Blinding: Volume 1

12

THE peacock and the peahen, as though scared for their lives, pecked grains of barley from Maria’s hand, to the indignation of Marinache, the turkey, who, watching them with one eye, turned the beads that hung over his beak purple. From time to time he stared, with the same one eye, at the summer sky packed with white clouds, and then his sluggish red eye sparkled like a drop of water. The three birds lived together, because there was no other option, in the slums on the edge of town, in the few U-shaped square meters covered with bird droppings. And if the pair of peacocks, plated in metallic green and deep blue, were the local favorites, the pride of the courtyard, the turkey, in contrast, was heckled and mocked for his belligerent attitude. With a coquettish crown of feathers on her crest, Pompilia walked delicately on her coral feet. She was constantly watching Păunaş, waiting to contemplate, again and again, the cosmogonic spectacle of his spread tail, sprinkled with blue eyes. The courtyard locals were of limited imagination when it came to baptizing the imperial egg makers. Pompilia was a hooker from a neighboring yard, who went out every day at dusk with a purse on her shoulder to hunt for men; as for Păunaş, there were dishcloths on almost everyone’s stoves, so crude you’d think blind people had sewn them, with shepherds playing the pipes or a little peasant girl singing at the stove, around which crooked letters misspelled: “Wherefer theirs pees, God is pleased” or “Păunaş in tha forist, tell me who I love best.” The turkey was pot-bellied and as dirty as Marinache, the gypsy accordion player who rode the tram, pretending to be blind and deafening the travelers, repeating the same saccharine waltzes from the Colentina River to Dristor. He kept his eyes rolled back, so two yellow stripes, like ivory, showed between his eyelids swollen with conjunctivitis. When he left the tram, he didn’t open his eyes again until he had gone around the corner.

The birds watched Maria with their jewel-colored eyes — emerald (the peahen), sapphire, and ruby. She laughed and called to them, or let a “goddamn it” slip out when one pecked her plump, girly fingers. With her permed hair and bold eyes, wearing a white blouse with a lace collar and no cleavage showing, a pleated knee-length skirt, coarse threaded stockings and poor kid’s shoes, and carrying an oval, scarlet bag, held at the hip by a strap that crossed her breasts diagonally, there was something virginal and decent about her. She was like a character from a 1950’s movie (and this was actually anno domini 1955), a black-and-white girl performing on a screen with scratched lines, in a theater that smelled like sunflower seeds and petrosin. Her smile and her earnest, strong eyes lit up the theater, with its broken chairs, unshaven hicks, rats, and the stench of urine from the toilets near the screen.

Maria had just gone into town. On weekdays, the roar of the Donca Simo rug factory followed her day and night, but on Sundays it was quiet. She slept in, upstairs in her bedroom where she cooked and washed. She looked at the sky through the curtain embroidered here and there with red flowers, and, if the sun was strong in her room, she would stand up to stretch and laugh, dazed by dreams and loneliness. She listened a while to the noises in the courtyard — Gioni’s barking, the screaming peacocks, the gypsies squabbling, the boors fighting and the creaking water pump — and then she got ready to go out. She washed her face, armpits, and breasts in the sink, put on her one nice shirt, and dug around in her bag for the cardboard package of cheap lipstick the color of a box of chocolates. She put it on her lips, holding them in the shape of a heart, then spreading it well by rubbing her lips together. The powder looked even more pathetic, and smelled even more like cat urine, but Maria liked it — all of the women she worked with put on this popular powder when they went out, so they all thought it was normal. With a little toilet water from a bottle shaped like a toy car, Maria could step into summer splendor. But she’d only waste the perfume for a date or a movie. When she went to the market or the factory, she remembered what Victoriţa the pickpocket had told her, when she poked her hollow cheeks into her room and wrinkled her nose at the little half-full car on the sill: “What in God’s name, forgive me, is this crap you’re always putting on? Listen to me, soap and water is the best perfume. You know why those ladies and countesses all wore perfume? Because they didn’t wash. Because they stank. Because they had to hide the smell of sweat.” Victoriţa had one cheek that was okay and plump, but the other was just skin stretched over her jaw bone, withered by some disease. Maria wanted to vomit just looking at her. She’d be out a few years, and they’d catch her with her hand in someone’s pocket, and they’d throw her back in prison. She had no husband and no kids, but she was extraordinarily happy. Through the thin walls, Maria could hear her singing with the radio all day, songs by Angela Moldovan:

I made my parka new again, oh ho,

I have my coat for snow or rain …

Not everyone had a receiver for the state station back then. There were only two radios in the courtyard at 67 Silistra. One moaned with workers’ songs from morning until night, upstairs in the house in back, in the room of the one who became Nenea Nicu Bă, but for now was only Nea Nicu, master carpenter, a scheming lush who wore a beret pulled down over his eyes. The other belonged to Victoriţa, and played more discreetly, well tempered by the urchin with a matchstick.

Right as she came out her door (this is when she lived on the ground floor), Maria met a variegated and contentious world, as if the whole house were a hive of parrots. Dorel the electrician shaved outside, leaning his mirror against the birds’ fence. He was naked to the waist with hairy shoulders, and his sweatpants fell in folds, showing his thick legs and his penis shoved down one side. But Maria paid no attention. Instead, she glanced at him happily, saying “Morning, Dorel,” and then dodging and giggling because he always tried to grab her and cover her face with foam. With the shaving cream on his face, his mouth looked as red as blood. “Kiss the hand, Aunt Angela,” Maria smiled to a woman upstairs, bent over the blue railing. “How’s Ionel?” “To hell with him, he just poops and pisses all day, how is he supposed to be? I change the diaper and he craps in the new one, like he was saving it special. Don’t ever have kids.” Angela also had the requisite cabbage-roll hairdo on top of her head, and a coat that spread the smell of kifte meatballs across the yard. “Are you going to the movies? Is there a good one on?” “No, I’m going into town, auntie. Isn’t it a shame about this sun?” “Go on, Maria. I’m going to see what’s up with the little one.”

The smells of the kitchens and toilets of the slums mixed with the heavy aroma of the rotten box of oleander with pointed leaves, full of lice and fluorescent grubby-pink flowers. A row of tulips glowed divinely in yellow and red flames. The warm breeze was bad for Maria’s hair. She took a kerchief from her purse and tied it under her chin. Chestnut strands, curled with an iron, were still swirling behind her, slipping out from the rayon cloth printed with images of Sinaia. Maria smiled — and Nenea Gigi, the lathe operator with streaked hair and a bad eye from an accident with a piece of scrap — watched her hips and inhaled the scent of her cologne. “She’s not pretty, but she’s still young,” he said to himself. “She’s got a guy in the city, the way she swings it.” Maria was actually smiling because she remembered a scene in “The Valley Echoes,” when the boy of ready money, dressed in a funny white suit, goes to the Bumbesti-Livezeni construction site, where young people work cheerfully, and flirts with the ordinary girls, calling them — it’s so funny — “Mademoiselle,” and they put the rich boy in his place and tell the world and even make a play about him, where the boy from ready money comes up behind a working girl in an apron, smiling and saucy, with big breasts out to here, and says:

Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle

Didn’t we meet last summer at the spa?

Actually, he doesn’t say it, he sings it, because it’s kind of a musical, and she answers him like an echo, and makes all the boys and girls in the theater fall over laughing:

What spa,

Maybe a spaz?

Come here and I’ll show you a spa!

And she snaps something with a rag. And the real rich boy is in the theater, and the tears come, and he starts sobbing in a really funny way … Maria can’t control herself and begins to laugh out loud. Two gypsy girls at the gate, Lina and Făftica, watch her with their mouths hanging open. They’re real gypsy-gypsies, with puffy skirts and coins in their braids, the gold coins, cocoşeii, that had been confiscated by the police a while ago. They were left with the copper ones. They were short, dark, and very young, about fifteen, but they had already been with men, guys older than they were, and Săftica already had two children hiding behind her skirts. They spit sunflower seeds all day and talked about their gypsy men, who “wandered from cunt to cunt” and never came back home. Three quarters of their vocabulary consisted of “eat me” and “up yours.” You wondered why they never got tired of the same stupidity. They didn’t have anything against Maria, but they’d hassle the other girls. For example, they were always criticizing Coca, the courtyard whore, who didn’t wear a scarf on her head but a pink cap, exactly the color of the oleander, which for some reason bothered them to no end. But at least Coca never brought men to her room, which was as clean and modest as Maria’s; she just walked the streets and went with the men to their places. She would come back at dawn, when the other residents picked up boxes of sausage and boiled eggs and went to work. There was shouting and fighting all the time in in the courtyard, but it had nothing to do with Coca. Most often the landlady, Madame Catana, began the arguments herself. Madam Catana was abnormally fat and mustachioed, with wicked, slanting eyes and frightening veins crawling like purple hunching worms on her manly feet. She would prop herself in front of a tenant and start to scream her head off at him, because she saw him smoking in bed and he was going to set the house on fire, or because he didn’t say hello to her, or because she didn’t like his face … For her, all the men were “assholes” and all the women “sluts” and “hussies,” tramps. She had the habit of coming to the yard to have a bowl of soup, and then there had to be absolute quiet, because while she sat outside chomping, Madame Catana did her books. The courtyard was still full of dirty kids in cheap underpants, black from rolling around in the dirt, and she had to get up from her stool to run at them, with a curse of “damn your mamma.” As much of a bitch as Ma’am Catana was, her husband was kind, an old man who looked like the good Lord himself, lazing all day around the yard, smoking cheap cigarettes on his doorstep. Behind him, through the cracked door, you could just see the landlord’s room of wonders, the thing the whole court talked about with timidity and admiration, like it was a realm of enchantment. Maria had once been in the room of miracles, and she had been dumbfounded by all of its beauty. The old man Catana, you could tell, had done well as a merchant — he had been somebody in his time. The room was filled with old furniture, its wood decorated with garlands, roses, and Cupids. On the stained, plush bedclothes, there was a huge doll with a plaster head, wearing a dress with a pink veil. Other, smaller dolls in long pink and blue dresses, lined the nightstand and bedstead, alongside Chinese dolls made of gypsum and translucent green stone. A large rug covered the entire wall alongside the bed. It took Maria’s breath away. It showed a blue lake with water lilies, and a wide field of flowers along its shore. In the middle of the flowers and lemongrass bushes, there was a golden pavilion full of Spaniards. Two were dancing, a woman with frothy skirts and castanets, and a stiff man in a very short jacket, with knee-length trousers and white socks, with his curly hair held by the typical braid and hat of the torero. The others sat around them, on chairs, the boys flirting with the girls, some playing guitars … A flock of pigeons scurried around their feet. The other walls had paintings in heavy, worm-eaten frames. Maria liked the painting of the gray kitten best, but also the one with swans and conical mountains made of curly wool. On the table laden with macramé, vases painted different colors held dried plant tufts that seemed to float. The tablecloth had heavy silk tassels. The air was brown and smelled like cherry wine. Hundreds of icicles descended from the ceiling plaster, making the place seem like a cave of treasures. There was an old candelabrum with crepe paper shades. In the evening, a pink and palpitating light filtered through the landlords’ windows, like in a dream.

But Catana didn’t seem to care about the beautiful room he shared with his shrewish wife. He had been building, for a lifetime, another room, one that would ferry him into eternity like an ark of ivory. The tenants found out about his obsession from Madame Catana herself, who, in one of her ferocious drunken rampages, had dumped dishwater on the old man and screamed her head off at him for stealing her youth and wasting her parents’ fortune. “He thinks he needs a tomb! A tomb! When we are barely getting by! You go around in rags from Dămăroaia, ay, saving money for a tomb? You rigged the scales in your shop and you’re thinking about the world to come? Haoleu, when the demons get you and shoot hot oil up your ass, the worms will eat you up and your tomb, too. You sinning bastard! Good people, do you know what this murderer has done with his life? Him, the little lamb right here? He killed a girl he was living with, when he had a shop in Buzău, he set her on fire and kept the ashes, and every morning he ate her with a spoon, from a bowl as big as this, and after this bastard finished he went to the police, and they beat him stupid for a week, even though he’d confessed, and he did twelve years in prison, look, this bastard, the one you see right here in the doorway. You say I’m crazy, but if you knew what this man did to my life, it’s a wonder he didn’t put me in the grave, too. And you need a tomb? Pink marble? Stone angels? People, it would have been better if he was a drunk, if he drank all the money, then we’d know what to do, but no, he’s spent forty years saving up for a tomb. For the past twenty years the masons have been feasting on his coins. Do you know what this pig has on his plot at Bellu? It’s no tomb, people, it’s a palace. You could drive a cart through there. And the statues! and the doilies! and the rooms! so many! A whole nation of people could stay there until the last judgment. Couldn’t you have built a row of houses, so we could live like regular people, put clothes on your children, the mob you made, that you were so good at, you with the goods, me with the bads. Why couldn’t you do that? Why heat your tomb if you’re going to croak? If they’ll throw you in the street for dogs to eat? If you’re in a marble tomb, what’s the difference? What are you going to know about it? That you died, idiot, you’ll be dead, that’s all you’ll know. Kicked the bucket! Thank God I’m younger than you. Tomorrow, the day after, I’m going to lay you out on the table in the dining room, stiff and cold, and man I’m gonna laugh. I’m going to dance a jig around you, just like this! Hup hup! And I’m going to grab your nose and pull your cock out for everyone to see, you better believe it. Murderer! Idiot! Do you really think you’ll ever see the inside of your marble tomb? When I see my own neck. Count yourself lucky if I bury you under the elderberries. You, my whole life you poisoned my soul, motherfucker!” The tenants watched them like a freak show and laughed, and the venerable old man nodded with clenched eyes and said gently: “That’s right, what she says is right, good people. Forgive me, good people,” but his words were drowned out by other insults from his wife.

A few years later, Maria found out that the delirious old woman wasn’t lying — on the contrary, when she reduced Catana’s tomb to a palace, her obtuse mind had not been fully able to grasp reality. When the old man died, in 1962, as a Christian, with a priest and candles in the final triumph, he was mourned by the entire courtyard as a neighborhood saint. He left nothing behind except the houses and a 50 bani coin in a felted box, on the table with the fabulous fringe. Despite her ferocious promises to the contrary, the landlady held the funeral with full pomp and circumstance, following the most impressive slum traditions. A procession of six gypsies playing funeral marches on bent and dented brass instruments and a big drum walked behind the elaborately carved wooden hearse with windows that were thin from being polished so much, drawn by horses in black masks. Some of the gypsies wore funeral banners discolored by weather, and another was hanging at the courtyard entrance. Then came Madame Catana and the rest of the family, in heavy, black clothes, holding on to the back of the hearse and wailing, followed by the whole crowd from the yard and the street, eating sunflower seeds and chattering. Maria had heard from Crazy Leana, who sometimes stopped by the new house on Ştefan cel Mare, that Catana had died, and she came to see him off on his final journey, and to see her former neighbors. She was already thin and sour on life. She saw Catana in his white, satin-lined coffin, among the crowns of crepe-paper roses: it was like God himself was being buried. The funeral train took Colentina to Obor, then Moşilor, passed through the center of the city and, five hours later, reached the alleyways stuffed with final resting places, the Bellu cemetery. The stone houses decorated with marble and tarnished bronze, statues and oval pictures, their windows and doors barred, gave the place the impression of a city where a different species dwelled, with different needs and different bodies than human beings. Sad cypresses offered up their leaves toward the sky. The hearse twisted and turned through the graves and tombs, and arrived in front of a strange construction.

It was a pink house, glistening nostalgically in the twilight. In that wet November, evening had come quickly, aided by gloomy, yellow clouds. The tomb had an austere triangular pediment, with a round window in the center. The door was framed by two niches, with two statues of polished brass. What human beings did those bronzes represent? What humility before the mystery of death? The statues were silently screaming, mad with horror or a terrible laceration of the bowels. You could see the roofs of their mouths and the molars at the backs of their throats, and there, behind their uvulae, they turned pink (in the twilight, perhaps) as though their throats and gullets were made of flesh, as if the terrible bronze encased still-living human bodies, with soft, palpitating organs, blood beating through the ducts of their veins, and minds feeling endless agony in every neuron. The bronze statues were frozen in defensive, blocking gestures, their fingers sprawled, their ribs visible, and their paunches clenched, desperate to break off their pedestals and run away through the endless cemetery. Only once, when the priest sprinkled everything with holy water did the strange building lose its enchantment. Rubbing their eyes, the people saw that, in fact, the two bronze Adonises were angels. Their mouths were open in song, and their eyes were lifted toward heaven. The service was long and tedious, and afterward (darkness had fallen completely, irradiated by the temple’s rosy crystal) the coffin was lowered down the steps of the tomb. A blackened iron door, very heavy and well oiled, opened into an empty room and a stone staircase leading to a basement. The pallbearers carefully shuffled the coffin on their shoulders, and the relatives followed. Maria thought that there would not be room for anyone else. She, in any case, did not want to go in. She had never liked funerals, or priests. She did not believe in the afterlife, or rather, she never thought about it. “Did anyone ever come back and say what it’s like? If you’re okay with yourself in your soul, there’s no reason to be afraid. Whatever will be will be.” But little by little, the crowd around her thinned out, everyone else climbed down, and there seemed to still be room inside. Soon, she was alone, in the creepy darkness and cold. The irregular architecture of the surrounding tombs, now pitch black, bit into the sky like the teeth of a saw. Here and there a statue (an angel blowing a trumpet with its wings outstretched) made a brown profile against the yellow dregs of the horizon. The cypresses looked like they were painted with bitumen, and their sinister branches shook. Maria, frozen with fear, climbed down the stairs.

At a great depth, far ahead of her, she saw two or three silhouettes advancing in the dark green, and merging into it. The steps seemed to have no end. Maria descended them for hours and almost forgot where she was, when she saw at the extreme end of the stairs’ diagonal a small rectangle of light. No taller than insects, the last people in the funeral train flashed for a moment in the slowly advancing light and disappeared through the clear portal. Maria followed them and found herself in a huge hall, moving forward in miniscule steps over a polished, imperial mosaic floor. The hall seemed to be round, but its sides were so far away that they almost disappeared into a pearly mist. Supported by colossal porphyry columns, a golden dome stood too high for words to describe, higher than the dome of the heavens for one who labored on the earth, and higher than the quartz sphere of the constellations. Monstrous sculptures were set into niches all around the room, alternating with red-brown columns. They were male and female nudes, painted the color of flesh, the women pink, the men olive, all with the same azure eyes and the same terror on their faces. Each of their toenails was as thick as a human body, and lost in the gold fog of the vaults, their faces shone only by the lights in their dilated eyes. Each giant exhibited a different, tragic debility: one woman’s left breast was afflicted with elephantiasis, hanging like a hideous sack down to her pubis. Another sculpture’s head was sunk into her neck, her sternum stuck forward like a bird’s. The man closest to her had a poliomyelitic leg, missing the thigh and hip, with only his femur, tibia and perineum sagging in pockets of wrinkled skin. The hernia of the next one filled his testicle, its sack hanging to the ground. Cripples, dwarfs, cachexics, coxalgics, myelomeningoceliacs, the monstrously obese, cyclopedes, those with cleft lips, eleven fingers and eleven toes, bruised skin from a cardiac deformity, lepers, those scarred by anthrax, by scrofula, by vitiligo … the curved line of giant statues embraced the room with a ring of mutilations, and the funeral train advanced across its endless surface, like a parade of mites.

Maria, her mouth agape, crossed the great colored surfaces, imagining, of course, that the floor of semiprecious stone (malachite? obsidian?) contained an enormous drawing, geometric or figurative, that she was too close to see. High above, near the apex of the vault, one must be able to glimpse the fabulous mosaic in its full meaning. The tentative steps of her cheap shoes were like the untrained fingers of someone who’d been recently blinded, or of a teenager touching a woman for the first time. Slowly, the pallbearers came to the center of the hall. As the funeral train progressed, they saw other views of the mausoleum. They could see symmetrical openings in the curved wall, between the niches and columns, portals with bronze inscriptions and intricate decorations, which led to never-ending galleries. Sweet and colorful light, like in a cathedral, filled the mausoleum from nowhere with a diaphanous jelly. In the withered silence, the only sound was the tap of shoes, punctuated and harmonious as the music of a carillon.

Maria passed through the group of relatives in mourning black. She could not look away from the coffin, which was now a shell of prismatic, tinted glass that the six pallbearers struggled to carry. How the dead body had changed! His features were decomposing, his eyes looked like two huge balls under the thick skin of his face, as if his eyeballs had merged with his cerebral hemispheres, and his nose and mouth had merged into a proboscis that ran down to his chest. His hands and feet had been reabsorbed into his belly and chest, which swelled into repulsive shapes. His clothes broke apart, his beard and hair were tossed around like fluff shaken off of a dandelion, and the whitish worm of his penis, gently palpitating, now lay, passive but alive, in the coffin’s elytrons. Maria touched the hard shell of translucent chitin. Her eyes dilated and goosebumps rose on her arms.

In the center of the hall, so far away from the circular wall that the statues and columns could barely be seen through the blue haze, no more imposing than a forest on the horizon, there was a crystal tomb whose lid was pushed to one side. The pallbearers lowered their burden, people gathered in a circle, and the priest began to swing the censer and sing. Everyone crossed himself exaggeratedly and responded from time to time with an “amen.” Strange echoes returned from all sides, minutes later, creating a rose of sonic interference that seemed almost visible in the air of the hall. The pupa, wet with gelatinous secretions, was placed in the crystal house, and the lid, covered with a minute and illegible inscription, was placed over it and sealed. The crystal was so clear and transparent that without the rainbow lightening of the quartz prisms, it would have looked as if the larva floated over the floor. Maria was lost in contemplation of the slow, twisted, peristaltic movements under the skin of the chrysalis, which looked like an eyeball twitching under a sleeper’s eyelid …

When Maria finally pulled her eyes from the enormous cocoon, she found herself alone. The bereaved relatives, the hooded gypsies, the musicians and the priest had perished — they seemed to have dissolved into that corrosive air. It would take days to reach the nearest exit. Had they been reabsorbed into the light of the endless mosaic on the ground? Had they descended even deeper through a hidden trap door? Maria neither understood nor wanted to. You cannot think under vaults that are wider than the bones of your skull. Frozen in the center of the dream, alongside the tomb dug out of crystal, she suddenly felt her entire being collapse, as though she were rotting completely in a few seconds, just before her mind would die. Terror ran over her like a frozen sweat. She knew, in that precise moment, that she would never tear herself away from the fascination and the unreality of the cavern-mausoleum, that she would stay there forever, like a paralyzed grub, living prey for the monster that thumped beside her in its egg. She made the effort of her life to move away, slowly, from the grave and then to run, screaming without hearing her screams, across the multicolored tiles.

She ran at random, for hours and hours, stopping occasionally to breathe, but the walls did not seem to come any closer, or it was happening so slowly that the columns and deformed statues seemed like icebergs on the edge of the universe. Little by little, however, they emerged from the blue haze of distance, and soon she realized that she was approaching a monstrous acromegalic, his thorax surrounded by clouds, his feet so large that between the toes there were vaulted entrances to galleries that dwindled to a point in the distance. Maria entered the arched tunnel between the statue’s right little toe and the next, and she found herself inside a phantasmal brick viaduct. On the spiderweb-covered walls, here and there, hung the yellow horns of the hunting trophies. Paintings in heavy frames, bronze with floral patterns, were so blackened with time you could no longer tell what they were supposed to be. Marble hearths, with cold bronze screens and shovels, alternated with spittoons of the same slippery metal. The gallery was lighted by torches in black metal stands, high along the walls thick with spiders and moths. The silence rang louder and the light seemed to dim as Maria, who suddenly remembered she had left little Mircea alone in the house for the first time, moved forward ever more quickly between lines that united in the distance. Maria began to run again, terrified that she would never escape the phantasmal catacomb. She broke a heel and ran on, limping, until her body more than she herself perceived a gradual change. The air turned pinker, and almost imperceptibly, the gallery seemed to turn meter by meter into that same painful, crepuscular rose. Just as gently, the floor became elastic, and the tiles that had been as clearly defined as a chessboard began to spread their colors into each other, their borders dissolving, and the pictures, hearths, and trophies on the walls also slowly lost their forms, leaning into the reabsorbing pearl rose of the walls, turning flatter and more monotonous. Soon, Maria was walking through a proboscis of wet flesh that, at the edge of her sight, curved into a widening spiral. The walls were running with a yellow liquid and teeming with gelatinous creatures. They vibrated continually, snorting magical, velvet sounds into the air, braided with voices and clanging, louder and louder, until she felt like she was walking through solidified noise. She felt the dizzying spin in her liver, even though the large curves, the ninth or tenth emanating from the center, could be no smaller than Bucharest. After she had passed through the entire snail, walking crookedly across a floor as viscous as the walls, she found herself in front of a sculpture or a colossal mechanism, occupying a bony, irregular cave, on a scale to match the monstrous edifice. It consisted of three pieces, which hung above the crown of Maria’s head like summer clouds oddly knotted together in the sky. Joined by gelatinous pieces of cartilage, the bone pieces vibrated in a continuous roar, like the mechanical looms, she remembered with horror. The first and the last — strangely reminiscent of stirrups — supported the ends of two enormous, round windows, hidden by a transparent, trembling membrane, while the middle one arched between them, like the entrance to a temple, giving the whole a depth and grandeur. Maria, crushed by the inhuman dimensions of the limestone building, approached the window at the other end of the room, climbed the chalky protrusions and excrescences, and crushed the amoebic creatures underfoot, until she reached the thick, moon-colored membrane, with shining lights and fluttering shadows behind it that seemed to be from another world. She pressed her brow against the warm tendon, she pressed her palms against the temples, which were also membranes, or screens, and she tried to see something through the cloudy, hyaline substance. The howl of the exterior world became excruciating, as unbearable as a waterfall. When an indescribable form emerged suddenly from the abyss, rising all at once, green and yellow and gray, moving its — what? face? cephalothorax? tail stinger? — toward the window of flesh, Maria began to scream and ran back without hearing her own scream, just feeling the pain in her throat, losing both of her shoes — back through the hall of enigmatic sculptures, back through the wet snail and back through the viaduct, which after several hours had regained its sweet coral tiles, its brick walls, its fireplaces and its brass spittoons, its hunting trophies and its blackened paintings, finally opening again into the huge, foggy hall of statues. She crossed it again end-for-end, stopping often to sleep through the night on the polished floor. After passing the quartz tomb in the center, where the larva had already wrapped itself in a cocoon of multicolored fibers, she spotted the countless steps that led to the exit. When she saw daylight again through the melancholy cypresses in the Bellu Cemetery, Maria crossed herself. In the tram, she had to brave the crowd staring at her bare feet. She changed trams at Buzesti and took the 24 to the Circus. She passed the florist and reached the entryway of the block with the furniture store, where she had lived for over a year. Already from the entryway she could hear little Mircea screaming. At the door to apartment five, she found her neighbors gathered, trying to calm the boy who was crying as loud as he could behind the door, “My-my-mom-eee! What will I do without my-my-mom-ee!” She dashed over, unlocked the door and took the boy in her arms. He laughed while he cried, drenched in sweat and flushed with the strain.

