before, jumping between questions and images, until Stănilă came to believe he was simply a lab rat, the object of some research, with his mind exposed to reveal its obscenity and turpitude to inscrutable superhumans. They applied the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory, which through its 550 questions crucified him on four validity scales (?, L, F, and K) and nine clinical scales (hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, masculinity/femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, hypomania). Then came Galton’s word-association test in the Jungian variation, the thematic apperception, the Rosenzweig study, with 24 pictures of frustration, and the Szondi test, with 48 photographs of mental patients … In the end, terrible, terrible butterflies drawn in charcoal, pencil, and blood on the Rorschach cards (Herman Rorschach – isn’t that strange?), where he couldn’t see anything but … From messer Sandro di Mariana a. k. a. Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci learned to stimulate the imagination through chance marks left on a wall by a paint sponge. You could see landscapes and battles, and yellow human torsos turned in strange positions, but more importantly you saw yourself, since ogni pintore depinge se … Koch’s Baum test and the Machover Draw a Person test concluded the graphico-linguistic avalanche that a normal, dignified mind would have responded to in only one way: aphasia, and it may in fact be that this is always the response.
The pajama-clad lieutenant was in a daze of tests and para-tests when he was visited by an unusually massive man, with a head like an ox and brown eyes, who stood beside his bed, hands in his pockets, looking toward him without much interest. “I’m just a pig-farmer’s kid,” said Stănilă to himself, over and over, and not only in this regard. “That’s what we country people are, damn pig-farmer’s kids, ready to pull our hats on our hearts whenever the boyar comes.” And in fact, everyone in the hospital room had stood up in a kind of silly ten-hut even before the stranger showed his papers. And the truth is that he didn’t make a great effort. The doctor who followed him was so scared-looking that he didn’t need any other identification. At a wave, the doctor disappeared, and a short and frustrating discussion followed. The stranger did not believe one iota of the phantasmagoria with the spider-woman. It’s also true that he didn’t think the jejune lieutenant was lying. He believed that there, in the side-show booth, something else had happened: that the officer had found out about something so terrible that his mind had sealed the revelation off, had vomited it out like poison, like an object it could not digest, and it had woven in its place the flimsy scenario that Stănilă remembered. The traces of the truth might persist in his subconscious, so that the superior officer (Romanian Securitate?
KGB? Both at once?) recommended – it was, in fact, an order – that Stănilă be interrogated while in a state of disinhibition. Resigned, Stănilă accepted. He knew what the man was talking about: Jagodka disinhibition, something they had also used. How the hell, he always asked himself, were the high-class spies trained to withstand an Amytal Interview? In any case, this method had proven more efficient than torture, and it had revolutionized the interrogation process. Only South American cretins (Stănilă still thought, then) would still use the electric clamps. Bloodthirsty animals.
That same evening, they gave him a subcutaneous injection of caffeine. The effect, in comparison with a cup of coffee, was of course more rapid and, above all, purer. His mind glowed like a crystal. He became more intelligent and articulate. He strove to convince his superior officer, sitting on a stool next to his bed, that his Moşi vision had been real in every detail. He described with cinematic precision the patterns and shades of the butterfly’s wings. He showed on what basis he held that the butterfly was the message. He reproduced from memory, verbally, the path of the wandering circus troupes over the map of Eastern Europe, down to the least important places they had gone. In fact, the entire map, like under a powerful light, shone eidetically in front of his eyes. He tried to read the title of the article floating around him like a fog, but it was, yet again, impossible. After a quarter hour they injected him, this time intravenously, very slowly, with a solution of sodium amytal, 10g per 100ml of sterile water. In a flash he saw – felt, knew, experienced – the entire network of his blood vessels, as though they were dyed florescent colors, and in love. His jugular veins, like two hands with delicate fingers, rose and fed the heavenly mandarin of his brain, which glittered all over with delight. And the blazing flame of love united his sublime body in happiness. The map of his body became the evanescent map of his language, twisting like the steam over coffee. His skin and nervous system formed a syntactic structure, branching in relations of independent, coordinating, and dependent clauses, groups of verbs and nouns, structures both deep and superficial, the fleshless, functional body of language. Morphology ran through his osteo-muscular system, and groups of muscles and bones were juxtaposed with parts of speech, contracting and relaxing in declinations, conjugations, and inflected endings; the paunches of coiled substances and glands produced the vocabulary in which epithelia and mucus and flat muscles and bacteria and vomit and saliva and gastric juices and fermented feces and insulin, lips and anus and esophagus and rectum, and bowels and duodenum, and bile and hunger and satiety merged, generating semantic fields. They stratified into calques from Greek and Turkish, slang and indecipherable jargon, the sublime phonetics of the respiratory apparatus, gentle fingers of god and zephyr blowing on the vocal chords; and the imaginary, the mystical body of the garden of roses, the moon leaning tenderly over the sun’s shoulder (the eternal incest of the sun and moon in our astral body), sprung from the sexual glands, from the grotesque monster between the legs, from the gaping eggs in their oily sacs and from the purple, rubbery glans, camouflaged in soft skin, in the cavernous body of the worm that spits in turn, into the world, and just as hot, the purest and most abject substance, the ivory of life and the residual waters. A more fantastic flower never blossomed from a more revolting root.
Blinding: Volume 1 Page 35