Blinding: Volume 1 Read online

  There were chilling stories about people who lost their shadows. Within a year, they said, their legs wasted away, they were covered in sores from their heads to the soles of their feet, white worms with black heads burst out of their bodies and crawled along the surface of their skin, and when they died, their guts slithered out of their stomachs like tangles of snakes and vanished into holes in the earth. Their souls went to Hell the moment their shadows were taken off, leaving their putrid corpses behind to wander briefly under the sun. The devils took the souls into a hole in the rocks, hung them upside-down from a redhot iron hook over a fireplace crackling with flames, and in the red air, in the stench of sulfur that burned more than the fire, in the screams more rending than the sulfur, the devils cut their tongues, pulled off their balls, burst their eyes, flayed their flesh, scratched their long nails across their livers, hearts, and kidneys, and jabbed a reddened stake into their anuses, and over and over again, without pause, for every moment of eternity.

  The priest’s Holy Writ, bound with golden wire, smoldered like embers in the purple, transparent, rayless sun of the morning. The large, leather Gospel, weathered as hard as iron and braced in tarnished silver, was held open by four children to the page where those fleeing Egypt, led by Moses, crossed the Red Sea between walls of water. The priest spoke the black and red Cyrillic letters, chanting and censing, and then motioned for the peasants to strip Vasili, the chosen boy. In spite of the wind that made his skin mist like a steaming horse, he was quiet, not trembling or rubbing his hands over the gooseflesh of his chest, where he wore a small, shining brass cross. Only a rag clung to his hips. He moved slowly toward the cliff-like bank of the river, his bare feet sinking into the snow, and the villagers followed a little behind. He was avoiding the lines of squawking crows on the roots, when suddenly his shadow became as long and pointed as the black hand of a watch and flowed onto the ice. The villagers knelt and made large crosses over their bodies, from their foreheads to their navels, while the priest prayed that the great frozen god would accept this sacrifice and let them cross safely to the other side. The boy held his arms out to the sides, and his shadow, close to the bank since the river ran from west to east, followed his lead. A long cross, blackish-pink, now stretched over the mirror of the water. “Receive, receive the shadow,” murmured the Badislavs ceaselessly, and then, before their eyes, the cross-phantom began to eat itself away, to evaporate like wet spots in the sun. The long trunk and the beam of the arms became thinner, broke into splinters, and were sucked one after the other into the river. After a few minutes, Vasili, pallid, the short golden hair of his arms and breast on end, had no trace of a shadow. He was moaning and crying. The others embraced him and quickly put his clothes back on, covering his shoulders with a shaggy sheepskin. The child climbed into the sleigh, covered himself in a blanket and mourned his shadow, lost now forever.

  The horses now stepped easily and powerfully across the ice, and the Badislavs marveled at what they saw through its transparent glass. They never would have imagined that there was such beauty frozen in the thick crust of ice. But the garden of the Lord is greater than the mind of man, and its wonders are many. The line of sleighs moved forward in silence and cold over the enchanting sight. On every side, at the depth of a fathom beneath the crystal, there were butterflies with spread wings. Their delicate, furry bodies like little worms, scarlet or light yellow or black, were more than twenty paces long, and their wings sometimes spanned forty paces. Their thin little feet were extended, three on each side, and their proboscides for drinking the fog of flowers (but where were there palace-sized flowers for these miraculous insects?) were turned like the hands of a watch under their heads, under their large, bloodshot eyes. Their scintillating wings were azure, touched with a painful velvet of Tyrian purple, and almost had the taste of a rotten cherry, a pistachio, an orange peel, or a Persian rug rubbed between the fingers of the eyelids. The exuberant floral patterns, with swallow tails, peacock eyes, ferret eyes, wasp eyes, sinful eyes and weasel eyes overlapped in the waters and multiplied all the way to the lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin, but, to quote Matthew, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Everywhere along the length of the river, as far as the eyes could see, were colored butterflies with their wings spread, a few steps from each other, in a dizzying mosaic. Those far away were small and hazy, in a blue fog, while those beneath the crossing sleighs looked like enchanted animals, the kind of sprite that old men prattled on about – like an unseen doe, an ostrich, a basilisk, or a milk-white unicorn. The sun, beating on their frozen wings, already near the cross of heaven and glowing like a yellow coin, reflected the butterflies’ colors onto the horses’ middles and muzzles and the faces of the people in the sleighs, staining them with blue, gold, scarlet, and saffron – select, luxurious colors, more beautiful than the ancient red of the icons at home.

