“Ah, Mamma,” I whispered in the crazed silence. I stared at the dentures for a few more minutes in the darkening light, until the dusk turned as scarlet as blood in veins, and the dental appliance began to glow with an interior light, as though a gentle fluorescent gas had filled the curved rubber gums. And then my mother formed, like a phantom, around her dentures. First there was her skeleton, as transparent as bloodworms or a green x-ray, velvet and delicate. Then her skull with the wide, dark stains of her eyes and the small stains of her sinuses, her thoracic cavity, the translucent butterfly of the iliac crest, the gelatinous tubes of her hands, feet, toes, and fingers. Over them, like a light snow, like the veiled fins of an exotic fish, grew my mother’s spectral flesh, a large naked woman with sagging breasts, yet beautiful and young like in photos, with her liquid hair dissolving into the night. She turned toward the livid block, and I held my hand over her lips, as though to stop her from saying something, or from singing. The crown of my head barely reached her nipples. Together, in the descending darkness, we formed an enigmatic statue, holding still for no one. I came back to myself with the dentures in my hand and a sense of frustration, the feeling that I had been very close to something important and serious. I wrapped them up again in the paper and waited, dazed, in the piaţa’s whirling silence.
And suddenly it started to snow. In the sweet light of the lone bulb on the square, hanging, lonesome and violet, from a post, the flakes fell quickly, then slowly, white entering the diffuse ball of light, almost-black passing the center, then white again toward the ground. I felt the snowflakes’ invisible touch on my lips and eyelids, when two or three of the windows in the nearby middle-class houses lit up. Through the colorless air, speckled with the wet ice of the snowflakes, I moved toward the apartment block, a black iceberg rising into the foggy sky. I entered through the side gate, which was guarded by gas meters like two chimerical beasts. I went down a few steps to the garden level. In the whole hallway, painted green, one yellow bulb burned as weakly as a candle. Along the ceiling of the corridor, which twisted unpredictably, ran a pipe, its iron bandaged in places with red putty and hemp. Small rooms, with doors that looked as thin as cardboard, lined the walls on the left and right. At the sound of my footsteps, a door would open to reveal narrow and muggy spaces — a man in his underwear, a woman in a housedress drinking coffee from a chipped cup, an old woman with her headscarf hanging off the back of a chair, revealing two braids of graying hair that hung to her heels … I crept to the stairway that led to the next floor and beyond, and climbed. Each floor was a different color of desolation. There were black doors like in a morgue, enamel plates, much bigger than they had to be, with the apartment numbers; brass, metallic-smelling peepholes, wilted fichus and dank jute rugs. On the top floor there were no doors — only bare walls, with greenish skin, under a weak bulb. A few metal steps led toward the roof exit. Miniscule, quick snowflakes fell inside and melted on the mosaic of the floor. I went out onto the roof and was stunned. A nation of melancholy stretched out before me. It was not possible that I was still on the roof of the yellow block from the piaţa. I was on the peak of a gigantic construction, where at last I recognized one of the old blocks downtown, surrounded by copper cupolas like monstrous breasts. As far as my eyes could reach, Bucharest, like a glass model filled with blood, stretched out its fantasy of roofs: enormous eggs, medieval towers, the spirals of the Metropolitan, the CEC’s crystal stomach, the spheres on top of the Negoiu Hotel and the ASE buildings, the twisted mushrooms of the Russian church, the Telephone Palace iceberg riddled with parabolic antennae, like the iron-braced leg of a child with polio, the phallus of the old fire watchtower, all of it populated with statues of gorgons and Atlases and cherubs and Agriculture and Industry and all the Virtues and Seneca and Kogălniceanu and Bălcescu and Rosetti and Vasile Lascăr, a universe of contorted limestone and gypsum and bronze, covered with snow.
I was standing just beside the sad face of a stone woman, a winged woman five times my height. A quarter of Bucharest was filled with her stone feathers. The cupolas had scales, like moon-creature eggs. All the flora, fauna, and demonology of this sight fluttered in petrifaction, black with pinkish flashes against the low, off-white sky. In the face of the statue I leaned against, I recognized my mother. When, in the silence of a winter night broken by lonely buses, one of the eggs in the limestone garland on my roof cracked dryly open and a translucent fetus, as big as a dog, wiggled out, twitching its wet and eyeless head, and when the jugular vein in the statue of my mother began to pulse, I ran toward the opening where I’d emerged and rushed down about ten floors before coming to one I recognized. I was in front of the familiar door of my parents’ apartment, on Ştefan cel Mare, where I had left a few hours before. My father opened the door. I took off my boots and my snow-wet hat and scarf, and took refuge, as usual, in my room. I took the packet from my pocket and returned it to the bottom of the bag, beside the documents. I hid the bag again behind some linens. I stripped down in front of the mirror. What a strange animal I was! My triangular head, like a snake’s, was transformed now by the terror of statues and cupolas that still reflected in my eyes. My heart was almost visible in the network of blue veins in the skin of my narrow torso. Between my thighs, my sex, already thick from the erections of so many painful nights, veered from childish pink toward dark brown. The hair on my thighs was growing thicker. I turned my back to the mirror and looked over my shoulder. My vertebrae rose like little white hills beneath my skin. On my back, as far as I could see, the triangles of my shoulder blades were so apparent that they looked like two thin discs, one on top of the other. My buttocks were round and heavy, like a girl’s, and the space between them was dark with hair, like a thick line of ink. I was obviously an animal, a fragile mechanism of organic material. I could not understand how I was able to make my skin and muscles move. I focused all the powers of my spirit on my fingers and commanded, “Move!” Nothing happened. It was like I had told a glass to slide across the table. How could I put one foot in front of the other? How could my pancreas and pituitary gland secrete their juices? How could sperm be born in my testicles and sounds in my ear canal? I passed my hands over my entire body and still did not understand how I could be just this assemblage of bones, cartilage, and skin and nothing more. I stuck out my tongue as far as it would go. I made wild movements with my hands. I pretended to be catatonic, trying to imagine how I looked from outside myself, from a meter away. Or I would wonder what it would have been like to not be born a person, but a bug or a plant, to live without realizing I was alive … After I got tired, I put on my pajamas and sat at the window, on the bedstead, to watch how the snow fell on the street. The sharp elements of the heater burned the soles of my feet.