Solenoid Page 4
My parents were waiting for me at home, and that was it, my entire life. I left them by the TV and went into my room that faced Ştefan cel Mare. I curled up in bed and wished that I could die—I wished it so intensely that I could feel at least a few of my vertebrae agree. My bed turned into an archaeological site, where, in the impossible shape of a crushed being, lay the yellow and porous bones of a lost animal.
5
The Fall, the first and only map of my mind, fell the evening of October 24, 1977, at the Workshop of the Moon, which met at that time in the basement of the Department of Letters. I have never recovered from the trauma. I remember everything with the clarity of a magic lantern, just as a torture victim remembers how his fingernails and teeth were pulled out, when, many years later, he wakes up screaming and drenched in sweat. It was a catastrophe, but not in the sense of a building collapsing or a car accident, in the sense of a coin flipped toward the ceiling and falling on the wrong side. Of one straw shorter than the others that decides your fate on the raft of the Medusa. With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse. If I blink, my life forks: I could have not blinked, and then I would have been far different from the one who did, like streets that radiate out from a narrow piaţa. In the end, I will be wrapped in a cocoon made of the transparent threads of millions of virtual lives, of billions of paths I could have taken, each infinitesimally changing the angle of approach. After an adventure lasting as long as my life, I will meet them again, the millions of other selves, the possible, the probable, the happenstance, and the necessary, all at the end of their stories; we will tell each other about our successes and failures, our adventures and boredoms, our glory and shame. None of us will be more valuable than any other, because each will carry a world just as concrete as the one I call “reality.” All the endless worlds generated by the choices and accidents of my life are just as concrete and real as any other. The millions of my brothers I will talk to at the end, in the hyperspherical summation of all the stories generated by my ballet through time, are rich and poor, they die young or in deep old age (and some never die), they are geniuses or lost souls, clowns or entrepreneurs selling funeral banners. If nothing human is foreign to me, by definition, I will embrace, through my real-virtual brothers, all possibilities, and fulfill all the virtualities meshed in the joints of my body and mind. Some will be so different from me they will cross the barrier of sex, the imperatives of ethics, the Gestalt of the body, becoming sub- or superhumans or alternative-humans, others will only differ from me in unobservable details: a single molecule of ACTH that his striated body released while your striated body did not, a single extra K cell in your blood, an odd glint in his eye …
I don’t know what I would have been like now, writing here in this cobweb-filled room in my boat-shaped house, in this semidarkness with only a yellow glow around the old windows, if my poem had been better received on October 24, 1977. Perhaps behind me I would have had a bookshelf (I’m ill just thinking about it) lined with my own books, with my name on the spine, with titles I cannot imagine. Over thirty years, volume after volume, these would have constituted a complete investigation of my interior world, since I can’t imagine I would have ever written about anything else. Perhaps I would have become, as written in Scripture, a man clothed in soft raiment, before whom the multitudes will prostrate themselves. If we were to meet now, after seven years, the one whose Fall found success at the Workshop of the Moon, and I, whose Fall, although identical to his letter by letter, was reviled, it could only be at some meeting between teachers and a well-known author, during a Saturday training session at Iulia Hasdeu High, or at Caragiale. We would have waited for him patiently, a herd of instructors, bitter about their inadequate salaries, the tyranny of state inspections, the old textbooks with reading passages about children who are torn apart by vultures or blown up on a bridge, with the attributes and complements and divisions of sentences, while he would have peacefully sipped his coffee in the principal’s office, made jokes and heard servile laughter, then they all would have proceeded, like a group of dignified statues, down the hallway lined with portraits of writers toward the auditorium, and the colleague on my right would have leaned toward the one in front of her and whispered in her ear: He looks so nice … Because for them, all writers are dead, and the deader they are, they better they sound. In fact, the writer on stage would have looked younger than me. He would have had that self-assurance that prestige and a body of work will give you; the chorus of literary world naysayers may dispute it, but it remains incontestable. He would have spoken simply, although his books spoke in complexities and subtleties. He would have allowed himself to be modest and warm toward this little world that he didn’t know and couldn’t know anything about. Afterward, he would have signed autographs (good Lord, signing autographs!), and I would have waited in a long line, holding his book, thinking it could have been my own. He would have asked my name, when I reached him, and he would have looked into my eyes just for a moment. He wouldn’t have been surprised that our names were identical, everything would have been—or is now, as I am writing—like a trance, like a dream. He would have written my name, then something like, “with best wishes,” he would have signed the same name, its shape deformed by the habit of hurried autographs. He would have moved on to the teacher from School 84, who gazed at him as happily as she would a fiancé. I would have gotten my coat and walked home in the wintry slush, with his book in my bag, along with a stack of seventh-grade homework. I would have read his book all at once, all night, because, whatever may be said, I love literature, I still love it, it’s a vice I can’t put down, a vice that will destroy me.
