“The Fall” Excerpt from the novel Solenoid — Mircea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter)

Sometimes I lose control of my hands, from the elbows down. It doesn’t scare me, I might even say I liked it. It happens unexpectedly, and luckily, only when I’m alone. I’ll be writing something, correcting papers, or drinking a coffee, or cutting my nails with a Chinese nail trimmer, and suddenly my hands feel very light, as though they were filled with volatile gas. They rise on their own, pulling my shoulders up, levitating happily through the dense, glittering, dark air of my room. I smile, I look at them as though for the first time: long, delicate, thin-boned, some black hair on the fingers. Before my enchanted eyes, they begin to make elegant and bizarre gestures on their own, to tell stories that perhaps the deaf can understand. My fingers move precisely and unmistakably, making a series of unintelligible signs; the right hand asks, the left responds, the ring finger and thumb close in a circle, the little fingers page through some text, the wrists pivot with the supple energy of an orchestra conductor. I should be scared out of my mind, because someone else, within my own mind, directs these movements, skilled motions desperate to be decrypted, and yet I am seldom ever so happy. I watch my hands like a child at a puppet show, who doesn’t understand what is happening on the miniscule stage, but is fascinated by the agitation of wooden beings with yarn for hair and crepe dresses. The autonomous animation of my hands (thank God, it never happens when I’m in class or on the street) quiets down after a few minutes, the motions slow, they begin to resemble the mudras of Indian dancers, then they stop, and for two or three minutes more I can enjoy the charming sensation that my hands are lighter than air, as though my father had used the gas line to inflate not balloons but two thin rubber gloves, and put them in place of my hands. And how can I not be disappointed when my real hands—crude, heavy, organic, chafed, with their striated muscles, the white hyaline of the tendons, and their veins throbbing with blood—reenter their skin gloves tipped with nails, and suddenly, to my amazement, I can make my fingers move as I want, as though I could, only by concentrating, break a twig from the fichus in the window or pull my coffee cup toward me without touching it. 

Only later does the fear come, only after this fantasy (that happens about once every two or three months) becomes a kind of memory do I begin to wonder if somehow, among all the anomalies of my life—because this is my topic—the fantastical independence of my hands is further proof that…everything is a dream, that my entire life is oneiric, or something sadder, graver, weirder, yet truer than any story that could ever be invented. The cheery-frightful ballet of my hands, always and only here, in my boat-shaped house on Maica Domnului, is the smallest, least meaningful (and in the end the most benign) reason for me to write these pages, meant only for me, in the incredible solitude of my life. If had wanted to write literature, I would have started ten years ago. I mean, if I had really wanted to, without the effort of consciousness, the way you want your leg to take a step and it does. You don’t have to say, “I order you to step,” you don’t have to think through the complicated process by which your will becomes deed. You just have to believe, to have belief as small as a mustard seed. If you are a writer, you write. Your books come without your knowing how to make them come, they come according to your gift, just as your mother is made to give birth, and she really gives birth to the child who grew in her uterus, without her mind participating in the complicated origami of her flesh. If I had been a writer, I would have written fiction, I would have had ten, fifteen novels by now without making any more effort than I make to secrete insulin or to send nourishment, day by day, from one orifice of my digestive system to another. I, however, at that moment long ago, when my life still could have chosen one of an undefined multitude of directions, I ordered my mind to produce fiction and nothing happened, just as futilely as if I stared at my finger and shouted, “Move!” 

When I was a teenager, I wanted to write literature. Even now I don’t know what happened, if I lost my way somehow or if it was just bad luck. I wrote poems in high school, I have them in a notebook somewhere, and I wrote some of my dreams as prose, in a large school notebook, with thick covers, full of stories. Now is not the moment for me to write about that. I took part in the school competitions for Romanian, on rainy Sundays in unknown schools. I was an unreal young man, almost schizophrenic, who during the breaks between classes would go into the school yard, to the long-jump pit, sit on the edge and read my poems out loud from ragged notebooks. People looked right through me, they didn’t listen when I talked, I was a decoration, not even a good one, on an enormous and chaotic world. Since I wanted to be a writer, I decided to sit for university entrance exams in Letters. I got in to the major without any problem, in the summer of 1975. At that time, my solitude was all-encompassing. I lived with my parents on Ştefan cel Mare. I would read for eight hours a day, rolling from one side of the bed to the other, under a sweaty sheet. The book pages would adopt the ever-changing color of the Bucharest skies, from the gold of summer dawns to the dark, heavy pink of snowy evenings in deep winter. Dark would come and I wouldn’t even notice. My mother would find me reading in a room sunk deep into darkness, where the paper and print were nearly the same color and I wasn’t reading anymore, I was dreaming further into the story, deforming it according to the laws of dream. Then I would shake it off, stretch, get out of bed—the whole the day I had only gotten up to go to the bathroom—and, invariably, I would go to the large window in my room, where I could see, poured out under clouds of fantasy, all of Bucharest. Thousands of lights were lit in the far-off houses, in those nearby I could see people moving like lazy fish in an aquarium, much further away the colored neon signs turned on and off. But what fascinated me was the giant sky above, the cupola higher and more overwhelming than any cathedral. Not even the clouds could rise to its apex. I pressed my forehead against the cold, elastic window, and I stood like that, a teenager in pajamas with holes in the armpits, until my mother called me to eat. I would come back to the vision of my solitude, deep under the earth, to read further, with the light on and with another, identical room, extended into the mirror of the window, until I was overwhelmed with exhaustion. 