13

MARIA left the U-shaped courtyard and walked into autumn. Above the yard, the sky was an intense azure with milky clouds frozen in curls. The green and pink oleanders painted their blue shadows on the whitewashed wall of the left-hand house, and further away, the semi-gypsy population sweated in the smell of roux, like fleshy growths on a coral reef. Once the courtyard gate closed, however, all of it stopped — the boiling, the smells, even the sounds — and Maria found herself on Silistra, walking through dead leaves and puddles that reflected the stormy sky. A wet, cold wind blew, seeming to blur the houses and passersby. But she was not cold. She continued walking in her summer dress among people with umbrellas and raincoats. An old woman with an empty bag over her head and shoulders (since cruel, ice-cold drops had begun to drizzle on the pavement) glanced at her strangely and went into a nearby courtyard. A glazier stopped at another gate, setting down his green burden, which reflected the sadness and desolation of the day.

How strange, how bright that cheap lipstick was, candy-flavored, on her young lips, below her chestnut eyes! Under the sky racing overhead like unraveling black smoke, she was the only thing with any color or life. Two eyes without mascara and a mouth in the shape of a heart. A few curls done with an iron fluttering under a scarf. Maria smiled. Her smile was good and honest, like the white collar on her pleated, polka-dot summer dress, the one we know, the only summer dress she could afford as a young working woman. She didn’t want to think about Costel yet, so she thought (and smiled) about her sister, Vasilica, and their old godmother, how one day the godmother, who couldn’t see well any more, put scouring powder on the cakes instead of powdered sugar (she had made some “Aunt Mimis,” her specialty, with a delicious cream center that smelled like lemon), and Vasilica had bitten a scented rhombus, and the powder scratched her teeth, but she didn’t dare say anything until her godmother took a bite and said, “Oh no, Vasilica! how silly, I put Comet on the squares instead of powdered sugar!” — and the two of them laughed until they fell over. A laugh slipped out of Maria, too, in the middle of the street. What a nut, the old godmother! But so was her whole family. Her godfather, Nenea Butunoiu, had been a merchant in his time. He’d had a haberdashery in Bucharest Noi. Now he repaired accordions and fumed about the Russians — only at home, of course, and in a whisper. As for the young godmother and her daughter Aura, Maria couldn’t stand them. She had never met more disgusting people, or seen more perfidious looks than those from their cloudy-green eyes, mother and daughter alike, two girls from the wrong side of the tracks primped up like they were something special. Marian, Vasilica’s boy, always wound up with a scratch under his eye when his godparents brought Aura over. A picture in her sister’s house showed the two children standing, holding hands in an odd way (Marian’s right hand in Aura’s left, meeting diagonally between them), Marian smiling foolishly and Aura frowning, with a face of unspeakable evil for a girl only five years old. Aura’s other hand held a hoop and her hair had a silly pompom, and Marian clutched a striped rubber ball to his chest.

How had she managed to end up with this brood of relatives? When had she had the time to surround herself with these people, who lived in Bucharest long before she came? Maria had arrived in the city during the war, when she found a tailoring apprenticeship with the Verona shop, at the same time as Vasilica. She had left behind her native Tântava. The shop was behind the ARO block, beside the white house with the veranda and multicolored marquee that belonged to the famous variety actress, Mioara Mironescu. The two little peasant girls, fifteen-year-old Maria and seventeen-year-old Vasilica, slept together upstairs in a single bed. They were shattered after hours and hours at the machines, and they dreamed all night of Singer machines and elegant young men, civil servants with panama hats and bamboo canes. They would wake up embracing each other, cheek to cheek, eager to go back into the bustling big city. They had Sundays off, and then they walked the streets, among apartment blocks framed by boulevards and lines of cars and carriages. They gazed, amazed and enchanted, at the stores, with their windows full of furniture and jewelry, at the dizzying heights of the Telephone Palace (how they wanted to be telephone operators! — in American movies the operator always met a young millionaire), at the offices where dusty youths at Yost typewriters hammered out letters and all kinds of documents, at the elegant old ladies who wore minks around their throats and looked like vamps from the movies. In the evenings, garlands of lights adorned the entryways to beer gardens, movie houses, and theaters. The girls toured these wonders with wide eyes. They were not part of their world, nor did the girls wish they were, since they could go to the cheap movie theaters in the neighborhood, full of workers who spit sunflower seeds and whistled when the boy kissed the girl on screen and sometimes, as though by accident, laid a heavy hand, smelling of lathe grease, on the thigh of the girl next to them. Often these idiots made the sisters change places in the dark hall, creaking across the wooden floor washed with petrosin. They also went to fairs, on the edge of town, crossing the rusty railway tracks and the fields of chamomile, to squeeze into a sea of people in front of childishly painted billboards, with wild animals and snake swallowers, spider-women, dwarves, and shameless girls who showed men their white, bare breasts, covered with moles … Children wore fezzes made of glossy cardboard, and blew colored trumpets. The sisters would buy themselves a bag of popcorn or a candy necklace, and like children, they enjoyed the whole motley day — their own youth, the freshness of the world. What did everyone back in the country know of these wonders? Nothing. Work and more work was all they had known their entire lives. Not even a year had passed since the sisters had become Bucharesteans, and they already despised the peasants, those who had “their head in a sack,” and they felt sorry for their sister, Anica, who had married in Tântava and would have to stay there all her life, with her cow and pig, working rows of tomatoes and green peppers. Once they’d had enough of wandering through the fair, the girls would ride the chain carousel, screaming until their throats gave out, spinning the world around them until they thought they would collapse. A boy on a chair nearby would catch the chair as they passed, then let it go, making them sway wildly, while they laughed until they cried and everything around them turned into a whirl of colors. In the evenings, they’d go to a cheap beer garden, one with different kinds of happy people, and they’d eat steaming mititei sausages in the hint of a distant accordion brought by the wind. They’d come home arm-in-arm, giggle up the spiral staircase and return to their bed with iron slats and the corner basin, their empty but intimate room, with a window to let the moon in. The girls would stay up late, talking under the sheet, in the blue, moonlit air that made their faces strange and pale, like in the movies. Maria was not pretty, but she was prettier than Vasilica. Her sister had the keen and cunning face of a squirrel, which no amount of effort would have made resemble the movie idols of the 40s, whom the two of them saw every day, on billboards over the theaters and in the newspaper ad pages. Maria decided in secret that Vasilica would never be more than a cute seamstress who charmed her upscale clients.

Now she looked through the back window of tram number 4’s last car as it rang through the smoke-filled intersection at Obor. A railway man who held a bundle of stove pipes in the middle of the crowd kept pushing her and blew the stench of sausages into her face. Because the tram was so full, people argued and whined like carnival barkers, but Maria — looking absently at the bars full of peasants with woven bags and braids of garlic, and at the stores selling windows and mirrors, or keys, or hardware, or fabric — paid them no attention. Stoically, she bore the patterned iron pipe stuck in her shoulder, and in the roar of horse-drawn trucks and trams crisscrossing and stopping sometimes nose to nose, throwing pale sparks into the dark air, she jumped from one thought to another, chilled by the raindrops pelting the window.

Maria and Vasilica were wearing braids down to their waists, woven with red ribbon, when they came to Bucharest. Their father, “Tătica,” brought them in a horse-cart and left them in the care of “Nenea,” their older brother, who would soon cross the Dniester and disappear somewhere on the banks of the Don. He wouldn’t come back until ’51. The girls labored in the workshop from morning until evening. At dawn, the rows of Singer sewing machines with glossy black wheels and pedals looked like giant insects with poisonous stingers, ready to receive their prey: young, living girls. Their boss was strict, with evil eyes and jaw muscles constantly twitching. She wouldn’t let the girls in the workshop leave before time, even to use the bathroom.

Despite her heavily rouged muzzle and eyelashes thick with mascara, there was something masculine about Maria Georgescu’s face. The older apprentices told the newbies what they had heard from those before them: that Madam Georgescu was not a woman in every sense of the word, that under her skirt she had what a man has. Some also said she had to shave her chin and her neck and between her breasts, so she wouldn’t grow hair like a bandit. But a thick powder covered everything, if there was any truth to it. Whatever the case, she never married. She lived in a shared room somewhere in Rahova with a schoolteacher, who was tiny and faint, with eyes surrounded by pink skin and teeth as small as a cat’s. Because Madam Georgescu never laughed, she frightened the apprentices, and they obeyed her without a complaint. The sisters never befriended the other girls, most of whom were hussies who talked in ways that girls from the country had never heard. They would have been miserable and cried every night in each other’s arms on their iron-slatted bed, had it not been for the wondrous Mioara Mironescu, the woman who became everything and more than everything to them, a fairy out of fairy tales, a model and a goddess, whose interest in the two little peasant girls seemed like a miracle. How had they come to the actress’s attention? Why — ever since she had seen them in the window of the house next door, laughing cheek to cheek and making faces, throwing crumbs down to the pigeons on the sidewalk — did the actress, stepping out of her massive Packard, stop, tilt back her black hat and veil, and stand there, a tailored silhouette out of a fashion magazine, her saffron-gloved hands clutching a bouquet of violets to her breast? The sun painted her face intense and pastel colors, igniting the thin silk of her veil and placing a large burning star on the wide onyx head of her hairpin. She watched the apprentices on the second floor for several minutes, fascinated, and then entered the dark hallway of her house next door, shedding her colors in the ever denser shadows. The black car left too, leaving the street empty and melancholic, enlivened only by the few tiny, rust-colored plants that grew between the bricks.

They met a few days later, and there followed a whirlwind of endless delight. The lady with short, slate-colored hair, with points framing her cheeks, with circles under her usually half-closed eyes, with brass bracelets jangling on her arms and even one on an ankle, took them out one evening to the Gorgonzola, a cabaret behind the Şelar, where black men sang in striped suits and hard felt hats. She would leave the two girls at a table to stare at the men blowing trumpets and glittering saxophones and at the people around them, and disappear down a staircase behind a red velvet curtain. A waiter brought the girls something to eat and some champagne, while people around them got up from their tables and crowded onto the dance floor. “Foxtrot!” cried the bass player, and everyone started to do such a ridiculous and wild dance that the sisters, no matter how awed they had been before, lost control of themselves and laughed until they cried. When the dancers went back to their tables, a plump, blond singer in a red dress with a strangely deep voice began to sing a sad, dragging song about a crazy love affair, “as never before on earth,” and the cowardly and cruel abandonment of the young “virgin” by “the man with flashing teeth,” who the virgin would still love “To the tomb of cold marble … To the bosom of God.”

Dizzy with champagne, the girls wept in the ever-thicker green smoke of cigars. Vasilica had just wiped her eyes with the back of her hand when she noticed the drummer smiling at her and winking. Her jaw hung open. She looked again. The black man smiled even wider, showing horse-like teeth between lips that looked made up. Vasilica turned around, but there was only a brown column. From then on, she kept from looking at the six jazzmen at all costs.

They were also brought glasses of a pale, crackling drink. The hall darkened slowly, and then a blue light, like that of a full moon, filled it, making the tinsel stars overhead sparkle and suddenly go out. Music began softly, with violins, and the young peasant girls were enraptured by the ravishing show on the night stage. A spotlight shone on the curtains, hesitantly, like it was looking for something that might be anywhere. The violins burst into swirling passion, and then they slowed, smooth and sweet, as a lady’s shoe appeared in the upper corner of the stage, descending slowly, until a stunning leg emerged inside a purple stocking, followed by a foam of lace. It was a dream woman, in a dress that left her powdered shoulders bare, a white satin dress with rich lace at the hem and a white, fluttering veil, a woman with pink and green cheeks glittering with gold dust. She descended gently from the night, and perched gracefully on the horn of a yellow crescent moon, with her eyes, mouth and chin smiling to lovers throughout the universe. The moon winked long, tangled lashes, and the fairy, whom they later recognized as their neighbor, wearing a curly platinum wig with strands falling past her hips, began to sing a song about Bucharest at night, sprinkled with stars, where the lovers listen, hand in hand, to the laments of gypsy fiddlers in cellar bars, and then go under the carpet of stars to embrace beneath flickering lamps, in piaţas with statues. Some blocks of scenery descended too: the Athenaeum, the Arc de Triomphe, and Mihai Viteazul on horseback, all painted strangely, all loops and spirals, as though they were woven in wrought iron. Silhouettes of young men in frocks and top hats and young ladies with skirts above their knees, with round bottoms and narrow waists, danced slowly among the cardboard buildings, in the chiaroscuro, for the only one glowingly illuminated was the languorous woman stretched along the crescent moon.

At the end of one of the stanzas, leaving the violins to take up the theme in an excess of suffering and languor, the singer stepped from the moon, and with a walk that paraded her wondrous hips, she descended the few steps that separated the stage from the club. She sang the rest of the song moving from table to table, resting a satin-gloved hand on the shoulder of a man and looking him long in the eyes, bringing her mouth toward his until everyone’s heart stopped, then pushing him sharply away and moving to another. One of the black men (the one who was smiling at Vasilica?) came toward Mioara and kissed her gracefully outstretched hand, and as the final chords were played, he walked her toward the stage, releasing her to sit once again on the crescent moon, to rise, pulled by invisible wires, and to disappear beyond the starry sky.

They went home in the Packard, so lightheaded that they were barely able to say goodnight to the singer, giggling and wobbling on high heels they weren’t used to. They stumbled up the stairs and fell asleep with their clothes on, with their two-bit pearl necklaces tangled together, so that the next day at dawn, Maria had to struggle to untangle herself from her sister, who was still sound asleep. “Lelică, hey, Lelică,” she said, and shook her, but Vasilica just turned, with her pale, plump arms, to the other side.

Maria was the first to go down to the workshop, to the rows of black machines with their needles, like elaborate buccal mechanisms, glittering in the dirty light. There was an intricate gold leaf filigree on each apparatus. She sat down, put her foot on the pedal, and turned the wheel and rod slightly until the greased needle began to move. It was so thin, and its tip was so sharp! During sleepless nights, she would often imagine she was being pierced by needles — that a long and gently curved tip would penetrate her heart. Then she would rise to her knees and lift one arm across her face, trying to ward off the long needle with the other, screaming with her eyes and lips. But the perverse needle passed through the heel of her hand over her heart, penetrated under her left breast with a quiet pop, passed through her heart, reddened her lungs like two large pinches of wool, and exited through her shoulder blade, pinning her to the headboard. She was fixed, martyred, and unable to escape. She waved her free arm in vain, like a dragonfly in an insect collection. This vision came into her life in the constant torture of working at the sewing machine. She felt increasing revulsion every morning as she approached the venomous vermin, and it was an effort just to survive beside it until dusk fell. That morning, Maria took a shirt collar and slipped it under the nickel sole, then tried to put the needle in motion. The pedal was stuck, and the needle did not want to come down and pierce the material. She turned the wheel by hand, but quickly realized that the mechanism inside the machine was blocked. Usually, when something like this happened, they sent for Nenea Titi, the mechanic, who set to work on the rods, discs, needles and other mysterious pieces of grease-covered metal that filled the curving body of the sewing machine. This time Maria, still feeling the champagne and the spectacles of the night before, opened the little door at the foot of the machine. She had an oil can and a screwdriver, and she hoped she could knock something or squirt a little oil somewhere and solve the problem herself. But when the curved wall opened with a click, she was astonished. And now on the tram, as she tried to look through the trails of rain on the window and see something in the shops that lined the boulevard, glimpsing, through the corner of her eye, a cloudy image of the Greek temple that would mean so much to her life, Maria trembled to recall what she had seen. In the metal window of the sewing machine were throbbing viscera — a kind of kidney, a kind of endocrine gland, flesh and cartilage, veins and arteries and lymphatic canals, ganglia dilating and contracting slowly below dewy blood, nerves branching in fusiform myelin sheaths, hyaline areas and dark areas like clots. It all throbbed and trembled beneath the powerful, audible pounding of an unseen heart. Maria slammed the small door shut and fled, screaming, out of the workshop. She never worked one of those machines again, and for the rest of her life she suffered an overwhelming fear of sewing. Vasilica had to make her dresses, the few there would be, for years after, and during the fittings, kneeling before her with a tape measure, she would always chastise her for not having learned to be a seamstress from Madam Georgescu (where would she be now, if she’s even still alive?) so that at least she’d have a trade.

In the days that followed, Mioara took the girls out for a boat ride in Cişmigiu Park (the driver of her black car rowed, with his sleeves rolled up, smiling at the ladies beneath his waxed mustache), she took them to a store on Cavafii Vechi and bought them trendy dresses and hats, she unbraided their hair herself, then left them in the hands of a master hairdresser, whose curling iron gave them ringlets until they looked like two ridiculous poodles in the salon mirrors, and to cap it off, she reserved for them a permanent table at Gorgonzola, closer to the stage than they had been the first night, and so it was there, for many nights in a row, that the apprentices enjoyed their champagne — sipping a bit more carefully now — and the dazzling numbers on the stage. The drummer, Cedric, would lead Mioara by the arm to their table, politely lifting his stiff hat to the young ladies. The girls looked at him wide-eyed and dumbstruck, as though they had seen Satan himself, but soon, with his eyes rolling and his wound-red mouth smiling, Cedric entertained them so much that from that night on, the girls could hardly wait for the band to go on break and the young man to visit their table. Elegant and charming, with a gold chain on his wrist and shoes with sharp points, Cedric told them stories of the French Quarter in his native New Orleans. He spoke of palm trees and agave, of glowing saxophones that blew in thousands of taverns, of Bourbon Street, where there were Mardi Gras parades each spring, and he described, in detail, the sinister voodoo rituals performed by mobs of black people in the city, casting bloody spells beneath the moon, dressed in masks of parrot feathers. He danced with Vasilica, trying to teach her to foxtrot. The black man danced divinely, moving his joints like a marionette around the poor girl who laughed like a fool in the middle of the dance floor, not daring to take a step. Meanwhile, Mioara took Maria’s hand, and with a strange smile on her lips, she placed her fingers (long and dry, with long, purple-lacquered fingernails) over Maria’s, which were politely resting on the table. The singer had an odd ring on her index finger that Maria, a little embarrassed, couldn’t pull her eyes away from. The loop was not metal, but seemed to be thickly woven from greasy hair, held together by thin spirals of silver wire. It was mammoth hair, Mioara explained. A few years ago, she had met an Austrian who had been to Franz Joseph Land, in the frozen north, where he would have starved to death with his fellow researchers on Siberian shamanism, if he hadn’t found, in a block of ice, an entire, intact mammoth, the meat of which fed them until spring. From the fur, during the fantastical polar nights in their miserable tents, they wove sweaters, blankets and jewelry. Mioara’s ring had a stone from the ivory of the same mammoth, upon which the Austrian had scratched, with a needle, the image of a butterfly, its wings spread and its antennae twisted in two symmetrical spirals. What was strange was that, if you looked more closely, the right wing of the butterfly was drawn with a firm line, while the other was only outlined in points that had turned black with the passing years. As Vasilica and Cedric seemed to have disappeared somewhere (it was long past midnight, couples stood in the thick shadows, at tables, embracing, paying no attention to the illusionist who twirled a fan of playing cards in his hands), Mioara took Maria’s arm, barely touching her, and lifted her from the table into the Bucharest night, flecked here and there by the gold of dim lampposts on Sécession. The singer dismissed her driver, and the two of them went on foot through the echoing, deserted streets, where nothing moved but a cat sneaking under a gate.

They went into Lipscani, by Carada Street, then through the Villa-crosse Passage, entering the Macca gallery. The tinted yellow skylights above, which the daylight turned transparent, now palely reflected the few electric bulbs placed in wrought-iron lanterns. The footsteps of the two women resounded loudly through the tunnel of white, spectral buildings, whose shops on the first floor had their shutters drawn. Rich stucco decorations, masks, gorgons, garlands and Cupids, reliefs and borders framed the upstairs windows. Mioara suddenly stopped under a street lamp and turned to Maria. In the artificial illumination, the singer’s face regained its lunatic appearance, glassy, detached from the world, as it had looked on stage, under the spotlight. Violet marks, green and citron stripes painted her sickly harlequin face, and her wet, sparkling eyes. Her rouged mouth seemed almost black, a soft and sensual flower. She held Maria’s head in her hands, looked in her eyes and, smiling, said she had a little apartment just upstairs, on the second floor. Wouldn’t she like to take a look, on her way home? Maria accepted happily. They entered through a black gate, polished, with a brass house number at eye level. Mioara went first, and gracefully moving the delicious roundness of her behind, climbed a stairway with a metal railing, followed by her young apprentice. A narrow corridor, with only a small sofa and a table with a beaten copper tray, had at its opposite end a single door, locked, with an oval window and pink curtains drawn on the other side. Mioara unlocked it, and they went into an alcove that left Maria breathless.

It was like a cabin on a luxury liner, even with a small window, closed with a nickel handle, shimmering behind a curtain embroidered with white birds. The scent of sweet perfume had faded the velvet curtains and bedspread to a bitter cherry hue. The singer moved forward into the jellylike air and pulled the curtains over the image of the yellow house next door. With the click of a lamp in the penumbra, the dark became red. Small Chinese vases and coffee cups lay in a crystal box, inlaid with walnut, with marquetry depicting warmly glittering lilies. Mioara gently lifted the lid of a gramophone and set a disk on the turntable. The chrome arm grated its needle over the black and red disk until they heard a tango that Maria recognized immediately:

When the depths of your eyes I miss

I sip from their dream rays at night

Little stars call me to you in whispers

They hunger for love’s paradise …

There weren’t any chairs, so after Mioara took off her shoes and lay over the bed, crossways, with a bare arm under her head, Maria sat on the bed, too. “Your place is so beautiful,” she whispered, enchanted. On the wall, a black velvet mask peered at her intensely, with hatred in its obliquely cut eyes. The singer lit a cigarette and, looking at the ceiling, where a coquettish glass majolica lamp was barely visible, slowly exhaled the smoke, which mixed with the transparent garlands on the arms of the lamp. Then she rose on one elbow and looked Maria long in the eyes again, hers half closed, as she had beneath the streetlight. The girl felt that nothing else in the world existed outside of this room where the two of them gazed at each other. Her heart suddenly become heavy, without knowing why, and when Mioara reached out her arm, like a pale snake that had a grown woman’s fingers, she suddenly broke into a sweat.

They remained silent until the end of the song. When the needle began to grate again over the glossy ebonite, the singer hopped up and closed the gramophone. Then she revealed (it had been covered with a flowery cashmere scarf) the toilet mirror in the green darkness, where the two of them appeared, whitish-brown, with sparkling eyes. “Help me take off my dress,” said Mioara, and Maria, obedient as a maid, came up behind her and began to unbutton it, revealing the singer’s neck and back, while she took off her earrings and bracelets, which left red lines over her elbows. Mioara pulled the dress over her head and remained in her slip, girdle and silk stockings, all as sparkling black as her short cropped hair. “That’s much better,” she whispered and lay back across the bed. Although she was skinny, the performer had large, round breasts and a firm bottom, and she seemed more womanly and more attractive the more she undressed. Maria looked shyly at the glistening skin of her protector’s thighs, between the edge of the fringe of her slip and the garter holding her stocking. All of the girls she had ever seen naked, by the river, the Tântava, had, like she did, like her sister, legs full of little lines of hair, but Mioara’s thighs were like ivory. And when the singer took off her stockings, rolling them, tinted like glass, toward the tips of her toes, the girl saw that her entire leg was white and clean, with painted toenails. “Take off your dress, too,” she said to the other in passing, once she dropped the rest of her dessous. Fear and confusion rose in Maria. Why had the singer undressed? Why wasn’t she embarrassed to show everything, everything? She had hair there, too, it was the only place on her body where she was like all girls, like all women. Maria had never seen such a beautiful woman. She lit up the room, and even her darker parts, the cherry-red coins of her nipples and the black triangle between her thighs glowed strangely in the air as thick as syrup. Embarrassed, not knowing what to think, feel, or do, she said: “But I’m not warm, it’s not that warm.” “No, but you’ll feel more relaxed.” As Maria hesitated, the singer stood, took a few steps over to a small, carved walnut sideboard and retrieved a bottle and two stemmed glasses. She poured a glass of an almost-black liquor and handed it to the girl. She turned the gramophone disk over, and they listed to “Zaraza”:

When you, señorita, came to the park that evening

With lily petals in your wake

You had eyes of tender passion, with lights of sin

And the body of a feline snake.

