He is a worm , Cărtărescu thought, waking in his armchair, a half-drunk glass of ouzo sweating on the side table. A worm chewing through the apple of my brain.
Outside, the fog lifted. Bucharest stretched its thousand cracked bones. And somewhere in the negative space between a sigh and a sentence, Mircea Cărtărescu and Theodoros walked together through a city that had never been built, constructing it with every step. mircea cartarescu theodoros
Θεόδωρος.
Cărtărescu woke with the word synapothanontes burning on his tongue—Greek for “those who die together.” He wrote it on the wall with a lipstick from his dead mother’s vanity. The lipstick was the color of arterial blood. Theodoros entered the waking world through small erosions. A page of Solenoid that Cărtărescu had revised seven times began to alter itself overnight: a paragraph about a blind watchmaker turned into a dialogue between two Alexandrian grammarians, one of whom kept calling the other “Theodoros.” The gramophone in the study, which Cătărescu had not wound since 1989, began to play a Byzantine hymn—not a recording, but a live performance, the crackle of the needle dragging across grooves that had never been pressed. He is a worm , Cărtărescu thought, waking
“That’s autobiography ,” Theodoros corrected, and bit into a honeycomb. From the ruptured cells, a tiny, fully formed Cărtărescu emerged—age seven, weeping, holding a dead sparrow. Theodoros placed the child on the palm of his hand and offered him to the real Cărtărescu. “Take him. He’s the only one who can save you.” Bucharest stretched its thousand cracked bones
Cărtărescu stopped sleeping. Or rather, sleep stopped being a refuge and became a second, more rigorous workshop. In dreams, Theodoros taught him the architecture of the sfera : the nested spheres of existence that Cărtărescu had spent his career trying to describe in prose. But where Cărtărescu’s spheres were made of bone and light and the mucus of unborn children, Theodoros’s spheres were made of time . Solid, granulated time, which you could hold like a pomegranate and crack open to release not seeds but entire centuries.
Theodoros held up the mirror. In it, Cărtărescu saw not his own face but a library. Endless shelves, stretching into a perspective that curved back on itself like a closed universe. On each shelf, a book. In each book, a life. And in each life, a single sentence, identical in every volume: