Blinding: Volume 1

18

I LOOK at my hands, in this silent afternoon at the end of summer, and sit, in my undershirt, in front of a notebook with a brown plastic cover. My hands are silhouetted, pale with dark outlines, against the red-gold of the window. I look at the skin that covers them, flaked and semi-transparent, like soft glass, hardening only at the fingertips, there, the ogival protuberances from the ragged skin I chew until it’s bloody, where my nails have grown, the way rigid elytrum grows over the stomachs of some insects. Under my skin, tensioned and fresh, run tendons that activate the levers of my fingers. And my fingers move, because we do not doubt ourselves. Because what flows within the borders of our skin is not only blood, lymph, hormones, and sugar: more importantly, our belief flows. “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove”: we say unto our fingers to touch, our eyes to see, our feet to walk, and these pieces of material submit, because they fall within our empires, and at the moment we command them, we are sure they will submit, because in a manner of speaking, this certainty itself is the command. Within our bodies, woven of arteries and veins, knotted in nerves and motor endplates, whetted by osmotic liquids, is a circulatory system of belief without doubt, the certainty of our angelic nature. For this is what an angel has always been: that intermediary who, vested in belief, starts from the spirit and moves matter, molds it, makes it submit. In the brain there is a pump that moves the metaphysical void, a neural heart which sends graceful messengers, swimming in the serum of belief, through long tubes of golden light, to all the provinces, departments, and cantons of our bodies. And they, the androgynous, with zirconium testicles and amethyst breasts, speed toward layers of striated fiber, contracting and relaxing them, pointing them toward what we desire in the depths of our beings, and the finger moves, and the mountains remove themselves to the sea. Oh, Lord, if only our skin were not so scaly, so opaque, if only its interior were not so polished that belief, when it reached the frontier, didn’t feel it had to turn back, like light in a concave mirror! If only the light of our hope would surround our bodies with an aura of azure and sodium! If only the filigree rays would spray through our eyebrows like bridges of fire, and touching a matchstick on the table would bid it to move! How often have I sat for hours on end, until I lost my mind, until I dissolved into fear and sweat, with my gaze trained on a grain of sand, a barely visible speck on the wooden table, mentally repeating, with all the force I felt I had: “Move! Move!” — and imagining it did, that the miracle came … I would put my finger right beside it, so the astral spectrum would reach, there, to the aloneness of its being. I strained, my heart thumping harder, the veins in my temples swelling, my eyes bulging from their sockets as though I was trying to lift an enormous boulder, but no, the angels only touched the dermis on the inside, trying to slip out along with beads of sweat, but they fell back toward my heart, as though pulled by a celestial force. I didn’t have enough belief, and the amount that I secreted barely filled my body’s bag of bones and guts.

I sometimes imagined that my belief extended me at least to the edges of Bucharest, to the railway lines and ringed roads that surrounded it like the hard membrane around a cell. With its demented and chaotic traffic, its industrial platforms, where every piece of every machine was long ago used up, both physically and morally, its universities and libraries where lichen blossomed in a thousand colors and species, its statues (ah, its statues!) that stop you cold, its Dâmboviţa and Colentina like capillaries knitted from cholesterol, its center of cubist apartment blocks crystallized around melancholy-soaked residents, its women with tattooed hips wandering the streets at random, shaded by flowering lindens — the city would become my own artificial body. I would name it with my name and dampen it with my desires. I would control the crawling of scorpions and vampires through its river-rock wells, I would calculate the trajectories of every drop of urine sprayed from the drunkard’s meatus onto a wall, his head against its frozen bricks, I would passionately play with the forms of the clouds, broken by the parabolic antennae of the Telephone Palace, I would mold them into matchsticks, spiders, Jehovahs, thumbtacks, I would make their puffiness write awful insults across the evening sky … I would immediately prohibit the production of estrogen hormones in all genital apparatuses, in people, rats, flies, and all other beings, and over the years, I would follow the course of the world’s deconstruction through angelification … I would transform Orthodox churches into semitransparent jellyfish, their flesh would show their icons like diffuse granules of gold and azure, priests in cassocks would be vacuoles and organelles slowly pulsing around the altar, and the parishioners would be filiform like an El Greco — with ragged fringes, pale, carrying batteries of murderous cells on their white vestments. And hundreds of churches would rise slowly over the ocean floor, among the blocks, their cupolas throbbing, their rainbow lace fluttering, ever higher through the pure air, scraping the skin of the city’s living flesh, until, with the unseen hands of belief, I would gather the group of felt-lined bells into one place, I would combine the fungi into each other, I would crush them gently, like grapes, until in the cup of my hand there would be a single, great bell of blue gelatin, smelling of myrrh, incense, and narcissus, with which I would wash my flashing eyes.

Oh Lord, solitude is just another name for insanity. I know full well that I will never be able to change, with my will, even the decay of my teeth. I know that I will never have dominion over even a tenth of my own body. As for what is outside of it — but what is outside? Without the photons that fall on objects and ricochet into the crystal of my eyes — ugly spheres stuck in the bone of my brain — the world would be an obscure heap of reverberations, like the spider’s world, where only whatever shakes their derisory web exists. What is frightening for me, in the image of death, is not non-being, but being without being, the terror of the life of a mosquito larva, an earthworm, a snail at the bottom of the abyss, the living and unconscious flesh with which we are all cobbled together. We perceive light with scaly eggs full of gelatin, we transform it into electrical impulses and transfer them to a mound of wet mucilage in a calcium shell. We will never know how a wavelength becomes a subjective sensation, how we see (Lord, how do we see?) the petal of a snapdragon. We can never understand how something may exist and yet we never see, hear, taste, smell, or touch it even once in our life. Our life — within the limits of our universe, wearing our corpse like a headscarf, like the starry bandages on a mummy. Our world — the field of our sensations. A puffy fungus of light that covers our pupils, the sonorous felt that grows on our temples. A lover’s nipples recalled by our fingertips. Our tongue like an orchid’s peduncle, our tongue painted not red, but sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. And the trees, made of madrepore, splattered with mucus, unleashing their crowns into our nasal passages. And rocks of limestone in the cells of the inner ears. And the peduncles that know cold and hot, all scattered like transparent drops of glue onto the network of our nerves. Sometimes I imagine I have been bathed in a corrosive liquid, one that dissolved my flesh, my skeleton, and my internal organs, sparing only my nervous system. Then I would be taken out and stretched over a glass lamella, with every little fiber of nerve stretched, with billions of branches unrolled around me like a thin undershirt, white and impossible to tear. What else would I be but a neuron, with a brain as my cellular body, spinal marrow as my axons, and nerves as my numberless dendrites? A spiderweb that feels only what touches it. Yes, each of us have a single neuron within us, and humanity is a dissipated brain that strives desperately to come together. And I wonder, quaking inside, whether the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the dead are nothing more than this: the extraction of this neuron from every person that ever lived, their evaluation, and the rejection of the unviable into the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and construction of an amazing brain — new, universal, blinding — from the perfect neurons, and with this brain we will climb, unconscious and happy, onto a higher level of the fractal of eternal Being. But what about the “unviable”? But what about the minds, souls, and sensations of murderers and sinners? Won’t they form, in Gehenna, an infinitely perverse brain, a monster, something that could make Leonardo’s combination of all the most hideous parts of the beings of the dark seem as beautiful as an archangel? And won’t this process continue, even in the superior world — the old quarrel, the eternal quarrel? Because eternal torture, the unending pain that is evil, the wailing and gnashing of teeth caused by the inability to be good, aren’t these still a form of existence, and as existence, aren’t they also endlessly beautiful? Separated by centrifugal force, in the great turbine of Dante, or through fractional distillation in the Deisis of Byzantine icons, Inferno and Paradiso, layer of perfumed oil over layer of stinking pitch, all these in the end are all wisdom. Paradise — the wisdom of the right hand, right hemisphere, feminine, gentle and puffy, endless, still waters, illuminated in their depths by the phosphorescence of terrifying abyssal fish … Hell — wisdom of the left hand, left hemisphere, sudden paracletian fire, the mask that covers, in the crux of destruction, the soul of a dove. Good and evil, two enormous Buddhas erupting over our lives from two volcanoes over our lives, opposing and yet similar principles like magnetic poles, in the end they couple, over a footbridge of nervous fibers, to make the motionless and complicated hemispheres of the great, incomparable Brain that dreams us all.

We will get there. Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem … And we will get there because we are there already, because we have a toehold, because we are amphibious, because, paradoxically and miraculously, we are already part of the machinery that invents us from moment by moment, we participate second by second in our own drawing, sculpting, conception, and knitting together. If this wasn’t so, we wouldn’t be able to move a finger, since the finger’s flesh, cartilage, and bone would not be obliged to heed our command. Because we already participate in the Divine, from everywhere, from the tufts of our armpits, from the fat of our hips, and especially from the shell on our shoulders, we emanate a scented light that envelops us like a weaver’s shuttle. It is the mandorla that will someday lift us toward the sky, the shell that seats a living embryo. Yes, we are neural embryos, tadpoles caught in atavistic organs, belonging to two environments at once, two zones of being at once. How strange we will be when, like cetaceans, we complete our departure from the firm earth of inert flesh and adapt to the new kingdom, where we will bathe in the mental fluid of an enormous knowing, completely one with it and lost within it, like transparent animalcules of plankton, or like a single animalcule filling the entire ocean, indiscernible from it, a marine flea with trawlers and fishing boats sailing on its back …

It is almost six in the evening of a late and suffocating summer … One thousand, nine hundred, eighty-six years ago a prophet came from Judea. After thirty-three years he was crucified, and after another three days he rose and ascended to heaven, not before he promised to return. So far, though, he hasn’t. I attribute this delay to the fact that, as you have seen, I still have perplexing hands. I have not yet been transformed, in the wink of an eye, and I have not yet seen a new earth and new heaven …

19

I SIT in my chair for a little while longer, in my attic with the oval window, on the edge of a galaxy. A quiet grows rosier as evening falls, interwoven with volatile and benign noises: the continuous song of the doves (they often stop on the ledge and peer a round eye into the cave behind my window), toilets flushing in other apartments, the limpid cries of the boys playing soccer between cars parked in front of the block … Now I am writing in the heart of the night. The little lamp on my desk is no brighter than a wick in oil, so it leaves the corners of my room dark, and my bed disappears into a triangle of pitch. The haze of alcohol fills the room, alcohol and sweat. Because in my home, in my bed, for the first time after months and months, someone is here, completely obliterated by the dark. If I push my head and shoulders out of the sphere of yellow light over the desk and accustom my eyes, slowly, to the tenebrous air, I think I can make out a crumpled structure, an engraver’s needle cobweb, a plaque almost unattacked by acid. After a long time, I perceive the phantom-like cloud of a crumpled sheet, veiling and simultaneously unveiling a human form. It all looks like a heavy plaster cast thrown onto the plank bed, a statue that creaks and bows the slats. But Herman is light, a skeleton that the wrapper of his skin can barely hold together, glued tight to his skull and flapping free everywhere else, because his metabolism is a haze of alcohol vapors. “Poor him,” Mamma said twenty years ago, “so young and polite, he tells me ‘kiss the hand’ ten times a day when we pass on the elevator or the stairs — poor kid, look how he ended up, look what drinking will do to a person …” But I, holding her hand, without imagining I would one day know Herman as well as I do myself, looked with fright over my shoulder, toward the entryway, where I could still see the drunk, unnaturally hunched over, silhouetted by the weak light of the yellow and red elevator bulb. His neck was at a right angle to his body, as though one of his cervical vertebra had bent his spinal cord horizontal, and his head, always looking at the ground, was the image of oriental humility. Whenever we met, he scared me, because all drunks scared me, they were strange animals — I heard them sometimes howling and cursing behind the block — and, even though Herman was gentleness itself, when he put his hand on top of my head, I jumped and Mamma pulled me close. He still wouldn’t take his hand off my hair, cut short, with bangs, and, if the elevator was coming from the seventh floor, he might stay like that for more than a minute. During this time he would gaze at us, in the shadow of the stairway, revealing very, very blue eyes beneath his eyebrows, grimacing with the effort of looking straight ahead. His face was handsome and young, intelligent, but his breath, reeking of vodka, made us hold on to each other for the entire time that, crowded in the elevator, it took to reach the fifth floor. When we closed the metal door behind us, with its crack of matte glass, and we stepped onto our calming landing, in front of apartment 20, we breathed deeply a few times, while Mamma unlocked the door and the elevator went another two floors higher, with Herman.

Aside from the customary “kiss the hand, ma’am,” he never opened his mouth, but he smiled at me and absentmindedly patted the top of my head. He always wore the same suit, dark and proper, with a white shirt open at the neck, showing a little of the soft, rosy skin of his chest. He was always drunk, and when we went shopping with Mamma, on Lizeanu, we could usually spot him in the bar, wasting his time with ordinary drunkards, but Herman never trembled. He never rambled when he spoke, and he never left his clothes undone or dirty. He was so different from Mimi and Lumpă’s father, a porcine gypsy, who would come home with a train of musicians playing the violin and accordion, while he howled his favorite song as best he could:

On my mother’s grave, on her grave

If tonight I don’t get you

Naked in your slippers

I hope this slum gets the plague

with his pants around his ankles, smacking the balloon of his hairy paunch! Or the drunk on Stairway 3, an old man in a gray hat who would pull out his little black worm and urinate like a racehorse with a thick jet onto the pillars in the hall, right in the middle of the kids playing in furniture boxes.

The young man lived with an aged peasant mother in a studio on the top floor of the block on Ştefan cel Mare. The elevator only went to the seventh floor, and then you took the stairs to get to his miniscule landing, shared by the apartment’s door, the always-barred metal door to the elevator motor, and the laundry door with a transparent window. The fourth door, for me the most mysterious one by far, led to the rooftop terrace. In fact, that landing (and not only the landing) was connected to concentric mysteries, ever more troubling, ever deeper … I had moved to the block on Ştefan cel Mare when I was five, and the immensity of its stairways, hallways, and floors had given me, for some years, a vast and strange terrain to explore. I went back there many times, in reality and dreams, or better put, within a continuum of reality-hallucination-dream, without ever knowing why the vision of that long block, with eight stairways, with the mosaic of its panoramic window façade, with magical stores on the ground floor: furniture, appliances, TV repair — always filled me with emotion. I could never look at that part of the street with a quiet eye. If I were to take a picture, I am sure it would show something completely different: between the enormous, scarlet castle of the Dâmboviţa mill, with its pediments and crenulations shooting toward the sky, and the sea of roofs and yellow, cubic buildings, pink, or calcio-vecchio cubic buildings of Bucharest beyond the street, there would only be an empty lot, maybe some piles of rusty tram rails, or concrete forms, or purely and simply a yellow pool, refracting the yellow clouds pouring over it … The block, the Police watchtower next to it, the Circus alley and its blue mushroom cap surrounded by poplars whose branches were held in a Renaissance entrelac (and which had grown enormously over the years: summer, from my parents’ apartment balcony, through the snowfall of poplar tufts, the tree growth kept me from seeing anything of the alley, but the tallest dusty pediment of the mill) seemed actually to live only in my mind, sprung pale and ghostly, from an emotional abyss. Everything is strange, because everything is from long ago, and because everything is in that place where you can’t tell dreams from memory, and because these large zones of the world were not, at the time, pulled apart from each other. And to experience the strangeness, to feel an emotion, to be petrified before a fantastical image always means one and the same thing: to regress, to turn around, to descend back into the archaic quick of your mind, to look with the eyes of a human larva, to think something that is not a thought with a brain that is not yet a brain, and which melts into a quick of rending pleasure which we, in growing, leave behind. In countless dreams I entered Stairway 4 of the block on Ştefan cel Mare, the way it was in the first months when we moved there: the hallway full of debris, the metal panel with little letter-box doors on a different wall than it is on today, a mysterious cell, full of magazines and packages, that doesn’t exist anymore — or maybe it never did — and the monumental steps up to the elevator door. Everything is vast, like in a basilica, solemn and frightening. More terrible still is the great white opening of the elevator shaft, before the car was installed. There is no door, just a rectangular opening in a wall. I go up the steps full of stone chips and whitewashed lime, surrounded by a kind of enchantment. I stop in the immense portal and look up the enormous, astounding well, with cable viscera hanging against the walls. The infinite height makes me nauseous, I squat down and feel someone yank me backwards. It is Mamma, who takes me by the hand and we climb the stairs, full of the same debris, sometimes so much that we have to clamber over the gray mounds. In between the landings with apartment doors are others, empty, sinister, with little windows where you can see the mill, and through one door alone, the incinerator. The incinerator already emits a revolting stench, since many families have moved to the block long before the construction was completed. I am more afraid of the empty landings than of those with apartments, even though each door is different there, even though great crates have appeared with cacti or oleanders, and a few grimy pictures are stuck to the walls. If I weren’t with my mother, I would never get home, because it seems certain that the floors continue above and below endlessly. Lost on empty landings, I shout desperately, until I lose my voice, weak with fear and strangeness. We do, in the end, get home. Mamma unlocks the door, twisting the security key in the keyhole that makes the wings of the little pieces inside pull back slowly. Only then does she unlock it with the real key. We enter the vast, empty rooms, and then into the front room. The evening is dark. In the triple window, a blood-colored cloud hangs over the city. Luminous billboards, very far away, flash on and off. In the room the only furniture is a bed and a chair. The walls are unpainted and two black, stunted wires cross the ceiling like spider legs. We don’t yet have electricity. Mamma, young and beautiful, lights a candle and sticks it to a saucer. We don’t have curtains, and the window is splashed with lime. We sit on the bed, embracing, and I melt from love and magic. Along the window only the stripe of clotted blood remains a while, and the rest is night. And the round, weak light of the candle, in prismatic needles, refracts in the window. It is a beautiful and sad quiet. I huddle against my mother’s body, and we watch the stripe of blood slowly disappear …

Then, in the trembling, spherical light of the candle, Mamma rises and projects her colossal shadow onto the ceiling and walls, like in a strange ballet, when the woman of dark flesh, but with clear, hazel eyes like two lakes at dusk, exchanges features, clothes, and internal organs with her own misshapen, anamorphic, palpitating shadow. She opens her hand and in the center of her palm, like in the heart of a brown flower, there is a white plastic elephant, thin and semitransparent in the yellow-dark light. She puts it on the chair and lets it hang its golden coin over the arm, connected by a thread to the elephant’s neck. The coin turns a bit and sparkles, blinking slightly, casting vague sparks onto the floor. Its weight sets the elephant in motion, wobbly at first, leaning on its right leg, then the left, while the coin slowly approaches the ground. Kneeling on one side of the chair and the other, we watch it together, happy and smiling, melting in the luminous night of the half-foreign room. And in the surrounding stillness, lit from behind, extending its shining trunk and misshapen shadow onto the wood of the chair, the elephant scoots forward, minute by minute, with small, dry chuffs, millimeter by millimeter, eternity by eternity, all the way to the edge, where it stops, leaning gently over the abyss. The coin is only a finger-width away from the floor, and it alternates its faces one after another, shifting like the phases of the moon …

Sometimes, two or three months after we had moved to Ştefan cel Mare, Mamma would push the button for six or four by mistake, in the newly installed elevator. We would rise in darkness. The car light bulb was constantly stolen, until they refused to replace it anymore, and, when the car stopped with a clang of a blacksmith’s hammer, we would open the door and happen upon an unknown and frightening world. If we stopped at four, the shock wasn’t so intense, because we recognized that landing from when we used the stairs, but if we came to any floor above ours, my eyes would pop out of their sockets with fear. Those worlds were always silent and abandoned. The air was green, and through its solemn fog I saw terrible images sometimes, over the familiar forms that I had expected. The doors of the apartments on five, each with a familiar detail — the blue plaque on Mr. Manu’s door, the policeman’s silver peephole shaped like a funnel, the brown mat by Săndel’s mother — were superimposed with monstrous, threatening mental inventions: other doors, other paint, other colors on the edges of the fuse box, other mosaics on the floor. The landing was identical to ours and yet completely different, as broadly alike as it was narrowly different in details. It was another universe that howled menacingly, like a glacier, and I was completely lost. Once we even went in the wrong entryway — there were two entries like ours, but they were Stairways 6 and 7, not 3 and 4 — and we were fooled until we took the elevator to the fifth floor and opened the green metal door onto another world, and as we went down the stairs, each landing — some illuminated and full of screeching silence, others sunken in the deepest dark — was strange and frightening, as though we had descended into Hell … I howled like an animal and pulled on my mother’s hand. She also shouted, trying to calm me down, but I was throbbing all over, like a bird’s heart, and I didn’t calm down again until I saw that I was outside, on the street, and I saw the electric poles over the tram tracks, holding their globes of rosy light. Trams and cars passed in the reddened evening, and the illuminated windows of the furniture store showed familiar, calming objects: chairs and couches, desks, lamps and shades …

The eighth floor of our stairway was incomparably more mysterious than the others. I discovered it late: when I went up there for the first time, with Luci and Jean, to go out on the rooftop, more than a year had passed since we had moved to the block. I was a full six years old, and in that concrete colossus, I only knew well our stairs and the hall across the entryway we shared. I would go out behind the block almost every afternoon to play with the other kids, on the worksites where they were still putting in the sewers and electric cables. I had heard about Stairway 1, as though it were a faraway continent I might never explore. Wherever I was, I had to be within my parents’ sight from our fifth floor balcony. They stood together watching me, head by head and their gaze delimited the safe and civilized world, beyond which I would be swallowed by the void. The universe at that time consisted of the three rooms in our home and a few annexes, extended like spider legs, with an ambiguity all the greater for their distance. There was a first zone, semi-real, where I could move by myself, more or less safely, after which followed the city streets, which my parents created by walking between real and foreign places. Only my mother and father, between whom I walked through fortresses and basilicas, depots and castles of water scraping clouds like flames on yellow heavens, only my gigantic masters and friends, clasping my fingers in their great, warm hands, talking quietly over my head and pulling me through round piaţas with fabulous statues in the center, could pacify the endless dominions of chaos. Like a reflex arc, like the engram of memory, like the melting of marble steps under millions of feet, some streets, the ones we took more often, solidified, they gained a consistency, they were colored in familiar shades, detaching from the unreal gray that surrounded them. The tram toward Dudeşti-Cioplea, where Aunt Sica lived (Vasilica, my mother’s sister), was the only one painted red, and above it was the only fragment of blue sky in Bucharest. Climbing on board, I liked to sit behind the driver, to see how the control with the metal ball clattered, and to watch the sky through the thick, violet glass of the sunshade. The ball on the control lever was brass, polished by the rubbing palm of the driver, and its curve gathered, in concentrated colors ten times more intense than in the thin air outside, all of the neighborhoods we passed and all of the wooden interior of the tram car, with wooden chairs and wooden handles that knocked against the vinyl roof. I saw the driver’s face there, too, and if I got closer, my own face, just my eyes and nose, smiling in dull wonder. Equally solid, and a little less strange — although still, so odd! — was the way to my godparents’ place, on Maica Domnului, where a different tram took us only a few stations, after which we had to turn down a slummy street, always full of mud, with fences painted dementedly in pink and blue and green, to reach, at the end of an endless road, the house shaped like a ship. Above this new neural pathway the sky had a completely different form: it was a sheet of scented liquid, with vast coral reefs, and sea lilies rocking in the currents of spring, filtering the frozen air through gills that looked like feathers, and schools of fish glinting in the sun and changing their direction suddenly, all at once, at a twitch in the clouds …

The eighth floor was a zone of abstraction, unsuitable for life. There, on the crown of the block, the air was probably so rarified that no normal human being could survive. It was an adventure already to walk the stairs to the sixth floor. The seventh was almost inaccessible, but the elevator, the living and moving soul of the block, would dare go that far, like an outpost reaching deep into Mato Grosso. The landings were, if not identical, at least of the same kind as those I knew. On the eighth landing — and how many rumors, legends and myths did we kids tell each other, about this far-off land! — everything changed. There was, first of all, the door to the rooftop. Our parents must have told us hundreds of times: “Never go out on the roof! That’s not allowed!” even before they had the tiniest idea of what this rooftop was like. We didn’t even dare to imagine it. In place of an image in our minds was a green light of fear. The bigger kids had been on the rooftop, and this gave them prestige and self-assurance. They told us about the narrow door with the leaded window, going outside, and seeing the entire city beyond the concrete balustrade, and how, if you leaned over, you could also see the street like the bottom of a well, with its miniscule trams and cars … The elevator housing was also on the eighth floor, and they talked about its thundering motor, starting and stopping. In the washroom just “stupid stuff” happened (and you couldn’t get another word out of them about it). Finally, on the eighth floor, like a watchman at the border of another world, lived Herman.

The day when I went up to the eighth floor for the first time, two things happened to me that were so unusual, I attribute my courage in these moments to my mind’s confusion. I had gone out behind the block at around nine in the morning, when, even though the sun was shining strongly, the air was still cold like water from the faucet. I was alone, so far, in the topsy-turveyness of construction materials, mud, and ditches that made up our play area. Behind the concrete fence and the metal gate, which the girls, playing school, covered with crooked letters in colored chalk, rose the enormous brick palace of the mill, and beside it, like an annex, the flattened building of the Pioneer bread factory, with curved pipes coming out of the walls and going back in on another floor. Its windows were opaque from flour, and it was surrounded constantly by the smell of warm bread. The brick factory was as tall as our block, and on its peak, lost in the clouds, sometimes a red flag fluttered. After I had shaken the levers of an abandoned bulldozer in the block courtyard, I climbed out of the cabin and began to work on a hill of sand full of the traces of children who clambered over it all day. I dug a hole into the wet, red sand, that smelled of snails, in sharp contrast to the dry, dusty layer on top, until I could put my entire arm inside. My nails smarted in the wetness and suddenly they felt actually painful: I’d hit something hard. I lugged out this object that had sat crossways to my tunnel, and when I wiped away the sandy dirt, I caught my breath: it was a large, heavy, shining cowboy pistol, a revolver, with a curved handle that barely fit in my hand and a mirrored nickle barrel. It never crossed my mind to wonder whose it was, or who might have lost it. I’d had, up to then, some ordinary, two-bit water guns, made of soft, pink plastic, from which I would suck the rubber-tasting water. I had hardly ever seen cowboy guns, maybe from rich kids, and none of them compared with my unparalleled revolver. It was all mine. I had found it, and from then on it belonged to me. I climbed back onto the soft vinyl chair in the bulldozer cabin and began to shoot all around into the frozen air. I had goose bumps from the cold, but the sun and the poplar puffs, and the twisted and luxurious vegetation twined around the concrete fence brought me the feeling of a torridly hot summer. Only when I ran along the sewer-pipe ditches, aiming at the first girl who came out to arrange her dolls on a rug in the sun, did I become conscious of the second amazing fact of that morning: I was naked from the waist down. I was wearing just an undershirt that fluttered over my hips, barely covering my behind and “little rooster,” but revealing them when I ran around and shot my pistol. Because the undershirt was a little long, Mamma hadn’t noticed that I’d forgotten to put my underpants on, since she had recently been letting me dress myself.

I felt my entire skin burn with shame. I pulled down my undershirt as far as I could and moved slowly, barely lifting my feet, toward our stairway. I made it into the hallway without anyone seeing me, and I scampered up the stairs. The mosaic steps were ice cold when I put my bare feet on them. The first floors were sinister and dark. One, which was mysterious, where I knew no one and thin pipes ran along the walls and fuse boxes lined up, then two, three, and four were each more familiar … I knew some neighbors who had kids: Romică’s mother, Virgil’s, Cristi’s, and the Chinaman’s … The policeman on four, with such a silly name: Corcodel, had made a monumental door, painted as black as the entry to a crypt. At Mr. Kulineac’s you could always hear Lola barking. Popa, who played soccer for Dinamo, had a daughter with fantastic toys that were brought from abroad, including a doll that pushed a stroller with a little baby … I found our apartment door half open, probably as I had left it. Mamma was doing laundry in the bathroom, and when I opened the door, she had suds up to her elbows and some in her hair. A big cake of laundry soap, green and narrow, tottered on the edge of the sink. I aimed the pistol at her and shouted, and Mamma jumped and started to shout back at me. She wiped her hands on a towel. She was enormous. My neck hurt from looking up at her face, projected somewhere against the ceiling. She told me to take the pistol back immediately to wherever I had found it, and when she saw my bare bottom, she smacked it a few times and found me some shorts. She had barely gotten them over my thighs when I tore myself from her grasp and ran outside again.

I met up with Luci, and then Jean, on the big tank near the concrete wall, across from Stairway 5, a macabre stairway, different from all the others and almost as mysterious as Stairway 1, because it was not in a hallway, but directly behind the block, near the entry to the furniture storeroom. Its gaping mouth, blacker than all the others, was mostly hidden by kitchen sets, hall tables, easy chairs, and windows packed in cardboard, all directly on the asphalt, and sometimes by workers armed with belts and hooks who would heave them into horse-drawn trucks. Jean sometimes would take a horse by the bridle and whisper in its ear: “ţuric!” and the horse would step backwards, knocking over chairs and tables.

