Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

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.