Next, two bare-chested gypsies in billowing pants juggled torches, to the chattering of a chimpanzee who, the lieutenant observed, had an ugly wound on its elbow. And it always protected it, keeping it close while it did somersaults, rumbling on its long and hairy arms with its knees tucked in. It had an oddly thick chain around its neck, held at the other end by the emcee, who had taken off his black suit and, in short-sleeves and shorts, was now the animal trainer. The monkey had such sad eyes that you could not look at it if you were past childhood. With its performance ended the “numerous wild animals” were announced at the entryway. Next there was a cataleptic woman sleeping on a bed of swords, who was none other than the big blond woman in her gold dress of flashing metal.
The officer let himself be stolen away by the charm of the fair again, marveling with wide eyes at everything that happened on the stage. The country boy in him was warmly happy, because when he was little he had never been on a teeter-totter, shot at a bottle, or gone to a circus sideshow, even though he would have given his own skin to do so. He had satisfied himself with what they showed on the platform, before the show, when they promised ten times as much if you went inside. Now he had entered, he was inside, and he couldn’t wait to see the spider-woman, the show’s number one attraction. And back in Teleorman, there had been, years ago, a spider-woman, but soon she stopped performing because — so the rumor went — she had married the ox-tongued man and gotten pregnant. The one here now was either the same one, which would make her pretty old, or another, maybe her kid. In either case, Stănilă had recognized her in the painting on the booths, at the entryway, her black mane and beastly green eyes, her globe-like tits, and the blind and hideous brood of black legs from which the monster’s torso emerged. It was identical to the one on the billboards in his memory, as though fairground painters followed canons, like those who painted churches.
In the end, after the starry rag of the stage background had framed a rather curious number (on a table, from the water of a glass carafe, dry leaves emerged and branched into a shrub the color of cinnamon. Multicolored, exotic fish fluttered tiny vial-like fins at the end of the many little branches, sucking water or sap. Sometimes they let go of the branch and glided around the fair hall, like sparkling dragonflies, to return to the bush and put their cartilaginous lips to the end of another branch), it got quiet and dark. Then there was a rending scream, a backwards scream, born not from a source outside of vibration, such as the larynx of a living man being chopped into pieces, but in the depths of the auditory cortex of each spectator, in the complex neurons that detect the loudness, pitch, and timbre of sounds, and which now created them out of nothing, curled up alongside the Sylvian fissure. In each listener, the roar of a spider and a woman lit the synapses and axons of the medial geniculate nucleus, ran down along the efferent nerves toward the inferior colliculus, encoded in the frequency of the electrical current leaping through supple tubes from each node of Ranvier that descended into the ventral cochlear nucleus, and filtered through the superior olivary nucleus in the brain stem, filling the aqueduct of the cochlear nerve. The electric scream passed through the massive brain stem, filling grottos and strange fissures, frightened Madonnas-with-child enthroned in stalactites, and finally entered the upside-down snail of the inner ear. It went into thousands of flashing rivulets, each watering, and at the end, it entered a transparent cell with tiny hairs housed along the spiral, between the tectorial and basilar membranes, in yellow, gelatinous lymph. Here, the inhuman howl, of being boiled in oil or flayed alive, of suffering a general metastasizing cancer, became a vibration of the endolymph that filled Reissner’s membrane, then transmitted the rising tidal wave in the oval window to the perilymph. Like a machine’s organs, the stirrup, anvil, and hammer continued the mechanical vibration and transmitted it to the tympanum, which, through the wax-filled auditory canal, made the air vibrate. And dozens of outer-ear pavilions amplified the scream like megaphones, alternately compressing and thinning the air, directing the terror toward the stage, concentrating it into one side, where a scarlet spotlight lit abruptly and everyone saw the spider-woman was screaming. The cries of agony, born in the minds of those who looked at her, penetrated her mouth, dilated her trachea, broke open the bronchi of her lungs, and swelled the thick veins on her temples. Everyone pumped into her the terror that passed through her torso, envenomed her breasts, and extended the arched bridges of her back, her hairy legs with terrible claws, her round and fragile stomach, full of eggs and innards, and the spinneret grown at its end, through which transparent silk ran. As with the voice of a woman who screams in orgasm beneath a man who strikes her rhythmically between her thighs, holding her hard, without escape, you could clearly distinguish two voices — one from the beautiful head with curly hair and thin skin like a child’s, and one from the pelvic animal. In the uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes, the vagina and labia, both voices are superimposed, and precisely from that mixture comes the excited and sweet moans, not just of any woman, but of your beloved, and not just of your beloved, but of any whore who ever screamed beneath a man. In the terrible howl of the fairground Sphinx, you clearly heard the voice of a woman and the voice of a spider, one stirring an amniotic pity, and the other freezing the blood in your veins and ravishing your mind with horror.
The spider-woman stood there in a blood-wetted corner of the stage and screamed, wagging her head on her long neck to one side and another for much too long for a human being, resembling more a transparent stalk, and scrutinizing the dark of the hall with her green eyes, like a wild animal, as though there were something she was expecting. The spotlight came from the back wall in a purple cylinder, like in a movie theater, illuminating the heads and chair backs in its path. The smoke of cheap cigarettes tossed and turned in the thick ray, making floral patterns of living ash. Although the officer, his hair on end and eyes gaping — Ionică from Teleorman, Ilie Aptrachei’s boy, who had never been to a sideshow — was completely under the spell of the sight of the spider with a woman’s trunk, a living movement, wet and small, much closer to him, attracted his attention suddenly and made his eyeballs converge in front of him on one of the heads, profiled in the wine-colored rays. He started violently and remembered himself, his mission, reality. Moving to rub his scalp, he tapped the edge of the cardboard fez. He yanked it off and threw it on the ground. For that head surrounded by the haze of flashing curls belonged, of course, to the Suspect, the princess, she of the tumescent neck, beautiful like no one else and repulsive like an image from a nightmare. Now, out of the tumor as big as a newborn’s head, peeling and oozing, a gently throbbing, glassy being emerged. The officer, leaning forward on alert, saw the worm prop itself up on small feet and emerge from the cocoon, with antennae like two needles with knobby ends and two flat, matte eyes. He saw it, completely hatched, clamber onto the girl’s head, wiping the liquid off, with its stomach alternately swelling and shrinking, and he saw how this action little by little pumped out a pair of ragged wings, unfolded them, flattened and dried them, until on top of the shining hair of the proletarian princess, like a diadem, the wings of a splendid butterfly spread out, much larger than the officer had ever seen. It took flight in the hall, like a multicolored bat, in and out of the spotlight rays. Its circles, following the bundle of Lobachevsky’s horocircles (ah, Herman!), came closer and closer to the Sphinx who, modulating her screeching into sweet glissandi like a meow, followed the flight of the lepidopteran with her green, beastly eyes. When, in a final loop, it sailed alongside the suffering face of the woman-chimera, a long and sticky tongue grabbed it, crushing its fragility, wrapping around its ringed body and pulling it into her rouged mouth, which chewed it avidly. For a while, at the corners of the mouth, the ends of dry wings were visible, but eventually these too slid into the mouth of the spider-woman …