The taste of the drink was deceitful, sweet and fragrant, camouflaging the flame of alcohol which stole into her before long, through her veins, changing her mood, quieting her anxiety and increasing her delight in being there, in the scent-impregnated alcove, beside the unbelievable diva. When she bent for the bottle, Mioara had two deep folds in the soft skin of her belly; the vertebrae of her spine arose like islands of luminous skin, and her vulva, under heavy buttocks, was black as a mare’s in the spiderweb of curly hair. The girl was beginning to feel herself unravel in the stale air of the room, when she saw Mioara approaching. Mioara embraced Maria and kissed her neck passionately, burying her mouth and chin in the hollow of the girl’s collarbone, the way she had only seen men do, in movies, to women they loved. “Don’t be afraid, little one, ah, how I long, how I long for you,” the actress sighed, lying over her and caressing her buttocks with one hand. The girl only stopped her when she tried to kiss her mouth. Then the singer rose, panting, to her knees and began to pull the clothes from the girl’s body, taking out her small breasts almost without nipples, yanking on her blouse until the buttons shot across the room, pulling down her cheap skirt and leaving it crumpled at her feet. She turned her face toward the girl’s hips and pounced on them savagely. Maria no longer defended herself. Something sweet and grave flooded her body — it was the way she felt when one of the more daring apprentices told her a story about love, about what it’s like when you’re being undressed. True, the one undressing was always a man. After he undressed you, he spread your legs and put in the thing that men have where you have nothing. So what would happen now? Could you do it with a woman? (But who was thinking these things, since Maria felt like she was looking down from somewhere above the two women spread across the bed.) Squeezing her hips in her hands, Mioara gazed, with her face contracted in desire, at the girl’s pubis, mounded between her thighs, under her ordinary, proper panties. She took them gently in her teeth, and pulled them down until she glimpsed the line of hair.

Abandoned and giddy with drink, Maria felt the actress stiffen and catch her breath. Her excited breathing stopped, and for a few seconds, only the empty scratching of the needle on the record came from the corner of the room. Disfigured with fear, the actress turned her face toward Maria, her eyes wild, her hair bristling over her ears. Mioara leapt to her feet and pressed against the wall with the black velvet mask, which now grinned menacingly, next to her cheek. “Forgive me,” she screamed, “forgive me! Forgive me!” She wasn’t screaming, in fact, they were short howls crazed with fear, pushed until her vocal cords would break, as though, in her ravished bed, instead of the young apprentice, a spider bigger than a person had appeared. Frightened, the girl stood up too. “No!” cried Mioara. “Stay away! Forgive me!” She curled up in a corner of the room, like a child, and crossed her arms over her face. Then she collapsed onto one side and lay on the rug. Shaking, Maria approached. She bent down and tried to rouse Mioara from her faint. But the singer’s muscles were clenched like stone, her face was ashen, and her eyes were open like a dead woman’s. Only her jugular vein throbbed softly beneath the skin of her neck.

The girl shook off her dizziness and found herself in her underwear in a strange room. Only then did she understand what had happened, and fear, repulsion, and self-hatred combined incomprehensibly in her breast, taking the place of lucid thought, and they drove her to run. Her clothes were a mess, but she put them on, in a kind of frenzy, and she opened the wardrobe to look for a shawl or something to cover the missing buttons of her blouse. But the wardrobe had nothing but uniforms. They were black, SS officer uniforms, the kind she saw every day in the cafes of Bucharest, or driving the streets in black cars. Above them were 5 or 6 tall helmets, each with the emblem of a grinning skull, and below the uniforms shined pairs of polished boots. Only behind the boots were stuffed some women’s clothes, a kind of carnival costume and some masks. Maria wrapped herself in a saffron mantle that could pass, in the city night, for a shawl. She glanced at the woman curled on the floor and departed, leaving the gramophone needle to scratch on the rotating disk.

She went through the passage quickly with loud footsteps and sank into the unlit, miserable streets, under stars that blew an icy air. Barked at by stray dogs, grabbed by drunkards, taken for one of the easy women who leaned here and there around the bars, walls, and light posts, the girl, whose mind throbbed full of unclean thoughts, took more than an hour to get home. Vasilica was not back. Maria put on her nightgown and lay under the sheet. She tried to force herself to sleep but fell into a painful numbness. The ether of the liquor she had drunk was completely evaporated, and now her stomach was heavy with a chemical, decomposed air. She was sweating. She pushed the sheet to one side and writhed and turned, drenching the bedsheets.

From this daze Vasilica woke her, just as the new day approached. She was drunk and giggling like crazy. With their fingers interlaced in the brightening room, while the sparrows began to chirp outside and they could hear vendors hawking their wares on a street nearby, the sisters told each other their strange stories, the disturbing experiences of the night before. Falling onto the sheet with laughter, Vasilica whispered in Maria’s ears that she had been with Cedric, the black man, to a couple of places where they had danced and he’d spent money left and right, that they had eaten crawfish on crushed ice and drunk a flaming liquor. He sipped it and suddenly breathed a flame toward the ceiling, like a dragon, charring the quartz prisms of the chandeliers. And then they went out onto the street and Cedric danced and sang the whole way, tapping the asphalt with his polished shoes, “Maria, he sounded just like a priest hammering the bell,” and she laughed when, after a series of pirouettes, Cedric suddenly fell to his knees at her feet, with his arms outstretched like onstage, hands wiggling and grinning with his ivory teeth, then jumping up to keep tapping and singing in English. He could make the sounds of a trumpet, a saxophone or the brushes on the drums, beating his curiously white palms on the pipes … until Vasilica did not know how late they had come to Cedric’s place, a room off Piaţa Lahovari. But what a room! On the walls, there was a kind of matting with masks scattered, “like ours with the goats, but uglier, real demons from the people he came from,” and in a corner there was a crimson idol “with its thing down to its knees.” In a glass case with countless little cups and glasses there was something dark and ugly. Seeing Vasilica looking in there fearfully, Cedric had laughed, opened the glass door, and grasped the hair of a human head, small as a fist, dried but with expressive features. “This man used to be alive,” he explained, “but now his power is mine.” It was an actual human head, and Cedric held it on his fingertip like a ball. In the same case, there were wide gaping crocodile jaws, full of needle-sharp teeth. Vasilica had known when she went into the room that she would sleep with Cedric. Unlike her younger sister, she was no longer a virgin: in the village she had had a “darling,” and since she had come to Bucharest, she had been, as would any happy and healthy girl, with two others, a clerk at the Department of Alcohol and a medical student, and she didn’t call them “darlings,” like in the country, but cupcakes, as they said in the neighborhood in those days. She wasn’t against having an affair, for her own pleasure, even with a black cupcake as cute as Cedric. But good Lord, listen to what happened next! Vasilica started to laugh so hard her eyes watered. It was so funny! Cedric poured a drink and started to murmur prayers in a satanic language, without looking at her. He clapped his hands and babbled. Sweat began to run down his forehead and cheeks. His shirt was soaked almost immediately, and his strong, well-defined muscles showed through the wet fabric. Then he pulled his shirt off and his striped pants down, almost tearing them, and then he was naked as a beast and smelled like a circus lion. His eyes became round, his corneas saffron. When he jumped up, Vasilica stiffened, thinking he would rush at her, but instead he opened a wardrobe and took out a German uniform, “Nazzies!” and threw it on the bed. He told her, with a wild look, to put it on. “And I pulled those tight pants on and buttoned the vest with iron crosses up to my neck, and then I put on the boots and the cap. I tightened the leather belt and looked in the mirror. And you know what, it looked good! But it all was kind of hanging off me, since it was made for a man …” Then Cedric gave her a thick, round leather crop, and he commanded her to whip his back without mercy while she said all kinds of stuff: dirty darkie, gigolo, sonofabitch … She beat him all night until her hand hurt, and that was it. Cedric came on the sheets several times, but he never touched her.

Maria raised her arm and watched its shadow on the wall. She told her sister about the singer. She scratched her head for a while, trying to guess what had scared Mioara so much. She decided it couldn’t be anything but the rosy butterfly on Maria’s hip, which the singer only saw when she pulled down her panties. But why, what had the mark meant to her? She remembered the ring on her finger, with the butterfly etched in ivory. The sisters thought they would try to find out what was really happening, but the next day the bombing of Bucharest began, and that magical night passed into oblivion.

14

THE next morning, after they’d trembled through the night in a shelter, screaming at every rumble of the earth and deafening explosion, the sisters found their neighborhood in ruins. Above, on the blue sky, transparent, without reality, the Americans had written VICTORY with colored airplane smoke, and the letters were unraveling, turning into just a line of clouds, scattered in the wind. Many homes had just a few walls still standing, like the remnants of cavity-filled teeth. The demolished roofs revealed people struggling with pieces of pipe and cable, salvaging something or other. Shop windows were shattered, and homeless kids plundered the mannequins. A tram lay across the street, toppled to one side, and one rail rose up vertically, two stories high, to point at the sky. Dusty soldiers ran around in disarray, with chairs in their arms, or vases or rolls of carpets. The head of a plaster gorgon, from over an entryway, had a triangular steel splinter stuck directly between its eyes. The splinter cast a pointed shadow, like a sundial, across the gorgon’s cheek, ear, and two ridiculous serpents in the tangled capital of fury.

The closer they came to their street, the greater the disaster. The ruins seemed more hideous and ancient, as though the bombing had happened decades ago. The brick walls were yellow and crumbling, and beyond the façades yawned chambers with nudes hanging on the walls, while dead bodies lay among glass cases displaying intact goblets. The girls passed a knife sharpener carrying his primitive machine on his back. They clambered over piles of rubble mixed with small objects and laundry, and stopped on the corner, embracing, with the same fear in their eyes. They did not dare turn onto the street where the center of their Bucharest lives had stood — but was it still there? — the tailor shop with the apprentices’ rooms upstairs, the other middle-class houses across the way that stood, decaying and clunky, full of silly ornaments, beside the Toval corporation, the factory for orthopedic shoes on the ground floor, along with the Leon Gavrilescu photo studio, and their close friend Nea Titi, who had the great and ferocious Singer sewing machine, decorated with gold floral designs in her window and on her hanging sign. And, of course, next to the Verona tailor shop, the whitewashed building with the butcher on the ground floor, where, three flights up, lived the actress who sang from the crescent moon.

Their hearts beating in their double chest, since fear and foreboding had made them Siamese, the girls entered the street of death. Never had they seen such carnage. Pools of blood glowed in the sunlight. Hands, jaws and smashed bones came out of the rubble and the cracks in buildings. A human brain, intact, moist, with carefully drawn circumvolutions, with tiny blue veins beating under the membrane, bloomed on the pavement, beside a wide-open skull. No house was left intact. Doors were standing, frames and all, while the walls were piles of bricks. An elevator shaft remained, wrapped in its black wire mesh, from the Romanian-German Petroleum Company, while the building around it had melted like sugar. Four floors high, the shaft, with a large wheel on top and its elegant, glass-doored car stopped between the floors, dominated the entire street like a menacing tower. Inside was still, perhaps, sitting on her chair resignedly, the elevator operator, whose power had been cut during the air raid the evening before, trapped in the cage of her eternal daily suffering. She might have struggled and screamed the whole morning, like a bird in her nest, and nobody had bothered to release her. Now she probably looked down from the height of fifteen meters at the disaster of the business district, happy in the end to have survived.

The sisters, with their damp fingers twisted together, stepped over the floor of broken windows, over widely scattered orthopedic shoes — in one a shard had cut a hole the width of a hand, exposing a beautiful lady’s revolver with six chambers and a tiny pearl handle on a wrinkled satin lining; in another was a small ingot of gold; in a third, a chess pawn, made of glittering crystal. They stepped over hats with veils, and photographic plates of frosted glass, liberally coated with silver nitrate. It was as if all the secrets of a seemingly indolent world had come to light at once, and this new world was as transparent and passionate as an engine on display in a science museum, with cut-aways in the thick metal to show how the pistons and valves moved. Who would have thought that Gavrilescu the photographer, with his big paunch and sluggish persona, always with a pint of beer in hand, and whose bloody body now lay across a pile of sepia photos of naked girls, had been a cunning and competent spy? Maria and Vasilica, passing by the former photography studio, stepped over exquisite bird’s-eye photographs of German encampments, filled with letters and arrows scratched into the glass plates. Or Nea Titi: always sullen and covered in sewing machine oil, whose hollow cheeks made him look like he only ate on Wednesdays and Fridays, now appeared to have been a great collector of gastropod cypraea, one of no more than a hundred worldwide — the conches were tossed about crazily, pearly pink and purple and anthracite, spotted like leopard fur, as though painted by Chagall, with spikes and ragged lace, big as a tire or tiny as grains of sand, and scattered and shattered everywhere. Now Nea Titi lay on his back, sliced open like an anatomical model, a pale rat in a jar of alcohol, disassembling himself in the clear liquid, displaying his liver, his heart and lungs, his large and small intestines, his kidneys and bladder. His eyes, open toward the sky, looked like two balls of green glass.

On the left side of the street was only the empty blue sky, held up by pillars of broken buildings. Across a vacant lot with conical pits and piles of rubble, one could see houses, many of them whole, from the next street. “My God, Maria,” Vasilica whispered, standing still in the middle of the street, “there’s nothing left … nothing …” They would have to begin their lives all over again, in some other shop, under some other boss. A bomb had fallen directly on the tailor shop, as though the Yank in his Spitfire, chewing gum and thinking of some down-home Ginger Rogers, had smelled the musky scent of thirty girls with bushy armpits — or the delicate Chanel of Mioara Mironescu? — and pushed the button on his joystick to drop the steel oval, with a yellow fin, the way in another situation he would have ordered open the valves of his shameful nerve, filling the corpus cavernosum with blood, to tumescence. To immerse thirty girls at once within the ravishing orgasm of death! Luckily, only one or two were caught at home, those who, like many others in Bucharest, had become numb to too many air raids, and had been content, in place of any other reaction, to cross themselves with their tongues on the roofs of their mouths and mutter absentmindedly, for the hundredth time: “Good Lord, make them go to Ploieşti!”

The girls, separated now and crying, went over to the old façade of the Verona tailor and up to the butcher’s. The half-skinned cow that had always been hanging on a steel hook was now mixed into the cubes of pavement, mutilated a second time. The indifferent lamb’s heads, covered in blood, stared into the azure sky with the same hallucinatory horror as Nea Titi’s human eyes. Sausages, headcheese, salamis and horseshoe-shaped pastramis lay everywhere, swarming with flies, like an animal’s organs in Arcimboldo. A delicate hand, as though painted by a Renaissance artist, rested, cut off at the wrist, on a slab of bacon tied with string. From the stump, like jellyfish filaments, the ends of veins and nerves emerged. On one finger, a ring with a white stone glistened. Maria’s heart stopped. She ran to the hand, getting her dress caught on a bundle of wires. She bent down, without touching it, choking with emotion. It was the butterfly! It was the mammoth-hair ring, on the withered finger, with its nail lacquered dark red, of Mioara Mironescu. Maria screamed as loud she was able to and Vasilica ran over. “Lelică, Lelică, it’s Mrs. Mioara’s hand!” The young girl’s hysteria grew into a fit, making her howl like an animal wrapped around Vasilica’s shoulders. Her sister tried to pull her away, to stop looking, to forget … But then, with a sharp contraction of her muscles, Maria stopped struggling. With her face ravaged, and something manic in her eyes, she grabbed the pale hand and brought it to her lips. She took the ring off of the finger and slipped it into her shirt, by her breast. A street vendor passed, in traditional apron and pants, with his Oltean hat around his neck, looking for something. A clerk with a white purse paused to look at them and passed on. The girls looked down. They took each other’s hands again, and walked through the ruined houses, trying to glimpse, in the piles of bricks and broken furniture, any vestige of their former lives. When they came to the back, to the service entrance, where the apprentices usually entered the building, they were moved by what they saw. Maria would never forget it, and she would tell the story many times, in the peace of her kitchen invaded by poplar tufts and wasps, cooking potatoes for Mircea and gazing at the dusty crenellations of the mill wall. And now, on the tram, when lazy, soft snowflakes suddenly began to fall, Maria remembered the morning after the bombing and smiled with emotion. The tram turned and rang its bell as it moved from station to station toward the university. Everyone wore heavy coats. Men wore Russian fur hats with the flaps down, or curly hats of wool. One or two had fedoras. The women held on to each other for warmth, laughing and joking, showing their missing teeth through their nauseatingly painted lips. Only Maria wore the same summer dress and the same headscarf with images of Sinaia. The other women were well cocooned, with rubber galoshes over their boots, as was the fashion in ’55. People at the stations froze in the snow, waiting for the tram. Some cars, Pobedas and Warszawas, attempted to lug their heavy carcasses, like beetles, over the white surface of the boulevard. In comparison, the black Volgas looked like limousines. Pushing away any thoughts of Costel, whom she was meeting that night at the International Fraternity Cinema, Maria sank again into the past, while the tram accelerated, creaking in every joint, past the statue of C. A. Rosetti, who reigned from his bronze chair over the leafless trees and snow of his little park.

Only the doorframe of the service entrance was standing. Behind it, the pile of rubble rose taller than a person. And within the wood frame, on the doorstep, his bare gray head in his hands, in his peasant dress and boots from the First World War, sat Tătica. Badislav Dumitru, known as Babuc, believed he had lost both of his daughters in a single night. “The poor man sat there on the doorway, and cried,” Maria would say dozens of times. “Poor Tătica! As mean as he was to you, as stingy as he could be, he wasn’t bad in his heart. He just worked hard and suffered a lot when he was a child. He was left without parents when he was very little and raised by his older brother, who beat him with a stick for any thing he did. When the war came, he was drafted, wounded, and decorated, and he came back to the village a sergeant. After that he married Mămica and took her from Dârvari, both of them dirt poor. They had eight kids. Four lived — Anica, Vasilica, me, and Uncle Florea. The others died from tuberculosis, which is how it was back then. But as simple as they were, country people, I remember how they would talk over any decision, Tătica and Mămica, anything. I would wake up at night, at their feet where I slept, and I’d hear them talking: ‘Maria, look, tomorrow we’re supposed to plow the hill. Don’t you think it’s too early? Should we leave it two or three days?’ And Tătica listened to what Mămica said and didn’t do anything they didn’t both agree on. And he didn’t yell at her, and he never hit her once, like everyone does in the country. And you know he didn’t get married again after my poor mamma died, at 54, and he never even looked at another woman. Instead, he turned bitter and stingy. Lord, how I cried once when he stopped by, you were little then, on the way back from the market, and he gave you a little 25 bani pretzel, small as a pinky ring and so hard you couldn’t eat it, and then when I was looking for the garlic in his bag and I found a big, puffy pretzel, covered in salt and poppy seeds … He had bought the little pretzel with the change he got from a leu and given it to his grandkid, since you had teeth and could chew. And anything you asked for, ‘Tătica, can you give me a bag of nuts?’ ‘I don’t have enough, taică, how am I going to have enough?’ And when we got married, he didn’t even give us a spoon … Well, that’s how he was, but he raised us all, for better or for worse, and we never lacked for anything. He never beat you when you were little and playing in the yard in Tântava. He only spanked you once, when you put the cat on his head and it scratched his face, do you remember? Otherwise, you just had to worry about his mouth: ‘Haoleu, if this kid was mine, I’d love to put a stick on him.’ That time, after the bombing, was the first time I ever saw him cry. He was in despair. When he saw that our house was destroyed, he thought we were dead. He had heard about the bombings in the middle of the night. Up to then, the planes had gone to Ploieşti, where the refineries were. They passed right over the village, over Tântava, you could see them, like silver butterflies … Often they dropped bunches of scrap metal that the kids collected from the fields. But our neighbor across the road, the one who died, Fănel, Ochişor’s kid, he had a radio, he was well set, and other people had them too, and that’s how the whole village heard about the disaster. Most of them had children or relatives in Bucharest. You can imagine what they felt like, what grief was there. Tătica got dressed and left in the middle of the night, walking along the road, to find out what happened to us. He walked 25 kilometers to Bucharest. He got there around six in the morning. He had already been sitting there for two hours when we found him, with his head in his hands and the woven bag beside him. That day made up for a lot.”

The girls had ran toward him, screaming, hopping along on the high heels that made their ankles bend. Tătica, raising his eyes red with tears, did not recognize them. Vasilica and Maria, his little girls in aprons and shirts they had made by hand, after they had woven the fabric themselves, had transformed into two demoiselles with curly hair, straight dresses tight at the hips, and strings of beads around their necks … When he hugged them, thanking God, while they cried, rubbing his prickly beard, overwhelmed by love and tenderness, the old man smelled perfume. A passing, absurd thought darkened his joy for a moment: had his daughters gone astray? In the village, there had been three sisters who went to live at Crucea de Piatră, and sometimes they came home gussied up with ointments and stinking of cologne. All the lads of the village, as many as hadn’t been drafted (before the end of the war, news of their son’s death on the front would reach 187 mothers in Tântava), whistled at them and shouted rude things. But no, Anica had been to Bucharest two days ago and found them toiling in the workshop, at their sewing machines. Embarrassed by the thought, Tataie hugged the girls tighter against his chest. He picked up his bag and the three of them went back to the street, forcing themselves not to look at the misery around them. The old man stopped worrying and cheered up. He walked, as he would until he was 87, until just a few days before he died, with enormous steps, so that the girls had to trot along on either side, barely avoiding being left behind. A man with a cart stopped by them, after they had come out of the bombed neighborhood. He was from Bolintin and knew Tătica somehow or other. They got into the cart and bumped along streets they had never been down before, until the picturesque and familiar scene of Obor, swarming with peasants, gypsies and lowlifes, opened before them. A blue smoke and the smell of grilling sausages filled the whole market. On Moşilor, and Oborul Nou, clots of carts and automobiles passed, advancing like snails in the sea of people. The middle-class houses and mud huts had almost all been made into bars. Among the many taverns full of peasants, there were signs for stores, and squalid workshops with heaps and piles of scythes, lines of shovels, chains and ropes … A Transylvanian man sold glazed bowls for ten meters along a shopfront, and after him there were babas hawking wooden spoons. A gypsy sat on a patch of grass and made rings from silver coins. Some stray children, stinking like corpses, stood around him, watching him blow fire through a bronze pipe.

They went into a bar and squeezed together on a long bench, at a pine table stained from top to bottom with tomato juice and seeds. After a half-hour battle with the mob at the counter, Tătica came back with two pints of beer and a narrow glass of rachiu. The place smelled like sweat, rancid lard, garlic, and above all sheep — the smell of peasants, impregnated into their skin and clothes, in the rush baskets they carried for eternity. Out of his own bag, the old man took some cheese, tomato and a piece of smoked sausage, and then traded a few slices with another person at the table for a heel of bread. The girls were starving, and they ate almost everything without saying a word. The man from Bolintin had disappeared somewhere in the crowd. “How is Mămica?” Vasilica asked later, looking around through the blue smoke from Plowman or National cigarettes, still chewing with her mouth full. She looked like a rodent, like a clever squirrel, tireless, always moving. She should have been called Martha, to contrast with the dreamer Maria, but the name Martha was completely unknown among the Tântavans. “Eh … you know your mamma, she’s fine …” Babuc spoke huskily, as though his voice weren’t coming from his throat, but from somewhere underground. “When I left she was milking the cow and going ‘haoleu, my heart, haoleu, my heart.’ She had heard about the bombing. To hell with you and your heart, with all your whining and sighing, I’m going crazy, that’s what I told her, but you know your mamma what she’s like. She says ‘I dreamed the girls were crossing black water, and Maria didn’t have any hands, and Vasilica was carrying dahlias, and she was laughing, like this, at the moon … What can it be?’ And crosses and crosses, and she spits down her shirt, and then ‘haoleu my heart, haoleu my heart …’ ” They all laughed, since just like chills, hemorrhoids, and jaundice, struggles of the heart weren’t taken seriously in the country. Sickness meant you lay around, wasted away, and never got up. Cholera, consumption, typhus, and pellagra were sickness. Anything else you walked off. Maria would always remember her mother, also named Maria, whom she sat with for a few days and nights before she came to her end, at fifty-seven years old, in 1960. When she was on her deathbed, in her family house, watched over from the walls by archangels and the almighty Lord himself, with his red book open on her lap, Maria Badislav was a saint. She complained about nothing. Her eyes, with tiny blue veins, shone in their sockets under her thin eyebrows. She passed down her thin and kind face to Maria, and Maria passed it to her grandson Mircea, along with the enchanting power of dreaming. All her life, Maria dreamed in the strong and bright colors of icons. She had dreamed of her husband before she met him (she recognized him on the spot, the morning when he wheeled his cart into her father’s yard to repair one of the axles, he was a turner from Bârvari); she had dreamed of all eight of her children, six girls and two boys, before she bore them, and she knew ahead of time which ones would live and which wouldn’t. “Poor Mămica,” all her kids said, among themselves, when they talked about her. Watched over by a candle that shone like gold in the clay darkness of the house, Maria was just as transparent and could be snuffed out just as quickly. Little Mircea was in the room too, playing explorer on an upside-down chair he dragged here and there. The old clock, with a locomotive on its face and two enormous bells on top, ticked loudly in the room’s quiet. Suddenly the old woman groaned, Maria began to scream, and Babuc rushed in from the porch, where he was warming some food. They grabbed her hands and looked, frightened, into her glassy eyes that no longer saw anyone. Tătica said huskily, “Maria, Maria …” and suddenly, as she half rose up, the old woman sighed from her lungs and in the box of her chest, transparent with suffering. Through the thin linen of her shirt, the three of them saw Maria’s heart unfold like a flowering bud. They saw how its jellylike petals unrolled within the box of her chest and how in the end, on the thick vein that served as its stem, a wondrous, pink, luminous flower flowered under her skin and bones. “Rupture of the heart” would be written under “cause of death” on her death certificate. The doctor, who’d just come from Domneşti, had never seen anything like it. “It’s like an x-ray, look, you can clearly see the lungs, three lobes on the right and two on the left, there is the clavicle, behind are the shoulder blades, and the ribs are whiter at the edges and grayer in the middle … And at the end of the aortal artery, her heart is just shredded to bits …” The peasants filling the room crossed themselves reverently. The priest, a young man with only a few tufts of beard, frowned, not knowing what to do. Miracles, of course, were no longer possible in the workers’ and peasants’ republic. They buried Maria quickly, on a rainy day, with the entire village gathered in the cemetery. The three girls cried as though their souls would break open, while Florea and Tătica, clean-shaven and dressed in black, were quiet and leaned their heads toward the ground, and the children, Marian, Mircea, Florea, and Rădiţa’s Doru, played with stones somewhere in the crowd, their jackets transparent with rain over their cheap clothes. Mămica would leave this much behind: a cloudy memory and an even cloudier photo, with a peasant girl in a black headscarf. Her face there had almost no features, it was so white and misty that Mircea, when he saw the picture in an issue of “Work of the Party” (he was five or six, and the family had already moved to the block on Ştefan cel Mare, still unfinished, with scaffolding across the front), drew in pen, on the oval wrapped by the scarf, an ugly face with a crooked nose, and teeth and eyes like a grinning skull. On the back, in marker, was written in that flowery hand that peasant kids learned under the rod of their Doamna before the war: “Mămica at our Wedding 1955, August 4.”

