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Part One

Before they built the apartment blocks across the street, before everything was screened o and su ocating, I used to watch Bucharest through the night from the triple window in my room above Ştefan cel Mare. The window usually re ected my room’s cheap furniture – a bedroom set of yellowed wood, a dresser and mirror, a table with some aloe and asparagus in clay pots, a chandelier with globes of green glass, one of which had been chipped long ago. The re ected yellow space turned even yellower as it deepened into the enormous window, and I, a thin, sickly adolescent in torn pajamas and a stretched-out vest, would spend the long afternoon perched on the small cabinet in the bedstead, staring, hypnotized, into the eyes of my re ection in the transparent glass. I would prop my feet on the radiator under the window, and in winter the soles of my feet would burn, giving me a perverse, subtle blend of pleasure and su ering. I saw myself in the yellow glass, under the triple blossom of the chandelier’s phantom, my face as thin as a razor, my eyes heavy within violet circles. A stringy moustache emphasized the asymmetry of my mouth, or more precisely, the asymmetry of my entire face. If you took a picture of my face and covered the left half, you would see an open, adventurous young man, almost beautiful. The other half, though, would shock and frighten you: a dead eye and a tragic mouth, hopelessness spread over the cheek like acne.

I only really felt like myself when I turned out the lights. At that moment, electric sparks from the trams that clattered on the streets ve stories below would rotate across the walls in phosphorescent blue and green stripes. I suddenly became aware of the din of tra c, and of my loneliness, and of the endless sadness that was my life. When I clicked o the light switch behind the wardrobe, the room turned into a pale aquarium. I moved like an old sh around the pieces of putrid furniture that stank like the residue of a ravine. I crossed the jute rug, sti under my feet, toward the cabinet in the bedstead, where I sat down again and put my feet on the radiator, and Bucharest exploded outside the lunar blue glass. The city was a nocturnal triptych, shining like glass, endless, inexhaustible. Below, I could see a part of the street where there were light poles like metal crosses that held tram lines and rosy light bulbs, poles that in winter nights attracted wave after wave of snowfall, furious or gentle, sparse like in cartoons or thick like fur. During the summer, for fun, I imagined a cruci ed body with a crown of thorns on every pole in that endless line. The bodies were bony and long-haired, with wet towels tied around their hips. Their tearful eyes followed the wash of cars over stony streets. Two or three children, out late for some reason, would stop to gaze at the nearest Christ, raising their triangular faces toward the moon.

Across the street were the state bakery, a few houses with small yards, a round tobacco kiosk, a shop that lled seltzer bottles, and a grocery. Possibly because the rst time I ever crossed the street by myself was to buy bread, I dream most often about that building. In my dreams, it is no longer a dank hovel, always dark, where an old woman in a white coat kneads bread that looks and smells like a rat, but a space of mystery at the top of a staircase, long and di cult to climb. The weak light bulb, hanging from two bare wires, gains a mystical signi cance.

Blinding

The woman is now young and beautiful, and the stacks of bread racks are as high as a Cyclops. The woman herself towers tall. I count my coins in the chimerical light as they glitter in my palm, but then I lose track and start to cry, because I can’t tell if I have enough. Further up the street is Nenea Căţelu, a shabby and lazy old man, whose bare yard looks like a war zone, an empty lot lled with trash. He and his wife wander dazed here and there, in and out of their shack patched over with tarred cardboard, tripping over the skeletal dog who gave them their name. Looking toward Dinamo, I can see just the corner of the grocery store. Toward the circus grounds are the supermarket and newsstand. Here, in my dreams, the caves begin. I wander, holding a wire basket, through the shelves of sherbet and jam, napkins and sacks of sugar (some with little green or orange metal cans hidden inside, or so the kids say). I go through a swinging door into another area of the store, one that never existed, and I nd myself outdoors, under the stars, with the basket of boxes and jars still in my hand. I’m behind the block, among mounds of crates made of broken boards, and in front of me is a white table where they sell cheese. But now there is not only one door, like in reality – here are ten doors in a row with windows between each one, brightly lit by the rooms of basement apartments. Through each window I can see a strange, very high bed, and in each bed a young girl is sleeping, her hair spilling over the pillow, her small breasts uncovered. In one of these dreams, I open the closest door and climb down a spiral staircase, which ends in a small alcove with an electric light. The staircase goes deep into the ground, and in the alcove, one of these girl-dolls is waiting for me, curly-haired and timid. Even though I am already a man when I have this dream, I am not meant to have Silvia, and all my excitement spends itself in woolen abstractions of words and gestures. We leave holding hands, we cross the snowy street, I see her blue hair in the lights

of the pharmacy window and the restaurant named Hora, and then we both wait for the tram while a snowfall covers our faces. The tram comes, without walls, just the chassis and a few wooden chairs, and Silvia gets on and is lost to a part of the city that I found only later, in other dreams.

Behind this rst row of buildings were others, and above them, stars. There was a massive house with red shutters, and a pink house that looked like a small castle. There were short apartment blocks braided with ivy, built between the wars, that had round windows with square panes, Jugendstil ornaments on the stairways, and grotesque towers. Everything was lost in the blackened leaves of poplars and beech trees, which made the sky seem deeper and darker toward the stars. In the lit windows, a life unrolled that I glimpsed only in fragments: a woman ironing, a man on the third oor in a white shirt wandering aimlessly, two women sitting in chairs and talking nonstop. Only three or four windows presented items of interest.

In my nights of erotic fever, I would sit in the dark at my window until every light was out and there was nothing to see, hoping to glimpse those uncovered breasts and cheeks and pubic triangles, those men tumbling women into bed or leading them to the window and taking them from behind. Often the drapes were drawn, and then I strove, squinting, to interpret the abstract and fragmentary movements that ashed in the wedge of unobstructed light. I would see hips and calves in everything, until I made myself dizzy and my sex dripped in my pajamas. Only then did I go to bed, to dream that I entered those foreign rooms and took part in the complicated erotic maneuvers in their depths . . .

