In short, the ruins we saw were like the pitiful remnants of a once-superb mouth with superb teeth now decayed and broken from which only the crooked and black teeth were still visible, in a reeking, repulsive smile. An immense stone portico, in the ogive, had miraculously remained standing, at the entry to a zone of even taller ruins. Shaggy vegetation grew over its crown of countless fallen blocks. We all passed under the portico, led by The Albino, and, through a rectangular opening in the pallid marble walls, soft to the touch, we sank into the moldy belly of the ruins. Before we were completey lost in the shadows I looked back. The moon, setting over the sky (it had been on our right, then our left, as we walked the convoluted path), sat directly on the portico’s apex, creating a strange symbol together, which the marrow of my spine and the nerves of my stomach understood better than I did myself.
And we went, in the end, into the belly of darkness, through the porphyry lips and the obsidian nymphs of the night. The stars disappeared, but in the torchlight, fairy-like crystals and agates caught fire. All around the walls of the granite vagina where we traveled, the crystalline façades flamed up and died out. We descended further and further, careful not to crush the translucent newts in the puddles where we stepped, and not to snag our hair on the horrible blind cave spiders of the caverns. We passed through a hall shaped like a cistern, half full of green water, through a hall with walls completely covered in fur, through a hall like a freezer, of thin, white crystals, through a rectangular hall of tile, with broken urinals on one side and, on the other side, pipes with the vestiges of calcium-crusted faucets. The Albino would sometimes say something out loud, and every time he spoke in the dripping silence, his voice sounded so brutal and obscene that it stabbed our stomachs with a sour flood of adrenalin. His colorless skin, pale eyes, and cotton hair made him seem like one of those depigmented beings in the depths of the earth, of the same lineage as the wingless insects, the crustaceans fanning their tactile organs over wet stone, and the ragged, famished bats …
We knew we were approaching the center when, suddenly in front of us, in a corridor as narrow as an animal’s trunk, and wearing the long vestments of a Catholic priest, Fra Armando appeared. When the torchlight brought him from the darkness, he was so motionless that he seemed to have been waiting for centuries, occupying and suffocating the whole corridor. On his head over his tonsure he wore a strange, steel miter, unlike anything a priest had ever worn. Out of this disturbing machinery two tubes emerged, curved and nickel-plated like syringe needles, and penetrated his skull, perforating it in the hollows behind his ear canals, as we would see when he turned around. Before he turned, and without paying any attention to Monsieur Monsú, Fra Armando approached the very young woman with large, velvety eyes under golden eyelids, touched his fingertips to her tattooed lips, and made the sign of the cross over her forehead. She smiled timidly and started to say something, but the priest stopped her. “Come,” he murmured, “Those Who Know are expecting you.”
17
REEEALLY good movie! That guy Jerarfilip was on a beautiful white horse, coming down a path in the forest and then far away, on a hill, there’s this castle. Then you see him go in the castle through an iron gate and then somewhere else, in a little piaţa there in the castle. And he starts fighting with this fat guy, a guard who ran the peasants selling stuff. Boy let me tell you how they fought, what he did to him. Ha-ha-ha! He dropped a basket on his head, then they cut a rope and a board fell on his head, and they knocked him in the pig slop … Then the other guards were coming, and the guy fights like three or four at once and then he sticks his sword and they all fall over in the mud. Boy, what a fight! And the girl, the count of the castle’s daughter, she comes down too, on her own horse, and she’s got her servant with her. And she sees the battle and how many times the guy spanks the other one’s butt and throws the other one like … like five meters, and the girl smiles … She was blond and beautiful, a damn princess, with her eyebrows plucked out: you could see that even back then (nonsense! that’s just the movie) that the girls did themselves up like they do now. But when a lot of soldiers came at him, he wasn’t going to get anywhere if he kept fighting, and the girl frowned and turned her horse around and left …
Lord, how she loved it! She had completely forgotten where she was; she’d stopped noticing Costel’s hand in hers long ago, her whole body and the world around her had disappeared, like hallucinations, like universes where no one had ever been born, where no one would ever understand, ever … She was inside the movie. Her facial muscles mirrored the emotions of those who fought and loved (but never made love, blew their noses, farted, hiccupped, belched, or left their flies open) there, beyond the glass between reality and dream. Paralyzed, unconscious, she experienced the movie so intensely that it was as if it wasn’t projected onto the screen (a torn, dirty sheet) but the smooth bones of her skull, in her frontal lobes, in whose white flesh the associative areas blinked on and off like neon signs. Her being, turned as fluid as milk, poured into the glass shell, the dirty-gray of the body of the princess with blonde braids and shining eyes, it filled the finest glass contours and wrinkles, and, in the enchanted armor of panniers and crinolines, she started to perform the scenes she knew by heart. No one knew, no one would imagine the truth, that now Ivon von Somethingorother was in fact Maria, she had invaded her like The Horla, or like the possessed are invaded by their demons. With her face alternating between light and dark, and her eyes reflecting the rectangle of the screen, Maria whispered the words she knew by heart: “O, Sharl, Sharl, I thought you would never come …” forcing Ivon to say it too, at the same time. Through the thin glass of Ivon, Maria felt the powerful chest of Gérard Philipe every time he and the princess embraced. And, when he fell into the hands of the count’s men, and the girl’s father the count didn’t know that Gerard wasn’t the spy, but that the spy was actually that ugly fellah, Marmandac or whatever, who wanted to steal the girl away, suddenly the audience heard her say, “Pablo! blah-blah-blah” (that is, in the language of the movie), but in the script it was supposed to be, “Sharl, will I never see you again?” But she said Pablo, I heard it with my own ears. And that’s when it hit me. And after that the girl kept lookin’ up at him with her mouth open, totally confused, and after that she said Sharl. Yep, after that she said Sharl, I heard her. But first she said Pablo.
It was the first time Maria had been able to enter the form of a character so well that she could change what it did on screen. She was shaken, dazed, when she realized that, breathing Ivon’s lines, she had changed her lover’s name. Later, in other films, she was able to change entire scenes, alter the plot, get rid of bad characters, or have her favorites marry even when it made no sense, to the consternation of the audience in the miserable theater, one of the three which staked out her territory: the Volga, the Floreasca, and the Melodia. Watching television in the evening, and staring out of boredom at some soap opera, Mircea would see his mother, balled up on the chair with a faded blanket over her legs, burst into tears during farewell scenes, the loss of a child (in all the Indian movies), or the unhappiness of a beautiful, ill-starred girl. She cried beneath the blanket, because Costel, sprawled on the sofa in his underwear, would tease her cruelly if he heard her, he would mock her until she ran into the other room, where she was free to sigh and moan. “That’s a woman, always ready to piss her eyes out …” Often though, when Maria could control herself, clenching her fists, and the tears on her cheeks were only shining trails in the light of the television, Mircea would see the fate of the show’s heroes suddenly change. Things would take a turn for the better, and films that started out as tragedies would end up in happy weddings and baptisms, the reconciliation of stalwart enemies, or the conversion of atheistic blasphemers. Then Maria’s tears would dry and her face would settle back into the enchanted, hypnotized expression that gave her happy dreams.