Magda Cârneci
Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Alina Cârâc
Our Several Kinds of Bodies
THERE ARE several kinds of bodies in our apparently single,
indivisible body. How can that be, like the translucent layers
of an onion under its dry, reddish-yellow skin? I don’t
know, I can’t explain it rationally, strictly logically, the way you’d
prefer. I have no more than my experiences, I collect moments
and states of being. And experiences, you know, exist in space
and time, three-dimensional, even four or five-dimensional. They
have a body, an age, they grow and evolve, and they can only be
told about.
For instance, the sweet-smelling body around my mother. Her
aromatic body. As a little girl, in my mother’s absence, I used to
hug her nightgown and, inhaling it greedily, I could immediately
conjure up Mother’s whole body next to me. A whiff of that
slightly fatty, sweetish aroma, mingling folliculin and sweat, filled
me with joy to the very threshold of swooning. I no longer suffered
from loneliness, separation, isolation, for I suddenly had
her whole body in my nostrils and from there in my senses, my
heart, my mind. So much so that this body of smell sustained me,
like a sort of airy milk that infused through my pores, alleviated
my hunger and thirst, letting me sleep. I actually had mother
next to me, with me. And when Father forbade me to keep
mother’s gown in my bed and chided me to be “a big girl,” to
“grow up,” it was a moment of pain so intense that I instantly
became conscious. I’ll never forget this consciousness, this pain. I
had to give up the nightgown, my portion of the aroma. But I
lost something vitally important, too, for Mother’s aromatic
body was stolen from me.
Not long ago I found that body again, around my own. I can
hardly believe it, but for some time now I’ve sensed around
myself my own womanly scent. A slightly fatty and sweet whiff
of folliculin and sweat, and something indescribable, light, delicate,
that chafes on my nerves. My hormonal body. It’s like a
cocoon of transparent, delicate silk that surrounds me, gossamer
that binds me in fine, invisible threads, immutably enclosing me
as if a pupa in my irrevocable destiny.
†
When I feel it haunting me, at times I plummet into a sort of fixed
mental space, and somehow I always arrive at the same spot in my
brain: I wake up abruptly in a broad green valley at the center of
which a small amphitheater can be seen, of a beautiful light ocher
stone, a warm, golden, chalky color. On my left I see a little girl,
naked, sitting crouched on the ground, her back turned toward
me. Her hair is blonde, short and curly. I try to circle round her to
see her face. I’ve no idea why, but I don’t manage to.
I walk on. Farther ahead on my left, I find a girl, a young
teenager who also sits crouched on the ground, her back toward
me. She is naked. Her chestnut hair falls to her shoulders. I see
her slender waist and narrow hips, two small hollows above the
little triangle-shaped sacral bone. I try to circle round her to see
her face, but, I’ve no idea why, I don’t manage to.
Then I come to a naked young woman on my right, also sit-
ting on the ground, hugging her knees in her arms, her back
turned. Her back is beautiful, well muscled and yet fine and delicate.
Her long black hair is gathered in a ponytail. This silhouette
seems vaguely familiar. I try to circle round her to see her face, but
this time, too, I’ve no idea why, I don’t manage to.
I continue to walk ahead, and I’m gripped unawares by a terrible
nostalgia: unexpectedly I come to realize, I know with utter
conviction, that the little girl, the young teenager and the young
woman are all me, nobody but me. They represent my past bodies,
outgrown, left behind somewhere like statues with their backs
turned, preserved eternally in a beautiful and sad valley. But where
is this valley located?
†
There exists a body of memory, secreted by recollection and imagination.
Occasionally it happens that I wake up in the morning with
the thought of something very dear to me, for instance, the farmyard
of my grandparents in Darmanesti, the yard of my childhood
to which I’m tied by so many experiences. Often I long so deeply
to be there again that, with deliberate leisure, I reimagine the place
in all its detail, except for my grandparents who are already dead.
And just like that, I don’t know how, I’m there. I’m actually there,
for I have an unnaturally clear, hallucinatory, intense vision of the
yard and the village. In fact, I bask in the joyous and disturbing certainty
that, in some inexplicable way, I’m in Darmanesti, really
there with my body and entire being.
It’s early spring and I’m behind the old house in the yard carpeted
by green, closely cropped grass. The place is deserted,
nobody’s around, it’s completely still, but my face is fanned by a
cool breeze, and I know for a fact that somehow I’ve transported
myself there, to the place I longed for so deeply. It’s true it
seems uninhabited (although other people live there now), it’s
precisely as I imagined it lying in bed. Somehow I teleported
myself, I have no idea how, right into the mental image I had
of my grandparents’ farm.