Beyond this second row of buildings, the city stretched to the horizon, covering half of the window with a more and more minuscule jumbled, blurry, haphazard mixture of the vegetable and the architectural, with steeples of trees shooting

Blinding up here and there and strange cupolas arcing among the clouds. I could just make out the zigzagging shadow of the mall on Victoria (once, when I was a child, my mother showed it to me, against a post-storm sky), and some other tall buildings downtown, decades old and built like ziggurats, laden with pink, green and blue uorescent billboards that blinked on and o in di erent rhythms. Further on, there was only the ever-greater density of stars at the horizon, which, way far-o , became a blade of tarnished gold. Held like a gemstone in the ring of stars, nocturnal Bucharest lled my window, pouring inside and reaching into my body and my mind so deeply that even as a young man I imagined that I was a mélange of esh, stone, cephalo-spinal uid, I-beams and urine, supported by vertebrae and concrete posts, animated by statues and obsessions, and digested through intestines and steam pipes, making the city and me a single being.

The truth is, while I sat all night on the bedstead with my feet on the radiator, not only did I watch the city, but it too spied on me, it too dreamed me, it too became excited, because it was only a substitute for my yellow phantom that stared back from the window when the light was on. I was over twenty years old before this impression left me. By then, they had laid the foundations of the building facing ours, they had decided to widen the street, repave it, demolish the bread factory, the seltzer shop, and the kiosks, and put a wall of apartment buildings, taller than ours, alongside it. The winter was windy, the sky white and clear after a heavy snow. I looked out the window only once in a while. A bulldozer knocked down, with its toothed cup, the building where a fulsome woman had lived, who had never shown herself to me naked. The interior of her rooms was bare and more visible now as ruins, and more sentimental covered in snow. Bucharest was losing a kidney, was having a gland removed, maybe a vital one. Maybe under the skin of the city, like under a

wound, there really were caves, and maybe this libidinous housewife who (out of spite?) never showed herself to me naked was somehow a center, a matrix of this underground life. Now the city’s gums crumbled like plaster. Soon, that side of the street looked like a mouth of ruined teeth, with yellowed stumps and gaps and rotting metal caps. The snow smelled wonderful when I opened the thin, wet window and put my buzz-cut head outside, freezing my neck and ears and watching the vapors pu out of the room – but beyond its clear, clean smell of clothes frozen on the line, I could sense the stench of destruction. And if it was true that the cerebral hemispheres developed out of the ancient olfactory bulb, then the stench, the metaphysical drunken breath, the smell of the armpits of time, the dishrag acridity of approaching ecstasy, the air of watercress insanity are, possibly, our most profound thoughts.

In spring, the foundations were excavated, sewer pipes spread like scabies through clay, pink and black cables unrolled from enormous wooden spools, each taller than a person, and concrete skeletons rose up, obscuring one strip of Bucharest after another, choking o the rustling vegetation and blocking up the entryways, gargoyles, cupolas, and stacked terraces of the city. The disorderly and unsteady forms of wood and cast iron, the sca olds that the workers climbed, the cement mixers that emitted waves of smoke, and the piles of new concrete electrical poles to replace the rusted metal cruci xes all looked like the visible parts of a conspiracy, meant to separate me from Bucharest, and from myself, from my fteen years spent sitting on the bedstead with my feet on the radiator, pulling the curtain back and watching the vast skies of the city. A section of my mind closes, a wall goes up, and the wall keeps me from accessing all I projected into every cube and square – the black-green and the yellow-green, the moon, thin as a ngernail, re ecting in all of the windows.

Blinding

When I was seven or eight, my parents made me take a nap every afternoon. The dresser faced the bed, and I would watch my re ection shine on its surface, minute after minute, a child with dark eyes sweating under his sheet and unable to sleep even for a second. When the sun re ecting in the veneer began to blind me, making me see purple spots, I turned my face to the wall to follow every little rust-colored blossom and leaf in the pattern on the upholstered side of the bedstead cabinet. In this oral labyrinth, I discovered little symmetries, unexpected patterns, animal heads and men’s silhouettes, and with these I created stories I meant to continue in my dreams. But sleep never came, there was too much light, and one October, precisely this white light convinced me to play with re: I listened rst for any sounds from my parents’ room, and then I slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the window. The image of the city was dusty and far away. The street curved o toward the left, so I could see the apartments on our side, toward Lezeanu and Obor. In the distance, I could see the old re watchtower, and behind it, a city heating plant with its parabolic tubes ejecting petri ed smoke. The trees appeared straight, or like Gothic arches, but the closest ones betrayed their provenance: the branches lled with trembling, sprouting leaves were not straight but twisted like an unfastened braid. I leaned my forehead against the window and, dizzy with insomnia, waited for ve o’clock, but time seemed to have stopped owing, and the terrifying image of my father bursting through the door – his dark hair knotted in a stocking on top of his head like a fez and falling in a thick line as black as a crow’s tail – kept coming into my head.

Once, during these minutes stolen from obligatory sleep, I contemplated the most beautiful scene in the world. It was after a summer storm, with lightning branching through the suddenly dark sky, so dark that I would not have been able to say if it was darker in my room or outside, with gusts of rain,

rapid parallel streams surrounded by a mist of ne drops lazily bouncing in every direction. When the rain stopped, daylight appeared between the black sky and the wet, gray city, as if two in nitely gentle hands were protecting the yellow, fresh, transparent light that lay across these surfaces, coloring them sa ron and orange, and turning the air golden, making it shine like a prism. Slowly the clouds broke apart, and other stripes of the same rari ed gold fell obliquely, crossing the initial light, making it clearer and cooler and even more intense. Spread over the hills, the Metropolitan towers the color of mercury, all the windows burning like a salt ame and crowned with a rainbow, Bucharest painted itself onto my triptych window, the sash of which my collarbone just touched.

