Solenoid E-Book

Mircea Cartarescu

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1388

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025 WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD AND THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION 'An instant classic' New York Times Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a teacher, Solenoid submerges us in the mundane details of a diarist's life and spirals into an existential account of history, philosophy and mathematics. Grounded in the reality of communist Romania, it grapples with frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system and the struggles of family life, while investigating other universes and forking paths. In a surreal journey like no other, we visit a tuberculosis preventorium, an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators and a minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. Combining fiction with autobiography and history, Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present. PRAISE FOR SOLENOID 'Cărtărescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult' TLS'A bravura performance' The Nation 'Surreal and viscerally political' FT 'Nothing short of remarkable' Los Angeles Review of Books 'A masterpiece' Astra Magazine

Leseprobe

1NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022

The New Yorker | Publishers Weekly | The Financial Times | Words Without Borders

“An engrossing study of a cerebral antihero, who longs to escape his earthly existence … an instant classic.”

New York Times

“Extraordinary and baroque … a bravura performance: extravagantly brilliant ideas pinwheeling out from the dark center of a scrupulously imagined and death-driven self.”

Will Self, The Nation

“An anti-novel that for all intents and purposes should not exist but still does despite itself, thanks to the overpowering talents of the author and the translator.”

Anton Hur, 2024 Dublin Literary Award Judge

“Presented as the digressive diary of a failed writer teaching at an elementary school in Bucharest, who fantasises about escaping the ugliness of life under communism, this novel by Romania’s best-known contemporary author is by turns mundane and metaphysical, surreal and viscerally political.”

Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times

“This profoundly surreal book presents an inner life like no other … [the] record of a dreamer and a visionary, genius and nutcase, loner and loser, philosopher and pariah – all rolled into one … Mircea Cărtărescu is no longer writing novels. He is officiating a cult.”

Costica Bradatan, Times Literary Supplement

2“Instead of delivering a sharp, succinct punch, Solenoid goes the way of the oceanic—rejecting brevity because the author, a Romanian Daedalus, is laying the foundation for a narrative labyrinth … The writing itself is hypnotic and gorgeously captures the oneiric quality of Cărtărescu’s Bucharest … The sheer immensity of Cotter’s undertaking combined with the unfailing evenness of the translation’s quality is nothing short of remarkable.”

Ben Hooyman, Los Angeles Review of Books

“[S]omething of a masterpiece … Solenoid synthesizes and subtly mocks elements of autofiction and history fiction by way of science fiction. The result is unlike any genre in ambition or effect, something else altogether, a self-sufficient style that proudly rejects its less emancipated alternatives … The mesmerizing beauty of creation, of reality giving way to itself: that, above all, lies behind the doors of Solenoid.”

Federico Perelmuter, Astra Magazine

“The great fun of this teeming hodge-podge is the way that Mr. Cărtărescu tweaks the material of daily life, transmuting the banal into the fantastical.”

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Cărtărescu weaves a monumental antinovel of metaphysical longing and fabulist constructions … This scabrous epic thrums with monstrous life.”

Publishers Weekly

3

4A man of blood takes clay from the peak

And creates his own ghost

From dreams, scents, and shadows

And brings it living down to us.

But his sacrifice is pointless,

However charming the book’s speech.

Beloved book and useless,

You will answer no question.

Tudor Arghezi, “Ex Libris”

A fragment of his eye socket was removed. The sun and everyone could see inside. It angered him and distracted him from his work; he was furious that he in particular could not see this marvel.

Franz Kafka, Diaries56

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Contents

Title PageEpigraphPART ONE12345678910111213141516PART TWO171819202122232425262728PART THREE2930313233343536373839PART FOUR404142434445464748495051AcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorsAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin PressCopyright8

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PART ONE

10

111

i have lice, again. it doesn’t surprise me anymore, doesn’t disgust me. It just itches. I find nits constantly, I pull them off in the bathroom when I comb my hair: little ivory eggs, glistening darkly against the porcelain around the faucet. The comb collects bunches of them, I scrub it with the worn-out bristles of an old toothbrush. I can’t avoid lice—I teach at a school on the edge of town. Half the kids there have lice, the nurse finds the bugs at the start of the year, during her checkup, when she goes through the kids’ hair with the expert motions of a chimpanzee—except she doesn’t crush the lice between her teeth, stained with the chitin of previously captured insects. Instead, she recommends the parents apply a cloudy liquid that smells like lye, the same one the teachers use. Within a few days, the entire school stinks of anti-lice solution.

It’s not that bad, at least we don’t have bedbugs, I haven’t seen those in a while. I remember them, I saw them with my own eyes when I was about three, in the little house on Floreasca where we lived around 1959–60. My father would hoist up the mattress to show them to me. They were tiny black seeds, hard, and as shiny as blackberries, or those ivy berries I knew I shouldn’t put in my mouth. When the seeds between the mattress and the bedframe scattered into the dark corners, they looked so panicked that it made me laugh. I could hardly wait for my dad to lift the heavy mattress up (as he did when he changed the sheets), so I could see the chubby little bugs. I would laugh with such delight that my mother, who kept my curly hair long, would scoop me up and spit on me, so I wouldn’t catch the evil eye. Dad would get out the pump and give them a foul-smelling lindane bath, slaughtering them where they hid in the wooden joints. I liked the smell of the wood bed, the pine that 12 still reeked of sap, I even liked the smell of lindane. Then my father would drop the mattress back in place, and my mother would bring the sheets. When she spread them over the bed, they puffed up like a huge donut, and I loved to throw myself on top. Then I would wait for the sheet to slowly settle over me, to mold itself around my little body, but not all of the sheet, it also fell in a complicated series of folds and pleats. The rooms in that house seemed as big as market halls to me, with two enormous people wandering around, who for some reason took care of me: my mother and father.