The whole experience lasts a few acute seconds. Then I am
shaken by a quick twinge of fear at the strange intensity of my
presence there, much too vivid. I enter into a sort of vibration,
which begins to cross my entire body in waves and scares me
even more than the fact that I’ve become totally conscious of
my presence there. It’s a vibration I’ve lived in dreams or in special
states of mind and meditation, like a bizarre electric current
possibly resulting from my chance connection to a superior,
unknown source. A vibration that frightens me every time, as if
my body weren’t ready for such energy, so overwhelmingly
excessive, albeit hidden in my cells, perhaps secreted by them,
an energy that is the sign of a savage force or the presence of a
nature alien to known physical forces. The vibration becomes
threatening in its intensity as it shakes my limbs in great spasm,
so I think to myself in a panic, “I want back.” I want back.
Immediately I find myself in bed, my eyes wide open, without
having dozed off for a single moment, as if I had physically
returned from my thought, right from my inner image, where
I had spontaneously reached with all my conscious being.
Maybe hyperconscious.
†
I look at a sparrow that is perched on my windowsill. Small and
plump, the color of cocoa, its beak tiny, short and black. With a
startled glance at me, it darts to the ground. I watch it pecking
fastidiously at something minuscule near a car’s tire. My eyes
follow it with pleasure, with love. It is so quick and intelligent.
What would it be like for me to live as a sparrow, I wonder. I try
to stretch my imagination. I imagine how the asphalt down
below looks viewed at its level, near its rough surface. It
becomes a long, gray, desolate expanse that extends very far.
Like a frozen desert, filled with all sorts of ridges and huge
crevices. These cracks are quite scary, and through them you can
see something dark, very black. On the left is a tall, vertical
object, with a strange, round, bulging shape, dark gray in color,
smelling rank, something chemical, the stench of machinery.
And this thing big as a huge boulder, a mountain rock round as
the moon, as the sun, has cracks that look the same, I don’t
know how that can be, all precise, equal but not very deep. In its
middle this strange object has a bright, shining metal button
where everything can be seen as in a mirror. On both sides there
are impressive, gigantic forms whose margins I cannot see, there
are thick ghosts with sharp edges that I must be careful to avoid.
The grass blades are enormous, my size, some even bigger. I
observe their cutting edge of an intense green on which soft and
irregular gossamer balls of dust fall ceaselessly. I look down at
my feet. A bluish worm wriggles, twisted like a venomous snake.
I don’t like it, so I put my foot out to stamp on it. I notice with
amazement that instead of a toes I have small claws, curled and
black, knifelike. I’m terrified. I feel the tiny gray feathers ruffle
around my ego. For a prolonged, petrified moment, I can think
of nothing, I fully exist there, in that nimble, plump, intelligent
body. I feel the need to chirp. Chirp.
†
There is also a body of love. We are together in bed, we make love,
love. It’s a sort of ballet on the horizontal, an exuberant dance, with
both set patterns of steps and others free, and I’m on the point of
singing. You knead me, you mold me as if a clay vessel, I let myself
be molded. With all my pores, I attend to what you do, I reward
your kisses and caresses promptly, I respond quickly with embraces
and kisses. You’re here, with me, in me. I’m here, with you, in you.
Absolutely here. Together we’re one single body. We create together
a work of art, undulating, perfect. At the same time, a hectic film
unspools behind my closed eyes, full of dizzying images of a strange
clarity. I see copper woods, oak trees rustling, swaying. I see a
meadow the shape of a square, full of blue-violet flowers as tall as a
man, fantastic in their appearance. I see the entrance into a palace,
and within it, a room filled with the most fabulous treasures, copper
vessels and weapons made of steel inlaid with platinum and
jewels, gold and silver coins, with precious stones sparkling softly in
the warm, dim light.
And then I see, I see that I myself am no more than a Egyptian sarcophagus.
My vaguely human shape is cut into stone. On the outside
I’m painted with men and women caught in scenes of adoration,
with their arms raised high, full of green palm fronds. But inside, it’s
empty, dark, a void. There’s neither cadaver nor mummy. The interior
is empty, dark, dry. All of a sudden you fall on top, in fact you are
set there as a lid, placed slowly and definitively above the sarcophagus,
like a slab. Your vaguely human shape is alien, bizarre, confused
with other animal shapes. Your form is that of the Sphinx. And in a
somehow fatal way I understand by your massive, as if final and
irrevocable, position on top of the empty sarcophagus, you seal a
great mystery inside. A profound, fecund, indescribable mystery.