My illumination would be scraped o , and above it, in neat, compact letters, a command would be written, as heavy as a curtain. But today, at the midpoint of my life’s arc, when I have read every book, even those tattooed on the moon and on my skin, even those written with the tip of a needle on the corners of my eyes, when I have seen enough and had enough, when I have systematically dismantled my ve senses, when I have loved and hated, when I have raised immortal monuments in copper, when my ears have grown long awaiting our little God, without understanding for a long time that I am just a mite burrowing my trails through his skin of old light, when angels have populated my head like spiro bacteria, when all the sweetness of the world has been consumed and when April and May and June are gone – today, when my skin akes beneath my ring like thousands of layers of onion paper, today, this vivacious and absurd today, I try to put my disorder into thought. I try to read the runes of windows and apartment balconies full of wet laundry, the apartments across the street that broke my life in two, just like the nautilus that walls over each outgrown compartment and moves into a larger one, inching through the ivory spiral

Blinding that forms the summary of its life. But this text is not human and I cannot understand it anymore. What remains inside – my birth, my childhood, my adolescence – seeps through the pores of the enormous wall in long enigmatic strands, deformed, anamorphic and foreshortened, nebulized and di racted, numberless, through which I can reach the small room where I sometimes return. Pearl over pearl over pearl, blue over blue over blue, every age and every house where I have lived (unless it was all a hallucination of nothingness) lters everything that came before, combining it all, making the bands of my life narrower and more heterogeneous. You do not describe the past by writing about old things, but by writing about the haze that exists between yourself and the past. I write about the way my present brain wraps around my brains of smaller and smaller crania, of bones and cartilage and membranes . . . the tension and discord between my present mind and my mind a moment ago, my mind ten years ago . . . their interactions as they mix with each other’s images and emotions. There’s so much necrophilia in memory! So much fascination for ruin and rot! It’s like being a forensic pathologist, peering at lique ed organs!

To conceive of myself at di erent ages, with so many previous lives completed, is like talking about a long, uninterrupted line of dead bodies, a tunnel of bodies dying one into the next. A moment ago, the body who was here writing the words ‘dying one into the next,’ with his face re ected in the dark pool of a co ee cup, fell o his stool. His skin crumbled away revealing the bones of his face, and his eyes rolled out, weeping black blood. A moment from now, the one who will write ‘who will write’ will be the next to fall into the dust of the one before. How can you enter this mausoleum? And why would you? And what mask of ti any, what surgical glove, will protect you from the infection emanating from memory?

Years later, while reading poetry or listening to music, I would

feel ecstasy, the abrupt and focused clot in the brain, the sudden surge of a volatile and vesicant liquid, the windowpane suddenly opening, not onto anything outside myself but into someplace surrounded by brains, something profound and unbearable, a welling-up of beatitude. I had access, I had gained access to the forbidden room, through poetry or music (or a single thought, or an image that appeared in my mind, or – much later, coming home from high school by myself, stomping in puddles along the streetcar tracks – a window glint, the scent of a woman). I entered the epithalamium, I steeped myself in the amygdalae, I curled up in the abstract extension of the gold ring in the center of the mind. The revelation was like a cry of silent happiness. It was nothing like an orgasm except in epileptic brutality, but it expressed tranquility, love, submission, surrender, and adoration. These were breakthroughs, ruptures leading to the cistern of living light from the depths of the depths of our being, rendings swirling in the interior limit of thought, turning it into a starry heaven, since we all have this starry heaven in the skull and, over it, our consciousness. Often, though, this interior ejaculation would not reach its consummation but stop in the antechamber, and the antechambers of antechambers, where it stirred ickering images that were snu ed out in a second, leaving behind regret and nostalgia that would follow me for the rest of the day. Poems, these illumination machines, debauched me. I used them like drugs, until it was impossible for me to live without them. I’d started, sometime before, to write poems too. Among so many graceful lines, enchanted and aggressive, I would nd myself stringing together, for no reason, passages of nonsense that seemed dictated by some other being. When I re-read them, they terri ed me like a prophecy come true. In these I spoke about my mother, God, childhood, just as if, in the course of a conversation over a beer, I had suddenly started to speak in tongues, with the thin voice of a child, a castrato,

Blinding or an angel. My mother would appear in my poems walking down Ştefan cel Mare, taller than the apartment buildings, kicking over the trucks and streetcars, crushing the sheet-metal kiosks beneath her enormous heels, sweeping up passersby in her cheap skirts. She would stop in front of the triple window of my room, crouch down and look inside. Her enormous blue eye and frowning brow lled the window, and lled me with terror. Then she would stand and set o westward, her wiry, phosphorescent hair destroying postal airplanes and satellites in the sky full of blood . . . What was going on with this mythologizing of my mother? Nothing had ever made me feel close to her, nothing in her interested me. She was the woman who washed my clothes, fried potatoes for me, and made me go to my university classes even when I wanted to skip. She was Mamma, a neutral being who looked neutral, who lived a modest life full of chores, and who lived in our house, where I was always a stranger. What accounted for this dearth of feeling in our family? My father was always traveling, and when he came home, red-faced, stinking of sweat, he would tie his hair, thick as a horse’s tail, on top of his head with pantyhose, with the top sagging open, a dark foot hanging between his shoulder blades. My mother would make him dinner and watch television with him, pointing out the cute folk music singers or variety show actors, gossiping about them endlessly. I’d eat quickly and retreat to the room facing the street (the other two rooms gave onto the back of the building, toward the melancholy red-brick Dîmboviţa our mill) to watch the polyhedral drone of Bucharest in the window, or to write disconnected poems in graph paper notebooks, or to curl up under the blanket, pulling it over my head as though I could not stand the humiliation and shame of being an adolescent . . . We were, my family, three insects, each only interested in our own chemical trails, occasionally touching antennae and moving on. ‘How did

Mircea Cărtărescu

you do at school today?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘Your Dinamo got creamed, on their own turf.’ ‘So what, I’m doing okay with Polytech.’ And then into the shell, to write more lines from nowhere:

mother, the power of dreams was your gift to me I would spend nights entire with you eye to eye and hand in hand I would believe I was beginning to know. and your heart would beat again for both of us and between our crania translucent as the shells of shrimp an imaginary umbilical cord would emerge and hypnosis and levitation and telepathy and love would be the di erent colors of the owers in our arms. together we would play an eternal game of cards with two sides: life, death while the clouds would ash in the fall of day, far o .

