By now, he was no longer descending but levitating like a cloud through the spectral world, in the colossal thickness of fear, over towers of claws and trees that looked like knotted intestines. The dull green and opalescent venom became more frequent, the petrified howling omnipresent … He slid over wide and frightening planets, through empires of desperation that fulminated around him like fog, compact and sparse by turn. Immense towers with tiny windows shining in the green dusk adorned their peaked cupolas with statues of people with their faces in their hands, women overcome with shame, old people begging for death … Through an oval window, there was a girl with an unspeakably romantic form, long curly locks, pearly teeth between her coral lips, a white lace bodice and a blue satin crinoline, and hundreds of bows, with the tips of her lizard-skin shoes peeking out underneath. She was seated at a spinet piano, playing sounds like the clicks of knitting needles. It would have been a charming picture of love, if below her ebony bun, held by a tortoiseshell comb, on her delicate neck with curls of short hair, there wasn’t a hideous tumor, a growth as big as a newborn’s head, bruised and scratched, excreting a yellow pus between its flakes of pink skin … Further on, in a glass, angular hall as big as a train station, along the halls where the young man drifted, dissolved in terror like the steam of hot breath, a procession appeared, moving toward a crystal tomb. He had entered the room through an open transom, with dusty edges, held up by a black wire hook, and he found himself suddenly naked, walking next to the others along checkerboard tiles, bloody squares with marbled designs alternating with white squares, crystalline, like sugar. Every being in the long procession was marked by a monstrous debility: flayed oxen tongues emerged from twisted teeth, vulvas hung down like the whiskers of catfish, gigantic skulls, translucid, filled with violet liquid … He alone, as he suddenly saw in the pure, prismatic façade of the tomb, was whole and beautiful like a god, especially since … he had wings … long, multicolored wings, like a tropical butterfly, with electric blue dots and lilac edges, tips shaped like cobra heads in a yet warmer velvety purple … He looked at himself in the polished mirror of the empty tomb, while he felt six claws as sharp as needles entering his flesh, and he knew then that the enormous wings had not grown between his shoulder blades, like an anatomical anomaly, but that a great butterfly, as long as he was tall, had climbed onto his back and anchored itself firmly onto his ribs, and it watched him with bulging, glowing eyes that had thousands of hexagonal facets. He imagined the inevitable moment when the twisted spiral of its proboscis would unroll, like a curved needle, and slide into his occiput, gently popping through his epidermis, the tip, hard as a diamond, slicing at a slant his skull’s layers of bone, puncturing the duramater and piamater, advancing slowly, greased like gelatin, through the occipital lobe, and stopping in the center of his brain, in the middle of the limbic ring, equidistant from the fornix, mammillary bodies, hippocampus and amygdalae, and sucking out, like a vacuum, one cubic centimeter of cream-caramel matter and replacing it with an egg … The egg is pearly pink, with a soft, pulsing shell, it descends along the proboscis and beds there, between the snowflakes of the axon bodies and the mad labyrinths of the synapses. Then the proboscis withdraws, just as gently, now coated in blood, and spirals back into place, and the butterfly flies off in a zigzag through the air, toward the window open in the roof. The disfigured procession carries the young inseminated god in their arms, places him gently in the hollow of the tomb, and covers him with its heavy, prismatic lid.
He woke up reeling, like he’d suffered a syncope, and to find himself rubbing Pushkin’s right, blind eye with a rag that the soot turned black. He touched his neck, staring into space, pulling the pink atoms of dusk into his chest, just as he did at the table with white and red squares in the beer garden where he had taken Maria for some beer and sausages. For a week, roaming all around Herăstrău Park with a ladder on his shoulder and a bucket in his hand, he didn’t dare touch any of the stone celebrities rising from lilac bushes. When he saw an Ostrovsky or a Sholokhov, it was like he had seen one of those ghouls that the old folks in his village would use to scare kids. His heart jumped in his chest and his feet went cold. Maria laughed, as though he was telling her about a dream, but years later, during Catana’s funeral, lost in the immense tomb of marble, Ionel’s story would come back to her. There was a strange likeness between the stories, as though it was a variation of an old legend, from another province and another rhapsode, who had forgotten some details and included some of his own, until you’d have to compare hundreds of variants, to put one over the other and trace the similarities and differences, to understand what precisely had happened somewhere, sometime, what nucleus of physical objects and confused beings, consumed in the furious flames of time, had risen as transparent smoke into the air, walking simultaneously down thousands of endlessly forking pathways of stories. In any case, even if she were a Mafaldă with her pineal eye emerging between her eyebrows, barely covered by a translucent layer of skin and staring its blue at the faces of tarot cards, Maria could never have guessed the countless ways her family’s life would weave together with “Aunty Hirsch” and her husband Ionel, the peasant boy come to the city to have an unbelievable career. A photograph from the early 70s, black and white with serrated edges, shows Costel and Ionel laughing together against a backdrop of modern buildings and ornamental trees. Costel is in an officer’s coat but black civvy pants, while Ionel, almost unrecognizable, fat and red-faced, is wearing a black jacket and pants from a uniform.
After the GAZ truck started and fell in with the snow-loaded cars with their windshield wipers on, across the area between the university and the imposing constructions of columns across the way, through the destructive gales, spring-dressed Maria passed, crossing the intersection at Children’s Romarta and continuing along the Casa Armatei. Plaster eagles on its roof were now snow-covered scarecrows, showing only their curved beaks, like claws from the paws of a white cat. From here started the movie theaters with names meant to remind everyone of popular democracy: Peace, Work, Brotherhood. From every cashier’s window, the steely eyes of a Soviet soldier watched you, a red star on his forehead and an automatic aimed at the guiltless passersby. Behind him stood a tank with the same starred pentagon on the turret, and the top half of the driver sticking out of his steel chamber. His ears stuck out of his black cap, and he held a red flag unfurled in majesty. However much the flag fluttered in the wind, you could still see, in the upper left corner, the hammer and sickle, sagely crossed. An alchemist like Fulcanelli (alas, the hidden author of The Mystery of Cathedrals was twenty years dead in anno domini 1955, when Maria met Costel again, after their short idyll in Govora, so no window of any workers’ movie theater in his beloved Bucharest would reflect his diminutive figure and drooping mustache) would have seen in these two symbols an unio mystica between sulfur and hydrargarum under the almighty sign of the Pentagram. Only one or two of the movie theaters showed tear-jerkers, where there were, even for the matinee, endless lines, because the young lathe operators and loom workers finished the night shift and went directly to the miserable, rat-poison-filled theaters to see Sara Montinel or Vico Torriani.