†
There exists therefore a mental body. Reclining in a lounge chair,
I close my eyes tightly, I observe myself from inside my body.
Or better said, from the inside of my head, for it is from here
that I try to visualize the various parts of me, my interior
organs and limbs. My mind scans my exterior shape, from my
toes upwards, past my hips and pubis, the diaphragm, solar
plexus, sternum, breasts and neck, arriving again at the head.
There my mind touches the shape of my cheeks, nose, mouth.
I do this deliberately, very slowly and with concentration. I
repeat this procedure several times. And after a while I have a
sudden insight: I realize that this is not me. I am not this. I am
something altogether different from this mass of flesh covered
by a bumpy skin. Somehow the I is off to the sides and
detached. The I — I am in fact enclosed in a carcass of bones,
skin and flesh. I animate on its interior a huge puppet of organic
matter, living matter. I am captive within a marionette made
of bizarre, warm, pulsating, self-regenerating stuff. What am I
looking for inside this mechanical doll, inside this complicated
machinery? Who shut me in?
I’m on the point of screaming. I’m a prisoner inside a sort of
sophisticated diving suit. The skin is the sensitive, thermo-regulating
protection layer. Senses are instruments that collect data
from the hostile, perhaps poisonous, ambient medium. Eyes are
a camera of gross imprecision whose performance requires constant
refocusing. Neither smell, hearing nor taste is truly highefficiency.
The mouth takes in samples of plants and animals and
sends them to an inner processing works. The lungs represent
the carburetor where gases are mixed for combustion. The heart
is the heating unit of the diving suit. From there, red feeding-
cleansing-heating-cooling fluid safely lubricates the whole apparatus.
The brain is the CPU, its program being set to process
rapidly the technical data of the sensors directed at the world to
be explored. I’ve been sent on an expedition to an alien and
remote planet. I was parachuted from my spaceship into this
tumultuous, unknown ocean. So far, so good, but how did I manage
to identify myself so completely with the instruments I was
issued, with my highly sophisticated diving suit? How did I manage
to believe that I’m the computer, the central processor, the
control panel with so many dials and electric signals, that I’m
nothing beyond the sensory instruments, carburetor, heating
unit and feeding-cooling fluid? What happened when I touched
down in the water? What terrible shock caused my autopilot to
go haywire? How could it supplant me at the command station?
Was this something necessary or was it a malfunction, a mutiny
of the crew? And how can the processor work without the I,
without I am, without me?
†
In my hand I hold a dried fruit. Like a big acorn, or rather a
chestnut, of a vaguely polyhedral shape with edges, wooden and
brown. It is late, nearly too late, I’m told from somewhere far
away, in an apodictic and disdainful voice, and the chestnut is a
desiccated shape. A dead, dried fruit. Yes, I admit in a loud
voice to someone I cannot see, the fruit is wooden and dried
out. But at the same time I feel with all my being it’s my fruit,
I know it’s mine, mine, dried and dead though it be. It belongs
to me in a profound sense, I believe in it even though it’s so
very late. And I feel this is important, essential.
Then all at once, this acorn, this chestnut, this dried fruit emits
a terrible crack, breaks apart as if with a clap of thunder, opening
in my hands into four equal pieces. The four quarters of shell look
like a small cross with the end of each arm bent inward. From it,
from inside it, a huge, vividly colored butterfly emerges as out of
nowhere, fluttering its wings right before my astounded eyes.
†
Perhaps people are a kind of rocket in several stages that have to
burn out in turn in order that the spaceship launch itself from
earth and return to the stars. Most of them misfire during the first
stage and do not manage to rise more than a few meters above the
broad launching pad. Others, very few, manage to take off successfully,
and in the second stage they orbit the earth like cruise
planes. Even fewer manage to ignite the third stage and escape the
earth’s sphere of attraction, entering interplanetary space. And
extremely few, perhaps only two or three per century, manage to
ignite the fourth stage and thereby leave our solar system.
I’ll unfurl my wings of blue silk, crossed by fine gold veins,
decorated with a black-and-white peacock eye. I’ll shake the
dust from my antennae, my legs, the other processors, I’ll burn
my cocoon and pupa, my previous bodies, steps, stages. Then I’ll
take off from among you. I’ll be a fountain to the stars.
†
There exist many other kinds of bodies. Future. To be.