Blinding: Volume 1

by Mircea Cărtărescu

  Sublimated cell by cell and organ by organ, turned into a complicated mist of words, the officer told them about everything down to the milk he suckled from his mother.

  THE enormous man had paid, in blindness, for what he heard. Now, however, smelling like fresh snow, he looked at me with eyes again unglued. His shining pupils scanned the peaks and valleys of my face, chest, and hands, as though at some point he would have to describe them, down to their most miniscule details, or die. “You are Mircea,” he repeated and stepped toward me, the step of a blind man, as though, although he had these large, brown eyes, he could not see more of me than, at the most, an intense irradiation of blue light. When he held open his arms for a ritual suffocation, I ran out of the office, leaving the door on the ground, and I dove, still hearing a “Mircea!” vibrating in the frozen air, down the olive hospital corridor. I ran like crazy under the dirty light bulbs, turning corners and hitting swinging doors with my shoulder, passing the same sad and cold sights: corridors endlessly going forward, with doors on one side and the other, long stairways, with spittoons on the landings, leading to other identical floors … Fear, rising irresistibly in me, made it difficult to know what I was doing. The chest of my pajamas was drenched with sweat, in spite of the cold that emanated from the walls. Some of the open doors showed me nightmarish scenes: white beds, half covered in rubberized cloth, where old people lay with strange tubes stuck in their stomachs, others defecating through artificial anuses with nickel taps … children with polio, with the femur stuck directly to the skin, without any surrounding thigh, struggling to peddle medicinal bicycles … open-robed fat women, masturbating, their eyes rolled back in their heads … I didn’t stop until I reached our ward, lit through every window by a mystical fog, which told me I had been lost in the corridors for more than half a day. Only then did I calm down, looking at the patients playing Nine Man’s Morris on the veranda, bathed in golden light like saints, or lying in bed with their hands behind their heads. I went to my bed and curled up on part of the sheet, with my face turned toward the deformed man sleeping noisily, his mouth gaping at the ceiling. His sickly hand hung into the empty space between our beds, with his fingers apart and pale. He was in sleep. His soul was far away. Sleep bodied him gently forth. What if I stretched out my hand then and my finger touched his dark, shoemaker’s fingernails? What if I transferred myself into his martyred body? I would lay there, forever, a paralyzed kyphotic, dirty with excrement, half rotted, looking at the ceiling with frightened eyes, while he, in my adolescent body, would run toward the autumnal world, in golden sunlight beyond the windows. I smiled, because as a matter of fact I would have not been displeased to swap our skins and flesh. I was so tortured, thoughtless, and sad, that the whispered life of a hospital would have been enough for me, forever. I imagined myself as the oldest patient in the ward, in the halo of its horrible symptoms, beloved by nurses, regarded with veneration and concern by the other patients. They would change constantly, always ready to throw themselves back into the twilit jungle of life at the slightest amelioration of their symptoms, while I, in the center of my immobile universe, would be the eternal Patient, over whom mornings, evenings, and nights, summers and winters would settle slowly, like so many layers of shellac over a Chinese box. Thirty … forty years in the same bed in the same ward, holding steady the same calm and white day, in which no surprise awaits you: that was my image, at the time, of happiness. It would hurt, of course. I would have to swallow the medications, bitter as iron. At night I would be woken up for shots, but I would have no desires, memories, or future plans. I would have no papers or identity. My fate would not depend on my word or anyone else’s. I would never have to endure the torture of being evil, or the regret of being good. A pure life, of arid and warm contemplation, in a closed space, a shelter: this is what I wanted then, and perhaps I want it still …

  After supper, we stayed up a few hours gabbing, looking at newspapers … A muscle in the corner of my mouth contracted vaguely when I tried to smile, for the first time in three weeks. I imagined how happy my mother would be when I showed her the next day. Mamma came three times a week, every visiting day, with bags full of jars of chicken soup and rice pilaf. She came with her eyes puffy from crying. She would do all of her bawling beforehand, so that she’d be strong at the hospital, not to discourage me. The next day would be the first time I could show her any sign of healing. I went to sleep with that on my mind, after lights-out, and I slept poorly, waking up irritated from twisted dreams that always repeated themselves, as though the projector in my brain played a filmstrip as knotted as a nest of snakes. Something in me knew, perhaps, that my mother would come to find me the next day in the basement, among those at death’s door.

