Who am I? Who was I? How is it possible? Why did I come into the world? What does all this madness mean, this circus, this illusion? Why did I pop out of a woman’s uterus onto a speck in a constellation of dust? And why do I understand this dementia? Alongside the banal nocturnal thought that you will soon disappear forever, when you sit bolt upright and you say, “No, Lord, I won’t, please, please, Lord …” and you are sure you will never think or feel anything ever again — alongside these hideous banalities, I have often experienced others, maybe even more disturbing to me: I could have been born an earthworm or a bug or a mite or a bacterium, I could have experienced existence and then disappeared without gaining anything, diving into mud at the bottom of a lake, advancing with peristaltic movements, waving my vibrating cilia in a drop of water, digging canals with my mandibles through a foul hunk of cheese that would have been my universe for my entire life. I could have been a fungus that gave thrush to a stray dog, or who the hell knows what, anything else. I could have been not only without conscience, but even without consciousness, even without feeling. God, a life without feeling, how horrible! To have the sacred opportunity to live in the world, and all you get to be is a chip from a tree trunk, or a pinworm smeared with feces in the rectum that is your whole universe. This is when the madness hits me, when I jump out of bed and pace with my hands on my head, muttering something quickly so I won’t hear myself think. My suddenly clear and perverse mind tells me that this is actually what I am, that I really am a pinworm, that the world really is a nasty anus, and that I will never know the true world, or the true consciousness, or the true light that makes this world, in contrast, look like a cesspool. My mind tells me I’m nothing more than a pool of flesh, veins and arteries, cartilage and mucus, and that itself is a miserable consciousness, barely able to understand its own misery.
Now, while I am writing these sentences, these pages are turning so dim I can barely see them. It’s a twilight you don’t often see in spring. The sky has suddenly turned yellow and threatening, leaving dregs of gold in the craggy apartment blocks — a yellow-green sky, like cobra venom. The sky is growing darker, while light still hangs on the houses and the windows, heating their pale skin, giving them the ravaged color of memory. I myself am as white as a pillar of salt in the shadowy room. I stand up by my desk to gaze at Bucharest, my city, my alter ego. This strange block on Strada Uranus, where I have decided to live, has always looked to me like the city’s penis, red and erect, with veins and cables flowing under its skin. My skull, transparent in the twilight, my thin, fluttering body, pink in the glowing window — I am a spermatozoon, ready to shoot toward the sky. As far away as the Intercontinental Hotel, the city raises its forms and branches, its roofs and clouds. My oval window is too small for me to notice the scene’s lack of edges, as I did as a teenager on Ştefan cel Mar, before they built the block across the street. Now I am on the other side of the block, within a symmetrical and far-off chakra. I am grown up, that is, I am an idiot, that is, I am tired, I’m decidedly finished with my life, I’m doing the only thing I have left to do, that is, I’m sending lusty and feverish glances through the block-curtain, through the shutter of my body, like a voyeur peeking at his own life, as though, like a shellfish, I was female until the middle of my life and then I became male, as though I could fertilize myself through the perineal wall. I am a voyeur of my own childhood and youth, trying to understand what is happening behind the blinds, running from one window to another, misreading what I see in the shadows, mistaking an elbow for a breast, mistaking a dress thrown over the back of a chair for exposed buttocks, mistaking black branches against the window for lovers flopping onto the bed. I cannot be there, I will never be there, but still I must get there, I must try to understand.
The buildings on the horizon have turned pitch black, smeared at the edges with a gloomy orange. I don’t want to turn the light on, even though now all I can see is the oval window, the dark orange page, and a trace of the same dirty color from the tip of my pen. In the (maybe) quarter-hour of visibility left, I turn back to the word engraved in brass. PÎNCOTA. “Paunch,” I’d said immediately, moving further through the harsh and burning light, turning onto a cross street. On both sides of the street were lines of square, yellow buildings with their plaster shattered, like Etruscan tombs. Some sort of house-wagon, two stories high, with all its windows broken, sprang directly from a pile of broken toilets, flattened cans, and paper. Old gypsies poked their heads out the windows. It all seemed familiar to me, and it hurt like a wound, as if the entire neighborhood were a crust of dried blood on a child’s knee, and I, the child, picked at the scab until beads of blood appeared. I could not place anything precisely, however. I don’t know how many corners I turned, or how many strange, triangular piaţas I found, each one with a statue of a soldier surrounded by puddles as green as bile, brimming with pollywogs. How many times did I retrace those streets, how many times did I pass the house (or castle) built by a crazy old man, who decorated it with turrets, niches with statues, and mysterious emblems … In the yard, there were glass globes in pink, blue, lilac, and saffron staked on poles, pembá, like a landscape of Christmas ornaments, plaster gnomes, and tomato trellises. Pîncota. I knew it had to be the name of a street, and that it couldn’t be anywhere but this tangled neighborhood. Pîncota. Paunch. When I was looking at the ruins — and actually all the houses were ruins, ruins that smelled like laundry soap and dirty water — the poem I had written a few years before came to me, written when I saw in a dream (as I would so many times) the house where I was born. I recited it out loud to the rubble of concrete fences, to the tiny flowers growing through the stones in the pavement, to the clouds built overhead like another labyrinthine district, overwhelmingly sad:
i remember: beads of sweat growing through pavement stones
i recalclass="underline" the grocery in the slums knocked over by clouds
and clouds running to my mother’s stomach, crashing into a billion snail horns