by Lina Meruane
price is right
There beneath the hair, inside his skull, in all those brains, Ignacio resolves that we should go out. Go out immediately, at a run if possible. We’ve spent the whole morning stuck inside waiting for the secretary’s call, him wandering around the house, me very still, immersed in a nineteenth-century novel that an unknown reader whispers to me from the walkman. Ignacio shakes me. I press pause, stop. The secretary just informed him that I can’t have an appointment until Monday. What happened to Friday? No one canceled, no one is going to miss their appointment today, Ignacio says Yuku told him. Desperate and inconsolable, Ignacio announces that if we don’t go out we will die of suffocation. We should go out and do something: look for furniture at second hand stores, for example. I wouldn’t be able to choose anything by myself, you have to come, he insists, and I accept because never have I had more free time. Never as much as I do now, in the Manhattan streets full of deadly potholes and manholes with ladders that lead down to hell. The light hits my face but I can’t touch it, I can’t use it, and I walk through the city like I’m on a tightrope, leaning against Ignacio who walks at a different pace, syncopating his unmistakable steps with other, unfamiliar ones, sharp-heeled and rushed, that wound the pavement. We rummage among furniture made of smooth and wild wood that evoked exotic birds and mandrills, lichens, African songs; and there is also the scent of candied peanuts and caramel apples, of pretzels, bagels just out of the oven, grazing our noses. Nothing Ignacio sees convinces him, and I, who can’t see enough and who follow his description of the world with only my fingertips, am afraid I’ll fall over at any moment, struck down by heat and displeasure. Then we go into a new furniture store and we rest by trying out some armchairs under dry, conditioned air. Can I help you? says a voice equally cold and dry but more inclement, and I know Ignacio feels duty-bound to give explanations, improvising a British accent that comes out respectably well. He talks about how our house is bare, how we only have, for now, a mattress on the floor and a dozen unopened boxes and suitcases. And a couple of rugs, and a scratch on the floor, I correct him through clenched teeth, no talent for posturing. I suspect Ignacio is looking around, that on the inside he is furnishing the postcard from nowhere: coffee table, sofa, recliners, and chairs that would have to survive us like the children we’ll never have. While he describes what our house will be like, I organize all that furniture we can’t afford in an imaginary budget. And the light now is so tenuous. When the saleswoman turns around Ignacio decides in the blink of an eye that the purchase can wait for a better moment. And he drags me out to the scorching street and I still hear him saying, breathless, more light, we have to have enough light, that’s the most important thing, right? And yes, yes, sure, light, bulbs and lamps and screens, all that, I answer, breathless myself, already up to my neck with him in a store full of lamps. Lamps that are old but mended, like the store’s owners: a sixty-something couple with long-lived lamps their own hands have refurbished. The younger man goes up the stairs to bring a lamp down. Are we only going to buy one? They’re not cheap, answers Ignacio, and what do we want another one for? So we have enough light, I say. So we don’t have a one-eyed living room, I add. Always two, just in case. We argue. The older one straightens his neck and decides for Ignacio that yes, it’s always better to have two. Lo está diciendo porque tiene un ojo en blanco, Ignacio grumbles defensively in Spanish. A white eye? What happened to your eye? I ask, turning to the old man. I feel Ignacio squeezing my hand while he apologizes for me, explaining that I’m asking because I have a problem with my sight, too. A problem, I repeat, I’m practically blind. Ignacio lets go of my hand then and puts his own away in his pocket, along with his metro card. I wait. I had a stroke, the salesman says, a stroke right here in my eye, he adds. There was no way to revive it, he says. An eye isn’t a heart. It’s not even half a heart. It’s much less, I add, that’s why we have two. The old man stands there reflecting, but not about what I’d just said. His dead eye never really bothered him much, he explains sadly, though without really explaining himself. He clears his throat and says that his people were dying back then. In the eighties, I say, asking but really affirming, because suddenly I know what he’s going to tell me. I know that he is, in his way, a survivor. That many people like him were filled with ganglia, with inexplicable ulcers, and that some went crazy or blind before sinking into stigma. That stigma had brushed against me and left a splinter behind: someone, maybe a decade ago, had told me that their AIDS diagnosis had been the closest thing he knew to having diabetes. That someone had identified with me, and then that someone had started to die in the eyes. The last time I saw him, he was blind. Only he and I are left, said the voice of the old man next to me, succinct as a summary trial. He was a judge of just causes, talking to himself. Only he and I, he repeats. I’d like to know where the other old man is; I’d like to be able to turn around, look toward the back of the store, where the old finger is surely pointing and expecting my eyes to follow. Losing this eye was the price I paid, he says without regret: the small price of staying alive.