That evening at the workshop, I was wearing a dirty-yellow mohair sweater with a thick collar that my mother had knitted. Both my white turtleneck and my sweater were meant to seem bookish: I knew what a writer looked like. A few years earlier I had seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the author in that film wore a turtleneck, a little frayed around the neck. All he did all day was hammer at the typewriter in this kind of uniform, and, as a result, beautiful girls came in through the window, via the fire escape. I couldn’t imagine what creatures would appear in my panoramic window on the fifth floor, where I would see the Balkan expanse of the city, its old walls, its facades, its baroque pediments drowning in vegetation. I was twenty-one, I was as skinny as a shadow, with a bowl cut and a precarious red mustache with a bare patch on the left. My dark face, with rings under my eyes, with all my life gathered in my eyes, looked like a charcoal sketch. But I had written The Fall, the insane spiral, broad as a maelstrom in the first cantos, then more and more frenetic, more hysterical, as the divine transformed into the obscene, geometry into chaos, angels into demons worthy of a medieval bestiary. I walked into the shabby classroom, an ordinary classroom with tables and benches, with brown paneling, along with ten or fifteen other college students. There, between dark walls hung with mold-stained portraits of linguists, the rest of my life would be decided. I knew the moment the workshop began, when the young professor and literary critic, endowed with a greater authority than humanly possible, with an oracular voice, with judgments no one could ever contest, announced the poems to be read. Seated beside the critic was a woman I didn’t know, dressed in pink, like one of those camouflaged mantids who hunt in the cups of flowers, disguised as harmless petals. Everyone else was a classmate, most of them poets, already accustomed to the Workshop of the Moon. It was a young workshop, founded only the year before, named for the huge, perfectly round moon that floated over the university the first night, covering a quarter of the sky. With only two or three windows lit, the dark university building groaned beneath it, compressed in the middle like under a marble of incalculable weight.
First to read was a guy with a mustache, someone I had not seen before. His collection of poems was called Autumnal Technology: dense, bizarre poems, each with an unexpected twist. I went next. My sheets of paper, thirty or so, were written by hand. I read through them, one after the next, in an impersonal voice. My reading lasted almost an hour, while my thin shape probably disappeared completely into the air of the room. I, in any case, no longer had a body or paper covered in handwriting. I was inside my poem that had replaced the world. I twisted inside its lines in an ever-tightening spiral. I plummeted from line to line, torn by its rough reptilian skin, its thorny scorpion tails. For me, the recital lasted just a moment, as though the first lines:
Golden lyre, pulse your wings ’til I conclude this song
Hide your horse’s head deep under silence
Golden lyre, pulse your wings ’til I conclude this song
had turned themselves over in another dimension and adhered to the last, becoming identical, indiscernible:
mud so versatile
mud of crates
mud of muds
mud of mists
mud
mud
The last word of the poem, in capital letters, was FINIS.
As was customary, a break followed the readings, with commentary to come after that. During the break, no one came near me. They were probably all in the thrall of the sacred horror of a magisterial work. I, in any case, was covered in goosebumps. I had been in the center of my skull, I had seen the living, chryselephantine statue that completely filled its dome of pale bones, and yet I had escaped with my life. Now, all I felt was the unfortunate itching of mohair on my bare neck. I was so tired my eyes went in different directions. The shapes of the room and of the people sitting on the benches blended together in the ashen light, until they turned into golden skeletons floating ghostly through the air. I inhaled my glory, steadily, through dry lips. A canonization would follow: I, the unknown kid who looked like a hairshirted friar with a rope belt, I would become the hope of world poetry, achieving in a single bound what others needed a lifetime to accomplish. I would never have to write another word. I would always be the author of The Fall, he with an eternal, marble cathedra in posterity’s Eden. Toward the end of the break, the great critic, the mentor of the workshop, came over to me and asked one thing, “What’s your real name, in fact?” That evening, he was wearing an impeccable gray suit and a cold blue tie. He was not yet forty. We would have to go back to another epoch to find someone who had garnered such authority and power at such a young age. I rose to my feet and responded that it was just as I had said when I introduced myself. “Oh, I thought that was a pseudonym …” Then he turned his back and went to the front of the room, as a sign the meeting would resume. Beside him, with the stony face of a Kabuki actress, was the floral woman.
