Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

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.