Mircea Cărtărescu - Blinding - Volume 1

“Fra Armando’s brain pulsed like a pillar of fire over the people, emitting polygonal beams. Its medullar tail undulated gently, like a flagellum, in the gelatinous air of the immense, vaulted hall. A fine, fluorescent tattoo mapped out its complicated pathways of catecholaminergic, noradrenergic, and acetylcholinergic neurons: red, black, and violet lines strangely intersected and interwove. The brain began to glide slowly, propelled by spiral movements of its tail, toward the atrocious contraption that Melanie constructed with the meticulous, unconscious attention of a mantis religiosa. An operating table? electroshocks? torture? a rape machine from a libertine bolgia? Bearings and gears shone through a small window framed by hydraulic cylinders. In a bath of opalescent liquid floated a spongy fetus with wise, oriental eyes. Dental floss connected filiform electrodes to its head, and the cables were plugged into the machinery. Under a bell jar, connected also to the assemblage of switches, a leaden sibyl read from a thick book, following the black spiders of letters with an unspeakably dry finger. An appalling skinned cat, nailed to a wooden plank between two inductive bobbins, was the last organic component of the machine. A few ivory nerves had been detached dexterously from its flesh and spread on both sides of its martyred body, in a fine network, numbered and inscribed with thick, inky letters. The animal rolled its clear eyes, with vertical pupils, and now and then its whiskers twitched.

“Finishing her work, covered with yellow beads of sweat, the Magdalenian-era woman sat unmoving, like an ebony idol. She reeked of armpits and wild arum, and drew thousands of flies with metallic-green or blue-cyan thoraxes, which soon covered her like a living shirt of fluttering chainmail.

“The Albino, in his new incarnation as an underground insect, had lost his eyes, and in their place were two vague atavistic swellings under his skin of crystal scales. But the eye in his brow had lit up like a great sapphire and projected an intangible cone of light, which turned Cecilia’s chocolate skin a charming shade of blue. The nubile girl was already naked, rubbed with aloe and narcissus, painted black on her lips, nipples, and the delicate folds of her hairless pubis. Her lowered eyelids, painted with kohl and dusted with gold, projected constellations onto the colossal vault, madder than ever, creating a sweltering and luminous summer night. On her neck, on an iridium chain, was a row of seven raw emeralds, untouched by any jeweler’s tools. On each emerald, a Hebrew letter was written in reverse. Two murex shells hung on her ears, like earrings. A creamy yellow cornelian gem covered the divot of her navel. Her nails, however, were truly wondrous.

“Her hands and her feet had nails of an intense, ultramarine blue, unreal and fluid like in a dream. And each one had an image in its depths, in relief, miniscule and yet still clear, like those photographs of famous monuments (or shameless women) in optical lockets. However far you were from the black princess, you saw perfectly the Giottoesque painting in her nails, and if you concentrated on a detail (the dentil molding on a wall, the Cybele of an edge, the finial on the tip of a yellow bell, the embroidery of flowers and lizards on a vestment) you saw just as clearly the details in the details, down to the thousandth level, until, delving into the whirlpool of her polished nails, you reached the subatomic world of quarks, charms, and scents … Scenes from the New Testament were painted on her fingernails, against a naïve background of medieval palaces and sycamores: the Holy Virgin asleep in her room of bare stone walls, smiling in a dream and covering her bare shoulder, while the archangel, standing beside her bed, a three-cupped lily between its fingers, is too shy to wake her; Jesus as a child whittling a wooden cross, while all the other goatherders make whistles; him again climbing for the first time (at about seven years old) into a mandorla that will raise him to the sky, to be presented to the angels; the adolescent Jesus in the wilderness, curled up on the sand, holding a snake’s triangular head and looking into its transparent eyes; Jesus and John, sitting on a bluff, watching the Jordan reflect the twilight in its waters; the daughter of Jairus, one day after she was awoken from the dead, braiding her hair at the mirror and singing a song without words; Peter, on Mount Tabor, squinting at the crystal spacecraft and wondering where he could cut enough branches for three shelters: one for Moses, another for Elijah, and another for Jesus; the adulteress, alone in the place to which she was condemned, trying to decipher what Jesus wrote in the sand, while a white drop of seed hangs between her legs; Jesus eating in Matthew’s house with the tax collectors and the sinners, who are astonished by the triangular radiation from the temples of the Nazarene; Dismas, his arms painfully crooked on the wood of the cross, his face green with suffering, still smiling at the Marys, kneeling before the three; and trillions of stars scattered over Jerusalem, each foretelling an incredible Salvation, unintelligible, unimaginable, but true …

