I’m afraid I won’t be able to describe him. One unbearably light day, I climbed onto a crowded bus. Someone stood up right in front of me and I got a seat by the window. I took out a book. Among the last to get on were two men, tall, bony, in crumpled long-sleeved shirts. They weren’t much older than forty, and they were good-looking, in a provincial way. A dwarf was traveling with them, and one of them helped him get on board before the doors closed and the bus started. When we came to the next station, the woman next to me got up and one of the two men, who had been talking constantly about soccer, resting his arms on the dwarf’s shoulders, sat down and took him on his knee, like a child. The poor guy was relatively well proportioned. He was at least fifty, judging by his damp hair, half gray, by the wrinkles on his face, and by his corpulence. He was not more than one meter high. He wore dark glasses, his mouth was red and pocked, and his unshaven face was quite bright and pinkish. His arms, exposed by his rolled-up shirtsleeves, were also pink and stubby, with tender skin, and hairless except on his fingers. He held on to the back of the seat in front of him, with his legs hanging into the abyss under the chair. What was disturbing was the way this man was shaking, like a frightened animal. He didn’t look at anyone. He just sat in the arms of the young man, shaking continuously. Sweat ran down the hair on his cheeks. The two men were paying no attention to him, as though he were a monkey or a dog on its way to the vet. I stood up when it was time for me to get off, and only then did the dwarf look at me, from head to toe, in fear. But he made no gesture. The young man turned to one side to let me pass.
Two or three days ago, on my way home at night, alone, I went into Stairway 1. I went into the entryway and looked up through the endless square well shaft lined with windows and gathering a speck of stars at the top. I went past the stairway that smelled like insecticide, its paint peeling from the walls in wide strips, and I went out again and continued, like a somnambulist, to the concrete courtyard. A single dim bulb, orange-red, shone a ghostly light over the yard. Everything was like a dream. I saw that throne with the rusty pot above it, and the depression with a little cement bridge over it, leading toward the walled-over doorway. Everything was narrow, gray, and oppressive, with sharply cut shadows, in silence, and a kind of hidden, latent, mythical power. A fire escape held in iron rings cast a lacy shadow onto the wall of the police station. A poplar leaf batted gently against a whitewashed wall. I was moving, fascinated and careful, inside a photograph. I looked fixedly toward the bridge, one end held by the huge, bare wall, the railing on the left casting a pitch-black shadow in a triangle over the tiles.
Out of that corner came Silvia, her eyes sparkling, her lips wet. Her tiny nipples peered through the flesh of her crossed arms. Her thin, naked body, her hairless pubis, and her limpid legs white as chalk were drawn against the rough background of the wall, where nocturnal insects scuttled. I recognized Silvia as one of those transparent beings who visited me ever more frequently, who would sit on my bedstead and watch me carefully, without disappearing when I opened my eyes in terror. She would come down the steps gently and stop in front of me. Then, confused, I realized we were the same height, we stood eye to eye. I hadn’t grown since I was ten, but the walls had grown tremendously and the mill behind the fence was an obtuse castle, as big as a continent, crowding the square of night sky above. Brown moths turned through the spectral air in electric light and landed on the lumpy lime, forming a mosaic of triangles. Silvia climbed onto the tall throne and sat over the metal bowl, and I stood with my head tilted back, looking into her eyes, following her glassy, whitish body, enlaced by the smell of ladybugs and milked flour. Looking me in the eyes and smiling, her girl face suddenly started to urinate a yellow sparkling stream, which bounced in drops of diamonds over the pavement at my feet. She was a frozen enigma. She looked like a baroque fountain of elliptical beauty.
There were days when the only people I saw on the streets were blind. The first one I saw gave me a feeling of foreboding. And then they began to stream in from all sides. Other times I only noticed the deformed beggars, their shirts undone to display a tumor as big as an infant’s head coming out of their stomachs, a grinning tracheotomy, an abscess spread from neck to collarbone, or hands and feet crudely cut off and the stumps tied with strings, like sausages. It was as if the entire population of Bucharest had been mutilated. Afterward, I would come back here, to my attic, the top of the scarlet block on Uranus, a block I’ve known since I was a teenager. I would hang out in this attic apartment with a chair, a table, and a bed, never guessing that I would drop everything one day to live my dream: to live in the halo of solitude, an unearthly life. It was a place to attempt (as I’ve done continuously for the last three months) to go back where no one has, to remember what no one remembers, to understand what no person can understand: who I am, what I am.
Last fall I rented this studio. I moved in bit by bit, first for a few hours in the morning, just to write, then to nap in the afternoon, and finally, I slept here, writhing through nocturnal nightmares. It’s a small room, with a ceiling that slopes from the front door to the window. One strange feature is that the window is oval — outside there is a garland supported by two plaster Cupids so that it frames Bucharest into a conglomeration of buildings and vegetation under a shifting sky, like a bad painting. The table is right by the window and bathed in light, while the bed is shaded in a dark corner. My bed is the deepest pit of my spider nest. The desk is only a projection of my bed. This text, which devours more and more white pages, like mold or rust, is the sweat, semen, and tears that soak the sheet of a single man. Spread like a damp piece of parchment, just skinned, over a wooden frame, the sheet could be the map of our secret life, with large areas of white and yellow, wrinkled and burned parts, nothing but countries and dominions with allegorical names, deltas and rivers and deserts: the Land of Love and the Land of Atrocities, the Laguna of Fear, the Fjord of Dizziness … Surfaces smeared by all the manure of the world, the cortex crammed under the skull like a dirty old shirt in a washing machine, sheets crumpled in the bed and pages in the notebook, trailed with ink marks — these three texts wrap themselves in and interpenetrate in my madness. If I were to stretch my cortex over the bed, it would cover it completely, like a gray blanket with six layers, crossed with veins. If I cut it into pieces and glued them between the covers, it would be this text, spoiled with lysergic acid, the fabric that holds my fearful, concupiscent sweat. Rising from the bed, I sit at the desk. Then I fall back into bed again, dragging the lace of inky letters, like a spiderweb, in my pulverized mind, and melting into the vast network of dreams.