  The convoy stopped to rest and eat, plum in the middle of the frozen Danube. They unpacked zacusca and cherry liquor, and sat on pallets of blankets, here and there, on the verdant glass. Shanks of pork stewed in pots of their own fat, along with the tripe that for so long had satisfied the convoy. They could see the back of a gigantic butterfly beneath them, only a few paces under the ice, like the neck of a dolphin under the waves of the sea. “I wonder what butterfly meat tastes like?” said a teenager with luminous snot on his upper lip, and, suddenly inspired, the peasants began to offer opinions: maybe it’s like goose breast, maybe the slimy foot of a snail, maybe like the tender, soft flesh from the shell of a boiled lobster. In the end, in spite of the priest’s advice to ponder the matter further, a few villagers lit up on hooch took out their shovels and heated stakes in the flames and began to break the ice. They lit more fires around, to lift out the entire winged midge. The crowd worked for a few hours, until they could touch the velvet fur on every side of the ringed stomach and palm the little goldfish scales on the wings. And when, suddenly, a tremor blew through the trim, budded horns of the butterfly and its thin feet began to twitch, the villagers took a scythe to the barrel-sized head and sent it rolling away. Blue, thick blood splattered the executioner. Then they began to cut hunks out of the butterfly’s back. The meat was as shiny and wiggly as aspic, but a little firmer, and sweet-smelling. Not one bone ran through it, but the skin and ivory needles held it in place like in a glittering net. They boiled it in clay pots and hung it from an iron tripod. All of them ate the flesh, except the priest, who thought he spotted one of the Impure One’s ploys. But nothing bad happened: the peasants licked their fingers with pleasure. Cracking the shell of the legs, they found a kind of marrow that tasted even better. Once they smashed the head to bits, they didn’t find anything inside but a fist-sized bit of brains that smelled revolting, like mold. With their stomachs set to rights and happy as clams, they took their curved knives and began to chop up the wings, like sails of a ship painted a thousand colors, calling their women and holding ragged blankets around their hips. “Not even the czarina has a skirt like this, old woman,” they smiled and laughed, while the women, wiser than they, dismissed them and left, saying that only a gypsy would wear clothes that gaudy. In the end, they made sheets from the wings and bundled themselves up in the sleighs, and set off again. They left behind a giant butterfly hacked to pieces, the veins of its wings spread on each side like rags, its mutilated legs strewn around in puddles of ash and burnt corn cobs.

  Over the course of 1845, Vasili and his kin continued along on the snowy paths of Muntenia. As far as they could see, flat fields stretched out around them that seemed to reach the ends of the earth. In some places, villages of cob houses and straw roofs lifted smoke toward a sky as white as cream. The peasants were mean and quick-witted, always thinking of tricks, the men thinner and darker than the gardeners in the sleighs. The women, in contrast, were much more beautiful. They were painted like city women, and knew how to make their eyes shine with a certain boiled plant. When the convoy stopped in the middl
e of a village, dogs barked at them, and they were surrounded by kids with pointy hats. The villagers, well paid in copper mahmuds, stabled their unbridled horses, and after they had knelt in the church (which was rounder than theirs, with lead-shingled steeples, but painted and furnished more poorly), the fifty Bulgarians were welcomed into the rooms of their willing hosts, where they drank hot ţuica brandy, spun wool, and told jokes. The two priests drained cup after little cup by themselves, trying to communicate in baptismal-fount Slavonic, and they ended up singing the holy drones and benedictions together. The others mixed with the Vlachs, talking with their hands and trading shots of rachiv, laughing without knowing why, marveling at each other’s strangeness. The Bulgarian boys, stout and awkward, with unibrows and thick, red-purple cheeks, ran their eyes over the thin mountain girls, whose faces were masterfully made up like Easter eggs. Not infrequently, knives came out as dawn broke, after the gazes got too bold, but the more level-headed ones separated the boys and calmed them down. Then the Badislavs made pallets for sleeping in someone’s entryway, and they slept as heavily as the ground, wrapped in their butterfly wings, protected by the candle that marked the wall with melted gold. They left as dawn broke, and a pale light stretched over the field. After three days and three more nights, they found the place.

