11
WITH tears in my eyes, I remember thirty years. I am not in my right mind. A loneliness murmurs in my ears, desperate and soothing at the same time, like the sound I once heard of the murmuring bowels wrapped around my mother’s womb — the babble of caves, with the underground spring of her bladder. Sometimes a tram passes, or deep in the night, a stray dog barks, or someone talks loudly, and all of these noises remind my skin (certainly then I heard through my skin, like spiders do, as though I were completely enveloped in my own eardrum) of the distant echo of my father’s voice, from a miserable room where I had yet to exist. Very young, unshaven, and wearing just an undershirt, my father would stick his ear to my mother’s stomach and speak, and my skin, thin as a soap bubble, heard his garbled words, the way you hear noises in the house when you sink into a full bathtub. I thought I smelled sweat from the bushes of his armpits. I felt him punch me on the heel or elbow when I pushed them against the elastic wall of my mother’s belly. Over part of my hunched, transparent body, I felt the shadow of the large butterfly on my mother’s hip, eclipsing the dim light bulb that hung from two wires in the ceiling. I would open my eyelids, soaking my corneas in placental fluid, and through the thick glass of the uterus, I saw the World: two huge animals sniffing each other in their lair, embracing each other on a plank bed, penetrating each other like heavenly bodies. Two monstrous anatomies nailed to the stocks, two teratological exhibits. My mother’s womb, like a lens of flesh, distorted the new world into which I would be expelled. Through it, the woman’s skull elongated, her snout filled with frightening teeth, her ribs poked through her skin and opened into two monstrous bat wings, while my father’s spine shot out bone spikes that scratched the ceiling. I was afraid of them, of their lair, of supplication to respiration and digestion, of the unimaginable touch of horny fingers on my fresh, moist skin.
I have been writing in this brown-covered notebook for three months. I’ve almost never left my apartment in the attic. And when I have left, to go to the grocery store or the bakery, or for night walks through Piata Rosetti, Piata University, Strada Batiştei, I’ve always returned with the feeling that something has happened. Not even the world is in its right mind. It’s as if my notebook were a permanent marker tip resting in a cup of water: slowly diaphanous veils emerge, purple and indigo, veils of unreality, diluted like cigarette smoke in the cold April wind. Yesterday morning, in a blinding light, a crowd of Bucharesteans gathered at the intersection of Moşilor and Bulevard, looking at the peaked domes of a house I had noticed long ago, a yellow building with a concave front, crowned with two domes like huge breasts, rising against the chaotic spring sky. Tram 21, passing at a distance of barely a meter, provoked the beautiful building, its window frames painted in pale blue, into a gentle and continuous shimmy, so that it really seemed to be a female torso emerging from the asphalt. Now, helmeted workers were up on the roof, on a circular scaffolding that bent around the brazen breasts and their nipples with black lightning rods poking out. At first, it was hard to tell what they were doing. The building had been restored only last summer. What could that be, foamy and pink, which was covering the abundant chest, bit by bit? The workers unpacked it from bales they carried on their shoulders to the top. In the end, everything became clear: they were giving the building a bra! Within two hours, the cupolas, which were at least five meters high, were completely covered by veils and lace of pink pearl, a flowery style with small holes. The two large cups connected in the middle by a turquoise brooch, and fastened onto an elastic band. The city, we were told, had been receiving reports of the building’s impropriety for several years, and it had waited patiently to find funds to remedy the situation. Although it looked like silk, the cover was actually made of waterproof plastic, able to withstand all types of weather.
And monsters. More and more of them came out, you could see them everywhere — cripples, hunchbacks, unbelievably stinky bums, bald-headed hags with cheeks as hollow as a Goya, the crazy and mad, and imbeciles with snot running into their mouths. In front of the Baraţiei Tower, an old beggar thumped onto the pavement, a venerable man with a gray and yellowed beard down to his waist. He had a serious face, but his pants were open like a hernia, and his penis and balls were hanging out, as pink as a teenager’s. And others, and others, filling the streets, waking the subway stations, a subterranean humanity rising like menacing water.
At first it was fun to look at her, although I realized how unusual her appearance was. She filled the subway seat nicely, her wonderful heft even continuing beyond its edges. She stood out mostly as a large patch of pink, since she was wearing a shirt and trouser ensemble made of pink satin, a thin material with flowers, like pajamas. She was considerably wider than she was high, stocky, puffy as a mandarin (and even the curve of her body had something about it of a Chinese person with a touch of obesity) and her unnaturally white arms, fat, with very thin skin, emerged from short sleeves. Her large head, wire-haired, very gray, was somehow paradoxicaclass="underline" its skin seemed coarser than her body’s, and her features appeared to have been artificially aged. Her metal-framed glasses contributed to this impression. And yet there was something terribly naïve and helpless about her face: like a ten-year-old girl’s, a mixture of fear and shyness. Sometimes she crinkled her nose like a little panda bear, and her fleshy mouth hung open in gentle perplexity. She looked so clean, so neat (you could almost smell the expensive soap) that you might have said she was from another country, or she was an Asian doll. After my eyes had cropped her out of the sweaty mob dozing in the train, I realized she was not alone. Beside her, standing, was another woman. Her hair was just as gray. She seemed, judging from her body, older than the first woman (but by how many years?), and her appearance attracted no attention at all. She was an ordinary woman, in an ordinary dress. Her face, bitter: pressed lips, wrinkles between her eyebrows — she was a woman without joy, probably damaged by life. She had a sturdy body, stout, but without the flabby appearance of the other. Watching the two of them trade looks, you could think at first that you were wrong. The one standing regarded the other with a love all the more touching on a face that harsh, and the seated one responded with small, shy smiles, looking up with the most childish eyes you could imagine. When they approached the station, the older woman motioned to the younger one. They became much more explicitly a couple than the language of their gestures had shown, and more mysterious at the same time. The two, with the same haircut, wiry and half gray, touched each other, regarded each other, and a love moved between them that was difficult to interpret, at once moving and odd. The older one sometimes held the other’s shoulder, with looks of quiet assurance, and other times she took her gently by her plump arm or caressed her forearm. The first responded awkwardly, slightly bent, her hands always hanging at her sides, always with the same small, lost smile. When the door opened, sliding to one side, the older reminded the younger to watch her step, like you would a child, and they moved across the tiled platform through the crowd. The younger one walked unnaturally, weighted, as though she had to lift her thick feet with her hands, wide and strange as pink balloons, and then suddenly she seemed alone again, a Chinese doll, or a teddy bear.