a place in the north
Eight in the morning on a suffocating Monday. He’s taking a shower after first preparing the syringe for me with clumsy fingers, and I inject myself with insulin before bathing. He makes his breakfast and my coffee with milk as I rummage among the black clothes in the closet, zip up my boots, adjust my glasses—also dark—and we head out like commandos on a secret mission: he’s describing obstacles on the sidewalks and giving clues to the initiate, he’s the militia leader who supplies street names for her to memorize, inserts the metro card into a slot before she can move through the turnstile. He is the one who instructs her on the number of steps leading to the platform, and he announces a long step to cross the gap. The doors of the car close and the trip begins. Are you nervous? But nervous isn’t the word, not nervous or anxious or worried, not even overwhelmed. I feel like a pregnant woman awaiting her misfortune. And the trip toward my fate was long, but eventually the train stopped at the station and we were walking again along a thunderous route that threatened to leave us deaf as subway rats. But we arrived and we got off the train and went up stairs without holding the railing because who knows what fingers, what saliva and hair have slid over it and coated it in misery. We held hands as we walked. Swept along by the tumult of bodies that pushed us and stepped on the heels of our shoes, just that, the touch of our fingers, was the most intimate thing that could happen. Ignacio never stopped squeezing my hand to announce obstacles and to warn me of pedestrians who were running across on the yellow or even the red light. Now we had reached the real pretzel smell of Madison and 37th. A dog barked, standing still amid screeching brakes. The river soaked the air in low, frayed clouds that left the pigeons breathless. I went along asking for atmospheric pictures to fill in the holes in my imagination, and I asked questions that grated on Ignacio. Is the north still to my left? Yes, there it was, the north was where it always was, with its thick sky. I couldn’t lose focus, my entire being demanded a multiplied concentration, an absolute dedication to the geography of things. And my head was buzzing, it was heating up with the images that every one of Ignacio’s words stirred up in my memory. He said Central Park, and my head filled with blue ducks and tadpoles in phosphorescent lagoons defying the tourists. He said Columbus Circle and I filled up with brides posing under a hollow and silvered planet with their future ex-husbands. He said step, careful, and I foresaw curbs much higher or much lower than they really were. Ignacio whispered we’re on Lexington and then something different happened, I didn’t see the street’s idiosyncrasies anymore, but rather the sign of a hospital that was just a few blocks further north. I saw in my mind’s eyes the room where I’d stayed for a long time; I saw the first black nurse of my childhood, the wide, toothy smile and the majestic air it gave her, I heard the hungry laughter that seemed to arise from deep inside her, but I couldn’t remember her name. The nurse and all the children in that room were made of w
ax; they all had definite faces but no identities. I had lost mine there, too. I understood all of a sudden, alarmed, that it was there, north of a gringo doctor’s office, where the long story of my blindness had begun.
