Maria was the first to go down to the workshop, to the rows of black machines with their needles, like elaborate buccal mechanisms, glittering in the dirty light. There was an intricate gold leaf filigree on each apparatus. She sat down, put her foot on the pedal, and turned the wheel and rod slightly until the greased needle began to move. It was so thin, and its tip was so sharp! During sleepless nights, she would often imagine she was being pierced by needles — that a long and gently curved tip would penetrate her heart. Then she would rise to her knees and lift one arm across her face, trying to ward off the long needle with the other, screaming with her eyes and lips. But the perverse needle passed through the heel of her hand over her heart, penetrated under her left breast with a quiet pop, passed through her heart, reddened her lungs like two large pinches of wool, and exited through her shoulder blade, pinning her to the headboard. She was fixed, martyred, and unable to escape. She waved her free arm in vain, like a dragonfly in an insect collection. This vision came into her life in the constant torture of working at the sewing machine. She felt increasing revulsion every morning as she approached the venomous vermin, and it was an effort just to survive beside it until dusk fell. That morning, Maria took a shirt collar and slipped it under the nickel sole, then tried to put the needle in motion. The pedal was stuck, and the needle did not want to come down and pierce the material. She turned the wheel by hand, but quickly realized that the mechanism inside the machine was blocked. Usually, when something like this happened, they sent for Nenea Titi, the mechanic, who set to work on the rods, discs, needles and other mysterious pieces of grease-covered metal that filled the curving body of the sewing machine. This time Maria, still feeling the champagne and the spectacles of the night before, opened the little door at the foot of the machine. She had an oil can and a screwdriver, and she hoped she could knock something or squirt a little oil somewhere and solve the problem herself. But when the curved wall opened with a click, she was astonished. And now on the tram, as she tried to look through the trails of rain on the window and see something in the shops that lined the boulevard, glimpsing, through the corner of her eye, a cloudy image of the Greek temple that would mean so much to her life, Maria trembled to recall what she had seen. In the metal window of the sewing machine were throbbing viscera — a kind of kidney, a kind of endocrine gland, flesh and cartilage, veins and arteries and lymphatic canals, ganglia dilating and contracting slowly below dewy blood, nerves branching in fusiform myelin sheaths, hyaline areas and dark areas like clots. It all throbbed and trembled beneath the powerful, audible pounding of an unseen heart. Maria slammed the small door shut and fled, screaming, out of the workshop. She never worked one of those machines again, and for the rest of her life she suffered an overwhelming fear of sewing. Vasilica had to make her dresses, the few there would be, for years after, and during the fittings, kneeling before her with a tape measure, she would always chastise her for not having learned to be a seamstress from Madam Georgescu (where would she be now, if she’s even still alive?) so that at least she’d have a trade.
In the days that followed, Mioara took the girls out for a boat ride in Cişmigiu Park (the driver of her black car rowed, with his sleeves rolled up, smiling at the ladies beneath his waxed mustache), she took them to a store on Cavafii Vechi and bought them trendy dresses and hats, she unbraided their hair herself, then left them in the hands of a master hairdresser, whose curling iron gave them ringlets until they looked like two ridiculous poodles in the salon mirrors, and to cap it off, she reserved for them a permanent table at Gorgonzola, closer to the stage than they had been the first night, and so it was there, for many nights in a row, that the apprentices enjoyed their champagne — sipping a bit more carefully now — and the dazzling numbers on the stage. The drummer, Cedric, would lead Mioara by the arm to their table, politely lifting his stiff hat to the young ladies. The girls looked at him wide-eyed and dumbstruck, as though they had seen Satan himself, but soon, with his eyes rolling and his wound-red mouth smiling, Cedric entertained them so much that from that night on, the girls could hardly wait for the band to go on break and the young man to visit their table. Elegant and charming, with a gold chain on his wrist and shoes with sharp points, Cedric told them stories of the French Quarter in his native New Orleans. He spoke of palm trees and agave, of glowing saxophones that blew in thousands of taverns, of Bourbon Street, where there were Mardi Gras parades each spring, and he described, in detail, the sinister voodoo rituals performed by mobs of black people in the city, casting bloody spells beneath the moon, dressed in masks of parrot feathers. He danced with Vasilica, trying to teach her to foxtrot. The black man danced divinely, moving his joints like a marionette around the poor girl who laughed like a fool in the middle of the dance floor, not daring to take a step. Meanwhile, Mioara took Maria’s hand, and with a strange smile on her lips, she placed her fingers (long and dry, with long, purple-lacquered fingernails) over Maria’s, which were politely resting on the table. The singer had an odd ring on her index finger that Maria, a little embarrassed, couldn’t pull her eyes away from. The loop was not metal, but seemed to be thickly woven from greasy hair, held together by thin spirals of silver wire. It was mammoth hair, Mioara explained. A few years ago, she had met an Austrian who had been to Franz Joseph Land, in the frozen north, where he would have starved to death with his fellow researchers on Siberian shamanism, if he hadn’t found, in a block of ice, an entire, intact mammoth, the meat of which fed them until spring. From the fur, during the fantastical polar nights in their miserable tents, they wove sweaters, blankets and jewelry. Mioara’s ring had a stone from the ivory of the same mammoth, upon which the Austrian had scratched, with a needle, the image of a butterfly, its wings spread and its antennae twisted in two symmetrical spirals. What was strange was that, if you looked more closely, the right wing of the butterfly was drawn with a firm line, while the other was only outlined in points that had turned black with the passing years. As Vasilica and Cedric seemed to have disappeared somewhere (it was long past midnight, couples stood in the thick shadows, at tables, embracing, paying no attention to the illusionist who twirled a fan of playing cards in his hands), Mioara took Maria’s arm, barely touching her, and lifted her from the table into the Bucharest night, flecked here and there by the gold of dim lampposts on Sécession. The singer dismissed her driver, and the two of them went on foot through the echoing, deserted streets, where nothing moved but a cat sneaking under a gate.
They went into Lipscani, by Carada Street, then through the Villa-crosse Passage, entering the Macca gallery. The tinted yellow skylights above, which the daylight turned transparent, now palely reflected the few electric bulbs placed in wrought-iron lanterns. The footsteps of the two women resounded loudly through the tunnel of white, spectral buildings, whose shops on the first floor had their shutters drawn. Rich stucco decorations, masks, gorgons, garlands and Cupids, reliefs and borders framed the upstairs windows. Mioara suddenly stopped under a street lamp and turned to Maria. In the artificial illumination, the singer’s face regained its lunatic appearance, glassy, detached from the world, as it had looked on stage, under the spotlight. Violet marks, green and citron stripes painted her sickly harlequin face, and her wet, sparkling eyes. Her rouged mouth seemed almost black, a soft and sensual flower. She held Maria’s head in her hands, looked in her eyes and, smiling, said she had a little apartment just upstairs, on the second floor. Wouldn’t she like to take a look, on her way home? Maria accepted happily. They entered through a black gate, polished, with a brass house number at eye level. Mioara went first, and gracefully moving the delicious roundness of her behind, climbed a stairway with a metal railing, followed by her young apprentice. A narrow corridor, with only a small sofa and a table with a beaten copper tray, had at its opposite end a single door, locked, with an oval window and pink curtains drawn on the other side. Mioara unlocked it, and they went into an alcove that left Maria breathless.