On the big tank, stomping as hard as we could to hear the metallic booms amplified in the space underneath, we chatted a while, almost calm. Jean from Seven told us that in Italy mămăligă was called “poopy-lenta,” “so you can run down the street shouting ‘poopylenta, poopy-lenta!’ and nobody will do anything to you,” and Luci, tubby and curly headed, perched on the fence and shouted it too, laughing like crazy at the funny word. After we’d had enough of saying it a hundred ways, we set to exploring, since there were too few of us yet to play anything. I objected with all my might to going into Stairway 5, more sinister for me than a dragon’s cave. When they grabbed me and tried to force me in, I fell on a pile of planks full of nails, and I got scratched a little on the leg. In the end, shaking, I said I would go on the roof if we went up our stairway, mine and Jean’s, since Luci lived on Stairway 3. Jean was a jerk. He had a bad mouth, sang songs, and told dirty jokes. He lived on Seven, he was always dressed poorly, and his mother looked like a beggar. His father drove a tractor for the circus, pulling around caged animals and houses on wheels. But we were all good friends, because we always laughed with him and didn’t try to fight. That day, for the first time, we went in the elevator without a grown-up. Jean stretched himself high on the tips of his toes, and reached to 7. “I can go higher,” he said, and he pushed the red button, which made a buzz so loud that we all screamed. This didn’t stop him. He stretched up to see himself in the mirror, stuck his tongue out, and in the end he pressed the last button, marked “O,” which made the elevator stop in between floors. “I’m telling! I’m telling your mom!” Luci shouted, crazy with fear, while Jean opened the doors so we could see the layer of concrete between the floors. “You’d have been stuck here, man! Toast!” And we believed we really were going to stay in that terrible elevator car, painted green, forever, without our parents or the real world, and they would bury us, the little ones, in an infinite block of ice, in endless fear. My tears had already started when Jean pushed 7 again and the elevator started moving, making its slow way through the concrete universe of the block. Two more metal doors appeared and disappeared, slowly, in the elevator window, until it stopped and we poured onto a foreign landing, so unfamiliar that we could have been anywhere, thousands of kilometers away, above or below, in one place or another. For Jean, however, this was the most ordinary place possible, because it was where he lived. I had the barrel of the pistol stuck in my underpants and covered carefully with my undershirt; I hadn’t shown it to the other boys, since I was afraid they would know whose it was and take it away. Now, more dead than alive with fear, I could feel it there, so warm, it was as if it had become part of my body.

Piled together, we scampered up the stairs. From even the first moment, a new kind of light fell on us and grew stronger as we ascended. It was white, intense, unreal light, completely different from the melancholy Nile-green air of the other floors. If the first flight of stairs was more or less the same as those between the floors we knew, the landing between 7 and 8 seemed new to us, like a fairy tale: there was no radiator or door to the incinerator, it was completely empty, white and pure like a painted box, and flooded with light from a few very high windows. From there, the light fell obliquely, in thick pieces, vibrating like crystals. We went up another flight of stairs, one much shorter than normal. I would have given anything to turn back; my fear had become almost unbearable, but Jean and Luci, their shapes eroded by light, their hair full of rays, continued, hugging the walls, smudging their clothes with lime. One more turn in the stairway and we arrived on the landing for 8, in a supernatural light. It came from a leaded window in the rooftop door, which had a large, rusted lock. It was hard to see anything in the shining light. Slowly, close together and looking all around, we began to make out a few things: an old bicycle leaning against the wall, a rotting wooden crate for an oleander, a few doors with barely demarcated shapes in the walls. The landing was so narrow compared to the others that it seemed to squeeze us, pushing its doors against us, trying to crush our bones and flesh. A constant, threatening murmur came from the elevator housing. We stayed there for a few minutes. Jean said some bad words, since the rooftop door was locked. Through its window you couldn’t see anything. It was as though you were looking into the mouth of an oven where the metal is heated white-hot. The crazy light was amplified by the immaculate walls. The outline of the old bicycle looked like flame. And we suddenly saw, through our clothes that had become as transparent as cellophane, the insides of our bodies, our fragile, dark skeletons, and our internal organs like shadows on an x-ray. When someone called the elevator, on the ground floor or some other floor, the elevator housing gave a pop that paralyzed us. Frozen, with wide eyes, we awaited the building’s collapse and the world’s end.

Then, the door of the only resident of that landing opened, and on its threshold, Herman appeared. But he was changed. His face was not a human face. His hands, holding a spiny mollusk shell as big as a teacup, were not human hands. And he wore only a silk robe, open at the chest, and decorated with the most fantastically alive and slippery drawings, passing into each other, looking at each other, playing with each other, coupling and biting and rending each other. It was a soft, crystal mirror, a prism with folds that reflected the space around it — us kids, the rusty bicycle, the rooftop door — but it deformed each surface anamorphically, filling it with colored sparks of the most tender violet and voluptuous red, the most unforgettable green, the most childish yellow, and heavenly blue and orange, so that, from Jean’s long-eared face stretched in a pleat of the robe, there emerged a stag beetle of ivory and gold, and the beetle’s mandibles were two statuesque naked women, holding cornucopias, watching over a gateway to hell, and each cornucopia, with the next movement of silk, became an agglomeration of viper skulls. Luci became a team of horses with flowering cashmere saddles, and in the middle of the flowers, asps battled unicorns for a priceless gem, and the gem was a planet covered in clouds, whose gaps revealed ponds and craters, and each pond reflected the inhuman face of Herman. I saw myself, too, in a single moment without end (and, in a way, also without beginning), but immediately my pallid and angular face, all eyes, stretched from the middle of pulsating irradiations over the entire vestment, completely covering it, so that Herman was now vested in the flayed skin of my face, wrapped in the long lashes of my eyes, illuminated by the timid strawberry-pink of my lips, punctuated by the black sun of the freckle by my ear, fringed by the vines of hair on my neck. The vision lasted less than a moment, and then shattered into spirals of spirals of spirals, greenish yellowish red, planets of lizards of stars, worlds of worlds, voids of voids, ship-moons, scorpion-cars, brain-vipers, vulva-angels, cloud-islands … Herman was floating. He levitated in the doorway, his neck broken and his face indescribable, and the colors of his horrible, enchanting vestment danced over our faces. We would never have snapped out of that fascination if the elevator hadn’t started again, with an apocalyptic bang. We started suddenly and ran down the stairs, howling as loud as we could, floor after floor, while alarmed neighbors opened their doors as we passed. I don’t know how we got to the ground floor, how we came out of the glass door of the stairway … We didn’t stop until we reached the big sheet-metal gate of the mill fence, where Silvia and Marcela were drawing princesses with colored chalk. Panting, we leaned against the fence, looking up at the top of the apartment block. What if Herman had followed us? But nothing happened. It was time to eat and our mothers, leaning on the balcony rails, called us up. First the girls left, then Luci. Jean went down the alley, and I was left alone, still leaning against the rough concrete fence. What a strange day! And, especially, how … unusual, how different I felt. While running down the stairs, I heard a loud clang behind me and I imagined I lost the pistol, but I could still feel its warm barrel against my stomach. When, at last, I heard my mother’s high voice, I went home and into the bathroom to wash my hands, where I wanted to admire my pistol again. But the pistol wasn’t there anymore, and the hard, hot barrel was made of flesh and came out of my body. It was my little pecker, that I used to go peepee, which now was strangely erect and painful. It all lasted a few minutes, and I didn’t have time to become alarmed before things turned back to normal, for years and years …

Herman is sleeping now, drunk, in my bed, crosshatched with dark. I was barely able to lug him up here. A few hours ago I went out for some air in the dusk as thick as pitch. I slowly crossed the lot full of old refrigerators and upholstery springs and casing wires, and stumbling over them, I saw the precise design of the walnuts in the tree branches against the velvet colors of the sky, urine yellow on the horizon, then pink, and on the opposite side, a deep blue, indigo that the moon whitened … A giant metal construction, like an endless drill rig, with antennae on top, a radio relay probably, gave me a strange desire to climb its narrow vertical ladder, through the protective ring, high up, in the middle of sunset. I passed through twisting neighborhoods, with old houses, massive as galleons, floating in the dusk, their balconies ferrying men in shirts and women in bras, smoking, speaking softly and listening to the crickets. I went down deserted side streets, past shoemakers and watchmakers with their shutters drawn. I went along the cyclopic worksite of the House of the People, avoiding the police patrolman talking about soccer, and I emerged, after a long while, onto the boulevard with movie theaters, already sunk into the dark. Yellow bulbs, every third one lit, transformed the buildings into pale crystals, without any trace of reality. The trees leaned the shadows of their branches over walls with blank windows. I walked slowly, my hands in my pockets, thinking of Cedric and Vasili, The Albino, and Herman, my senseless and endless manuscript, this illegible book, this book … I passed in front of Romarta, looking, as always, toward the cubist attics (superimposed, retreating from each other) of the block across from the Casa Armatei, and wishing I could live there, high up, in the last cube, under the great blue sign for the C. E. C., so that I could go out in the evening onto the little landing in front, lean against the last C, seen by no one, like a Ferragus scorning the metropolis, and contemplate the city, my mysterious and beloved city spread under the Persian carpet of the constellations. On the almost-deserted streets came a wave of warm air that smelled like linden trees. The trolley buses passed, sad like funeral trains, through the University intersection. I followed the line of my thoughts up to the strange, enchanting story of Paul and the Russian circus dwarf, Katarina, who always held her panther cub in her arms, and when I reached Piaţa Rosetti, with its nationalist statue sunk in a tarnished bronze chair, the haunting syllables began to churn in my mind: NO-TO-KO … TO-KO-NO … NO-KO-TO … A nearby maxi-taxi idled with its lights on, without a driver or passengers, docked by the statue like a skiff on the rocky shore of a little island. Collapsed beside the statue, with his back against the bronze plaque, lay a beggar or drunk, one of those who had multiplied in Bucharest in recent years. I don’t know why I crossed the street and entered the little park around the statue. Night had descended like pitch, like in the slums. The bronze statue was almost invisible, and the beggar was a warm spot, a viscous liquid muddying the spectral marble. He cast a fetus-like shadow, with its head pressed unnaturally into its chest, in a perpetual bow, in endless humility. It had been years since I had seen Herman, but every time I did, it seemed like he had always been with me, sometimes curled up inside me like an embryo in a uterus, other times protecting me like a ghost from the folds and corners of the city.

I squatted in front of him and took his face in my palms, pricked by his few days’ beard. My stomach turned over from the nauseating stench of cheap alcohol in his mouth. Nearly fifty years old, Herman was almost bald; white hairs, every which way, surrounded his skull, and his face belonged to a man of suffering, one made for suffering. His crusty, elongated eyes, with tufts of eyebrows above them, opened for a moment, without focusing, like in a faint, lowering their eyelids again and showing only two stripes of cornea, yellow as ivory. Because of the night and the sad moon, the former azure of his irises was now stained by coma and agony. I was barely able to carry him to the 343 bus station, where I had to put him down for half an hour until the bus came to take us close to home. I shoved him into the tired elevator that carried us to the last floor of the old, scarlet block; and look at the old man now, the codger, the great sinner in my bed, shaking and stinking of sweat. A few minutes ago, I stopped writing to open his left fist, where I saw, between his fingers, a crumpled piece of paper. On the cheap paper, torn and torn again, that he must have kept in a dirty pocket full of stuff, something was written in pencil, which at first sight looked like a telephone number. Then I saw it was a mathematical formula. I am writing it here as best as I can make it out, hoping I don’t get one of the signs wrong:

20

I RECALL that first and only hard-on of my childhood with the perplexity I have always had for the old paintings warehoused in the ponderous gallery of my memory, heaps upon heaps of paintings, with supple lichen flowering in layers thicker than clotted paint, and blind scorpions gnawing the pads of their frames. In Ammon’s horn and the mammillothalamic tract, in the habenular nuclei and the fornix, and beneath the quartz cupola of the encephalon, there are thousands of transparent tubes, through which run paints and oxides and thousands of studios where painters with fifty hands copy, restore, cut out, mix and separate, create pastiches and replicas and duplicates, falsify dates and signatures, project onto the desolate walls of the skull’s yellow bone slides and retroprojections, deformed by the phrenological curves of the brow and temples, the protuberances of imagination and wiliness, of pity and suspicion … There are also museums, well lit and snobby, with square tiles dividing their hall floors into vast chessboards, and festive light fixtures within vaults painted with winding allegories, where the stem of a heavy chandelier flows from the navel of Arrogance. There are official pictures drowned in asphalt, there are limpid wall texts, under glass plates, beside each immense canvas stretched over the immaculate walls … But they are museum-traps, as sweet-smelling as carnivorous plants, where even the visiting public is an illusion painted on the walls and desolate canvases. There everything, but everything is fake, fabricated from one end to the other, hanging from striations and peduncles like rotting fruits. Where should you look and whom should you believe, when you recall other dreams in your dreams, and when in those dreams you remember things that never happened, and other sights flash in your mind when you eat or read a book distractedly, and you take them as the bizarre caprices of an interior demon, when in fact they are the faithful engrams of deeds accomplished when you saw with bigger eyes and thought with a smaller and more rudimentary brain? When, at your desk, where you fill lines of slag left by a dirty ball on a fabric of vegetable fiber, looking at the filigree design of coffee cups, and suddenly the design seems to float in the air, it doubles and deforms strangely, changing into a scene at morning, with a glinting, evanescent sea visible between the pink columns of a geometric temple and palace and when the picture floats minute after minute, transparent, over your office, as though it would melt again like sugar in water — it is impossible to tell where, on the tridimensional, endless cobweb map of your place in the world, you find yourself and your fear and fascination: in the dead-end of Illusion, in the street of Reverie, in the park of Memory, in the bus station of Hallucination, in the borough of Reality … It’s easier to imagine that you have pierced the folded map with a needle, uniting incompatible and disparate places in an incomprehensible trajectory, perpendicular to the paper, hidden, penetrating existence out of nothing into nothing, as we ourselves unite emotional incongruencies with the paradoxical transit of our lives: birth and love, art and madness, happiness and death …

Later, when I was sitting on the cabinet in the bedstead with my feet on the radiator, watching for entire afternoons as Bucharest disappeared, floor by floor, behind the scaffolding and casings of the block across the street, I remembered that first inexplicable tumescence of the unimportant appendix I used to go peepee not as a fact in itself, but as a piece of the entire constellation which also included, with differing levels of probability or fiction, other physiological, psychic or oneiric bizarrities — structures of weakness which doubled, like a ragged batting, the melancholic firmness of my mind. The snow that fell heavily over Ştefan cel Mare (then pot-holed and half as wide as it is today) crosshatched the immense panorama of the city. It reflected the colors of the sky on the earth and sent the greenish phantasms of the mixture of houses and trees onto the sky, colors which repeated on my retinas after I stared, hour after hour, with dilated eyes, blinking as seldom as I could. Sometimes I aimed my gaze at a single snowflake, as soon as it appeared in the upper corner of the window, and I followed its oblique and rapid fall, so that in those seconds I could see all its crystalline, evanescent details and perceive the metamorphosis of its colors, from the dirty gray that enveloped it when I saw it against the milky sky, to the fairy-like white, with the little, tufty halo it acquired against the houses’ roofs, windows, and doors and the dirty drifts on the sides of the road. Toward noon, the sky turned red, and it continued to snow apocalyptically. The shadows of people bound up in coats who crossed the street holding water canisters (the pipes in the apartment block had frozen long ago) blurred, erased by thousands of snowflakes, and when I looked up toward the gray lint falling from the crepuscular expanse, I felt I was at an angle flying toward the heights, my room and all, as though my apartment were a spaceship ejected from the ground. The radiator burned my bare feet, and the room was wrapped in darkness and loneliness. I had finished my homework long ago, and there was so much emptiness and melancholy in my life, so much inability to imagine not only my future, but also the present moment, that my mind, like a vacuum, sucked a weird marrow from the thin bones of my memory. And this fluid, which rose, rotating in my skull like in a drain basin, this metaphysical interferon secreted by each cell, gland, and cartilage of my body’s empire, slowly filled the walnut form of my mind, impregnating itself with the bitterness of its tannin, dissolving my consciousness and, thus ennobled, retreating into the tubes of memory. I went back, back toward the interior. I descended into the heart of my heart, I made myself tiny and thin and moved around my spinal cord, leaving my adolescent body to clang about like an oversized jacket. I went back to my anterior forms, toward the rings of ever more tender growth as I approached the pith. I assumed my form at fifteen, and I left it like a virtual aura for the one I’d had at eleven, then nine, then five, until I curled up in my own stomach like an infant who had my features and eyes. Then, on the depressing, fleshy screen of the winter sky, like my own visual field, hallucinations intertwined so oddly, and in such detail, that they could not be anything but memories pumped through the umbilical cord from the fetus toward the mother, since in the inverted film world of memory, the child gave birth to the mother, moment by moment, and fed her a substance which didn’t end but was secreted ever more abundantly. The me of today englobes the me of yesterday, who encompasses the one from the day before yesterday and so on and so on, until I am only an immense line of Russian dolls buried one in the next, each one pregnant with its predecessor, but still being born from it, emanating from it like a halo, so that the middle is darker and the surfaces more diaphanous, and the glassy surface of my body in this exact moment already reflects the tame light of the one that I will be in an hour, since my astral body is nothing else but the clairvoyant light of the future. From the dark toward the light, from lead to crystal, from crush to levitation, from everything to nothing, the absurd trajectory of our lifetime tapers off, until it ends in a threadbare void. And the I of every moment is connected to the one before through a sturdy umbilical cable, with two arteries and one vein, moving the ineffable erythrocytes of causality. Beside it, a subtle and complicated vascularization, a braid of blue and violet capillaries inextricably connects the Russian dolls to each other in a wooly cocoon, so that the moment of now can branch out, over a period of five years, and another over seven, touching flexible synapses to the heavy eyelids and Buddha smile of one of the millions of children and adolescents that look like me, sucking on their minds, their neck glands or their suprarenal capsules to draw out emotions, chemicals, scenes, ideas, or something else I cannot imagine and do not dare to understand. With some of these brothers of mine (odd brothers, all carrying my name and genetic code, the way that in big families the youngest children wear the eldest’s clothes) I have lost direct contact, while others feed me through tens of thousands of tentacles. In their turn, they feed each other, they ally with each other, and they plot against each other, holding out their hands to each other over the ages in such a dense tangle of relations that they blacken a four-dimensional field — my real being, of which the “I” of this moment is only a spot, a state, an isotope in an infinite series, a meeting of the virtual with the wonder of reality, which, look, just passed. Because, just as some beings who live in a bi-dimensional world see a ball traverse the scene like a point that appears out of nothing, becoming an ever larger disk and shrinking again to a point which disappears, the baroque anatomy of my body reveals and at the same time hides a fourth dimension: time. Take a biopsy of my spinal marrow and you will find a white disk with the pattern of a gray butterfly. Take a biopsy of my real being, the way you would cut down a tree, and you will find the concentric circles of Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea in Mircea …

I didn’t turn on the light, even after darkness fell, and nothing was left of the entire triptych of the city but the phosphorescent blue of snow on the roofs and the reddish sky, still unexpectedly light, so that the darkness was concentrated in my room, surrounding me in sadness. In the next room the television was on, and my parents made comments and giggled stupidly. Muffled thuds came from the room on the other side, from the next apartment. In nights of excitement and fever, lying on my sheets like a burning statue, I would hear whispers from beyond the wall, squeals and sighs, or it seemed like I heard them, and rising to my knees, I would press myself against the cool gypsum, I would put my ear to it and try, holding my breath, to guess what was going on in there, how they were struggling in bed, in a mass of wet and throbbing organs, a man and a woman, pleasuring each other, their hands touching the skin of each other’s erogenous zones and the spiral hairs of their pubises, nibbling their nipples and ear-lobes. My ear froze and began to sting, and my heart beat so hard that it drowned out other sounds. I writhed like someone being burned alive in a fire, I spread across the wall until the whitewash covered my skin and my pajamas, and I stayed like that for hours on end, a bas-relief of frustration. After I had lost all hope of hearing something real and started to feel palpitations of tiredness, I would throw myself back onto the bed, and fall asleep to dream that a long, narrow panel opened in the wall, right over my bed, and I rolled into the neighbors’ room, where a luscious pale woman pressed against me and offered the menacing spider between her thighs, an actual spider, from the Amazon, big and strong like a crab, which I picked up by the thorax, as big as my hand, and took from the woman’s pubis, which was as flat between her legs as a doll’s. When I turned the spider over, it had a narrow, red wound on its stomach, between its vibrating legs, just like (I remember within the dream) the girls in the waiting room of the Emilia Irza Hospital, where I was admitted when I was five, just before we moved to the block on Ştefan cel Mare. I threw the spider as far away as I could and cleaved to Silvia, trying my hardest to put myself between her thighs, until my drops of semen poured onto her stomach in thin, ivory jets. I stood and, looking around, realized her room was as narrow and round as an alveolus, with its walls lined in black velvet. A metal spiral staircase took me outside, after I climbed up three or four floors. I was on Ştefan cel Mare again, in front of the appliance store windows, magically illuminated in the night.

I had just turned five when my mother, I still don’t know why, took me to the Emilia Irza hospital and, because there was no one she could leave me with at home, had me admitted to the children’s ward. At least that’s what she’s always told me. I tried to ask her about it later, in the hot summer nights spent in the kitchen, watching the wasps come and go through the air vent over the stove, but she stubbornly resisted, the way she did when I asked about other things, images and facts that remained in my memory, but which, inexplicably, had disappeared from my mother’s. For example, I see myself in a dark bathroom, with a large, pale boiler tank at the end of the tub. Through its little door I can see the burner’s frozen blue flames, the only lights in the room. Their continuous murmur, calming and sad, is the only sound I hear. Then a splash. I’ve taken my hand from the water and violet drops, like grapes, plop onto the water’s oddly dark surface, through which I see my little body, like a livid fish. The violet, strong-smelling water is up to my neck in the metal tub. “Permanganate” I hear clearly in my head. And I know that my mother had poured that liquid, with a not-unpleasant smell, from a bottle into the tub. Then she left me (why?) in the dense shadow, steeping in the bath of rotting flowers. It stank of swamp, violets, permanent marker, uterus. I dissolved in the unmoving water until I could not tell my limbs apart and they were ever more clenched in crystal. Any drop from my fingers fell with a genetic, unexpected sound on the mauve water, as though, at that moment, my ear canal was being sketched out, with its labyrinthine structure, and then dissolved again in the boulder of temporal bone. Every drop reinvented my cochlea. In the end, my mother came back and delicately sunk my head under the hypermanganate-laced water, wetting my hair, and she started to massage my neck. Squinting, with the water lengthening and squeezing my facial mask, I followed the will of the giant woman who bathed me, who doused me with violet rags pulled from the mirror of water and rubbed my shining limbs … Mamma sweated, and her breasts, sagging even then, with enormous, scarlet ovals on their peaks, began to show lines of violet drops, as though the permanganate was actually my mother’s sweat, as though inside she was completely filled with permanganate. Yet later, my mother would never confirm this memory, even though I am sure that it didn’t happen just once, but over a long period of time, the ritual of this foul chemical wash continued in that bathroom, which I don’t know if I should place in the house on Puccini or the apartment beside the garage. In the same way, I never found out what the formidable battery of vials was for, thick as a thumb and full of a yellow liquid, which I happened upon at fourteen, in my parents’ buffet. It was a white cardboard box, long and relatively narrow, on the top of which was written — and like the almost mystical term “permanganate,” the name of this incredible medicine rises in my memory sparkling, like it was written in precious stones — QUILIBREX, with straight, blue letters. Inside were dozens of vials, thin cylinders with tapering necks and pointy glass bumps on the end, lined up in a cardboard grid. On each vial, with its liquid shining in the light like gold, something was written, tiny, illegible, and inside there were beings: delicate, lacey worms, some with pink colors and little black fibers in their tails, others with wet skin marbled in vitiligo, vague reptiles with budding feet, a Sybil like a small beetle, as though sculpted in lead, reading a book spiritedly, a spermatozoid five centimeters long, a transparent embryo, through whose skin showed a brain like a sack of venom … And then, I remember one of the vials had a sailing ship inside. An admiral with silken epaulettes was pacing on its deck with his hands behind his back. Resolutely, Mamma did not remember, or did not want to remember, the box of “Quilibrex.” Why, month after month, had I bathed with permanganate? Did I have some horrible, or merely unpleasant, skin disease? Were there blind sarcoptic mites swarming below my skin, with long hairs emerging from the stumps of their legs? Or was the jungle of supple trees that was my hair teeming with lice? As for the vials, I would swear they were not for me. At Voila, they poked my butt countless times with penicillin or streptomycin, at the slightest sniffle. Each time the nurse, a soulless executioner, woke me up in the middle of the night, I could clearly see the needle pierce the rubber plug in the little bottle and extract a whitish substance, so awful-smelling that later I would say mold smelled like penicillin, not the other way around. I winced, resigned and horrified still. I was just a handful of boy with pajama bottoms pulled around his ankles, and I withstood the gentle and quick smacks of the hand on my buttock, already wet with alcohol, and I endured the torture of the needle penetrating my skin and flesh and depositing, in a bag of living pain, moldy water. But I never got shots from the thick, golden vials. They could only have been for one of my parents. I played with them for a week, and then they disappeared without a trace.

One morning at the end of August we left, for the last time, like on an iceberg, the yellow house in Floreasca, where we had lived for three years, and we went off along the quiet neighborhood streets, passing the grocery at the end of our street, where they would send me to buy things with the exact change, past the barber where I had once gotten lost and howled until I turned blue. I held Mamma’s hand. We took various buses, and after burrowing through incomprehensible areas of the city, we arrived in front of an enormous building. I didn’t know I would have to spend a week behind the façade with thousands of windows, after which I would never go back to our apartment in the house, but I would fill a new spiral, much bigger, in another block, where I would live for almost twenty-five years. And it is so clear to me now that the foggy façade of the Emilia Irza Hospital, like the block across Ştefan cel Mare, built fifteen years after we moved, was nothing other than the opercula, impenetrable membranes separating the compartments, ever vaster, of the spiral shell secreted, structured, and inhabited by the soft flesh of my mind (here, in this notebook) and the soft meditation of my flesh (in real life), if life and thought about life are ever separate, which happens outside the awareness of the event, and on the other side the gestural realm where the gesture intervenes and all other beliefs wither, turn to dust, and disappear. Through the muddy filter of the hospital, the previous lives of the siphonophore larvae that I had been, from birth to two-and-a-half years old (on Silistra), from then to three (the block beside the Floreasca garage) and then in the house on Puccini — beings with differently developed brains, with different connections in which images were more like emotions and tastes, and every event took the form of a yet more disorienting surprise; the other fetal lives, a little more evolved than the real fetus, dreaming with rapid eye movements in my mother’s genital paunch, appeared like a magical series of reincarnations, just as odd to the being behind the window-filled wall as the bestiary animals or humanoids who, they say, live on other planets, in the colloidal suspension of the stars.

I remember a freezing morning, consonant with the ancient, legendary, lost in illo tempore purple dawns, that welcomed us, my mother and me, on our way to daycare, and whose engram entered unexpectedly into my poems:

ah, mamma, i dream of you so often!

i walk holding your hand in enormous mornings

you and i reach the factory courtyard and its drums of acid

we enter shops full of threads from mechanical carpets

or, in the black hours of morning

we walk hand-in-hand on narrow streets with little shops

and we turn off the gas by the reddened squash

But, if it is absurd and delusional to use the word “memory” for those unplaceable and atemporal images of asphalt reddened, as far as you can see, from sunrises that warm faces and garments, washing them in a thin liquid purple and extending fine and endless shadows of amber, I can instead mark out scene by scene — how strange — that inexplicable week in the hospital, my first complete separation from my parents and home.

They both took me. I remember how cold I was, as though I were looking at a group of photographs that held in their thick layer of silver nitrate not only images but also sensations, emotions, sounds, and smells. I wore navy corduroy overalls, with two satin mushrooms stitched onto the chest, the same overalls that appear in black-and-white pictures from this period: I am in the Ştefan Gheorghiu schoolyard, in a group of kids, three girls with scarves on their heads, all taller than me, and standing beside us, next to Aunt Estera, is my father’s co-worker, in a kind of raglan sweater often worn in the ’60s. Aunt Estera has wiry hair and a cigarette between the fingers of her left hand. I’m sticking out my chest, relatively chubby in the face, sickly, and my hair combed with a part. As soon as we entered the hospital doors, we were submerged in endless green corridors. We were accompanied by a nurse in white, who kept opening doors with opaque windows ahead of us, and closing them once we passed. Along the walls, between numbered doors, with nickel ashtrays beside them, were glass cases of disgusting and fascinating anatomical displays: slices of heart, pieces of colon, and fetuses in various stages of development, which I stared at in passing, without daring to ask for an explanation. The only one that startled me was the thick jar, half a meter across, where two infants floated, Siamese twins, conjoined at the pelvis, so that two trunks emerged obliquely from what was a single body from the waist down, with only two feet and toes crinkled from the wet. You wouldn’t have been able to say, looking at the bald skulls and eyes rolled back into the head, what sex the two beings were, but their shared pubis was a girl’s. In the ever more imbricated hallways, sometimes rising and falling like a stairway with a banister, sick elderly people sat here and there, in discolored scarlet robes. My mother went into a room with the nurse, while my father and I waited in the hall in front, on a vinyl bench. I couldn’t sit still for more than two minutes. I nosed around, up and down the freezing hall, for fifteen minutes, looking with wide eyes at all the cases, and at the posters of skinned people on the wall. One shelf had a plaster model, also a half-skinned person, who had a face on one side, with a breast and a still-human arm, while on the other side, it grinned bare teeth stuck in its jaws, and its eyeball shone like a marble. Each organ, in various colors, could be removed from the flayed body, to get deeper inside, so that soon I was holding a ribcage in my hands like a pan flute. My father, who did not have a single white strand in his hair combed smoothly back — he was much younger than I am now — stood up, red with anger, and smacked me (“Hey, those things are expensive! Put those bones back!”), but just then Mamma came out. I could barely recognize her in the miserable thin robe, flannel, blue with dots that were once white but now showed the background color, and with a cap of the same material on her head. She hugged me and, to my discomfort and my father’s irritation, started to kiss me with slummy tenderness, saying over and over, like a rosary in a gypsy accent, “I could just eat you up! Mamma’s little boy! What will you do without your Mamma for so long?” and more kisses, so many that I was relieved when she put me down and left me in the care of the nurses. My father kissed me too (I remember the sensation of his unshaven whiskers on my cheeks and the vague smells of cologne and walnut oil) and paused to whisper something to my mother. I remember them there, in the narrow, high hallway, face to face, talking seriously, without smiling, without holding hands.