Time passed quickly in the bustle of bars on Obor. No one talked about anything but the bombing, the way that a few years earlier they’d talked for months only about the earthquake and the fall of the Carlton block, which acquired the melodramatic proportions of the sinking of the Titanic, by means of the ridiculous waltz played on every accordion. Little by little, the tall glasses of liquor turned rosy, and the color passed into the whites of the eyes of those on the smoke-blackened benches. As evening began, the trams crisscrossed in the piaţa, clanging deafening bells. Tataie and the girls left the bar at five in the afternoon and walked along Mihai Bravu, winding into the lonely slums, where flocks of children played ball on the street or poked through the mud, until they came to Rădiţa’s house, where they spent the night. Nenea and Uncle Florea were on the Russian front, and Rădiţa, who had a small shop no one entered, in spite of the beautiful cases full of porcelain dolls, had been left alone, scared, crying night after night, waiting from morning to evening for word from the front that her husband was dead. They listened to the radio for a while, but they couldn’t get any information from the propaganda programs. The country was occupied by the Germans, or at least that was the reality behind the beautiful words. They slept piled into two beds, without undressing, and the next day they went back to Tântava, where the girls would stay until the war was over.

In March of the next year, it snowed wet and unusually large flakes over the roughly three hundred houses in the village, “lamb snow,” as they called it. People were annoyed, because they had to wear their heavy clothes and wool hats again, when they had thought they would move on to lighter wear. They were also afraid a frost would catch the budding trees and there would be no fruit in the summer. Maria was standing in the oven, stirring a hanging pot. The oven was made of clay, with a great yellow fire, a wood floor and a sooty window as big as a hand. The back was lined with reeds, which wild bees filled with black honey in the summer. Above was the chimney, where the smoke rose from ashen twigs that were almost always damp and full of caterpillars and spiders. In the oven, with her face hot from the fire and watching the smoky arabesques in shafts of light, Maria felt like she was inside a rounded, tender belly. It smelled like mămăligă and mouthwatering stew. She was just stirring some mămăligă when she heard the dog, Roşu, barking like he was possessed. The dog, swith fur the color of fire, had its own strange and moving story. For a time, there were always Germans in the village. They would come on their motorcycles for a beer at the bar in the center of town, next to the footbridge where Băcanu Village started … People didn’t love them or hate them; they became used to them. Only in the years that followed, when the German soldiers were replaced by Russians, did the villagers begin to miss them and speak of them fondly. The Germans had treated the locals well. They paid for what they drank and ate, down to the last penny, and they played with the children and gave them chocolate. The charm of their blue eyes would stay with the Tântavans, in contrast to the Russians, who behaved like wild beasts. Rapes and robberies came one after another with the Russians, and not even the movies with dumb, evil German characters, nor the propaganda for Soviet heroes, nor the slogans like

Stalin and the Russians

Brought to us our freedom

nor the new national anthem with

Our people will always be the brothers

Of our Soviet liberators

would change their conviction, often repeated, if under their breath: “The Germans, you know, they was what they was, but they was good people. But God save you from an angry Russian …”

A German officer (Maria remembered his name as Klaus) had been billeted for a while with the Badislavs. He stayed in the room on the other side of the hall, lying on the bed almost all day and reading, under the shawls and coats that hung from the beam. One day he came out wearing one of Babuc’s wool hats, and the children fell over laughing. And this same Klaus got into the habit of playing in the yard with Roşu, one of the two dogs — the other was old, Roşu’s mother —; he taught him to fetch a stick he’d throw as far as the shed, to shake, and to do other silly things. When he was leaving for his native Bavaria, the German begged Tătica for the dog. Out of gratitude, Tătica gave the dog to him, and Klaus put Roşu in his sidecar. And wouldn’t you know but the dog came back a year later, trailing a collar with a German inscription, which the villagers much admired, standing surprised around him. When the dog saw Tătica, he went mad with joy, hopping and whimpering, even though he was weak, his ribs showing, and he pawed the ground with aching feet. The village told this story for a long time.

And now the dog was barking more frantically than Maria had ever heard, until he couldn’t breathe. She came out of the oven door, and the snowflakes immediately froze her face, which was red from the fire. At the gate was a poor beggar, who seemed to have come from some hospital, since his head was completely covered in dirty, almost black, bandages. Only his eyes showed, and even they were hazy through the ceaseless snowfall. His clothing was no different from any other beggar’s who had passed through the village. Still, his crooked figure, as much as Maria could see through the snow-capped fence, had something wrong with it, something of a person from somewhere else, or possibly (Maria crossed herself on the roof of her mouth) not even a person. Framed by the dilapidated house across the street, his body looked like one of the demons painted in the village church, the ones from the terrifying Last Judgment, with broken hips and more vertebrae in his neck than seemed natural. His body’s proportions were bizarrely perverted, and he was twitching as if he were being beaten by a gale. The girl clutched her jacket and crossed the yard along the trodden path. Passing the quince trees, she brushed against them and covered herself with frozen puffs, miniscule crystals one over the other, sparkling like sequins.

Now they were face to face, with the fence between them, almost as high as their chins. Maria quickly said the words that usually got rid of beggars: “I don’t have anything. How should I have what to give you? Move on, go ask someone else, get out!” But the person under the bandages began to giggle and said quietly, “Maria, don’t you recognize me?” And then he put his hands to his mouth like a trumpet, leaned back, and moving his fingers quickly on invisible valves, let out a wild solo, imitating the swing of the brass instrument so well that the girl immediately knew who was standing there. The mummy, blinking his yellow eyes, launched into a drum solo, rumbling and hissing with his mouth, doing the bass and the small drums, making the brushes and tom-toms and maracas, speeding up and huffing, until he hit the cymbals with all his power, almost making them real in the crystalline, frozen air, and then he bent suddenly at the waist, in a bow. “Cedric, crazy Cedric,” laughed Maria, “what in God’s name are you doing here? What’s with the get up?” Vasilica appeared from the barn, smelling not at all unpleasantly of bull and warm dung. “My oh my, it’s Cedric …” she rolled her eyes toward the heavens like a martyr, but at the same time she remembered flogging him mercilessly in the musky smell of his hot room. She would have done it again, now and then, she almost admitted to herself, as she had said to herself often enough in bed at night, wrapped in a wet excitation. She had liked wearing the black, svelte uniform, and the complete power she had had over the male who kissed her boots, who writhed and screamed with every lash, intoxicated her now, in memory, as much as she refused to admit it.

Cedric came inside the hall and entered the big room on the right. He was as happy as a puppy and equally ragged. He let his gauze strips fall off, and soon his broad grin flashed just as it had at the Gorgonzola. The girls brought him some ţuica and nuts. He ran his eyes over the icons on the walls, full of dragons and militant angels, the yellowed photos in frames of crushed glass, and the raw silk towels. Tătica and Mămica had gone to Bolintin that morning, and would be back late that night or the next day. They still had their wagon and two horses, fat and beautiful, already old, horses that a few years later would be taken by the collective to the ravine. The girls and Cedric had plenty of time to catch up, then, as much time as the day was long. Maria just had to run to the oven now and then, to check on the mămăligă or to make sure the stew was boiling.

They put a round table on the clay floor and sat around it, on little chairs. Maria put the mămăligă in the middle of the table and began to fill the bowls. While they ate in the dark mystery of the room, it snowed steadily and melancholically on the windows, and Cedric told them a fantastic story.

15

MARIA got off the tram at University, in a scene of deep winter. She couldn’t recognize the main boulevard or the side streets under the thick layer of snow. The familiar statues, Mihai Viteazul, Heliade, Gheorghe Lazăr, and Spiru Haret rose out of the snow like the turrets of gigantic submarines. The gray edifice of the university, stretched along its great length, looked like a basalt cliff by a frozen sea — an irregular cliff with allegorical statues on its face — Science, Art, Agriculture, Trade — that could have been elements of natural fantasy, bizarre stalactites that bad weather would carve into gryphons and trolls and countless other fairy-tale creatures. Trees with black branches, full of crows, knocked against the dry glass windows of the building. Each branch wore a delicate ice crust.

Color had completely disappeared from the city. You felt like you were in a black and white film, wound on a well-used reel. The old celluloid, stored damp, the copy of a copy of a copy, was full of spots and scratches, and when the film was projected they looked like long drops and streams of rain. The only living, flesh-and-blood presence, colorful as a flower, was Maria, who, in her summer dress and high heels, clopped quickly toward the movie theater, lifting her ankles out of the snow as deftly as a cat. In heavy clothes, heads hunched between their shoulders against the cold, the passersby seemed too immersed in their own problems to waste a glance at her, as her plump hips swayed past them. She was carefully dressed, but unfortunately in light clothes, untouched by the deadening air around her. The gale, from the Russian steppes, blew so hard from the side that you expected the trams and cars to roll over. With every gust, people turned their backs, cursing into their scarves.

A Russian GAZ truck stopped along the curb beside her. A young man in a sweatshirt and khaki hat with earflaps pulled down to his eyebrows (military issue, with the emblem ripped off the front) called to her from the driver’s side: “Maria! Maria!” Her heart jumped, as she was still dazed by the intense, spherical light of Cedric’s story, but she smiled when she recognized the man. “Ionel, Ionel, my boy, you have to stop your drinking,” she sang to him as she came over to the blue jeep. “Because all the girls laugh at me? Bottoms up? Hey, where are you going? You have a date? Toniiiight I have a daaaate … I’m so haaaapy, can’t be laaaate …” “Shush, no. I’m just going to a movie.” “What’s on?” “I don’t know what it’s called, one with the guy I like, Gérard Philipe.” Ionel smiled wryly. How the hell did Maria know every actor’s name? If he went to a movie with a girl, with an apprentice, they just chose one at random, and if they liked it, they told other people to see it too. He lived near Maria, on Silistra, but he was thinking about moving, since he was driving a truck for the state, now, for the newspaper Scintea, and there was no reason he had to keep living there with all the gypsies, in the slums. He had knocked on Maria’s door a few times, like boys will do, but without any luck. Once he had picked her up in the truck and they went to Casa Scinteii, when it had just been built, a marble palace that took the girl’s breath away. He took her inside, into the vast hallways and monumental stairways, everything in superhuman dimensions. The countless wooden doors with red plates for the various bureaus and editors looked somehow petty, like the ugly, jaundiced, clear-looking, cheap-suited inhabitants of the white stone castle. It was like the real, legitimate inhabitants, of noble and Olympian lineage, had been kicked out by a tribe of pygmies. Maria had let him take her out another time, for a pastry and a soda, but she wouldn’t let it go any further if you broke her arm. So much for that. She was a bit past her prime, at twenty-five, and if she didn’t hurry, she’d end up living with her cats, like everyone who kept her nose in the air, especially if she didn’t have anything between her ears. Ionel had left her in the pay of the Lord, and now, he was seeing a college student, Estera Hirsch, who, when they had kissed in a dark block stairway, put her tongue in his mouth right away, but to look at her, four-eyed and a little prim, active in the Young Workers Union, you wouldn’t have thought she was so fiery. But she was, and how! If the walls could talk in her studio apartment in Predoleanu, high, in the attic, in the clouds, if only they could talk … Between sessions of mad rolling around on her metal-slat bed, Estera would get up quietly and sit at her desk to study articles by Engels, naked as her mother made her, her chest freckled down to her nipples and her public hair as red as the cover of Lenin’s complete works, which lay in a pile next to her bed. She taught Ionel too, she wanted to raise his consciousness, she told him to go to night school … That’s a girl, with help like that he could be someone, he could work at HQ, doing propaganda, a man with an institute car waiting at the gate. For a country boy made truck driver, that would be something. “Okay, Maria, stay good!” he said while he turned the ignition.

Maria smiled after him condescendingly. Ionel was from Teleorman, his family had received some land after the War for Reunification, and they had spent the last few years resisting collectivization. He was the only one of his brothers to go to the city, where for a while he had worked paving streets, digging ditches for the sewers and other public works in the May 1 District, until, after he had gone into a family bar on Lizeanu to warm himself up, he had happened upon someone he knew, almost unrecognizable in his black leather coat with a nice wool hat sitting comfortably enough on his head. It was Zambilă, from Iliasca, whose father, half gypsy, half Serbian, had once set the village on fire and then cut his own throat with a sickle. They had a little drink together, a rye that was increasingly rare, being replaced almost everywhere by Two Blue Eyes ţuica, and nea Zambilă — now Comrade Ciocan, from the District, offered him a better job. Sculptors, volunteers in the War for Peace and Socialism, who rejected the formalist and intimist aberrations of bourgeois art, had placed thousands of busts in all of the parks in the Capital, busts of men of culture and art from all times and places across the globe, who, although they had not managed to correctly grasp the relationship of classes and the struggle of the proletariat for a better life, still displayed a critical-realist view of the society where they lived and worked. Countless Gorkys, Solohovis, Lermontovs (since pride of place must be given to the fighting heritage of the Russian people, our big brother to the east), Neculuts, Vlachuts, Cosbucs, Eminescus — the poet who, even though he didn’t completely understand … still wrote “The Emperor and the Proletarian” and “Our Youth” —, Shakespeares, Voltaires, and Victor Hugos have sprung up like specters, on vine and lichen-covered pedestals along dark paths, chastising from the heights of their genius the unprincipled couples necking under the moon. The most prolific seemed to be Bălcescu, as though he were multiplying in clones: starting from the hundred lei note, his frozen effigy had spread everywhere, as though the whole of the young people’s republic was a bank note, where a population of mites travelled the tangled lines and dots of blue watermarks, collecting in the beard, eyebrows and sunken eyes of the 1848 partisan. Then there were the statues of people from the Communist underground who had fought the bourgeois-landowner regime, who had pasted manifestos onto walls dimly lit by Bacovian light bulbs while a sweet girl in a white blouse stood lookout, who blew up a German landmine by hitting it with an iron hook, saving the bridge downstream at the price of their lives, who blew the factory whistle to call workers to strike, who were tortured in H-cell in Doftana and never betrayed their comrades — just like you saw in all the Romanian movies: Olga Bancic, Eftimie Croitoru, Basil Roaită, Ilie Pintilie, and others whose actions are not widely known … Not to mention the great socialist and communist leaders, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, in bronze or red marble statues on enormous pedestals (but this would not be part of his beat). Of course, nea Zambilă, Ciocan from the District, did not string all these names together at the time. Instead he said only that he was in need of someone to clean the busts in the district parks, to clean off the clay, soot, dust and (pardon) pigeon droppings that stained their heads and shoulders. All Ionel would have to do is take a ladder and a bucket of water, and roam and scrub the park paths systematically, stopping by the citizens of granite and white stone to make them glow with cleanliness and general wellbeing.

The young man got so thoroughly drunk that afternoon that he could barely crawl home to his room in the slums. He got barked at and even bitten by a pack of dogs, wet from where he fell in a puddle … In the morning, after nightmares of statues that spoke or grabbed at him, crushing his bones with stony arms, and after he had remembered, shuddering, that he had kissed nea Zambilă’s hand in the bar many times, in front of everyone, he shaved in his chipped mirror and went off to the new job. The City had given him all according to his need, and for days and weeks, he combed the stone locks of illustrious men, polishing pumice across the wide, convex ovals of their blind eyes, throwing away the cigarette butts that disrespectful people had stuck between their sensual granite lips. For days and weeks, he collected fresh excrement, half black-green, half white, from the birds that crowned the statues, and he crushed the speckled spiders that had woven dense webs from the cheeks’ massive ledges up to the eyebrows. It was spring, and the forsythia bushes made blinding yellow marks on the retina that remained after he looked away, as though he had looked at the sun. In the evenings, he would walk home through the amber fluid that flooded the poor neighborhoods, past girls playing with hoops and fat women on the stairs, or every few days, he would stop by Estera’s and rip her clothes off, almost as soon as he closed the door of her studio apartment on the terrace over the old, crumbling block; he threw her onto the bed with her face down and penetrated her from behind, and she, losing control of herself in excitement, with her braids stuck to her dripping face, would start with perverse and husky whispers, between her ever louder grunts: “Marx is a shithead … say it … say what I’m saying … Gheorghiu-Dej is an asshole … ah!.. aaa … Lenin … motherfucker … Stalin … aaah, aaaaah …” Stalin’s name would always send her into a ravishing orgasm, one that probably alarmed the whole block, after which she would rest — her creamy white skin with constellations of freckles on her buttocks, and even on her labia — for a few minutes and then go back to studying party documents, while Ionel, light as air, his penis resting soft and shiny on his groin, would put his hand behind his head and close his eyes. Beneath his eyelids he saw, much more precisely than in reality, statues, nothing but statues, entire nations of busts with names written below them in black letters, heads and shoulders emerging from each other, superimposing, intersecting … Their features combined: Caragiale wore Eminescu’s locks, Olga Bancic had Tolstoy’s beard, Makarenko was written under Alecsandri … Then he would drowse, lying on his back, and dream fragments of dreams where he saw himself at home in Teleorman; he’d open his eyes and see Estera, late into the night, still at her desk, her shoulder bones and breasts contoured by the lamplight and her dark, copper-colored curls, except for one strand, lit like a flame, beside the lampshade.

One evening in April, climbing his A-shaped ladder, fighting against the cockchafers that attacked Pushkin’s lichen-encrusted temples like tobacco crumbs, Ionel noticed a pitch-black crack at the base of the bust, where it connected to the pedestal. That afternoon he had played a game with himself, trying to guess the names of the stone citizens just by touching their faces. From far away, he would concentrate on the white shine of a group of lilacs, squinting his eyes and forcing himself not to look at the sculpture. He kept his eyes on the ground as he approached, and once he was on the ladder, he closed them completely. He would take the chiseled cheeks in his palms, pass his hands over their wrinkled foreheads, trace his finger over their rough curls, and then say confidently: “Ah, Beethoven, daddy-o, was that you all along? Why the ugly face?” He knew absolutely everyone, they were his colleagues, he patted them protectively on the cheek or pate, he touched the breasts, harder than any woman’s, what’s theirs is theirs, of an underground communist … if they got too dirty he’d tug their ear … With this Pushkin in the Ghica Tei Park, well hidden on a path no one ever took, there was something wrong. Unlike the other busts, firmly cemented onto their poorly painted plinths, this one, who looked Ionel in the eyes the way he once did d’Anthes, during their fatal duel, rocked, almost imperceptibly, with every scrub of the stiff brush on his sideburns. The fissure widened and trembled, dark as a line of ink. It is what it is, Ionel said to himself after he looked over both shoulders, assuring himself that the pathway was deserted. Gathering his courage, as he stood on top of the ladder and pushed hard on the young writer’s left shoulder, on the epaulette, without knowing if he felt joy or fear as he saw the bust pivot on the right shoulder, and a deep well open in the pedestal, with metal rungs down one side.

A beetle hit him in the lip like a brass bullet. The smell of lilacs grew stronger as the night thickened. Already, half of the sky was a deep blue, full of the new moon and a few sparkling stars, while a sweet pearly pink light and bloody clouds outlined the ornamental shrubs on the other side, dressing each branch with a rosy-brown mist. The air darkened into sepia, like in an old picture. Ionel hesitated for a moment, and then the most bizarre ideas entered his mind. It could be an extension of one of the sewers that led into the wastewater network, that branched beneath the entire city and led downstream, toward the Danube and then to the sea, taking away Bucharest’s fermenting turpitude: liquefied feces, newspapers used for toilet paper — the front page, with the smiling beloved Leader, crumpled into a star and smeared with shit — bloody pads of cotton, gray Volcano condoms that always broke, bunching up like painful rings at the base of the vigorous tools of men who hoped they wouldn’t dump a sixth runt into their wives, rotting rats, cats with their guts hanging out in delicate hues of blue and orange … Or it might be a secret drop site for the Securitate, the institution in charge of catching the spies who photographed national targets with ingenious cameras hidden in their glasses frames. Securitate officers were smiling, energetic men who defended revolutionary progress. They each had a delicate wife at home, a wonderful homemaker, and they based their work on subtle logical inferences … Major Frunză and Capitan Lucian were Ionel’s role models, when he read about their adventures, in book after book of the Enigma series that had appeared about a year ago. Or it could be the entrance to a Nazi bunker … but then why didn’t anyone report it when they built the statue? And suddenly the young peasant remembered the story of The Enchanted Flint where fantastic treasure, gemstones and precious scepters inlaid with gold and surrounded with pearls, had been the reward for the bold one who climbed into the hollow. “A treasure,” whispered Ionel with wide eyes. Sometimes, digging out their huts or a well, his fellow villagers would find a rusty bucket full of coins, or an emerald … Ionel took another look up and down the already dark path, and then he lowered himself into the pedestal, holding tight to the throat of the Russian poet, who now looked off to one side, as though he wanted no part of the deeds of these miserable, mortal creatures of flesh, skin, nerves, and blood that would scrub him for all eternity. Propping his hands against the well’s stone walls, the young man sank up to his waist into the pitchy darkness of the interior, where the slanted light of the moon lit only the first two steps. Ionel carefully went another step down and then dragged Pushkin’s bust back over the opening, obliterating the smell of the spring sky and leaving himself in an absolute night.

Later, a week or so after that illuminated night of disturbing hallucinations, the young man would tell Maria the story of his adventure in the belly of the dark. He was still seeing her, because of a certain resentment he felt toward the damned “yid” who in the midst of pleasure slandered the teachers of mankind, and she was seeing him out of loneliness and a desire to go to the movies, which was what she loved most in the world. Time had evaporated along with the light, and the only measure of his descent, metal rung after metal rung, was fear. His eyes went blind, there was screeching in his ears, the calcified chochlea spun crazily in the midst of nonbeing, and the analytical mind of fear broke open. The young man no longer knew whether he was climbing up or down, or along an endless railroad track, grasping the ties; all he could feel with his palms and fingers was the rhythmic interval of the form and the cold of metal bars, the only objects in space. But what if these were only subjective sensations? What if he was just lying under a sheet somewhere, and the nerves in the skin of his palms, projected into his brain’s sensorial-motor zones, constructed the sensation of narrow, cold cylinders, just the length he could feel with his palms or the tips of his fingers? In the middle of the dark, with your body completely liquefied, it was impossible to say whether your pancreas was still inside the somatic bag or sagging outside like a hanged man’s tongue, or to know if your skeleton had turned into a shell like a crustacean’s, or if your neurons had left the original ball under your skull behind, spreading, unraveling like obscene lace to the end of night. The organ of fear did not have a clear shape, like the fungiform papilla or the eyeball, since it was constantly devoured by what it perceived. The organ of fear was crazed with itself in every moment, it contracted and struggled in corrosive liquid, in unforgiving acids of fear. The young man descending no longer knew who he was, nor what area of the world he climbed toward, but he saw the fear, he saw it growing, becoming a fabled scene, painted with the nuances of horror, with desperation, disquiet, anguish, terror, panic … There were startled mountains and petrified cities and forests of cold sweat. Monuments of horror lorded over vast, misty piaţas. Adrenaline sculptures, fluorescent green, portrayed terrible violations, rendings and vivisections, ablations, desquamations, excoriations …

By now, he was no longer descending but levitating like a cloud through the spectral world, in the colossal thickness of fear, over towers of claws and trees that looked like knotted intestines. The dull green and opalescent venom became more frequent, the petrified howling omnipresent … He slid over wide and frightening planets, through empires of desperation that fulminated around him like fog, compact and sparse by turn. Immense towers with tiny windows shining in the green dusk adorned their peaked cupolas with statues of people with their faces in their hands, women overcome with shame, old people begging for death … Through an oval window, there was a girl with an unspeakably romantic form, long curly locks, pearly teeth between her coral lips, a white lace bodice and a blue satin crinoline, and hundreds of bows, with the tips of her lizard-skin shoes peeking out underneath. She was seated at a spinet piano, playing sounds like the clicks of knitting needles. It would have been a charming picture of love, if below her ebony bun, held by a tortoiseshell comb, on her delicate neck with curls of short hair, there wasn’t a hideous tumor, a growth as big as a newborn’s head, bruised and scratched, excreting a yellow pus between its flakes of pink skin … Further on, in a glass, angular hall as big as a train station, along the halls where the young man drifted, dissolved in terror like the steam of hot breath, a procession appeared, moving toward a crystal tomb. He had entered the room through an open transom, with dusty edges, held up by a black wire hook, and he found himself suddenly naked, walking next to the others along checkerboard tiles, bloody squares with marbled designs alternating with white squares, crystalline, like sugar. Every being in the long procession was marked by a monstrous debility: flayed oxen tongues emerged from twisted teeth, vulvas hung down like the whiskers of catfish, gigantic skulls, translucid, filled with violet liquid … He alone, as he suddenly saw in the pure, prismatic façade of the tomb, was whole and beautiful like a god, especially since … he had wings … long, multicolored wings, like a tropical butterfly, with electric blue dots and lilac edges, tips shaped like cobra heads in a yet warmer velvety purple … He looked at himself in the polished mirror of the empty tomb, while he felt six claws as sharp as needles entering his flesh, and he knew then that the enormous wings had not grown between his shoulder blades, like an anatomical anomaly, but that a great butterfly, as long as he was tall, had climbed onto his back and anchored itself firmly onto his ribs, and it watched him with bulging, glowing eyes that had thousands of hexagonal facets. He imagined the inevitable moment when the twisted spiral of its proboscis would unroll, like a curved needle, and slide into his occiput, gently popping through his epidermis, the tip, hard as a diamond, slicing at a slant his skull’s layers of bone, puncturing the duramater and piamater, advancing slowly, greased like gelatin, through the occipital lobe, and stopping in the center of his brain, in the middle of the limbic ring, equidistant from the fornix, mammillary bodies, hippocampus and amygdalae, and sucking out, like a vacuum, one cubic centimeter of cream-caramel matter and replacing it with an egg … The egg is pearly pink, with a soft, pulsing shell, it descends along the proboscis and beds there, between the snowflakes of the axon bodies and the mad labyrinths of the synapses. Then the proboscis withdraws, just as gently, now coated in blood, and spirals back into place, and the butterfly flies off in a zigzag through the air, toward the window open in the roof. The disfigured procession carries the young inseminated god in their arms, places him gently in the hollow of the tomb, and covers him with its heavy, prismatic lid.

