Girl like a lizard,
Asleep on the slate,
Throw yourself in the river
Your life to escape
Across the way, Nenea Căţelu’s dogs were huddled like black rags in the rain. The crucified figures on neon pillars between the tram rails, each with his crown of thorns, raised their bloody faces toward the sky lapping up the November rain. The rails carried only service cars, with a kind of yellow gallows on the back platform, metal, with a hoist. I sat on the top of the bedstead and propped my bare feet on the burning elements of the radiator, which they had already turned on for testing. I stayed like that until it was completely dark and the city, like in an illustration in an old children’s book, was blotted out delicately under the silver clouds and moon. Only neon signs, flashing on and off in the distance like phosphorescent deep-water fish, broke the nightfall with their indistinct green, azure, and purple letters. As I had done since childhood, when a sign went out I closed my eyes, counted to seven or eleven, and when I opened them again, I saw the same sign again, lit. In this way I could keep it lit endlessly, leaping over the night’s emptiness, because the dark space that remained after the rectangle or circle of light went out on the top of the blocks downtown became suddenly much blacker than the rest of the nocturnal panorama. I didn’t turn on the light in my room, and I stayed like that until two in the morning, watching the dark through the sparking blue window, feeling like a cave animal, with transparent flesh and no eyes, touching the walls with the thin tips of my tactile organs.
That night, as I fell asleep, the mask of my face felt heavy, like bronze, from so much effort and contortion. I woke up the next day pale and dizzy. As I brushed my teeth I realized, without yet understanding, that in fact, there really was something unusuaclass="underline" the cold water I used to wash was running out of my mouth, even though my lips were pressed together: a muscle in the upper one, on the left side, had gone soft, powerless and a little twitchy. It was odd, and almost funny. “What the hell?” I said to myself, and I sipped some more water into my mouth, trying as hard as I could to keep it in. But the harder I tried to control my lips and cheeks, the more strongly the twisting, turbulent stream squirted from the lax dam of my upper lip. I walked out of the bathroom and, for about an hour, I piddled around, trying to avoid thinking about that peculiarity that, I hoped, would gradually pass, like a twitch or a fluttering eyelid. But the anomaly stubbornly persisted. I realized I could no longer whistle, and my lip, for about a centimeter, was covered with bestial puffiness, soft like a snail’s flesh. Not even then was I scared, but I showed my mother (just back from the piaţa, weighted down with enormous shopping bags) what had happened to me, smiling naïvely, as though she was going to praise my soon-to-be-demonstrated dexterity. But Mamma was scared, she clamped her hand to her mouth like a peasant and let out a highly aspirated “aaoleo!” We left quickly for the Emergency Hospital. It was Saturday, and there was no one in the waiting room. It smelled like rubber and antibiotics. Finally, a middle-aged doctor came, who examined me and made a snap diagnosis that turned out to be correct: facial palsy, probably peripheral, sinister, additionally named “a frigore,” since the nerve that activated the musculature of half my face was broken, at the ear, from excessive cold. The frozen rain that had fallen on my head a day before had done me in. Hospitalization was demanded, in the neurology ward, to begin treatment as soon as possible, and so the doctor, after she joked and chatted with me a little, wrote an admittance to Colentina Hospital, where I arrived that same afternoon.
In the large neurology ward in Section IV of the hospital on Ştefan cel Mare — a few yellowed and crumbling buildings with their prows and sterns pointed with glassed-in verandas, so that they looked like Spanish galleons anchored side by side in a sparkling cove — there might have been thirty beds. Their population, although homogenized by scarlet gowns, full of thin spots, red spots, and ironing scorch marks, rapidly diversified for me, as I got to know the other patients, each with his own illness, personality, and story. Since I wasn’t examined until Monday morning, I had enough time to follow, on the one hand, the progressive extension of paralysis over my face, encircling, as slow as a minute hand, the commissure of the mouth, cheek muscle, left cheek bone, and eyelid (which I was unable to close, for three full months, without using my finger), until my face — and this showed most when I laughed — came to resemble a sinister harlequin; and on the other hand, to become part of the small group of younger people, the “kindergarten,” as Doctor Zlătescu and her assistants called us, the guys with whom later, for an entire month, I would sit at the veranda table and play endless games of 21 for matchsticks. The others I knew less welclass="underline" I remember a former doctor who had MS, who always sat, dreaming, on the top of his bed. If you approached him, he would reach into his pocket and take out a black and white photo showing a heteroclite group of people, whose names, relatives, and other details were always changing. There was a person who had been hit on the head with a crowbar during some “incidents with Hungarians” at the border, during some historic moment I could never place; a man with Parkinson’s, drugged with L-DOPA as much as he could take; a bartender from the Intercontinental who wore women’s underpants, with satin ribbons; and an antipathetic person, extremely fat, always stinking of sweat and suffering (terribly) from Reiter’s syndrome: he thought his own teeth were conspiring against him and he could not keep himself from chewing his tongue and cheeks. I also remember an old man, at least eighty, completely decrepit, called Mr. Ionescu, who would brag that “before the Communists” he had written reports in The Universe about serious social problems in Romania: “We flogged them, we did, we flogged them without mercy! We were the terror of the political press, we were! Bucşescu could come to me, and Vosganian, and Lacheris, even Samurcaş came to my office once, and they’d fall to their knees, they did, and they’d give me millions, just not to write about their shady deals! Cockroaches, evil, spiders of the regime of corruption, that’s what we called them, we did! And I’d throw their millions right back in their faces!” The old man, completely bald, with what looked like varicose veins on his scalp, wide, beastly eyes, and toothless jaws always chomping, caught his breath and began again with the same senile vehemence, spitting on us while he raged: “They sent women to corrupt me, courtesans, call girls … They came to my office, to the newspaper, you can’t imagine who came: look here, I had Debora Zilberştain on my lap, and Angelica Ducote (the one from the Oteleşanu Beer Garden), and Mioara Mironescu from the Biscuit (no no, the Gorgonzola), and that Vetuţa that Eftimiu used to visit for her carnaval de Venice … All of them came, they did, I had all of them, but I still wrote my stuff, rascals the lot of them! When they heard Ionescu, they thought Satan, they did!” The old man had known “like my own pockets” Camil Petrescu, Homer Patrulius (“the only one who was a genius, he was; Lovinescu would say: ‘You’re a genius, my good Patrulius, you’re a genius!’ ”), Minulescu, Corduneanu … Occasionally, the nurse interrupted him to stick a syringe needle in his buttocks, with the same indifference as if she were injecting a corpse, or to delicately take his glans between her fingers and insert the pink snake of the probe, the only way Mr. Ionescu had left to urinate … Finally, from somewhere, some corner of my memory, appears a tall guy, fragile and pale, like a species of green lobster, always sitting at the window and looking into the distance. He suffered, I believe, from an unusual acromegaly. I didn’t notice him until everyone did, one visiting day, when a woman came accompanied by a ten- or twelve-year-old girl. The endlessly tall man suddenly sprang to life, approached the girl like a ghost, took her aside, and gesticulating like a necromancer, talked to her about half an hour. “Don’t forget to dream,” he shouted with his dull, squawking voice, when the mother and the girl left the ward.