  In the middle of the night I suddenly woke up, as lucid as if I had never gone to sleep, not only that night, but ever in my life, as though the notion of sleep was unknown to me. I was lucid as a sculpture in a coffee bean, lucid as a hymn dedicated to lucidity. Opening my eyelids, I saw a human face a few centimeters from mine. The light of the autumn moon, of an incomparable transparency, emphasized the pale mask’s cheekbones and chin and left its eyes sparkling and obscure. Kneeling at the head of my bed, looking at my face with the insane expression of those without expression, silent, petrified, was the third nurse, “the saint,” the one without hips or breasts, that no one undressed with their eyes. I lifted myself on an elbow, not at all surprised. I smiled and put my hand on her arm. It was thin as a stalk, but it had materiality and warmth. As though this was all she was waiting for, the nurse suddenly put her arms around my neck and made room for herself beneath my sheet, with an unexpected energy. My penis hardened instantly and the thought passed through my mind, which was suddenly overwhelmed by a tidal wave of erotic chemistry, that I would, at last, make love for the first time, that I would enter for the first time the warm tunnel between a woman’s legs. The nights of suffering and wet frustration, when, hour after hour, I stalked movements in the houses across the street, when I froze my ears against the wall in the hope of hearing some moan from a woman next door, these would be recovered and, possibly, forgotten, like too-small clothes. Now the nurse tried to take me, she was on top of me, she kissed my neck and chin and put her hand inside my pajama bottoms, first touching me below my stomach, under the bar of rigid flesh, which then she encompassed in her cold palm and pulled forcefully. I turned her over and returned her touches. I felt her breasts, barely rising, but with pitch-black, unexpectedly large nipples, and I moved my hand down to the area of her curly fur, that area that grows deeper in the mind of man, the dark forest, the sacred wood where the Entry gave onto the unimagined and incomprehensible, toward the Enigma, the Garden, Glory, Horror, the cistern of fire of limitless madness of our being. Because, just as the Chinese mandala of Yin and Yang has darkness in the middle of light, the mind of man hides a uterus, a cavern, a carnivorous flower with fleshy and fuming depths, towards which he strives his entire life, to make love with himself in order to find himself beyond sex and destiny, in the pure kingdom from which we all emerged.

  If I had become a man then, everything would have been lost, but I was, perhaps, saved. If the nurse had an interior sun, there, inter urinas et faeces, she didn’t have any path of access. Her uterine palace was as hidden and unassailable as the fortresses of hashish salesmen. Between her legs, this woman as thin as a stalk had a vulval structure more modest than a store-front mannequin. There was nothing to penetrate, nothing to conquer. For a few hours, maybe, we writhed, naked under the sheet, until I painfully and warmly ejaculated over her fingers and onto her stomach. We fell asleep next to each other, pressed stomach-to-stomach, reconciled and sad like twins floating in the same placental liquid. Before I sank completely into sleep, the words rang again, those the girl had constantly whispered while we flopped around like fish on land: “Go all the way! All the way!”

  In the morning, I woke up alone in my bed, as though everything had only been a hallucination. Onl
y the soccer player, rising beside me, winked once, happily. Had he heard something? It would have been hard not to. Only now I realized how loudly the bed must have creaked. Still, he didn’t say anything. We all waited, gabbing, for visiting hours. Autumn glided slowly toward winter, and that morning through the window I saw the first snowflakes of the season. In a few days, the hospital courtyard, where from the ward windows I could see that some alleys (and if I went onto the veranda I had an open but narrow glimpse into Ştefan cel Mare, with the round tobacco stand where the patients bought their cigarettes, and the rotting fences around the houses across the way, interrupted from time to time by a passing tram) would be covered by an early snow, only as thick as a finger, and the pavilions of aged stucco, that once looked like galleons rocking toward a green ocean, would become the ships of an arctic expedition, caught in endless ice, pink in the eternal, sad twilight. But it was warm in the ward, and its inhabitants, who left their identities and roles at the door, and even, in an odd way, even their memories to become living anatomical preparations, illustrations of Pick’s disease and Trigeminal neuralgia and facial palsy and narcolepsy, living together in a delicate Qumran, in a brotherhood not of suffering, but of irresponsibility and childishness, in blue pajamas, hunched on the foot of their beds and chatting … Hospital life had such charm, in the close, hot space, while outside the large windows it snowed …