He woke up reeling, like he’d suffered a syncope, and to find himself rubbing Pushkin’s right, blind eye with a rag that the soot turned black. He touched his neck, staring into space, pulling the pink atoms of dusk into his chest, just as he did at the table with white and red squares in the beer garden where he had taken Maria for some beer and sausages. For a week, roaming all around Herăstrău Park with a ladder on his shoulder and a bucket in his hand, he didn’t dare touch any of the stone celebrities rising from lilac bushes. When he saw an Ostrovsky or a Sholokhov, it was like he had seen one of those ghouls that the old folks in his village would use to scare kids. His heart jumped in his chest and his feet went cold. Maria laughed, as though he was telling her about a dream, but years later, during Catana’s funeral, lost in the immense tomb of marble, Ionel’s story would come back to her. There was a strange likeness between the stories, as though it was a variation of an old legend, from another province and another rhapsode, who had forgotten some details and included some of his own, until you’d have to compare hundreds of variants, to put one over the other and trace the similarities and differences, to understand what precisely had happened somewhere, sometime, what nucleus of physical objects and confused beings, consumed in the furious flames of time, had risen as transparent smoke into the air, walking simultaneously down thousands of endlessly forking pathways of stories. In any case, even if she were a Mafaldă with her pineal eye emerging between her eyebrows, barely covered by a translucent layer of skin and staring its blue at the faces of tarot cards, Maria could never have guessed the countless ways her family’s life would weave together with “Aunty Hirsch” and her husband Ionel, the peasant boy come to the city to have an unbelievable career. A photograph from the early 70s, black and white with serrated edges, shows Costel and Ionel laughing together against a backdrop of modern buildings and ornamental trees. Costel is in an officer’s coat but black civvy pants, while Ionel, almost unrecognizable, fat and red-faced, is wearing a black jacket and pants from a uniform.

After the GAZ truck started and fell in with the snow-loaded cars with their windshield wipers on, across the area between the university and the imposing constructions of columns across the way, through the destructive gales, spring-dressed Maria passed, crossing the intersection at Children’s Romarta and continuing along the Casa Armatei. Plaster eagles on its roof were now snow-covered scarecrows, showing only their curved beaks, like claws from the paws of a white cat. From here started the movie theaters with names meant to remind everyone of popular democracy: Peace, Work, Brotherhood. From every cashier’s window, the steely eyes of a Soviet soldier watched you, a red star on his forehead and an automatic aimed at the guiltless passersby. Behind him stood a tank with the same starred pentagon on the turret, and the top half of the driver sticking out of his steel chamber. His ears stuck out of his black cap, and he held a red flag unfurled in majesty. However much the flag fluttered in the wind, you could still see, in the upper left corner, the hammer and sickle, sagely crossed. An alchemist like Fulcanelli (alas, the hidden author of The Mystery of Cathedrals was twenty years dead in anno domini 1955, when Maria met Costel again, after their short idyll in Govora, so no window of any workers’ movie theater in his beloved Bucharest would reflect his diminutive figure and drooping mustache) would have seen in these two symbols an unio mystica between sulfur and hydrargarum under the almighty sign of the Pentagram. Only one or two of the movie theaters showed tear-jerkers, where there were, even for the matinee, endless lines, because the young lathe operators and loom workers finished the night shift and went directly to the miserable, rat-poison-filled theaters to see Sara Montinel or Vico Torriani.

More than anything, Maria liked to watch movies. Even later, when she was burdened with life as a housewife, she would delineate her strange triangular world in the heart of Bucharest with three cinemas, located at equal distance from the block on Ştefan cel Mare: the Volga, the Melodia, and the Floreasca. It was rare that she would leave this territory where she felt safe, and when she did, her trips through the city (if she wasn’t going to Vasilica’s or to her godmother’s) were taxing adventures in lands full of danger, barred by oniric fears. It was as though the theaters on the triangle points protected, with their hallucinatory secrets, the only area of reality in the universe, where her house was, and the market, the grocery and the cafeteria, the newsstand and the neighbors, while outside of this wise eye open to the cosmos, the world disintegrated, and filled with pale demons and smoke … Maria went to see a movie the way other people went to church, ready for strong emotions, for tears, streams of tears sparkling in the dark of the hall, for long laughter, for hatred and love. She hated war movies, she only went to those where, as she said, “everyone laughed, and sang, and danced,” or those where a mother’s heart was torn by cruelty. If she thought a movie was “nice,” she saw it ten times with no decrease in pleasure. But, however tempting the movie was, Maria would wait patiently, for weeks on end, “for it to come by us,” on the pretext that the ticket was cheaper at the local theaters than downtown. In fact she was repulsed, especially as she got older, by the thought of leaving her zone. She might tell herself she wasn’t dressed well enough to go downtown, but actually the people seemed strange and hostile to her, and there was something else, an interior resistance, something that prohibited her from confounding herself with her image of herself as a young person, as though her life had been sectioned off at a certain moment and remodeled from the ground up, or as though a sinister (or ecstatic) enigma had rounded in the belly of her mind, like a pearl, adding layer over layer of pearly inhibition around a painful thought.

Now, however, as she was consuming her last stores of youth, Maria, the only point of light in a dull, Siberian city, walked without any trace of disquiet, passing gracefully among the tramps who masticated pretzels in front of the halls, toward the Brotherhood of Nations Theater, where they were showing a Gérard Philipe movie. Victoriţa, the thief, had seen it and thought about it so much, “what that boy did and how he lost the girl,” that Maria practically didn’t know whom she was on a date with, Costel or Gérard himself, the way that sometimes, when a movie was over and she went outside, out the back door, under the sky filled with stars, even though it had been daylight when she went in, she felt like she was living in a movie, one as long as her life, one that who knows who (many people, in any case) watched in a dark hall. And those people were living in another movie, one that others were watching, and so on, and so on.

She spotted Costel and laughed with a snort. He was still in his worn-out sweatsuit, still with those boots with metal on the heels, still poorly shaven, with those eyes that could be gentle or horribly serious, the black and beautiful eyes of a boy from Bănat. And his hair was as black as a crow’s feather, thick as a horse’s tail, combed back smoothly over his head. He seemed spacey, looking for her everywhere, with his hands in his pockets as always (“it’s okay, I’ll change him”), while it snowed like hell on his head and shoulders. But the gusts of eastern winds didn’t make him shiver like everyone else. The young locksmith from the ITB workshop, unbeknownst to him, had noble ancestry. The zipper on his sweatshirt was half open, revealing his undershirt and his completely bare, white chest as though it was a mild, early fall. He wasn’t even wearing his ancient, oil-stained beret, which Maria had made such fun of in Govora. Bored, he took some change out of his deep pants pocket and started to count it, leaning against the window where Gérard Philipe, in the high ruffled collar of his period costume, pointed the tip of his saber at an enormous bearded man’s chest. With a wide smile, Maria walked toward him and took his arm, while Costel, angry he hadn’t seen her coming, quickly stuffed the change into his pocket and said “Good evening” so formally that the girl turned even happier. These stupid boys from Bănat. In Govora, Costel had been one of a group of apprentices from a Lugoj vocational school, all of them dumb as rocks, slow-witted and lazy, and the damned girls from Muntenia, Maria and two others, who had gotten tickets through the Union, had lots of fun at their expense. They would make dates and not go, they’d ask them to bring them who knows what, they’d fool them, two or three times, with the same silly smiles … They went out with them on Saturdays, to a dance (two Saturdays in a row) where the girls danced with each other, like most girls there, while the guys from Bănat, stuck together like a hydra with multiple heads, drank borviz and muttered a word or two in their own silly language. Still, even from the first dance, when she had worn her dress with a sequin belt, which, unfortunately, had scorched on the cast-iron stove while she twirled with Ştefania through the poor dance hall — also known as the cafeteria —, Maria started to watch Costel from the corner of her eye. Maybe because she actually liked the guy, even though he was nearly four years younger, or maybe because she was in that period of eclipse that follows the loss of a beloved in a woman’s life. She often dreamed of a desolate aloneness, like a sad and sweet poison, and to manage the eternal afternoons between the midday meal and supper, she made recourse to the subterfuges that only people overcome by loneliness and nostalgia know. Lying in her iron-slat bed, her eyes closed, she counted to five thousand in her head, then opened her eyes and tried to guess how much of the winter evening had passed by the change of the light, from ash to dark pink, to brown. Then she watched the steady, silent snowfall over the silhouette of the old, crumbling bricks of the sulfuric acid plant, and then she would close her eyes and count again to five thousand, trying to avoid what, in the end, when evening came prematurely and the room fell dark, and only the snowflakes continued to fall, sparkling in the light of a yellow bulb hanging from a post outside, she could no longer avoid: thoughts of Pavel, her Pablo, the student she’d met two years before at a party at the I.O.R. plant, where Vasilica had taken her when she was dating Ştefan, whom she eventually married and had Marian with, Maria’s dear nephew. With her head turned to the wall, stuck to a pillow, and her body feverish under a thin, plaid dorm-room sheet, Maria slid her right palm softly over her breasts, touching her hardened nipples, moved it down her stomach and put her fingers under the elastic band of her underwear, burying them in her thick, wiry pubic hair. She stroked, sweaty, feeling excited and sad at the same time, in a desperate, perverse excitement, rejoicing in the suffering and degradation and destruction. The little round cylinder followed the wet line of her lips, and she extended the tip of her index finger to her anus, repeating, that is, drowning in the pain of love and unhappiness of sex, the motions of the beloved hand of a delicate and strong man, the man under whom, penetrated and drunk with love, holding him tightly by his neck, she had moved for the first time as a lover, as a woman. He had been her only lover, and he had disappeared five months ago. That’s how it was then: young people had dates in the city and went to a hotel or to some woman who kept rooms especially for amor. Going where one or the other lived was impossible, since most of them lived with host families, two or three to a room. If you missed a date, you might never run into the other person again, as happened with Maria and Pablito, the weaver and the philosophy student, who couldn’t find each other one evening in June, when, after a stupid misunderstanding (as the girl believed) she had been waiting in one spot for three hours, pacing, more and more frightened, under the chestnut blossoms along the road, their leaves luminous-transparent in the electric light, while he, probably with a bouquet of flowers — always, for every date — paced under some town clock, somewhere else. Much later, Maria heard that Pablito had found, in fact, a better offer — that he had always been embarrassed to be with a girl from the slums and to have to make love in sordid places, and then walk, late at night, through back alleys, dodging toppled drunks and offering cigarettes to half-asleep policemen.

They entered the theater that was as dirty as a men’s restroom, with petrosin-washed floors full of sunflower seeds and candy wrappers. The chairs, more than a few of which were unusable, were crowded with young people who looked like they had all been made by the same mother and father: boys with unshaven faces, low foreheads, and hair combed back, held by sugar and greased with walnut oil, holding trashy girls with thin, hot-curled hair by the shoulders. During the newsreel the jerks would shout, squeal, and call to their friends rows away, without paying any attention to the wise leaders of the Party and People’s Republic, as they appeared, yellowed, on the cheap film and set on the screen. Things that were impossible to understand happened between serious people, who kept shaking hands or walking through fields and steel mills, narrated by a manly voice, enthusiastic but so hollow, as though he were shouting the words through a tin funnel. Against the background music (which was always the same, a kind of half-folk, half-classical melody), mechanical threshers filed by, electricians climbed high-tension poles, miners came out of shoots grinning through coal dirt like they were in blackface, and people in city suits applauded (and a few in peasant dresses) in a hall as big as a movie theater. Maria, whom Costel dared finally to take by the hand, without looking at her, waited patiently for the silly newsreel to end and the movie to start. Sometimes she recognized the old man figure of Dej, and maybe Ion Gheorghe Maurer, but the others were completely unfamiliar to her. A flood of names and faces. She thought it was a little funny when the Chinese showed up. They were also building socialism, with their Asian eyes and broad laughter, obligatory on every face. The Russians, in turn, were always frowning and determined. The Soviet movies always began with a statue: a man and woman in bronze, with the man holding a hammer and the woman holding a sickle. Where were they supposed to be? And why was she so small beside him? Russian women, you see, were brave and worked shoulder to shoulder with the men. The bronze Russian woman was as delicate as a ballerina.

The violent flickering of the screen tired Maria’s eyes. The theater smelled like wet wool, since everyone had taken off their coats and hats and held them on their laps. Now armies marched over the screen. Tanks ran across snowy fields. They filmed a plane from inside while bombs dropped through its open hatch. Below, in yellowy sepia, clouds blossomed like mushrooms. Costel, still without looking at her, began to gently stroke her fingers. She felt the blackened lines of his mechanic’s hands passing over her knuckles, making a weak sound when they touched her nails or the ring with a butterfly, the ring from Mioara Mironescu. In the semi-dark, the Kirlian effect revealed a moment of supernatural beauty: their hands were surrounded by a lace of blue stars, flames, a fabric as fluffy as snowflakes, and the snaking flashes and darts of green rays. The butterfly on the ring absorbed and glowed with the delicate colors of orange and magenta. Their hands touched tenderly, the only colorful things in the hall where shadow fought with light, both of them dirty and sad.

16

A PATCHWORK of colored frogs and sequins, Cedric’s French Quarter was a story of palm trees and agaves bending in the wind, and light-skinned black women sunning themselves on wrought-iron balconies, protected by the ivory plumage of their fans. Many generations earlier, Africans embedded hallucinatory, picturesque scenes on the flexible yellow lamellae bone — high stacks of dried crocodile skulls, a man sodomizing a ram, an idol with lobster claws devouring a gigantic cockroach. The pearl piercing the ear of the slave who brought a tray of coffee to Cecilia and Melanie, two black women in silk dresses, a gray pearl, the size of a cherry, gathered into its sphere the neighborhood of wooden buildings and multicolored flags, the Mississippi River that curved around it broadly, then perished into glimmering swamps on its way to the Caribbean, the swirling clouds of spring, and the somnambulist faces atop the endless necks of the ladies, who tranquilly discussed, over honey cake, the arrival of Mardi Gras, in a few days … Their Cajun French sounded more like the zithering tones of Roussel, full of insects and pendulums, than the tongue in which, in roughly the same period, General de Gaulle addressed the French on the radio, encouraging them, reminding them of their love of country and duty to hate their foreign rulers, or the concomitant tongue in which his Parisians, thus heartened, wrote a million denunciations to the collaborating authorities.

Cecilia wore a Prussian blue turban. Her thick lips, the color of dark coffee, were carefully tattooed. Her beastly nose contrasted oddly with her large, fairy-like eyes that flashed gold between eyelids lined with black. A thick layer of mascara weighed on her lashes, so long they could not be natural. Over her eyelids, the random dust of gold, blown softly from the slave’s palm, ordered itself (since nothing happens by chance in this world of paranoia and dreams) precisely into a map of the boreal constellations, those made banal by the zodiac, on the right eyelid: while on the left, strange austral revelations, including the Pneumatic Machine and Southern Cross, glowed with a living flame, surpassed only by the grains of the star Canopus which guided sailors through the eddying Straights of Magellan. Cecilia was at most thirteen years old. When she laughed, she pushed the tip of her tongue between her perfect teeth. From the time she was an infant, her tongue had been pierced by a blue glass ring, which made the same clinking sound when she spoke her chirping syllables, as the ice cubes in her martini.

Melanie was old, with elephantine hips, but above her décolletage, her collarbones and neck were just as supple as Cecilia’s. She carefully hid the embarassment of her life, her scalp as bald as the palm of her hand, beneath a wig of ostrich feathers. Under the wig, in the middle of her forehead, fixed on a thin chain, hung Leon, the living beryllium crystal, with its own metabolism and sexuality, which had been placed in her hand by a French Quarter priest. There were few people of the Lord in that region, so Fra Armando was forced to work as a voodoo magician as well, two days a week. On another day he served as an imam for a small but active Muslim community, and on another as the officiant in a Hebrew temple, and he dedicated the other three days entirely to the Savior crucified on the cross of wood. The Leon Crystal was growing. Each year it added something new to reflect the events of Melanie’s life — a prismatic horn, or a delicate needle, something longer or shorter, thicker or thinner, more colorful or transparent. When the old woman lost her second husband (of the four, the only one she really loved) the crystal grew a knot as black as a rotten tooth, which she then removed with pliers, out of spite, the way she had pulled the memory of Desiré from her soul. At night, after she put out a plate with sprouted grains and fried bananas, Melanie sank the crystal into the glass of water where she kept her dentures. In her imagination, the hideous U-shaped object, made of a waxy substance as pink as vomit, spaced by inhuman wires and teeth, was Leon’s secret lover, with whom the virile crystal engaged in monstrous copulations. In the morning, Melanie drank the water from the glass, so the crystal seed would pass into her and live as long as he had waited in the bottom of the earth, among the mine-flower petals, damned to the cavern’s darkness and oblivion.

They lounged on bamboo chairs on the wrought-iron balcony, enjoying the reflection of New Orleans in the mirror of the sky, the face of an angel with feathery wings that unraveled with a breath of wind. Slave Cedric (oh, of course it was a game, Cedric was just Cecilia’s cousin and played the washboard at Monsú, but he liked, on these kinds of afternoons, to put on livery and humbly serve his cousin and great aunt, to produce, in the coffee aroma, the air of another age) let them chatter as he watched his two masters, illuminated by sun and coffee, sweat large, yellow drops. From time to time, he wiped their brows with a handkerchief, brushed the pistachio crumbs from their laps, or drew their attention to a yellow car that inched through the straight and narrow alley. Across the road was another line of identical houses, with two stories and the same wrought-iron balcony, twisted into the most fantastical shapes, where other black women, and red-haired prostitutes, and pretentiously dressed tourists, and sailors with ridiculous hats emerged to watch the wonder of the sunset. He indulged the women and turned the decorated cups onto paper-thin saucers to read letters and filigreed signs in the dregs, telling the past, or the future, or Lord knows what. The women, each with her little cup between her fingers, looked like two plants that bore porcelain flower chalices, turning to follow the setting sun. Then Cedric gave the long-awaited sign, and they rose lazily from their lounge chairs. Propping her hands on her enormous hips, Melanie rubbed her sleeping bones awake and leaned backwards. Each vertebra, beginning with the sacrum and ending with the axis on which the exaggerated prognathism of her skull rotated slowly, popped separately and distinctly, like the cords of a crystal harpsichord. They entered the shadowy cave of their living room, which they crossed quickly. There were heavy lace doilies, thrown over richly ornamented furniture, pale alligator skulls, voodoo masks on the walls, each as delicate as a white clown, and thick carpets with incomprehensible designs. They opened and pulled the veneered doors shut behind them, going into other, cooler rooms where glass carafes glimmered, and paintings rested at an angle to the light, which bleached them into a milky white. These rectangular wooden houses were much more capacious than you would think. Two or three kids (but whose?) huddled in corners, with large brown eyes void of any expression. A small black lady braided a ribbon into her curly, rebellious hair.

They left. Cecilia’s red lace parasol looked now almost purple. They waited for a taxi to pass down the rosy pavement. Svelte men, dressed in the latest zoot suits, would cast a glance at Cecilia, who stared straight ahead, barely blinking her exaggeratedly long lashes. “How long do we have?” the old lady asked. She had hardly been able to control her disquiet all afternoon, as she kept the girl, as directed, in ignorance. Cedric removed his pocket watch, attached by a fob to his buttonhole, opened the gold lid, thin as a leaf, and saw the needles already showing a few minutes before seven. “Less than an hour, Madame.” The shop window across the way displayed medical instruments — syringes so long they must have been for veterinarians, oddly shaped forceps, vases in the form of beans, revolting rubber tubes and back braces. A plaster mannequin — as naked as an ancient statue, but with no trace of sex — wore one of those flexible whalebone girdles that had become almost obligatory for certain women, older than forty and fat as hippos, in the Quarter. Melanie pressed her fingers on Cedric’s arm, indicating the shop window with her eyes. He nodded. She crossed while the other two remained in the labyrinthine twilight, ever more scarlet (but with a strange dirty yellow higher in the sky, much brighter than the air between the houses, a sky crossed high and low by bats), and since they were standing together, heavily made up and swathed in silk, with the moon of coagulated blood as an umbrella, with their black and pointed shadows lengthening over the wall behind, full of cherubs and stucco garlands, Cecilia and Cedric looked like they were cut from an old magazine, bordered with pictures of the music hall.

Cecilia had spent the day preparing for the solemnity of the spring night to come. From the moment she woke, The Albino had arisen before her eyes like a dream image that sometimes appears, for a moment, on the retina — a black man white as milk, with a large, raspberry-colored wart near his right nostril and eyes as yellow as a dog’s. When he bent over her, smiling strangely, his head filled almost the entire space below the gold canopy. Only a thin triangle of smoky air could be seen from the room, where Vevé, the little black girl, poked her bright face. The Albino owned the Monsú jazz club where Cedric played. He had come to the city more than twenty years before, in an odd automobile, carrying, on the back bench seat, with its neck sticking out through the window, a gigantic, fat bass that was once mahogany, but now black and grimy, so that everyone could see its scrolled, termite-pocked ebony neck and thick strings, braided at their ends with red and green threads. On the same back bench was a package, a large rectangle wrapped in coarse paper. The man looked like a being from another realm: wooly hair, a stooped quivering, and skin as white as that of any descendant of the old French gentry. His tuxedo resembled Humphrey Bogart’s and an ever-present Havana cigar drooped from his mouth. He made both whites (sailors and riff-raff) as well as blacks (saxophone players and whores) want to chase him away or cut him down. The one who set the car — rented by Monsieur Monsú (as he happened grotesquely to be called) — on fire, while it was parked in front of the premises, died within the week, from a scorpion sting. After a few months of fruitless vigil at the back door, where, at dawn, The Albino would leave the premises, after his car had been turned into a baroque braid of burnt iron, the hit man mistakenly shot the district police inspector and ended up in the electric chair. The woman who slipped into his bed to discover his secrets, a mulatta as heartless as death itself, one of those who allow scores of men to explore their secret tunnels from the age of seven, let him tie her hands behind her back and make love to her through the night. In the morning, she was ravished and smitten like the most pious of the pious, but Monsieur Monsú brutally threw her out and never again allowed her into his bed. She withered from love as if from a rare cancer. Wrapped in black lace, she spent her days in church, before the icon of the Holy Mother. On her deathbed, surrounded by mounds of roses, she raved: “He has diamonds for testicles … his sack is transparent, and they shine in the night …” Once the mulatta died, the French Quarter dwellers finally accepted the enigmatic man, who had such power and brought (from where?) new rites and customs, about which they didn’t speak, but which thrived, brightly colored, in everyone’s fantasies. His establishment, lined like a brothel with waves of cherry silk, was the first on Bourbon Street to develop the taste for a type of show that, at that time, didn’t have a name. Past two in the morning, on the central stage, in front of patrons snorting opium through filigreed pipes or debasing themselves with azure absinthe, the show featured bare men and women, coupling in knots like human snakes, using items that could be purchased, in order to continue the orgy at home, from a small shop owned by the same Albino: ivory phalluses carved vein by vein to match the god of plenty, black velvet masks, lace lingerie, complicated leashes and collars, crops made of hippopotamus … In time, a chain of similar stores scandalized the neighborhood, competing with and oddly replicating the traditional boutiques of Mardi Gras masks and voodoo accessories.

