“All of a sudden, the tunnel would expand into fleshy, soft folds, and a blinding world would appear before us. Dozens of pink moons made the water glow, a vast gulf full of ships, edged with hills with crystal palaces, beryllium pagodas, and crysolite bells piled one on top of the next — ornaments for the architecture of fables. Our frigate neared the shore, and we disembarked onto pink marble steps, carved with volutes and counter-volutes. The staircase began in the waves and rose toward a grand façade. The columns of the portico were fifty times thicker than my body. The statues above, in moon-reddened arcades, could have symbolized either vices or virtues. Blind windows, round and rectangular, showed on the façade as translucent and flat as a mirror. We went into the marble palace, bare of any furniture, tapestries, or paintings, and eventually, in one of the halls, on a marble throne, we found a girl with a shaved head, her entire scalp decorated in marvelous tattoos. On another night, in another castle and another hall, instead of the throne, in the middle of the marble cavern, we found one of the hydraulic presses from my mother’s shop. A scrap of brass came out of its jaws, and on it were letters. A word was written there, a name I had never heard before.
“One night in every two or three, Herman would come and we would talk, never for more than an hour, in the ruined house. Set against the moon, spiders would shimmer their transparent legs through the steps of a strange ritual. Speaking in a sad monotone, the young hunchback again and again unraveled the thin material of my life — with prints of our tower, the field, Mamma and Pappa, my dolls, and the neighbor’s girls — to build other and still other scenes in their place, with marble temples dissolving into the light. One night, after he had led me through the galleries of a house whose windows were held by putti and garlands, and then down rectangular corridors with niches of pot-bellied urns, we came to a room in ruins, lit by a moon through a frameless window and overgrown with weeds. There I looked Herman in the eye.
“I was naked to the waist, as usual, and my hair ran over my shoulders, down to my nipples. Herman held a hair clipper, nickel-plated, like a pair of pliers with one long side, full of teeth along the edge. He came toward me, smiling, and with his other hand he mimed a pair of scissors. I let him clip me bald, strand by strand, my hair falling around me. Then I let him shave my head with a razor, an old one that folded into its handle. In the end, Herman ran his fingers over the flat hemisphere that housed my brain, as voluptuously as he would have touched a grown woman’s breast. That was the one time I was scared. Only then did I see a plank table, with an arrangement of instruments that were completely unfamiliar to me. Some of them looked like the pieces of metal I found in the field, near the greasy machinery and the old tram. Others had long needles at the end with unnerving curves. With these, all night long, until the dawn turned white, Herman tattooed my entire scalp. He worked as laboriously as a giant arachnid, mechanical and quiet. What fantastically colored anatomical illustration, what constellations from a map of another planet’s stars, what starched lace, like over the scalp of a rotund Dutchwoman, did Herman engrave into my skull? I would never know. Through the long hours of painful slices, prickings, and impregnations of multicolored inks, I looked around myself, moving only my eyeballs, and I observed certain incongruities between the ruined room I was seeing and the way it had looked before, like in those games where you compare two almost-identical pictures. The tarnished doorknob, the plug hanging from the wall, and the mold on the tapestry were all different, even if I couldn’t say how. Perhaps the difference was not in them, but in me, in my emotions, even in my nature (yes, yes, that’s it, because I remember looking deep into Herman’s fish eyes, and seeing a strange princess from a faraway land, her head shaved and her ears oddly large. That was the only time I ever saw myself and thought that I was beautiful).”
Anca went home at dawn, at last, with stiff bones, with the conviction that this was not the world where she had been born, that it all looked different, that the clouds made impossible, prophetic shapes in the morning sky, that even the sparrows who hopped through the garbage were not supposed to be the way they were, but some other way completely, although they had the same shape that Anca remembered. Her father saw her through the tower window, his face pale and sleepless, his hair blown in the cold wind. When he saw her, he was motionless for a moment, and then he disappeared from the window. “He banged down the spiral staircase and rushed to me. I hugged him and drew in his smell of red putty and hemp. My head was cold and painful. My inflamed skin drew a network in my mind of linear and pointillist pain. I leaned my skull against his chest, and this was how my mother found us, rushing over from a neighbor who had a phone. She had called all the hospitals, ambulances, the police … I climbed the tower’s three flights of stairs, and they locked me up in my room without a mirror, and there I stayed until, in slow rotation, autumn, winter, and spring had passed, and it was summer again. My hair grew like reeds, like a brown grass, and that year bushes of hair sprouted from my armpits, and below my belly, so much that I was afraid that the curly, sparkling tufts would surface and cover me everywhere, leaving just my nipples and eyes, like a mother dog. How lonely I was, when the cupolas of my breasts took shape! When my skin became soft! I lay in my wet bed for hours, curled up, my hands pressed between my legs, wetting my pillow with saliva and tears. Ever since, ashen faced, she had seen the colored drawings on my skull, my mother had begun to hate me, she only came into my room to yell at me about straightening up, or smelling bad, or that I hadn’t bathed since who knows when. She said nothing to me when I woke up one morning, scared to death, with a spot of blood on the sheet, between my legs. She just brought me a tub with some bleach and soapy water, so I could wash the coarse cloth. When she would burst into my room, with her tortured laborer’s face, with the smell of cheap soap, “Cheia” or “Cămila,” carrying a bowl of soup, something softened and flowed within me, leaving an unbearable void between my ribs: I did not want, even if you broke my arm, to become a woman, to go to the factory, to cook, wash, sew, and then let a husband grab me at night and slam me onto the bed to step on me and abuse me, the way my father did with my mother. Why didn’t Mamma leave? Why didn’t she go out into the world? What kind of life was that, home and the factory, with only one dress for years and years, with a bra that looked more like a dishrag and underpants in shreds from being boiled so often? Now and then she went to the hairdresser, and she came back with some ridiculous stuffed-cabbage hairdo, and in a few days it fell apart. When a thread came out of a stocking, she took it for mending to a lady who sat from morning until evening in a small room with one window, barely big enough for her folds of fat, looking like a caterpillar in a print dress. Yes, my mother came into the world and lived without joy and without hope. So I didn’t mind when I saw how much she hated me. I saw my shitty future in her, being a painter or weaver or stamper, because then I could not imagine a different life was possible. And maybe it isn’t.