To conceive of myself at different ages, with so many previous lives completed, is like talking about a long, uninterrupted line of dead bodies, a tunnel of bodies dying one into the next. A moment ago, the body who was here writing the words “dying one into the next,” with his face reflected in the dark pool of a coffee cup, fell off his stool. His skin crumbled away revealing the bones of his face, and his eyes rolled out, weeping black blood. A moment from now, the one who will write “who will write” will be the next to fall into the dust of the one before. How can you enter this mausoleum? And why would you? And what mask of tiffany, what surgical glove, will protect you from the infection emanating from memory?
Years later, while reading poetry or listening to music, I would feel ecstasy, the abrupt and focused clot in the brain, the sudden surge of a volatile and vesicant liquid, the windowpane suddenly opening, not onto anything outside myself but into someplace surrounded by brains, something profound and unbearable, a welling-up of beatitude. I had access, I had gained access to the forbidden room, through poetry or music (or a single thought, or an image that appeared in my mind, or — much later, coming home from high school by myself, stomping in puddles along the streetcar tracks — a window glint, the scent of a woman). I entered the epithalamium, I steeped myself in the amygdalae, I curled up in the abstract extension of the gold ring in the center of the mind. The revelation was like a cry of silent happiness. It was nothing like an orgasm except in epileptic brutality, but it expressed tranquility, love, submission, surrender, and adoration. These were breakthroughs, ruptures leading to the cistern of living light from the depths of the depths of our being, rendings swirling in the interior limit of thought, turning it into a starry heaven, since we all have this starry heaven in the skull and, over it, our consciousness. Often, though, this interior ejaculation would not reach its consummation but stop in the antechamber, and the antechambers of antechambers, where it stirred flickering images that were snuffed out in a second, leaving behind regret and nostalgia that would follow me for the rest of the day. Poems, these illumination machines, debauched me. I used them like drugs, until it was impossible for me to live without them. I’d started, sometime before, to write poems too. Among so many graceful lines, enchanted and aggressive, I would find myself stringing together, for no reason, passages of nonsense that seemed dictated by some other being. When I re-read them, they terrified me like a prophecy come true. In these I spoke about my mother, God, childhood, just as if, in the course of a conversation over a beer, I had suddenly started to speak in tongues, with the thin voice of a child, a castrato, or an angel. My mother would appear in my poems walking down Ştefan cel Mare, taller than the apartment buildings, kicking over the trucks and streetcars, crushing the sheet-metal kiosks beneath her enormous heels, sweeping up passersby in her cheap skirts. She would stop in front of the triple window of my room, crouch down and look inside. Her enormous blue eye and frowning brow filled the window, and filled me with terror. Then she would stand and set off westward, her wiry, phosphorescent hair destroying postal airplanes and satellites in the sky full of blood … What was going on with this mythologizing of my mother? Nothing had ever made me feel close to her, nothing in her interested me. She was the woman who washed my clothes, fried potatoes for me, and made me go to my university classes even when I wanted to skip. She was Mamma, a neutral being who looked neutral, who lived a modest life full of chores, and who lived in our house, where I was always a stranger. What accounted for this dearth of feeling in our family? My father was always traveling, and when he came home, red-faced, stinking of sweat, he would tie his hair, thick as a horse’s tail, on top of his head with pantyhose, with the top sagging open, a dark foot hanging between his shoulder blades. My mother would make him dinner and watch television with him, pointing out the cute folk music singers or variety show actors, gossiping about them endlessly. I’d eat quickly and retreat to the room facing the street (the other two rooms gave onto the back of the building, toward the melancholy red-brick Dîmboviţa flour mill) to watch the polyhedral drone of Bucharest in the window, or to write disconnected poems in graph paper notebooks, or to curl up under the blanket, pulling it over my head as though I could not stand the humiliation and shame of being an adolescent … We were, my family, three insects, each only interested in our own chemical trails, occasionally touching antennae and moving on. “How did you do at school today?” “Fine.” “Your Dinamo got creamed, on their own turf.” “So what, I’m doing okay with Polytech.” And then into the shell, to write more lines from nowhere:
mother, the power of dreams was your gift to me
I would spend nights entire with you eye to eye
and hand in hand I would believe I was beginning to know.
and your heart would beat again for both of us
and between our crania translucent as the shells of shrimp
an imaginary umbilical cord would emerge
and hypnosis and levitation and telepathy and love
would be the different colors of the flowers in our arms.
together
we would play an eternal game of cards with two sides:
life, death
while the clouds would flash in the fall of day, far off.