I don’t know if Akasha exists, the universal memory of the anthroposophists, where every gesture ever made and every word ever spoken is recorded, and every nuance of green ever seen by the compound eye of every locust, but in my meager memory, rent and consumed by misfortune’s flames, nothing of what I experienced that evening has been lost. The train turntable of my life. In that hour of not even ferocious slaughter—offhand slaughter, scornful and smiling—the coin fell on the wrong side, I drew the short straw, and my career as a writer continued, perhaps, within another possible world, wrapped in glory and splendor (but also in conformism, falseness, self-deception, superbia, disappointment), but here all that was left was an unfulfilled promise. I have poisoned my nights, for the seven years since, in a masochistic effort to remember the grimaces, the sounds, the movements of air in that basement room that turned into the tomb of my hopes. Someone spun a pen around their fingers. Someone turned to the girl behind him and gave a knowing smile. Someone was wearing suede moccasins. The mohair collar itched, my cheeks burned.
They talked about my poem as though it were a specimen of literary disease. A mixture of poorly digested cultural detritus. A pastiche of … (here a list of about twenty names). The first reader was a real poet, I was an eccentric. “We have discovered a valuable addition to our contemporary cabinet of poetic curiosities.” “‘To aim for a thousand, to hit just a six,’ Arghezi can be so devastating.” As more and more people spoke, my amazement and my shame spun out of control, exceeding all limits. It wasn’t possible, I couldn’t be sitting in a congress of the blind. I clung to every positive nuance, I tried to ignore the sarcasm and not to hear the judgments raining down with careless severity. Surely things would turn around. The first speakers were mistaken, they were small fry without any taste. When someone new took a turn, I fixed my mind on him, under the illusion I could make him say what I wanted to hear, the way you push your entire body against the steering wheel when passing someone on a two-lane road. This time it will be okay, things will change starting now, I told myself, but the young man commenting, a classmate of mine, proved just as independent and impliable and brutal as a surgeon with a trepanning drill. And this was just what was happening: the vivisection of my martyred body. Cutting out my heart on the temple-top altar. Amputation without anesthetic, but also without hate, the way children pull the legs off flies. I screamed too, as inaudible as a fly and just as futile. Pompous, baroque, with an ambition suited to a higher goal, my poem was passed from hand to hand, they read aloud from its impossible prosody and “obvious” aesthetic inconsistencies. At times, “by the law of large numbers,” one could find a formulation “that, considering the author’s age, might give us some hope for the future.” As the evening went on, they talked less and less about The Fall, and more about the other poet’s work, mature and brutally masterful, elliptical and enigmatic. In the end, I was forgotten completely, in a pitiful, shadowy corner, where my turpitude was camouflaged.
I felt ashamed, more ashamed than I had ever been. At the start I had been shocked and indignant, but now I only wanted to disappear, to stop existing, to have never existed. I stopped hoping, stopped defending myself, my thoughts stopped fighting against theirs. I was like a rat left to float in a bucket without escape, losing hope and letting himself sink to the bottom. Still, charred as I was by their stubbornness and scorn, I held on to my last shard of hope: the great critic. With some regularity, he would overturn, without the right to appeal, the sentences handed down by those in the room, and his statements were chiseled in immortal granite. Like a medium, he could make no mistakes, because a daimon lived inside him, and if he did make a mistake, everyone would ignore the evidence and follow in his mistaken footsteps. The critic, who always spoke last and always to great effect, would restore to The Fall its initial grandeur, its marvelous depth and ecumenicism. The cathedral had been turned into a public toilet, but with his thin, playful voice, making caveats yet full of power, the critic could douse it again with holy water. Feverish, my head sank to my chest, I was waiting for nothing more than the evening’s final speech, as were the others in the room. And he began to speak, after a long pause that showed no one else had anything more to say.
He began with me and described my poem as “a pointless whirlpool of words.” Interesting, even moving in its intentions, but an obvious failure in its actual outcome, “because the poet has no feel for language and nowhere near the talent needed for such an undertaking.” It was precisely its boundless ambition that made the poem ridiculous. “You need to learn to walk before you can run. The poet who read here tonight is like a toddler who wants to not only run a marathon, but to win.” He continued in the same vein, quoting here and there, recalling earlier comments, always to agree with them, and in the end, before turning to the second author, he turned his thumb down with one last line: “The poem reminds me of those cartoons where the fuse burns down to the powder and the cannon swells up as much as it can, but then the ball rolls out and falls, flop, onto the ground, just in front of the barrel …”
I have no idea what he said about the other poet.