But I don’t remember the bites. My mother said they made little red circles on your skin, with a white dot in the middle. And that they burned more than itched. That may be, all I know is that I get lice from the kids when I lean over their notebooks; it’s an occupational hazard. I have worn my hair long ever since my attempt to become a writer. That’s all that’s left of that career, just the hair. And the turtlenecks, like those worn by the first writer I ever saw, the one who is still my glorious and unattainable image of a Writer: the one from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My hair always hangs down onto the girls’ downy, lice-filled hair. Along these semitransparent cables of horn, the insects climb. Their claws have the same curvature as the strands of hair, and they attach to it perfectly. Then they crawl onto the scalp, dropping excrement and eggs. They bite the skin that has never seen the sun, immaculate and parchment-white: this is their food. When the itching becomes unbearable, I turn on the hot water and prepare to exterminate them.

I like how the water resounds in the bathtub, that chaotic churning, that spiral of billions of twisting jets and streams, the roaring vertical fountain inside the green gelatin of infinitesimally rising water conquering the sides of the tub with checked swells and sudden invasions, as though countless transparent ants were swarming in the Amazon jungle. I turn off the faucet and there is quiet, the ants melt into each other, and the soft, jelly sapphire lies silent, it looks at me like a limpid eye and waits. Naked, I slide into the water. I put my head under right away, feeling the walls of water rise symmetrically over my cheeks and forehead. The water grasps me, it presses its weight all around me, it makes me float in its midst. I am the seeds of a fruit with green-blue flesh. My hair spreads toward the sides of the bathtub, like a blackbird opening its wings. The strands repel each other, each one is independent, each one suddenly wet, 13 floating among the others without touching, like the tentacles of a sea lily. I pull my head from one side to the other so I can feel them resist; they spread through the dense water, they become heavy, strangely heavy. It is hard to pull them from their water alveoli. The lice cling to the thick trunks, they become one with them. Their inhuman faces show a kind of bewilderment. Their carcasses are made of the same substance as the hair. They become wet in the hot water, but they do not dissolve. Their symmetrical respiratory tubes, along the edges of their undulating abdomens, are completely shut, like the closed nostrils of sea lions. I float in the bathtub passively, distended like an anatomical specimen, the skin on my fingertips bulges and wrinkles. I am soft, as though covered in transparent chitin. My hands, left to their own will, float on the surface. My sex rises vaguely, like a piece of cork. It seems strange that I have a body, that I am in a body.

I sit up and begin to soap my hair and skin. While my ears were underwater, I could clearly hear the conversations and thumps in the neighboring apartments, but as though in a dream. My ears still feel plugged with gelatin. I pass my soapy hands over myself. My body is not, for me, erotic. My fingers, it seems, move across not my body but my mind. My mind dressed in flesh, my flesh dressed in the cosmos.

As with the lice, I am not that surprised when my soapy fingers come to my navel. This has been happening for a few years. Of course I was scared when it started, because I had heard that sometimes your navel could burst. But I had never worried about mine, my navel was just a dent where my stomach “stuck to my spine,” as my mother would say. At the bottom of this hollow there was something unpleasant to the touch, but that never worried me. My navel was no more than the indentation on top of an apple, where the stem comes out. We all grew like fruits from a petiole crossed with veins and arteries. But starting a few months ago, whenever I poked my finger in to clean this accident of my body, I felt something unusual, something that shouldn’t have been there: a kind of protuberance scraping against my fingertip, something inorganic, not part of my body. It lay within the pale knot of flesh, like an eye between two lids. Now I looked more closely, under the water, pulling the edges of the crevasse apart with my fingers. I couldn’t see well enough, so I got out of the tub, and the lens of water flowed slowly out of my navel. Good 14 lord, I smiled at myself, here I am, contemplating my navel … Yes, there was the pale knot, sticking out a little more than usual, because as you approach thirty the stomach muscles start to sag. A scab the size of a child’s fingernail, in one of the knot’s volutes, turned out to be some dirt. But on the other side, a stiff and painful black-green stump stuck out, the thing my fingertip had felt. I couldn’t imagine what it could be. I tried to catch it with my fingernail, but when I did, I felt a twinge that frightened me: it might be a wart that I should leave alone. I tried to forget about it, to leave it where it had grown. Over the course of our lives, we excrete plenty of moles, warts, dead bones, and other refuse, things we carry around patiently, not to mention how our hair, nails, and teeth fall out: pieces of ourselves stop belonging to us and take on another life, all their own. I have, thanks to my mother, an empty Tic-Tac box with all my baby teeth, and also thanks to her I have my braids from when I was three. Photographs on cracked enamel, with little serrations along the edges like a postage stamp, are similar testimonies: our body really was once in between the sun and the camera lens, and it left a shadow on the film no different than the one the moon, during an eclipse, leaves across the solar disk.

But one week later, again in the bath, my navel felt unusual and irritated again: the unidentified piece had grown a little longer, and it felt different, more disturbing than painful. When we have a toothache, we rub our tongue against our molars, even at the risk of hitting a livid pain. Anything unusual on the sensitive map of our bodies makes us unsettled, nervous: we’ll do anything to escape a constant discomfort. Sometimes, at night, as I’m going to bed, I take off my socks and touch the thickening, hornlike, transparent-yellow flesh on the side of my big toe. I pinch at the growth, I pull it, and after about a half hour I have the edge up, and I keep pulling, with the smarting tips of my fingers, as I become more irritated and more worried, until I remove a thick, shiny layer, with fingerprint-like striations, a whole centimeter of dead skin, now hanging disgracefully from my finger. I can’t pull off any more, since I have already reached the living flesh underneath, the part where I feel pain, but still I have to put a stop to the irritation, the unease. I take a pair of scissors and cut it in half, then I examine it for a long time: a white shell that I made, without knowing how, just as I don’t remember how I made my own bones. I fold it between my fingers, I feel it, it smells vaguely like ammonia: the piece 15 is organic, yet dead, dead even while it was a part of me, adding a few grams to my weight; it still makes me uneasy. I don’t feel like throwing it out, I turn out the light and go to bed, still holding it between my fingers, only to forget everything the next day. Still, for a little while after that I limp slightly: the place I pulled it from hurts.