  It was twilight, and snow had started to fall again. The whips snapped lazily and a horse snorted through its powerful nostrils. The priest, deep in thought, counted his prayers on a string of agate beads. The cherry-red stones knocked against each other with a sweet, quiet sound, shaking under the priest’s furry phalanges, one of which was only a stub. His right index finger had withered and dropped off in a few seconds, when, as a young monk with downy beard, he had first touched a woman’s nipple, breaking his vows of purity and propriety. Now the stub began to itch and the agate beads glowed, as had the brazen blackberry of that breast. The moment he began to be afraid and to whisper prayers into his beard to ward off the Unclean One, he saw the ruin. It was a soft light in the blood-red field, like the last molar in the mouth of an old woman. They stopped, climbed down beside the abandoned walls, holding a lantern up to one almost-finished wall and one half done that made a corner in a pile of snow-covered stones. The walls were painted inside, following the norms of piety – saints with parted beards, gold haloes, wide vestments, and blue skirts, olive-faced and frowning. There was no doubt that a church had once stood there, beautiful and famous. There were over forty saints painted on the two walls, each unrolling a parchment cylinder with letters nestled inside. Each had his own little house, separated from the others with thick, scarlet lines. And in an odd coincidence, one of them like the priest had a deformed stub in place of his left index finger. This was unheard of in a holy painting, since if a saint had missing parts, he would be imperfect. Weaklings, yes: this would demonstrate the way the spirit overcomes the flesh, but the handless, the gimps, and the blind could not be saints. Trembling in front of everyone, in the flickering lanterns, the priest held out his hand against the saint’s. At that moment, they all felt the earth move and they dropped to their knees. They would never be able to say whether it was the earth that leapt or their spirits within, or both at once. The fact is that in the passionate murmurs of prayer, flakes of fire fell from the sky and sat upon each of them, and suddenly, men, women, and children began to prophesize and speak in tongues, with their eyes wide, shouting and laughing and chortling in tears, while walls of glittering air grew from the earth, elongating the walls that stood, vaults of air arched over the glowing heads, and a steeple of air rose toward the heavens. Slowly, the new walls condensed. They became milky, then translucent, then metallic matte, finally covered in masterful paintings, matching the ruined walls, which now were clean and couldn’t be distinguished from the new church. Cathedrals with carved flowers and vines, an iconostasis covered in images, and an altar dressed in expensive items added themselves to the miraculous collection. Meanwhile, the priest’s stub grew into a ghostly crystal finger, with slender bones inside it, and a transparent nail on the tip. Capillaries wove through the flesh, while skin sprouting with thin threads of gray hair dressed the finger. When the priest took his hand from the saint’s painted palm, he saw that the saint also had a new finger to replace the one that had been left out.

  They founded the village of Tântava there, between the Argeş and Saba. First they dug cottages into the strangely soft clay, and as spring came closer, they built houses, each with an entryway and two rooms, gathered around the grandeur of the church like sheep around their shepherd. Beside the church, they dug long beds for vegetables, and by summer the little village was as happy among its greens and vines as it had been in the Rhodope Valley. Over the next quarter century, the first Badislavs in Muntenia became the land’s inhabitants – they lived, they procreated, and they forgot their old language and learned what the people around them spoke. They extended their lands and drank their brains out at the bodega that soon appeared in the village center. The bar was a place to toast the Devil, the Lord’s little brother (as the older ones believed), to kill each other with tomato stakes over a woman, to hold vigils over old men in agony, so that they wouldn’t have to die without a candle on their chests, and to look for rainclouds in the sky, all without ever imagining that, in fact, they weren’t building houses, plowing land, or planting seeds on anything more than a gray speck in a great-grandson’s right parietal lobe, and that all their existence and striving in the world was just as fleeting and illusory as that fragment of anatomy in the mind that dreamed them.