Leaving them didn’t frighten me at all. I was tugged gently away, down other corridors, by the woman in white (who looked like a typical German, blond, short hair, penciled “eyebrows abroad”). This trust is incomprehensible to me, entering into the great adventure of detachment from my parents and exploring the hospital with a kind of wondrous enchantment. That first week of independence, subtracted from normal life, would be, perhaps, the model for my later experiences of closed, isolated worlds, spherical like pearls and just as precious, adorning the asymmetrical, capricious edifice of my ordinary life, which is impossible to totally comprehend. When they sent me away later, to camp or on trips, or who knows where else, my indifference left my parents at a loss for sufficient expression of their indignation. “Did you miss us?” they always asked, and I always responded, sincerely and naïvely, “No.” “You’ll never win with that attitude of yours,” Mamma would repeat, bitterly, adding: “I’ve never seen such a spiteful child,” meaning that, after the age of six, I would not let her kiss or pat me, but I spurned her, putting my hands across my chest and turning my head. Not once, in my adolescence, did I write them or call from camp. My father did the same when he was in the field, so that, abandoned and in a way offended by everyone, my mother often complained that she lived with two savages. The love and even passion that appear in every line I have written about my mother (and I’ve written almost solely about her) have always taken me by surprise, and made me wonder whether it was poor literary effect or if there had ever been an age in which I truly loved my mother more than anything in the world. If there had, then what conflict, frustration, or betrayal on her part had transformed my adoration into frigidity and, perhaps, a subterranean enmity? It’s true, she often told me I treated her “like an enemy,” and I remember how she cried once on my birthday, when she bought me a jacket and I told her to her face “I won’t wear something like that,” or when I wouldn’t touch the food she made, saying invariably and impersonally: “I don’t like it.” “You’re like your father. When we were first married, I would wait for him to come home from work to hot food on the table. I was thinking maybe he’d say something nice, just a word … But he would eat and not say anything. And if I asked him, when I couldn’t take it anymore, how’s the soup, how’s the steak or whatever, he’d keep his nose on the plate and tell me just ‘How should it be? It’s food!’ It killed me …”

I was finally alone with the medical assistant, holding her hand down the greenish corridors, over a red and white mosaic floor, like a chessboard. We walked down cold, vast hallways, we went up marble stairs, and in the end we came to a wing that was completely different from the others. On both sides of the corridor were unimaginably large doors, reaching almost to the ceiling, where large white globes hung from metal stems. Many doors were open, and standing in their thresholds were children, some just poking out their heads, curious, others completely in the hall, girls and boys my age, some a little bigger, all dressed in a kind of pajamas I had never seen — instead of buttons they had knotted cords. The pajamas were faded from washing, but you could see that they had once had bright colors, and they were decorated with animals: giraffes, zebras, elephants, monkeys … I walked down the entire corridor, looking in the rooms, which were the biggest I had ever seen (except for the ghostly palaces in my dreams) and almost empty. Some toys were lined up on the floors. I let the kids touch me with their little hands while I walked, and ask me my name, and ask me why I had come to their door, this time completely wooden (the others had opaque windows), at the end of the corridor. The nurse opened the two white doors wide and the smell of freshly washed clothes emerged like vapor from the room lined with shelves from top to bottom. Hundreds, thousands of pairs of pale pajamas, neatly folded and perfectly arranged, filled the shelves. On their edges were drawings of nothing but animals and birds, sketched loosely and repeated over all the material. The nurse hesitated a moment, looked at me, and chose a pair from one of the lower shelves, blue with white elephants. She unfolded the top and showed it to me, smiling in a tempting way. I don’t know what in those flannel rags, the elbows so worn you could see through them, looked extremely beautiful to me. I could hardly wait to put it on. In fact, that day, everything seemed unusual and magical, as though someone had changed the light suddenly, and a kind of emotional tuft covered all that I saw.

The nurse put the pajamas in my arms and pushing gently on my neck, led me to one of the doors with a window, in the middle of the corridor, where a young girl was standing. From the first moment, I saw such evil and hostility on the girl’s face that I could only think of Aura, the granddaughter of my old godmother, who scratched my face whenever my parents made me and Marian play with her. I walked in past her and saw another girl in the middle of the room. She was sitting down and combing the hair of a dilapidated doll. She looked a lot like the first girl, and both regarded me with dissatisfaction. The nurse didn’t say another word. She undressed me, pulled the pajama tops and bottoms onto me and showed me my bed. There were only three white cloth beds here, with metal panels around them (one of which slid to the floor to let us into the bed), a table and three chairs, two sinks with mirrors, and a shelf on the wall. Across from the door were immense windows, beyond which, at our height — the tops of our heads didn’t reach the sill — we only saw sky. When the woman in white came out of the room, telling us only, “Be good!” all of my attention turned toward my two small roommates.

The one I had seen first, on the floor, was named Carla. She was a little bigger than I was, she must have been already six. On her face, the pure, geometrical evil, extracted from the evils she did each day, was so pronounced that it seemed like a physical feature, like a puffy eye, or a mole, or a second nose. It looked like it could be removed through a simple operation, with local anesthetic, and then the girl’s face would be normal. Carla had oblique, dark eyes like a cat’s, with something crooked about them, and a grown woman’s laugh that glued her lips onto her face like an artistic collage — the same lips that she would have at thirty, superimposed, guilty and disingenuous, translucent like the skin of earthworms, revealing their lines of blood. She was the boss, she had invented “mineymoezish,” and over the week, she was the one who gave me the most bruises, pokes, and scratches. In the first few moments I was alone with the girls, Carla pulled a chair to the sink and climbed up and snatched the toothbrush the nurse had put in a cup for me, next to the other two. She threw it onto the carpet with a hatred that petrified me, because I had never encountered it before, in anyone. I had always been the littlest and most spoiled wherever we lived, passed from arm to arm, dosed with candies, cookies, and taffy, stolen by Victoriţa from the preschool where she worked, and the children always circled around me, at the house and block alike, when I would recite poems, “Uncle Stiopa the Policeman” and “Olenka’s All Grown Up,” admiring my cleanliness and the shine of my golden locks … I never knew hostility, not even when my father unexpectedly grabbed me, held me down and pinched my nose, and my mother pushed a spoon into my mouth, forcing me to swallow the bitter medicine, and whacking my head if I let it run out of the corners of my mouth while I twisted and writhed. I was horrified only by the brutality of the situation, since I knew that my parents loved me and wanted to make me feel better. But what did Carla have against my stupid toothbrush? And why didn’t she talk to me, why did she only brush me away from where they were playing? Why, later, did she knock over my blocks and break my toys? I wanted to cry just thinking about it, the way that later I would always cry after I fought with boys, whether I beat them or got beaten up.

Bambina’s face looked like Carla’s, aside from her eyes, which were dull and gray like concrete. But the evil on the flesh of the first here grew a blister as thin as a fish bladder, glimmering, and evenly enveloping her entire face. Bambina was not impulsive like her friend, but she was perverse and calculating. Her limbs and her trunk were filiform, brown as a gypsy’s. She never looked you in the eye, and when the nurse came she would transform into the most well-behaved girl. Wherever she was, when she heard the easily recognizable steps of the nurse’s high heels, she would go sit at the table and begin to play with a doll, quietly, her feet together and her elbows by her body, and for this she was always praised. The nurse called her nothing but “little angel,” but I knew from the beginning whom I was dealing with, thanks to my toothbrush, which I picked up, washed, and put for the moment on the stiff sheet of my bed. Going into the hall a bit to see the other kids, I swung the door a while and then re-entered the great white cave. I caught Bambina wetting my toothbrush in the pot full of pee. I was so shocked by the girls’ behavior that I didn’t think to complain to the nurse who took care of us.

Both girls had hair that stuck out like Furies’, and they spent the day banging their slippers against the wall that separated us from the next room, yanking the hard fabric band that came from a hole in the wall, to raise and lower the window blinds, and especially playing with hideous rag dolls with plaster heads, like they were back then, dolls they bashed together until the faces shattered, saying they were soldiers or boxers. In the evening they would scare themselves, telling each other that the dolls would come for revenge during the night, so before bed, they tied them in cords and laces, making grotesquely large knots. I spent most of my time in the hallway or by the window. By the last day, I didn’t have my toys, and the two would shout if I even looked at their dirty dolls. I also liked to lift and lower the metal panel on my bed, to wander the hall and look at kids in the other rooms (even though I wasn’t supposed to go in the hall) or to gaze minute after minute at the marine-blue flowers on the tiles below the faucet, until I started to see double and the flowers — they were irises — merged into each other and took on a strange multidimensionality. It gave me the feeling that I had slipped out of reality and penetrated that unspeakably deep field of irises. I wandered through them without a body, without movement, I was that world where there was nothing but intensely blue flowers, floating in the air at equal distances, above and below, before and behind, to infinity. I would forget myself completely, until a slipper got thrown at my head or my waist, knocked my cheek against the faucet, and brought me back into the room.

I was totally isolated from the girls in faded pajamas, as though we were from different worlds, a feeling heightened by my inability to understand them. Most of the time, they spoke an unknown language, made not only of sounds but also of gestures and touches and even of smells (when one of them — in moments of discussion I became able to anticipate — broke wind), and which they performed with unbelievable speed and precision. Much later, reading about Vollapük and Esperanto, I remembered how Carla and Bambina talked, and the idea of naming their language passed through my mind, a language where ordinary sounds were mixed with bizarre glottals, with deaf-mute signs and facial expressions like catatonic schizophrenics. I thought of it as “mineymoezish,” because their most common invented word was “minemoe” or “mynimoe,” accompanied by rolling eyes and the motion of pulling something from their chests with imaginary claws.

Evening meals were almost magical. The nurse sat with us, on a folding chair, and our table was lit by a very weak shaded lamp, which only drew the plates and our nearby faces from the dark. Even the figure of the nurse, whose white and massive chest rose like an iceberg in the light, remained in a penumbra. The plates had the same unique food each night: it looked like a trembling jellyfish, almost completely translucid, with its internal organs (darker, amber-colored) showing through its skin. When you stuck your spoon in it, the jellyfish throbbed and tensed with pain. We had to eat all of it, despite the insipid taste, like flan without enough sugar. If the trembling aspic was not a kind of medicine, then I don’t know what medicine is. But it is possible that it was, because only during this time did the nurse sit with us to the end, to the last swallow. Many times one of the girls, most often Bambina, would lie down and vomit, covering the carpet with cheesy pasta, but without a word of reprimand, the nurse immediately called the housekeeper, who cleaned the floor and brought another plate of jellyfish. Like later, in the Voila sanatorium, whose madness seems to have been prefigured by that of Emilia Irma’s, the child would not escape until his plate was clean, even if it meant he had to stay at the table all night.

When she got them to talk, without their catching on, about their strange speech, the nurse got a story, more mimed than spoken in words. Carla, from time to time, had the same dream, in which, naked and with curly hair past her buttocks (“and I had boobs like a big woman,” she showed, cupping her fingers in front of her chest), she wandered through a vast palace of white marble, with a portico, galleries, and statues, and a shining mosaic spread on the floors, tracing out an incomprehensible design. Suddenly the palace was full of endless vistas, without any furniture or paintings, translucent like it was carved from salt, and filled with torpid, multicolored, butterflies. Surprised, Carla wandered through the halls until, in the center of one, she discovered a crystal mausoleum, sparkling in all the colors of the rainbow. Inside was a soft being, with a complex and delicate anatomy, wet orifices on the edge of an ashen stomach, and a vaguely sketched-out face, from the middle of which protruded a short proboscis, with a large bead of milk inflating and shrinking at its tip. Crinkled skin, like a scrotum, rose slowly, and the being opened a human eye (here, Carla closed her eyelids and then opened them with an unnatural slowness, until her eyes became two staring globes, as though paralyzed with fear; at the same time she made the gesture of pulling her heart, veins and all, out of her chest with the claws of her left hand). Then the statues came to life, climbed from their plinths, gathered around the tomb, and began to speak in this unusual language to each other, which Carla learned after many identical dreams and which she transmitted to Bambina, so she would have someone to practice with in the daytime. Despite all the nurse’s ploys, Carla never breathed a word regarding what, precisely, the statues had said.

The girl projected this same dream to us, directly into our brains somehow, as though we had dreamed it ourselves, because her words and motions were only vesperal flashes on the black crests of waves: elliptical, uncolored, and dissipating soon within the prayer-like atmosphere of the evening meal. After we finished eating, we each went to our own bed like every night, and we curled up under the sheets. In the hospital, the rooms were much taller than in the houses were I had lived, and all the way at the top, they had enormous, white globes attached to the ceiling with long metal stems. Before sleeping, I would fix my gaze on one of those globes, floating like a foggy moon in the brown darkness. I stared at it hard, until I felt that it began to oscillate … right … left … more and more … with the miniscule image of my bed held in its curve … one side … the other … until I sank, sighing, into sleep, to dream bad dreams about the girls, their hands knocking over my block towers …

Like the décor, the days were also incomparably vaster than they seem today. Eternities of fresh, glacial light passed between waking up, long mornings, and afternoon meals, there were fluttering changes of gold and shadow from the flowing clouds covering and revealing the sun in the large, white-framed windows. The girls’ features, the beds’ metal panels, the intense blue of the irises under the sink, and each detail of the hideous dolls: their shiny cardboard flakes, covered in plaster, where a nose or eyes were drawn, vibrant and glowing, that detached themselves vigorously, three-dimensionally, one on top of the other — it was as if I weren’t seeing these things with my eyes, but an impersonal camera lucida, cutting and merciless, that spotlighed even the most unimportant details with a kind of abstract consciousness. Everything glowed and spun in colors and designs from the beginning of the world. From my spot at the window, I watched Carla and Bambina perform their ballet like tiny goddesses of destruction. I watched their glassy fingers tear shreds from the sheets, blindfold their dolls, and execute them by stabbing a splinter of pressed wood in the dolls’ chests. I made myself as small as possible when they began to bounce around, ungracefully like wild animals, throwing whatever they could grab into the middle of the room. I tried to interfere once when they went “hunting” in the other rooms and dragged back a smaller boy, who they threw down, leaning over him, poking him, pulling out strands of his hair and kicking his ribs. Then they turned to me and scratched me like cats on my cheeks and shoulders. Afterwards, they would bang their slippers against the wall for hour after monotonous hour, one beside the other, chattering in mineymoezish and hopping around, until the nurse came in and took them by the ears. Then they started to scream and blame me: I was the one responsible for the mess in the room, the noise, everything. I wouldn’t leave them alone, and I took their toys.

The afternoons were almost taller, like vaults of quotidian architecture. After the meal we were supposed to sleep for two hours, but no one did. The two of them stood up on their beds and pulled each other’s hands and pajamas, trying to make the other fall, while I stared out the window at the shining outlines of the clouds, at their transformations, at their steady advance toward one of the window hinges. I watched how the September evening fell, and the pineal gland at the base of my brain detected the seasonal change in light. My pupils grew, and a gentle, atavistic sadness stole around my chest as evening came. A little before it got completely dark, the air became enchanted. Across the walls, stripes of red liquid stretched, phosphorescent, and the air in the room turned brown. The long rectangles of the windows turned from light blue to yellow, and then an unnatural, gloomy orange that covered everything in the room. Then the silence and boredom became unbearable, and everything (only then) began to reek of doctors and hospitals.

It was the moment that I waited for all day: when Carla and Bambina took off their pajamas and, like large dolls, with unexpected grace, they climbed from their beds and began to dance through the room. I knelt and, my mouth gaping, watched their small naked bodies, dark brown in the evening light, spinning like two small fish in a glass globe. From time to time, catching the window light, their eyes sparkled one moment and went dull the next. They lay down and rolled over the worn carpet, they crab walked, they tried to walk on their hands, they held each other’s arms and spun … I knew the nurse would never come at that hour (we were horribly frightened of her), so I climbed out of bed, too, tentatively, watching the dance with a kind of prudent enchantment. I looked curiously at their thin chests and the fine line between the lips of their shining pubises. At the house I had played doctor with Anişoara, in the basement, in the little room painted light green, and we often took our underpants off, but this seemed like something else, because the girls dancing around the dark room did not encourage the same complicity in danger and shame as my meetings with Anişoara. The ordinary, dumb girl at the house, who taught me to play “shots with pants off,” looked at my naked body with a kind of dreamy admiration, while I was probably so indifferent that I don’t even remember Anişoara without her underpants, just the fear of our parents catching us.

What was happening now was magic. Neither Carla nor Bambina were themselves any more, as though the acid of evening had dissolved the crust of evil from their faces, and left them pure and inexpressive like benign masks. I could hardly recognize them. When it was so dark that their dance was only visible against the windows — their black and supple silhouettes were like African statues — the two approached me, by the window, their eyes shining, and took off my pajamas. They lay back triumphantly to show me the purple slits between their thighs, as though there was something grand there, and glorious. They smiled to each other, confirming their exorbitant power, and they rejoiced to see me looking at them, but my small sex, in contrast, brought the usual meanness back to their gaze. They pulled on it, pretending to cut it off, and in the end they turned their backs to me, as though I didn’t exist. Then we got dressed again, quickly, since we heard the steps of the blonde nurse, who was bringing us our usual mollusk supper, covered with caramel syrup, which we had to eat to the last spoonful. The last night, while I chewed the tasteless meat, I felt something like a rubber tube in my mouth. I plucked out a white vein, with a greenish tip, which I placed on the edge of my plate, and I vomited. The nurse immediately brought me a fresh helping.

The children in the other rooms were not healthy and whole the way we, at least in appearance, were. Almost all of them had some strange thing wrong that made a powerful impression on my mind. One boy’s fingers stuck out in every direction, like lobster legs. The room next door constantly reeked of stinging urine and maple. A thin, withdrawn person with dull features screamed her head off when Carla and Bambina, after a lengthy hunt, caught her and pulled her into our room. They wrestled for half an hour while the child writhed like a leech, until they pulled her pajama bottoms down, to look one more time, like at a rare flower, at the bud so complicated you couldn’t have said if it was male or female. There was also a little girl, sweet and lively, happily laughing and talking with everyone, whose hands came out directly from her shoulders, like wings, without arms in between. Everyone admired her waist-length hair, like a blond doll’s, and her shining blue eyes. Several other children had terrible deformities from polio. They all wore the same faded pajamas printed with animals, bound with cords like file folders.

My parents’ arrival, one day before we left the hospital, in a milky morning that already foretold the change of seasons, in those days when I could not talk or play with anyone, was the only real event. They abruptly appeared in the room, in windbreakers and arm in arm, young and dark-haired, almost as tall as the ceiling, and they fell upon me in a frightening display of love. In a few moments, I was surrounded by new toys with a strong smell of paint — a set of cardboard boxes with fairy-tale pictures, each smaller and smaller, fitting one in the next, other wooden blocks that made square pictures: turkey, pig, cow, and ones you could make castles with, and especially a white rag horse with glass eyes and a red lacquer saddle. This toy was so dear to me that even at fourteen I still had it, somewhere in the buffet, shaped like a kind of deformed worm, almost totally brown from dirt, marked all over with pen, with its eyes missing and cuts that revealed the fragile roughness of its harness. My parents did not stay long. After they promised to take me home the next day, “to a new house, bigger, you’ll see,” they left just as strange, just as altered. I realized then that their departure made no difference to me: I could have stayed in the hospital my entire life, watching the walls darken and brighten in the sun, melding into the stereoscopic field of my irises, or listening distractedly to the demented inflections of mineymoezish. And always whenever I would later abandon myself to the will of punctual, spherical worlds, the pearl-worlds that I strung, like vertebrae, upon the cord of my spinal marrow, I would stay there, metamorphosed, adapted to the texture of the air there, the flashes of the clouds there, until something from the outside world hurried my abortion through those successive abdomens, with other placental constellations, amniotic waters, dawns and gods … Once my parents were gone, I was left sitting on my bottom, on the carpet, building block towers and pyramids for the horse. A bit later, however, coming back from the potty, I found the tower I had worked so hard to balance until it was as tall as I was toppled and scattered, and the purple lacquer saddle torn from my horse’s body. Only then did I begin to cry, in despair, the way I should have cried when my parents were leaving. When the nurse came, the pious little girls were in their beds, playing dolls.

The next day, my clothes were brought back, and my pajamas, balled up, sour-smelling, stayed on the floor, like an anatomical specimen on a slide. The nurse took me by the hand, under the hostile gazes of Carla and Bambina, who did not want to say good-bye as the large blond woman asked, and we walked again, together, through the sinuous corridors and the frozen stairways, until we reached the waiting room with the plaster model of the skinned man. My parents again went into the next room, to talk to an unseen doctor, so I was alone in the olive air, listening to the sound of my footsteps on the square floor tiles. I approached, as I had the week before, the armless and legless statue, half a person with painted yellow skin, hair like a black hat and one coin-like brown nipple, and half a nightmarish monster, made of blood-red muscular fibers, knotted blue veins, and the tips of ivory bones. Through a hole in his cranial cavity, above the skeleton of his face, you could see his brain. No martyr had ever suffered so much, or been so savagely and scientifically tortured. On each detachable organ, held by nails to the next, there were small numbers written in an ancient hand, seconded by a table on the wall with knowledgeable explanations, which for me were nothing but thorny decorations. I stood still in front of the tragic sculpture, its gaze lost in its spherical eye, held up by orbital muscles like hands raising an offering. The blue, porcelain eye had a brown glass iris, where a fragment of light flashed. Leaning my head far back, since I was only waist-high to the man skinned alive, I contemplated the sinister foreshortening, the same way I had stared at the field of ink-colored flowers, until in my self-hypnosis, self-forgetting, the statue’s trepidacious extermination of being became suddenly pregnant and luminous, its contours irradiated by hesitant stripes of gold. And then, only then, I realized the man was screaming — hoarse, unending, in wild glissandi, coughing out pieces of larynx and bloody strands of tracheal mucous. He screamed like a hyena, like a stray dog being beaten to death, like someone being boiled in oil, like a woman giving birth to a bat. His body was gripped by unbelievable convulsions. Bloody stumps reached toward the ceiling, stained by squirting arteries. I started to howl in terror along with him. We howled together, we writhed together, and in my little brain with soft bones the scream turned a blinding yellow, apocalyptic, pulsating, unbearable. I screamed with my hands on my ears and my entire body, through the narrow tunnel of my throat and my buccal cavities, became a howl, it dressed my howling body in a howling anatomy, so that I didn’t howl, but the howl howled me, I was the one that ran through the vocal cords of my howl, wounded by my glottis and epiglottis, flowing down my tongue, narrowing myself to pass through my howling lips.

This is how my parents found me, balled up on the square tiles, at the feet of a plaster model, screaming as hard as I could. I kept screaming, my nose running and tears wetting my face and neck, until we left the hospital door, through the yellow leaves and cobwebs. We waited a long time for the tram in a lonely station. I kept sighing, and my cheeks did not dry until I saw the red tram coming, rocking on its rails, like a tired beetle.

21

MAYBE, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling … Last night, with all of my strength sucked dry, I fell asleep between my flaccid sheets and lay like a corpse frozen on a field, in an utter lack of existence that made death seem like a pointless agitation, until I reacquired, for the first time in three or four years, my state of nocturnal “revelation” (in fact, I’ve never found the right name for it, and the one I use here seems to serve only inasmuch as it is weak and unmarked, because, in addition, in the limitless insanity of my “essential” dream — and here, more than ever, the word “my” should be in quotation marks — it doesn’t “reveal” anything to me, except, perhaps, revelation itself: it reveals to me the fact that in this opaque, dense world, murderous as a pillow that someone holds over your face, kneeling mercilessly on your chest to stop your writhing, revelation is possible. Like a porous flaw in the hard ivory that surrounds your interior cistern of living light, a pore gnawed out by a swarm of termites, a tunnel can suddenly open for your vision, illuminated from within by an undying fire, while you rotate unquiet, in dreams and visions, around and around the Enigma. But what can you understand if, sliding through the tunnel at a terrible speed, you feel your eyes burnt to a crisp and your ears torn by flames, your tongue liquefied and bubbling, your skin scorched like the rinds of trees, your nasal mucous digested by incineration? In the spooling sheets of ash, in the carbonic rose, what of you remains after you meet the living you, what can have a revelation, what can follow the melting? It is the center of the rose of our death, because there in the center of our carbonized body, among the petals of char that were our liver and brain and lungs, held together, like an abominable blossom, there among the scrubbed granules of our molars, between the matchsticks of our bones burnt white, there is still something, and that something is everything. When the tunnel turns straight and the flames from the oven’s mouth lick it, melting the glassy walls, when you speed fantastically fast directly toward the blindness beyond blindness, toward the deafness that makes deafness seem like the wailing of a slaughterhouse, when the protuberances of fire that burn fire like kindling lap against the black rose, its petals (kidneys and vertebrae, theorems and desires, theories and gods) lift off and ignite again, tumbling back down, and in the middle of the middle of the middle of the cup of the rose, an indestructible quartz sphere appears, that can penetrate the architecture of the tongues of flame, in the hierarchies of wasteland. In the center of the cistern of fire, reflecting the fire, it becomes itself the generator of living power, and so it was at the beginning, since you can never experience an enigma if you weren’t the one who made it.

This is the “dream” I have tried to describe over many pages, and that I had for the first time at the age of sixteen, right or almost right after I got out of Colentina Hospital. Since then, it has replayed itself, in various variations, with details added and elements subtracted, possibly twenty times in these fourteen years. At the start, it came disturbingly often, maybe once a month (while I was feverishly searching through neurological treatises to diagnose myself), then the intervals extended and everything seemed to be on the way toward “healing,” with time. Last night’s dream, the result, perhaps, of yesterday’s pages (when I was detailing the vision of the plaster model screaming and spouting blood, I felt something much like insanity), followed the pattern of all the ones before and was no less devastating, even though it had been two years since the last time. As usual, accompanying the eruption of the revelatory dream — but what veil was moved away? on the contrary, the veils lay on top of each other, thicker and thicker, until their thickness, around the fragile egg of your dura mater, a celestial turban with the diamond of Shiva on the brow, becomes enormous, filling the entire cosmos (finite, but without limits, where imaginary time follows space in all its directions) with an impenetrable batting — my oneiric activity intensified considerably, along with waking states in which my self was suppressed. Monsters teemed under my eyelids as I curled up in bed and closed my eyes. Rotted skulls, indescribable faces, and terrible whispers in my ears tortured me until morning, when, so often, I woke up completely paralyzed and couldn’t make even the smallest gesture for minutes on end, even though my mind tried desperately to command, firmly, to believe, not to doubt. It was as though I had ordered a mountain to hurl itself into the sea.

And then the night came when, after I was finally able to fall asleep, it seemed that I rose, still wrapped in my sheets like a mummy. It awakened no suspicions when I saw myself from above, from the ceiling, as if twin entities from my consciousness had decoupled and moved several meters apart, one of them crossing (by what osmosis? by what tunnel-effect?) the metaphysical skin around my encephalon that separated the inside from the outside. The room was dimly lit in a gently rotating olive light. Although everything was in its proper place (see, the English notebook is open on the table, as I left it the night before, and my pants on the back of the chair were on the carpet in my dream, just as I would find them the next day in reality), there was a lunatic mist in the room’s air, as though I had slept poorly or I’d awoken in a world identical in every detail to our own, but reconstituted (too faithfully, in a way that was too nuanced) on a strange planet, for incomprehensible ends. And suddenly I began to hear the sound. It seemed like it had always existed, but it had evolved over millennia far below the threshold of my perception. It had amplified, starting from an almost absolute silence, seeking my ears (or maybe the zone of my temporal lobes, found at the interface of vibration and sensation) like an arrow finding its target, and in the end, amplifying billions of times from its original point, it slid through the great audile gate of my mind. The sound, that began as small and inoffensive as the buzz of a tiny fly, almost inaudible, oscillated like a siren, but on a frequency all its own and with a certain glissando that gave it an almost-tactile velvetiness, as though your fingers softly rubbed a petunia’s soft, fibrous petals.