I tugged on the hard sliver coming out of my navel, until, unexpectedly, it was in my hand. A small cylinder, a half centimeter long and about as wide as a matchstick. It looked to have gotten darker over time, worn and sticky and tarnished with age. It was something ancient, mummified, saponified, who the hell knows. I put it under the faucet and washed away the layer of grime; I could see the thing had been a yellowish-green color, long ago, perhaps. I put it in an empty matchbox. It resembled, more than anything, the stub of a burnt match.

A few weeks later, my navel, again softened in hot water, yielded another fragment, twice as long this time, of the same hard substance. I realized that it was the flexible end of a piece of twine, I could even see its multitude of twisted fibers. It was string, ordinary string, the kind used for packages. The string with which, twenty-seven years earlier, they had tied my navel in the decrepit workers’ maternity ward where I was born. Now my navel was aborting, slowly, a piece every two weeks, every month, then another after three more months. Today I’m removing the fifth piece, carefully, with a certain pleasure. I flatten it out, scrape it clean with my fingernail, wash it in the bathtub water. It is the longest piece so far, and I hope the last. I put it in the matchbox, alongside the others: they lie there politely, yellowish-greenish-black, their ends raveling. Hemp, the same material as homemade shopping bags, the kind that cut into your hands when filled with potatoes, the same material you use to tie packages. On Holy Mary’s Day, my father’s family in Banat would send me packages: poppy-seed and apple pastries. The brown-green string was my favorite part: I would tie the doorknobs together, so my mother wouldn’t have another child. On each knob, I tied tens, hundreds of knots.

I stop worrying about the string from my navel and, as the water runs off my body, get out of the tub. I take the lice solution from behind the toilet and pour a little of the pungent substance over my head. I wonder what class gave me lice this time, as though it matters. Maybe it does, who knows. Maybe 16 different streets in the neighborhood and different classes in school have distinct species of lice, different sizes.

I rinse the revolting solution off my head and comb my hair, hanging over the brilliantly clean porcelain of the sink. And the parasites begin to drop out, two, five, eight, fifteen … They are tiny, each one in its own drop of water. Squinting, I can see their bodies, with wide abdomens and three still-moving legs on each side. Their bodies and my body, wet and naked, leaning over the sink, are made of the same organic tissues. They have analogous organs and anatomical functions. They have eyes that see the same reality, they have legs that take them through the same unending and unintelligible world. They want to live, just as I do. I wash them off the sides of the sink with a stream of water. They travel through the pipes below, into the sewers underground.

With my hair still wet, I go to bed beside my meager set of treasures: the Tic-Tac box with my baby teeth, pictures from when I was little and my parents were in the prime of their life, the matchbox of fibers from my navel, my journal. As I often do in the evenings, I pour the teeth into my hand: smooth little stones, still bright white, that were once inside my mouth, that I once used to eat, to pronounce words, to bite like a puppy. Many times have I wondered what it would be like to have a paper bag with my vertebra from when I was two, or my finger bones from age seven …

I put the teeth away. I would like to look at some of the pictures, but I can’t stay up any later. I open the drawer in the nightstand and put everything inside, in the yellowed “snakeskin” box that used to house a razor, a shaving brush, and a box of Astor razor blades. Now I use it for my lowly treasures. I pull the blanket over my head and try to fall asleep as fast as I can, perhaps forever. My scalp doesn’t itch anymore. And, since it’s happened so recently, I hope it won’t happen again tonight.

2

I meant my dreams, the visitors, all that insanity, but this is not the time to talk about it. For now, let me turn again to the school where I’ve worked more than three years already. “I won’t be a teacher all my life,” I told myself, I remember 17 like it was yesterday, when I was taking the tram home, late one summer night under rosebud clouds, from the end of Şoseaua Colentina, where I had been to see the school for the first time. But no miracle has happened; I very likely will be a teacher all my life. In the end, it hasn’t been all that bad. The afternoon I visited the school, just after I received my assignment, I was twenty-four in years and maybe twice as many kilograms in weight. I was incredibly, impossibly thin. My mustache and long hair, slightly red at that time, did nothing but infantilize my appearance, such that, if I glanced at myself in a shop or tram window, I would think I was looking at a high school student.

It was a summer afternoon, the city was brimming with light, like a glass whose water arches above its lip. I took the tram from Tunari, in front of the Directorate General of the Militia. I passed my parents’ apartment building on Ştefan cel Mare, where I lived too, and as usual I searched the endless facade for my window, lined with blue paper to keep out the sun, then I passed the wire fence of Colentina Hospital. The hospital wings were lined up over the vast grounds like brickwork battleships. Each one had a different shape, as though the tenants’ various diseases had determined their building’s bizarre architecture. Or perhaps each wing’s architect had been chosen for his disease, and he had attempted to create an allegory of his suffering. I knew each one and had stayed in at least two of them. At the right end of the grounds, I shuddered at the sight of a pink building with paper-thin walls, the neurology wing. I had stayed there for a month, eight years earlier, for a facial paralysis that still bothered me from time to time. Many are the nights in which I wander in my dreams through the wings of Colentina Hospital, I enter unknown, hostile buildings, their walls covered with anatomical diagrams …

