Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

The sister took nut meat from broken, woody shells, dipped them in salt and munched in silence, and then they broke more, two at a time, against the heels of their hands. Cedric, inside one nut, found the pink, trembling brain of some small animal. He cleaned off the dura mater woven with little veins of blood, and crushed it with delight against the roof of his mouth. It was past midnight, and in the tile stove only ash was left.

“Following in the footsteps of Fra Armando, we all passed into the enormous hall. Enormous? Hall? Really it was a world, with a horizon just as far away as in our world. Its vault — since it seemed to be a half-sphere with an apex dozens of kilometers from our entrance and a height as hard to estimate as the vault of heaven — began from the floor and appeared to be fashioned from a yellow kaolin, perfectly flat, with no niches, louvers, or inscriptions. The light within the incalculable hemisphere came from the midpoint: it was a column of pure, liquid flame, descending from the center of the cupola to the center of the floor. The source was so far away that the quartz fire could never have filled the hall if the entire floor wasn’t a flat, blinding mirror, perfectly circular, prismatic, and flashing with the most delicate nuances of violet and strawberry and raw green and orange, coloring our faces and pounding us with confused emotions. The heavenly disc, with a gentle surface like warm ice, crunched below our feet, crystalline, like a massive glass platter, poured from billions of intangible concentric moats, which, from the center to the edge, opened symmetrical, pale triangles of reflection. This was the secret hall of Those Who Know, which had, I later understood, not one, but billions of entrances scattered over all the earth. Not only every cave or any door — even the door of a dirty warehouse or a sinister mausoleum — but any hole of snakes, any vulva between a woman’s legs, or any photographic camera could be an Entrance. Any book could be an entrance, any painting, any thought. This is because we were in the center of the center of our world, in the pineal ovum, the center of the flower, the eye of the heart and the heart of the eye, the flame’s flame’s flame’s flame’s flame. We were (incorporeal, apparently, we only then discovered our corporeality, the vertical swamp of wrung-out organs, imbricated one in another, the soft, aqueous machinery that constantly generates the mystical field of life without being life itself, the voluptuousness of love without relation to love, the fabulousness of thought while being the exact opposite) very close to truth, goodness, and beauty, three words for the cistern of light in the middle of our lives, that lightning which, slicing open our body to death between brain and sex, confounds them within one single sun, blinding, blinding …

“We lost years of our lives marching toward the center, and during that time we did not eat, drink, or sleep. Now and then we touched the warm glass of the floor, pressing our ear to it and listening to the chorus of a billion voices. Cupping our hands on either side of our eyes and looking deep into the mirror, we saw entire races of men and women, completely naked, holding their hands out to us and screaming in torture or ecstasy. Were we the angels of a sunken world? Sometimes we caught the eye of one of the young girls with hair falling in curls past her buttocks. She lay down on the pebbly earth of those islands, pressed her temple and breasts to the ground, and in a sweet lordosis raised her rump, in the middle of which her pomegranate sparked like a gemstone. Why, though, did she have those seeping crusts between her shoulder blades? All of these people were sick and deformed. Each had a different stigma. Hundreds of thousands of diseases exhibited their sequelae beneath us, upsetting but at the same time fascinating. For that young man, with a Greek face so upturned that the tendons of his throat crushed his Adam’s apple, would have filled out his form too well, would have melted into it, if a venomous anthrax, just under his left arm, hadn’t made him stand out, hadn’t given him true existence. All of them lived through plagues that served as their names, their habits, and maybe even their souls. They had cleft lips, flaking skin, paunches swollen with cirrhosis, umbilical hernias like watermelons, leprosy and scabies ennobling pink bodies that otherwise bore the imprimatur of tiresome perfection. I watched them for hours on end through the semiprecious floor, which cast a glassy green shadow over their faces as their eyes eternally searched for ours. And then our small procession set off again, always in the same order, squinting at the far-off liquid flame, which made prismatic flakes between our eyelashes. And what a giant landscape appeared under the floor of liquid agate! What a sunken continent! Blue mountains, with thousands of fog-wrapped peaks, rivers wider than the Amazon, fields with unknown flora, grazed by bats with human eyes … Legions of beasts snorting through the endless forests, where every leaf and every vein on every leaf was covered in calligraphy with a miniaturist’s akribia … Isthmuses of madrepore leading to eyes made of water with islands in the center … And we passed over gold and purple clouds with the steps of superfluous gods, incapable of dissolving the transparent hail between us and our creation, unable to intervene in the tragic course of the world …

“At great intervals (decades? years? hours? moments?), the column of fire flashed obliquely, touching a spot on the surface of the floor and then returning to the black center of the disk. From the circular moats, with diameters so large that their metal lines seemed straight, objects and creatures appeared, like sophisticated projections on a drawing table. Were they real beings? Were they simply phantoms? We would never find out, because we dared to look at them only with our sight. The nanosecond flash of a ray produced, suddenly, the city of Amsterdam, with each of its four thousand Dutch houses. It reflected their austere façades in its semicircular, inner ear-like canals. And Badislav Dumitru appeared in the doorway of the house destroyed by bombs, crying with his head in his hands, beside his bag of stinking garlic. And the priest from the village of Bârzava appeared, in his holiday vestments, with the quartz box holding the tooth of the martyr on his chest. And here was one of the sinister instruments that Herman used to tattoo Anca’s perfectly spherical skull. And now, the immense wall of Victor’s ilium bones, the enigmatic dark brother, the great and necessary and impossible Victor. And the dwarf hugging a white panther cub. And Dan Nebunul rising with the registries through the well of Stairway One’s interior courtyard, and the dusty-blue mushroom of the State Circus with its windows shining like diamonds. And the hansom of Efraim Scopitul, and the statue of C. A. Rosetti suddenly brought to life, declaiming in the center of five hundred statues in Bucharest, urging them to revolt, and the cloudy nimbus that Maria didn’t have time to see the day she went out with Costel in Govora, and Mircea ( which Mircea?) writing a demented, endless book, in his little room on Uranus, and Fulcanelli howling at the bottom of the inferno, naked in the tongues of fire, and Voila, and Montevideo, and New Orleans, and the ice of Antarctica, and the pearls of universes strung on a metaphysical cord, and fractals, and national history with heroes and monuments, and Witold Czartoryski, the 18th-century Polish poet who saw through Costel’s eyes without his knowing or consent, and we ourselves, Monsieur Monsú, Fra Armando, me, Cecilia, and Melanie, and you Vasilica, and especially you, Maria (in hundreds of forms); and this nut, and this chair, and this glass lamp, and Tântava and everything, and all of it … So there was a time we didn’t feel alone at all: we were there with everything, we were one with the universe, we were one with all that was given to us to perceive and experience. And we understood then that we all were Those Who Know, that in all space and time, in all being, there was no place for innocence … that we all knew we knew, without knowing, though, what we knew. That the only non-knower on the face of the earth was yet to be born, because a single wave of his hand would make a transparent universe opaque, changing the fluctuating and fairy-like aurora borealis of potential into truth and reality. With each step toward the center, the disk changed into earth.”