  During the visiting hour, Mr. Ionescu again found it meet to cause a fuss. He went after the nurses who, it seemed, purposely neglected him. It was funny that it didn’t bother him at all, the sadism with which the two old mares stuck syringe needles into his wrinkled buttocks, like into an old horse, squirting a few cubic centimeters of serum abruptly into his flesh with a kind of hatred that roused our indignation; nor was he bothered that he had to struggle and writhe and foam at the mouth for half a day, with his bladder about to burst, until one of them would take it upon herself to slide the catheter into his urethra; nor that they had given him, as a joke, a robe with buttons missing and put it on him backwards, with the big hole between his shoulder blades and the fabric unraveling everywhere. What he found intolerable was that the girls dressed indecently. “Harlots! I can see your underwear through the robe! Look at you, not even a bra, I can see you half a league away! No woman in my time would have walked around men like that! Not even in Crucea de Piatră they didn’t, I say, because the police would pick them up immediately! Moral corruption, the world is rotting like an apple, I tell you! The apocalypse is coming! Were there women like this in my time? Did whores like this walk the streets? There were whores, of course, but what women they were! The rich ones would put on extra petticoats, and when you took the last one off, I say, however coquettish and brazen she seemed, she’d turn red like a dove and bury her face in the sheets. They didn’t wag around, they didn’t, with their tits under a man’s nose, especially rickety, sick men like us. Shame! Shame on you!” While the old man’s eyes bulged out of his head in indignation, the girls fell over laughing, sorting medications in the compartments of their table. They stopped at each bed and left a few pills or brightly colored capsules on the nightstand, in a special tray, which, when shaken, made a happy, gentle clatter. One day, from one of these long orange and green capsules, forgotten on the nightstand of an old man with nocturnal bruxism, who always woke us with atrocious grindings, a kind of transparent larva emerged, slightly violet, with a complicated interior structure and four black, jointed legs. It pulled itself along the table and then disappeared somewhere underneath. From then on we all opened our capsules gently and carefully, and we only swallowed the bitter powder inside. We would all take the opportunity, when one of the nurses was at our bed with her back to us, to pretend to take her into our arms, to stroke her imperial buttocks, with the line of her underpants, indeed visible like under glass, in the back of the gown pressed to her ass, and to stick our middle finger into the shadowy wetness between her thighs. Then we would settle down, take our medications with a glass of water, and wait for breakfast: bread with butter (no salt) and tea in iron cups.

