“After centuries of walking through the bowels of night, lapping at the sweet mirrors of ice, clambering over stalagmites the size of elephants, and shaking on rope bridges thrown over crevasses, we found ourselves advancing through flesh. We didn’t realize when, slowly, softly, during the course of our many backsteps and quick leaps ahead, the walls of the tunnel became warm, wet, and pulsing, so that it seemed like we were walking through an enormous vein. We stepped into ever more elastic tissue; and in the thick, hyaline walls, we saw countless miniscule cells with violet nuclei. The transparent insects were still there, but they didn’t swarm. They adhered to the walls, their bellies beating with pleasure. Their long, hard proboscides were stuck in the epithelium of the grotto, and they sucked a black blood, whose course into their stomachs was easily visible through their colorless bodies. We crushed hundreds of them in our steady, endless descent. With time, the flesh conduit narrowed so much that we could barely make headway. The walls began to stick together, a cavity had to be made, and Fra Armando forced our way by pushing aside the hot muscles, hidden under a pearly mucous. It was like he was swimming through ambiguously scented female flesh, as wrinkled and snotty as the foot of a snail. And unexpectedly, at the end of the last push, the Light appeared.”
Cedric trembled inside and fell quiet for a few moments. The night was high, and the tiny, frozen stars of winter were stuck like needles over Tântava. But no fiber of crystalline night air came in through the small-paned windows of the old house. The sisters listened to the story with their hands over their mouths and their pupils so dilated that it seemed like their little cups of ţuica had been sprinkled, the way their grandparents had done, with the fatidic gypsy seeds, to engender (through what chemical mutation of this venomous cure?) not a bestial desire to couple, but a longing for fiction. The mirror, set obliquely under the beams, beside the bunch of dried basil, doubled the lamp on the wall in its crooked waters, surrounded with sharp, prismatic rays, so weak that just one step away from its flame the light became brown as dirt. The only thing that the mirror could not double was the smell of sheep and holiness. The smell emanated, like another type of light, from the blankets on the bed with wooden stake legs, the short, three-legged chairs, the round table where bits of mămăligă remained, and the yellowed pictures in crushed-glass frames on the walls. Maria looked, her mind wandering, at the washcloths on the walls: she had woven some of them herself, before the war. Underneath, the cheap paper icons, lithographs in sepia and magenta, were now mandalas charged with power. They clinked the ţuica cups again, and they broke open more nuts … Years after this, Mircea would also climb up the hall ladder into the attic to examine the black roof rafters and the strange compartments in the attic floor, one of which was full of crunchy nuts. A slanted pylon of daylight came down, while the rest was dark. In one corner, between two girders, there always shone the wide wheel of the spider, with the fat insect right in the center, motionless, wearing its red cross on the back of its stomach. The boy bombarded it with kernels of corn, but the horrible creature did not deign to move, pretending not to notice the holes that gaped, ever wider, in its web. It only adjusted its legs slightly when it was directly hit, but after a moment it was still again, as though its obese stomach were terribly difficult to move. The indifference and power of the spider did not fit its size — they were those of a bison, or a hippopotamus. When Mircea poked it with a stick, the arachnid fought back, and it would not flee until the last moment, slinging from thread to thread and then running over the dirt of the floor so quickly that it scared the boy, and he dropped the stick and never again touched the attic hatch. He had no doubt that the spider would get him, that it would crawl up his pants leg, pull itself under his shirt, along his spine, under his shirt, and stick its venomous canines into the back of his neck. The next day, peeking up the ladder again, pale and very cautious, he calmed down. The beast was not going to stalk him and jump on his face from some secret spot — it had repaired the torn wheel and sat in the center again, heavy as a ball bearing, puffed up, emanating power and cold …
The sister took nut meat from broken, woody shells, dipped them in salt and munched in silence, and then they broke more, two at a time, against the heels of their hands. Cedric, inside one nut, found the pink, trembling brain of some small animal. He cleaned off the dura mater woven with little veins of blood, and crushed it with delight against the roof of his mouth. It was past midnight, and in the tile stove only ash was left.
“Following in the footsteps of Fra Armando, we all passed into the enormous hall. Enormous? Hall? Really it was a world, with a horizon just as far away as in our world. Its vault — since it seemed to be a half-sphere with an apex dozens of kilometers from our entrance and a height as hard to estimate as the vault of heaven — began from the floor and appeared to be fashioned from a yellow kaolin, perfectly flat, with no niches, louvers, or inscriptions. The light within the incalculable hemisphere came from the midpoint: it was a column of pure, liquid flame, descending from the center of the cupola to the center of the floor. The source was so far away that the quartz fire could never have filled the hall if the entire floor wasn’t a flat, blinding mirror, perfectly circular, prismatic, and flashing with the most delicate nuances of violet and strawberry and raw green and orange, coloring our faces and pounding us with confused emotions. The heavenly disc, with a gentle surface like warm ice, crunched below our feet, crystalline, like a massive glass platter, poured from billions of intangible concentric moats, which, from the center to the edge, opened symmetrical, pale triangles of reflection. This was the secret hall of Those Who Know, which had, I later understood, not one, but billions of entrances scattered over all the earth. Not only every cave or any door — even the door of a dirty warehouse or a sinister mausoleum — but any hole of snakes, any vulva between a woman’s legs, or any photographic camera could be an Entrance. Any book could be an entrance, any painting, any thought. This is because we were in the center of the center of our world, in the pineal ovum, the center of the flower, the eye of the heart and the heart of the eye, the flame’s flame’s flame’s flame’s flame. We were (incorporeal, apparently, we only then discovered our corporeality, the vertical swamp of wrung-out organs, imbricated one in another, the soft, aqueous machinery that constantly generates the mystical field of life without being life itself, the voluptuousness of love without relation to love, the fabulousness of thought while being the exact opposite) very close to truth, goodness, and beauty, three words for the cistern of light in the middle of our lives, that lightning which, slicing open our body to death between brain and sex, confounds them within one single sun, blinding, blinding …