Solenoid Read online

  During the day, I would go for walks in the endless summer. First, I would look for two or three different friends, who were never home. Then I would go down unknown streets, I would find myself in neighborhoods I didn’t even know existed, I would wander among strange houses that looked like bunkers from another planet. Old, pink houses, merchant-style, their facades loaded with stucco cupids, chipped all over. There was never anyone on these streets, beneath the arches of old plane trees. I would go into the old houses, wander through their kitsch-filled rooms, climb bizarre exterior stairways to the second floor, discover vast, empty rooms where my footsteps sounded indecently loud. I went down into basements with electric lights and opened doors of rotten wood to find hallways that smelled of earth, with thin gas lines along the walls. On the pipes, affixed to the wall with sloppy foam, beetle pupae pulsed slowly, a sign that their wings were forming under their husks. I would pass into the basements of other houses, climb other stairs, enter other barren rooms. I would sometimes end up in houses familiar to me, rooms where I had once lived, beds where I had slept. Like a child stolen by nomads and found many years later, I would go directly to the dresser, where I would find a silver fifteen-lei coin (placed in my cradle after my first bath, now so tarnished you couldn’t see the king’s face), the bag with the lock of hair cut at age one (the same age when I was presented a tray of objects for me to choose my destiny, and I chose, so they tell me, a pencil), or my poor little baby teeth, a complete set, which I’ve already written about. Still wandering, every day in the summer of ’75, down the streets and into the houses of that torrid city, which I came to know so well, to know its secrets and turpitudes, its glory and the purity of its soul. Bucharest, as I understood it at the age of nineteen, when I had already read everything, was not like other cities that developed over time, exchanging its huts and warehouses for condominium towers, replacing horse-drawn trams with electric ones. It had appeared all at once, already ruined, shattered, with its facades fallen and its gargoyles’ noses chipped, with electric wires hung over the streets in melancholic fixtures, with an imaginatively varied industrial architecture. From the very beginning, the project was to be a more human, a more moving city than, for example, a concrete and glass Brasília. The genius architect planned the narrow streets, the uneven sewers, the houses slouched to one side, overrun with weeds, houses with their fronts fallen in, unusable schools, bent and ghostly stores seven stories tall. And, more than anything, Bucharest was planned as a great open-air museum, a museum of melancholy and the ruin of all things.

  This was the city I saw from my window on Ştefan cel Mare, and the one, if I had become a writer, I would have described endlessly, page after page and book after book, empty of people but full of myself, like a network of arcades in the epidermis of some god, inhabited by a sole, microscopic mite, a transparent creature with strands of hair at the end of its hideous, stumpy legs.

  That fall I did my military service, and those nine months knocked the poetry or any hazy literary dream out of my head. I know how to disassemble and reassemble the modernized Kalashnikov. I know how to fume the scope with a burning toothbrush so it won’t glint in the sun at the firing range. I loaded, one after another, twenty cartridges into a clip in winter, negative twenty degrees Celsius, before standing guard at a far-off corner of a military compound, in the wind and wilderness, from three in the afternoon until six in the morning. I pulled myself a kilometer through the mud, with a gas mask on my face and a thirty-kilo pack on my back. I inhaled and exhaled mosquitoes, five or six per cubic centimeter of bunk room air. I cleaned toilets and polished tiles with a toothbrush. I broke my teeth on army crackers and ate potatoes, peels and all, from a mess kit. I painted every apple tree on the compound. I beat up another guy over a can of tuna. A third was ready to stick his bayonet in me. I did not read a book, not a word in fact, for nine months. I did not write or receive any letters. Only my mother visited me, every two weeks, to bring some food. The army did not make me a man, but it did increase my introversion and aloneness. Looking back, I wonder how I survived.

  The first thing I did the next summer, when I was “liberated,” was to fill a tub with hot water as blue as a gemstone. I let the water fill over the overflow, up to the lip of the porcelain tub, to arch in tension gently above the rim. Naked, I climbed in, while the water flowed onto the bathroom floor. I didn’t care, I had to get the grime of those nine military months off of me, the only dead time, like a dead bone, of my life. I sank completely into the holy substance, I held my nostrils shut and let my head go far underwater, until the top of my head touched the bottom of the tub. I lay there, at the bottom of the tub, a thin adolescent with his ribs pathetically visible through his skin, with his eyes wide open, looking at the way, many kilometers above, light played over the surface of the water. I stayed there hour after hour, without needing to breathe, until whatever was on me detached, pinching off in pleats—a darkened skin. I still have it, hanging in the wardrobe. It looks like a sheet of thin rubber, dimpled by the shape of my face, the nipples of my chest, my water-wrinkled sex, even the prints from my thumbs. It is a skin of ash, agglutinated, hardened ash, gray as Plasticine when you mix all the colors together, the ash of those nine months in the army that nearly did me in.