In just a few seconds, the sound gained corporality and became yellow. It twisted into my brain like a corkscrew, ever more powerful, oscillating up-down, up-down faster and faster, rising asymptotically from audible to loud, surpassing the thresholds of acceptability, then tolerability, until it transformed into a howl of gold. I felt that the amplification would never end, and a destructive hysteria, a terror synchronized with the mad growth of the sound, encompassed me, mastered me, and substituted itself for me, against all of my efforts to maintain my identity. The sound had exceeded my ears’ capacity to hear, maybe dissolved them into flame, when the second part of my dream unleashed itself. I was knocked down violently by invisible hands, dragged out of my bed, sheets and all, and thrown against the furniture on the opposite wall. In other iterations, the abuse did not stop here. I was carried, with an ever increasing speed, through strange rooms, on tunnel-like roads covered by trees, reaching infinite speed, while the tongues of flames of the former sound burned my body. They exploded my head and spread me out triumphantly through all of space, through all of time, through all being, until being itself burned and the bubbling fire took its place, thickening, multiplying, concentrating, and endlessly amplifying. Howl of fire, falling and rising a billion times a second, my howl and God’s, my terror and triumph, horror beyond horror, happiness a billion times exceeding happiness …

I found myself again in my bed, and it seemed I was awake. The green room pulled into itself, and rotated the same lunatic light. It seemed tears had dried on my cheeks. I got up and went to look for my mother. Dawn was breaking. I walked down the halls and through the rooms of our home, still lost in the twilight. The doors opened before me by themselves, letting me enter, slowly and steadily, three rooms in turn. When the living-room door opened, I saw the dawn sun in the window, small and red, without shining, rising over the Dâmboviţa mill. On the ravished sofa my parents were sleeping, Mamma with her head completely beneath the sheet, curled up, so that she seemed oddly small, and my father on his back, with the buttons of his wrinkled pajamas undone and wearing a sleeping cap, made of a knotted woman’s stocking, to keep his hair back. I walked closer and looked at my mother with a strange intensity. Almost immediately, I actually woke up, and I remained for a bit in a state of complete confusion, like I had the night before. Then I did some little, absurd things. I went to the bathroom, and after I looked at myself in the mirror a while, without a single thought, I began to cut my fingernails. Or I screwed and unscrewed the cap of the rubbing alcohol. My scalp burned all over, as though it were covered with an incandescent metal web. I walked mechanically back to my bed, where I fell right asleep again and vegetated for a few hours without dreams, until dawn came.

During one of my dream-wanderings through twilit rooms, on reaching the living room, I was surprised that my mother was no longer sleeping in the sofa bed. Only my father was there, with his face turned toward the wall, wearing just an undershirt and breathing steadily. Frustration and disquiet woke me immediately. When morning came and my mother came back with the milk, she told me, black with anger, that “this father of yours” had gone out again with his newspaper buddies to celebrate someone-or-other. Mamma had made such fuss over the expense that she slept in the little room, leaving my father to sleep alone … The dream, therefore, involved a kind of bizarre clairvoyance, as though in a way I could touch reality — even if it was outside my body — through dark rooms.

It all began in the late fall of 1973, when I was caught in a bad, freezing rain while coming back from some workshop classes. My uniform was drenched immediately and water ran through my hair, under my collar, zigzagging over the naked flesh of my spine and spreading over my back. The view from number 5 was desolate in any case, but beneath the steady rain, all the houses and the sky looked like they were made from clay and pitch. The leaves stuck, dead, to the tram’s sides and windshield, rotted in puddles, and caught on the hunched shoulders of a crazy baba who leaned against a fence, spread her legs, and urinated along with the rain. When I got home, I took a hot bath and I soaked with the water over my ears, listening to the curiously clear sounds coming from the neighbors — voices, barking, a washing machine humming — until the heat almost made me sick. Afterwards, for the entire evening, one after the next, I emphatically recited works of poets I had discovered, one after the next. The latest poet always seeming like the greatest, the only one touched by genius, the only one. The emotions of my declamation — in a low voice, still, since I was afraid my parents would tease me, even though they usually were lounging like the dead in the blue aura of the living-room television — passed all measure. On the edge of my bed, book in hand, I whistled, hooted, and barked the verses, contorting the muscles of my face trance-like until they started to hurt, and, like the peribuccal sphincter of trumpet players, they even went numb for a bit. Each line had to be experienced with absolute intensity, since each line brought new meaning, an interior light to my pathetic life in my room with dim bulbs and old furniture. When I recited these poems, looking in my own eyes in the mirror and grimacing (I thought) desperately, prophetically, purely, or passionately, it seemed my interior chemistry changed: my hair rose up, not just on my head and arms but even on my thighs, my eyes widened, the acne that covered my forehead lit up across my pale skin … I sweated profusely, soaking my pajamas, which always had broken buttons. I could not stay still. I was encompassed in exaltation. I went to the panoramic window, where stitches of rain fell over Bucharest, to recite:

Girl like a lizard,

Asleep on the slate,

Throw yourself in the river

Your life to escape

Across the way, Nenea Căţelu’s dogs were huddled like black rags in the rain. The crucified figures on neon pillars between the tram rails, each with his crown of thorns, raised their bloody faces toward the sky lapping up the November rain. The rails carried only service cars, with a kind of yellow gallows on the back platform, metal, with a hoist. I sat on the top of the bedstead and propped my bare feet on the burning elements of the radiator, which they had already turned on for testing. I stayed like that until it was completely dark and the city, like in an illustration in an old children’s book, was blotted out delicately under the silver clouds and moon. Only neon signs, flashing on and off in the distance like phosphorescent deep-water fish, broke the nightfall with their indistinct green, azure, and purple letters. As I had done since childhood, when a sign went out I closed my eyes, counted to seven or eleven, and when I opened them again, I saw the same sign again, lit. In this way I could keep it lit endlessly, leaping over the night’s emptiness, because the dark space that remained after the rectangle or circle of light went out on the top of the blocks downtown became suddenly much blacker than the rest of the nocturnal panorama. I didn’t turn on the light in my room, and I stayed like that until two in the morning, watching the dark through the sparking blue window, feeling like a cave animal, with transparent flesh and no eyes, touching the walls with the thin tips of my tactile organs.

That night, as I fell asleep, the mask of my face felt heavy, like bronze, from so much effort and contortion. I woke up the next day pale and dizzy. As I brushed my teeth I realized, without yet understanding, that in fact, there really was something unusual: the cold water I used to wash was running out of my mouth, even though my lips were pressed together: a muscle in the upper one, on the left side, had gone soft, powerless and a little twitchy. It was odd, and almost funny. “What the hell?” I said to myself, and I sipped some more water into my mouth, trying as hard as I could to keep it in. But the harder I tried to control my lips and cheeks, the more strongly the twisting, turbulent stream squirted from the lax dam of my upper lip. I walked out of the bathroom and, for about an hour, I piddled around, trying to avoid thinking about that peculiarity that, I hoped, would gradually pass, like a twitch or a fluttering eyelid. But the anomaly stubbornly persisted. I realized I could no longer whistle, and my lip, for about a centimeter, was covered with bestial puffiness, soft like a snail’s flesh. Not even then was I scared, but I showed my mother (just back from the piaţa, weighted down with enormous shopping bags) what had happened to me, smiling naïvely, as though she was going to praise my soon-to-be-demonstrated dexterity. But Mamma was scared, she clamped her hand to her mouth like a peasant and let out a highly aspirated “aaoleo!” We left quickly for the Emergency Hospital. It was Saturday, and there was no one in the waiting room. It smelled like rubber and antibiotics. Finally, a middle-aged doctor came, who examined me and made a snap diagnosis that turned out to be correct: facial palsy, probably peripheral, sinister, additionally named “a frigore,” since the nerve that activated the musculature of half my face was broken, at the ear, from excessive cold. The frozen rain that had fallen on my head a day before had done me in. Hospitalization was demanded, in the neurology ward, to begin treatment as soon as possible, and so the doctor, after she joked and chatted with me a little, wrote an admittance to Colentina Hospital, where I arrived that same afternoon.

In the large neurology ward in Section IV of the hospital on Ştefan cel Mare — a few yellowed and crumbling buildings with their prows and sterns pointed with glassed-in verandas, so that they looked like Spanish galleons anchored side by side in a sparkling cove — there might have been thirty beds. Their population, although homogenized by scarlet gowns, full of thin spots, red spots, and ironing scorch marks, rapidly diversified for me, as I got to know the other patients, each with his own illness, personality, and story. Since I wasn’t examined until Monday morning, I had enough time to follow, on the one hand, the progressive extension of paralysis over my face, encircling, as slow as a minute hand, the commissure of the mouth, cheek muscle, left cheek bone, and eyelid (which I was unable to close, for three full months, without using my finger), until my face — and this showed most when I laughed — came to resemble a sinister harlequin; and on the other hand, to become part of the small group of younger people, the “kindergarten,” as Doctor Zlătescu and her assistants called us, the guys with whom later, for an entire month, I would sit at the veranda table and play endless games of 21 for matchsticks. The others I knew less well: I remember a former doctor who had MS, who always sat, dreaming, on the top of his bed. If you approached him, he would reach into his pocket and take out a black and white photo showing a heteroclite group of people, whose names, relatives, and other details were always changing. There was a person who had been hit on the head with a crowbar during some “incidents with Hungarians” at the border, during some historic moment I could never place; a man with Parkinson’s, drugged with L-DOPA as much as he could take; a bartender from the Intercontinental who wore women’s underpants, with satin ribbons; and an antipathetic person, extremely fat, always stinking of sweat and suffering (terribly) from Reiter’s syndrome: he thought his own teeth were conspiring against him and he could not keep himself from chewing his tongue and cheeks. I also remember an old man, at least eighty, completely decrepit, called Mr. Ionescu, who would brag that “before the Communists” he had written reports in The Universe about serious social problems in Romania: “We flogged them, we did, we flogged them without mercy! We were the terror of the political press, we were! Bucşescu could come to me, and Vosganian, and Lacheris, even Samurcaş came to my office once, and they’d fall to their knees, they did, and they’d give me millions, just not to write about their shady deals! Cockroaches, evil, spiders of the regime of corruption, that’s what we called them, we did! And I’d throw their millions right back in their faces!” The old man, completely bald, with what looked like varicose veins on his scalp, wide, beastly eyes, and toothless jaws always chomping, caught his breath and began again with the same senile vehemence, spitting on us while he raged: “They sent women to corrupt me, courtesans, call girls … They came to my office, to the newspaper, you can’t imagine who came: look here, I had Debora Zilberştain on my lap, and Angelica Ducote (the one from the Oteleşanu Beer Garden), and Mioara Mironescu from the Biscuit (no no, the Gorgonzola), and that Vetuţa that Eftimiu used to visit for her carnaval de Venice … All of them came, they did, I had all of them, but I still wrote my stuff, rascals the lot of them! When they heard Ionescu, they thought Satan, they did!” The old man had known “like my own pockets” Camil Petrescu, Homer Patrulius (“the only one who was a genius, he was; Lovinescu would say: ‘You’re a genius, my good Patrulius, you’re a genius!’ ”), Minulescu, Corduneanu … Occasionally, the nurse interrupted him to stick a syringe needle in his buttocks, with the same indifference as if she were injecting a corpse, or to delicately take his glans between her fingers and insert the pink snake of the probe, the only way Mr. Ionescu had left to urinate … Finally, from somewhere, some corner of my memory, appears a tall guy, fragile and pale, like a species of green lobster, always sitting at the window and looking into the distance. He suffered, I believe, from an unusual acromegaly. I didn’t notice him until everyone did, one visiting day, when a woman came accompanied by a ten- or twelve-year-old girl. The endlessly tall man suddenly sprang to life, approached the girl like a ghost, took her aside, and gesticulating like a necromancer, talked to her about half an hour. “Don’t forget to dream,” he shouted with his dull, squawking voice, when the mother and the girl left the ward.

But I had too little to do with these guys. At night, some curled up and whimpered irritatingly, and others ground their teeth to make you shudder. Those close to me (literally, since our “kindergarten” was bed by bed near the entry doors) were different. Near my bed, separated from me by a nightstand, was a suffering, deformed shoemaker about fifty-five years old, whose skull, with skin the color of feces, emerged directly from a misshapen trunk. It looked like two children’s heads, one in back and one in front, were forcing themselves up through his flannel pajamas. In addition to this hideousness, the hunched man had been struck by hemiplegia right in his miniscule shoe shop. He was the only one in the hall who was completely helpless, unable to sit up in bed, and the target of everyone’s hatred, since he made the room smell terrible at least once a day, when one of the nurses put “the pot” under him, and after a period of time, took it away again, wrapped in dirty paper. The poor man was so embarrassed, he begged the ground to open up and take him in. I talked many times to this Leopardi tortured by melancholy. Evenings I took off his old watch, with its calcified face and khaki canvas band, to close it in his “drier,” and in the morning I would buckle it to his wrist again. This man of pain had deep folds between his eyebrows. Only visits from his family cheered him up a little: an oligophrenic woman, who had had an operation on her head, in front, where a blue scar, crossed with stitches, arched up until it entered her hair, and a normal girl, his great pride. Three quarters of the time he spoke only of her, how well she studied, how she played …

One morning, while a doctor was making rounds, Mr. Paul, the shoemaker, found he couldn’t talk: he babbled, he didn’t find his words, and his face turned purple the way the embarrassing organs hold blood. A terrible fear consumed him. The doctor tried to calm him down, but the deformed man’s mouth suddenly gaped open toward the ceiling (what was with his teeth that they looked so unusual? a deformed bridge? tartar deposits on each tooth, forming cameos of religious scenes, gardens of forking paths?) and loosed sharp howls, silly sounding, like a fox caught in a trap. He screamed like this and writhed as much as his hemiphlegia would allow, with his face flushed and tears running over his temples, until they tranquilized him. Toward evening he cheered up again and laughed happily. He had thought that, on top of deformity, on top of paralysis, God had also smitten him with babbling. This had driven him out of his mind: “What would Smârdan’s damn kids say if I came back from the hospital babbling?” But there was no reason to fear. To my right was a zit-faced dick, with an Oltenean horse-face, a poorly dressed jackass of a soccer player. He had arrived just the day before I did. After a fall on the pitch, blood had started to come out of his ear. He woke up one night with a red pillow. Hair cut straight, small round eyes, a mouth without lips and ubiquitous acne gave him the classic look of a “no-gooder” from old films with crusaders and chastity belts. He was under observation, like the good-looking and well-raised young man next to him, who, with a completely normal medical record, went to sleep one night and couldn’t be awoken for eight days, at which point he opened his eyes, happy and hungry. Since then more than a month had passed, his brain was explored in I don’t know how many rounds, and the EEG came back normal every time. “Nobody knows what I have,” he told everyone, proudly. I discussed literature with him, I enthusiastically recited Tzara and Vornca, and he talked to me about Mandiargues and Beckett. He liked to make me laugh, since then (as my illness progressed) the right half of my face came to life, the corner of my mouth rose happily toward my ear, my eye narrowed and flashed, while, like the unseen face of the moon, the left side stared like stone, hieratic and mysterious. “It’s like you’re both Riga Crypto and Enigel the Laplander!” Also around age 17 or 18 was the only epileptic in the hall, a big country boy, with long, hanging ears and bloodshot eyes. While I was there, he only had one attack, but it was violent and terrible: he fell suddenly, howling like he was being impaled, into the space between the rows of beds, and his clonic movements began right away. A doctor came quickly and pushed his hands hard against the boy’s mouth and nose until the convulsions became less intense, and the large body in blue pajamas became inert on the floor. But until then, no one was scared. On the contrary, he was entertaining us with pointless, childish stories, lost in details, about ghosts coming out of the pond and children who could tell the future. The soccer player, the narcoleptic (named George, I think), the epileptic, and I were the “kindergarten,” and we spent all our time together, usually playing cards, at the end of a bed or on the terrace, telling jokes and spying on the nurses. In the last week of my stay, they added a kid of about ten, who had a burning desire to be operated on, for a reason that will surprise you: after an appendicitis they had taken out his tonsils and some polyps, and now he was faking (so the doctor thought) acute pains in his stomach. If there was so much as talk of an operation, his little pecker would instantly harden, which made the soccer player roll on his bed with laugher. Of course the ass took care to “get him up” twenty times a day, describing, in great detail, silly dissections, resections, and trepanning and pretending that he was salivating from pleasure. But the boy saved himself from all the teasing with his unusual gift for cards. He trounced us, over and over again, at 21. He won dozens of boxes of matchsticks. His miraculous intuition told him when to stop at 14 or 15, or, on the contrary, to take a hit when he had 19 or even 20.

My medicine was cortisone-based. Thus, I was not allowed to eat salty food, but they thought maybe I would enjoy the terrible salt substitute on every table on the balcony, potassium chloride. I was also given some vitamins, but, thank God, no shots. The treatment the doctor prescribed, from the first day she saw me, after the nurse examined me all over (not including my pajama bottoms, as I hoped and feared, because I had seen that one of the examination rubrics was “genital appearance” — but there the nurse had written, ex officio, “normal”) she scratched a key over the sole of my foot, put drops in my eyes and checked my other reflexes with a rubber hammer. The examination excited me to an unexpected degree. The nurses, one blond and plump, the other red-haired, wore white gowns that were easy to see through, especially when they leaned over, showing their panties and, when they wore them, their bras. Every day I ascertained (and discussed with my friends) the color and design — circles and flowers — of their intimate lingerie. Between their buttons, the gowns, ironed like paper, sometimes gaped to show the roundness of their breasts and, if you were lucky, even the circle of a nipple. Since I was 16 and my hormones were first in line as blood irrigated my brain, I had no trouble imagining that I would have both of them, that they would come to my bed one after the other, on some night colored by moans and gnashing teeth. There was also a third nurse, “the saint,” as the deformed man always called her, a girl with a thin, pale face, almost without a body, in any case without feminine attributes, who floated quietly among the ill, doing the most revolting tasks (pushing the catheter into a patient’s urethra, reducing a rectal prolapse, carrying the chamber pots) without her face showing that grimace of disgust and scorn found on the other two. After this first examination, the doctor set my diagnosis, treatment, and even a reasonably ambiguous prognosis, saying, apparently as a joke: “Now don’t go thinking we can make a toothless baba into a marriageable girl …”

The weather outside was miserable, it rained hard and stupidly, the few trees that could be seen through the veranda windows only had a few yellow leaves on their branches, and the alleyways were black, wet, and foggy. In the evenings I read, most of the time, especially after eating. Twice a week I “took the rays” and twice, on different days, I got a massage, since it was part of the treatment. In the meantime, my facial paralysis had become total. Being a “nice” and typical case, I was often visited by medical students doing a rotation in our hall, in groups of 7 or 8, surrounding a bed and trying to make a diagnosis. “Look at his face,” the professor would say to them, after they closed in around me. There were cute girls and guys in short-sleeved doctor’s shirts. “Is it symmetrical or asymmetrical?” “Asymmetrical,” most of them shouted, but with a disapproving glance from the bearded one, the others shouted louder: “Symmetrical! Symmetrical!” “Now, laugh, my boy,” the professor added, and I complied, like a trained monkey. “Asymmetrical,” they all hooted triumphantly. Next, they put drops in my eyes, straining to spot I don’t know what reaction. Once the professor left, I knew I would have some quiet. The short-sleeved guys slapped the girls on the butt, they went on the veranda to smoke, they joked and talked without paying any attention to the sick people in cherry-red gowns or pajamas with washed-out stripes, with a rough texture like sheepskin.

When I took the rays, I went down two floors, through vast, cold hallways that felt as sinister as a morgue. Each had two or three vinyl benches where hardly anyone ever sat. A public telephone hung on the wall, where a frail patient in a robe with circles like a kimono was talking. I went into a dark hallway, lined with blue oxygen tanks. I caught foggy images from the hell of intensive care out of the corner of my eye, through the slit between rubber paper curtains, and finally, I reached the narrow examination room loaded with electrical devices. Even I could recognize how bizarre and ridiculous these boxes with ebony buttons and dials were. They were held together with beefy bolts, like on a tank. Inside the dials moved needles shaped like arrows, down to their little tails, and the letters and symbols were written in ink, in an old hand. It was like the warehouse of some television repair store, where you tripped over cables and wires, where countless metal jacks awaited plugs with ordinary plastic caps, where panels with potentiometers and voltmeters looked like tram controls. I would sit on a chair in front of each one in turn, and the doctor, usually buried in a copy of Sport when I arrived, came, looking like a skeptical magician, to place two Vaseline-covered electrodes on my temples, which he then stuck fast to my skin with leucoplast gum. Then he turned an ebony button to a certain level and went back to his corner, lost behind the pages of athletic classifications and commentaries. I was left with an hour of waiting and anxiety. The Vaseline popped slightly when the electrical current passed through, as though it were bubbling in a boil. With my eyes closed, I imagined how the electron fluid traversed my scalp, burrowing into my skull bone and perforating the sheets of thick, vaulted parchment that wrapped my brain. Next, it sunk into the complicated and analgesic marrow, exploring its circuits and structures, favoring the emissions of neurotransmitters, stimulating glial cells, waking the princesses sleeping in alcoves of mystery, proliferating the ragged claws of crabs and beetles scuttling in the basements, and vibrating the quartz globes in kaolin halls vaster than the mind itself. Violated, humiliated, but at the same time greased with a strange myrrh in the irrigation of its veins, my brain slowly unfurled its twisted legs, blossoming like a land of milk and honey, watered by a carnivorous Jordan. I descended into the karst, excavated by streams of violet current. I explored tragic, grand structures, propelled toward their heights — abstruse palaces glowing in the sun, their pointed peaks flying weathervanes made of masses of neurons, their checkered halls with floors teeming with moist, transparent animals, whirlpools of colored information, and balls of serpents braided around jade spools. I crossed the swamp of axons on skiffs of iridium, I hacked away dendrites and tentacles with a machete, I faced dangerous hurricanes of nightmares, I dared to meet the eyes of heavenly emissaries, until, in the end, through fogs of blue, I spotted the liminal space I so long had hoped for, the cochlea of the opposite ear rising from the temporal cliff like an enormous Ferris wheel. Then, in a daze, I would open my eyelids: the hour had passed. The technician ripped off the leucoplast and removed the electrodes, leaving my temples glistening. After every appointment for the rays, I spent the following afternoon staring at nothing, dreaming without dreaming of anything, meditating without a thought, but feeling my life was as expansive and pure as an enormous summer sky. I would respond to my friends if they asked me something, eat if it was time to, but I was not there, and I felt strongly I was not from there, that the colored forms around me, like the ironwork of voices, and the deceit-work of autumn clouds, although identical to those from my world (and exactly because they were identical) were nothing more than a vast and shabby stage set. I looked at everything, without fixing my gaze anywhere. My eyes moved in different directions, the right and left phantoms parted, slowly, from each other, and the world doubled and melted into a kind of fine mist, brownish-red, and then gold, until only the gold was left, like on an icon, shaking in the cold and emptiness … Then images of the ward came back, but without shape or sense, like the baroque fabric design that I used to gaze at as a child, on afternoons when they forced me to sleep. I would stare, with my face to the wall, at the back of the sofa, the floral patterns of its cloth. I followed all the twists and forks as though they were under a magnifying glass, and I observed each shift of nuance of color, until I knew the material as did perhaps only the one who had made it, but without knowing why I knew it, why my mind recreated that piece of fabric, why it glowed anew, in three dimensions, in the center of my visual field, with every thread and every colored millimeter visible in a radiant light. Images where you do not exist are horrible, images that anyone could see and graft onto your mind, your flesh … In the end, after hours and hours of nothing, I came back to my own feelings. I rediscovered my endocrine glands and my skin, my history and my values, my pajamas and my playing cards. I laughed again, with half of my face, at George’s jokes, and at night, before sleeping, I pictured the asses of the two nurses, and in my mind I took them from behind, again and again, under my warm and damp sheets. In the morning, I buckled the cripple’s watch back onto his hand, and then the doctor and assistants came. Time reproduced itself with the placidity of an inferior invertebrate, three-quarters full of eggs …

22

THE final component of my treatment was massage. Long after I left the hospital, I continued to do it myself, in the mirror, like a woman worried she’s getting old. I’d put a little talcum powder on my fingers, and start with my forehead, pushing my skin toward my temples and noting, day by day, how, if I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise, the folds in the left part of my brow took a clearer shape (in the hospital they’d been non-existent). I turned next to my eyebrows and the tops of my cheekbones, with the special movements I’d learned from the blind masseur, and then massaged under the cheekbones to the cheeks, where I would push for minutes on end. The cortisone and electricity treatments had stimulated the regeneration of my nerves, but my facial muscle mass recovered almost randomly, so that my face’s symmetry changed — the price I paid to recover basic movement. I spent even more time on my lips and chin, and then ended by massaging my neck, marveling every time at how thin it was and how quickly it reddened under my fingers. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, feeling a benign tension in all of the muscles of my face. An adolescent’s head, pale as death with circles around the eyes, stared back at me from the prison of the mirror. Then I’d fall into bed with a book, and evening would find me reading, as usual, and mad with loneliness.

But, while I was in the hospital, the facial massage sessions took place in the office of the blind masseur, twice a week; his wide, moist hands alone shaped, like a sculptor, the waxy clay of my face. He emanated cold like an iceberg. I was scared of him the entire time, even though, when I descended into his lair for the first appointment, I realized he was not completely unfamiliar. I had seen him often on Ştefan cel Mare, walking arm in arm with a red-haired woman, violently rouged and painted, wrapped in fox furs. Utterly imposing, with an unusually large face, the blind man displaced the air in front of him as he walked, with that characteristic gait, as though he was resisting someone who pushed him from behind. In his examining room, beside its diminutive furniture and bookcases, dressed in a white shirt that revealed his hairy arms, the masseur was even more impressive. He filled his office the way an enormous statue of an idol gathered the cave around itself. Inside the building, he took off his black glasses, so you saw his closed eyelids, with beautiful lashes, rounded by the dead eyeballs underneath. He had the eyes of a sleeping person, or of someone trying to solve a knotty problem that has no answer.

I never felt completely relaxed when I went in for the massages. I would always have rather done the rays. In the first place, the office was far from my hallway. It seemed like I had to descend dozens of floors and cross hundreds of empty corridors to get there. At the beginning, I would always get lost and end up in the women’s halls, x-ray rooms, or laboratories, or simply in cold, green halls with no way out. I remember how surprised I was when, opening one of the anonymous white doors at the end of a corridor, I found a bedroom, a boudoir really, with a vanity holding a variety of unguent perfumes and a bed with a teenage girl lying on the sheets, curled up and reading a book with a cherry-red cover. Hearing the door, she jumped up, frightened, and began to scream, looking at me with wide eyes. I saw my reflection for a second in the clear mirror of the vanity: a dreary guy, in a robe and pajamas, standing in the half-open door, just as frightened as the girl. Apart from the strange apparition of this intimate alcove within a hospital and the powerful beauty of the brunette who occupied it, there was, through the window with foaming curtains pulled to one side, a piaţa surrounded by blackened old buildings, with an equestrian monument in the middle that I knew well from the encyclopedia I read — I really read it, I didn’t just look things up — and I had read it often and well from the age of seven: it was the statue of Simón Bolívar from downtown Montevideo …

Finally I made it to the massage room, which looked just like any other examining room, white and functional. The blind masseur knew me by my voice and invited me to take off my robe and pajama top and sit on a veneered chair in the middle of the room. He stood behind me, like a barber or dentist, and suddenly I felt my head caught by unusually large hands and pressed powerfully against his stomach, which felt like a soft, white wall. The massage could not have gone more than twenty minutes if he’d done it without stopping, and that’s how long it lasted on days when many patients were in line, patients whose footsteps, whispers, and massive men’s growling voices were easily perceptible through the door. When I was the only client, however, his hands might wander over my face for an entire hour, focused, pressing, vibrating and rubbing certain groups of muscles with fingers like a violinist’s, and other times totally distracted, touching just my eyeballs (extremely gently), the corners of my lips, and my jugular, which beat slowly in the warm flesh of my neck. During the first few appointments, the blind man massaged my face in silence, at most tossing out a remark or two that left me at a loss: “Your bones are like crackers. Don’t ever become a boxer.” Then he fell quiet again, and I heard nothing but the grainy swish of the talcum-covered fingers that rubbed my flesh until, I imagined, it became translucid like the cap of a jellyfish and revealed, pure and white, the ivory of my skull, as polished as a stone in a riverbed. The repetition of the same pushing and pulling and trembling fingers, the odd heat of his stomach that almost completely engulfed my head, and the mystical light of blindness that floated in the examination room transported me into a tense and unpleasant state. I was deeply scared, so deeply that I could not recognize it as fear, but more as sadness, as disappointment. The blind. Blindness. Since I was little, I had been tortured by a thought that I tried in vain to communicate to the big people. And it wasn’t just the great quandary that all boys and girls rack their brains about: how children come into the world. To that at least I knew I would not get, as yet, the answer, or I would not get the whole answer, because the adults, united in an impenetrable conspiracy (as though they were initiates of an Eleusinian Mystery, and we, the little, were profane; and really, don’t all mysteries, and maybe all religions, follow the model of this first exclusion? Isn’t sex a kind of immortality to which you gain access through maturity? Doesn’t it divide life into two stages, a larval stage and another, burning in the eternal light of consciousness? Isn’t the child, in comparison with the adult, like the adult in comparison with the angel he will become, through transformation and vestment in praise of the holy body? “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face …”), a conspiracy that did not allow anything to reach our little minds thirsting for truth. I thought then that children appeared out of their mothers’ stomachs at the bottom, or by cutting the belly, the way we think now (mistakenly and madly) that we will see without eyes and hear without ears and sing without lips in the promised new life after the obstetric labor of death. More than the question, “how are children made — and born,” which made grown-ups seal themselves inside a bitter and angry muteness (somehow jealous), saying only, through their teeth: “You couldn’t think of anything better to ask?” other questions nagged me, ones I knew that my parents would not answer, not because I wasn’t supposed to know the answer, or because they didn’t know, but because they couldn’t understand what I wanted, because I couldn’t explain what made me so uneasy. I burst into tears so many times, sitting on the bed behind my mother who, naked to the waist, tapped a fork between the threads of the Persian rug she was working on. I might have asked her what the world would be like if no one lived in it, that is, if no one saw it, but I couldn’t even transform the mounting fear into a thought, let alone a question. I had, in fact, from time to time, had a horrible flash of insight: the world would exist even if no one ever saw it. But then what would it be like? It would have no color, or taste, or texture, or smell … And yet it would be, just as much as the one we see and feel. I looked at the room around me, and I tried to imagine the carpet frame, the bed, the walls, and even my mother, with her curly hair falling between her shoulder blades and her damp breasts hanging on her chest. I tried to imagine erasing the colors from everything, but somehow keeping the shapes, and I tried to “see” the chunky, desperate gray that would remain, the way that our room would be if no one saw it, a kind of concrete bunker in which you couldn’t distinguish the chair from the cement, or the rug frame from the cement, or the half-woven rug from the cement, or Mamma from the cement, petrified on the edge of her bed. I knew, though, that even this vision was an image, that it was also “seen” with a half-closed mind, they way you squint to see just the essence of a painting. But what if my mind closed all the way, and what if, even more to the point, there had never been an eye or a mind? How would things look where no person had ever stepped? How could they exist, without form or color? Then I would imagine the world, the whole world, everything that existed, as a great darkness, with denser parts and muddier parts where the things used to be — a limitless swamp, with spheres slow dissolving, no light anywhere, no nuance, no sound, only darkness with bigger and smaller muddy parts, thrown in heaps and piles like old furniture in a completely dark workshop.