The great painting that had barely fit in The Albino’s car now dominated the circular hall. It was the only decoration on the back wall, opening like a window onto a scene of fantasy. The picture, after witnessing centuries pass, had acquired a dull sheen, radiating loneliness and melancholy. It showed gigantic palaces of rosy marble, their façades packed with colonnades and statues, rising, shining like mirrors, from the blinding evanescence of green, clear seas that sparkled under the abstract sun of a perfect dawn. Ships, loaded with barrels and anchored at the shore, seemed like part of the same shell of smoky glass as the dementedly ornamented buildings, and they had the most moving sculptures black gall could imagine: hate, ecstasy, evil, stupidity, illumination, Christian piety, scorn … endogenous aggressiveness, grotesquely unleashed, like a monkey with electrodes on his skull triggering the hippocampus … palaces of insanity and wisdom emerging, vertical, fragile, from the green, limitless ocean. There were no human beings anywhere. In the lower right corner, there was a signature in black ink: Desiderio Monsú. The spectral vision seemed to spread beyond the painting’s frame, and the bejowled mestizos, with enormous rings on their fingers, sweaty from their armpits to their waists, could sometimes make themselves believe that this place where they looked at those women’s pink bottoms, shimmying obscenely in front of them, being mounted by hairy men with bovine balls, was nothing other than a pavilion of pleasure or torture, a grotto of hell or heaven, surrounded by that unearthly scene, spread as far as imagination could extend. Then, a sudden nausea washed over their internal organs, and mad with the sadness of being merely human, and not gods or nightmarish demons, they would empty their glasses of whisky, tequila, or absinthe without a breath, hold out their hands and dampen their fingers between the thighs of the redheads and black women, and collapse with their heads onto tables of woven bamboo …

For ten years, The Albino bought up whole streets in the French Quarter: bars, jazz clubs, restaurants where crawfish were prepared in eighty ways, with ten varieties of Béarnaise, bordellos and Mardi Gras souvenir shops, tobacconists and palm-shaded residences … Fashion boutiques and barges in the port and prostitutes with branded buttocks now wore his insignia: a calligraphic M with a certain imperial refinement, barely distinguishable within a spiderweb of volutes. This same sumptuous M, as though in precious stones, was engraved into the side window of his black Packard, chauffeured by an Indonesian who brought him to and from the Monsú.

When The Albino entered one afternoon through the place’s hinged, crystal door, protected from the waves of rain that crashed onto the sidewalk by the black umbrella of his chauffeur, who was soaked instantly by the clouds breaking over New Orleans, the doorman, a prematurely gray black man in a purple livery, kept his eyes on his master’s face, forgetting his words of greeting as much as his customary bow. That cost him his job, and, at dusk, he enriched the alligator feed in the Louisiana swamp. But how could the poor man not stare, when he saw that, alongside his master’s flat, African nostrils, the wart, always dark brown and big as a pea, had become suddenly, overnight, raspberry-colored, clear and bright as a giant sturgeon’s egg. Red, pearly veins, like roots, started at the shining bead (where something throbbed like a wadded-up embryo), spread across the bridge of his nose and under the taut skin of his cheeks, and continued to grow in the days and weeks that followed, enveloping him in a web of capillaries, even in the pupils of his eyes, his gums, and the entirety of his lingual mucous. In The Albino’s eyeballs, the doctor with the silver saucer on his forehead saw, hanging from the fibrous peduncle, a kind of crustacean slowly moving its feathered antennae and odd masticatory apparatuses in the vitreous fluid. Pains like unimaginable atrocities of war accompanied this spread of the bizarre parasite through the body of Monsieur Monsú. Blind and racked with spasms, as though he had tetanus, the owner of twenty-five percent of the French Quarter was been abandoned by his doctors after months of torture, and left to scream like someone being skinned alive. He lay naked on his bed in his ivy-covered house in the select north-city neighborhood, watched over by two frightened nuns from the Catholic Mission. The pearl beside his nostril had grown as big as a grape, and in its hyaline shell were vague webs of blood. The wiry lines, flexible and absorbent, spread under his skin everywhere, to his fingers and testicles and toes, and wrapped them in networks, like tangles of hair.

This is how Fra Armando found him when he arrived in his familiar Cabriolet to give him last rites. The nuns had decided to do their duty to the end, although nobody in the city could have said what god The Albino might worship. The priest, called in such haste that he still had, between his gold-crowned molars and the flabby wall of his cheek, a little, bloody wad of bread, climbed the colonial building’s stairs two at a time. On the landing, he spit the bread into a polished spittoon in the curve of the wood-carved staircase, where the paneling made of four precious woods met a large painting, an imitation of Degas’ dancer tying her shoes. That morning, he had taken part in a shamanic ceremony, in which he had healed a dying man by sucking the illness from his body and presenting it to him in the form of a ball of bread filled with blood. He had just put the revolting maple wood mask back on its hook and was preparing a second group of feathers in his jaw when Sister Fevronia called him to the phone. Now the Friar, who mysteriously had avoided meeting The Albino before this moment, was seized by an illuminated nervousness. The spectrum of belief in New Orleans — which, in the somber penumbra of his room, he had often imagined as a marvelous, multicolor orchid, its petals separate yet united in the sacred ovarian globe — had contracted, suffered fires and mutations, regressions and metastic developments, since the arrival of Monsieur Monsú. Heresies and crimes, conversions and sudden apostasy, apparently spread in seemingly ordinary statistical patterns — these proved something else to the one who sensed the religious ferment of his community in every pore. On the edge of the field of prismatic forces, a great glacial continent had suddenly appeared — a black iceberg, foreign and irreducible, over which, as in Ezekiel’s vision, The Albino reigned, sweating black flames and shrouded to the waist in a metal resembling chrysolite.

When he entered the room, the priest encountered the large, milk-white, starched sails that covered the nuns’ heads. Fevronia was as beautiful as a sculpture in porcelain, and just as fragile. Her brown eyes were like two glassy shells, wide apart and staring into space. Caterina was taller and prim, with azure eyes. When you saw them coming down the path, framed by agaves and enormous cacti and the Louisiana sky, her whitewashed face looked like a mask, and it seemed the same triumphant sky around her face also shone through her eyeholes. Now, though, their eyes looked at the floor, because Monsieur Monsú had died. “Too late, Friar,” whispered Caterina, “you are too late.” But a sensation of power, like a sunrise, grew inside the priest, along with a soulful impatience. The Friar suddenly felt that a god resided within him. “Out,” he said quietly to the nuns, who slid away and shut the door in its mahogany frame. A chorus of angels, sculpted on the back of the door, turned their round mouths and pious eyes toward the sky.

A whistling silence vibrated the crystal chandelier in the stairway for over an hour. The nuns, seated together on a plush bench near the door, looked through the window at the back of the next house, loaded with purple clusters of Japanese lilac. It was a tense, mental silence. There were currents of silence freezing the air in the hallways, just like those sometimes emitted by the ocean, at a frequency of eight cycles per second, which irritate the hypothalamus unbearably and make entire crews of sailors hurl themselves into the sea, leaving their sponge-covered vessels drifting, sails mangled by the winds, prow and stern paced only by seagulls … In the end, after she had knocked several times in vain, Mother Fevronia was bold enough to open the door a tiny crack. She peered into the vast bedroom and yanked the door closed again, in terror. She was overcome by an uncontrollable shaking in her hips and collapsed onto her sister, who held her in her arms. Mother Fevronia never told anyone what she had seen, but in her dreams she saw them again and again, for months on end, the two men in the great bed under a cashmere canopy: Monsieur Monsú lying on his back, his arms crossed and his eyes rolled into his head, and above him, with his body on the other body, with his arms on those arms, his legs on those legs, his eyes on those eyes, his mouth against that mouth, Fra Armando making a continuous, inhuman sound, through his nostrils, and glowing in the dark, with faint needles of light.

In New Orleans, dusk is violent and translucent, the clouds turning to rags of flame over the termite-eaten wooden buildings. Above the clouds, in a Diesis of rays, in a glory and wonder that overwhelm the soul, you can see, with some frequency, visions of the Trinity surrounded by winged creatures, the seraphim, cherubim and angioletti of faith, or indecipherable allegorical scenes, as if the entire sky, ablaze with twilight, was a ceiling painted by a colossus, who drew the crepuscular light through the round window of the sun. Precisely this kind of vesperal cataclysm now arched over the city, changing the waters of the river into blood, when, after hours and hours of tense quiet, Fra Armando emerged from the death or bedchamber of The Albino. The nuns flinched violently and jumped to their feet (having completely forgotten what they’d heard and why they were waiting), and stared at the man in his violet cassock, ashen-faced and red-eyed. Exhaustion had turned the flesh of his face almost transparent, exposing his bare skeleton, and the bald skull in the middle of his tonsure showed the gently pulsing circumvolutions of his brain. The Friar threw himself onto the bench, leaning his back against the fabric walls. “He will live,” he said to himself, in a quiet voice, “I gave him another ten years.” Then he continued, more slowly: “How many I lost, God only knows.”

While the sisters went into the sleeping chamber, the priest rose, trembling, and moved toward the stairs. He descended into a deserted street. He walked like an automaton over the sonorous sidewalk, his cassock snagging the wide, fleshy ornamental plants, dogs barking at him from the yards, until he came to Canal Street and saw, alongside the high, stone buildings of the central business district, the waters of the Mississippi crowded with ships. The old streetlights came on, whose gas from another age had not been replaced with electric bulbs. Elbowed by the black people and the flock of promenading civil servants, the Friar went to the riverfront and stood before its unimaginable width. On the far-off bank he could just see Lilliputian houses, with their dozens of windows sparkling madly. Resting his elbows on a wooden rail, he eagerly breathed in the cool, salty air. It took a few minutes for Fra Armando to notice how odd the southward rushing waters looked. The twilight-colored river had turned to blood. The Friar followed the dizzying rush of lenticular red cells, the size of loaves of bread, the amoeba-like gliding of the white cells, transparent enough to show their darkened nuclei, the snaking spiral worms that must have been malaria germs, the unusual fluorescence of lymph, the currents of glucose and protein. Fascinated and deathly tired, the Friar suddenly sensed that everything was alive, that everything lives, and that the universe does not at all operate like clockwork. Instead, it is a malleable architecture like the human body, a temple of skin, a basilica of scratches, a cenotaph of snot, with no right angles or durable materials, where the person creates his dreams, thoughts, and illusions, his time and his language like a cell secretes a hair or the crystal horn of a nail. And still, the least important cell in the universal body receives, through angel hormones and neural visions, the imperious commandments of God.

Less than a week later, Monsieur Monsú reappeared at his place on Fuck Street, as even then they had started to call Bourbon. The filaments of the jellyfish that had invaded his body were gone, leaving almost unnoticeable lines on his skin, like the flowers and Art Nouveau ornaments that decorated stone buildings uptown, while the wart beside his nostril remained forever limpid and raspberry, with something inside, like a fish embryo floating in an egg, occasionally twitching its virtual tail. At night, however, the Packard would take him to the edge of town, to the lacustrine cottage of Fra Armando, in the middle of the endless swamp. The immense limousine, with chrome hubcaps and its chauffeur rigid in his place at the wheel, sat the entire night among pools of water that reflected the heaps of stars overhead, between carnivorous plants with sticky seeds and human-like tongues, until the windows turned bonbon pink, and daylight, with its gray-yellow fringe, poured over Louisiana. The lamp in the cottage never went out. Sometimes a silhouette of a man in a cassock, or a suit and lavalier, appeared at the window nearest the little bridge. Odd people of different races, hunchbacked and crippled, crossed once every few nights along the sole access to the house perched on stilts, besieged above and below by stars. One of these people might piss from the narrow deck, extendedly, black as pitch against the yellow of the dawn, splashing glittering drops of amber into the lily pond. The stench of urine hovered over the cottage, combining strangely with effluvia of myrrh and incense.

At about that time, the rumor of a demonic plot filtered into the city, first through the ebony-skinned women who sold mangos and avocados in the market, then penetrating, by way of the servants and maids, all of the neighborhoods and social strata. This plot was much stranger and more frightening than voodoo rites. It was a conspiracy between the Teacher of Justice and the Evil Priest capable of shaking the powers of heaven. Allegories as complicated as hopscotch, childishly transparent allusions wrapped in fear and hysteria, and unprovable lies layered in embellishments all took shape like a mirage mirrored in the sky over the colonial city. No one dared to follow his finger along the tangled designs of fantasy to their mundane origin, everyone talked about the fetid (assuming the spirit had nasal passages) cesspool of the cottage on the lake, everyone talked about the perverse meeting of the world’s two halves, Light and Dark, into a Gnostic globe that far exceeded critical mass, everyone moaned to imagine the devastating explosion to come. In a vacant lot full of garbage, they found a human skeleton with each bone a different color (or so claimed the seamstresses whispering into the ears of petticoated ladies). A flea-ridden stray dog was said to have given birth to two puppies, then a blue glass ball, and then two more puppies. It was said that a mulatta woke up one morning with her fingernails and toenails grown a cubit in length and curved like scythes, so that she crawled out of bed buck naked and walked on all fours like a beast, until her mother strangled her with her apron. For almost ten years, on the northern cotton fields and in basements filled with whiskey vapors (after ’33, stills were legal, and the gangster era entered its decline), people would gather — standing or squatting, smoking or downing drinks — around someone who brought news of Those Who Know, the new sect that had begun to spread through the city, following the networks of restaurants, bordellos, and obscene stores of The Albino. Those Who Know could have been anyone, whores or stevedores, high school teachers or train mechanics, so that you might sodomize the fat ass of a prostitute and have no idea what terrible sacrilege you had committed, or you might listen to the blabbering of a short, bald Figaro as his razor wandered over your soapy cheek, without knowing what amazing power his ruddy skull contained. Those Who Know were not marked by any outward sign, and thus the terror and mystery increased; each person suspected the next. The terrible part, people said, was that the old refuges of those besieged by evil — holiness, and the good and moral life — had allied themselves for the first time with the shadows, so that they might inextricably bind the world in a spider web of neither good nor evil, neither ecstasy nor horror, neither everything altogether nor the void, but Something Else, something inhuman, undemonic and undivine, incomprehensible and impalpable. It was said that they were plotting a Change. The vomiting, ejaculating, bleeding, speaking, pissing, breathing through pinched nostrils, salivating, defecating, suppurating or thinking or imagining, in any case the transpiring of a new world, or an Anti-world, or better put, something lacking both existence and a name. A new vibration, from a new instrument, spread from the cottage on stilts where the priest of all beliefs and the monster of all perversions met, night after night. Miracles that looked nothing like miracles, with neither rhyme nor reason, following an Anti-plan that might have been crafted by the frontal lobes of the cosmos, or in any case not from the middle of the skull’s walnut — an Anti-plan that blossomed, if not quite in reality, at least in the effluvia of rumors and fables. It was said that little girls in a tenement by the river had dolls that grew, each one of them, beneath their ordinary canvas dresses, hairy, living vulvae, flesh and skin, anuses and navels. The ring of a respectable matron, who fanned herself on the balcony of her house, tightened suddenly like a sphincter, severing her finger completely and then rolling into a pot of begonias. At dawn, on February 4, 1932, hundreds of people supposedly saw the old east-side cement factory that had been demolished three decades earlier, enthroned over the city on an evanescent foundation of clouds. An old Indian woman was supposed to have defecated a tapeworm with dragonfly eyes and hundreds of wriggling legs, which then scampered away, into the forest, dragging its pouches of egg sacs.

The police frequently stormed the priest’s cottage. They turned it upside-down and interrogated the two inhabitants, binding them in the complicated webbing of the lie detector. They found nothing suspicious, supposedly, but who would vouch on his life for the police? Those Who Know, with their infallible strategies, had surely infiltrated the forensics brigades. The file on the “Change,” thousands of pages long, matched, point by point, Breton’s Surrealist manifesto, published ten years earlier: “L’homme, ce rêveur définitif …” Two young officers, who took turns leading the police literary circle and were poets themselves, one in the style of Auden, the other an e. e. cummings, were put at the disposition of W. W. Schrinke, the well-known psychoanalyst, and they studied the city’s rumors, complaints, and depositions for six months with the feeling, as one of them later said, that they were fishing in the sewers, through rotting rats, bloody bandages, and newspapers with fecal matter … The latent content of this enormous collective dream, the outline, tattered and symmetrical like a fish skeleton, began to appear, through the opercula and scales of hallucination, toward the beginning of the fifth month: during the night of the fifth-sixth of April, 1936, there would be a ritual reconciliation of Light and Dark, the two powers that struggled for supremacy within the mad labyrinth of history and the human body. In the course of the ritual, there would be a death and a rebirth. The newborn being would be beyond good and evil, thus able to penetrate the unknown beyond the tegument of our world, but the tremendous energy required to move beyond illusion would come from an abominable murder. So this was what the police were supposed to stop, the police who took no more account of metaphysics and religion than the dirt on a fingernail. They had a few years to work, during which they would watch the lake house night and day, interfere with The Albino’s clandestine dealings, and above all, try to discover the intended victim in time. The report from Professor Schrinke stated (or “divined”) that the victim would be someone very young, with black skin.

When she woke up, in her canopy bed with its golden brocade image of a unicorn resting its head in a virgin’s lap, Cecilia smiled lazily at her Uncle Monsú, as she had every Wednesday since they first met. Why did the pale man with black features attend weekly the girl’s rising? Why did Melanie and Vevé always show her a peculiar deference and do her bidding? Or that silly Cedric, who indulged her poking thin, gold needles into his buttocks and played the clown day by day, hamming it up, juggling plates and pineapples, stumbling like a drunkard, making a crooked saxophone meow like a cat until he got her to smile, and then, content, left for work? What family relations existed between them, in that world of aunties, uncles, and cousins, but without parents, or any trace of the past? She had been the princess of this little world for as long as she could remember: The Albino, Melanie, Cedric, and, more rarely, Fra Armando (but Cecilia felt strange around him, as though she didn’t have the gaze to meet the prelate when he gazed at her with ashen eyes, the way a museum piece, or a fish in an aquarium, doesn’t stare back at you when you stare at it), then, for a few years, her little maid Vevé … Cecilia was too used to her to worry her with these mysteries. (And she was used to almost no one else, since she didn’t count the black children as human beings. They played in the shadows and around the corners, or appeared, like ghosts, trodding toward the kitchen, and she was never sure how many there were, or who they belonged to.) But in her moments alone, in front of the crystal mirror, looking at her exotic beauty in the fairytale-blue air, she found herself touching her full, tattooed lips and asking, out loud, “Who am I?” At the sound of Cecilia’s voice, accompanied by the clinking of her glass ring against her crystalline teeth, Vevé would immediately appear, poking her little head into the ribbon-covered mirror and putting a comb carved from bone into her hair. The sad question would melt away in the opulent emptiness of the colonial cage, until it became an airy, frivolous aside.

That entire morning, Melanie and Vevé had labored to prepare Cecilia for the Ceremony, the great ceremony that everyone had told her about since she was little, first in the form of fairytales that enchanted and horrified her, and then in parables and allusions that she was not entirely able to follow. When, a few days earlier, the first drops of blood had slid like tears down her ebony thighs, Aunt Melanie, overcome with a strange trembling, had told her, through chattering teeth, that the Ceremony was coming. At that moment, Cecilia was playing with a thin kitten, with big, silly ears, giving it her toes to chew and scratch with its back paws. It stretched its face out and licked the menstrual dew before the girl could stand. Melanie jumped up like a demon, her lioness nostrils dilated and her eyes bloodshot; she grabbed the cat by the head and tore it in two pieces, hurling bits of flesh and fur onto the elaborate peacock design of the Persian carpet. Cecilia felt both ill and pleased at the sight, because she also felt, then, for the first time, from within her sealed shell, the spasms of desire for a man. She was wearing silk underwear, and had scented oils on her face and breasts. Her makeup was refined, and she was wrapped in the most splendid dress, with lamé flames, flashes of anaconda skin, and electric blue waters, wonderfully matching her silk, floral turban. Monsieur Monsú attended, without boredom, the almost eight hours of complicated cosmetic and vestimentary operations. Sunk into a wicker chair, he gazed at Cecilia as though she were a mystical bride, or a goddess.

And now, beside Cedric, fascinated by the medical store window display across the street, obscured occasionally by carts pulled by mules who poked long, nervous ears through their felt hats, by lemon-colored limousines, and even, once, by an empty hearse, with shining windows and flamboyant ebony sculptures, Cecilia waited patiently for her aunt, who had not emerged from the glass door. Finally, the towering Melanie appeared, walking proudly and carrying a giant paper bag with the store’s emblem, a dragon’s head in scarlet crayon, under which — the girl now noticed — was drawn, in calligraphy with fastidious volutes, the same M that marked all the businesses of Monsieur Monsú. Out of the top of the bag, over the corners of coffee-colored paper, strange spindles protruded, like very long screws, with metal butterflies gliding on their helixes, then the delicate edges of test tubes, then nickel devices that resembled elaborate forceps … She crossed quickly, clop-ping her high heels made of Hatteria under the hooves of her wide, bruised feet. “We can go now, we have everything we need. The damned sales clerk kept asking me questions, so I told him to call his boss” — she whispered to Cedric, who was overwhelmed with a deep melancholy. “There’s a taxi! Get it quick!”

“I still hadn’t realized what would happen, and I didn’t understand anything until I saw, there in the catacomb, the yellow butterflies, puffy and bloody, breaking out of the girls’ tongues and drying their wings in the torch flames. Only then did I know what a tangled mess I was a part of, and I knew I could not get out of it, since my flesh and mind were woven from the same tangle. A bird woven into a tapestry could more easily tear a hole in the fabric and fly away.” As Maria and Vasilica stopped eating, in the clay room of their family house in Tântava, and the mămăligă dried out on the wood table, Cedric, with his wide eyes, now full of the reflections of colored ghosts from the icons, took the story slowly and ever more painfully further. The rustic, yellow moon, yowled at by the village dogs, made its appearance in a corner of the window, while the snowfall stopped. The single candle glittered, with rays as thin as copper wire, over the half-shadowed faces of the sisters. Cedric was almost lost in the dark; only his eyes and teeth shone in the increasingly still light of the room. The Virgin and St. George, the archangels and pictures of Tătica in the first war, and the raw silk rags were oddly consonant with the substance of the story, because all the world’s beliefs housed hearths hot with magic, the same way any evil witch eventually finds her way to the one terrifying god, the potter, weaver, genetic engineer, mad savant, or rabbi that gave us life.

“The taxi took us to the edge of the great swamp. We stepped out into water up to our ankles, and if we hadn’t had special galoshes with wide soles, we would have sunk to our knees in the mud swarming with worms.” The women lifted their dresses and tied them with leather cords, the way you tie an umbrella closed. The Albino, who had left their house abruptly a few hours earlier, was waiting for them on a little rise of earth. A leech, through whose fatty skin you could see sacks of blood, was lazily crawling over his boot. With a torch in his hand (because night had fallen, billions of stars appeared, and only the west of the sky was colored by an eyelash of intense purple), brave and lordly in his colonial suit of beige linen, he came down slowly and offered his arm to Cecilia. Melanie walked behind them, sighing, and Cedric, after he’d sent the taxi away, paying the driver five times the fare, caught up to them, shaking his shoulders and distractedly humming “Dixie.” They wound themselves down a path with many turns, slightly above the level of the swamp. The stench was overwhelming, entering not through the nostrils, but through the skin. The grotesque croaking of frogs rose like vines around the pillars of stench, opening a florescent cacophony onto the folded vault of night. The cold became piercing. On the leaves of wild irises, rushes, and carnivorous plants, gigantic firefly larvae flashed their horrible masks, with mobile and blind maxillaries snatching at threads on the hips of those who moved through the endless swamp, desperately warding away mosquitoes.

The moon appeared, enormous and round, and rose to occupy the center of the sky. Suddenly it emitted so much frozen fire that Monsieur Monsú’s torch was not needed. Under the yellow light, billions of pools burned as furiously as gasoline, and strange ruins, covered in engravings, appeared. ‘That must be a painting of a palace,’ I first thought when I saw them, feeling a chill spread across my skin. I had only been playing once a week at Monsú’s, spending the rest of my time at the Tequila and Red Fox, but whenever I had sat on stage in the round, cherry-red salon, light like a witch’s cave, I imagined what it would be like to wander through those ghostly, shining buildings, full of statues. Here, in the swamp, in the middle of the paths with hundreds of turns, there rose — it was the first I had heard of them — buildings just like those in the painting, pale, with statues that looked like they were made of flesh, in daylight they must have had vivid colors, but now they seemed dispossessed of color and, at the same time, their life. You know, Derry Fawcet, my friend who played bass, he had a hobby of going onto the rooftop on clear nights and taking pictures of the stars through a telescope. And in his pictures, the stars were not yellow or white, like they were in the night sky, but shimmering in thousands of colors: violet, pink, jade-green, cyclamen, mahogany … He told me that’s what they were really like, but at night, our eyes could not perceive the colors, so we saw them as anemic, pathetic, stripped of their beauty. That’s how I explained to myself the sad pallor of the ruins that appeared before us. It was as though centuries had passed over the buildings in the painting. Their walls were as thin and fragile as paper, and not one was still whole. The windows were only empty holes in walls of dislocated marble. On the edges of the ruined parapets grew pitch-black trees, outlined against the moon. Transparent swamp lilies opened their receptacles like jellyfish, from inside the hip of a crumbled statue. The chimeras on the walls howled soundlessly toward equally mute stars. Here and there, a column of porphyry supported a corner of pediment, on which a hero’s foot, sculpted in high relief, still stepped toward the void, shoed in stone sandals. And all, but all, the desperate faces of the statues, columns and capitals, escarpments and embrasures and abutments — all were covered with the same type of engravings, seeming at each step to organize themselves into nuclei of images and nodes of meaning, but undoing themselves in continuous evasion and evanescence, like an allusive writing, like the writing in dreams. I squinted to decipher it, and it seemed that, between the breasts of a marble woman, I could see a butterfly with its wings spread, and on a heavy pediment a hand without an index finger. The statues, mutilated when they fell from their niches, lay scattered around, and I stumbled over one that floated, without arms, face down in the mud. I shooed a giant toad off the back of the statue’s frozen neck and turned its face toward the moon. Although it was stained with mud, I would swear, Maria, I could swear it was your face! And that’s why I noticed your face in the club, the Gorgonzola!

