They entered the theater that was as dirty as a men’s restroom, with petrosin-washed floors full of sunflower seeds and candy wrappers. The chairs, more than a few of which were unusable, were crowded with young people who looked like they had all been made by the same mother and father: boys with unshaven faces, low foreheads, and hair combed back, held by sugar and greased with walnut oil, holding trashy girls with thin, hot-curled hair by the shoulders. During the newsreel the jerks would shout, squeal, and call to their friends rows away, without paying any attention to the wise leaders of the Party and People’s Republic, as they appeared, yellowed, on the cheap film and set on the screen. Things that were impossible to understand happened between serious people, who kept shaking hands or walking through fields and steel mills, narrated by a manly voice, enthusiastic but so hollow, as though he were shouting the words through a tin funnel. Against the background music (which was always the same, a kind of half-folk, half-classical melody), mechanical threshers filed by, electricians climbed high-tension poles, miners came out of shoots grinning through coal dirt like they were in blackface, and people in city suits applauded (and a few in peasant dresses) in a hall as big as a movie theater. Maria, whom Costel dared finally to take by the hand, without looking at her, waited patiently for the silly newsreel to end and the movie to start. Sometimes she recognized the old man figure of Dej, and maybe Ion Gheorghe Maurer, but the others were completely unfamiliar to her. A flood of names and faces. She thought it was a little funny when the Chinese showed up. They were also building socialism, with their Asian eyes and broad laughter, obligatory on every face. The Russians, in turn, were always frowning and determined. The Soviet movies always began with a statue: a man and woman in bronze, with the man holding a hammer and the woman holding a sickle. Where were they supposed to be? And why was she so small beside him? Russian women, you see, were brave and worked shoulder to shoulder with the men. The bronze Russian woman was as delicate as a ballerina.
The violent flickering of the screen tired Maria’s eyes. The theater smelled like wet wool, since everyone had taken off their coats and hats and held them on their laps. Now armies marched over the screen. Tanks ran across snowy fields. They filmed a plane from inside while bombs dropped through its open hatch. Below, in yellowy sepia, clouds blossomed like mushrooms. Costel, still without looking at her, began to gently stroke her fingers. She felt the blackened lines of his mechanic’s hands passing over her knuckles, making a weak sound when they touched her nails or the ring with a butterfly, the ring from Mioara Mironescu. In the semi-dark, the Kirlian effect revealed a moment of supernatural beauty: their hands were surrounded by a lace of blue stars, flames, a fabric as fluffy as snowflakes, and the snaking flashes and darts of green rays. The butterfly on the ring absorbed and glowed with the delicate colors of orange and magenta. Their hands touched tenderly, the only colorful things in the hall where shadow fought with light, both of them dirty and sad.
16
A PATCHWORK of colored frogs and sequins, Cedric’s French Quarter was a story of palm trees and agaves bending in the wind, and light-skinned black women sunning themselves on wrought-iron balconies, protected by the ivory plumage of their fans. Many generations earlier, Africans embedded hallucinatory, picturesque scenes on the flexible yellow lamellae bone — high stacks of dried crocodile skulls, a man sodomizing a ram, an idol with lobster claws devouring a gigantic cockroach. The pearl piercing the ear of the slave who brought a tray of coffee to Cecilia and Melanie, two black women in silk dresses, a gray pearl, the size of a cherry, gathered into its sphere the neighborhood of wooden buildings and multicolored flags, the Mississippi River that curved around it broadly, then perished into glimmering swamps on its way to the Caribbean, the swirling clouds of spring, and the somnambulist faces atop the endless necks of the ladies, who tranquilly discussed, over honey cake, the arrival of Mardi Gras, in a few days … Their Cajun French sounded more like the zithering tones of Roussel, full of insects and pendulums, than the tongue in which, in roughly the same period, General de Gaulle addressed the French on the radio, encouraging them, reminding them of their love of country and duty to hate their foreign rulers, or the concomitant tongue in which his Parisians, thus heartened, wrote a million denunciations to the collaborating authorities.
Cecilia wore a Prussian blue turban. Her thick lips, the color of dark coffee, were carefully tattooed. Her beastly nose contrasted oddly with her large, fairy-like eyes that flashed gold between eyelids lined with black. A thick layer of mascara weighed on her lashes, so long they could not be natural. Over her eyelids, the random dust of gold, blown softly from the slave’s palm, ordered itself (since nothing happens by chance in this world of paranoia and dreams) precisely into a map of the boreal constellations, those made banal by the zodiac, on the right eyelid: while on the left, strange austral revelations, including the Pneumatic Machine and Southern Cross, glowed with a living flame, surpassed only by the grains of the star Canopus which guided sailors through the eddying Straights of Magellan. Cecilia was at most thirteen years old. When she laughed, she pushed the tip of her tongue between her perfect teeth. From the time she was an infant, her tongue had been pierced by a blue glass ring, which made the same clinking sound when she spoke her chirping syllables, as the ice cubes in her martini.
Melanie was old, with elephantine hips, but above her décolletage, her collarbones and neck were just as supple as Cecilia’s. She carefully hid the embarassment of her life, her scalp as bald as the palm of her hand, beneath a wig of ostrich feathers. Under the wig, in the middle of her forehead, fixed on a thin chain, hung Leon, the living beryllium crystal, with its own metabolism and sexuality, which had been placed in her hand by a French Quarter priest. There were few people of the Lord in that region, so Fra Armando was forced to work as a voodoo magician as well, two days a week. On another day he served as an imam for a small but active Muslim community, and on another as the officiant in a Hebrew temple, and he dedicated the other three days entirely to the Savior crucified on the cross of wood. The Leon Crystal was growing. Each year it added something new to reflect the events of Melanie’s life — a prismatic horn, or a delicate needle, something longer or shorter, thicker or thinner, more colorful or transparent. When the old woman lost her second husband (of the four, the only one she really loved) the crystal grew a knot as black as a rotten tooth, which she then removed with pliers, out of spite, the way she had pulled the memory of Desiré from her soul. At night, after she put out a plate with sprouted grains and fried bananas, Melanie sank the crystal into the glass of water where she kept her dentures. In her imagination, the hideous U-shaped object, made of a waxy substance as pink as vomit, spaced by inhuman wires and teeth, was Leon’s secret lover, with whom the virile crystal engaged in monstrous copulations. In the morning, Melanie drank the water from the glass, so the crystal seed would pass into her and live as long as he had waited in the bottom of the earth, among the mine-flower petals, damned to the cavern’s darkness and oblivion.