The manuscript of The Fall, still today, bears the fingerprints of those who spoke that night. Hundreds of sleepless nights since then have I ruminated over the same rocambolesque scenario: I track down and punish all of those who mocked my poem and destroyed my life. But especially, after so many years, I take my revenge on the single person who—bound and helpless, a simple, living anatomical specimen, made for torture—has fallen into my hands forever: me, no one but me.
6
I am, thus, a Romanian teacher at School 86 in Bucharest. I live alone in an old house, “the boat-shaped house” I have already mentioned, on the street called Maica Domnului, in the Tei Lake neighborhood. Like any other teacher in my field, I dreamed of becoming a writer, just the same way that, inside the café fiddler playing from table to table, a cramped and degenerate Efimov still lives who once thought himself a great violinist. Why it didn’t happen—why I didn’t have enough self-confidence to overcome, with a superior smile, that evening at the workshop, why I didn’t have the maniacal conviction in my beliefs in spite of everyone else, when the myth of the misunderstood writer is so powerful, even with its concomitant measure of kitsch, why I didn’t believe in my poem more than I did the reality of the world—I have searched for an answer to all these questions every day of my life. Starting in the depths of that damp autumn night when I walked home, blinded by headlights, in a state of paranoia I had never felt before. I couldn’t breathe for rage and humiliation. My parents, who opened the door for me as always, were left speechless. “You looked like a ghost, you were white as lime and didn’t hear a word we said,” my mother would tell me later. I didn’t sleep at all. I reread the poem several times, and every time it seemed different: wonderful, imbecilic, imbecilically wonderful, wonderfully imbecilic, or just pointless, as though the pages were blank. I had just read Dostoevsky’s Netochka Nezvanova, and I thought it was his best work, unfinished because it couldn’t be continued, because the young author had reached one of his world’s extremes too early. I often thought about Netochka’s father, Efimov, the self-taught violinist who, consumed with passion and inspiration, had become famous in his far-off province. The pride of a lowly man in the throes of a fantastic power knows no limits: Efimov came to think of himself the greatest violinist in the world. Up until, as Netochka writes (but can we believe her? What did that girl know about art, about music, about the violin? How her father must have tortured her with his furious insanity, with his crises of pride followed by despair, illness, and drink?), a “real” violinist came from Moscow to give a concert in the provincial capital. Of course, of course, after he heard “the real one,” Efimov never touched the violin again and disappeared from his own fantasy world, his daughter’s world, and even Dostoevsky’s world, leaving behind only the fumes of wincing tragedy and a scherzo damnation. A poor man deceived by the shabby, provincial devil. I am sure that no one who reads Netochka ever doubts Efimov’s mediocrity, the risible glory of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, his pitiful self-deception. But I—who had lived, for several months in the summer of ’76, like him and like the gods, terrified by my own greatness, by the all-encompassing power of the one who took my place and drove my hand across the paper, so that my poem ran for pages, without erasing, without revising, without adding, without rewriting, as though I had pulled away, line by line, a white strip covering the letters and words—I knew that Efimov truly was a great violinist, too great and too new and too out of nowhere to be truly understood, that the governor and those around him, although they had felt the power of his art, could never perceive more than a great, boundless light, and they could never explain why that music, so different from its birthplace, had moved them so deeply. I knew that it wasn’t him, who was manipulated like a doll by a hand from another world, who was the imposter, but “the great,” “the real,” successful Muscovite violinist, who was world-famous, who had played for crowned heads in Paris and Vienna, and who had deigned, at the end of his career, to descend to the end of Russia to perform for the barbarians’ pleasure out of the grace and nobleness of his art. An art that followed the rules, the centuries-old canons, a successful kind of music, of course, but a human one. And just this humanity was the coin that passed everywhere, in palaces and hovels alike, because the weight of the coin feels so nice in the palm of your hand. But inhuman, disordered art that didn’t follow even the construction of the human ear, nor the construction of the violin, that knew not the limits of fingers on the strings, art from another world that magically penetrated Efimov’s body, that art presses against your hand like the icy blade of a razor, it slices down your life line, leaving you scarred forever.