“What real world?” Cărtărescu asked, and for the first time, he was not afraid.
“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.” mircea cartarescu theodoros
Iona, who had lived with the great hallucinator for four decades, did what she always did: she made tea. But when she poured it, the liquid rose not as steam but as a column of recrystallized time, and in that column, for just a moment, she saw Theodoros. He was climbing a ladder made of her husband’s broken ribs, and he was smiling. The night of the arrival, Cărtărescu undressed in the study. He removed his clothes, then his skin—not metaphorically. The skin came off like a silk robe, revealing a second body underneath: a body of manuscript pages, densely written, each sentence a vein, each paragraph an organ. He stood there, a man made of his own books, and waited. “What real world
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. Theodoros placed the child on the palm of
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.