I found myself looking through my family’s small archive, housed in an old purse my mother had since before she was married, a shoulder bag, garnet-colored, its imitation leather almost completely worn through. It was lined with a cheap silk, somewhat stained. In the bag’s pocket, I found two watches, so old they had a blackish salt on their faces, and the backs of their cases were tarnished green. The watchbands had been lost long ago. Aside from the watches, there were some fuses, a vacuum tube from an old radio, and other little things I had played with as a child. Folded inside a yellowed piece of paper were two braids of blond-gray hair, tied with elastics – my own hair, from when my family, as Mamma told me the story, would put me in dresses and aprons and call me (they and all our neighbors) Mircica. The hair was soft and always gave me a chill, because it was so tangible, it was like that three-year-old boy had lived a life parallel to mine, like he might come through the door at any moment. At the bottom of the bag there were documents and receipts, rental contracts, warranties, stamped and embossed, and also yellow, sharp-smelling old pills from old doctors, faded pictures with zigzagged and torn edges, with dates and short descriptions in permanent marker, written in an awkward and misshapen hand, coins no longer used, a small baptismal cross, a white ower from somebody’s wedding . . . I poured the bag onto my bed and went through the contents,

without knowing what I wanted to nd. I came across rolls of lm, developed and wrapped in paper. I held them up against the light to see scenes of family, framed the long way or the short, everyone with black faces and white hair, white suits and black shirts, black dresses with white owers and white dresses with black owers. The three or so pictures from when I was small were well known: the one in a yard, near Silistra, in a little knit-cotton suit and boots, with curls and cowlicks, with one hand on a globe pedestal and the other moving toward my eyes. I was eighteen months old and sni ing. You could see the wall of a house from the edge of town, with geraniums in the window, and the yard paved with gravel. Then, the picture of me on a motorcycle with a sidecar, at a fair – me chunky and scared, in short sleeves – next to a thread-worn stu ed bear, not much taller than I was. In this last one, however, no one was sure it was me. It might as well have been my cousin, Marian, my aunt Sica’s kid. The image, a bit small, had faded into a dirty sepia. Three more pictures, from times immemorial, were mixed in with documents, discharge papers, and medals with chipped enamel. There was the typical picture of my parents, retouched so often that it was hard to say what the couple actually looked like: him with hair as black as an ink stain, slicked back, with an expression so stern you’d think he was facing a ring squad, wearing a black wool suit that seemed like part of the background, and her in a wedding gown, with an unrecognizable face (it could be anyone from the movies of the time), and on one side, holding the monstrous wedding candles, an unnaturally fat bridesmaid, her legs touched by elephantiasis, and a bald groomsman with a mustache like Groucho Marx. The second photo was, actually, the rst chronologically. It was my mother and father in the spa town where they met. Here, she is beautiful, with high cheekbones, chestnut hair in curls, shining eyes: a young worker who moved to the city with no

Blinding future plans. He is almost a boy, not much more than twenty, and he looks like me. He’s wearing sweats and military boots. It is snowing lightly on their bare heads, while they lean against the railing of a bridge. Two people cross the bridge, wearing berets. It’s 1955, and the winter is much gentler than the one before. Some wandering photographer, maybe a former factory owner, or perhaps he had been a photographer under the previous regime too, shivered on the bridge, waiting for customers, and my parents – who at the time just barely belonged to each other – let themselves be immortalized, out of timidity, in the sad splendor of their youth. The last picture was carefully cut in half, not with scissors, but by folding it over and over. The lm coating had cracked rst, so the porous paper could be torn relatively accurately. What was left was an image of my father holding me in his arms, around when I was two and wore the famous blond braids. Still, I’m not wearing a dress but a pair of owery ‘Spielhosen.’ My dad is smiling, square-jawed, with penetrating eyes, down the camera lens, while I am laughing at someone to my left, in the missing part of the picture. You can just see a woman’s bare elbow.

The inside of the handbag, where I had looked before, but not with the interest I now had, smelled like the watches’ old copper and tarnish. The last thing I saw, because they were well hidden in the bag’s dusty folds, were my mother’s dentures, which she never used and hid there like they were shameful, nothing to talk about. When I rst found them, I felt the same nausea and discomfort that I’d felt once before, in the depths of my childhood. It happened during the rst year that I could cross the street by myself – for some bread, an issue of The Reckless Club, or to get my dad some cigarettes. In the silent summer evenings, I would reach a building that is not there anymore, go into the tobacco store, and look with trepidation at the cashier, a heavily made-up and fat woman with pink hair, surrounded

by magazines and newspapers. Outside it was getting darker, and only here, in the little room with a window, was the light intense and still. I looked through the glass counter at all the packs of cigarettes, pipe tobacco, pistol-shaped tin lighters, and pocket knives that looked like lead sh . . . Next to them were other little trinkets. To me, the most beautiful things were the boxes of lacquered cardboard, with pictures of blue and gold tropical butter ies, and on the right a sticker where something was written in black ink. The word was long and fascinating: prophylactic. What could it have inside? I would often sit in the silence of my room, dgeting with a toy, a tin laurel tree with a plastic fairy coming out, and wondering what strange, exotic plaything could be inside the butter y box. Sometimes I imagined it could be in fact a butter y, with a body like a bow string and wings of the same crinkly paper as fancy candy wrappers. Or a scented, chewy gum, with a little red stone set in the gelatinous middle.