  THE past is everything, the future nothing, and time has no other meaning. We live on a piece of plaque in the multiple sclerosis of the universe. An animal, small and compact, a single particle a billion times smaller than a quark, and a billion billion times hotter than the center of the sun, encompassed the entire design that our mind perceives in the moment it is given to perceive, uniting it in the breath of a single force, with balls of space and strings and the foggy droppings of the galaxies and the political map of the planet and the unpleasant smell of someone’s mouth you’re talking to on the bus and Ezekiel’s vision on the banks of the Chebar and every molecule of melanin in a freckle under the left eyebrow of the woman you undressed and possessed a night ago and the wax in the ear of one of the ten thousand immortals of Artaxerxes and the group of catecholaminergic neurons in the medulla oblongata of a badger asleep in the woods of the Caucasus. It encompassed everything our mind has never known and will never understand, because, in a sense, that point actually was our mind, the thought that thinks itself, like a sword so sharp it cuts itself to pieces. It was the absolute past, without fissure. It was metaphysical flesh, homogenous and fiberless, without any distinction, aside from some at first unobservable filaments of the future. When and why did the symmetry shift? Who created the initial estrangements, and how? Who could have withstood the first crack of the fissuring All? The future, that is, estrangement, separation, and cooling, broke the original globe into a thousand shards and gouged hideous wounds into the body of the oneness of being, spaces that widened ever more, separating the granules of substance and letting a photonic blood gurgle between them. A purulent night wrapped every corpuscle into being, in a dark and hopeless schizophrenia. The universe, which was once so simple and complete, obtained organs, systems, and apparatuses. Today, it’s as grotesque and fascinating as a steam engine displayed on an unused track at a museum. It demonstrates its rods and levers under a bell jar. And until the bell of our minds is incorporated into the universal desolation, it will function as an internal organ reflecting the whole, the way a pearl reflects the martyred flesh of an oyster.

  And yet, the universe is not everything that happens, but much, much more. Because, if those parts of us that analyze, those parts of every living being – the eyes, the compound eyes, the camera eyes, the antennae with batteries of chemoreceptors, the lateral lines of fish, the ears with trembling cochlea, the osmic cells in the nasal passages, the taste
buds, the organs a spider uses to feel vibration and the organs a tick uses to sense carbon dioxide, the touch receptors of the skin, the ones that twist around every fiber of muscle in the oral organs of the Sarcoptes scabia, the ones that feel cold and heat, the ones stimulated by the otolithic stalactites of the organs of balance and the hundreds of thousands of other senses that simultaneously ingest the vibrations of matter – if these vulvae, if these tentacles adhere to the symmetry of the stars, there is still everything that we cannot perceive except through the super-sensory organ of thought, a super-symmetry, structures twisted around themselves that annul, at a higher level, the flow from the past toward the future, from all toward nothing. The universe, at a higher level than the visions of galaxies and quasars, is reflected in itself, in a super-mind, whose foundation is memory. There is a universal memory, a memory that encompasses, houses, and destroys the idea of time. There is Akasia, and Akasia is the savior of the universe, and beyond Akasia there is no hope of salvation. She is the eye in the forehead of All, encompassing the history of All and all that is, was, and shall be. In Akasia there is no death, or birth – all is coplanar and all is illusion. All of the world’s events, and every particle of substance, and every quantum of energy are present in transfinite light, there, in Memory. And if our thought (by which we perceive, in privileged moments of ecstasy, Akasia) would ever be able to turn back upon itself – perhaps by adding a seventh layer to the neocortex or by creating another, bizarre, organic basis for itself – the way that once, in the mind of a fur-covered being, awareness turned on itself and became consciousness, we might be able, like the angels, to detect the Memory of the Memory of the world, and the Memory of the Memory of the Memory and so on and so on, infinitely. And if conscience became prescience, reflecting itself in itself, it would then become omniscience, rising above this telescoping memory to see the center of the rose with infinite petals, to see the enchanting spider that weaves illusion, modeling it quickly into universes, spaces and times, bodies and faces, with its infinite, articulating legs.