In short, the ruins we saw were like the pitiful remnants of a once-superb mouth with superb teeth now decayed and broken from which only the crooked and black teeth were still visible, in a reeking, repulsive smile. An immense stone portico, in the ogive, had miraculously remained standing, at the entry to a zone of even taller ruins. Shaggy vegetation grew over its crown of countless fallen blocks. We all passed under the portico, led by The Albino, and, through a rectangular opening in the pallid marble walls, soft to the touch, we sank into the moldy belly of the ruins. Before we were completey lost in the shadows I looked back. The moon, setting over the sky (it had been on our right, then our left, as we walked the convoluted path), sat directly on the portico’s apex, creating a strange symbol together, which the marrow of my spine and the nerves of my stomach understood better than I did myself.

And we went, in the end, into the belly of darkness, through the porphyry lips and the obsidian nymphs of the night. The stars disappeared, but in the torchlight, fairy-like crystals and agates caught fire. All around the walls of the granite vagina where we traveled, the crystalline façades flamed up and died out. We descended further and further, careful not to crush the translucent newts in the puddles where we stepped, and not to snag our hair on the horrible blind cave spiders of the caverns. We passed through a hall shaped like a cistern, half full of green water, through a hall with walls completely covered in fur, through a hall like a freezer, of thin, white crystals, through a rectangular hall of tile, with broken urinals on one side and, on the other side, pipes with the vestiges of calcium-crusted faucets. The Albino would sometimes say something out loud, and every time he spoke in the dripping silence, his voice sounded so brutal and obscene that it stabbed our stomachs with a sour flood of adrenalin. His colorless skin, pale eyes, and cotton hair made him seem like one of those depigmented beings in the depths of the earth, of the same lineage as the wingless insects, the crustaceans fanning their tactile organs over wet stone, and the ragged, famished bats …

We knew we were approaching the center when, suddenly in front of us, in a corridor as narrow as an animal’s trunk, and wearing the long vestments of a Catholic priest, Fra Armando appeared. When the torchlight brought him from the darkness, he was so motionless that he seemed to have been waiting for centuries, occupying and suffocating the whole corridor. On his head over his tonsure he wore a strange, steel miter, unlike anything a priest had ever worn. Out of this disturbing machinery two tubes emerged, curved and nickel-plated like syringe needles, and penetrated his skull, perforating it in the hollows behind his ear canals, as we would see when he turned around. Before he turned, and without paying any attention to Monsieur Monsú, Fra Armando approached the very young woman with large, velvety eyes under golden eyelids, touched his fingertips to her tattooed lips, and made the sign of the cross over her forehead. She smiled timidly and started to say something, but the priest stopped her. “Come,” he murmured, “Those Who Know are expecting you.”

17

REEEALLY good movie! That guy Jerarfilip was on a beautiful white horse, coming down a path in the forest and then far away, on a hill, there’s this castle. Then you see him go in the castle through an iron gate and then somewhere else, in a little piaţa there in the castle. And he starts fighting with this fat guy, a guard who ran the peasants selling stuff. Boy let me tell you how they fought, what he did to him. Ha-ha-ha! He dropped a basket on his head, then they cut a rope and a board fell on his head, and they knocked him in the pig slop … Then the other guards were coming, and the guy fights like three or four at once and then he sticks his sword and they all fall over in the mud. Boy, what a fight! And the girl, the count of the castle’s daughter, she comes down too, on her own horse, and she’s got her servant with her. And she sees the battle and how many times the guy spanks the other one’s butt and throws the other one like … like five meters, and the girl smiles … She was blond and beautiful, a damn princess, with her eyebrows plucked out: you could see that even back then (nonsense! that’s just the movie) that the girls did themselves up like they do now. But when a lot of soldiers came at him, he wasn’t going to get anywhere if he kept fighting, and the girl frowned and turned her horse around and left …

Lord, how she loved it! She had completely forgotten where she was; she’d stopped noticing Costel’s hand in hers long ago, her whole body and the world around her had disappeared, like hallucinations, like universes where no one had ever been born, where no one would ever understand, ever … She was inside the movie. Her facial muscles mirrored the emotions of those who fought and loved (but never made love, blew their noses, farted, hiccupped, belched, or left their flies open) there, beyond the glass between reality and dream. Paralyzed, unconscious, she experienced the movie so intensely that it was as if it wasn’t projected onto the screen (a torn, dirty sheet) but the smooth bones of her skull, in her frontal lobes, in whose white flesh the associative areas blinked on and off like neon signs. Her being, turned as fluid as milk, poured into the glass shell, the dirty-gray of the body of the princess with blonde braids and shining eyes, it filled the finest glass contours and wrinkles, and, in the enchanted armor of panniers and crinolines, she started to perform the scenes she knew by heart. No one knew, no one would imagine the truth, that now Ivon von Somethingorother was in fact Maria, she had invaded her like The Horla, or like the possessed are invaded by their demons. With her face alternating between light and dark, and her eyes reflecting the rectangle of the screen, Maria whispered the words she knew by heart: “O, Sharl, Sharl, I thought you would never come …” forcing Ivon to say it too, at the same time. Through the thin glass of Ivon, Maria felt the powerful chest of Gérard Philipe every time he and the princess embraced. And, when he fell into the hands of the count’s men, and the girl’s father the count didn’t know that Gerard wasn’t the spy, but that the spy was actually that ugly fellah, Marmandac or whatever, who wanted to steal the girl away, suddenly the audience heard her say, “Pablo! blah-blah-blah” (that is, in the language of the movie), but in the script it was supposed to be, “Sharl, will I never see you again?” But she said Pablo, I heard it with my own ears. And that’s when it hit me. And after that the girl kept lookin’ up at him with her mouth open, totally confused, and after that she said Sharl. Yep, after that she said Sharl, I heard her. But first she said Pablo.

It was the first time Maria had been able to enter the form of a character so well that she could change what it did on screen. She was shaken, dazed, when she realized that, breathing Ivon’s lines, she had changed her lover’s name. Later, in other films, she was able to change entire scenes, alter the plot, get rid of bad characters, or have her favorites marry even when it made no sense, to the consternation of the audience in the miserable theater, one of the three which staked out her territory: the Volga, the Floreasca, and the Melodia. Watching television in the evening, and staring out of boredom at some soap opera, Mircea would see his mother, balled up on the chair with a faded blanket over her legs, burst into tears during farewell scenes, the loss of a child (in all the Indian movies), or the unhappiness of a beautiful, ill-starred girl. She cried beneath the blanket, because Costel, sprawled on the sofa in his underwear, would tease her cruelly if he heard her, he would mock her until she ran into the other room, where she was free to sigh and moan. “That’s a woman, always ready to piss her eyes out …” Often though, when Maria could control herself, clenching her fists, and the tears on her cheeks were only shining trails in the light of the television, Mircea would see the fate of the show’s heroes suddenly change. Things would take a turn for the better, and films that started out as tragedies would end up in happy weddings and baptisms, the reconciliation of stalwart enemies, or the conversion of atheistic blasphemers. Then Maria’s tears would dry and her face would settle back into the enchanted, hypnotized expression that gave her happy dreams.

After the word FIN appeared and the dirty, yellow lights came on, Maria and Costel stood up without a glance at each other. She smiled, he squinted in the light, and they turned — moving with slow and mechanical steps, like slaves in chains, behind the dozens of kids with fat faces and girls who were attractive only by virtue of their youth — toward the door, over which was written in white on a blue rectangle: EXIT. With the same stumbling gait, careful not to step on anyone’s feet and especially not to get stepped on, they dragged toward the narrow hallway that led outside, withering under the garlic stink from one person’s salami to another, and the smell of sheepskin from everyone. Even before they saw the light outside, Maria, with a happy heart leaping up, knew that spring had come, because a purple butterfly perched on a pipe in the wall, folding its wings and occasionally moving its little filiform feet. Maria stared after it for a long time, keeping her discovery for herself. She didn’t even show Costel. She was holding his arm tightly to keep the crowd from separating them. It seemed that no one else saw the velvety wonder, the spot of blood on the dirty green of the pipe. It was like the butterfly was not sitting there on the pipe at all, but on Maria’s retina, where, writhing in the swirling optical chasm, it wanted to spread its wings into the two hemispheres of her brain. Only once she passed did it lift off, its wings fluttering like a wind-up toy over the heads of the flock crowded in the tunnel, to escape into the whirling light outside.

Bucharest was now enveloped within the heat of a scented spring, with puddles reflecting the blue sky, budding black branches on trees that lined the boulevards, and windows sparkling in the steady, intense, white light, raising pulses and stirring memories. The hair and umbrellas of pedestrians crossing the street were caught by warm gusts. The wind popped the red flags mounted on storefronts (since May First was approaching), and often an elegant woman would lose her hat, to the laughter of groups of machine-shop apprentices. Squinting and pursing their upper lips in so much sun, the troglodytes who emerged from the somber grotto of the theater moved over the sidewalks or straight into the mostly empty boulevard, cut only by a Volga or a ringing tram. The police, who had not changed into their fair-weather uniforms, moved around without doing anything, layered in coats and Russian hats, squabbling with a gypsy in a cart, whose horse had shat in the center of the Capital. Where were the snowdrifts that had lined the streets? Where was the milky sky, so low you could have touched it? Now the sky’s color rose, limitless, outlining the statues outside the university, the cubist apartment blocks, with dozens of balconies, big and small, glowing pink in the luminous air, and the pitch-black hornbeams and poplars with leafless branches. Around these sharp shapes, the strong blue diminished until it was almost the pure color of light, and then straight overhead it became deep and intense, in places ultraviolet, a color you could not see without feeling woozy and exalted, as though you could peer through the translucent skin between your eyebrows with the great and lost pineal eye, now withdrawn to the base of the skull, on its tiny Turkish saddle, attentive only to the bestial light of the interior world.

Released, finally, from the plodding narrows, Maria and Costel walked down toward University, happy and without a thought, they mixed into the scenery, drowned in the whirls and fractals of history, without distinguishing themselves from their world, and without understanding that they lived on a grain of sand on a beach wider than the universe, spread out and sifted, melancholically, by a mind that chose the two of them and decided their destinies. They were unfazed by the debt of their existence owed to their separation and imagination, down to the most hallucinatory details, by a monstrous cabal of neurons, by the fact that only for this sect are they significant, alive and bright-eyed, as they moved arm-in-arm, within the moment “now” in a world lacking time, over the sidewalk from Casa Armatei on the theater boulevard, into a Bucharest in which every building was only a wood and paper façade, propped up in back with rough-hewn boards, a city built with tweezers inside a green, paunchy glass.

But the clouds seemed so real! — blown along the sky by a dark, passionate wind, broken by the warm metal of the trams and the bay windows on the roof of the university. The white light was so comforting, sliding over the cheeks, and so nourishing for the arterial system, in the clammy air of young flesh, replete with desire, dreams, and adrenaline! In the breath of spring, Maria, the simple girl from the edge of town, almost past marrying age, felt she could love the awkward boy beside her, whose arm she gently pressed. She watched him from the corner of her eye, as he walked beside her through the fluid honey of the sun. He was very, very much a child, thin as a banjo and sickly pale, with pitch-black eyes. His flat hair, combed back and glued to his scalp with walnut oil, was a black mirror of shifting waters, a style that would have been completely ridiculous if it wasn’t the look of all the young men in the factories and workshops; when they were leaning over a wrench or lathe, a curl might fall loose, might fall in their eyes and they’d push it, irritably, back on top time and again. Costel was not that tall, not too handsome; he wasn’t “fine,” as the girls in the rug factory said, but at least he was gentle and serious, and his eyes (although Maria would later complain constantly that her husband was “jumpy” and “weird,” that she never knew what was inside his head) sometimes had a warm, meditative expression, as though, from time to time, someone else, a far superior person, had inhabited his mind, and Costel himself had gone to some other place. That look of noble contemplation — the deep and true melancholy that sometimes crossed his face, especially in the evening, even when he was wearing just torn pajamas and smoking smelly Mărăşeşti cigarettes — looked like it wasn’t his, and it wasn’t, actually, because in those moments Costel was completely without a self or a thought, the way an actor who plays a noble person may be, in his normal life, a middling blockhead. Without liking the boy from Banat too much, Maria loved, actually loved, even then, the deceitful sadness on his face, when his unknown ancestor, a great Polish poet of the XVIII century, arose within his tangled viscera, like puffs of steam over a coffee cup, to regard the world once more, through Costel’s black eyes, which were identical to his own.

High on the sweet amphetamine of springtime, the two young people went arm-in-arm through the yellow air, cold as glass, talking about nothing and laughing. Maria wondered how he was able to keep frowning even when he laughed, and Costel felt he was made entirely from scented air. He was trying as best he could to find Maria’s algorithm, to intuit (like in those almanac puzzles where, knowing which direction the first gear turned in a complicated system, you try to work out which way the last one turns) the ineffable functioning of her mind, to extract its secret, how it produced those happy smiles, equivocal, bitter, hesitant, those little grimaces of dissatisfaction that frightened him, those vague declarations of the eyes and eyebrows, those evanescent inflections of the voice, those tiny quivers of the wings of her nose. Thus did the young apprentice imagine the psychology of the girl he loved: the projections and diagrams of technical drawings, cycloids and hyperbolae, a rubber geometry, extensible and yet precise, from which, if you knew the laws and mastered the technology, you could obtain each of the thousands of possible effects and combinations. And if in saying something else or pressing her arm a little harder, Costel saw her react completely differently than he expected, his explanations were not mystical or poetic, nor did he credit them to the ineffable caprices of women; he blamed instead the imperfections in his technique, not following all the gears, bolts, pinions, clutches, and Maltese crosses closely enough. Looking at the stars sometimes, dreamily, in his underwear, on the small, rusty balcony of the house where he lodged, humming a little song from Banat:

Sure, I’d join the army too

Hai tri-li-li-li-li

If they used corn stalks to shoot

Hai tri-li-li-li-li

Costel thought the constellations were another kind of machinery, and he tried to examine their surfaces for shining traces of grease and lathe oil. The entire world was a mesh of gears, where the rotation of the most miniscule grains of sand at one end of the ocean produced, at the other, a devastating earthquake; the wing of a butterfly in the Antilles caused a tornado in Kansas; and a small concupiscent thought of a bum on Rahovei shifted the wrath of God toward a billion inhabited worlds. In his dreamer’s paranoid mind, and under the feminine lashes of his eyes, everything connected to everything else in a vast, crystalline conspiracy.

Turning from the boulevard, they sank into the spectral and sonorous streets behind the Hotel Ambassador. Maria took off her batik scarf and let her rings of hair, curled with an iron, flutter over her back. The day began to descend toward evening, but the air was still just as hot and windy as before, knocking against the glass edges of the buildings, which were eviscerated by emptiness and silence. Their steps took them, strange but somehow foreseeable, toward the street where Maria once lived over the tailor’s shop. More than ten years had passed since the terrible bombing of ’43, and the neighborhood had been completely rebuilt. Where the Verona tailor shop had been was now a square building, anonymous, green, with a white glass plaque at the entryway: “Phthisiology Laboratory, District 23 August.” Most buildings had a red or blue plaque like this one. Flapping red flags were not missing from the girders over the entryway, and a sickle crossed with a hammer inside a wreath of grain was sewn onto the flags with yellow fabric.

Maria frowned, and beneath the skin of her face, countless muscular fibers contracted at the command of a fine system of levers and threads under her skull, contributing (as Costel believed) to the outline of an expression full of emotion and hard to define. The shadow of her former adolescence now brought exaggerated relief to the hills of her cheek bones and chin, her philtrum, and the slight depressions in her cheeks, as clouds, running over hills, will suddenly block the sparkling sun and bring cold and chill — almost another season. Maria remembered, or something rose from her memory through a passive and painful process: Mioara. Cedric. Tătica sitting on the rock in the doorframe, holding his gray head in his hands. Her splendid adolescence never to return. A tiny, tapered tube, its lower end in the corner of her eye, secreted a teardrop. They walked past the former location of the workshop without her telling Costel that she once had lived there. She only, at the end of the street, leaned her head on his shoulder and continued walking like that, her face diagonal and her eyes a Modigliani, filled with watery ink.

They hadn’t taken ten steps more through the transparent afternoon air, which jiggled gently at every movement, when Maria lifted her head again, surprised and confused. Over the houses (reconstructed in the same middlebrow style), just as Maria had seen it after the bombing twelve years before, rising pitch black against the motionless, clear sky between the tips of the poplar trees, rose the elevator shaft. It had remained upright after the block surrounding it turned to rubble, its wire mesh covered in grease. There was a large wheel on top of the black parallelepiped, holding a thick, greasy cable, a braid of thousands of steel wires, attached to the elevator car on the top floor and a massive, rectangular counterweight below, now hidden by houses and shrubbery. Maria could not believe her eyes: how was it possible that this chimera had survived, when everything, everything around it had been demolished and rebuilt? Maria had no knowledge then of the nuclear dome in the center of Hiroshima or of the Church of Memories in Berlin, ruins carefully maintained (as though they were relics of distant ancestors or the skulls of sanctified martyrs) in the post-industrial, steel and glass centers of great cities. And even if she had known, she wouldn’t have made the connection, because an incredible fact wiped out any analogy and intensified Maria’s impression that she was hallucinating, her awkward feeling — one that got stronger as she got older — that her mind did not belong to her, that it was only the theater for a play that was completely beyond her control or understanding, which granted her an unequaled importance in the world.

She nearly dragged Costel down two or three winding streets. They crossed a piaţa with an agoraphobic statue and found themselves, suddenly, at the base of the great monument, in front of the dark-green elevator doors. A piece of matte glass, black with years of dirt, was placed in the massive sheets of metal. To the right of the door, a brass, unctuous plate, besieged by a kind of green lichen, held an ancient and weathered ebony button. Over the button, written in curls and flourishes, was a name: MARIA. The grooves of the curls were filled with dirt and barely visible. However strange it seemed, it was not this plaque, bolted beside the elevator door, that made her heart beat and Costel’s cheeks lose their blood (he had also seen the elevator shaft, he was also perplexed, but his passion for technical design was stronger, and thus he had been admiring more the mechanical precision of works from long ago, from the “bourgeois-landowner regime,” of an elevator no longer built in factories of the present day). It was what they had seen from far away and which now, craning their necks, they saw again: a vague motion on the top of the tower, in the wood and glass car suspended twenty meters from the ground. There was someone inside, there was a glimmer and a flash, in the center of and above the abandoned neighborhood’s bloody, ghostly architecture. It was a trembling, blue light, a light that reminded Maria of the azure waters over the breast of Păunaş, the peacock in the courtyard on Silistra.

The light went around the corner of the grass by the petroleum-greased tower. Costel walked away, leaving Maria frozen, wide-eyed, in front of the door. In back of the mesh and iron rod building was a lot with stacks of car tires, and at the far end, the back wall of a yellow house with a window in the middle, right at the top. In the window was an old woman’s head. Her eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and she sucked a round, sugary candy on a pink plastic ring. Nodding her head cheerfully, she motioned to the young man, who had turned away with disgust. Moving slightly away, in the lot, from the foot of the elevator shaft, Costel could see into the car at the top. He was sure there was a human being inside, but also something like a bird, something with wings. He went back beside Maria and put a hand behind her shoulders (she moved close to him, warm and frightened), he asked her with his eyes, and then, with her permission, he held out his other hand and pushed the elevator button. The ebony cylinder sank with a squeak into its housing, but, as though there was no electricity in the ancient shaft (and there probably wasn’t), nothing happened. The silence continued to be complete and whistling. Not even the wind, rushing toward them in warm and scented gusts, fluttering their clothes and revealing Maria’s thighs, which looked like they were made of transparent honey or liquid amber, rustled the soft leaves of the surrounding trees, as though it was only a change of light in the petrified neighborhood. Maria, her face almost red in the evening illumination, had known ahead of time that the elevator would not move. The plaque, which smelled of tarnish, had her name on it. Her finger had to touch the button, leaving a fine filigreed network of papillary ridges. She held out her hand with such grace that it seemed to cascade from her body, like a pseudopodium full of florescent corpuscles, flowing gently, undulating, pouring toward the brass plaque through the flickering delta of her five fingers (over one of the canals filled with ships, barges, and picturesque water houses, the ring of mammoth hair arched like a bridge). Her index finger — with her painted nail reflecting for a second the enormous, orange sky, with the surrounding buildings and, in the center, her face as thin as Mircea’s face bent over this page of the book, as though it were the golden space of an aquarium — delicately touched the concave surface of the button, pressing it down to the level of the yellowed plaque. Someone with the perspective of an angel (or Laplacian demon) — someone whose eyes could perceive not only the refraction of corpuscles or photonic waves across the surfaces of objects, but also the objects themselves, as they really are, suddenly given in all their details, at every level that our minds artificially separate: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, poetry, as though the entire mind became an eye, one of the billion eyes of God — someone who could come closer and closer to the image of Maria’s glassy-skinned finger, branded with the design of her fingerprint, until he practically became one with it (and also with every molecule of the ebony elevator button) — he would have witnessed the strange and unexpected meeting of two universes. He would have seen that in between the two surfaces, one of flesh, the other of former flesh, there was, however strong the pressure, a miniscule space, and there, in a no man’s land, like between neuronal synapses, there were negotiations, deals were made, prisoners were traded, and sophisticated passwords were exchanged not in words, but in spatial whirls and torsions. The neurotransmitters fire in thin fountains, green-yellow like venom or florescent blue, moving chemotactically toward the receptors in the button. There, like keys in a lock, they match, displace, or block other substances, palaver endlessly in the catecholaminergic code, and in the end, are reabsorbed, dismantled, and transformed into other and yet other substances, later absorbed by the kidneys of the cosmos and eliminated from existence. Meanwhile, their oriental chattering inserts itself, through long neural pathways, into the elevator’s nervous system, transmitted from axon to axon through ring-form, demyelinated delays, the ring finger, reappearing from place to place, reaching the motor area after countless intermediaries, reconversions, distortions and retardations, to operate, for the first time after years of impasse, the petrified organism of the electric motor.

Maria jerked her finger back as though the button were hot when she saw how quickly the wheel on top turned over and began rattling and rotating, making the entire black mesh tower tremble. Sliding down rails greased with petroleum jelly and hoisting the great rectangular counterweight, the elevator started, with a magisterial slowness, to approach the ground. The lower part of the car was attached to a cable that curled like an intestine and snagged on the dusty mechanism. Passing along each of the three floors, the elevator dinged like a train reaching the end of the line. Gliding almost silently, it measured the space slowly down to the last floor. The two young people stepped back, clutching each other and afraid, when at the end of an endless descent, lasting hours or millennia, the elevator stopped, finally, behind the massive doors on the ground floor. Through the matte glass, nothing in the car was visible but a vague flickering. Whatever was inside did not want to come out, or was not able to come out under its own power. Her hair suddenly sprayed across her face by a wave of orange light, Maria released herself from the mechanic, approached the elevator again, and touched the once-shiny nickel handle in the shape of a T. She turned it toward the left and opened, with a frightening screech, the door frozen on its hinges. Not yet wanting to understand the fabulous image she saw, divided by the rhombuses of the rusty gate, she folded it to one side, and only then really looked, with her eyes widened in amazement.

Inside the walnut-paneled car, between the crystal windows that doused the area with prisms and rainbow iridescences, seated on a little chair, was a rubicund, naked woman, blinding in the milky maturity of her skin, who held in her arms, like a swan and just as heavy, an immense butterfly with a thick, velvety body, six nervous legs that ended in claws propped on the woman’s breasts and stomach, a round head with enigmatic eyes, and a proboscis rolled up like a clock spring. The wings, unable to unfurl completely in the tight space, lined the car with an electric blue that hurt your eyes to look at, like the flame of a welding torch. The woman was at least forty years old. She had rings under her glassy, intelligent eyes, her breasts turned slightly toward the ground and their bluish curves were marked with small blue veins, and her stomach was creased with several deep folds. Her hair had grown down to the ragged floor of the elevator and the last tendrils were spread on the ground, wrapping her right thigh in curls and distinct locks. A subtle scent, dissolving rapidly in the sweet spinning of spring, wafted from her icon-like pose. A large, melancholic Omega was gouged between her eyebrows.

For a long time, she barely moved, staring at the two young people surrounded by the crepuscular light. When she stood, they sensed the fully female power of her hips. Her delicate webs of dry, curly hair did not quite cover the curved whiteness of her pubis, marked by a vertical velvet fissure. Released from the confining walls, where it left blue smudges like eye shadow, the butterfly beat its wings several times. Unfurled, they were more than three meters across. Although the woman held on to it as strongly as she could, hugging her arms around its ringed body, it still managed to pull itself free, to circle like a bird of prey over the vacant lot and rest, finally, on the warm wall of the house at the end. With its wings spread almost as wide as the yellow wall, it basked a few moments in the already rubicund rays of the sun, and then it brought its wings together and rested like the tail of a gnomon, casting a peaked shadow over the dandelions and chamomiles growing at the foot of the cracked wall. The underside of its wings took relief in the light that fell on their veins and nerves, a much paler blue below than the one above. Over the house’s pointed roof and chimneys, on the still-afternoon sky, blue, just visible, was the thin fingernail of the moon.