This may be the source of my discomfort regarding the blind. When I was small, I imagined they all lived in that swamp, like sinister tadpoles, amphibians with rigid necks that would project their awkward and prudent images onto a sea of multicolored lights, full of sunlight, but inside, in the subcutaneous night, they would project their tentacles and the bizarre sensory organs they used to communicate with other worlds silently, like abyssal fish — worlds of fear, perhaps, and depression. They knew what being was like when no one saw it. They were, furthermore, its agents, its spies, its avant-garde in the blank world. Through their often half-open eyes, through which you could see a puss-filled cornea, death and agony stalked you, the great ataraxia of nothingness. I didn’t know then that the blind, who seemed to all have the same mother and father, are actually diverse, and their blindnesses have a well-developed taxonomy. Later I saw newborns without eyeballs, cased in large cylinders of alcohol. They had no eyelids or eyelashes, and their flat brows, like ivory helmets, extended down to their lips. I heard about those born blind who remained blind all their lives, in spite of the fact that their eyes and their optical nerves were intact, virtually functional; and about those who, on the contrary, had normal development of areas of sight in the occipital husk, but still could not see because of some mysterious atrophy or dysfunction in the optical chiasm or retina; those with cataracts on both eyes or invasions of blood in the vitreous humor; those who had no notion of sight, the way we have no notion of what fish feel with the lateral line or what the ovum feels when the spermatozoid first touches it and the chemical capsule on its tip breaks, instantly making the enormous sun of reproduction opaque; those who have a notion of sight, but only on the left, not the right, without one eye being more damaged than the other; those who see images normally, but are not able to understand what they see; those who have the feeling they are surrounded by deep night and those who still perceive a vague luminescence coming from everywhere; those whose blindness is only the fleshly equivalent of some terrible psychodrama (since between the eyes and the testicles, the globes above and below, between castration and plucking out the eyes, there has always been a sadistic and at the same time redemptive transit); those who see as if they’re looking through a screen, and those who see as if they’re inside a dream … Blindness is ragged and gradated: no one sees in full, and no one is utterly blind. And just as all matter of all worlds came from an infinitely dense and burning point in space, just as all life branched out of the first coacervate in the bubbling ocean, sight has arisen in, and been clarified by, the flesh of animals, sprouting from the first point of chromatin in the body of the first paramecium. Its red dot saw only light, intense and pure, undifferentiated into forms and colors. It is the light that rose through the tubes of generations, separating itself from itself and filling with attributes, like the black thread of the snail’s eye rises through its scaly horn to appear on the tip. And perhaps at the end of the growth of sight, like in the Zen parable about the mountain, we will come again to contemplate, in a different way, pure light, with the body changing suddenly into the brain, and the brain becoming only an eye, and the eye disintegrating suddenly into light … And only then will the great unification take place, not of the four forces into one, but of the eye that sees with the world seen by it, in an eye-world continuum that may be called the All …

Over time, the masseur became more talkative, and toward the end of my hospital treatment, the ever more occult, more labyrinthine movements of his fingers on my face were accompanied by bizarre stories, neither flesh nor fowl, whispered, insinuating stories as if he were telling them to himself, as if he expected me to answer — the completion of a phrase left hanging, the flash of recognition at an allusion that for me was utterly obscure … When I entered his office and he recognized my voice (later he probably knew my footsteps, too, or other sounds: who knows, the swish of my clothes, the way I turned the doorknob or knocked) his unmoving face changed to the smile of an enormous Buddha. An odd crease appeared between his eyebrows, as if a bud were struggling to break through, an ocular bud, a seeing mole. He moved behind me, and, executing his ritual, he adorned it with eccentric myths that have stayed alive in my memory. At first, his stories did not have a completely unusual atmosphere, even though it was a little embarrassing that the blind man suddenly shared intimate things with a boy he didn’t know, things that were surely painful for him. Yet he did it with detachment and a kind of half-scientific interest, half self-deprecation that made the revelations bearable, like a few splashes of lemon over the fat spine of the fish on a platter.

Before going blind, he had worked with “the blue-eyed boys.” I didn’t know the expression then, so I asked, “Where?” to which he responded teasingly, “Eh, the guys with stars on their shoulders,” and continued to describe his professional life only in this kind of paraphrase, to the extent that, in the end, in my ingenuous mind of the time, the working-class child whose parents didn’t talk about politics at home, there formed a jumbled-up, fairy-tale image, where I saw the masseur in the middle of a kind of angelic hall of superhumans, all tall and blond, with shining azure eyes … I imagined them naked, statuesque, really white as marble, until their eyes became unsettling and haunting in their Hellenic faces. Their shoulders were decorated with glowing constellations, forming zodiac signs as clear as the decals on glasses. “The happy boys,” as the blind man also called them, could be Cancers, Scorpios, Capricorns, or Virgos, depending on their rank in the hierarchy. They moved among us but were unseen, they heard everything we said, even in the privacy of our homes, and still no one guessed where they held their mysterious meetings, in what network of underground highwaymen’s tunnels … If they were all azure-eyed, it was because their blood itself was azure, like that of gods and spiders. Incorruptible and distant, a race of masters from other areas of the Cosmos, these “boys” (a sign of their ritual virginity), with an unshakable and enigmatic happiness, had interfered somehow, from times immemorial (which went back, according to some rumors, to old king Burebista: because it was certain that Dekeneu, his great priest, due to the heights of the sacred mountain where he lived, had a blue fluid in his veins, with a strong smell of cyanide, blood much better suited to absorbing the scarce oxygen of those heights and transporting it through the systems and mechanisms of his astral body) in the political structures of humanity. More than ever in recent decades, their domination became complete, triumphant. Of a higher rank than the angels, these super-watchers, from their aerial palaces, aimed eagle-gazes over the ant hills that the workers of the earth raised in their cluelessness, and they unleashed themselves from time to time over frightened hoards, snatching mortals toward the sky. No one could penetrate their ways or understand their thoughts. Two men slept in one bed: the one was taken, and the other left; two women were grinding together, one was taken, and the other left. The vultures came in droves to the place where the cadaver lay.

I had this vision while the masseur, whose speech was neither fish nor fowl, pressed my eyelids with his talcum-covered fingers, as though he wanted to open my eyes. “The accident” that made him blind, five years before, removed him forever from that glorious sect. Naturally, those ranks would not admit any being with a deformity, anyone who would disrupt their perfection. The masseur went blind because he had seen too much, he said, and I drew the conclusion that destiny had reserved certain unpleasantness for these privileged beings. The quantity of information that they could receive was limited, and if they consumed their ration before death, they went blind or deaf or insensible for the rest of the years they had to live. Angels fallen into the concrete marsh of streets, metros, and fish markets, dragged the secret of their blue blood with them to their graves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23

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

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

Cut down cowardly from behind

Inert lay now the nation’s boast

Belate! be in our hearts enshrined

… And his cigarette fell, one quarter smoked.”

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

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

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

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

When they started to get rid of some of the yids (’cause the boss was a real anti-Semite), Estera became Emilia. Only close friends still used the old name. Comrade Stănilă Emilia — who once every year assembled the law school department secretaries and the student leaders (handsome young people, their hair cut like the Chinese or Koreans, the girls with skirts well below their knees) to tell them that love of country and Party was much more important than “the beloved person” — had been great during the winter of ’56, when a few mangy students had done some silly things. She had taken measures immediately, first assembling a complete list of all the hoodlums and putting it into the right hands. The officer smiled at the memory: what a nut! During those nights when frost grew high on the windows, Estera was fainting with excitement as she was taken vigorously from behind. She was in the college bathroom, kneeling beside the urinals, and those revolting students did her every way you could imagine, one after another and several at a time … Then she rose to the top of the University Party hierarchy, and now she would rise even more. They had called her to the Capital. He had seen her speaking at meetings several times, and she had an amazing way with words, chapter and verse. She had adapted perfectly to the changing of the Palace guards, from Russophile to nationalist. Ceauşescu’s name replaced Dej’s in the economy of her nocturnal orgasms, which, once Stalin was forgotten and the terrors ended (or because of her advancing age?) diminished slightly in drama, while becoming longer and more carefully staged.

Lieutenant-Major Ion Stănilă wasn’t really known for his intelligence in the Department of State Security. Instead, a mean hillbilly cunning had kept him away from traps, from his colleagues’ ill will, from deals that were too dirty or from deals where you would end up knowing too much. His work had been routine: he recruited informants in a few businesses, so that his desk always had a pile of inarticulate and boring reports, which, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t squeeze anything out of — this one did this, that one said that … “Yesterday, 26 V ’967 was paiday and Maistru Boţan Ilie had a beer, telled the one about the Chief in Hell in a shit tub. He also say that Communists is a society for lazy peoples, that the Germans don’t goof off like we do. He say that over there, the engiuneers keeps their asses in the chairs and their eyes on their works, and we do it all backwards, we keeps our eyes on the chairs and asses in our works …” Most infractions were for political jokes. How the hell were you supposed to arrest a person for that, especially since you knew that the jokes were put out, along with all the rumors, by a special team in Buzeşti, by your own colleagues adapting them from French collections … And they got passed to the Czechs, Bulgarians, Russians, and Poles, so it was no shock that the whole camp laughed at the same jokes, just changing Kadar into Brezhnev or Walter Ulbricht into Ceauşescu. Better to have them laugh than march in the streets. Or how were you supposed to arrest someone for listening to Radio Free Europe? First of all, there weren’t a lot of people doing it, and then, even those who were said it was all lies and provocations. The youth have their music. They need something to suck on, or else they’ll do something even sillier.

Two years ago, he had been surprised to be taken from the routine of meeting stool pigeons in safe houses (actually the squalid dwelling of some worker who left a key for him to use the place while he was at the factory: many of his colleagues used these houses, in fact, more as “fuck rooms” for their women), and to receive his first more unusual mission. Information existed that throughout Eastern Europe, wandering troupes of free-professionals had appeared, nomadic circus performers who entertained at fairs and vacant lots at the edge of town, troupes that resisted legitimate attempts to centralize the artistic phenomena of the circus world and place it under state control, following the model of the celebrated Moscow State Circus. Of course, there had always been rope dancers, fire swallowers and sword swallowers, strong men, dwarves, and paranormals, but what was happening now was completely different. The itineraries of some twenty of these kinds of troupes, from Gdansk to Groznâi, had followed pointless routes, apparently unconnected to immediate sources of profit. They often arrived at market sites and regular festivals, but not during the traditional fair season. Some drove covered carts or GAZ trucks with clanging sheet metal and drove in circles, while others, after a long straight path, sometimes going through rapeseed and sunflower fields, suddenly curled wide toward the left. As though on command, all of the troupes performed their shows simultaneously, on the same day and at the same time. This made the KGB officers, who were the first to be briefed (coincidence?) on the circus people’s strange maneuvers, suppose that there was either an existing plan, known and followed like a train schedule by all of the troupes, or that there was constant communication between the convoys. The second hypothesis fell right away. There was no physical contact in evidence, not by radio, homing pigeons, or human messengers. The idea of a pre-existing conspiracy, probably against state orders (there was some evidence in this respect), became the working hypothesis of the socialist secret services, even though the possibility of a political, military, or even industrial espionage network was not ruled out (some of the circus people did own and use cameras, old ones, true, actually daguerreotypes, which projected inverted images directly onto opaque glass plates). Moscow sent a coordinated plan of counterattack to the satellite countries. Then, in 1966, and not two years later, the first rebellion against the Russians had happened nearby, those first beatings of national pride; the Securitate leadership checked with the “Big Chief” to cover its ass and then rejected the Soviet plan, with many tactful caveats, demonstrating that, given our particular conditions, measures should be taken on the local level. The national plan was code-named “Operation Sycamore,” not for some occult reason, but simply because the officer in charge was Major Sycamore Bădescu. Being a bit of a physiognomist — the Major had written his doctorate in criminology on the works of Gall and Lombroso, in connection with recent work on “the crime chromosome” —, the officer chose the most “folksy-faced” people for the operation, so that they would integrate perfectly into the atmosphere on Moşilor Street. Idiots, fatties, rosacea drunks, crosseyed hillbillies, one-toothed brachycephalics, women with beehives and powdered faces, teenagers with wet lips and the crooked gaze of onanists — this was the profile of ideal agents for the present mission, in the Fellini-like vision of Major Bădescu. The fact that all of these features presupposed a subsidiary oligophrenia produced a paradox: like any artist, the major would have to accept that his ideal was impossible in the world of the senses. Wasn’t it Leonardo da Vinci himself who said that the hand cannot follow the mind? “La polizia e una cosa mentale,” said Sycamore Bădescu to himself, smiling bitterly, and he used what he had at hand.

Thus did (then) Lieutenant Ion Stănilă come to sell Turkish fezzes made of aluminium foil and crepe paper, sequined trumpets, and cardboard glasses in the fetid crowd at the Moşilor market, in the wineshop and meat-patty autumn of ’66. Between the fish market, with its putrid stench of salt and women, and the Obor hall, the vast pavement of the piaţa was no longer visible under the mud. The chairs of the chain carousel rotated crazily at the back of the scenery. The motor was hidden by panels dotted with dancing Arab girls and camels with human faces. A sea of people crowded under the central stem with their arms and legs held out by centrifugal force. Even though you wouldn’t think you had enough room to take your hand out of your pocket, the mob managed to advance in fat heaps toward the piaţa, the wine shop, the cheesemongers with their little cloudy jars, and the mounds of crates where the popular soda sold for 75 bani, in round, dull bottles. Dressed in a sheep fleece, pulled tight like a theater costume, with a fez on his head, and blowing a horn shaped like a butterfly proboscis that shot out when filled with air, the officer found himself on a corner near the booths where the circus shows were performed. On the little table in front of him, he also sold sawdust-filled balls of colored paper that hung by rubber bands, clay birds painted strawberry and indigo, with colored feathers on their tails, celluloid weebles with lead bases, and sunglasses with red cellophane lenses. The kids around him, ragged and snotty from the bad weather, constantly stretched out their hands to steal or beg for a hat or a ball, and the lieutenant, with his eyes all around, could barely keep up surveillance of the circus entryway. From time to time he put a paper fez on the boy’s head, so he would walk through the piaţa as a living advertisement. It was strange how caught up in the business he became. He got the goods from the DSS inventory, and now he was chewing his fingernails over how to make a profit, however small, for himself, so first he started to ask 50 bani more than the price set by his superiors, then a whole leu. He haggled with the clients, like at the market, and he tried to trick them when counting money. On the very first day he was surprised to find himself, by lunchtime, completely oblivious to his mission. Hundreds of suspects might have passed him while, red in the face with effort, he hawked his wares. At night, tossing and turning in bed beside his wife, whose freckles were lit faintly in the dark like ground cloves dusting a gingerbread figurine, Lieutenant Stănilă plainly saw on his retina heaps of metal watches with multicolor plastic bands, multicolor wrappers, referee’s whistles, rubber balls, hamsters running on wheels and elephants pulled by the weight of gold coins.

It was only on the second day that the officer began the disturbing adventure that he now, in his room on Dristor, awaiting his superior, relived in his memory, against his will, just as he had done hundreds and thousands of times before. The Securitate officer returned to his corner at the fair, beside the booths covered over with pictures of clowns, the deformed women in swimsuits, and a hideous spider with a girl’s head and chest (the girl had vampire fangs and blood on her lower lip). He was blowing hard on his horn to make it shoot straight out, when suddenly he saw a terribly familiar face in the crowd of people gaping at the emcee on the booth platform. A jolt of ice-cold adrenaline overwhelmed his arteries. Good Lord, that evening in May, with beetles thudding through the dark rose of Ghica Tei park, and the dizzying smell of lilac. The descent, through the plinth of Pushkin’s statue, into the green empires of fear … The levitation over palaces and halls of a transparent hell … And the sphinx-like face of the princess in the oval window, a fairy-tale face in blue satin crinoline, sitting at the spinet piano with its lid inlaid with mother-of-pearl … The languor of her eyes and the horrible, scabby tumor on her neck … It was her, but now in a worn-out raincoat, now with pallid lips marked with cloudy sores, wearing a man’s boots and galoshes. The emcee shouted something into the microphone, but nothing more came out of the box speakers than a groan like a truck. Beside him, a wide, flabby old lady with bleached hair juggled bowling pins. Her lamé dress made her look like a decrepit virago. “Get your tickets, the show is starting!” said the man in black, dropping the microphone, and some of those who gaped, but not too many, mainly those with children, climbed the platform steps and bought tickets. The multitude of trinkets on Officer Stănilă’s improvised stand faded away, while he was unable to take his eyes from the being he had once seen in an inexplicable trance and who had suddenly invaded reality like the smell of sewage, brusquely delivered by a gust of air. She was there, concrete and splattered by the Obor mud, mixed in with the mob of peasants and slum-dwellers, where even a neck boil the size of a quince was not out of place, among twisted faces, toothless mouths, mealy eyes, and gout-swollen fingers. The girl climbed the platform too and bought a ticket. For the second time, but for a different reason, the officer completely forgot his mission. He dryly closed his case with colored ribbons and paper hats, put the wooden goat to one side, and case and all, he presented himself to the blonde in the lamé dress, who had transformed into the cashier. Ticket in hand, he entered the room mechanically behind the others and searching in a daze for the girl.

The hall seemed much larger from the inside than you would have believed from the brightly painted booth outside. At one end a stage was visible, with a blue sheet hanging with a few gold stars. There was no other scenery. The walls were bare, unplanned planks, the floor was made from the same material, and the fifteen-or-so rows of chairs were set up like seats in a movie theater, pivoting up and down on rods, with numbered tags on the backs. It smelled disgustingly like kerosene, like all the theaters did at that time, and on the ground, never mopped, sunflower seed shells and pretzel crumbs

with salt and poppy seeds

it’s what your stomach needs

swam in spit. Someone, maybe at the previous show, had dropped a bottle of ţuica, and now it smelled overwhelmingly of plums, and you could get drunk just off the thick fumes. With a fez on his head, forgotten in his emotion, and carnival glasses on his eyes, the officer sat in one of the last rows and changed seats a few times to the right or to the left, because meaty peasants, in heavy sheep coats and hats, sat down in front of him. His chest beat powerfully, as though not just his heart, but also his lungs, throat, the marrow in his spinal canal and the ganglia of nerves were pulsating, hot, synchronized and suffocating. The young woman in the brick-colored raincoat, with cheap clips holding her hair above the gaping sore, sat quietly three rows of black chairs ahead.

Onstage, the first to appear was a thick woman in a fringed bathing suit. She had large red lips like a black woman, and she tossed and twisted and slid a snake along her neck. The snake wasn’t too big. It moved like wax, and it was ringed with alternating stripes of coral, black, and gold. The woman danced with the snake to a broken, scratchy music that came from a speaker that matched the one outside, as she wrapped it around one arm, passed it over her breasts, and then finally, took it tightly by its head and looked directly into its gemstone eyes. From time to time the snake stuck out its thin, forked tongue, cylindrical and wet as a worm. Staring fixedly, the woman suddenly opened her mouth and took the snake’s head between her thick lips, sucking it into her interior. Centimeter by centimeter, the reptile penetrated the woman’s throat, dilated with swollen veins like an opera singer’s. The rouged ring of the dancer’s mouth expanded more and more as the slippery body widened, and her eyes became glassy and cloudy, as though she herself had become an ophiuroid. The heavily painted lady spent a few long minutes swallowing the muscular, living cylinder, until the snake disappeared completely down her throat and into her stomach. Then she started to dance again, rocking her navel, sometimes shaking her white buttocks beneath the noses of the front rows, until she regained her vulgar gaze. Then she stood still again, her stomach moved a few times as though she would burp, her neck dilated again, and the glassy body of the reptile emerged from her lips like a tumescent tongue. Grabbing it immediately, she slowly pulled out the enormous earthworm, whose body bore carmine traces of lipstick. A cage was brought in and a black rabbit was pulled out by its ears. Once set on the stage, the snake lifted the first third of its body, leaned toward the disoriented, jumping rabbit and jetted forward, biting its ear. The rabbit held still, its entire body throbbed, and then it collapsed, all in a single moment, onto one side, its little legs trembling. The woman presented its corpse triumphantly, yanking it by the ears. She kissed the snake sweetly on the nose and exited to wild applause.

Next, two bare-chested gypsies in billowing pants juggled torches, to the chattering of a chimpanzee who, the lieutenant observed, had an ugly wound on its elbow. And it always protected it, keeping it close while it did somersaults, rumbling on its long and hairy arms with its knees tucked in. It had an oddly thick chain around its neck, held at the other end by the emcee, who had taken off his black suit and, in short-sleeves and shorts, was now the animal trainer. The monkey had such sad eyes that you could not look at it if you were past childhood. With its performance ended the “numerous wild animals” were announced at the entryway. Next there was a cataleptic woman sleeping on a bed of swords, who was none other than the big blond woman in her gold dress of flashing metal.

The officer let himself be stolen away by the charm of the fair again, marveling with wide eyes at everything that happened on the stage. The country boy in him was warmly happy, because when he was little he had never been on a teeter-totter, shot at a bottle, or gone to a circus sideshow, even though he would have given his own skin to do so. He had satisfied himself with what they showed on the platform, before the show, when they promised ten times as much if you went inside. Now he had entered, he was inside, and he couldn’t wait to see the spider-woman, the show’s number one attraction. And back in Teleorman, there had been, years ago, a spider-woman, but soon she stopped performing because — so the rumor went — she had married the ox-tongued man and gotten pregnant. The one here now was either the same one, which would make her pretty old, or another, maybe her kid. In either case, Stănilă had recognized her in the painting on the booths, at the entryway, her black mane and beastly green eyes, her globe-like tits, and the blind and hideous brood of black legs from which the monster’s torso emerged. It was identical to the one on the billboards in his memory, as though fairground painters followed canons, like those who painted churches.

In the end, after the starry rag of the stage background had framed a rather curious number (on a table, from the water of a glass carafe, dry leaves emerged and branched into a shrub the color of cinnamon. Multicolored, exotic fish fluttered tiny vial-like fins at the end of the many little branches, sucking water or sap. Sometimes they let go of the branch and glided around the fair hall, like sparkling dragonflies, to return to the bush and put their cartilaginous lips to the end of another branch), it got quiet and dark. Then there was a rending scream, a backwards scream, born not from a source outside of vibration, such as the larynx of a living man being chopped into pieces, but in the depths of the auditory cortex of each spectator, in the complex neurons that detect the loudness, pitch, and timbre of sounds, and which now created them out of nothing, curled up alongside the Sylvian fissure. In each listener, the roar of a spider and a woman lit the synapses and axons of the medial geniculate nucleus, ran down along the efferent nerves toward the inferior colliculus, encoded in the frequency of the electrical current leaping through supple tubes from each node of Ranvier that descended into the ventral cochlear nucleus, and filtered through the superior olivary nucleus in the brain stem, filling the aqueduct of the cochlear nerve. The electric scream passed through the massive brain stem, filling grottos and strange fissures, frightened Madonnas-with-child enthroned in stalactites, and finally entered the upside-down snail of the inner ear. It went into thousands of flashing rivulets, each watering, and at the end, it entered a transparent cell with tiny hairs housed along the spiral, between the tectorial and basilar membranes, in yellow, gelatinous lymph. Here, the inhuman howl, of being boiled in oil or flayed alive, of suffering a general metastasizing cancer, became a vibration of the endolymph that filled Reissner’s membrane, then transmitted the rising tidal wave in the oval window to the perilymph. Like a machine’s organs, the stirrup, anvil, and hammer continued the mechanical vibration and transmitted it to the tympanum, which, through the wax-filled auditory canal, made the air vibrate. And dozens of outer-ear pavilions amplified the scream like megaphones, alternately compressing and thinning the air, directing the terror toward the stage, concentrating it into one side, where a scarlet spotlight lit abruptly and everyone saw the spider-woman was screaming. The cries of agony, born in the minds of those who looked at her, penetrated her mouth, dilated her trachea, broke open the bronchi of her lungs, and swelled the thick veins on her temples. Everyone pumped into her the terror that passed through her torso, envenomed her breasts, and extended the arched bridges of her back, her hairy legs with terrible claws, her round and fragile stomach, full of eggs and innards, and the spinneret grown at its end, through which transparent silk ran. As with the voice of a woman who screams in orgasm beneath a man who strikes her rhythmically between her thighs, holding her hard, without escape, you could clearly distinguish two voices — one from the beautiful head with curly hair and thin skin like a child’s, and one from the pelvic animal. In the uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes, the vagina and labia, both voices are superimposed, and precisely from that mixture comes the excited and sweet moans, not just of any woman, but of your beloved, and not just of your beloved, but of any whore who ever screamed beneath a man. In the terrible howl of the fairground Sphinx, you clearly heard the voice of a woman and the voice of a spider, one stirring an amniotic pity, and the other freezing the blood in your veins and ravishing your mind with horror.