2
I FOUND myself looking through my family’s small archive, housed in an old purse my mother had since before she was married, a shoulder bag, garnet-colored, its imitation leather almost completely worn through. It was lined with a cheap silk, somewhat stained. In the bag’s pocket, I found two watches, so old they had a blackish salt on their faces, and the backs of their cases were tarnished green. The watch-bands had been lost long ago. Aside from the watches, there were some fuses, a vacuum tube from an old radio, and other little things I had played with as a child. Folded inside a yellowed piece of paper were two braids of blond-gray hair, tied with elastics — my own hair, from when my family, as Mamma told me the story, would put me in dresses and aprons and call me (they and all our neighbors) Mircica. The hair was soft and always gave me a chill, because it was so tangible, it was like that three-year-old boy had lived a life parallel to mine, like he might come through the door at any moment. At the bottom of the bag there were documents and receipts, rental contracts, warranties, stamped and embossed, and also yellow, sharp-smelling old pills from old doctors, faded pictures with zigzagged and torn edges, with dates and short descriptions in permanent marker, written in an awkward and misshapen hand, coins no longer used, a small baptismal cross, a white flower from somebody’s wedding … I poured the bag onto my bed and went through the contents, without knowing what I wanted to find. I came across rolls of film, developed and wrapped in paper. I held them up against the light to see scenes of family, framed the long way or the short, everyone with black faces and white hair, white suits and black shirts, black dresses with white flowers and white dresses with black flowers. The three or so pictures from when I was small were well known: the one in a yard, near Silistra, in a little knit-cotton suit and boots, with curls and cowlicks, with one hand on a globe pedestal and the other moving toward my eyes. I was eighteen months old and sniffling. You could see the wall of a house from the edge of town, with geraniums in the window, and the yard paved with gravel. Then, the picture of me on a motorcycle with a sidecar, at a fair — me chunky and scared, in short sleeves — next to a thread-worn stuffed bear, not much taller than I was. In this last one, however, no one was sure it was me. It might as well have been my cousin, Marian, my aunt Sica’s kid. The image, a bit small, had faded into a dirty sepia. Three more pictures, from times immemorial, were mixed in with documents, discharge papers, and medals with chipped enamel. There was the typical picture of my parents, retouched so often that it was hard to say what the couple actually looked like: him with hair as black as an ink stain, slicked back, with an expression so stern you’d think he was facing a firing squad, wearing a black wool suit that seemed like part of the background, and her in a wedding gown, with an unrecognizable face (it could be anyone from the movies of the time), and on one side, holding the monstrous wedding candles, an unnaturally fat bridesmaid, her legs touched by elephantiasis, and a bald groomsman with a mustache like Groucho Marx. The second photo was, actually, the first chronologically. It was my mother and father in the spa town where they met. Here, she is beautiful, with high cheekbones, chestnut hair in curls, shining eyes: a young worker who moved to the city with no future plans. He is almost a boy, not much more than twenty, and he looks like me. He’s wearing sweats and military boots. It is snowing lightly on their bare heads, while they lean against the railing of a bridge. Two people cross the bridge, wearing berets. It’s 1955, and the winter is much gentler than the one before. Some wandering photographer, maybe a former factory owner, or perhaps he had been a photographer under the previous regime too, shivered on the bridge, waiting for customers, and my parents — who at the time just barely belonged to each other — let themselves be immortalized, out of timidity, in the sad splendor of their youth. The last picture was carefully cut in half, not with scissors, but by folding it over and over. The film coating had cracked first, so the porous paper could be torn relatively accurately. What was left was an image of my father holding me in his arms, around when I was two and wore the famous blond braids. Still, I’m not wearing a dress but a pair of flowery “Spielhosen.” My dad is smiling, square-jawed, with penetrating eyes, down the camera lens, while I am laughing at someone to my left, in the missing part of the picture. You can just see a woman’s bare elbow.