My plan was to wait until the next time my parents and I walked to the Volga Theater to see a movie, and ask them to buy me a prophylactic. It was only three lei. If it came to it, I could get the money myself, from around the house, in ve, ten or fteen bani coins, until I had enough. I started getting the money together, and I imagined the pink-haired cashier would give me a maternal smile and put the box I wanted in my hand (I even knew which one I wanted: the one in the case, where the butter y uttered against a bright green background) . . . One evening on the way to the theater, I saw some Chinese boxes in another tobacco store, and I got up the courage to ask: ‘Daddy, what’s a prophylactic?’ My father frowned and said harshly, ‘You couldn’t think of anything better to ask?’ I was walking between my mother and my father with quick steps, and they went quiet for a few minutes, trading glances. I knew from my father’s tone that I had hit one of those closed doors, those places that your

Blinding parents, however much they love you, will never let you enter. I could feel their breathing, their mysterious, adult lives, those incomprehensible prohibitions regarding the birth of children and the small and underdeveloped members between the legs and the way Mamma was tumbled onto the bed by my dad in the bedroom, when she cried out and I tried to save her, pounding the spine of a prickly and bestial man. After the unfortunate question, I felt a kind of horror, a feeling I re-encountered when I opened the yellowed packet that held my mother’s dentures. They were upper teeth, from the front, dirty-white with a little blue, made of cheap plastic, stuck into arti cial gums. The gums were a color of red that would never be found in the membrane of an actual mouth. They had a special shade, as though their plastic had come from other dentures, old ones melted down and reused: a purple, a barely breathing mauve in the dominant red. A few wire stubs, poking out here and there, added to the fascinating repulsion I felt toward the object in my hand.

I had bad teeth from my mother, prone to cavities and rotting, and chipping. While chewing, I would sometimes feel, on my tongue, an unmistakable piece of molar: shiny as a mirror on one side, rough and hard on the other. From her I had unimaginable toothaches that would make me run through the house, knocking chairs over and pulling on the drapes. But I could tell that it wasn’t dread of my own teeth’s foreseeable future that disturbed me when I saw the hideous curve of those gums. It was their color. There was something in particular about that tinge that reminded me of something I had seen before, something I had once known, but could not bring back to mind. For a few days, I carried my mother’s gums and teeth in my pocket everywhere I walked. I ddled with them obsessively on my route past Cantemir High on Toamnei Street and Profetului Street, I went down Galaţi in the roar of tram number ve, I wandered through ruins around Lizeanu. Twilight came,

and the dusty snow on the sidewalks timidly re ected the pink sky. An old woman at a window sucked spasmodically at a child’s candy ring. I saw a cat with eyes that I would know later from Gina. A woman stopped, looked around, and hiked up her stockings, pinching them through her parka and skirt. I was waiting, as I wandered among stores and children’s carts, for the moment when the twilight would turn exactly the same color as my mother’s gums, and suddenly it did. I was on Domniţa Ruxandra Street, where a small piaţa opened, dreamlike, lined with courtyards with colored globes on trellises, and there was an apartment block, almost alive, yellow and thin as a scalpel, with a vertical strip of matte glass over the entrance. The glass glowed in the twilight, and its ame inverted the branching art nouveau ironwork, black and warm as night. The snow lit the piaţa strangely with a white light from below, as though from underground, melting quickly in the morbid rose of nightfall. The silent block made me feel shaken and faint, like a blade plunged into asphalt and broken o . I stood in the middle of the piaţa, like a statue of a sad hero, and from my pocket I took the paper thin with age and unwrapped the hideous object. I raised the dentures over my head, and the teeth began to glitter, yellow like a salt ame, while the gums disappeared, melting into the matching color of evening.

‘Ah, Mamma,’ I whispered in the crazed silence. I stared at the dentures for a few more minutes in the darkening light, until the dusk turned as scarlet as blood in veins, and the dental appliance began to glow with an interior light, as though a gentle uorescent gas had lled the curved rubber gums. And then my mother formed, like a phantom, around her dentures. First there was her skeleton, as transparent as bloodworms or a green x-ray, velvet and delicate. Then her skull with the wide, dark stains of her eyes and the small stains of her sinuses, her thoracic cavity, the translucent butter y of the iliac crest,

Blinding the gelatinous tubes of her hands, feet, toes, and ngers. Over them, like a light snow, like the veiled ns of an exotic sh, grew my mother’s spectral esh, a large naked woman with sagging breasts, yet beautiful and young like in photos, with her liquid hair dissolving into the night. She turned toward the livid block, and I held my hand over her lips, as though to stop her from saying something, or from singing. The crown of my head barely reached her nipples. Together, in the descending darkness, we formed an enigmatic statue, holding still for no one. I came back to myself with the dentures in my hand and a sense of frustration, the feeling that I had been very close to something important and serious. I wrapped them up again in the paper and waited, dazed, in the piaţa’s whirling silence.

And suddenly it started to snow. In the sweet light of the lone bulb on the square, hanging, lonesome and violet, from a post, the akes fell quickly, then slowly, white entering the di use ball of light, almost-black passing the center, then white again toward the ground. I felt the snow akes’ invisible touch on my lips and eyelids, when two or three of the windows in the nearby middle-class houses lit up. Through the colorless air, speckled with the wet ice of the snow akes, I moved toward the apartment block, a black iceberg rising into the foggy sky. I entered through the side gate, which was guarded by gas meters like two chimerical beasts. I went down a few steps to the garden level. In the whole hallway, painted green, one yellow bulb burned as weakly as a candle. Along the ceiling of the corridor, which twisted unpredictably, ran a pipe, its iron bandaged in places with red putty and hemp. Small rooms, with doors that looked as thin as cardboard, lined the walls on the left and right. At the sound of my footsteps, a door would open to reveal narrow and muggy spaces – a man in his underwear, a woman in a housedress drinking co ee from a chipped cup, an old woman with her headscarf hanging o the back of a chair,