Next, the tram passes along the former ITB workshops, where my father worked for a while as a locksmith. Some apartment blocks have gone up in front of them, you can barely see the workshops from the street. The ground floor of one block was once a clinic, right at the Doctor Grozovici stop. For a time, I went there for my injections, vitamin B1 and B6, following my facial paralysis at age sixteen. My parents would put the vials in my hand and tell me not to come back with them unopened. They knew me too well. At first, I would drop them down the elevator shaft and tell my parents I had done them, but this didn’t work for long. In the end, I had to get it done for real. I would 18 set off for the clinic, at dusk, my heart full of dread. I walked the two tram stops as slowly as I could. Like when I had to go to the dentist, I would hope that some miracle would happen and I would find the office was closed, the building demolished, the doctor deceased, or that there was a blackout and the drill couldn’t run or the lights above the chair would go out. No miracle ever happened, however. The pain waited for me, all of it, with its blood-colored aura. The first nurse at Grozovici who, late one night, gave me the injection was pretty, blonde, very neat, but I soon became terrified of her. She was the type who treated your bare bottom with complete disdain. Not the thought of the pain that was to come, but this woman’s disdain for the kid with whom she was about to have an intimate relationship (albeit just sticking a needle in his butt cheek) quickly eliminated the vaguest excitement, and my sex gave up its efforts to lift its head and take a look. I waited next for the inevitable wetness on the soon-to-be martyred flesh, the three or four smacks of the back of her hand, then the shock of the needle stuck into flesh, its tip always sure to hit a nerve, a vein, to hurt you somehow, a lasting, memorable pain, then increased by the poison that traveled down the channel of the needle to spread, like sulfuric acid, throughout your hip. It was horrible. The blonde nurse’s injections would make me limp for a week.

Luckily, this nurse, who was probably into S&M in bed, traded off with another nurse at the clinic, this one just as difficult to forget, though for different reasons. She scared you to death when you first saw her because she had no nose. But she did not wear a bandage or a prosthetic, she simply had, in the middle of her face, a large orifice vaguely partitioned into two compartments. She was as small as a gosling, brown-haired, with eyes whose tenderness might have seemed attractive if the skull-like appearance of her face did not overwhelm you. When I came on the blonde nurse’s night, I was seen right away. The wind whistled through the waiting room. But the noseless little person seemed unusually popular: the waiting room was always full of people, as full as a church on Easter. I wouldn’t get home from the clinic until two in the morning. Many of the patients brought her flowers. When she appeared in the doorway, everyone smiled happily. I could understand why: no one, probably, had ever had a lighter touch. When my turn came and I sat with my pants down on the rubber of her examination table, I would become dizzy from the 19 smell of flowers, a row of seven or eight bouquets, still in cellophane, along the wall. That extraordinary brunette woman spoke calmly and measuredly, then touched my hip for a moment and … that was about it. I didn’t feel the needle, and the serum diffused through my muscle with nothing but a gentle warmth. Everything happened in a few minutes, and I went home happy and full of energy. My parents looked at me suspiciously: maybe I had thrown out the vial again?

Next came the Melodia movie theater, just before Lizeanu, and I got off at the next stop, Obor, where I transferred to a tram going perpendicular to Ştefan cel Mare, from Moșilor toward the depths of Colentina.

I knew these places well, it was, in a way, my neighborhood. My mother used to shop at Obor. She would take me with her, when I was little, into the sea of people filling the old market. The fish hall that stank until you couldn’t take it anymore, then the great hall, with bas-reliefs and mosaics showing unintelligible scenes, and finally the ice plant, where the workers handled blocks of ice that were white in the middle and miraculously transparent on the sides (as though constantly dissolving into the surrounding air)—to my child’s eyes these were fantastical citadels of another world. There at Obor, one desolate Monday morning, I saw a poster that stayed with me for a long time: a giant squid in a flying saucer reached out its arms toward an astronaut walking a red, rocky terrain. Above, the words Planet of Storms. “It’s a movie,” my mother said to me. “Let’s wait for it to come somewhere closer, to the Volga or the Floreasca.” My mother was afraid of the center of town, she didn’t leave her neighborhood unless she had no choice, for example when she had to go to Lipscani to buy my school uniform, with the checkered shirt and pants already sagging in the knees, as though someone had been wearing them at the factory.

Even Colentina looked familiar to me, with its run-down houses on the left and the Stela soap factory on the right, the place where they made Cheia and Cămila laundry detergents. The smell of rancid fat spread from here over the entire neighborhood. Next came the brick building of the Donca Simo textile factory, where my mother once worked at the loom, then came some lumberyards. The wretched and desolate street drove toward the horizon, in the torrid summer, under those enormous, white skies you only see above 20 Bucharest. As it happened, I had been born in Colentina, on the edge of town, in a decrepit maternity ward thrown together in an old building that had been half gambling house, half bordello in the years before 1944, and I had lived my first years somewhere on Doamna Ghica, in a tangle of alleyways worthy of a Jewish ghetto. Much later, I went back to Silistra with a camera, and I took a few pictures of my childhood home, but they didn’t turn out. Now Silistra isn’t even there, it was bulldozed, my house and everything else wiped off the face of the earth. What took its place? Apartment blocks, of course, like everywhere else.

Once tram 21 passed over Doamna Ghica, I entered a foreign country. There were fewer houses, more dirty ponds where women with pleated skirts washed their rugs. Seltzer shops and bread shops, wine stores, fish stores. An endless, desolate street, seventeen tram stops, most without wind shelters or any reason to be there, like the whistle stops trains make in the middle of a field. Women in print dresses, a daughter on each arm, walking nowhere. A cart full of empty bottles. Propane tank centers where people lined up in the evening for the store to open the next day. Perpendicular streets, dusty, like a village, lined with mulberries. Kites caught in the electric lines, strung between wooden poles treated with gasoline.

I reached the end of the line after an hour and a half of rocking in the tram. For the last three or four stops I may have been the only one in the car. I exited into a large circle of track, where the trams turned around to go again, like Sisyphus, toward Colentina. The day was tilting toward night, the air was amber-colored and, on account of the silence, ghostly. Here, at the end of line 21, there was not a soul in sight. Industrial halls, long and gray, with narrow windows, a water tower in the distance, and in the middle of the tram turnabout, a grove of trees literally black from the heating oil and exhaust fumes. Two empty trams stood one beside the other, without drivers. A closed ticket booth. Marked contrasts between the rosy light and the shadows. What was I doing there? How was I going to live in such a remote place? I walked toward the water tower, I came to its base to find a padlocked door, I tilted my head back to look toward its sphere glittering in the sky, at the end of a white, plastered cylinder. I walked farther toward … nothing, toward the emptiness … This wasn’t, it seemed to me, where the city ended, but where reality ended. 21 A street sign to the left had the name I was looking for: Dimitrie Herescu. Somewhere on this street should be the school, my school, my first job, where I should appear on the first of September, more than two months from that moment. The green and pink building of an auto mechanic did nothing to destroy the rural atmosphere of the place: houses with tile roofs, yards with rotting fences, tied-up dogs, tacky flowerpots. The school was on the right, a few houses down from the mechanic, and it was, of course, empty.

