Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

“ ‘ 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 …