revealing two braids of graying hair that hung to her heels . . . I crept to the stairway that led to the next oor and beyond, and climbed. Each oor was a di erent color of desolation. There were black doors like in a morgue, enamel plates, much bigger than they had to be, with the apartment numbers; brass, metallic-smelling peepholes, wilted chus and dank jute rugs. On the top oor there were no doors – only bare walls, with greenish skin, under a weak bulb. A few metal steps led toward the roof exit. Minuscule quick snow akes fell inside and melted on the mosaic of the oor. I went out onto the roof and was stunned. A nation of melancholy stretched out before me. It was not possible that I was still on the roof of the yellow block from the piaţa. I was on the peak of a gigantic construction, where at last I recognized one of the old blocks downtown, surrounded by copper cupolas like monstrous breasts. As far as my eyes could reach, Bucharest, like a glass model lled with blood, stretched out its fantasy of roofs: enormous eggs, medieval towers, the spirals of the Metropolitan, the CEC ’s crystal stomach, the spheres on top of the Negoiu Hotel and the ASE buildings, the twisted mushrooms of the Russian church, the Telephone Palace iceberg riddled with parabolic antennae, like the iron-braced leg of a child with polio, the phallus of the old re watchtower, all of it populated with statues of gorgons and Atlases and cherubs and Agriculture and Industry and all the Virtues and Seneca and Kogălniceanu and Bălcescu and Rosetti and Vasile Lascăr, a universe of contorted limestone and gypsum and bronze, covered with snow.

I was standing just beside the sad face of a stone woman, a winged woman ve times my height. A quarter of Bucharest was lled with her stone feathers. The cupolas had scales, like moon-creature eggs. All the ora, fauna, and demonology of this sight uttered in petrifaction, black with pinkish ashes against the low, o -white sky. In the face of the statue I leaned against,

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I recognized my mother. When, in the silence of a winter night broken by lonely buses, one of the eggs in the limestone garland on my roof cracked dryly open and a translucent fetus, as big as a dog, wiggled out, twitching its wet and eyeless head, and when the jugular vein in the statue of my mother began to pulse, I ran toward the opening where I’d emerged and rushed down about ten oors before coming to one I recognized. I was in front of the familiar door of my parents’ apartment, on Ştefan cel Mare, where I had left a few hours before. My father opened the door. I took o my boots and my snowwet hat and scarf, and took refuge, as usual, in my room. I took the packet from my pocket and returned it to the bottom of the bag, beside the documents. I hid the bag again behind some linens. I stripped down in front of the mirror. What a strange animal I was! My triangular head, like a snake’s, was transformed now by the terror of statues and cupolas that still re ected in my eyes. My heart was almost visible in the network of blue veins in the skin of my narrow torso. Between my thighs, my sex, already thick from the erections of so many painful nights, veered from childish pink toward dark brown. The hair on my thighs was growing thicker. I turned my back to the mirror and looked over my shoulder. My vertebrae rose like little white hills beneath my skin. On my back, as far as I could see, the triangles of my shoulder blades were so apparent that they looked like two thin discs, one on top of the other. My buttocks were round and heavy, like a girl’s, and the space between them was dark with hair, like a thick line of ink. I was obviously an animal, a fragile mechanism of organic material. I could not understand how I was able to make my skin and muscles move. I focused all the powers of my spirit on my ngers and commanded, ‘Move!’ Nothing happened. It was like I had told a glass to slide across the table. How could I put one foot in front of the other? How could my pancreas and

Mircea Cărtărescu

pituitary gland secrete their juices? How could sperm be born in my testicles and sounds in my ear canal? I passed my hands over my entire body and still did not understand how I could be just this assemblage of bones, cartilage, and skin and nothing more. I stuck out my tongue as far as it would go. I made wild movements with my hands. I pretended to be catatonic, trying to imagine how I looked from outside myself, from a meter away. Or I would wonder what it would have been like to not be born a person, but a bug or a plant, to live without realizing I was alive . . . After I got tired, I put on my pajamas and sat at the window, on the bedstead, to watch how the snow fell on the street. The sharp elements of the heater burned the soles of my feet.

After evenings like this, which had become the atmosphere of my lonely and frustrated life, after my mole-like wanderings along the continuum of reality-hallucination-dream, an inextricable triple empire, I would fall onto my bed and take a book at random from the pile on the oor, beside the bedstead. I would read almost all night. Books came at the right moment, mysteriously, as though they were pieces of a puzzle, of an image that was clear yet incomprehensible, incomplete, a kind of superbook at the threshold of books and my mind. I read deep into the night, the silence ringing ever louder, and sometimes a bug would buzz into the lampshades, burning itself on the hot light bulb. A truck would shake the windows. I began to blink more and more, faster with the right eyelid, more reluctantly with the left. I remembered nights when I would have to press my eyelid closed with my ngers to fall asleep, and days when only half of my face would laugh, while the other half stayed sullen and sinister. Now, when I blinked quickly, the orbicularis muscle of my mouth twitched and bothered me, and when I was tired, a cold sweat spouted from the pores of my left cheek. I tried looking at the image of the room with a single eye. With my right eye, the room looked bright, and the colors shone obediently one beside the next. My left eye, however, saw a strange greenish cavern, where wet forms oscillated like the skin of an underwater animal. By the end of the night the books’ meanings

would completely evaporate, and I would be in the embrace of their thin pages, their incomprehensible cabalistic signs, and the scent of their dusty paper, the most stimulating scent on the planet. My two cerebral hemispheres contracted with pleasure in their bone scrotum. Half asleep, I spied on the books with the passion of a voyeur. I would rip a page’s corner to see the threads of pu y texture, pick at the wound of a torn binding, or watch, for as long as half an hour, an insect crossing the enormous eld, from its home in Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Double’ or Everyman’s Physics.