It was a small school, an L-shaped hybrid, with an old central section, plaster cracking, broken windows, and at the other end of a small courtyard, a new section, even more desolate. In the yard, a basketball hoop without a net. I opened the gate and entered. I took a few steps on the courtyard pavement. The sun had just begun to go down, a halo of rays settling on the roof of the old building. From there, it sprayed out sadly and, in a way, darkly, since rather than illuminate anything it increased the inhuman loneliness of the place. My heart grew worried. I was going to enter this school that looked as stiff as a morgue, I was going to walk, the register under my arm, down its dark green halls, I was going to go upstairs and enter an unknown classroom where thirty strange kids, stranger than another species, were waiting for me. Maybe they were waiting for me even at that moment, sitting silently on their benches, with wooden pencil boxes, their notebooks with blue paper covers. At the thought of this, the hair on my arms stood up and I practically ran into the street. “I won’t be a teacher all my life,” I told myself as the tram took me back into the known world, as the stations passed behind me, the houses became more frequent, and people repopulated the earth. “A year at most, until some literary magazine asks me to be an editor.” And in the first three years I taught at School 86, I truly did nothing but feed on this illusion, just as some mothers breastfeed their children long after they should have been weaned. My illusion had grown as large as myself, and still I couldn’t—and in a way I can’t even today—resist opening my shirt, at least now and then, and letting it voluptuously cannibalize me. The first years passed. After another forty, I’ll retire from this same school. In the end, it hasn’t been that bad. There were long stretches when I didn’t have lice. No, if I stop to think about it, it hasn’t been bad at this school, such as it is, and maybe even a little bit good. 22

3

Sometimes I lose control of my hands, from the elbows down. It doesn’t scare me, I might even say I like it. It happens unexpectedly, and luckily, only when I’m alone. I’ll be writing something, correcting papers, drinking a coffee, or cutting my nails with a Chinese nail trimmer and suddenly my hands feel very light, as though they were filled with volatile gas. They rise on their own, pulling my shoulders up, levitating happily through the dense, glittering, dark air of my room. I smile, I look at them as though for the first time: long, delicate, thin-boned, some black hair on the fingers. Before my enchanted eyes, they begin to make elegant and bizarre gestures of their own accord, to tell stories that perhaps the deaf can understand. My fingers move precisely and unmistakably, making a series of unintelligible signs: the right hand asks, the left responds, the ring finger and thumb close in a circle, the little fingers page through some text, the wrists pivot with the supple energy of an orchestra conductor. I should be scared out of my mind, because someone else, within my own mind, directs these movements, skilled motions desperate to be deciphered, and yet I am seldom ever so happy. I watch my hands like a child at a puppet show who doesn’t understand what is happening on the minuscule stage but is fascinated by the agitation of wooden beings in crepe dresses with yarn for hair. The autonomous animation of my hands (thank God, it never happens when I’m in class or on the street) quiets down after a few minutes, the motions slow, they begin to resemble the mudras of Indian dancers, then they stop, and for two or three minutes more I can enjoy the charming sensation that my hands are lighter than air, as though my father had used the gas line to inflate not balloons but two thin rubber gloves, and put them in place of my hands. And how can I not be disappointed when my real hands—crude, heavy, organic, chafed, with their striated muscles, the white hyaline of the tendons, and their veins throbbing with blood—reenter their nail-tipped skin gloves, and suddenly, to my amazement, I can make my fingers move as I want, as though I could, through concentration alone, break a twig from the ficus in the window or pull my coffee cup toward me without touching it. 23

Only later does the fear come, only after this fantasy (that happens about once every two or three months) becomes a kind of memory do I begin to wonder if somehow, among all the anomalies of my life—because this is my topic—the fantastical independence of my hands is further proof that … everything is a dream, that my entire life is oneiric, or something sadder, graver, weirder, yet truer than any story that could ever be invented. The cheery-frightful ballet of my hands, always and only here, in my boat-shaped house on Maica Domnului, is the smallest, least meaningful (and in the end the most benign) reason for me to write these pages, meant only for me, in the incredible solitude of my life. If I had wanted to write literature, I would have started ten years ago. I mean, if I had really wanted to, without the effort of consciousness, the way you want your leg to take a step and it does. You don’t have to say, “I order you to step,” you don’t have to think through the complicated process by which your will becomes deed. You just have to believe, to have belief as small as a mustard seed. If you are a writer, you write. Your books come without your knowing how to make them come, they come according to your gift, just as your mother is made to give birth, and she really does give birth to the child who grew in her uterus, without her mind participating in the complicated origami of her flesh. If I had been a writer, I would have written fiction, I would have had ten, fifteen novels by now without making any more effort than I make to secrete insulin or to send nourishment, day by day, from one orifice of my digestive system to another. I, however, at that moment long ago when my life still could have chosen one of an undefined multitude of directions, ordered my mind to produce fiction and nothing happened, just as futilely as if I had stared at my finger and shouted, “Move!”