The spider-woman stood there in a blood-wetted corner of the stage and screamed, wagging her head on her long neck to one side and another for much too long for a human being, resembling more a transparent stalk, and scrutinizing the dark of the hall with her green eyes, like a wild animal, as though there were something she was expecting. The spotlight came from the back wall in a purple cylinder, like in a movie theater, illuminating the heads and chair backs in its path. The smoke of cheap cigarettes tossed and turned in the thick ray, making floral patterns of living ash. Although the officer, his hair on end and eyes gaping — Ionică from Teleorman, Ilie Aptrachei’s boy, who had never been to a sideshow — was completely under the spell of the sight of the spider with a woman’s trunk, a living movement, wet and small, much closer to him, attracted his attention suddenly and made his eyeballs converge in front of him on one of the heads, profiled in the wine-colored rays. He started violently and remembered himself, his mission, reality. Moving to rub his scalp, he tapped the edge of the cardboard fez. He yanked it off and threw it on the ground. For that head surrounded by the haze of flashing curls belonged, of course, to the Suspect, the princess, she of the tumescent neck, beautiful like no one else and repulsive like an image from a nightmare. Now, out of the tumor as big as a newborn’s head, peeling and oozing, a gently throbbing, glassy being emerged. The officer, leaning forward on alert, saw the worm prop itself up on small feet and emerge from the cocoon, with antennae like two needles with knobby ends and two flat, matte eyes. He saw it, completely hatched, clamber onto the girl’s head, wiping the liquid off, with its stomach alternately swelling and shrinking, and he saw how this action little by little pumped out a pair of ragged wings, unfolded them, flattened and dried them, until on top of the shining hair of the proletarian princess, like a diadem, the wings of a splendid butterfly spread out, much larger than the officer had ever seen. It took flight in the hall, like a multicolored bat, in and out of the spotlight rays. Its circles, following the bundle of Lobachevsky’s horocircles (ah, Herman!), came closer and closer to the Sphinx who, modulating her screeching into sweet glissandi like a meow, followed the flight of the lepidopteran with her green, beastly eyes. When, in a final loop, it sailed alongside the suffering face of the woman-chimera, a long and sticky tongue grabbed it, crushing its fragility, wrapping around its ringed body and pulling it into her rouged mouth, which chewed it avidly. For a while, at the corners of the mouth, the ends of dry wings were visible, but eventually these too slid into the mouth of the spider-woman …

“Stop! Stop! Turn on the lights!” yelped Stănilă suddenly, leaping to his feet. “Securitate!” The spotlight went out and there was a terrible scramble. People poured out on every side, running into and trampling each other. “Turn the lights on for fuck’s sake!” shouted the officer again, trying to get to the stage, buffeted by bodies in fur coats. Now he knew: the contact had been made! The butterfly was the message! “You thieves!” he shouted like he was out of his mind when he finally reached the dirty stage wings, a booth in fact, full of moth-eaten costumes. He grabbed the collar of the barker who, in the gray light of day that came through the window, was a poor little man with the face of a civil servant. The spider-woman was nothing other than a slutty girl with a chin full of zits, who had just taken the black and hairy legs made of thread-filled rags off her hips. The snake swallower was in a housedress and was combing the chimpanzee’s head for fleas, holding it in her lap like a child. A woman burst in, frightened, holding a piece of old newspaper — the baba in lamé, who left the booth door open in her surprise. “Aha! The evidence! You’re doing yourselves in!” Stănilă grabbed the newspaper that the woman was bringing back from the privy, unfolded it and …

Two years later, the officer still could see before his eyes an enormous, illegible, hazy newspaper article with a headline two fingers tall that he tried in vain to read, an article printed around a map of Eastern Europe, the socialist camp, over which, in a large arc, beginning with Eastern Germany, going down through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, and climbing again toward the middle of the Russian steppes, a word was written, in enormous type:

BLINDING

The lieutenant knew that he was holding a document of historic importance. The letters showed nothing other than the path of the travelling caravans, which cut through fields, crossed watercourses, went brazenly up mountains and sank into sulfurous swamps to draw (for whose eyes?) with invisible traces a word across the curvature of the planet. He alone, Securitate officer Stănilă Ion, through his exceptional abilities, had unmasked a (fascist? American? or, like he had read in Science and Technology magazine, extraterrestrial?) conspiracy against the state powers of the Warsaw Pact. Naturally, what he had found was only one tile of the politico-diplomatic chain of dominos, but it was essential. His superiors barely realized how important it was. As for him, he could not have imagined a greater triumph than to go home one fine day and embrace his little Jew and whisper in her ear: “Wife, take a look at your major!” “I’m very curious to know how a major makes love,” she would whisper, and the two of them would end up on the rug in their house’s sumptuous hallway …

Unfortunately, none (or almost none) of this happened. Stănilă did not receive anything more, two years later, than one star to go with the other two on his epaulet. A banal promotion, for years of service, not merit. After a moment of panic, the circus people had asked for his identification, and he discovered that he had no papers on him at all. They had been stolen in the crowd, even the badge from his coat pocket. Then the circus people began to yell and hit him with whatever they could find, shouting, “Crazy jerk! Get out, get the hell out of here!” Even the monkey jumped on his back and yanked his hair. Scratched and beaten by gypsies, smeared with greasepaint by saltimbanques, and blinded by clouds of face powder, he was sent off with a formidable kick from the spider-woman directly into the putrid pond behind the wheeled booth, where he lay unconscious until evening. When he woke up, across the sky there was nothing but a blood-colored stripe. The caravan had disappeared, and nothing more remained but the wooden sideshow booth in the middle of the deserted piaţa. Behind him, the motionless chain carousel stood against the sky like a sad mushroom. A dull bulb on a lightpost, far away, increased the air of desolation. The suitcase of fair trinkets, of course, had also disappeared. The officer came home huffing and hawing, after he had argued with the tram inspector because he didn’t even have five bani for a ticket. The last surprise of the unhappy day awaited him in his little nest of folly, where he found his wife discovering with delight how a major makes love … his own supervisor, Sycamore Bădescu, whose ruddy butt, decorated with two large balls, was pumping vigorously between the white gams, in satin stockings, of his Esther. It was given to the unhappy lieutenant to listen one more time, covered in mud and propped against the bedroom doorway, to her passionate abuse of the leaders of humanity …

Having reached this desolate point in his remembrance, the lieutenant-major, sitting in his office in an anonymous Bucharest building, held his head in his hands and pressed his eyeballs with the tips of his stiff fingers. He pushed until the green-blue dots drew a misshapen carpet over his field of vision that reminded him of the ink blots of a Rorschach test, where, at the time, he had only seen, only … but the officer refused to remember what came next, and he pushed away, with desperate gestures, the flashing images, loaded with hate and horror, with which his consciousness assaulted him: the starched fabric of the straightjacket, the bearded doctor, the tranquilizers, the fights with the other patients, the escape attempt at night, in his pajamas, in the deserted quiet of the tram. He’d been captured again and held in the high-security wing for six months, and for two of those weeks he’d been strapped down … And then the morning when he woke up with a clear mind and feeling light, completely in control of himself, when he asked to be contacted by his superiors regarding a question of maximum importance … The Securitate acknowledged him only after another week, during which he was subjected to countless tests, each more disconcerting than the one before, jumping between questions and images, until Stănilă came to believe he was simply a lab rat, the object of some research, with his mind exposed to reveal its obscenity and turpitude to inscrutable superhumans. They applied the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory, which through its 550 questions crucified him on four validity scales (? L, F, and K) and nine clinical scales (hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, masculinity/femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, hypomania). Then came Galton’s word-association test in the Jungian variation, the thematic apperception, the Rosenzweig study, with 24 pictures of frustration, and the Szondi test, with 48 photographs of mental patients … In the end, terrible, terrible butterflies drawn in charcoal, pencil, and blood on the Rorschach cards (Herman Rorschach — isn’t that strange?), where he couldn’t see anything but … From messer Sandro di Mariana a. k. a. Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci learned to stimulate the imagination through chance marks left on a wall by a paint sponge. You could see landscapes and battles, and yellow human torsos turned in strange positions, but more importantly you saw yourself, since ogni pintore depinge se … Koch’s Baum test and the Machover Draw a Person test concluded the graphico-linguistic avalanche that a normal, dignified mind would have responded to in only one way: aphasia, and it may in fact be that this is always the response.

The pajama-clad lieutenant was in a daze of tests and para-tests when he was visited by an unusually massive man, with a head like an ox and brown eyes, who stood beside his bed, hands in his pockets, looking toward him without much interest. “I’m just a pig-farmer’s kid,” said Stănilă to himself, over and over, and not only in this regard. “That’s what we country people are, damn pig-farmer’s kids, ready to pull our hats on our hearts whenever the boyar comes.” And in fact, everyone in the hospital room had stood up in a kind of silly ten-hut even before the stranger showed his papers. And the truth is that he didn’t make a great effort. The doctor who followed him was so scared-looking that he didn’t need any other identification. At a wave, the doctor disappeared, and a short and frustrating discussion followed. The stranger did not believe one iota of the phantasmagoria with the spider-woman. It’s also true that he didn’t think the jejune lieutenant was lying. He believed that there, in the side-show booth, something else had happened: that the officer had found out about something so terrible that his mind had sealed the revelation off, had vomited it out like poison, like an object it could not digest, and it had woven in its place the flimsy scenario that Stănilă remembered. The traces of the truth might persist in his subconscious, so that the superior officer (Romanian Securitate? KGB? Both at once?) recommended — it was, in fact, an order — that Stănilă be interrogated while in a state of disinhibition. Resigned, Stănilă accepted. He knew what the man was talking about: Jagodka disinhibition, something they had also used. How the hell, he always asked himself, were the high-class spies trained to withstand an Amytal Interview? In any case, this method had proven more efficient than torture, and it had revolutionized the interrogation process. Only South American cretins (Stănilă still thought, then) would still use the electric clamps. Bloodthirsty animals.

That same evening, they gave him a subcutaneous injection of caffeine. The effect, in comparison with a cup of coffee, was of course more rapid and, above all, purer. His mind glowed like a crystal. He became more intelligent and articulate. He strove to convince his superior officer, sitting on a stool next to his bed, that his Moşi vision had been real in every detail. He described with cinematic precision the patterns and shades of the butterfly’s wings. He showed on what basis he held that the butterfly was the message. He reproduced from memory, verbally, the path of the wandering circus troupes over the map of Eastern Europe, down to the least important places they had gone. In fact, the entire map, like under a powerful light, shone eidetically in front of his eyes. He tried to read the title of the article floating around him like a fog, but it was, yet again, impossible. After a quarter hour they injected him, this time intravenously, very slowly, with a solution of sodium amytal, 10g per 100ml of sterile water. In a flash he saw — felt, knew, experienced — the entire network of his blood vessels, as though they were dyed florescent colors, and in love. His jugular veins, like two hands with delicate fingers, rose and fed the heavenly mandarin of his brain, which glittered all over with delight. And the blazing flame of love united his sublime body in happiness. The map of his body became the evanescent map of his language, twisting like the steam over coffee. His skin and nervous system formed a syntactic structure, branching in relations of independent, coordinating, and dependent clauses, groups of verbs and nouns, structures both deep and superficial, the fleshless, functional body of language. Morphology ran through his osteo-muscular system, and groups of muscles and bones were juxtaposed with parts of speech, contracting and relaxing in declinations, conjugations, and inflected endings; the paunches of coiled substances and glands produced the vocabulary in which epithelia and mucus and flat muscles and bacteria and vomit and saliva and gastric juices and fermented feces and insulin, lips and anus and esophagus and rectum, and bowels and duodenum, and bile and hunger and satiety merged, generating semantic fields. They stratified into calques from Greek and Turkish, slang and indecipherable jargon, the sublime phonetics of the respiratory apparatus, gentle fingers of god and zephyr blowing on the vocal chords; and the imaginary, the mystical body of the garden of roses, the moon leaning tenderly over the sun’s shoulder (the eternal incest of the sun and moon in our astral body), sprung from the sexual glands, from the grotesque monster between the legs, from the gaping eggs in their oily sacs and from the purple, rubbery glans, camouflaged in soft skin, in the cavernous body of the worm that spits in turn, into the world, and just as hot, the purest and most abject substance, the ivory of life and the residual waters. A more fantastic flower never blossomed from a more revolting root.

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

24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On one of the evenings, when the intensive care ward looked at itself for a few minutes, I suddenly felt that I was looking. I sat up, fresh and nonchalant, without any crack in my consciousness, perfectly aware of what had happened and where I was. I removed the transparent tube from my nose by myself, slowly, like an exotic parasite, and then I touched my face. Trying to smile, I noted — as I had already guessed — the elasticity and docility of my muscles that raised the corners of my mouth. I had made great progress. I could blink my left eye — true, more slowly than the right, and not all the way — and I could raise my eyebrows. For a few months, my smile would stay crooked, and my face would always have a gentle asymmetry. The world of my left eye, withered from so much privation and humidity, would be crepuscular and dark, with strange olive tones, but, combined with the radiant colors from the right, it would not bother me too much. On the contrary, this way my world has a special topography, which I didn’t notice before the illness, and which looks like the world in a dream, when every shape is porously illuminated by emotion.

Doctor Zlătescu, who was in charge of our ward, seemed to have expected I would come back to life. I hadn’t been myself more than an hour yet when she came toward my bed like a Fury, red with indignation, with her teeth clenched. She called me everything, stupid suicide, senseless, idiot kid. She asked me rhetorically (since she was too angry to listen to anyone) what had been in my sick head when I did that. Didn’t I realize I could have died, for Christ’s sake? Didn’t I think about my parents? And how bad would she look, she who was responsible for me as long as I was in the hospital? I listened, scared, embarrassed by the indecent sounds she made in the eternal twilight of the basement. I wouldn’t have known how to respond, anyway. After a little while she calmed down, spent, and sat on the edge of my bed, and after a long silence, she looked at me and smiled. Like a newborn who sees a smiling mask, I raised, reflexively, the corners of my mouth. “You’re going the right way, băbuţo,” she told me, mussed my hair a bit and left. I would see Doctor Zlătescu again after seven or eight years, one sunny day, downtown on Magheru Boulevard. I was with a friend from college and we were gossiping about the Folklore assistant when I saw her: even in the middle of summer when the asphalt melted under our feet, she was wearing a grotesque wool hat, with vines of her dandruffy hair coming out in all directions. On the breast of her spandex, fluorescent-green dress, she wore scout badges and medals. Yellow unit commander ribbons emerged from a purse of ripped white rubber-cotton that she’d found in some trash pile. Her face was a terrible mask of insanity. She talked incessantly, pointing at a parking sign … I was shaken for the rest of the day. That evening, I sat at the window for hours, in the twilight yellow like a sodium flame, repeating the motto of my life: “God, what is happening? What the hell is happening?” to which the city responded with murmurs and specters.

Mamma came every day to sob at my bed, to brush back my sweat from my brow and to straighten the bag of glucose on the stand. She also could not understand what had made me run hundreds of volts through my fragile skull, peeling off layers and layers of old calcium. When they moved me again to the neurology ward, she came back to life, especially when I could smile without effort. She kept trying to hide her hands, stiff and blackened like an auto mechanic’s, which I had seen right away, but I hadn’t wanted to say anything about their terrible state. She said she had cleaned the sink or undone the trap underneath, she wasn’t sure … Only when I went home again, after about ten days (during which time they did several EEGs without finding anything), I found out what had happened: my mother had argued horribly with my dad, and she was trying desperately to find a job and make a little money, so that he didn’t have to take care of her, a fact that he constantly threw in her face. Some newspaper ad had unleashed this mess. One day she came home with a spool of steel wire and a kind of bizarre drill, with a vise attached — it turned out to be a spring-turning machine. “Ma’am, this work isn’t for you,” the metal worker had said humbly at the shop that placed the ad, but my mother insisted, and now she was trying to work at home, in the kitchen, tripping over spirals of blackened wire, moaning and whining about her hands, while the springs came out crooked and twisted, or they sprang back, recalcitrant, smacking her fingers and scraping the backs of her hands. When she started it up, the drill screamed loud enough to make the whole block jump to its feet. In a kind of martyrdom mixed with pain and hate, and the desire to victimize the entire world, my mother kept at this dumb idea for a few months, and she never made even one spring right. Her hair smelled like hot iron, and her hands were one big wound, but she went back to her torture, night after night, with a crazed blindness, refusing to listen to anyone, her eyes fixed and red, and when I held her hands and tried to talk to her rationally, she writhed and shouted like she was out of her mind: “Leave me alone! Stay out of it, snotface! Leave me alone!” This was her plan to punish my father.

It had been a hard winter. The mounds of brown snow lining Ştefan cel Mare were taller than a person. The plows, lined up one after another, were still parked along the sidewalk, and their drivers, in coveralls and fur hats, stood in a circle for a little ţuica. In the morning, my windows were frozen everywhere. In the bottom part, the frost was completely dull and twisted in rhythms of Art Nouveau, while a hand’s width from the top, the ice became translucent, wet, and wavy, and through it, standing on the bedstead, I liked to look at the snowy city. The air was so milky then, and the fog was so compact, that the rapidly falling flakes were barely visible. Bucharest looked like a child’s drawing, all roofs buried in snow and smoking chimneys. The roads, in spite of the plows and salt, were covered again immediately with new immaculate layers, which then dirtied into puddles of milky coffee by twilight. And twilight came quickly, at four in the afternoon, when the streetlights came on, and the snow-filled sky darkened into rose and remained red all night. I spent countless nights at that window, watching how it snowed furiously in the neon lights, and counting cars and trams … Once, in a winter that I cannot place (in childhood? in a dream? in another life?), something disturbing and charming happened. Only a splinter of it remains in my mind, flashing now and then without hope of elucidation: the painful violet of the imagination … a snow-covered hill … a green window … Nothing more, but in this nothing was a tangle of beings and inexpressible states, a kind of a prophecy, an aura, a happiness with a tight heart …

In spring, late in April, at night, I had the first “dream” with that terrible, terrible sound, amplified into a flame. In the golden, transparent air of my waking mind, or my ultra-waking mind, open like a triumphant crown in my sleeping body, a spiral appeared in my head. A long and fine arc, made up of smaller spirals, each twisting in turn, rotated spiral after spiral, making another one, hundreds of times larger, which rotated in turn around another axis, making close, flexible circles. From the new tube another formed, and from this one another, endlessly upwards and downwards, so that you could climb up and down from spiral to spiral, from one existential level to another, without limits, you could encompass the entire spiral simultaneously in each of its spirals, you could simultaneously become the master of the universe and the nothing of nothingness … The grandeur of the embossed tubes that began at the third and fourth level up could barely be imagined, and the others grew exponentially, so much that they broke the crystal safe of any mind, escaping into obliteration and insanity. And still I followed them, while the sound of gold and the void grew with each new level, until the spirals and the sound were one, and my face shattered like a handful of dust in the breath of God. Then I screamed, carbonized by beatitude and torture, in phrases I no longer knew, although I could touch them like the hard blades of knives. After a time without succession, my being acquired an asymmetry, the volume of a non-spatial void and the absence of light. Just as abyssal caves swab the dark and cold with their bioelectric train, I felt a Being approach — a Being made of cosmoses. Every cosmos had inhabited worlds, and every one of those worlds had a multitude of inhabitants. Their material was fire, and their thoughts sparked like supernovas. I shouted toward that Being, and it responded.

The center of the dream, the gate, the vulva, can no longer be described. I woke up in another dream, in a foggy levitation, wandering through the well-known rooms of our apartment. At five in the morning, when the sun was a scarlet ball over the Dâmboviţa Mill and my sweaty parents were sleeping under disordered sheets, I felt a wave of love for my mother, for the closeness of her shape completely wrapped in a sheet, like a mummy. Then I went back to my own bed in the room above the street, a mechanical movement, without thought … I woke up disoriented. I remember the trip to the bathroom, my small pointless actions, and shaking all over, like a cornered animal … It would all repeat dozens of times, almost identically, up to today (yes, almost up to today), for fourteen years. And each time after that, sometimes for a week, I dropped everything, sinking completely into my piercing sense of predestination. I was called toward something, there were signs, coincidences multiplied, and in my mind there were imperious and strange images, but I was to be held a bit longer in the antechamber of understanding. I would have preferred eternal torture, if torture was predestined. My past was the key, the disturbing signs seemed to be legible, I had to begin the great reading, but no shining star offered me any epiphany of understanding. I didn’t know whether the lines of my life (voices and caresses, clouds and cities, laughter and the earth full of worms) should be read vertically or horizontally, from the left or the right, of if I should go back and forth in the boustrophedon of my childhood. I didn’t know if the writing was pictographic, phonetic or if it was a writing at all. Illustrations and illuminations, vignettes and friezes with labyrinths of reeds decorated the old book of hours, its pages made of skin. In the filigree of every page, I could see a braid of blue and red veins, beating with a single pulse, irrigating the paragraphs. Arborescent nerves made every letter as sensitive as a tooth. Mistakes were attacked with antibodies of lymph. The parchment was alive, like skin just flayed from a martyr, and it smelled of ink and blood. What precisely was written on my skin, or what was tattooed there, between my nipples, was completely obscure to me. Thinking and fretting didn’t help, just as good eyesight doesn’t help an illiterate. After weeks of helpless reverie, I abandoned the search and returned to my sorry everyday life.

25

“ ‘QUILIBREX!’ shouted Fra Armando down the underground corridor, through walls of pale-shining quartz flowers, and the guardian, completely covered in a rubber hazmat suit with a gas mask on his face, let us pass, after he pressed into each of our palms a glass cylinder, thick and warm, pointed at the tip, which he pulled like expensive candies, from a white cardboard box. I put my vial into my pants pocket and forgot about it for a long time. While we were walking, always in descent, along the more and more irregular path, crossing pitch-black lakes, staying away from the wheeling depigmented bats, whose ramifying veins were visible through their skin, pinched on the shoulders by crustaceans on the ceiling with comically long antennae, leaving behind formations of karst so beautiful your heart would stop, we watched the hierophants of the abyss out of the corners of our eyes. The priest was always ahead of us, lighting our way with a magnesium torch. I could not see his albino ally, unless I craned my neck and looked far behind us, which seemed to be somehow unfitting or prohibited, since Monsieur Monsú, whenever I turned my gaze, gestured angrily for me to look forward. Or maybe he only wanted me to pay attention to the ever more frequent fissures in the swampy floor: sinkholes whose bottoms you could not see, emanating a green tumescence. The Albino, with his now-dead raspberry bead floating over his face like a miniscule satellite shadowing a milky planet, was the last in the group. On his head and shoulders, the transparent crustaceans teemed in thousands, surrounding him, like a speleological god, with millions of rays of continuously moving antennae. His eyes, in daylight as pale as a snake’s, were now only two slightly bellied ovals, a statue’s eyes, with no trace of irises or pupils. We walked between these two as black people, more enslaved, humiliated, powerless and fascinated than any one of our people ever was. Hamites, Cushites, Ethiopians, and Zombies. Chained, tortured, and whipped by white hands like the sails of a windmill, leaving the Ivory Coast on reeking galleons. Filling the mines, bordellos, and common graves in fifty kingdoms. And we were still ourselves kings, suzerains of our teeth, whiter than the white man’s bones, masters of the confederacy of our pigment, masters of the totems between our legs … In the strange mine of our souls, however, we were not masters of anything. Melanie’s sweat smelled like a fox’s underarms, coming from the entire volume of her hippo-like rump, which chafed against the walls, breaking the mine-flowers’ fragile towers. She pulled Cecilia by the hand. Cecilia’s fantastical make up came even more to life in the aquarium-light of the torches. The constellations of gold on her eyelids reflected on the walls and ceilings like in a planetarium. ‘Look, the cosmos surrounds us!’ whispered Fra Armando, smiling. I followed him closely, watching how two tiny lines of blood spouted from the places where the thin tubes of his miter broke into his skull, behind his ears, to penetrate his brain with stereotactic precision. His blood had already soaked the collar of his vestments, and like an embroidery thread, it braided itself into the threads of gold, making angels and chrysanthemums.

“The path descended, and it couldn’t do otherwise, because the fibers of space themselves went down, as though deformed by a revolting, difficult suffering. The transparent insects, with thousands of glassy anatomical details under the shells of their teguments, became larger and more aggressive. With a strange movement of their legs, the spiders spat jets of saliva at us, trying to pull us into the spools of their sparkling webs, where you could see the dried skeletons of bats, axolotls, and children. The mineral mosaics on the walls seemed to continuously change their colors, and bizarre icons appeared in unexpected combinations of marble, pyrite, porphyry, and quartz. Vasilica, I saw Saint George across an entire wall, wearing a purple mantle, as we know him, but thrown from his horse, with a yellow fear in his eyes and holding up his right hand in defense, pierced by the lance of the bile-green dragon, which triumphantly, with fire pouring from his nostrils, spread his wings over the world. I saw a woman nailed to a cross with spikes of zirconium nails, and three men in black garments crying at the foot of the cross and kissing her last curls of hair, red as copper wire. And I saw a man with wonderful brown eyes, holding a girl on his lap who was only a few years old, naked and plump, giving a blessing with two fingers. All of these ghosts merged one into the other like the waters of a cotton vestment …

“After centuries of walking through the bowels of night, lapping at the sweet mirrors of ice, clambering over stalagmites the size of elephants, and shaking on rope bridges thrown over crevasses, we found ourselves advancing through flesh. We didn’t realize when, slowly, softly, during the course of our many backsteps and quick leaps ahead, the walls of the tunnel became warm, wet, and pulsing, so that it seemed like we were walking through an enormous vein. We stepped into ever more elastic tissue; and in the thick, hyaline walls, we saw countless miniscule cells with violet nuclei. The transparent insects were still there, but they didn’t swarm. They adhered to the walls, their bellies beating with pleasure. Their long, hard proboscides were stuck in the epithelium of the grotto, and they sucked a black blood, whose course into their stomachs was easily visible through their colorless bodies. We crushed hundreds of them in our steady, endless descent. With time, the flesh conduit narrowed so much that we could barely make headway. The walls began to stick together, a cavity had to be made, and Fra Armando forced our way by pushing aside the hot muscles, hidden under a pearly mucous. It was like he was swimming through ambiguously scented female flesh, as wrinkled and snotty as the foot of a snail. And unexpectedly, at the end of the last push, the Light appeared.”

Cedric trembled inside and fell quiet for a few moments. The night was high, and the tiny, frozen stars of winter were stuck like needles over Tântava. But no fiber of crystalline night air came in through the small-paned windows of the old house. The sisters listened to the story with their hands over their mouths and their pupils so dilated that it seemed like their little cups of ţuica had been sprinkled, the way their grandparents had done, with the fatidic gypsy seeds, to engender (through what chemical mutation of this venomous cure?) not a bestial desire to couple, but a longing for fiction. The mirror, set obliquely under the beams, beside the bunch of dried basil, doubled the lamp on the wall in its crooked waters, surrounded with sharp, prismatic rays, so weak that just one step away from its flame the light became brown as dirt. The only thing that the mirror could not double was the smell of sheep and holiness. The smell emanated, like another type of light, from the blankets on the bed with wooden stake legs, the short, three-legged chairs, the round table where bits of mămăligă remained, and the yellowed pictures in crushed-glass frames on the walls. Maria looked, her mind wandering, at the washcloths on the walls: she had woven some of them herself, before the war. Underneath, the cheap paper icons, lithographs in sepia and magenta, were now mandalas charged with power. They clinked the ţuica cups again, and they broke open more nuts … Years after this, Mircea would also climb up the hall ladder into the attic to examine the black roof rafters and the strange compartments in the attic floor, one of which was full of crunchy nuts. A slanted pylon of daylight came down, while the rest was dark. In one corner, between two girders, there always shone the wide wheel of the spider, with the fat insect right in the center, motionless, wearing its red cross on the back of its stomach. The boy bombarded it with kernels of corn, but the horrible creature did not deign to move, pretending not to notice the holes that gaped, ever wider, in its web. It only adjusted its legs slightly when it was directly hit, but after a moment it was still again, as though its obese stomach were terribly difficult to move. The indifference and power of the spider did not fit its size — they were those of a bison, or a hippopotamus. When Mircea poked it with a stick, the arachnid fought back, and it would not flee until the last moment, slinging from thread to thread and then running over the dirt of the floor so quickly that it scared the boy, and he dropped the stick and never again touched the attic hatch. He had no doubt that the spider would get him, that it would crawl up his pants leg, pull itself under his shirt, along his spine, under his shirt, and stick its venomous canines into the back of his neck. The next day, peeking up the ladder again, pale and very cautious, he calmed down. The beast was not going to stalk him and jump on his face from some secret spot — it had repaired the torn wheel and sat in the center again, heavy as a ball bearing, puffed up, emanating power and cold …

The sister took nut meat from broken, woody shells, dipped them in salt and munched in silence, and then they broke more, two at a time, against the heels of their hands. Cedric, inside one nut, found the pink, trembling brain of some small animal. He cleaned off the dura mater woven with little veins of blood, and crushed it with delight against the roof of his mouth. It was past midnight, and in the tile stove only ash was left.