From its minuscule black body, the insect projected six transparent legs, each with a dark spot at the end. If you concentrated, you could see that its antennae, also translucent, were constantly shaking. It patiently traversed the hills and valleys of cheap paper, buried itself in between the pages, and appeared in the yellow, glistening light again, without giving any thought to the complicated mental processes of Goliadkin or to the black letters, bigger than its own body, which encoded his insanities. Hard little barbs kept it anchored to the book, to the universe where it was born. You could blow as hard as you liked, but you wouldn’t knock it o . It would, though, stop for a moment to weather the hurricane, pressing its stomach to the thick mat of the paper, and then it would go on, with steady and satis ed steps. No one could take it from its homeland, where it appeared and where it would die, turning into a dry shell at the base of a page. It might bite, from time to time, into a black or white piece of woven ber. It would stick its ovipositor into the dot on the ‘i’ in Goliadkin and leave a cylindrical tube with a small embryo inside. It did not know that its world meant something, that it could be read – it experienced its world, and that was enough. Maybe Goliadkin, or I, whose eye like a billion suns approached, was this insect’s God, but its nervous ganglions barely managed to keep it alive. I was a God that had not

Blinding created it and could not save it. I was eternally unknown and indescribable.

Then suddenly I would feel someone watching me. I would shiver all over, leap up and go to the window. I saw the stars scattered over the city. Someone, deep inside another night, of another kind, held my world and followed, with amusement, my progress over its twisting roads, blowing loneliness and evil from its mouth like tongues of black re, and I hung on to my life, spreading sticky viscera over the page. What book might I be in? And what kind of mind would I need to understand it? And if I could, wouldn’t I be disappointed to nd I was living inside a cheap, licentious little book, or a train schedule, or a coloring book for children, or an abject anonymous letter, or a roll of toilet paper?

I closed the book over this being, minuscule but just like me, a body full of organs like mine, cells whose protoplasm accomplished the same billion chemical maneuvers per second, and I turned out the light at exactly the moment dawn began to whiten the window. I curled up and pulled the blanket over my head, leaving just a narrow gap where I could breathe. That was how my mother slept, mummi ed in the fetal position, and that was how I had slept, too, for as long as I could remember. But I was always afraid to fall asleep. Where would my being be for so many hours? I might go somewhere I could not come back from, or I might return transformed into a horrible monster. The rupture of my self’s continuity made acid churn in my solar plexus. The idea seemed unbearable – that I dissolved, night after night, into a terrifying jungle, one that was inside me, but that was not me. What would I do, descending further and further into the catacombs of the imagination, if I penetrated its depths and found myself among horri c, blood- and sperm-splattered idols of archetypes, the instincts of hunger and thirst, the gag re ex? And what if I did penetrate this zone,

Mircea Cărtărescu

what if I I sank into the somatic, what if I twisted around kidneys and vertebrae, su ocated by cells that were growing hair and nails, hugged by the peristalsis of my innards? Anything could happen: the mechanism that wakes you up could break, like on one spring morning, when I opened my eyes in a room ooded with light, fresh and full of life, and I realized I could not move. I was completely paralyzed. I tried to get up. I commanded my ngers to move. I didn’t know, I did not know how to do it anymore. The light dwindled to a few folds of the blanket, a piece of owered fabric, a ash in the mirror. It lasted no more than a minute, and then my body returned to my possession, and the hypnologic rebellion was over.

In the end I would sink into sleep, wrapped in a cocoon of fraying dreams. I melted into sleep like sugar into water. I slid like a gear in the clutch of forgetting. I started awake, sometimes so violently that it seemed like everything inside me rattled. Other times, I fell in a nosedive like an old elevator plummeting down an endless well. Horrifying snouts and masks – torn cheeks, eyes hanging from their sockets, brains exposed – appeared for a second, then melted away with the howls of animals in agony. A timid voice whispered my name, very close to my ear. Slowly, a lather of word-images ooded my retinal screens, and someone composed stories and scenes from the aleatory marks, the way I would, from the stencils on the apartment wall or the tile on the bathroom oor. A chiromancer traced his nger, with a fat gold ring at its base, over the palm of my dream, interpreting and prophesying, slowly wading through the chaotic lines, then suddenly circling his nail around a mound of limpid skin, the glassy cover of thumping veins and arteries. Acrid delirium, a stew of colored threads, garbage swept into heaps – and unexpected, sweeping Altdorfer scenes, oceans and ships, blue mountains and amber beasts, battles where every button and lily on the banners and every freckle on the soldiers’ faces was visible, like under a blinding magnifying glass. Ivory castles, abstruse, with twisted columns and round windows like in Monsú Desiderio. Cells

like Piranesi. Twilight collapsed over abandoned buildings, severe and singular – I circle around them in a slow ight, passing the mascarons below the roof, alternating with glowing windows, where ‘HARDMUTH ’ is written. In a night coagulated like blood, marble itself turns brown, its geometry emphasized by small, red stripes. These kinds of stripes and bands of evening light hem the acanthus leaves on immense capitals, stone snakes in gorgons’ hair, the nipples and pubic hair of living, rickety Atlases who hold up balconies. I pass, tiny as a ea, under immense porticos, into halls with beautiful mosaic oors, under cupolas high as the stars. I wander through sinuous labyrinths, leaving through crystal doors, to sink again into aphasia, misunderstanding, delirium, and dejection. Jungles with limpid springs, swamps with visions of eternal citadels: such was the cartography of my dreams. And in my dream life I remembered earlier dreams. I knew: I had been in that pink building before, the one that seemed made from a child’s blocks. I had already held a completely transparent spider, spread across my palm, heavy as a sphere of quartz, with only its emerald, pulsing sack of venom visible in its stomach. I had already squinted, blinded by the ame of sunrise, in one of the canals of this impossible Venice. Pipes ran between dreams, they were connected the way buildings in Bucharest were connected with each other, the way each of the days of my life, at a distance of years or months, or one night alone, was bound, by imperceptible threadlike tubes, to all of the others. But the catacombs, tubes, cables, wires, or passages were not all equally important. The dream highways would abruptly pour onto reality’s thoroughfares, making constellations and engrams that someone, from a great height, could read like a multicolored tattoo, and someone from a great depth could feel on his own skin, like the sadistic torture of tattooing. Sometimes I woke in the middle

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of the night with one hand completely numb, cold as a snake’s skin and strangely heavy, a soft object I could move only with my other hand. In my mind I saw it black and bruised, and I rubbed it, with the same incomprehension and terror I would have touching an anaconda on the mosaic of its back, in the absurd hope that somehow I would feel it become part of me. When I let it go, it fell back onto the pillow, and only when I pushed and pulled it did the cold skin nd its power, the inert esh begin to prickle, and I ll the numb glove again. Its lace of nerves, veins, lymph pathways and tubes of psychic energy came back to life, and soon my corporeal system was once more complete.