When I was a teenager, I wanted to write literature. Even now I don’t know what happened—if I lost my way somehow or if it was just bad luck. I wrote poems in high school, I have them in a notebook somewhere, and I wrote some of my dreams as prose, in a large school notebook with a thick cover, full of stories. Now is not the moment for me to write about that. I took part in the school competitions for Romanian, on rainy Sundays in unknown schools. I was an unreal young man, almost schizophrenic, who, during the breaks between classes, would go into the schoolyard to the long-jump pit, sit on the edge, and read my poems out loud from ragged 24 notebooks. People looked right through me, they didn’t listen when I talked, I was a decoration to them, not even a good one, on an enormous and chaotic world. Since I wanted to be a writer, I decided to sit for university entrance exams in Letters. I got into the major without any problem, in the summer of 1975. At that time, my solitude was all-encompassing. I lived with my parents on Ştefan cel Mare. I would read for eight hours a day, rolling from one side of the bed to the other, under a sweaty sheet. The book pages would adopt the ever-changing color of the Bucharest skies, from the gold of summer dawns to the dark, heavy pink of snowy evenings in deep winter. Dark would come and I wouldn’t even notice. My mother would find me reading in a room sunk deep into darkness, where the paper and print were nearly the same color and I wasn’t reading anymore, I was dreaming farther into the story, deforming it according to the laws of dream. Then I would shake it off, stretch, get out of bed—the whole day I had only gotten up to go to the bathroom—and, invariably, I would go to the large window in my room, where I could see, poured out under clouds of fantasy, all of Bucharest. Thousands of lights were lit in the far-off houses, in those nearby I could see people moving like lazy fish in an aquarium, much farther away the colored neon signs turned on and off. But what fascinated me was the giant sky above, the cupola higher and more overwhelming than any cathedral. Not even the clouds could rise to its apex. I pressed my forehead against the cold, yielding window, and I stood like that, a teenager in pajamas with holes in the armpits, until my mother called me to eat. I would come back to the vision of my solitude, deep under the earth, to read farther, with the light on and with another, identical room, extended into the mirror of the window, until I was overwhelmed with exhaustion.

During the day, I would go for walks in the endless summer. First, I would look for two or three different friends, who were never home. Then I would go down unknown streets, I would find myself in neighborhoods I didn’t even know existed, I would wander among strange houses that looked like bunkers from another planet. Old, pink houses, merchant-style, their facades loaded with stucco cupids, chipped all over. There was never anyone on these streets, beneath the arches of old plane trees. I would go into the old houses, wander through their kitsch-filled rooms, climb bizarre exterior stairways to the 25 second floor, discover vast, empty rooms where my footsteps sounded indecently loud. I went down into basements with electric lights and opened doors of rotten wood to find hallways that smelled of earth, with thin gas lines along the walls. On the pipes, affixed to the wall with sloppy foam, beetle pupae pulsed slowly, a sign that their wings were forming under their husks. I would pass into the basements of other houses, climb other stairs, enter other barren rooms. I would sometimes end up in houses familiar to me, rooms where I had once lived, beds where I had slept. Like a child stolen by nomads and found many years later, I would go directly to the dresser, where I would find a silver fifteen-lei coin (placed in my cradle after my first bath, now so tarnished you couldn’t see the king’s face), the bag with the lock of hair cut at age one (the same age when I was presented a tray of objects for me to choose my destiny, and I chose, so they tell me, a pencil), or my poor little baby teeth, a complete set, which I’ve already written about. Still wandering, every day in the summer of ’75, down the streets and into the houses of that torrid city, which I came to know so well, to know its secrets and turpitudes, its glory and the purity of its soul. Bucharest, as I understood it at the age of nineteen, when I had already read everything, was not like other cities that developed over time, exchanging its huts and warehouses for condominium towers, replacing horse-drawn trams with electric ones. It had appeared all at once, already ruined, shattered, with its facades fallen and its gargoyles’ noses chipped, with electric wires hung over the streets in melancholic fixtures, with an imaginatively varied industrial architecture. From the very beginning, the project was to be a more human, a more moving city than, for example, a concrete and glass Brasília. The genius architect planned the narrow streets, the uneven sewers, the houses slouched to one side, overrun with weeds, houses with their fronts fallen in, unusable schools, bent and ghostly stores seven stories tall. And, more than anything, Bucharest was planned as a great open-air museum, a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things.

This was the city I saw from my window on Ştefan cel Mare, and the one, if I had become a writer, I would have described endlessly, page after page and book after book, empty of people but full of myself, like a network of arcades in the epidermis of some god, inhabited by a sole, microscopic mite, a transparent creature with strands of hair at the end of its hideous, stumpy legs. 26

That fall I did my military service, and those nine months knocked the poetry or any hazy literary dream out of my head. I know how to disassemble and reassemble the modernized Kalashnikov. I know how to fume the scope with a burning toothbrush so it won’t glint in the sun at the firing range. I loaded, one after another, twenty cartridges into a clip in winter, negative twenty degrees Celsius, before standing guard at a far-off corner of a military compound, in the wind and wilderness, from three in the afternoon until six in the morning. I pulled myself a kilometer through the mud, with a gas mask on my face and a thirty-kilo pack on my back. I inhaled and exhaled mosquitoes, five or six per cubic centimeter of bunk room air. I cleaned toilets and polished tiles with a toothbrush. I broke my teeth on army crackers and ate potatoes, peels and all, from a mess kit. I painted every apple tree on the compound. I beat up another guy over a can of tuna. A third was ready to stick his bayonet in me. I did not read a book, not a word in fact, for nine months. I did not write or receive any letters. Only my mother visited me, every two weeks, to bring some food. The army did not make me a man, but it did increase my introversion and aloneness. Looking back, I wonder how I survived.