“Following in the footsteps of Fra Armando, we all passed into the enormous hall. Enormous? Hall? Really it was a world, with a horizon just as far away as in our world. Its vault — since it seemed to be a half-sphere with an apex dozens of kilometers from our entrance and a height as hard to estimate as the vault of heaven — began from the floor and appeared to be fashioned from a yellow kaolin, perfectly flat, with no niches, louvers, or inscriptions. The light within the incalculable hemisphere came from the midpoint: it was a column of pure, liquid flame, descending from the center of the cupola to the center of the floor. The source was so far away that the quartz fire could never have filled the hall if the entire floor wasn’t a flat, blinding mirror, perfectly circular, prismatic, and flashing with the most delicate nuances of violet and strawberry and raw green and orange, coloring our faces and pounding us with confused emotions. The heavenly disc, with a gentle surface like warm ice, crunched below our feet, crystalline, like a massive glass platter, poured from billions of intangible concentric moats, which, from the center to the edge, opened symmetrical, pale triangles of reflection. This was the secret hall of Those Who Know, which had, I later understood, not one, but billions of entrances scattered over all the earth. Not only every cave or any door — even the door of a dirty warehouse or a sinister mausoleum — but any hole of snakes, any vulva between a woman’s legs, or any photographic camera could be an Entrance. Any book could be an entrance, any painting, any thought. This is because we were in the center of the center of our world, in the pineal ovum, the center of the flower, the eye of the heart and the heart of the eye, the flame’s flame’s flame’s flame’s flame. We were (incorporeal, apparently, we only then discovered our corporeality, the vertical swamp of wrung-out organs, imbricated one in another, the soft, aqueous machinery that constantly generates the mystical field of life without being life itself, the voluptuousness of love without relation to love, the fabulousness of thought while being the exact opposite) very close to truth, goodness, and beauty, three words for the cistern of light in the middle of our lives, that lightning which, slicing open our body to death between brain and sex, confounds them within one single sun, blinding, blinding …

“We lost years of our lives marching toward the center, and during that time we did not eat, drink, or sleep. Now and then we touched the warm glass of the floor, pressing our ear to it and listening to the chorus of a billion voices. Cupping our hands on either side of our eyes and looking deep into the mirror, we saw entire races of men and women, completely naked, holding their hands out to us and screaming in torture or ecstasy. Were we the angels of a sunken world? Sometimes we caught the eye of one of the young girls with hair falling in curls past her buttocks. She lay down on the pebbly earth of those islands, pressed her temple and breasts to the ground, and in a sweet lordosis raised her rump, in the middle of which her pomegranate sparked like a gemstone. Why, though, did she have those seeping crusts between her shoulder blades? All of these people were sick and deformed. Each had a different stigma. Hundreds of thousands of diseases exhibited their sequelae beneath us, upsetting but at the same time fascinating. For that young man, with a Greek face so upturned that the tendons of his throat crushed his Adam’s apple, would have filled out his form too well, would have melted into it, if a venomous anthrax, just under his left arm, hadn’t made him stand out, hadn’t given him true existence. All of them lived through plagues that served as their names, their habits, and maybe even their souls. They had cleft lips, flaking skin, paunches swollen with cirrhosis, umbilical hernias like watermelons, leprosy and scabies ennobling pink bodies that otherwise bore the imprimatur of tiresome perfection. I watched them for hours on end through the semiprecious floor, which cast a glassy green shadow over their faces as their eyes eternally searched for ours. And then our small procession set off again, always in the same order, squinting at the far-off liquid flame, which made prismatic flakes between our eyelashes. And what a giant landscape appeared under the floor of liquid agate! What a sunken continent! Blue mountains, with thousands of fog-wrapped peaks, rivers wider than the Amazon, fields with unknown flora, grazed by bats with human eyes … Legions of beasts snorting through the endless forests, where every leaf and every vein on every leaf was covered in calligraphy with a miniaturist’s akribia … Isthmuses of madrepore leading to eyes made of water with islands in the center … And we passed over gold and purple clouds with the steps of superfluous gods, incapable of dissolving the transparent hail between us and our creation, unable to intervene in the tragic course of the world …

“At great intervals (decades? years? hours? moments?), the column of fire flashed obliquely, touching a spot on the surface of the floor and then returning to the black center of the disk. From the circular moats, with diameters so large that their metal lines seemed straight, objects and creatures appeared, like sophisticated projections on a drawing table. Were they real beings? Were they simply phantoms? We would never find out, because we dared to look at them only with our sight. The nanosecond flash of a ray produced, suddenly, the city of Amsterdam, with each of its four thousand Dutch houses. It reflected their austere façades in its semicircular, inner ear-like canals. And Badislav Dumitru appeared in the doorway of the house destroyed by bombs, crying with his head in his hands, beside his bag of stinking garlic. And the priest from the village of Bârzava appeared, in his holiday vestments, with the quartz box holding the tooth of the martyr on his chest. And here was one of the sinister instruments that Herman used to tattoo Anca’s perfectly spherical skull. And now, the immense wall of Victor’s ilium bones, the enigmatic dark brother, the great and necessary and impossible Victor. And the dwarf hugging a white panther cub. And Dan Nebunul rising with the registries through the well of Stairway One’s interior courtyard, and the dusty-blue mushroom of the State Circus with its windows shining like diamonds. And the hansom of Efraim Scopitul, and the statue of C. A. Rosetti suddenly brought to life, declaiming in the center of five hundred statues in Bucharest, urging them to revolt, and the cloudy nimbus that Maria didn’t have time to see the day she went out with Costel in Govora, and Mircea (which Mircea?) writing a demented, endless book, in his little room on Uranus, and Fulcanelli howling at the bottom of the inferno, naked in the tongues of fire, and Voila, and Montevideo, and New Orleans, and the ice of Antarctica, and the pearls of universes strung on a metaphysical cord, and fractals, and national history with heroes and monuments, and Witold Czartoryski, the 18th-century Polish poet who saw through Costel’s eyes without his knowing or consent, and we ourselves, Monsieur Monsú, Fra Armando, me, Cecilia, and Melanie, and you Vasilica, and especially you, Maria (in hundreds of forms); and this nut, and this chair, and this glass lamp, and Tântava and everything, and all of it … So there was a time we didn’t feel alone at all: we were there with everything, we were one with the universe, we were one with all that was given to us to perceive and experience. And we understood then that we all were Those Who Know, that in all space and time, in all being, there was no place for innocence … that we all knew we knew, without knowing, though, what we knew. That the only non-knower on the face of the earth was yet to be born, because a single wave of his hand would make a transparent universe opaque, changing the fluctuating and fairy-like aurora borealis of potential into truth and reality. With each step toward the center, the disk changed into earth.”

Soon, the small procession could barely squeeze itself between so many walls, barrels, cables, people of different countries and epochs, fair monsters, stinking lagoons (which they crossed in gondolas), statues at every step — Hitler and Kafka and Lombroso and Pushkin —, branching seas with trawlers and whales … They were not surprised when they passed along the shore of Beheading with three beings crucified on pitch-covered crosses, whom they recognized as Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, in their rich oriental costumes, nor when Marconi, in front of his ridiculous device, received the first message over the air-waves: from quiqui quinet to a michemiche chellet and from a jambebatist to a brulo brulo … Crossing countries and seas, eras and spheres, finally they reached the middle of the middle, the enigma of the enigma, the navel. They were on the sharp edge, beyond which the void began. The black hole in the center of the disk must have been hundreds of meters in diameter. The river of vertical fire, which you couldn’t think of or look at, fell directly through this orifice, forming a great and holy mandala forming together a — yin and yang, matter and spirit, horizontal and vertical, woman and man, vulva and penis, in eternal copulation, palpable, the fire without beginning or end … The roar of this liquid column, like melting pearls, sounded like enormous rushing waters. They stopped there, half illuminated, half burned by the light of that light. Humanity, all humanity, flowed behind them and surrounded them, like an amphitheater of bodies stretching for dozens of miles. And strangely, however far away a face might be, an old man’s face, a child’s face, the face of a beggar or an emperor or a cardinal, even if it blended into thousands of other faces in a stripe of ochre at the edge of sight, it was perfectly drawn, and recognizable even before you actually saw it. Everyone saw each other as though they were in the foreground, half a meter away. Cedric, for example, recognized his neighbors from the The Crest, every last one here in the catacombs of the swamp. Everyone talked to each other, and their voices wove together like bindweed at the root of a giant tree — the great voice of a golden waterfall and wind. Concentrating on one face alone, you heard its voice at that moment, however far away the prostitute or pastor speaking might be, as though that voice had been born right in your ear, or in the auditory zone of your mind, like the wheedling voices of madness.

“Fra Armando waited for all movement to settle. The voices fell silent. The oak of flame raged and shook in its monotone flow, but soon its howl became the definition of quiet, and if this howl, which no one understood, suddenly ceased, the true silence would have made the blood run from everyone’s tympana. When the archon stepped slowly toward the razor’s edge of the disk, they could hear the delicate tap, like the touch of Chopin, of his heels over the gentle surface. The priest of all religions stopped just at the edge of nothing, with his face toward the purple flow. He raised his hands. The long sleeves of his vestments made thick folds around his shoulders, unveiling his unexpectedly thin arms. In that moment the irradiant column, dozens of meters wide, stopped burning, so that now a pearly liquid could jet from the apex of the vault, at once obscene and prophetic, because it looked like either procreative sperm or a melted brain, but most of all like the old and sickly gemstones that decorated the haloes of Byzantine Gods. Then the air under the fantastical vault withered into a warm, semitransparent brown, and the kaolin yellow walls began to pulse like skin, and to blush with an uncertain mosaic of red and blue capillaries, against a hyaline background of diaphanous flesh. Looking around themselves, some believed they were in the stomach of a giant being, distinguishing, with the stubbornness of amateur astrologists, beyond the skin of the walls, the richly irrigated wrinkles of a large intestine, and the circular muscles around a urinary sack. Others believed they were in the vestibule of a brain, and they swore that the folds, taken by the first group for intestines, were nothing other than cerebral circumvolutions, and the so-called bladder was the pineal gland, smelling of neural hormones. And, as the great disk of the floor regained its mirror-like qualities in this low light, we floated inside a sphere where up and down swapped places a billion times a second, becoming utterly identical, mixing layers of reality and possibility until being became homogenous, and no person could say who he truly was: the one that stood in front of the mirror, or the one that grew from his feet, higher and higher toward the Nadir. He was in fact both. What every person had intuited at some point in their lives somehow, suddenly, became clear: that reality is just a particular case of unreality, that we all are, however concrete we may feel, only the fiction of some other world, a world that creates and encompasses us …

“A great mystery, a penetrating melancholy spread now through the billions of surrounding eyes, which in the peanut-colored penumbra shone like balls of glass hanging from thin peduncles, as though all of humanity, melted under the organic sky of the grotto into a single being, was nothing more than a carnivorous plant, a sundew cup open in the bog, flashing its sticky diamonds under the sun at dawn. Everyone waited for signs and wonders, for admixtures of angelic protein into their poor terrestrial feed. How those eyes would have adhered to a lost angel, blown by the wind over sulfurous fens, how they would have touched, delicately, thoughtfully, and ravenously, the rings of gold falling over his shoulders, his ribs sculpted in morphyl, his sandals of iridium wire … How they would have immobilized him in a terrifying embrace, he who came to bring the Gospel to the garbage of the world. How they would have digested him, organ after luminous organ, voice after voice, drinking him through their eyes, then turning their faces to the remains of feathers and bones scattered in the wind, sterile insemination in sycamore eyes of water, full of larvae and mosquitoes … How they would have waited then, for centuries and millennia, those eyes becoming clear and innocent again (a sign of hunger), for another messenger, another revelation of Good News …

“Fra Armando turned toward the immense auditorium and began to speak, profiled against the quaking column, his face so dark that his features were visible only as a sketch of fine lines, like the impenetrable mask of an insect. As he talked, his strange miter spread one or more mechanical petals open, so that by the end of his speech, the rosy brain of the hierarch was unveiled and defenseless, in the middle of a flower of steel. The pipe as thin as a syringe needle irrigated Wernike’s area in the left hemisphere, with a yellow milk, vesicant or nutritive, or both perhaps …

“ ‘There are gods,’ he said, ‘there is Divinity. The countless grotesque, tragic, false, and crude religions are only sensory organs, ways our world touches what transcends and creates us. They are the insect’s antennae, the grub’s palps, the open eyes of soothsayers, through which we touch? attract? drive off? murder? love? the divinity that approaches. The eternal schizophrenia of religions, tangled in rites and interdictions, stained with visions and blood, inverted against conscience and happiness, and preaching another conscience, another happiness, is like a parricide who wants his father to be king, and kills him to become one himself. Religions are madness, and yet they are the only way, since they are the only way out of our world that the mind (our organ to detect gates and exits) can imagine, the only great purpose for which the universe lives. Because an enormous conspiracy in the world is being plotted against our being: everything, the pencil we touch and feel as hard, the pain that darts through our molars, identical days, the fact that every morning we open our eyes in the same room with the same things in their places, the sun that never suddenly turns green — everything wants to convince us, against all evidence, that existence actually exists, that the world is real, that we are truly living in a true world. That we should be calm, that we should be born, that we should live, that we should die comfortably. But how can the wall exist in front of me? In a single second when the voices in your ears stop, in one pure moment of meditation, all of the demented propaganda collapses, and we begin to shake the bones of our minds awake, trampling down madness with madness. Because everything and everyone, however monstrous or distorted, whether motionless in catatonic dances, rounding their circular retina, clanking rat skulls at the waist, crowned with human teeth, or spit on with gold and myrrh — these images themselves are phantoms produced by neurons, along with acetylcholinesterase. Gods and demons, with cannibalistic mouths or with no mouths at all, say the same thing, always the same thing: You are not from here. Here is not your kingdom. You must leave, you must find your world, the world where you have been and where, without your knowing, you long to be. You have to search for the exit, this is the purpose of your life, for the rules of the game at the level where you are. Everything conspires to convince you that there is no exit, and truly an exit does not exist until you search for it. And in a way, the searching is the exit, as though the space you move through with hope and faith were to harden behind you, and construct your exit tunnel, your own, open only to you, like a pore that spreads suddenly in the flower-petal skin of Divinity. No sect, no church can take you there directly. Prayers and postures cannot help. Churches are like dreams: the vein of ore runs thin through many strata of useless sediment. The art of belief is the art of sorting. But everything in a rite is a sign, an indicator, flickering under centuries of perversion: a wonder, a hallucination, a catastrophe, a bearded face in a triangle of rays — here, there is nothing to find, but from here, you can begin to search. Wonders exploding like a carpet of bombs over Judea. The billion faces of Krishna, permitted for a moment to a few human eyeballs. Turquoise giants, god-goddesses, from the brain of he who listens to Bardo Thodol. Koans and mandalas and the Great Vehicle and the Lesser Vehicle and the light of Tabor and interior prayer. All of the techniques of ecstasy, all of the alkaloids of sacred plants and those distilled (coca and angel dust and speed and acid and grass and Jacob’s ladder and smack), all dreams, all mantras — all of it leads here, to this hall, and you have all arrived here by searching along one of the endlessly multiple paths. Perhaps all of you see, in the cistern of living fire from the depths of your being, a Salvation. And it is true, here, we stand in the center of any one of us, because, sinking ourselves into ourselves as though we descended inside a tower and we extended the decent into the earth all towers are built on, we would all meet in this great common hall, this hall that is everyone’s and no one’s. But the revelation has only now begun.

“ ‘Churches are machines to travel to the past, and the sacred is a mode of feeling your first childhood. The past is everything, the future nothing. That is why they crush us, that is why they frighten and overwhelm us with their sparkling vaults of carnelian and their niches with statues made of mercury. They are enormous because we are miniscule. We are human mites, wandering through temples and basilicas and circular labyrinths, over gentle stone slabs with mosaics, watching the ceiling rise immeasurably high on the nerves of ogives, sparking from the light filtering through magisterial rosettes. We do nothing but remember, we see again with a child’s brain the house where we first opened our eyes, the fantastical room where we learned to perceive shapes and colors. And especially, we see how the gods — our mother and father — changed the lines, interfering between our eyes and the walls, furniture, pictures — in the space that had just gained consistency. Yes, Mamma and Pappa, we meet them in the church, and the myths speak about them. Their emblems decorate all of the iconostases of light, because they are the torero’s cape, they are the idols, they are the gods, they are what they are … The inflexibility of sects, the monotony of voices, and the smells of the censers open a conduit in our minds (or our navels, our genitals, our hearts), there where we are the most naked and soft, toward the Precambrian era of our lives, when we were the passive subjects of quotidian salvation, sucking, swaddling, elimination and sleep, with its enormous freight of dreams. Then there’s our waking, the smile of the gods, always in the same forms: the ceiling, the walls, furniture, and pictures, and then emotions impossible to express in language, since language comes only with a sublimation of emotions, on the fossilized earth of true fear, love and hate. The words we use for those things today are only the shadows of shadows, and even much worse: betrayals, contortions, forced etymologies. We will not sob our hardest anymore, not under torture, not in Job’s despair, the way we did when we were infants, and we will not be able, it is not given to us, whatever we do, to love the spirit of God with passionate abandon, childlike, the way we once loved our mothers, when love was not only love and we were not only ourselves, and Mamma was not only Mamma. The essence of the essence of the sacred: memory. The memory that precedes memory. The transport to the world of an encephalon largely free of myelin, that sees, thinks, and feels differently, closer to the seed we exited — namely, the Exit. Even in the embryonic state, the process of maturity begins, the process of betrayal. Even then the basal axons of the mind are swaddled in blankets of myelin, and thus mummified, separated from one another. They become simple logical cables, barely communicating through their terminations, which still never touch. What used to be a unity of minds, the intimate epidermic contact of neurons, is destroyed even more completely in early childhood. Once the vital circuits are complete, the emotional circuit has its turn for mummification. The white substance spreads like scabies toward the edges of the brain, shaping, sparking, isolating, estranging. And in adolescence the oligodendrogliomas triumph almost in full: thought itself is myelinized. This is how we forget, we forget ourselves, and the blinding reservoir, the central canal of our life’s plasma only appears in dreams, rites, psychoses, per speculum in aenigmate … Oh, if just once, one mystic would be able to melt, through meditation or inspiration, the deceitful white substance, recontacting the skull’s neuronal matter, a billion times more than critical mass, remaking our original brilliance! What fusion, what a magnificent spark and total dissolution of the cosmos and maya! What a rose of nonbeing pearls! Saints and illuminati, gods and archangels would perish with carbonized wings like flies around this fire, original and terminal and incomparable … Like a salmon, this mystic would have to travel backwards, thrashing upstream against time, his brow cutting against the currents, leaping over the high threshold of cataracts and waterfalls to ever purer waters, sweeter and colder, to the point where the spring is lost underground, in the kingdom of pyrites and agates. Simultaneously, he would cross, in reverse, the entire structure which corresponds point by point to the ages of his theology, noology, biology, geology, and nadalogy, all of it illogical and impermeable. He would descend below the pia mater, through the six layers of the neocortex, go deeper through the limbic system, wander the paleoencephalon and the dozens of Arcs de Triumph of the vertebrae, cross with great thrashing and effort the blood-brain barrier, which estranges the central nervous system and buries it in the sarcophagus of the body, unrecognized by antibodies as flesh of his flesh. He would collapse into the somatic, drenched in humors and tissues, and then cross, with intense effort, the second barrier, the body-world barrier (because we are Russian dolls stacked one in the other), cross the golden platter of the world, and reach that same light of the happy void in the end, because time and space and being are one …

“ ‘There are gods, but where is the God? Why have you come here, from your towers, from your rotating lighthouses? Why have you descended snail-spiral stairways within your self, coming here, in the self of all, in the Self? Did you realize that any kind of diving (into thought, dreams, crystals, seas, reading) leads here? That whenever you took a step down the greenish stairway in your block, or a basement, or a grotto in the mountains, you were coming closer to this place? I look at you: you are all here: the real and the potential and the illusory. Real people, characters from books (welcome Dionysus! and you Oliveira …) or films, or computer games (Mario and Luigi, each holding a fat koopa), opaque as the Zohar, semitransparent as agate or transparent as abyssal worms — you are all here, for what? Naturally, for Him. For the constructor. For the one who created. For the weaver. For the shoemaker Arepus who holds us all on his craggy knees. For the brain that dreams us and the sex from which we spouted, hot and screaming in pleasure. For the one who saves by beginning and who does not save, so all may begin. Like a female butterfly, he has scattered his pheromones in the world, and you swarm now around that stomach, musky with sacredness, wilting deeply, so deeply with the desire to be, that is, to be saved!

“ ‘Since you arrived, however, you haven’t seen a single god. Only a cerebro-genital cavern and an Excalibur of light. Chalice and sword, greater than the mind and more eternal than the sex — but no god. So one of you might raise the chorus again, like a spider, “God is dead” and shouting we are in the cylinder of death, we agonize, we agitate, we search stubbornly for exits, we move the ladders here and there, we find dead-end caverns and return to the cylinder, gripped by sudden flashes and folded vibrations, and in the end each of us is extinguished, one after the other, like tiny light bulbs, and we leave behind putrid carcasses, dried shells, and dead eyes at the bottom of the jar. But even in this case, the triumph would be ours. The ashen inventor of the jar would not, as we might have thought, fill it with disappointment, but with pure and fresh happiness. Because where did the cylinder come from? And who crafted the stairs? And whose fingers send out the folded vibration? The fact that he kills us is nothing compared to his great mercy, to the terrifying patience that sprang from his heart when he let us live. Living, we knew him. Being, he saved us, and will we be saved eternally, even when we are smashed to pieces, even when we are crushed, bone by little bone. No one, opening his eyes, sees anything but you, Lord! No one, battered by suffering, howls anything but your name. And any living person who shouts, “God is dead,” moves his larynx with the trade winds of your breath.

“ ‘No, the God has not died, he is us moment to moment, or better said, he will be us. Because we all wilt with the desire to become organs, glands, systems and apparatuses in his body, neurons in his thalamus, sperm in his eggs, or simply quarks in the abyss of his matter. And our whole world is only the heaving, the pitching of selves toward him. He is not He-Who-Is, but much more: He-Who-Will-Be. God has not died, rather he has yet to be born. All of us, already illuminated by his foreknowledge (because our flesh is the herald, our flesh is the good news), being only the supposition of our future being, we will one day be him, he will one day be born in us, so that he can someday give us birth. And just as the poet is preceded and formed by the form-without-words of his poems, so God himself is born from the center of his creation so that he may create it. All worlds exist to be existed. All are pregnant with their own gods, the monads are women heavy with statues of light, the starry tree is blossoming, and in the ovaries of its flowers are void and happiness. All creators are the creatures of their creatures and are born to create them, in unfissurable duality.

“ ‘We are creation. In a superior world someone will write, letter by letter, or will draw, feature by feature, the sublime and grotesque of our silhouettes. And any gesture we can make, we make because one day it will be described in a work. We are unable to conceive of, or to experience what will not be written. We speak what is put in our mouths, we see what is given to us to see, and what happens is what is written to happen to us. But we are creation before it is created, because to be created always supposes creating. We are here on a limb, at the edge of existence, because what is the center if not an edge inside? Descending in our minds, for years and years, with stubbornness, writhing, and sleeplessness, clenching our teeth until they shatter, leaving behind a trail of saliva, blood, dejection, logic, calcium, and fear, we come here to find ourselves one moment, at the end of our lives — facing our lives, which have arisen before our eyes like a monumental stairway, but one where we cannot take a step, not because weakness impedes us — no, we do not lack for will — but because we are here at the impassible edge of edgelessness, and however many steps we climb we will still be at the edge, and even if the light of our being would grow a thousand times with every step, the next step will find us just as profane, marginal, and opaque as the first step we’ve ever taken. In this way we will wander eternally, on Jacob’s ladder, at the peripheries of Divinity, on the vacant lots of revelation, wilting while we regard the far-off spring of fire. We cannot enter eternity gradually. Wonder is not given in a series of steps. Beyond the walls are other walls, and beyond those walls other walls, and wonder is the sight of endless walls arranged close to each other, the way the rose is not its center but the scented arrangement of its petals, its edges, and its surfaces. You will suddenly snap the crystal rose from its iridium tail, because tearing off petal after petal is pointless.

“ ‘Because we are creation before it is created, we have gathered here all of those who will be created (for you know this much, Those Who Know: that you will be created, and that those who do not know will never exist in this world, just as in a book no miriapod or hero or smile exists if the author does not write: “miriapod,” “hero,” “smile,” and in fact, you, knowing, already existed and existing, you are already saved, albeit only by salvation), out of the limitless fear of staying on this limb forever. I imagine the howls of horror from all the unborn — unbeing must be only self-horror and self-terror, only cries from the inferno. Out of fear we dive into ourselves, calling on our god like a child in a dark room calls for his mother. What we do not know is that the God, now, whimpers with fear, because he too is not yet a god, the way a woman is not a mother until she has borne a child. So we walk blindly toward one another, through fear, the world, and its god, World and God.

“ ‘We are here to give birth to our mother. To give birth to the One who will give us birth. It’s true, the Exit is barred and we will not give birth to ourselves in other worlds. We will not emerge from this stomach, rather, we are all the stomach from which He will be born, because any world is a stomach that swells and contracts. We will save ourselves through him, inventing him, conceiving him, and he will seem to grow within our world, but in fact, he will grow within an enormous world, one much higher, because he, rising from our plane like the crest of a wave, into the third, unimaginable dimension, will curve toward us to see us, describe us, create us, syllable by syllable and turn by turn, the way we hang from the pearl statue of his body. We will see him only in sections, because he is perpendicular to our world, bowed deeply above it. We will see the succession of his bodies: at a few months, a year, three years, five years three months, five years three months one hour, five years three months one hour and four seconds … how he slices himself amazingly thin, with the mechanical microtome, into microscopic slides suspended in Amann’s lactophenol, then dyed green from iodine and fuchsine (since they are transparent sparks and would be completely lost in the transparency of our illusion), but we will lose all that is not coplanar with the disk of our lives, the way characters in a movie will never see the thick beam that projects them, or the hundreds of eyes that watch them in the dark theater. We will see him grow among us, but he will not be among us. We will interfere in his life, with discretion, in succession, and in helping him become what he is, we will leave nothing, but nothing to chance. The smallest incident: a worm writhing at the end of an invisible thread, an unforeseen snowflake caught on his chin, an inflection in the voice of any one of us — will modify a letter, line, or paragraph in the book he will write, and which is the only world we have. An inopportune sneeze, and one of us disappears. A fluttering eyelash, and he’ll never write a thing. Surveyed by us like ten thousand apostles, served by us like a cohort of angels, the boy will grow in wisdom and vigor, but how much he grows in glory, we will never be able to know. Because he will be at the same time among us and in a greater world, with an extra dimension of glory in the world for which we are only a flat, dull projection. And this world of glory is, in turn, nothing but the flat, dull purgation of a world of hyper-glory, with another god that writes in the golden howl of inspiration, written in turn by another … And the tunnel of gold, ever longer and heavier, stretches endlessly, like a string of pearls in which the string is only an infinite point of light, and the pearls are enclosed within each other, pierced through their blinding center. And it is bizarre that each of the pearly spheres is founded on the others, born of the one below it, just so that it once, sometime, can give birth to one more, in an endless flickering of the possible and the unreal and the real, in a dance of transparencies and opacities, around the thread reduced to that most ecstatic star …’

“The steel flower was now completely open, to expose in its center, sagging with its own weight, the throbbing brain of Fra Armando. The crowd, hungry for a miracle, looked longingly at him, like a loaf of fresh bread they hoped would be broken and set before them, so they would eat and be filled, and they would take of the broken pieces left in the baskets. Somewhere in the first rows, a scrawny woman held, with a kind of pride, a heavy glass cylinder where a yellow fetus floated, spongy and tranquil. I remembered the vial in my pocket. When I put my hand in my pocket, it was warm and hard. But I could not pull it out, because it was flesh of my flesh, my erect sex, my seed risen to the tip and ready to spurt. Did all the men in the crowd have erections? Even the boys, even the babies asleep in the floral scarves tied on their mothers’ backs? I glanced to my left, at a dwarf — sweaty, myopic, with a hideously red mouth: yes, his risen member was visible under his cotton pants. I no longer doubted this strange effect of approaching the sacred, as I knew that all the women’s and girls’ vulvas were sweetly moist. Because this happens however often we dream, regardless of the content of our dream, as though the great light of the dream were of the same nature as the smell of a cheek and the velvet of skin and the stiffness of another’s pubic hair, as though the dream were our interior partner, a woman if we are men and men if we are women: it excites us, it stirs the lubricating seminal fluids, it incites our minds with fantasies and tangles … To ejaculate in the uterus of our dream, to fecundate ourselves, like snails, to make love with ourselves between the kaolin walls of our skull — this is what we always wanted, and we have wanted it perhaps forever …

“ ‘He will be born here,’ continued the priest, ‘as here all of us are born, because here all our minds and sexes meet. Here all uteruses intersect and become one alone. The central point of our world is the central point of each of our beings. All women ever inseminated were inseminated here, just as all people, however different from each other, meet in the idea of a person. He will be born somewhere, sometime, from a concrete and living woman, but we must conceive him here, first. How could someone become a prophet, without having the model of a prophet? How could a god ever be born, if we did not know that gods existed?’

“Fra Armando turned toward the raging column of milk and sperm, whose vines rose and entwined in rapid vortexes. He spoke to it, his arms spread, in an unknown language. Sometimes, I thought I recognized the gutturals of Somalians, or Arameic glottals, the lip-smacks of the Dogons, or the fifths of the Javanese. ‘Mineymoe,’ he often shouted, like an obsessive cadence of speech, and when he uttered (barked? cursed in torture? ground his teeth?) this word, he also made a gesture with his hands, half masked by the golden ephod and the maniple that doubled his brocaded sleeves. It seemed he sank his claws into his sternum, yanked out his ribs with a demented effort and tore his heart from the roots to offer it, with incomparable terror and devotion, to the vertical Jordan. The flame ignited again, flickering and fluttering into the consistency and light of liquid gold, whipped, it seemed, by the barbarous consonants, the hisses and whoops of the great priest’s voice. Fascinated by his bizarre invocation, I had hardly noticed that the formerly still crowd had begun an agitation: one by one, a few dozen girls, naked to the waists, their hair in hundreds of braids, their pupils dilated by belladonna, came to the front, pushing their shoulders and hips past those around them. Some had their nipples pierced with glassy jade rings. Others had a violet swastika tattooed between their breasts. More than a hundred girls filled the space between the priest and the crowd. Wherever they stepped their bare feet on the gentle floor of transparent stone, they left a moist footprint, surrounded by vapor, which slowly evaporated.

