I didn’t turn on the light, even after darkness fell, and nothing was left of the entire triptych of the city but the phosphorescent blue of snow on the roofs and the reddish sky, still unexpectedly light, so that the darkness was concentrated in my room, surrounding me in sadness. In the next room the television was on, and my parents made comments and giggled stupidly. Muffled thuds came from the room on the other side, from the next apartment. In nights of excitement and fever, lying on my sheets like a burning statue, I would hear whispers from beyond the wall, squeals and sighs, or it seemed like I heard them, and rising to my knees, I would press myself against the cool gypsum, I would put my ear to it and try, holding my breath, to guess what was going on in there, how they were struggling in bed, in a mass of wet and throbbing organs, a man and a woman, pleasuring each other, their hands touching the skin of each other’s erogenous zones and the spiral hairs of their pubises, nibbling their nipples and ear-lobes. My ear froze and began to sting, and my heart beat so hard that it drowned out other sounds. I writhed like someone being burned alive in a fire, I spread across the wall until the whitewash covered my skin and my pajamas, and I stayed like that for hours on end, a bas-relief of frustration. After I had lost all hope of hearing something real and started to feel palpitations of tiredness, I would throw myself back onto the bed, and fall asleep to dream that a long, narrow panel opened in the wall, right over my bed, and I rolled into the neighbors’ room, where a luscious pale woman pressed against me and offered the menacing spider between her thighs, an actual spider, from the Amazon, big and strong like a crab, which I picked up by the thorax, as big as my hand, and took from the woman’s pubis, which was as flat between her legs as a doll’s. When I turned the spider over, it had a narrow, red wound on its stomach, between its vibrating legs, just like (I remember within the dream) the girls in the waiting room of the Emilia Irza Hospital, where I was admitted when I was five, just before we moved to the block on Ştefan cel Mare. I threw the spider as far away as I could and cleaved to Silvia, trying my hardest to put myself between her thighs, until my drops of semen poured onto her stomach in thin, ivory jets. I stood and, looking around, realized her room was as narrow and round as an alveolus, with its walls lined in black velvet. A metal spiral staircase took me outside, after I climbed up three or four floors. I was on Ştefan cel Mare again, in front of the appliance store windows, magically illuminated in the night.
I had just turned five when my mother, I still don’t know why, took me to the Emilia Irza hospital and, because there was no one she could leave me with at home, had me admitted to the children’s ward. At least that’s what she’s always told me. I tried to ask her about it later, in the hot summer nights spent in the kitchen, watching the wasps come and go through the air vent over the stove, but she stubbornly resisted, the way she did when I asked about other things, images and facts that remained in my memory, but which, inexplicably, had disappeared from my mother’s. For example, I see myself in a dark bathroom, with a large, pale boiler tank at the end of the tub. Through its little door I can see the burner’s frozen blue flames, the only lights in the room. Their continuous murmur, calming and sad, is the only sound I hear. Then a splash. I’ve taken my hand from the water and violet drops, like grapes, plop onto the water’s oddly dark surface, through which I see my little body, like a livid fish. The violet, strong-smelling water is up to my neck in the metal tub. “Permanganate” I hear clearly in my head. And I know that my mother had poured that liquid, with a not-unpleasant smell, from a bottle into the tub. Then she left me (why?) in the dense shadow, steeping in the bath of rotting flowers. It stank of swamp, violets, permanent marker, uterus. I dissolved in the unmoving water until I could not tell my limbs apart and they were ever more clenched in crystal. Any drop from my fingers fell with a genetic, unexpected sound on the mauve water, as though, at that moment, my ear canal was being sketched out, with its labyrinthine structure, and then dissolved again in the boulder of temporal bone. Every drop reinvented my cochlea. In the end, my mother came back and delicately sunk my head under the hypermanganate-laced water, wetting my hair, and she started to massage my neck. Squinting, with the water lengthening and squeezing my facial mask, I followed the will of the giant woman who bathed me, who doused me with violet rags pulled from the mirror of water and rubbed my shining limbs … Mamma sweated, and her breasts, sagging even then, with enormous, scarlet ovals on their peaks, began to show lines of violet drops, as though the permanganate was actually my mother’s sweat, as though inside she was completely filled with permanganate. Yet later, my mother would never confirm this memory, even though I am sure that it didn’t happen just once, but over a long period of time, the ritual of this foul chemical wash continued in that bathroom, which I don’t know if I should place in the house on Puccini or the apartment beside the garage. In the same way, I never found out what the formidable battery of vials was for, thick as a thumb and full of a yellow liquid, which I happened upon at fourteen, in my parents’ buffet. It was a white cardboard box, long and relatively narrow, on the top of which was written — and like the almost mystical term “permanganate,” the name of this incredible medicine rises in my memory sparkling, like it was written in precious stones — QUILIBREX, with straight, blue letters. Inside were dozens of vials, thin cylinders with tapering necks and pointy glass bumps on the end, lined up in a cardboard grid. On each vial, with its liquid shining in the light like gold, something was written, tiny, illegible, and inside there were beings: delicate, lacey worms, some with pink colors and little black fibers in their tails, others with wet skin marbled in vitiligo, vague reptiles with budding feet, a Sybil like a small beetle, as though sculpted in lead, reading a book spiritedly, a spermatozoid five centimeters long, a transparent embryo, through whose skin showed a brain like a sack of venom … And then, I remember one of the vials had a sailing ship inside. An admiral with silken epaulettes was pacing on its deck with his hands behind his back. Resolutely, Mamma did not remember, or did not want to remember, the box of “Quilibrex.” Why, month after month, had I bathed with permanganate? Did I have some horrible, or merely unpleasant, skin disease? Were there blind sarcoptic mites swarming below my skin, with long hairs emerging from the stumps of their legs? Or was the jungle of supple trees that was my hair teeming with lice? As for the vials, I would swear they were not for me. At Voila, they poked my butt countless times with penicillin or streptomycin, at the slightest sniffle. Each time the nurse, a soulless executioner, woke me up in the middle of the night, I could clearly see the needle pierce the rubber plug in the little bottle and extract a whitish substance, so awful-smelling that later I would say mold smelled like penicillin, not the other way around. I winced, resigned and horrified still. I was just a handful of boy with pajama bottoms pulled around his ankles, and I withstood the gentle and quick smacks of the hand on my buttock, already wet with alcohol, and I endured the torture of the needle penetrating my skin and flesh and depositing, in a bag of living pain, moldy water. But I never got shots from the thick, golden vials. They could only have been for one of my parents. I played with them for a week, and then they disappeared without a trace.