  4

  The summer after my army service, the one I dreamed of while I was curled up in a trench under nighttime barrages, my future paradise of endless freedom, civilian life with its mystic-sexual aura, but which proved to be just as lonely and barren as the previous summer—no one calling on the phone, no one home, no one to talk to, days on end (aside from my ghostly parents)—I wrote my first real poem, what would remain the only literary fruit of mine to ever mature. At the time, I would learn the meaning of those lines from Hölderlin, “O fates, permit me just one summer / and an autumn to ripen my fruit …” I also felt like the gods for those few months in 1976 when I was writing The Fall, but afterward my life—which should have turned toward literature with the naturalness of opening a door and, once in the forbidden room, finally discovering your deepest, truest self—took a different path, suddenly, almost grotesquely, the way you throw a railway switch. Instead of Hölderlin I became Scardanelli, locked for thirty years in his tower, raised high above the seasons.

  The Fall was not a poem, but The Poem. It was “that unique object through which nothingness is honored.” It was the result of the ten years of reading literature. For the past decade, I had forgotten to breathe, cough, vomit, sneeze, ejaculate, see, hear, love, laugh, produce white blood cells, protect myself with antibodies, I had forgotten my hair had to grow and my tongue, with its papilla, had to taste food. I had forgotten to think about my fate on Earth and about finding a wife. Lying in bed like an Etruscan statue over a sarcophagus, my sweat staining my sheets yellow, I had read until I was almost blind and almost schizophrenic. My mind had no room left for blue skies mirrored in the springtime pond, nor for the delicate melancholy of snowflakes sticking to a building plastered in calcio-vecchio. Whenever I opened my mouth, I spoke in quotes from my favorite authors. When I lifted my eyes from the page, in the room steeped in the rosy brown of dusk on Ştefan cel Mare, I saw the walls clearly tattooed with letters: they were poems, on the ceiling, on the mirror, on the leaves of the translucent geraniums vegetating in their pots. I had lines written on my fingers and on the heel of my hand, poems inked on my pajamas and sheets. Frightened, I went to the bathroom mirror, where I could see myself completely: I had poems written with a needle on the whites of my eyes and poems scrawled over my forehead. My skin was tattooed in minuscule letters, maniacal, with a legible handwriting. I was blue from head to toe, I stank of ink the way others stink of tobacco. The Fall would be the sponge that sucked up all the ink from the lonely nautilus I was.

  My poem had seven parts, representing the seven stages of life, seven colors, seven metals, seven planets, seven chakras, seven steps in falling from paradise to hell. It was supposed to be a colossal, astonishing waterfall from the eschatological to the scatological, a metaphysical gradation on which we set demons and saints, labia and astrolabes, stars and frogs, geometry and cacophony, with the impersonal rigor of the biologist who delineates the trunk and branches of the animal kingdom. It was also an enormous collage, since my mind was just a jigsaw puzzle of citations, it was a summum of all that could be known, an amalgam of the church fathers and quantum physics, genetics, and topology. It was, in the end, the only poem that would make the universe good for nothing, that would banish it to the museum, like the electric locomotive did to the steam engine. Reality, the elements, galaxies would no longer be needed. The Fall existed, within which Everything flickered and crackled with an eternal flame.

  The poem was thirty handwritten pages, the way I wrote everything back then, obviously, since my long-standing dream of a typewriter was impossible to realize, and I reread the poem every day, I learned it by heart, or better said I caressed it, I checked in on it, I cleared the dust off of it every day as though it were a strange machine from another world, a machine that came, who knows how, through the mirror, into our own. I still have it, on the pieces of paper where I created it without erasing a letter, that summer when I turned twenty. It looks like an old piece of scripture, kept under a bell jar in a great museum, in controlled temperature and humidity. It too is an artifact; I have surrounded myself with them until I feel like a god with a thousand arms in the middle of a mandala: my baby teeth, the threads from my navel, my pale pigtails, the black-and-white photos of my childhood. My eyes as a child, my ribs as an adolescent, my women from much later. The sad insanity of my life.

  That fall, a luminous fall like no other I can remember, I went to the university for the first time. When bus 88 crossed Zoia Kosmodemianskaia toward Batiştei, I was bubbling with happiness like champagne: I was a college student, something I had never dared to dream, a student of Letters! From now on, I would see the center of Bucharest every day, what seemed to me at the time the most beautiful city in the world. I would live in the splendor of the city that unfurled, like a peacock, its Intercontinental Hotel and National Theater, its university and Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture, its Cantacuzino Hospital and four ministering statues behind it, with hypnotic eyes of churning waters. Gossamer cobwebs drifted through the air, young women rushed toward their studies, the world was new and warm, just out of the oven, and it was all for me! The building that housed the Department of Letters had inhuman proportions: the marble hall looked like a barren, cold basilica. Below, in the chessboard of the floor, the white tiles were more worn than the black ones. Thousands of footsteps had dug into the agate-soft surface. The library was a ship’s belly loaded with books. But I had already read all of them, every one; in fact I had already read every letter ever written. Still, the height of the library took me by surprise: twenty floors lined with numbered oak cases, connected by ladders, where the librarians climbed up and down, their arms full of books. The head clerk, a bearded, antipathetic young man, sat at all hours like a robot behind a raised desk at the front of the room, receiving and sorting book requests from the line of waiting students. Along the walls, as though in another castle, heaps of books awaited sorting, constantly tipping over, startling everyone at their tables.

