dazzling- mircea cartareascu

When she started working again, it was deep summer, the walls of the sleeping room, a deep, dark red, with rock sparkles and little branches drawn with cheap paint, were radiating the summer heat, and even though we always kept the window open, sweat was pouring down on us. Even the bed sheets were sticky, yellowish from the sweat absorbed all through the night. Mother's hands were barely visible, the famous "crooked toothed" fork moved up and down with the speed of lightning, just like a samurai sword, and the carpet was growing almost visible, revealing new faces every minute, new delicate details of a butterfly wing, or a military plan, a topographic map of some sort, another page from an Arabic manuscript, another neutronic star caught in gravity colaps, another fragment from an unheard chant, a technical drawing of a mechanism with racks and Malta crosses, another moll from my face, a thistle caught in the scarf of her sister, Anita, a small, white spot, on the crucified's Christ toe nail, another blue-painted Dutch landscape on the ceramic of a cup, another inferno sank in pus and stench, another Bucharest, from other times, or from no times at all (so detailed in its drawing, that you could even distinguish the smallest of snow flakes in the light of the tram headlights that was stopped in the Round station in the evening when, after two years, we would come back home soaking wet, with gum boots on our feet, through the red evening filled with neon shop fronts, and through the falling snow a man with his face burnt,without lips and nose, comes close to us with his teeth grinning, and climbs in the tram next to us; and it was snowing as it would have been the end), other gardens, other baroque buildings, other voices, other rooms, other havens, other gods. With the water pouring like ground-waters on her glossy, naked body, with her frail hair pinned up in a tight bun, with disgracious bushes of red hair marking her armpits, mother was working on the most wonderful carpet in the world, wonderful because it was the world itself and more, being a concentration of universes, a painting of all paintings and icon of the world's icons. I would take the big magnifying glass, the one specially made for weavers, with which I played most of the time, and I would magnify one of mother's breasts, until the top of its granulated nipple would become as big as a pomegranate or, watching my eye in the mirror, its pupil would invade the glass and the whole magnifier would become a cloudy blackish-green spot, and I would "open", as I then put it, a small portion, the size of a stamp, from the carpet. Any point on it would then flourish into an image, an object, a landscape, a human face from all places and all times, a spermatozoon in the pearly liquid put on the glass of the microscope, a scolex tapeworm, caught on the wall of an intestin, a Roman emperor resting his varicose legs on a purple stool, one of Altdorfer's battles, a Jodorovski movie, a magnified photograph of the surface of the Calisto satellite, a strong, unpleasant smell of hipermanganat. It was a codex of the worlds, one of Maxwell's daemons, but above it all, the new carpet was for me the proof of mother's magic and almightiness, for which I had now a love impossible to retain in the weak container of my skull.
I would rarely go out, and when I would, I would do terrible things, as if I wanted to prove mother I was only well next to her. One morning I lay down in the middle of the street, on the oil-stained asphalt, and I stayed there for a few buses to pass over me, their drivers not noticing me, or knowing the fact that they couldn't harm me, their tires being so high. A long time after this I would recall in my sleep the immense metal bodies passing on top of me with an apocalyptic sound. Most of the time I would just jump on the bed, behind my mother, looking through the game cards of "Fool", with the national costumes of the socialist nations: the Russians, the Serbs, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians, the Chinese, putting them one on top of the other "to kiss", or I would have a futile struggle with the patience game: a plastic spiral on which I had to make a small ball climb, all under some sort of sapphire work, identical to the summer sky in its transparency.
We would both play with the carpet too, but some other way than before when I would guess if from the little dots of the pattern a flower, or a snail would reveal itself. Now I would look through the magnifier to a corner of the immense painting, and I would solemnly say: "Father will come tonight with a big fish wrapped up in a newspaper under his arm", or "Tomorrow aunt Vasilica will come over and bring me glucose". And that would happen. Mother didn't have to tell me stories with naughty princesses, for I found all the story books I needed weaved and interweaved in the carpet.