Faraway is a Long Way From Here
-Una Clara Sigheti
I have come to know the harsh fabric of they grey carpet,
when it wrinkles to reflect the clouds.
I fell over in my chair
and probably out of reflex, or maybe even desperation
I clung to it,
thinking I'd float.
Managed to keep my head above the water for a while there
and I could even see the door's frame somewhere in the distance,
but soon enough I gave up struggling.
Falling in my chair was rough, but sinking into the carpet - on the contrary, was as smooth as the flight of plastic bags,
when you can't find anything better to look at...
Going deeper and deeper into it, I caved in completely, feeling
itchy inside of it,
just like in a woolly sweater worn on my bare skin.
Apart from that, the place needed some serious sweeping
- there was algae in there, hair and even a message in a bottle (1) .
Although I didn't feel the impact, there is nothing scarier than
my fucking chair
falling over with me in it,
thanks to the embarrassment of not being able to pick myself off the floor, coupled with the suspicion that
nobody would help me up,
or even worse
- that somebody pushed me in the first place.
1. To the sound of broken glass
I guess, if they could feel anything, even the tiny plastic figurines or golden key-chains would be outraged of how ugly they turned out, just as people revolt against their own fate. The tragedy we share with steel badges and porcelain puppies everywhere is that once you become kitsch, only out of bad taste will anyone ever admire you again. And I know that, because I've lived for many years now, without once noticing the tackiness of faces I've encountered, blind to the corny essence of human nature itself. Oh, and how we love our crappy things… The silhouette of a world otherwise dressed in three layers of thick clothes does sometimes reveal itself, but only in the most miserable of circumstances, only to the lowest of the low, as I suspect, happened to the fat cook in purple robe from the correctional school Saint Mary.
For you to understand it better, just imagine in a décor of broken kitchen tiles with floral motif, the image of truth at lunchtime, depicting her pastoral scene in the foreground, as she heavily sweats in food-scented steam, stirring away with her wooden spoon in the stew. At her feet, tiny friends from the animal kingdom roam as they please, the moral lesson here being that she learned not to crush them under her slippers on purpose, since they all shared the same fate and, as the saying goes - the unseen hand of destiny pulled her puppet strings, alongside those of the cockroaches in that place. I was left with the impression that her grotesque sense of resignation made her seem just as honest as she was appalling to the eye, and her lacking that precise breeze of lamentation, typical for the damned in denial of their punishment, somehow sheltered our cook. Probably, she had been crushed as well.
Still, it wasn't as easy for me as it was for her to truly accept where I was and why I got there. The irresponsibility with which I beat up my High School Headmaster, when he corporally disciplined me (because I had previously used Stefanescu's head as my personal punching bag) had been the very same irresponsibility, with which I served my sentence as a juvenile delinquent at Saint Mary. In only two years in the above-mentioned correctional facility, I managed to beat up - in the order of importance Father Niculae, carpenter instructor Mister Vestemean, Bica the security officer, that guy from the library, Mareana the cleaning woman on the second floor and a dog from our yard (2). Apart from the staff, I also beat up my older mates, my younger mates, mates of the same age as me, which meant I would get disciplined quite a lot - mostly by corporal punishment and, being thus provoked, I ended up beating the following as well: Mister Ilie from mechanics, the dorm's supervisor Neacsu and that fat man, who came around every three days in a pick-up truck to bring supplies. Anger stalked in my nerves, like nicotine collected in the lungs; it would coagulate into drops of acid sweat, which melted my brain and fell down my throat like bullets - burning layer upon layer of tissue and leaving behind smoky orifices. Violence would take over me in its electrical shock embrace, making me yank myself out like crazy, hitting everything around me. I would then feel all of my burning secretions dripping down my arteries and my strength would grow, as if it were raining inside of me, raining with bullets dipped into the gods' gastric fluids (3) and, the slippery release would leave me almost amnesiac, gasping on top of somebody.
My mind untangled a bit, due to Dobre, security officer on the night shift, who had made a nasty habit out of lecturing me on comradeship and self-control, behind the power station in the yard. Among other things of lesser importance, he preached the spirit of Romanian law in the 90s and believe me, we had a hell of a laugh together, when Dobre heard on the news that a law had just been passed, forbidding victims to defend themselves with a superior weapon than the aggressor's. In other words, it was illegal over here to defend yourself with a sword against a knife, with a gun against a sword or a machine gun against a simple gun - as if, inequity would really be the problem in such circumstances. As Dobre said - you could suddenly find yourself switching roles with your aggressor in a mere fraction of a second, because that's all the time a victim actually needs to pull out a thicker knife from his sock and in fact 'Man, nobody can really know their role in the world nowadays'. As entertaining as it was back then to hear Dobre complain that 'these bastards would put anybody in the joint', even him, a security officer, if, let's say he'd ever use his stick to discipline a troublesome kid - there was no joke about this law. While Dobre was a bit disturbed by it, I was downright baffled to discover moral relativism, and the thought that justice could switch sides with such ease was one particularly difficult for me to digest at that age.
In the eyes of the law, the mates and staff, I myself aggressed seemed to be victims. But let's not forget - my victims were the aggressors of others in turn (even mine), while that High School Headmaster, who had corporally disciplined me to begin with wasn't less guilty than all the rest. It didn't take me long to discover wolves dressed up as sheep everywhere and to blame the entire judicial system for the situation I was in, all of us were in. One day, half joking - half seriously I found myself addressing my people, standing on top of the table in the cafeteria and screaming out a series of vulgar offences (4) about the staff of the facility and that 'only in the name of a deplorable automatism does traditional morality dare to entirely pardon all victims and forever blame the guilty! (5) '
Although nobody was listening, the guards weren't around either, I pushed the ridicule further: the difference between punishment and reeducation is as inexistent, correctional facilities as such being a kind of sentience, which anticipates even our crimes not yet committed. 'The judges who sent us to correctional school implicitly sent us to the jails awaiting us in the future!' I then compared capital punishment applied to jail prisoners guilty of murder with the way in which violent youths are being disciplined through even more violence in correctional schooling. 'While life-time imprisonment or execution are heavy punishments applied to some by the will of others, the true capital punishment we enforce on ourselves unaware, when we in fact attack ourselves, thinking we're defending - against violence, through violence!'
Too late. The guards jumped up to beat me with sticks, the boys jumped as well with dishes, cups and knives; stew was flying across the room, forks stuck into chests, broken ribs, tables overthrown, screaming as you can't imagine. While Bica the guard was suffocating me and I was hitting him over the head with my spoon, the cook was looking at us completely undisturbed, stirring the stew as always. I gave Bica a push, then spit on him and stood up fascinated to see that fat lady in purple robe, as if I was watching a cooking show on TV, on any random Sunday afternoon and, it seemed incredible. No, not that I had provoked a violent riot, but that this fatty was going on about her chores like she wasn't even there, like a bizarre mirage. In that moment, I got smashed over the head with a plate and lost consciousness. From the cafeteria I slipped away into this world of marble tiles running all the way up to the sky, where everything was made of pottery and glass - even I, where cups could talk and they'd walk together, holding each other by the handle, plates would play Frisbee with each other, mirrors would trick passer-bys and I got dizzier and dizzier, twirling this porcelain ballerina in never-ending pirouettes. I danced with her for decades and then everything cracked and broke all of a sudden, the tiles broke into pieces, the cups in pieces, the dishes in pieces, my ballerina, my own body, everything in pieces.
To the sound of broken glass, the way downward from the Purgatory into the Inferno was louder than I had ever imagined. The guards had just thrown me out the fucking window.
(1) But I drank it.
(2) Whose degree of guilt remains to be established only by our children's children.
(3) And the gods feed on ambrosia burgers
(4) Which I can no longer recall at this time
(5) All for the short lasting awareness of the surrounding area of our cook, who had probably had few such subjects of divagation lead her away from her stew in recent years.
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