Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

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.