“You are Maria,” the woman said, stepping outside the box where she had waited for twelve years, feeding the strange infant from her breast, and dreaming, maybe, or gazing in a trance into the mirror on the elevator car wall. Because the mammary glands and tear glands are skin modified by the same hormone, the butterfly had fed alternately on tears and milk. Now the woman walked gracefully on the warm sidewalk, enveloped in spring. Costel and Maria walked very slowly, on either side of her, down the empty street. “Charlie told me about you. We only met for a moment, but he was able, in that moment, to tell me everything. The years from that time until I met you have passed so quickly, it’s like I was in a book and the author wrote ‘and then twelve years passed’ … Just that much, as long as a phrase, an endless phrase that enclosed my child and me in a vial of liquid time. When I was young, I read the fairy tale about the djinn trapped in his bottle for millennia, and I quaked wondering how it was possible to experience something like that, the silence and endless stillness, your mind devouring itself in convulsions, nails growing into the heel of your hand, until they came out the other side, teeth plunging savagely into your tongue just to feel something, and from time to time, powerful hysteria rising inside you, dissolving you in its poisoned acid … So much better to choose the nameless tortures of a true, honest, inferno, with concrete objects that smash your mouth and crack your eyes and rip your kneecaps from your flesh! Even screaming, even writhing, you know you exist, that you are in history coming from somewhere and going somewhere, albeit another horrible suffering.

“It was different with me, it’s different with women. I lay in my chrysalis like a hard-shelled louse, degenerate, just a stomach full of fat and eggs, without eyes, without nerves, without hopes or expectations. Not like a consciousness that follows a thought to its end, then remains empty until the end of time, but like a thought from another, much greater someone, like a letter in a book, like a dot of color in a painting. I did not suffer, because I am woven from suffering; I did not think, because I am part of another thought, the fantastic intellection at the root of the world. My message is encoded in me, it is me, the way the host is the Savior, and the words of this message, meant only for you, are my fingers, lips, hips, spleen and vertebrae and large intestine. How odd, to live through someone else’s history, as though you were a dream creature, created entirely by the mind and yet complete, with personalities and desires, and with brown eyes with green flecks, without interiority, and which does not think, see, hear, or know it is alive. To be a secondary character in someone else’s novel rather than the enormous world of your full complexity, to be only one who brings a tray with a letter. To Hell with your heart and vulva and beliefs! Did you deliver the message? You will never appear again, not in this book or any other. And still, how pleasant it is to bear a message of good news … To be the Angel, kneeling with folded wings, speaking with a different kind of vocal apparatus than humans have, amidst the sounds of a triangle and carillon: ‘Rejoice, Maria!’ And then dissolving, not to disappear forever, but to return to the Intelligence whose fold you were, as though the fold would flatten or the smile depart, leaving the face serious, smiling only in its celestial eyes …

“I, this crumple in the sheet, this pleat of the Divine. This imperfection, this shard. This negativeness, which, much more blinding than beautiful, exceeds the flesh and mind in monstrousness. Ringworms, scorpions with translucent tails, octopi, abyssal fish that are all teeth, spiders and scabies, hunchbacks, lepers, cretins and newborns with only one eye in their foreheads are all less hideous than a beautiful woman in the splendor of her youth. For she is a piece plucked from God, a biopsy of his organ of light, a painful lumbar puncture that squirts a jet of liquid. She leaves a cavern in perfection, and she travels a much greater distance than monsters or any nightmare. It is terrible to possess beauty. Over twelve years I often looked at myself in the mirror, until my sin, my greatest and most unforgivable sin — because arrogance is another name for beauty — became clear and unbearable. Such joy I felt to find, now and then, a ring or wrinkle! Such a relief when my forehead was blotched with freckles! And when a pimple appeared on my lip, I was happy for days; it was as though a supernova had exploded in the abysses of constellations, destroying shameless matter, filling entire parsecs with blood. Aging, I offended the Flame less and less, my spark gained more and more of the delicate texture of ash. That’s all, all I wanted to be: a letter in a book, a snowflake of ash … Blessed, then and welcome may my double chin be, my sagging breasts, stretch marks, and varicose veins. I feel my beauty ebbing out of me like plasma, illuminating my contour and returning to the Beauty of the limitless one …”

Costel and Maria came to the end of the street, with the grand odalisque between them, her nipples turning wine-scarlet in the declining light. They stopped, contemplating the vanishing point of the nearly deserted boulevard. Some groups of young people passed occasionally, high school students with caps and briefcases, college kids with their hair combed flat over their heads, girls with their hair all in curls and eyebrows oddly plucked, their “eyebrows abroad,” as Tomazian teased on the radio; you might see a gentleman with a lavalier, a cane in hand, and a suit so elegant you wondered if time had gone backwards and the “Befores” ridiculed in magazines had become the “Afters.” Even though people passing by smiled at the three of them — they’d stopped at the corner, by the storefront of a funeral home, with a coffin leaned against the wall — nobody seemed to notice anything unusual. Walking on tip-toe, with her hair down to the backs of her knees, the last ringlets tickling the soft flesh there, oval like a closed eye, the woman from the elevator seemed to be made of honey-colored air. Maria suspected, despite their passivity, that everyone else could see the woman just as well as they did, but she matched so well the odd, nostalgic corner of Bucharest and the nightfall that she didn’t register in their minds. Her image descended directly into the obscure depths of their emotions and dreams.

They turned back, passing the unmoving houses again. Behind the curtains and windows covered with blue paper, a light would appear here and there. Maria remembered, charmed, the wonders in her landlord’s room on Silistra: dolls with pink and blue dresses, vases with painted feathers, pictures of wooly kittens … There could be so much of this kind of beauty behind every one of those curtains! She would never lose the taste for knick-knacks, macramé doilies, little framed photos: and in ten or fifteen years, on Ştefan cel Mare, she would fill her house with little angels, squirrels or kaolin ducklings, at two or three lei apiece, bracing herself resignedly for her husband’s sarcasm: “You brought another hen? If you won’t throw them all out, I will, just wait!”

“I had no childhood or youth. I page through my memory pointlessly, the way you pointlessly try to remember the eternity before you were born. Yet, there is a gray light there, a nuance somewhat lighter than the black we use for nothingness, and which, without representing, without showing something, signifies that the apparatus exists through which something might show itself. There are blind people who know they used to see, but, through an accident of fate, do not, and there are others who have no knowledge of any lack, for whom sight is unimaginable, the way we cannot imagine what we would feel if a sensory organ opened in our forehead like a flower, or if we grew bushy antennae like a moth. I always knew I was made to exist, full in body and mind, like the large, limpid eyes of the blind or dead, but also that I could not perceive existence. What does a millipede perceive, hanging in a slow spiral beneath a rotting leaf? What can a paramecium, writhing in a cup of tea, sense of the world’s spectacle? I experienced and sensed only that much for more than twenty years, as though I lived within the vague and mediocre dream of a railway clerk. I probably whimpered all night, wrapped up tight in wet diapers, struggling to get my hands out. I think I later went to school and shoved my classmates during recess, and I dirtied my nails with ink, and my cheeks and even my tongue … Or maybe I was sweet and awkward at thirteen, when anyone could do anything, embarrassed and revolted by the painful growth of my breasts … putting my first pad in my shorts and feeling, with more and more irritation, the wetness there … Maybe I was courted by a carbuncular apprentice who carried my books home and clowned around … I have no idea. None of this even weighs as much as a film that my mind confuses with all the others when I emerge from the dark theater, squinting my eyes against the August light, the sparking windshields and shop windows full of colored inscriptions. I only know this much: until the bombing I was, for a year, the elevator operator in this office building of a Romanian-German petroleum corporation. For a whole year, eight hours a day, I sat on my little chair, opening and closing the elevator door, sliding the iron gate over, pushing buttons, carrying the clerks and their perfumed secretaries up and down, without any thought beyond doing this my whole life and then retiring from this less-than-two-square-meter box. Day after day within the four walls, thinking that I could have been a worker in a fertilizer factory, spitting out my lungs after a couple of months, or a waitress carrying ten plates or eight pints of beer at once with my butt bruised from pinching, or a whore bearing all the pigs and drunks on earth … So, at least I had a chair to sit on, at least, sometimes, the polite gentlemen smiled (even though they would try to touch me almost every day when, to my horror, one would enter the elevator alone and I had to take him to the top; sometimes I even had happen what any operator will tell you is normal: a gentleman shows you something before you can close your eyes, and you end up — you, a virgin with romantic dreams — with that pink stalk on your retina, unable to get it out of your mind, crying through the night on your lonely bed), at least the air smelled of cologne and Havana cigars … I had my proud moments and small satisfactions: I thought everyone admired the way I could stop the elevator, with a quick, decisive motion, right at the floor, not a millimeter too high or low … In the evenings, after the corporation closed, I would go, with my stiff back, through the ash of the streets, and, after a dreamlike hour of walking, reach my room, where I curled up on the bed like a kitten. I never saw anyone, never went out. Sundays it always rained, and all I did was sit by the wet window and look outside, at the yard behind the house, and watch the single tree there shake under gusts of rain. But I would not get lost in reveries or lamentations like other unmarried girls. Too great was my lack of experience, too obvious that all I touched turned to ash. It became ever clearer, precisely because no one chose me, that I was a chosen one. Not the Chosen One, because I sensed how small and weak I was. But still, something was going to happen, there would be significant moments, or hours. I would exist within a story, even if it wasn’t my story. It would give me coherence and dignity within a world, even if it was the most illusory world of all. Because you get reality from a story, not a substance. You could be carved in stone and not exist, lost somewhere inside endless dunes. But if you are a phantom in a dream, then the great light of the dream justifies you, constructs you. And there, in the story twisting in the mind of a person sleeping, you are truer than a billion inhabited worlds.

“And when, one evening in spring-summer-fall-winter (I had lost, if I ever had it, the thread of days and seasons) I found myself stuck in the top floor of the elevator shaft, with the electricity suddenly cut and a diffuse smell of fear floating around me like an arabesque of cigarette smoke, I knew at once that my astral moment had arrived. The sirens howled deafeningly outside, it was like you could hear, in a metaphysical sense, the engines of the approaching bombers, and when the quakes and explosions began, like a summer storm when the scary lightning flashes and you taste metal on your tongue and the children scream with their heads under blankets. This kind of blinding flash of lightning disassembled, in a single blow, the brick and lime flesh of the building, leaving only a skeleton of beams and black mesh. Up on the top floor, in my box of wood and crystal, with nighttime Bucharest around me, violently illuminated, from time to time, by the anti-aircraft guns and the ravishing explosions of carpet bombing. In contrast to the disaster below, a massive crystal moon, in its first quarter, wove itself around me like a motionless spider’s web.

“Then I took off my clothes, and I stood completely naked to await my winged groom, there, in the narrow nuptial chamber. He knew I was there, before he saw me from his cabin, he sensed the pheromones emanating from below my stomach (he felt with his brain, not his nostrils, because the brain is no more than the monstrous blossom of the olfactory bulb), and he dove toward my ziggurat of grease and metal. Suddenly he was in my cabin, blond and naked, with butterfly wings between his shoulder blades, his penis erect, powerful and golden, his dog tags on a silver chain around his neck. I clung to him and everything became luminous, fabulously colored, as though we had entered the mystical aura of a chakra with dozens of petals. When he broke my seal, he inserted in the center of my abdomen not only an ivory liquid, but also complete knowledge, as though his cannula of supple flesh had become a cord of communication between our two minds, through which, in a flash, we said everything to each other, we knew everything about each other, from the chemistry of our metabolisms to our complexes, preferences, experiences, and fantasies. He was Charlie Klosowsky from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was accompanying the bombers that took off almost daily from an airbase in Malta. A lieutenant with almost a thousand hours of flight time in the supple Spitfire which, through an ingenious mechanism, fired through propeller blades that rotated so fast they became invisible, he had flown many times over the Balkans and Romania. He had watched the steel cylinders of the Ploieşti refineries explode and the stations at Câmpina crumble to bits as though made of matchsticks. He had run through the sky, like he was playing tag, with IARs and Stukas; he had seen flak tear balls of fire and black smoke from a bomber’s stomach, and the mushrooms of dust grow, three thousand meters below, on scratches as abstract as a map of the earth. It was like he had done nothing his whole life: held the joystick, pushed the triggers of his guns, and looked at the indicator panel, alone in his cabin, for hours and hours, just as I, in the elevator cabin, pushed buttons and watched the succession of floors. We both rose and fell, and neither of us had memories or a life of our own. We had come into the world (but which one?) only for the moment of our coupling, like two insects, in a halo of concentric circles of light. And that was how we would always be: standing, stuck together, united above in our gazes and below by that seminal cable, through which we felt millions of bits of information invading me. We stayed like that, in that closed circuit, in that wheel through which the man flowed into the woman through her sex and the woman into the man through his eyes, even when we released each other, even when he stepped backwards and took a moment to gaze at my belly and breasts, both wet with sweat. I looked once more at the curly hair on his chest, also wet, and his soft sex, and then he was in his ashen cabin again, and he was completely ashen, like in a black-and-white film from wartime, racing on through the calm or cloudy skies with the planes of enemy hunters, shot down the same day or surviving until the depths of old age, bouncing grandchildren on their knees and telling them how they fought in the war. Who cares?

“As for me, I stayed in the cabin, aging for twelve years, and raising my child. From the beginning, I felt it in my uterus, first like a revolting larva, with, fortunately, soft mandibles, frightening to look at. I saw it, as though my stomach had turned to crystal. It ate my placenta like a worm eats a cabbage leaf. Then it grew limbs and its wings budded in its armpits. And from one day to another it became a butterfly. It spread through my uterine canal like the showcase of an insect collection, its proboscis sucking at the gelatin plug that separated it from our world. It was born completely wrapped in its wings; it came out dirty with blood and placental liquid and its own feces, that I had to clean afterward, for days on end, with my saliva, tears, and milk. After a week it was puffy and fresh, with sparkling eyes, and it spread its wings, which had room then to curve freely through the space between the mirror and the grill. At first, the tips of its wings were not more than two hand-widths apart, and their blue didn’t flash like it does now. It was a female which must, someday, reach maturity. I combed my fingers daily through the soft fur on its belly, and I felt, near the last rings, how the tubes were growing that would fill the air, for hundreds of kilometers, with scents only their antennae can perceive. Pheromones: a single molecule suffices for one cubic kilometer of air. Yes, soon I will have suitors for my little girl …”

The suitors appeared, but they looked so pitiful! Passing the last five-story apartment block before the lot, the three people watched, amazed, behind the tower of black mesh, a scene from a fantasy. At the far end of the lot, the entire wall of the house was covered with butterflies. In the center, its enormous wings wide and sparkling, rested the elevator woman’s grand butterfly. Its knob-capped antennae symmetrically framed the window where the old woman with a sucker in her mouth reappeared. Around its immense wings, placed symmetrically and in an orderly fashion, were countless other butterflies, each one unique, of all shapes, sizes, and colors, making up a carpet of ravishing beauty. Even in the distillated twilight, the colors glowed like glass, yet velvety, in soft nuances that merged and separated, making waves, turning toward a unanimous brown and flashing again in green, azure, lemon, mahogany, and carnation, so pure that you would have thought that they were the flames of a quartz prism, or that they were the light of dawn, like a needlepoint of drops of dew, on a violet crocus. The moon above showed its strong, sharp peaks.

The golden, naked woman opened her mouth wide, until the curved tip of her tongue became visible, held from below by a flap of skin, and she let out a piercing sound. The great butterfly abruptly lifted from the wall, blowing away the others with the beat of its azure wings. It turned again over the vacant lot and threw itself, like a hawk diving at a field mouse, onto its mother’s breast. The velvety body was almost as long as she was. The woman held it in her arms and turned to Maria: “It will be soon,” she said, smiling so sadly and strangely, that, years later, that smile would reappear to Maria in her nightmares. And, before the young people could recover, the woman pushed the butterfly into the elevator. She knelt before the girl, large and heavy, wrapped in her fibrous hair, and kissed her right hand. The lips on the back of her hand appeared to release a volatile substance that rose into Maria’s brain and, for a moment, made it sparkle. Costel saw clearly (but he would soon forget) a crown of light around the temples of his beloved. The woman rose and turned, showing her imperious hips, with her dark, almost animal, vulva beneath them, and went into the elevator cabin, sat again on the chair and took the butterfly back into her arms. In all this time, the air was so dense with the other thousands of lepidopterae that the two of them simply breathed them in, pulling them into their nostrils and lungs, feeling how they fluttered in the alveoli, and exhaling them again into the dusk. But in the end, together with the almost complete nightfall and the apparition of the first stars on the summer sky (since it had become, without doubt, summer, and the night was hot and scented), all the butterflies flew into the elevator, as though into a luminous trap, filling the space completely. Behind the grill, the woman and the great butterfly were no longer visible. Maria closed the metal door, and the elevator slowly started upwards, making the tower of pitch tremble. At the top, it stopped beneath the great wheel, and it would have become completely invisible if the moon hadn’t beat blue light on its crystal windows.

Maria took her dark young man by the hand and set off, overcome with sadness, through the spectral streets, toward home. They crossed the city in little more than an hour, hardly speaking. Costel was completely focused on the small, damp palm of his girl, whose fingers twitched at the caresses of his own. The heat intensified and the trees along the streets smelled of fleshy leaves and sap. A tram would pass on its way to the train yard at Vatra Luminoasă, rattling and shaking on the rails. Garbage men filled bins beside scavengers, and the street cleaners stood in twos and threes, leaning on their brooms and smoking. Some factories had their workshops illuminated and inside pieces of machinery twitched: the night shift. They came, finally, to Colentina. From the soap factory came an unbearable smell of rancid fat. They went two more stops on the tram, passing the short and dilapidated houses, covered with tarred cardboard like garages. Costel, who had been enveloped by the endless afternoon, almost without his knowing, in an egg of translucid yet impenetrable amber — because to intuit a miracle you need a different synaptic make-up than the step-by-step macramé of short strings in the left hemisphere, and Costel was a true believer in the left hemisphere, the logician of melancholy — hummed a song to himself that at the time was on everyone’s lips:

And one, and two, and nine, and ninety-nine,

Tell me, Gardenia, tell me,

and he wondered again what spring or lever to push to make Maria’s neck muscles contract and turn her gaze toward him, so that later, through another adroit maneuver, the way he worked the metal sheer in the ITB plant, he could provoke at least a little smile, at least one gentle lift of the cheek bones, or that complex and ineffable coordination of peribuccal and periorbital sphincters that produced an expression of tranquility. He was four years younger than Maria, and in his still-virginal mind, he pictured a large table, like the one for logarithms, sines and cosines in the musty book he had in his room, a table of the thousands of gestures, words, corporeal shifts, facial expressions, hairstyles, clothes, shoes, cigarettes, cirrus patterns, cloud cover, constellations, political events, sidewalk chips, flashes of memory — matching all the possible reactions of the female youth, in a direct, unequivocal, and immutable relation. But it took hundreds of parts of this mechanism, activated at once and in synchronization, for her to graze his poorly shaved cheek with her hand, hundreds of thousands of meshing gears and transmitting belts for her to embrace him, and (here, Costel had no doubt that all his mechanical aptitude would not help him at all) a mechanism vaster and more complex than the universe, with more components than there were photons running through space, for Maria ever to say to him, “I love you.” The table, as yet, included very few certainties, many hypotheses, and a host of erasures and revisions. It stretched, step by step, in unforeseeable and heteroclite directions.

They entered a tangle of streets on the right of the main road, through the darkness that smelled like dirty wash-water. Crickets chirped, dogs barked, and from time to time an old man in a beret poked his head out of his gate, looked up the street and mumbled something. Then he closed the gate and disappeared into a vault of grape vines. In other yards, people were eating outside, around a table covered with a cloth, under a light bulb hung over a branch. Thousands of flies and mosquitoes glinted as they flew around the bulb. But most houses were silent and dark already, covered with a powder of stars.

A triangular piaţa, dimly lit by a streetlight, had a round place in the center with flowers and a cheap statue of a plaster soldier, smaller than life-size, with his gun raised. One hand had fallen off long ago, leaving a stub of rusty iron, the kind used to reinforce concrete. It was an unspeakably sad place. Entering it, you grew just as pale and immaterial as everything around you. But exactly there, Maria stopped, turned toward Costel and said seriously, almost angrily, “Kiss me.” The Bănăţean felt his mind make a popping sound and the world order shake. The effect came before the cause and time ran backwards. In a moment, he tossed the limitless table into the fire, since it foretold nothing, and he abandoned himself as living prey, to the other hemisphere, where contradictions disappear within a tender light, a universal solvent. He awkwardly took the girl by her waist, the way he’d seen in movies, and he tried to open her mouth with his lips and tongue, but she resisted, and their kiss was a typical 1950s kiss, romantic and almost chaste, the way everyone imagined their mother and father kissing before they came into the world. And that’s what it was: a Hollywood kiss, with mimed passion and no drop of eroticism. Even the light on Maria when they let each other go and Costel could see her face directed up at him, seemed studied, like a lighting effect meant to emphasize her sparkling eyes and her teeth as perfect as yesteryear’s divas’. Maria had not put her arms around Costel’s neck but held him lightly on the shoulders, as though they were dancing. She didn’t know why she had told him to kiss her. Maybe it was fear. She had thought again and again about the woman with the butterflies and her terrible message. She was chosen, she didn’t doubt it — but for what? And why her exactly? Lord, she thought, it’s frightening to be chosen, to feel the angel’s finger point toward you like a dagger. To feel that you have left the obscurity of your freedom behind, that you are in the light, that you are observed, every moment of your life, and that nothing belongs to you, not even your own soul. It is so extraordinary for the gaze of Someone so powerful and incomprehensible to stop on you, that it doesn’t matter whether you are chosen for beatitude or torture. We should pray, daily, in hope and despair, “Lord, do not choose me, Lord, never let me know you, do not keep me in your book …” Maria trembled with fascination and horror, because from now on, she could not escape. Yes, out of fear she had kissed the apprentice, fear she would love him and marry him and stay with him her entire life. How clear it was! She looked at the young man carefully, as though for the first time: was he even worth loving? Was he going to be the man of her life? She saw black eyes and pale cheeks and sad lips. Suddenly, she was indifferent to it all. “Why her exactly? Why her?”

They parted, after they had talked a little more, holding both hands, at the gate by her house on Silistra. It seemed like they were deep at the bottom of an ocean, that the stars were just the reflections of waves under the moon of another world. The oleander in the yard was sweet and dizzying. They kissed again, their lips barely touching, and Maria went inside. In their wire cage, the peacock and the peahen pecked a stump of wood. Marinache ruffled his wings in sleep, sensing the girl pass, but his squawk stopped in his throat, and his comb rested pale and soft, hanging over his beak. A few windows, covered with blue paper, were lit, and there were men’s and women’s voices, talking quietly or arguing. The girl went up the narrow stairs, in an almost total darkness, down the hall that creaked terribly with every step, and unlocked the door to her room.

Through the window comes the moon,

It comes into our room,

she murmured, because, actually, the scythe of moon threw a bluish light on the floor and side of her bed. She felt, all at once, terribly alone. She curled up on her mattress, pulled her sheet over her head, and fell asleep, after weeping like a child for a long time.

Costel had stayed a bit by the gate, inhaling the suffocating air of the slums, where the peppery smell of the stars mixed bizarrely, nostalgically, with barking from far-away dogs. His hands in his pockets toyed with a few coins, turning them between threads and crumbs. Maria. For him, Maria was the woman with the butterflies, even her lips were the butterflies every man waited for mystically, and which he had tasted there, beneath the piaţa’s dim lightbulb. Like through spark-filled stillness, the image of his beloved, completely psychic (because even though he had held her, Costel would never have dared to imagine that he would one day master the empire of tissues, glands, and memories that carried the name Maria, and to whose ports he would send galleons loaded to the masts with hopes, gazes, caresses, sperm, dusks, a desperate flotilla of impossible communication), ran drop by drop through his venous system. It reached his heart, now surrounded by the rays of the moon. From the auricles it rippled into the ventricles, and then it was shot by a powerful contraction into the jugular arteries, where it separated into thousands of filaments and tubes that pushed their tiny fingers into his brain and wandered through the axonic pipes. Billions of identical Marias in glucose tunics housed themselves like parasites in every starry cell and every glial cell like enchanted spirochetes, they met in halls and corridors and merged one with another, like beads of mercury, into the greatest and most hieratic Sea, until, in the supreme hall, on the brain’s supreme throne, framed by griffons, a single, immense Maria shook again, reflecting the pleasant bas-relief of the skull, under which she barely fit, and where she was venerated by a deceased Polish poet from two centuries ago. After the light went out in the girl’s window, Costel lit a cigarette and went back through the sweltering labyrinth, starting at every shadow. With each step, he felt his skull wobble gently, like a gyroscope.

Soon, the night became suspect. The muddy streets multiplied, and the stars above were not the same. They were dull and close like naïvely painted scenery. The fences, where he ran his fingers, absentmindedly, began to shine like cardboard. The houses blurred their barely visible outlines, becoming unformed mounds of earth, and the dogs’ barking rarified and spread over scales in ever slower glissandi. “What the hell?” said the young man, passing a hand through his hair. His hair was now as dense as a piece of rubber. When his hand fell over his face, he felt dull, softened features, as though modeled in porcelain. Even the visual space seemed full of cobwebs. Costel looked, like a sleepwalker, at his left hand: his fingers were shrinking into his palm. In a flash, he realized that he had left the Story, that he had reached the wings, where everything was crosshatched, a world barely formed, its space and time still budding. He continued moving forward, until there was nothing left of him but the forward movement. The world now was dirty and diaphanous, like modeling clay when you’ve mixed all the colors together, all the figurines, all the trees. Soon, any property would be reabsorbed into the final matrix: the night. Which also dissipated into the unthought, the unwritten, the nonexistent. Into the white page, above which I lean, and which I will no longer desecrate with the obscene seed of my pen.