The first thing I did the next summer, when I was “liberated,” was to fill a tub with hot water as blue as a gemstone. I let the water fill over the overflow, up to the lip of the porcelain tub, to arch in tension gently above the rim. Naked, I climbed in, while the water flowed onto the bathroom floor. I didn’t care, I had to get the grime of those nine military months off of me, the only dead time, like a dead bone, of my life. I sank completely into the holy substance, I held my nostrils shut and let my head go far underwater, until the top of my head touched the bottom of the tub. I lay there, at the bottom of the tub, a thin adolescent with his ribs pathetically visible through his skin, with his eyes wide open, looking at the way, many kilometers above, light played over the surface of the water. I stayed there hour after hour, without needing to breathe, until whatever was on me detached, pinching off in pleats—a darkened skin. I still have it, hanging in the wardrobe. It looks like a sheet of thin rubber, dimpled by the shape of my face, the nipples of my chest, my water-wrinkled sex, even the prints from my thumbs. It is a skin of ash, agglutinated, hardened ash, gray as Plasticine when you mix all the colors together, the ash of those nine months in the army that nearly did me in. 27

4

The summer after my army service, the one I dreamed of while I was curled up in a trench under nighttime barrages, my future paradise of endless freedom, civilian life with its mystic-sexual aura, but which proved to be just as lonely and barren as the previous summer—no one calling on the phone, no one home, no one to talk to, days on end (aside from my ghostly parents)—I wrote my first real poem, what would remain the only literary fruit of mine to ever mature. At the time, I would learn the meaning of those lines from Hölderlin, “O fates, permit me just one summer / and an autumn to ripen my fruit …” I also felt like the gods for those few months in 1976 when I was writing The Fall, but afterward my life—which should have turned toward literature with the naturalness of opening a door and, once in the forbidden room, finally discovering your deepest, truest self—took a different path, suddenly, almost grotesquely, the way you throw a railway switch. Instead of Hölderlin I became Scardanelli, locked for thirty years in his tower, raised high above the seasons.

The Fall was not a poem, but The Poem. It was “that unique object through which nothingness is honored.” It was the result of the ten years of reading literature. For the past decade, I had forgotten to breathe, cough, vomit, sneeze, ejaculate, see, hear, love, laugh, produce white blood cells, protect myself with antibodies, I had forgotten my hair had to grow and my tongue, with its papilla, had to taste food. I had forgotten to think about my fate on Earth and about finding a wife. Lying in bed like an Etruscan statue over a sarcophagus, my sweat staining my sheets yellow, I had read until I was almost blind and almost schizophrenic. My mind had no room left for blue skies mirrored in the springtime pond, nor for the delicate melancholy of snowflakes sticking to a building plastered in calcio-vecchio. Whenever I opened my mouth, I spoke in quotes from my favorite authors. When I lifted my eyes from the page, in the room steeped in the rosy brown of dusk on Ştefan cel Mare, I saw the walls clearly tattooed with letters: they were poems, on the ceiling, on the mirror, on the leaves of the translucent geraniums vegetating in their pots. I had lines written on my fingers and on the heel of my hand, poems inked on 28 my pajamas and sheets. Frightened, I went to the bathroom mirror, where I could see myself completely: I had poems written with a needle on the whites of my eyes and poems scrawled over my forehead. My skin was tattooed in minuscule letters, maniacal, with a legible handwriting. I was blue from head to toe, I stank of ink the way others stink of tobacco. The Fall would be the sponge that sucked up all the ink from the lonely nautilus I was.

My poem had seven parts, representing the seven stages of life, seven colors, seven metals, seven planets, seven chakras, seven steps in falling from paradise to hell. It was supposed to be a colossal, astonishing waterfall from the eschatological to the scatological, a metaphysical gradation on which we set demons and saints, labia and astrolabes, stars and frogs, geometry and cacophony, with the impersonal rigor of the biologist who delineates the trunk and branches of the animal kingdom. It was also an enormous collage, since my mind was just a jigsaw puzzle of citations, it was a summum of all that could be known, an amalgam of the church fathers and quantum physics, genetics, and topology. It was, in the end, the only poem that would make the universe good for nothing, that would banish it to the museum, like the electric locomotive did to the steam engine. Reality, the elements, galaxies would no longer be needed. The Fall existed, within which Everything flickered and crackled with an eternal flame.

The poem was thirty handwritten pages, the way I wrote everything back then, obviously, since my long-standing dream of a typewriter was impossible to realize, and I reread the poem every day, I learned it by heart, or better said I caressed it, I checked in on it, I cleared the dust off of it every day as though it were a strange machine from another world, a machine that came, who knows how, through the mirror, into our own. I still have it, on the pieces of paper where I created it without erasing a letter, that summer when I turned twenty. It looks like an old piece of scripture, kept under a bell jar in a great museum, in controlled temperature and humidity. It too is an artifact; I have surrounded myself with them until I feel like a god with a thousand arms in the middle of a mandala: my baby teeth, the threads from my navel, my pale pigtails, the black-and-white photos of my childhood. My eyes as a child, my ribs as an adolescent, my women from much later. The sad insanity of my life. 29

That fall, a luminous fall like no other I can remember, I went to the university for the first time. When bus 88 crossed Zoia Kosmodemianskaia toward Batiștei, I was bubbling with happiness like champagne: I was a college student, something I had never dared to dream, a student of Letters! From now on, I would see the center of Bucharest every day, what seemed to me at the time the most beautiful city in the world. I would live in the splendor of the city that unfurled, like a peacock, its Intercontinental Hotel and National Theater, its university and Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture, its Cantacuzino Hospital and four ministering statues behind it, with hypnotic eyes of churning waters. Gossamer cobwebs drifted through the air, young women rushed toward their studies, the world was new and warm, just out of the oven, and it was all for me! The building that housed the Department of Letters had inhuman proportions: the marble hall looked like a barren, cold basilica. Below, in the chessboard of the floor, the white tiles were more worn than the black ones. Thousands of footsteps had dug into the agate-soft surface. The library was a ship’s belly loaded with books. But I had already read all of them, every one; in fact I had already read every letter ever written. Still, the height of the library took me by surprise: twenty floors lined with numbered oak cases, connected by ladders, where the librarians climbed up and down, their arms full of books. The head clerk, a bearded, antipathetic young man, sat at all hours like a robot behind a raised desk at the front of the room, receiving and sorting book requests from the line of waiting students. Along the walls, as though in another castle, heaps of books awaited sorting, constantly tipping over, startling everyone at their tables.