“In contrast, Cecilia’s toenails had illuminations from the old testament: Zipporah putting her son’s foreskin on her finger and saying proudly to the winged man, “Surely a bloody husband art thou to me!”; and the Angel of the Lord was by the threshing place of Araunah the Jebusite, arming himself with the devastating instrument and spreading plague over the people, from Dan to Beersheba; the head, legs, and hands of Isabella, in a pile of bloody tissue, and a dog with human eyes gnawing a finger with many rings; Maaseh, a sweet Philistine with silk eyelashes, embracing his wife for the last time and allowing his heart to be crushed for the Lord; Job, old and happy, fat, with his skin as pink as an infant’s, a ladybug on his finger just opening its wings to fly; a bride not even twelve years old, already decorated, holding her hand, in terror, over the place between her boyish thighs and thinking of the night to come; the Lord, on his sapphire throne over the cupola like a field of heaven, looking, with strange eyes of unearthly anatomy, over the arid landscape of Judea perishing below him; Ezekiel, in the valley of dry bones, in despair, gathering the wild lilies suddenly growing from the headbones and chestbones full of dust; Daniel, pulled from the lions’ den, still smelling days and days afterwards of the beasts’ testicles; the Day of Ire, descending unexpectedly, like a thief in the night, over the villages, vineyards and orchards, laying waste to all in an ambiguous glory …

“The matron approached the nubile girl, took her hand with an unexpected delicacy and grace, and led her toward the mechanism on the edge of emptiness. She spread her across the narrow chassis and secured her wrists and ankles in cuffs. Crucified on an aluminum St. Andrew’s cross, Cecilia revealed her sex to our eyes like a black flower with crinkled petals, a feline sex, a sphinx’s vulva, unsuited for ordinary copulation. Slowly, with a sharp gesture of Melanie’s fingers, the hydraulic cylinders began to move, and the metal frame rose to vertical. Disturbingly beautiful, Cecilia smiled with the bright smile of African women, but also with something of a girl’s perversion, pleased to show everyone her secret flower. She leaned her head on one shoulder, and her eyes covered with a thin fog. Curled in its aquarium, the fetus suddenly opened its yellow eyes, and its barely sketched mouth began to speak unheard words, as it gaped like an exotic fish. The Albino, whose uniform had evaporated like gas into the air, slowly approached the operating table. His sex was erect and semitransparent. His testicles of filigreed ivory were visible through his scrotum like soft glass. We all imagined we were about to witness the ritual rape of a virgin by the horrifying cleric. We did not imagine, however, the unimaginable. And I cannot describe the indescribable. For hour after hour, the young woman’s body of flesh, blood, and nerves experienced the entire scope of human suffering and beyond. Happy were those pagan warriors fallen into the hands of their enemies, held in oubliettes for dozens of years and tortured daily under the senior’s eyes. Happy those who were burned at the stake, flayed alive, or devoured by cancer. But the girl’s screams somehow seemed to be screams of unbearable pleasure, and on her face her clenched lips and eyes revealed a devastating ecstasy. The only deed that words can describe, although itself appalling, seemed, in comparison with what had come before, to be a gesture of tenderness: with an expert flash of the blade, The Albino sliced open Cecilia’s stomach, without spilling a drop of blood, and removed her uterus, as clean as an anatomical specimen, watched over by the two ovaries like two spread wings at the ends of their tubes, between the fringes of soft skin, like two rhinestone mititei. Only then, as though the delicate organ held all her vitality, did her dark body die, soft and ashen, and rot beneath our eyes, until the bones scattered, yellow, over the floor. Only the radius of her left hand remained held in the metal cuff. Then those bones changed to dust, and the dust was absorbed into the glassy floor.