  At eleven, as usual for that day of the week, I went off again through the hospital corridors to the office where I did “the rays.” This time it seemed like I made it there extremely easily, in a second. The vast labyrinth of green corridors was reduced (at least in my memory) to a single corridor, with a door at the end that seemed to me, maybe from the semi-shadow, scarlet and mysterious. When I went in, though, I found the banal and pitiful electrotherapy office, with mounds of devices dating from the time of Volta, exhibits from a technological museum. In the seventh grade I had tried to build a voltameter from cardboard, wire, and an empty marmalade jar: all of the instruments here seemed made by students in a workshop, from the same materials. Miraculously, they still worked, although the only proof was the movement of the stamped metal needles in the graded windows of thick, green glass. There was no sign of the doctor except a copy of Sport, forgotten on the chair, with pages turned down. But why did I need a doctor? I sat where I always did facing the galvanized metal monster, and I greased my temples with a little Vaseline from a yogurt jar. Then I put the electrodes on my temples, glued them with leucoplast, and stuck the prong at the end of the wire into its ebony plug. I turned the potentiometer gently toward the right, watching the needle come to life and move slowly over the screen. At the same time, I started to hear the somehow reassuring little sparks of heated Vaseline. Then I sat still, with my eyes closed, swimming again in my imagination, in the fabulous trajectory of rays through the empire of my mind. There were ghost towns there, villas with crystal columns, and torture chambers with instruments of gold. There were crematoria with violet smoke coming from their chimneys. There were Flemish houses lining canals where cephalorachidian fluid flowed lazily. There were chameleons with iridium jaws. While I watched the mysterious cavernous flux, I was blinded now and again by the multicolored shine of cave flowers. I was moved emotionally by a naked girl wrapped in cobwebs, by a pregnant woman whose stomach curved as much as possible and broke like a pomegranate and scattered into the holy night of light and blood, and by an old woman in a shell of sugar. In my mind, the words of the “saint” suddenly rang out, clearer than any real sounds that her vocal chords and cartilage could have made, echoing like in a frozen hall: “Go all the way! All the way!” Then, another voice, indescribably terrifying, annihilating, so intense and closed within itself that it could not have been composed of sounds, but phonemes, whispered quietly and powerfully in my brain: “Mircea.” For a moment, the enormous universe had this name. “Here I am, Lord,” I whispered, opening my eyes. I already knew what was being asked of me. And it was as though everything had already happened long ago. As I stood shaking in front of the tangle of wires and screens, with Vaseline licking my cheek and throat, for a long time I didn’t move at all. Finally, I put out my hand and took the potentiometer knob between my fingers. I can still feel its hard ebony ridges. I was not inside my body. Everything seemed like a sculpture from a block of yellow matter, a forgotten legend, an incomprehensible allegory. “All the way!” ordered the quiet, impenetrable nurse, who had no glottis, hyoid bone, tongue, tonsils, or palate. In the emotional sculpture one detail began to move. My fingers turned an ebony knob toward the right. A metal needle also glided to the right in a graded window, watched by two brown, inexpressive eyes. Hermetically sealed, like a syllable, in the glass vial of my body, I watched helplessly as I made the most insane gesture of my life, the one that unleashed, perhaps, everything. After I had turned the knob very slowly, after my lunatic internal structures began to shake, and chimeras and stone gargoyles fell off and smashed to bits on the pavement, and the quartz architraves of my temples cracked in zigzags, and a population of giant myriapods and termites swarmed in the dusk, I quickly turned the button all the way!

  Back from the bathroom, the doctor found me on the floor, convulsing with clonic spasms, with red foam on my lips (I had broken a molar and bitten the inside of my cheek)
and my pajama bottoms drenched. My temples smelled like something burnt. They took me to the basement, to intensive care, where I stayed in a coma for more than a week. They fed me glucose intravenously, and then through a tube down my nose. My epileptic seizures continued daily. When I opened my eyes again, it was evening, and a dry sadness floated over the intensive care ward full of people in agony, thousands of kilometers under the earth, with all history and all shapes and all ages. The patients lay on their tables wrapped in plaster sheets. A nurse in white, with a waxy face, stood still beside a podium. Nickel cases with boxes of syringes vibrated gently in the light-brown air. I stayed another week in that cargo hold. I saw outlines without being there myself. I made out sounds – moans, footsteps, a clink – without ears or hearing. Someone defecated, at times. Someone urinated. I was a duplicate, a copy, a picture, a mannequin. I saw, I felt, what a movie character sees, feels, and thinks, a character who moves and talks but is, in the end, only a spot of emulsion on a filmstrip. What despair and horror hides beneath the arrogant attitude and turned-up mustache of a grandfather, long dead, of whom only a picture is left? I was also long dead. They kept just my simulacrum. Glazed surfaces, eternal evening, plaster statues on sarcophagi … Falling back into sleep, wrapped to the neck in my liver and bile and nerves and guts … Curled up in my own stomach, feeding like a parasitic worm on the striated muscles of my homunculus … Blowing a living mist on my own mirror …