  Because it will become important later in this text (which is not, thank God, a book, illegible or otherwise), I want to record a detail here: the first time I walked into the library—a place I never stayed for long, since I never read at a table but in my bed (that piece of furniture which, aside from the book itself, is the essential part of my reading tool kit)—a thought came into my mind and never left. In the center of the reading room there was a massive card catalog, from the last century, full of drawers labeled in an antiquated hand. I knelt before one of them, since the letter V was at the very bottom, in the first row up from the floor, I pulled the drawer out to reveal, like a whale’s baleen, hundreds of yellowed, typewritten cards showing the name, author, and other information about the ever more numerous and ever more useless books written in this world. Toward the back of the drawer, I found the name I wanted: Voynich. I had never known exactly how it was spelled, but I’d found it here.

  This name had been stuck in my head ever since the seventh grade, when I cried while reading a book. My mother heard me and came running into my room, in her fuzzy bathrobe, smelling like soup. She tried to calm me down, to hold me, thinking that my stomach hurt or I had a toothache. It took her a long time to understand I was crying because of the tattered book lying on the rug, missing its cover and first fifty pages. Many of our books looked like that: the one about Thomas Alva Edison, the one about the Polynesians, and From the North Pole to the South. The only complete (and unread) books were Battle en Route by Galina Nikolaeva and How the Steel Was Tempered by N. Ostrovsky. In between my inconsolable sobs, I told my mother something about a revolutionary, a monsignor, a girl, a story so tangled that I didn’t really understand it (especially since I had started it halfway in), but which had made a strong impression. I didn’t know what the book was called, and at that time I didn’t care about authors. When my father came home that evening, leaving his briefcase on the table as usual (I always took his Sport and The Spark newspapers to read the sports pages), he found me with red eyes, still thinking of the scene in which the young revolutionary finds out his father was the very monsignor he despised! “What book is this, dear?” my mother asked him at dinner, and my father, wearing just his underwear, as he usually did around the house, said, with his mouth full, something that sounded like “boyish,” to which he added, The Gadfly. Yes, the young man was known in Italy as the Gadfly, but I didn’t know what that word meant. “One of those big gray flies, with big eyes,” my mother explained. I had never forgotten that night, when I cried for four hours straight while reading a book, but I had never had the chance to learn more about it or its author. The first surprise was that the author was a woman, Ethel Lilian Voynich, as I read her full name on the card, alongside the year that The Gadfly was published: 1909. I felt I’d achieved a small victory, I had cleared up a mystery almost ten years old, but, in fact, my frustration would only increase. I didn’t know at the time that the name I looked up in the catalog—my earlier tears turned out to be a kind of odd premonition—would connect two of the most important areas of my searching, since the displeasure of not becoming a writer had, paradoxically, released me (and I hope that this will not be yet another illusion) to follow the path toward my life’s true meaning . I never wrote fiction, but this released me to find my true calling: to search in reality, in the reality of lucidity, of dreams, of memories, of hallucinations, and of anything else. Although it rose from fear and terror, my search still satisfies me completely, like those disrespected and rejected arts of the flea circus and prestidigitation.

  I threw myself into my new life like a crazy person. I studied old literature with inept professors, reading monks and nuns who wrote three lines each in Old Slavonic, based on foreign models, since we had to explain the gap in the history of a culture that had come to life somewhat late. But what did I care? I was a student of Letters, as I had barely dared to dream. My first paper, on psalm versification, was almost one hundred pages long. It was monstrous, containing all possible references, from Clément Marot to Kochanowski, the psalms of Verlaine and Tudor Arghezi. All my examples were translated by me, preserving the original verse forms …

  How lonely and hopeless I was! I would leave the university at dusk, when the asphalt, wet from the day’s rain, reflected the illuminated billboards along the street. Instead of taking the bus, I often walked home among the grand apartment buildings on Magheru from before the war, past the Scala bookstore and Patria movie theater, then as the evening turned as yellow as kerosene, I sank into the little streets full of stucco houses, as they turned dark blue then black as pitch, on Domniţa Ruxandra and Ghiocei; I was amazed again and again that I could go into any house, into any of the old rooms, dimly illuminated by the stump of a candle, into the rooms upstairs with an Italian piano, with cold hallways with pots of dusty oleanders withering in the shadows. Mysterious from the outside, with their cohorts of stucco figurines, these ancient houses were even more mysterious on the inside. Empty and silent, without a speck of dust on their macramé-laden tables, they seemed to have been suddenly abandoned in a terrible panic, as if in escape from a devastating earthquake. The inhabitants had taken nothing with them, they had been happy to escape with their lives.