Because it will become important later in this text (which is not, thank God, a book, illegible or otherwise), I want to record a detail here: the first time I walked into the library—a place I never stayed for long, since I never read at a table but in my bed (that piece of furniture which, aside from the book itself, is the essential part of my reading tool kit)—a thought came into my mind and never left. In the center of the reading room there was a massive card catalog, from the last century, full of drawers labeled in an antiquated hand. I knelt before one of them, since the letter V was at the very bottom, in the first row up from the floor, I pulled the drawer out to reveal, like a whale’s baleen, hundreds of yellowed, typewritten cards showing the name, author, and other 30 information about the ever more numerous and ever more useless books written in this world. Toward the back of the drawer, I found the name I wanted: Voynich. I had never known exactly how it was spelled, but I’d found it here.

This name had been stuck in my head ever since the seventh grade, when I cried while reading a book. My mother heard me and came running into my room, in her fuzzy bathrobe, smelling like soup. She tried to calm me down, to hold me, thinking that my stomach hurt or I had a toothache. It took her a long time to understand I was crying because of the tattered book lying on the rug, missing its cover and first fifty pages. Many of our books looked like that: the one about Thomas Alva Edison, the one about the Polynesians, and From the North Pole to the South. The only complete (and unread) books were Battle en Route by Galina Nikolaeva and How the Steel Was Tempered by N. Ostrovsky. In between my inconsolable sobs, I told my mother something about a revolutionary, a monsignor, a girl, a story so tangled that I didn’t really understand it (especially since I had started it halfway in), but which had made a strong impression. I didn’t know what the book was called, and at that time I didn’t care about authors. When my father came home that evening, leaving his briefcase on the table as usual (I always took his Sport and The Spark newspapers to read the sports pages), he found me with red eyes, still thinking of the scene in which the young revolutionary finds out his father was the very monsignor he despised! “What book is this, dear?” my mother asked him at dinner, and my father, wearing just his underwear, as he usually did around the house, said, with his mouth full, something that sounded like “boyish,” to which he added, The Gadfly. Yes, the young man was known in Italy as the Gadfly, but I didn’t know what that word meant. “One of those big gray flies, with big eyes,” my mother explained. I had never forgotten that night, when I cried for four hours straight while reading a book, but I had never had the chance to learn more about it or its author. The first surprise was that the author was a woman, Ethel Lilian Voynich, as I read her full name on the card, alongside the year that The Gadfly was published: 1909. I felt I’d achieved a small victory, I had cleared up a mystery almost ten years old, but, in fact, my frustration would only increase. I didn’t know at the time that the name I looked up in the catalog—my earlier tears turned out to be a kind of odd premonition—would connect two of the most important areas of my searching, since 31 the displeasure of not becoming a writer had, paradoxically, released me (and I hope that this will not be yet another illusion) to follow the path toward my life’s true meaning. I never wrote fiction, but this released me to find my true calling: to search in reality, in the reality of lucidity, of dreams, of memories, of hallucinations, and of anything else. Although it rose from fear and terror, my search still satisfies me completely, like those disrespected and rejected arts of the flea circus and prestidigitation.

I threw myself into my new life like a crazy person. I studied old literature with inept professors, reading monks and nuns who wrote three lines each in Old Slavonic, based on foreign models, since we had to explain the gap in the history of a culture that had come to life somewhat late. But what did I care? I was a student of Letters, as I had barely dared to dream. My first paper, on psalm versification, was almost one hundred pages long. It was monstrous, containing all possible references, from Clément Marot to Kochanowski, the psalms of Verlaine and Tudor Arghezi. All my examples were translated by me, preserving the original verse forms …

How lonely and hopeless I was! I would leave the university at dusk, when the asphalt, wet from the day’s rain, reflected the illuminated billboards along the street. Instead of taking the bus, I often walked home among the grand apartment buildings on Magheru from before the war, past the Scala bookstore and Patria movie theater, then as the evening turned as yellow as kerosene, I sank into the little streets full of stucco houses, as they turned dark blue then black as pitch, on Domnița Ruxandra and Ghiocei; I was amazed again and again that I could go into any house, into any of the old rooms, dimly illuminated by the stump of a candle, into the rooms upstairs with an Italian piano, with cold hallways with pots of dusty oleanders withering in the shadows. Mysterious from the outside, with their cohorts of stucco figurines, these ancient houses were even more mysterious on the inside. Empty and silent, without a speck of dust on their macramé-laden tables, they seemed to have been suddenly abandoned in a terrible panic, as if in escape from a devastating earthquake. The inhabitants had taken nothing with them, they had been happy to escape with their lives.

My parents were waiting for me at home, and that was it, my entire life. I left them by the TV and went into my room that faced Ştefan cel Mare. I curled 32 up in bed and wished that I could die—I wished it so intensely that I could feel at least a few of my vertebrae agree. My bed turned into an archaeological site, where, in the impossible shape of a crushed being, lay the yellow and porous bones of a lost animal.

5

The Fall, the first and only map of my mind, fell the evening of October 24, 1977, at the Workshop of the Moon, which met at that time in the basement of the Department of Letters. I have never recovered from the trauma. I remember everything with the clarity of a magic lantern, just as a torture victim remembers how his fingernails and teeth were pulled out, when, many years later, he wakes up screaming and drenched in sweat. It was a catastrophe, but not in the sense of a building collapsing or a car accident, in the sense of a coin flipped toward the ceiling and falling on the wrong side. Of one straw shorter than the others that decides your fate on the raft of the Medusa. With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse. If I blink, my life forks: I could have not blinked, and then I would have been far different from the one who did, like streets that radiate out from a narrow piața. In the end, I will be wrapped in a cocoon made of the transparent threads of millions of virtual lives, of billions of paths I could have taken, each infinitesimally changing the angle of approach. After an adventure lasting as long as my life, I will meet them again, the millions of other selves, the possible, the probable, the happenstance, and the necessary, all at the end of their stories; we will tell each other about our successes and failures, our adventures and boredoms, our glory and shame. None of us will be more valuable than any other, because each will carry a world just as concrete as the one I call “reality.” All the endless worlds generated by the choices and accidents of my life are just 33