“ ‘Mineymoe!’ growled the officiant for the last time, and the hundred virgins imitated, in an echo, the holy syllables. Their thick-lipped mouths, crudely tattooed to their gums with blue signs, hung open, showing their red, voluptuous tongues in all their length, under the arches of their shining teeth. It was a strange and frightening vision. With their eyes dilated and tongues stuck out to the maximum, the girls trembled. Entire groups of muscles on their thighs and arms, but also along their spines, beat with a life of their own, like the muscles of an epileptic, or a great hysterical seizure. On their muscular tongues small swellings appeared, amplifying the texture of their taste buds. They grew larger and larger, until they turned into white cysts, frightening to see, that burst one after another, drawing screams like labor pains from the martyrs’ throats. With still-wet wings, with a bead of sparkling liquid at the end of their raised proboscides, hundreds and thousands of butterflies emerged from the blisters. At first as pale as embryos, they quickly took on kaleidoscopic colors, velvety or metallic, and took flight from the rent tongues. Soon, the entire cavern teemed with them, but the largest and most beautiful, with eyes like Chinese fish and stalks fluttering a handspan past the ends of their wings, swirled lazily around the steel flower and brain at the edge of the abyss.

“ ‘Mineymoe!’ murmured the multitude, and I found myself whispering, along with them, the barbarous word. The virgins collapsed to the floor and lay like the dead. Only a shiver at times agitated their gelatinous flesh. Dozens of butterflies, with their wings full of peacock eyes or branches of coral, swarmed now onto the bare brain of Fra Armando, like a thick pollen of plush and velvet. Months before, in countless places on the earthly sphere, young girls had taken walks through fields of flowers. A large, heavy butterfly, out of nowhere, spiraled around them, and the two tumbled to the ground between marigolds and daisy chains. Then, impelled from within, as though it were winter and she wanted to catch a snowflake, the girl stuck out her little cat tongue so that the butterfly could land and caress her striated palate with its wings. The tentative steps of those six feet across the lingual mucous proved to be an unexpected pleasure, yet soon a vibrant pain took its place, because the winged beast had stuck its toothed ovipositor into the scarlet tongue’s flesh, inseminating it with eggs as small as poppy seeds. Then it took flight again and vanished, leaving the girl to sob among the flowers like one violated by a fairy-tale flyer.

“The cerebral shell of the priest began to radiate an aura of fire, which incinerated the lepidopterous wings like dry leaves. Then, like a hydrogen balloon, his pink and snotty encephalon began to rise, with the cerebrum and stem, pulling the spinal marrow out behind it, freed from the yellow canal of the vertebrae. His body, emptied of noble substance, fell to the ground like the robes of a courtesan, leaving this second, truer body to float, free and glimmering, in the thick aspic of the hall air. It hung above our heads, immobile, for as long as the unbearable torture of Cecilia lasted. For soon The Albino emerged from our group. His white Pierrot face accentuated his black features. He snapped his rawhide crop now and then against his military boots, and when he reached the crumpled body of Fra Armando, he used it to push the body over the edge, into the abyss. He turned sternly toward the crowd, advanced on the first rows, and lashed them as hard as he could, gasping, until the whip tossed squirts of blood and pieces of torn ears and fingers into the air. People shoved each other and screamed, until a large amphitheater, full of fallen bodies, flayed to the bone by rawhide, formed an arc around the Master some distance from him. The silence was total; not even the wounded, some with cut throats, others with crushed eyes, dared to moan. Frightening, in this silence, was the sound of his metal-tipped shoes on the hyaline tiles. As for the silence of the central cascade of lights, it was mystical and negative — compared to this kind of silence, the lack of any sound would have been a monstrous cacophony. It was a quiet outside of hearing, or the ear, or consciousness — it was Outside. Monsieur Monsú reflexively straightened his colonial uniform and turned toward the ivory flow. With the end of his crop, he drew a complicated, indecipherable weaving, which persisted for a second in the air, like an illusory macramé. The viscous column stopped flowing at once, and the silence, terrestrial this time and greasy, drenched us like sweat. The edges of the column were sucked slowly toward the center, until only a sphere, a pearl as large as a cathedral, remained, floating on the black abyss. The pearl collapsed rapidly, greatly increasing in density, to become in the end so spacious that its central diameter could be subtended by a person with arms and legs spread. Strange chemical processes were unleashed in the milky bead, until it changed into a tomb of blinding crystal that emitted prismatic flashes …

“The butterflies below the volatile vault fluttered their wings more slowly, like wind-up toys when their interior spring releases, until they fell to the floor, by the thousands, and rotted there almost instantly. And when the ragged keratin blackened and molded, we saw that the insects had skeletons and skulls, but their bones as fine as needles seemed to be made from the same blinding quartz as the tomb in the navel of the earth. After their aspic flesh scattered into the air, their bones crumbled too, each in two pieces, each piece in two fragments, each fragment in two granules, each granule in two sparks, violet and orange, each spark in two white bits of dust like ground sugar. In a few moments we were enveiled ankle-high by fine sand, shaped in waves, glowing in places with miniscule crystal.

“ ‘Nothing, nothing exists,’ The Albino uttered slowly in the deafening silence. ‘We are thin spiderwebs, inflated and torn apart by the wind. We are the fringe of interference on a soap bubble, multicolored, wet, despairing … We are mites in the skin of the soap bubble, laying our eggs and dirt … Our world has no weight or sense. We are simulacra of the unreal, itself in turn a simulacrum. This stage of the unreal becomes opaque and real only when seen as a whole, from the top end or the bottom, page after transparent page. But there is no top or bottom, and there are no eyes to see from that perspective. Page over page over page, our world is a book made of onion skin. And this skin has veins, and nerves, and glomeruli of stinking sweat.

“ ‘The people of old knew, and said, that every world is a book containing a book, and inside every Gospel is a Gospel. Once the sun stopped for an entire afternoon and another time shadow took ten steps back. Another time, everything was still, and pastors ate without eating and birds sang without singing … And Jehovah appeared in his pillar of cloud and fire, unexpectedly, between two pages of a pastoral as it happened, like a bookmark, one of those made by little scholars, decorated with stitches … It wasn’t time that stopped and turned back, but the long fingers scanning the pages, turning back to a passage they found dear.

“ ‘We are children and reproductions, but whose, whose? We are written in calligraphy, with gold and feces, but for whom? Who reads the poor story of our lives? Of course, only Him, the Writer. And he reads it once, in the moment he writes it. For the duplication of worlds is a process of writing/reading, as though an umbilical cord connects them, and through the cable, simultaneously, reading and writing cross from both ends, because if he blows his Spirit through the tube, inflating our bubble of soap, we, in turn, reflect his face in its curve, and through the tube we can see his zirconium larynx. And whoever swam against the terrible current of blessing, climbing like salmon toward the source, would escape the balloon of illusion and cross the cord that connects us to His mouth and His lungs. He would settle there, in the alveoli. He would multiply there madly, in Abraham’s breast. He would metastasize in the liver and balls. He would fill the Hierarch with the anarchic swirls. The god would die in unimaginable pain, and his howls would shape the deicide’s eternal crown.

“ ‘For all of us, at the end of time, murder and eat our God. Otherwise we could not become him, we could not be in him and he could not be in us. Devotion, therefore, is murder. Prayer is crucifixion. Love is torture. Adoration is strangulation with the wide hands of cherubim. Limitless pain is the deisis of our lives. That is why all gods were hacked and maimed and hung up by nails. Fra Armando has shown you the way of unification, I have shown you the way of dismemberment, and no one tells you: Choose!

“ ‘We will invent the being that will invent us, but not from pure light. Our world is no diamond. In the earth, the dead and crystals shine and reek. In our guts are worms, in the worms are guts, and in their guts are worms. Even the divine Dante pissed foully on the bark of the oak tree. But the humble prostitute delicately places an iris in the vase of earth. Thus the Creator will be man and light, and also woman, black and slave, with the mind of an angel and the heart of a bitch. This is the only way the hemispheres, schizophrenia, and paranoia will be left behind, and the sexes, man and woman, will annul each other, and the powers, master and slave, will become one, and wonder of wonders, good will be corrupted by evil so that it sparkles stronger, and evil will rise through good so that its darkness increases, and at their meeting, and above them, where they will arch out of themselves and come together, they will become identical, light and dark, in a single, ecstatic word:

BLINDING.

“ ‘Blinding!’ the crowd shouted, just as, minutes or centuries before, they had shouted, ‘mineymoe!’ I shouted with them, feeling the roof of my mouth go numb with fear. Meanwhile, The Albino transformed. The skin of his face, pale as one forever dead, now became transparent. His groups of facial muscles became visible, red and striated, and held at the ends by white tendons. Rings of flesh dilated and contracted around his eyes and mouth. Then we could also see through his muscles. His brain appeared through its phantom of mist and wind, phosphorescent green, and the seams of his bones were violet. Toward the end of his speech, even his bones became smoky, and then they went clear like frozen water. His brain, irrigated by black blood, pulsed under its glass bell like an immense toad. At its base, the pituitary gland glowed like a sapphire grain. I watched its slow and slovenly migration to the surface, on a peduncle like a snail’s horn, until it came through his brow, where it opened, the blue eye between his eyebrows, in a triangle that could have been divine, if the tip weren’t turned toward the earth. Monsieur Monsú’s neck and arms also became transparent, covered with crystal scales. A fascinating monster now stood in front of us and spun its hippopotamus-skin crop.

“Melanie, dressed in fantastical fabrics and fluttering her great wig of ostrich feathers dyed the color of carrots, passed to the front, holding a paper bag in her arms. She emptied it onto the floor and began to assemble, with the awkward dexterity of a child, the bizarre machinery of rods, indicators, bolts, pinions, and cuffs of a metal that shone dully like aluminum. She placed Leon the crystal, withered now like an old mushroom, on a stopper of spiraled lamé. Engraved tubes, metal strips, and electrical conductors in colored plastic connected various parts of the machinery. How could the bag have held all these parts, the entire assemblage? Where had Melanie gotten the syringes, the blades? The blue oxygen cylinders, with rusted pressure gauges, rose up like out of nowhere.

“ ‘Cover one eye,’ continued The Albino, ‘and see with the other: the world will look flat and wilted, like a drawing on a plate. Look with both eyes, and the hidden dimension will explode. The water will be deep and clear. One disjuncture is enough, a different angle of the two balls under the brain for the anaglyph to swell into bas-relief, hautrelief, into statues, and perhaps, if our eyes converge to the point where they can see into each other, the statue will also swell into something with multiple dimensions, an unimaginable object. Look now at this carpet of gaudy colors; this abstract leopard skin — and truly, at the distant walls of this hall, beyond the black precipice, will be painted an enormous shimmering rectangle in sapphires, emeralds, heliodors, and chrysoberyls — but look at it with dreams and distraction, taking it in at a glance, dissolving yourself in it. Your eyeballs will accentuate the convergence. The left image and the right image, phantomatically, will slide onto each other, will fit and join together, until the hologram comes to life and the wondrous chimera of the Book that contains us will be revealed in undying glory.’

“A colossal butterfly now spread its wings before us, inside a cube of blue light like an aquarium. On its purple velvet thorax glittered the brilliant tomb, suspended between heaven and earth, as though protected by the filiform legs. The vision lasted only a few minutes, until our sight grew tired and the incandescent spots became unformed again. Whither had the winged buffalo disappeared?

“In the same way, you can gaze at the gaudy spectacle of our world, the objects and deeds piled together, without reason, in heaps around you. Take each in turn and touch, smell, and think about it: useless. Chaos will constantly grow, because mystery is the father of an endless line of mysteries, and solutions are always partial and self-devouring … But think of everything at once, with a distracted and dreaming thought, until your cerebral hemispheres converge and the two slightly different images, rational and sensual, analytic and synthetic, diabolic and divine, male and female, glide onto each other. Suddenly the carpet of spots disappears and, clearly, in thousands of dimensions, we can think, for moments or millennia, of the undepictable face of Divinity. We will see then, face-to-face, what we have only glimpsed, partially, in mirrors and enigmas. Face to face: because our face is incorporated into His face. Eye to eye, because our eyeballs are in His eyes …

“Fra Armando’s brain pulsed like a pillar of fire over the people, emitting polygonal beams. Its medullar tail undulated gently, like a flagellum, in the gelatinous air of the immense, vaulted hall. A fine, fluorescent tattoo mapped out its complicated pathways of catecholaminergic, noradrenergic, and acetylcholinergic neurons: red, black, and violet lines strangely intersected and interwove. The brain began to glide slowly, propelled by spiral movements of its tail, toward the atrocious contraption that Melanie constructed with the meticulous, unconscious attention of a mantis religiosa. An operating table? electroshocks? torture? a rape machine from a libertine bolgia? Bearings and gears shone through a small window framed by hydraulic cylinders. In a bath of opalescent liquid floated a spongy fetus with wise, oriental eyes. Dental floss connected filiform electrodes to its head, and the cables were plugged into the machinery. Under a bell jar, connected also to the assemblage of switches, a leaden sibyl read from a thick book, following the black spiders of letters with an unspeakably dry finger. An appalling skinned cat, nailed to a wooden plank between two inductive bobbins, was the last organic component of the machine. A few ivory nerves had been detached dexterously from its flesh and spread on both sides of its martyred body, in a fine network, numbered and inscribed with thick, inky letters. The animal rolled its clear eyes, with vertical pupils, and now and then its whiskers twitched.

“Finishing her work, covered with yellow beads of sweat, the Magdalenian-era woman sat unmoving, like an ebony idol. She reeked of armpits and wild arum, and drew thousands of flies with metallic-green or blue-cyan thoraxes, which soon covered her like a living shirt of fluttering chainmail.

“The Albino, in his new incarnation as an underground insect, had lost his eyes, and in their place were two vague atavistic swellings under his skin of crystal scales. But the eye in his brow had lit up like a great sapphire and projected an intangible cone of light, which turned Cecilia’s chocolate skin a charming shade of blue. The nubile girl was already naked, rubbed with aloe and narcissus, painted black on her lips, nipples, and the delicate folds of her hairless pubis. Her lowered eyelids, painted with kohl and dusted with gold, projected constellations onto the colossal vault, madder than ever, creating a sweltering and luminous summer night. On her neck, on an iridium chain, was a row of seven raw emeralds, untouched by any jeweler’s tools. On each emerald, a Hebrew letter was written in reverse. Two murex shells hung on her ears, like earrings. A creamy yellow cornelian gem covered the divot of her navel. Her nails, however, were truly wondrous.

“Her hands and her feet had nails of an intense, ultramarine blue, unreal and fluid like in a dream. And each one had an image in its depths, in relief, miniscule and yet still clear, like those photographs of famous monuments (or shameless women) in optical lockets. However far you were from the black princess, you saw perfectly the Giottoesque painting in her nails, and if you concentrated on a detail (the dentil molding on a wall, the Cybele of an edge, the finial on the tip of a yellow bell, the embroidery of flowers and lizards on a vestment) you saw just as clearly the details in the details, down to the thousandth level, until, delving into the whirlpool of her polished nails, you reached the subatomic world of quarks, charms, and scents … Scenes from the New Testament were painted on her fingernails, against a naïve background of medieval palaces and sycamores: the Holy Virgin asleep in her room of bare stone walls, smiling in a dream and covering her bare shoulder, while the archangel, standing beside her bed, a three-cupped lily between its fingers, is too shy to wake her; Jesus as a child whittling a wooden cross, while all the other goatherders make whistles; him again climbing for the first time (at about seven years old) into a mandorla that will raise him to the sky, to be presented to the angels; the adolescent Jesus in the wilderness, curled up on the sand, holding a snake’s triangular head and looking into its transparent eyes; Jesus and John, sitting on a bluff, watching the Jordan reflect the twilight in its waters; the daughter of Jairus, one day after she was awoken from the dead, braiding her hair at the mirror and singing a song without words; Peter, on Mount Tabor, squinting at the crystal spacecraft and wondering where he could cut enough branches for three shelters: one for Moses, another for Elijah, and another for Jesus; the adulteress, alone in the place to which she was condemned, trying to decipher what Jesus wrote in the sand, while a white drop of seed hangs between her legs; Jesus eating in Matthew’s house with the tax collectors and the sinners, who are astonished by the triangular radiation from the temples of the Nazarene; Dismas, his arms painfully crooked on the wood of the cross, his face green with suffering, still smiling at the Marys, kneeling before the three; and trillions of stars scattered over Jerusalem, each foretelling an incredible Salvation, unintelligible, unimaginable, but true …

“In contrast, Cecilia’s toenails had illuminations from the old testament: Zipporah putting her son’s foreskin on her finger and saying proudly to the winged man, “Surely a bloody husband art thou to me!”; and the Angel of the Lord was by the threshing place of Araunah the Jebusite, arming himself with the devastating instrument and spreading plague over the people, from Dan to Beersheba; the head, legs, and hands of Isabella, in a pile of bloody tissue, and a dog with human eyes gnawing a finger with many rings; Maaseh, a sweet Philistine with silk eyelashes, embracing his wife for the last time and allowing his heart to be crushed for the Lord; Job, old and happy, fat, with his skin as pink as an infant’s, a ladybug on his finger just opening its wings to fly; a bride not even twelve years old, already decorated, holding her hand, in terror, over the place between her boyish thighs and thinking of the night to come; the Lord, on his sapphire throne over the cupola like a field of heaven, looking, with strange eyes of unearthly anatomy, over the arid landscape of Judea perishing below him; Ezekiel, in the valley of dry bones, in despair, gathering the wild lilies suddenly growing from the headbones and chestbones full of dust; Daniel, pulled from the lions’ den, still smelling days and days afterwards of the beasts’ testicles; the Day of Ire, descending unexpectedly, like a thief in the night, over the villages, vineyards and orchards, laying waste to all in an ambiguous glory …

“The matron approached the nubile girl, took her hand with an unexpected delicacy and grace, and led her toward the mechanism on the edge of emptiness. She spread her across the narrow chassis and secured her wrists and ankles in cuffs. Crucified on an aluminum St. Andrew’s cross, Cecilia revealed her sex to our eyes like a black flower with crinkled petals, a feline sex, a sphinx’s vulva, unsuited for ordinary copulation. Slowly, with a sharp gesture of Melanie’s fingers, the hydraulic cylinders began to move, and the metal frame rose to vertical. Disturbingly beautiful, Cecilia smiled with the bright smile of African women, but also with something of a girl’s perversion, pleased to show everyone her secret flower. She leaned her head on one shoulder, and her eyes covered with a thin fog. Curled in its aquarium, the fetus suddenly opened its yellow eyes, and its barely sketched mouth began to speak unheard words, as it gaped like an exotic fish. The Albino, whose uniform had evaporated like gas into the air, slowly approached the operating table. His sex was erect and semitransparent. His testicles of filigreed ivory were visible through his scrotum like soft glass. We all imagined we were about to witness the ritual rape of a virgin by the horrifying cleric. We did not imagine, however, the unimaginable. And I cannot describe the indescribable. For hour after hour, the young woman’s body of flesh, blood, and nerves experienced the entire scope of human suffering and beyond. Happy were those pagan warriors fallen into the hands of their enemies, held in oubliettes for dozens of years and tortured daily under the senior’s eyes. Happy those who were burned at the stake, flayed alive, or devoured by cancer. But the girl’s screams somehow seemed to be screams of unbearable pleasure, and on her face her clenched lips and eyes revealed a devastating ecstasy. The only deed that words can describe, although itself appalling, seemed, in comparison with what had come before, to be a gesture of tenderness: with an expert flash of the blade, The Albino sliced open Cecilia’s stomach, without spilling a drop of blood, and removed her uterus, as clean as an anatomical specimen, watched over by the two ovaries like two spread wings at the ends of their tubes, between the fringes of soft skin, like two rhinestone mititei. Only then, as though the delicate organ held all her vitality, did her dark body die, soft and ashen, and rot beneath our eyes, until the bones scattered, yellow, over the floor. Only the radius of her left hand remained held in the metal cuff. Then those bones changed to dust, and the dust was absorbed into the glassy floor.

“Monsieur Monsú held the butterfly uterus in the open palm of his right hand. Its skin fibers gently pulsed. In the end, it took flight, not through the mechanical beating of lepidoptera, but by undulations within the gelatinous medium, the way transparent beings on the bottom of the ocean proceed dreamlike through the abyss. Fluttering over the emptiness, the little life form turned toward the diamond cell in the center of lights. It touched it after eons of hypnotic travel. It curled up there, in the flashing box, took root in its crystal earth and unrolled a peritoneum crown. Its center continuously developed an ovum, filigreed, pearly, with constantly changing designs and mirific protuberances extended into the ionosphere. In the end, the uterus itself, with its tubes and contractions, was only an almost-unobserved detail of the great bead, of the egg with a quartz shell.

“The egg appeared to be tattooed with a labyrinth of dully colored lines, which crossed each other and shifted, so that, at the beginning, nothing could be deciphered, aside from some illusory outlines, more guesses than anything, like looking in the filigreed dregs of coffee. As its volume increased and its surface widened, the strangest, most heteroclite designs began to spout from the tissue of lines. There was the face of a young man, with features in charcoal, his hair black vines curling along his ascetic cheeks. His severe, visionary eyes were slightly asymmetrical, the right inspired by a spark of spirit, while the left, tragic and matte like a covered mirror, had violet circles beneath. Below the fibrous threads of his moustache, his mouth could have been a woman’s, if its sensuality were not negated, dissolved, denatured, and reconverted by bitter folds at the corners. Every feature of this portrait was, if you looked closer, formed by other drawings, on a smaller scale, and those by others, all brilliantly clear, just when your eye touched them, so that you could dive endlessly into the spectacle of the world, deepening the visions within a single hair of an eyebrow, and you could explore skies with other stars, heavens, and gods within a pixel in the immensity of the cheek. It was All, and all ran in the heart of all, and the real hand and the possible drew each other, exchanging densities and destinies a billion times a second. It was the Mandylion, the Vera Icon, the image of the human face, acheiropoieta, the one we search for always, which we see in all the compositions of the world, because the world itself — for us, and gods, and Divinity — has a human face. From this, sunk in tragedy and the stench of the sulfur from Gomorrah, cultivating tens of thousands of horrible diseases in the furrows of our body, never being sure of tomorrow and writhing to breathe another moment, we yet smile, just as a two-month-old child will smile even at two eyes drawn on a white piece of paper …

“Fra Armando’s brain, slithering with its spinal tail, shooting beams like a spacecraft, migrated over the billion heads of the crowd toward the great sphere that encompassed almost all the space in the middle of the disk where we stood. The egg rotated heavily around its vertical axis, constantly displaying other canals, dry seas, and continents, throwing off other garlands of fire and reabsorbing them in its paunch of albumen and yolk. The brain approached the sun like a lonely navigator, seeming to slide along a subliminal pleat, on a guide tube hidden in another dimension. There was a whisper, unheard but possible to feel with the entire body, denser than the organ that perceived it — that whisper from the middle of the night, to which you can only respond, suddenly awake and afraid, ‘Here I am, Lord.’ The solitary sperm slid along the beacon, along the whisper of billions of decibels. The golden male fluttered along the guide tube of the shock wave of billions of gigatones. The entire hall, and everyone inside, quaked in trepidation. The ovum whispered, it whispered a name. Quiet, monotonous, unhurried, powerful as a seraph, the face in the egg whispered a whisper, whispered a name. Its own name. ‘Here I am, Lord,’ responded the brain and the sperm, and the response — happy in terror, frightened in ecstasy — was not a sound, but the advance itself.

“The tadpole, with its curved brow like a glass shell, finally stopped only a hand width from the enormous filigreed stomach. The hard membranes mirrored each other. Colored whirls appeared in the front-most points and encompassed, in ever larger circles, the trembling spheres. A dialogue was improvised, the channels and frequencies aligned, passwords exchanged, thousands of keys went into thousands of locks of air and void. They turned, raised pinions and cams, and released chemical barriers. And suddenly not the skin, but the space itself between them opened like a gate, suddenly there was no space between the membranes, and the sperm and the ovum were one, the brain and the sex were one, space and time were one.

“And space/time/brain/sex began to rumble. There were monstrosities. There were miracles. A mathematics of the bordello was invented, a sublime defecation, a conceptual vomiting, an angelic retching, a real dream, a dead life. There were hoots and howls, but were they laughter or crying? There was a revelation, but was it from a prophet or a madman? It was everything, but it looked like nothing … We stood stockstill and watched that agony, an agony not of death, but of creation, a sob, not of birth, but of the final swoon. We saw sounds of catastrophe and waste-laying, we heard colors of fire and ice. The explosion/implosion smelled like roughness. Atoms were solar systems and constellations were pheromones. Oh infernal paradise, oh darkened light!

“A cause/effect germinated in the middle of the edge of this nymphal melody. It flattened the flesh/air, it quieted its transparent opacities. It organized the future/past, it listened to words/things. From the winds of karma, from the frightening bardo of the dust of twilight, a child would come into being. It would be because it already was, already it saw its parents copulating like two locusts, already the whirlpool of space/time/brain/sex drew, with its blood-dipped finger, a Caudine fork, an Arc de Triumph. Two chromosomal sets would fuse, yes and no would wed in maybe, and then the egg, already past the barrier of being, would begin its gigantic conclusion, turning the ever more complicated pages of life, complicated not by what the text said, but by the structure of the pages themselves, as though the first would be a point, the second a line, the third a surface, the fourth a volume, the fifth a Möbius strip, the sixth a nest for the Tomistic swallow, and so on and so on, until the billionth page, where Divinity is raised to the power of Divinity. Mitosis and meiosis, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, morula, blastula, gastrula, and the three embryonic wrappings glittering like soft glass while they wrinkle, shape, reabsorb, form tubes and buds, separate at catastrophic points, meet again to sketch faces and limbs, organs and skins, systems and mechanisms. Fish, reptile, amphibian, mammal, the fourth week, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh. The sixth month, the seventh, the turn in the eighth. Floating on a lotus flower, in the middle of black waters, eyelids closed and face smiling — enormous eyelids without lashes, under which the ocular protuberances slide as quietly as porpoises. The skin of pearl, shining in wisdom.

“It heralds the Gospel for all. There is no other annunciation than a person’s birth. And every birth creates a religion, it is an annunciation. And religion itself has no other meaning than Birth. It shows us the Way, it reveals the Steps to us. It preaches Happiness. Already our eyes, fallen out of their sockets from such blinding blinding, will see the embryo, the child, wonder, ransom. Black and white, Asian, women, men, and children, we wait, on the edge of the abyss, rejoicing. We would take light from light and never die again …

“Then came the infinitesimal catastrophe. As before, at the beginning of the beginning, an elusive asymmetry within the initial conditions made the primordial force cleave in half, then into four parts, and then the infinitely hot and dense point exploded into the fireworks of the world, and the way a tremor of a butterfly’s wing on a guava leaf in the Antilles unleashes a tornado in Colorado, and the way you don’t know where the Spirit comes from or where it goes — in the middle of the middle of the scented zygote, in the chromozoidal ball of seraphim snakes, a whirl arises, a probabilistic wind, more limited than the space of a molecule. One letter inverts in an orthography, and something glides in the oily stereochemistry of that substance. The gaze of one of us (a skeletal woman with a number tattooed on her forearm? a hydrocephalic with bulging eyes?) might have been enough for the miniscule tragedy, because observation always alters the experiment. Or maybe Evil itself, as undefined and intangible as gravity, passed a turbulent finger into the heart of the god in genesis, the same finger that stirs the worlds. The same way, a quinine camellia sprouted in the middle of our rejoicing.

“The egg now folded a second center around the allogenic information, and a membrane fogged over like a cartilage curtain between itself and itself, like a mirror where the self can see itself, identical and yet completely different, because the right of one is the left of the other, and the second, for the first, is a monster, because its heart is on the right and it speaks with the right hemisphere of its brain, and feels pity with the left half. White and black are not more different from each other, or more alien. Our world became schizoid, because what was born in fact was Duplication, or Rupture — the surface of the mirror between two dreaming embryos, face to face, their enormous vaulted foreheads almost touching, looking at each other with smoky eyes. They would come into the world as monozygotic twins, and what would be born was Estrangement itself. We saw the apocalypse through the lenses of beads of tears. What was happening? Which one was our god? What would become of the world of this illegible book, this book?

“And then, Maria, while we contemplated the double proliferation of the cells (two morulas, blastulas, gastrulas, separated, or united, by that mirroring skin), we were torn apart by a devastating flash of lightning. The column of fire reappeared and moved among us, making us one with the disk’s shining floor, integrating us into it, digitizing our blood and our tendons and our nerves, transforming them into memory, pure memory, holographic, indestructible. I was home again, I was in Akasia, the universal memory that sees all, that knows and understands and feels compassion. The mother-memory that protects, that caresses. And the blinding, blinding disk broke from its foundation with the crack of the ruination of worlds, levitated toward the vaulted ceiling of the hall, shattered into thousands of polygonal fragments and splinters, and, Maria, it was given to our eyes, spread now evenly over all the surface of the disk, to see what you cannot, what you should never see, what never can be said. And the disk rotated around its axis, faster and faster, until a sphere of glory appeared, shimmering in billions of colors, with a living pool of light in the center. And the sphere set upon the crown of His head, over the black vines of hair, illuminating His sad, brown eyes. For it was He, in a dense world, in a dense light, along whose spinal cord, through transparent flesh, six chakras and six carnivorous flowers opened.

“The seventh chakra, Sahasrara, the diamond sphere, glowed on his crown.”