huddled there in the billions of pores.
i know: kindergartens, nurseries, roads of lamp gas
i understand: night, night with a goiter
stars, chopped chrysanthemum stuffing
chopped arteries, ponds …
i see again: i see you kneeling again, sagging breasts, black hair whirling
white arm outstretched, fingers crinkling my face
huge, terrific, bomb exploding in slow motion
big black fly buzzing in the net of my nerves.
my dear mother who never bore me!
i write these lines to you, lines that will never be born.
i still know diamond street and house number zero
where you knit my veins into a sweater for dad
i still know, i know those clouds chained like rabid dogs
rushing towards your stomach, rending it — taking me out
taking me out of there, i remember, mamma,
and wrapping me in the blanket of your hair.
how you screamed out, how bruised you were when the clouds, your men
and gynecologist fertilized you, delivered me,
when i, pure as milk and polite
left the shadow of my fingers upon your face.
The windows on one side of the streets had already begun to sparkle in the dusk when I found it. “PÎNCOTA (formerly Silistra)” was written on a small blue placard, nailed to a fence greased with petroleum. I cannot understand to this day why they changed the name of the street. But I know when I entered that tunnel of unsettling houses, walking with small steps, I was trying as hard as I could to recognize, to reconstruct, and to relive. I’d only glimpsed this completely walled-off part of my life in my deepest dreams, and even then as something ambiguous and surreal, something combined with disparate objects from other layers of my mind. I walked with the feeling that nothing was real, that I was entering my own brain, or entering a realm attached to reality like a denture over toothless stumps. There was an overlapping stage décor, something fabled and psychic, enchanted. I saw the balcony with oleanders, propped on the pink clay backs of the two Atlases with hairy pubises. On the balcony, so eaten away by termites that the holes could be seen from the street, a wicker rocking chair swayed gently in front of a door with rectangular windows. I passed the old grocery store, with its low entryway beneath a stone arch. I put my head into the basement where, in my mother’s arms, I must have stared with round, dumb eyes, and touched the fire-red poppies in the showcase (still there after twenty-eight years) near the primitive cash register, with rolls of paper for tickets, and the receipts and shelves of canned food and pasta glimmering in the shadows. The shopkeeper was still there, mummified, her nose eaten away, her teeth bare, wrapped in the rags that remained of her apron. Spiders scurried everywhere, caught between old wormy sacks of flour and petrified sugar, in webs so thick that they looked like pieces of felt or batting. Across the black and withered hands of the shopkeeper (with a faded bow in her hair) crawled oily cockroaches, touching their antennae in an abstract alphabet. Everything was rotten, everything stank, everything in the old grocery store was infested. I left with cobwebs in my hair, as if I had turned gray from grief, and I went on through the neural tunnel until I saw before seeing, I intuited, located or maybe constructed, digging through the day’s soap with my own eyes, the House. The old and dear house, forgotten and remembered so often, the house in the middle of my mind.
When I actually saw it, behind the wrought-iron railings, in the U-shaped courtyard, it seemed surprisingly narrow. In my memory, in dream and dream-memory, it was different, vast and teeming with people. In fact, it was not more than six or seven meters wide. Half of its flat and sunny façade was taken up by a blue pathetic-looking Mercedes from the 70s, battered and repaired. I shook with excitement. I was seeing what I thought I never would. The building that shared the yard was irregular, as if its three parts, each with a second floor, had been erected at different times. The right side, where Madame Catana and the old man lived, was like a country house, painted blue, with wood-framed windows, while the one in back was a middle-class house, yellow and flaking, with a wooden hallway upstairs (where the ship was, and Elvira and Uncle Nicu Bă). The dirty-white painted hall also went along the left side of the building, supporting the roof with its wooden pillars. Through the pillars I saw windows with deep-blue wooden shutters. The shutters were torn from their hinges, and the windows were broken, some walled over, and others covered with newspapers yellow with age. Below, a burgundy door opened in the blue wall, the scarlet door of my nightmares, present like a seal of blood over everything I have ever written, and everything my mind describes in sleepless afternoons.
Shaken, with my hair standing on end, I opened the wrought-iron gate and entered the yard. There was no one there. Bright clouds were motionless in the sky. In one corner, a pink oleander, the only living thing in the empty courtyard, exuded a wild smell. I stopped in front of the deep-red door. I leaned my head against it for a moment. I felt like I was draining out of myself, flowing over the courtyard tiles like a shadow. The door was not locked, so I opened it halfway and went in. I was no longer in reality. I knew, I recognized everything. I knew the stairway, also scarlet, that smelled like detergent and Clorox. I walked upstairs slowly, ready at every step to faint. Emotion eclipsed me like an overwhelming pain, one so vast that it became a kind of joy. I reached the next story, the gallery with plank floors, worn by time. I opened another door between shattered windows. I entered a vestibule I knew, one I remembered with a new wave of adrenaline in my arteries. There were three doors here, in a thick green light, where gnats swarmed. I did not hesitate for a moment, because it was the front door, also scarlet, it was the wallpaper with flower baskets, moldy and ripped from the walls, but still recognizable. I opened the door and entered the room. I stopped on the threshold, squinting from so much light.
A blinding morning sun poured into the room, and in the intolerable light, at its center, I saw my mother, young and naked, sitting on the bed, the lupus mark on her hip, her hair tossed onto her shoulders, looking at me with a welcoming smile.
Part Two
12
THE peacock and the peahen, as though scared for their lives, pecked grains of barley from Maria’s hand, to the indignation of Marinache, the turkey, who, watching them with one eye, turned the beads that hung over his beak purple. From time to time he stared, with the same one eye, at the summer sky packed with white clouds, and then his sluggish red eye sparkled like a drop of water. The three birds lived together, because there was no other option, in the slums on the edge of town, in the few U-shaped square meters covered with bird droppings. And if the pair of peacocks, plated in metallic green and deep blue, were the local favorites, the pride of the courtyard, the turkey, in contrast, was heckled and mocked for his belligerent attitude. With a coquettish crown of feathers on her crest, Pompilia walked delicately on her coral feet. She was constantly watching Păunaş, waiting to contemplate, again and again, the cosmogonic spectacle of his spread tail, sprinkled with blue eyes. The courtyard locals were of limited imagination when it came to baptizing the imperial egg makers. Pompilia was a hooker from a neighboring yard, who went out every day at dusk with a purse on her shoulder to hunt for men; as for Păunaş, there were dishcloths on almost everyone’s stoves, so crude you’d think blind people had sewn them, with shepherds playing the pipes or a little peasant girl singing at the stove, around which crooked letters misspelled: “Wherefer theirs pees, God is pleased” or “Păunaş in tha forist, tell me who I love best.” The turkey was pot-bellied and as dirty as Marinache, the gypsy accordion player who rode the tram, pretending to be blind and deafening the travelers, repeating the same saccharine waltzes from the Colentina River to Dristor. He kept his eyes rolled back, so two yellow stripes, like ivory, showed between his eyelids swollen with conjunctivitis. When he left the tram, he didn’t open his eyes again until he had gone around the corner.