My dreams also pulled me into the past. For almost two years, before they built the apartments across the street, I often dreamed I was climbing mountain peaks to dizzying heights. Usually, inside the black rocks, thin as skyscrapers, there were stairs and places to live, but I preferred to scale their outsides, to grab stone after stone, always higher, until I reached the fogcovered summit. Then the crags and towers disappeared, and the dream took me through sunken spaces, wet with emotion, through buildings and rooms I recognized without knowing where they were, or when I had been there, or what had happened to me to now cause this hysterical sobbing, this fainting, and the inhuman sadness of living in these rooms. I dreamed of buildings at the bottom of cold, clear water, where I could breathe, but which resisted my advance. Through di use light, my hair uttering in the currents, I moved toward massive ruins, toward blue and yellow walls thousands of meters deep, at the bottom of the water. Red crabs scuttled in the sand, and here and there a sh shuddered in front of a window. The façades were rotten and ruined. I penetrated through swollen doors crusted with snails, I penetrated interiors full of swirling water. How high the rooms were! They were eaten away with

decay and melancholy. Embroidered tablecloths oated over the bu et, a sea urchin rose out of a red crystal cup, and coral grew on the worn marshes of carpet, infested with krill. An octopus nested in the toilet, and a glittering dust swirled in the sink. I explored every room, trying to determine where I was, how I knew the large radio with ivory knobs and a magic eye, the sewing machine with a pedal, corroded beyond recognition, the tapestry with two wool cats, framed with the owering of a million ickering worms. Even the chairs, toppled and tumbled by the currents, seemed familiar. Yes, I had once sat between their legs that slanted toward the sky, I had rocked there, during yellow spring evenings. A loneliness no person can experience in real life, one that could break your bones like a wild animal, tore at my internal organs. The dream would end when I found, in the kitchen, seated at the feet of the old cooler, a large cadaver rocking in the currents. A woman devoured by salt covered the entire cement mosaic oor. Her dress had melted and tangled with seaweed, like paste, like a co ee-colored gelatin. The stove had crusted into her hip and her hair was stuck to a drape with butter y ribbons. The great statue, wrapped in rags, was four or ve meters tall.

I would awake shaken, frustrated like an amnesiac who cannot remember who he is. I tried to relive the vast, dead areas of my mind. A few cardboard buildings rose up in the petri dish of my thalamus, there between my hippocampus and my tonsils. Over them was the great aurora borealis of my cortex. I recapitulated: from birth to age two – on Silistra, a slum street in Colentina, from age two to three – the apartment in Floreasca, near a garage; from three to ve – the house, still in Floreasca, but on a beautiful, quiet side street, named for an Italian composer. Then, on Ştefan cel Mare, in the tall building next to Miliţie. These were the forgotten compartments of my spiral shell, built by my mind, one after the other, like a

Blinding line of ever-larger skulls, and left behind to decay like molars, down to the bloody rot of their roots. I knew that I had lived in those places. I retained some images, but no experiences, no emotions, nothing real. The three or four buildings were like the deformed teeth of my mother’s dentures, untouched by the nerves or irrigating threads of her veins and arteries. Plastic, cheap, stupid plastic. I imagined that their doors were only etched on the walls, that their interiors were full and massive, like llings in praline candies, and that, therefore, everything was a crude, fairground imitation. But I searched around these edi ces more and more stubbornly, because they still were my only landmarks. I tried to reconstitute my cerebral animal in their strange dance through time, touching the bumps of the buildings, the housing of its successive skulls, built from calcium spittle. Patiently, the esh of my mind built rooms and roofs, scenes and deeds. Growing, it left them dry and empty like the yellowed skulls of dogs on elds, or like the clean, rubbery inside of a doll’s head.

Unusually for me, I started to linger at the table after eating, talking with Mamma, who was happy to remember one thing or another from the past. The table, with its torn plastic cloth, was laden with chipped and dirty plates, and with spoons and forks that, no one knows why, were larger than any others I had ever seen. Their metal, maybe plated, was twisted in strange ways: hunched spoons, forks with bent tongs, teaspoons as big as other people’s serving spoons, and a gigantic ladle. Mamma, silhouetted against the summer sky (where the tips of poplar trees rose, full of seed pu s and the crenellations of the Dâmboviţa mill), with her face thin like mine and her skin soft, spoke more for herself than for me, her attention inward, her voice mixing with the sound of doves and the scent of summer. I pushed a wasp into the honey and watched it writhe, heavy, a bubble of air between its jaws, while Mamma told old stories about her childhood in the country, with my grandparents ‘Mămica’ and ‘Tătica,’ who appeared in her dreams almost every night, about the family house, old and rotted, in Tântava, with all the rituals of Romanized Bulgarians, wrapped in the mystical incense of Orthodoxy and an ancient, un-Christian fear, talking about Christ and the Virgin and archangels without knowing the rst thing about the Bible, singing their carols like petri ed stories, with no clue who Herod was or the magi. As children, Mamma and the other girls her age had sent balls of eggshell-covered

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Mircea Cărtărescu

Blinding

The Left Wing

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Mircea C ă rt ă rescu Blinding

The Left Wing

PENGUIN INTERNATIONAL WRITERS

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The Left Wing

Part One

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