Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

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

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

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

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

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