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 façades loaded with stucco cupidons, chipped all over. There was never any one 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 with a slobbery 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 who was stolen by nomads and found after many years away, 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 gorgons’ 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 and more moving city than, for example, a concrete and glass Brasilia. 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 literary haze 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, -20℃, before keeping watch 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 bunkroom 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, in fact not a letter, 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 multiply my introversion and solitude. 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 gently above it. 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, the 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 thin rubber, and it is textured 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. 

The summer after my army service, the one I dreamed of while I was curled up in a trench under night-time 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 afterwards my life—which should have turned toward literature with the naturalness of opening a door, and, in the forbidden room, you finally discover 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 did not have any 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 miniscule letters, maniacal, with a handwriting I could decipher. 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 also 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 send 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 then, obviously, since my longstanding dream, a typewriter, was impossible, and I re-read 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 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 Batiștei, 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 surface, soft as agate. 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, making everyone jump 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 toolkit)—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, in the seventh grade, 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, a book 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. Ostrovski. 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 half-way 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 the true meaning of my life. 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 sprang 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, keeping 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 boulevard. 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 Domnița 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 a pianina, with cold hallways with pots of dusty oleanders withering in the shadows. Mysterious from outside, with their cohorts of stucco figurines, these ancient houses were even more mysterious 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, like a devastating earthquake. The inhabitants had taken nothing with them, they had been happy to escape with their lives. 

My parents were waiting for me at home, and that was it, my entire life. I left them at the TV and went into my room that faced Ştefan cel Mare. I curled up in bed and wished that I could die, so intensely that I could feel at least a few of my vertebrae agreed. My bed turned into an archeological site, where, in the impossible position of a crushed being, lay the yellow and porous bones of a lost animal. 

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 College of Letters basement. 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 collapse or a car accident, but in the sense of a coin flipped toward the ceiling and fallen 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 piața.  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 as 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 super-humans 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 semi-darkness with only a yellow glow around the old windows, if my poem had been well 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 study 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: he, whose Fall found success at the Workshop of the Moon, and I, whose Fall, although identical to his letter by letter, was scorned, it could only be at some meeting between teachers and a well-known author, during a training on a Saturday, 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 nay-sayers may dispute it, but it remains incontestable. He would have spoken simply, although his books spoke in complexities and subtilities. 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. Afterwards, 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 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 façades, 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 moustache with a bare patch on the left. My dark figure, 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 Maelström 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 in 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 moustache, someone I had not seen before. His collection of poems was called Autumnal Technology: dense, bizarre poems, each with an unexpected twist. I followed. 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 until I conclude this song

Hide your horse’s head deep under silence

Golden lyre, pulse your wings until 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 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 grey suit and a cold blue tie. He was not yet forty. We would have to go back to another epoch to find someone with 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 roundtable of my life. In that hour of not even ferocious slaughter—off-handed 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 a promise never to be fulfilled. I have poisoned my nights, for the seven years that followed, 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. Pulling out my heart on the top level of the temple. 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 onto 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 sunk to my chest, I was waiting for nothing more than the evening’s final speech, as did the others in the room. And he began to speak, after a long pause that showed no one else any 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.” Precisely its boundless ambition 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.

***

Mircea Cărtărescu is a writer, professor, and journalist who has published more than twenty-five books. His work has received the Formentor Prize (2018), the Thomas Mann Prize (2018), the Austrian State Prize for Literature (2015), and the Vilenica Prize (2011), among many others. His work has been translated in twenty-three languages. His novel Blinding was published by Archipelago in Sean Cotter's English translation.

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Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T.O. Bobe's Curl and Nichita Stănescu's Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. His translation of Magda Cârneci's FEM, a finalist for the PEN Translation Award, was published by Deep Vellum in 2021.