sleepwalker
There were a lot of people waiting to be seen; we’d be spending an ungodly amount of time in that office painted with stripes and crumbling to pieces. There I was, standing next to Ignacio on the other side of the desk from Lekz’s secretary, a disheveled Doris who wore a shirt as a dress over stockings. And flip-flops. Yes, whispered Ignacio later, she was wearing the same outrageous gold flip-flops, with pale and swollen toes peeking out, their nails a strident color. It was the same gray Doris I knew very well, a Doris who shouted into the phone as she argued with patients, who controlled the doctor’s schedule with an unyielding hand. I heard a listless greeting from afar, and I imagined her sprawled out as she slept during her commute from New Jersey, arriving at the office before Lekz with a box of donuts in hand. I also thought that even before Doris got there, Yuku would be in the doorway squinting her light eyes, an efficient Japanese assistant monitoring a frenetic eight on her wristwatch and wondering why Doris was taking so long, whether her train had stalled for good in the tunnel under the water. Yuku understood delayed trips, being suspended over the ground; she was never going to repeat that single, anguished trip of thousands of aerial kilometers, or rather miles, from Tokyo. I was still anchored to Ignacio, who was filling out my paperwork with the secretary. They were arguing, yelling, and I retreated from the noise, completely lost in the void of myself until Ignacio burst the bubble by poking his finger in my ribs. Lina! He pulled me toward him and nervously stammered another Lina in my ear: Doris is waiting for you. Who? Doris? Doris! I said, pursing my lips, confused, opening my eyes too wide, what is it? Though I only saw her in shadows, I could guess at her scowl. Without hearing her, I could reconstruct the question she’d just asked, calling me by my official name, the one on the forms. Did I or did I not still have the same medical insurance? Yes, of course, in my very best English, the same insurance. But what good had it done me to have it, I thought then without saying it, if it couldn’t insure me against this. But yes, I said again, everything is the same, same university, same books growing old under a layer of dust, the same social security number, the same solitude now shared with Ignacio. Everything was the same, and yet it all seemed radically transformed. Doris considered the interrogation over, and sent us to sit down. And might I know why you weren’t answering the questions? I heard Ignacio say testily, cracking his knuckles. How am I going to explain things about you that I don’t even know? Do you think I’m psychic? I can’t tell what you’re thinking, he concluded, tucking his shirt into his waistband to train hands that wanted to smoke but couldn’t. But no, Ignacio, of course not, and it’s a good thing too that you can’t read my mind, I answered without thinking about what I was saying. And then I said to myself: I’ll never let you see what’s inside here, things I don’t even tell myself. And then, finding my voice, I explained that I hadn’t known to whom Doris was talking. I didn’t see the gestures that went with her questions, nor could I read her lips or the wild movement of her hands. Being like this, in a fog, is like being asleep and awake at the same time. It’s like being a little deaf. Ignacio nodded because he knew what it was to take off his glasses at night and be deaf. He rubbed his eyelids, or I imagined that he rubbed them, under his glasses. He sighed near my ear. Then he took my arm and didn’t let go again.
overtime
It wasn’t minutes but rather hours, days, months in that waiting room, with its constant crossing and uncrossing of legs, its dragging of shoes toward the bathroom and its plopping into dilapidated chairs. Ignacio dozed, his head lolling every now and then. A person had settled in to my right and was letting out aggressive sighs while turning the pages of a magazine surely full of depressing stories meant to raise your spirits. I heard yawning, the endless music of the minute hand, and finally an anxious standing up, approaching the secretary to ask for explanations for the doctor’s delay. Doris took her nose out of her papers to remind us all with well-practiced coldness that one had to take time to consult this particular doctor, because this eye doctor only took serious cases of blindness. That is, said Doris, imitating the doctor’s tone and clearing her throat like the spokeswoman of terror that she was, this doctor was only interested in extreme cases, eyes in extremis, the ones that required extraordinary acuity; Lekz, Doris went on, swallowing a cookie she was chewing with her mouth open, Doctor Lekz was interested in taking his time on every eye, in searching retinas for the sibylline presence of other illnesses of the body, AIDS, for example, syphilis, tuberculosis, and she went on listing them while she twisted a lock of hair with a finger. Badly-treated diabetes, high blood pressure, even lupus. Because the eye, her perverse, ire-filled tone went on, the retina was our life record, the mirror of our unfortunate acts, a perfectly polished surface that we spend our existences ruining. For all the damage we had caused, now we would have to wait our turn: wait without giving lip, or simply leave. No exceptions were made, because everything the doctor saw in that office was already exceptional. And it wasn’t just a speech of Doris’s. I had verified her words during uncountable hours waiting in that room, and also later on in the examining room. I never noticed Lekz rushing a single syllable or discreetly checking the time; there wasn’t a single clock on the walls of his office, no phone ever rang, he didn’t have a cell phone. No one ever interrupted him. He was an absolutely dedicated specialist, true Russian fanaticism inculcated by his Soviet lineage. Each visit he went back over the patient’s trajectory, asked for details, wrote everything down carefully in his record, although in an impenetrable script, and then, looking attentively into the eye, he seemed to light up. He was entranced before the pupil that his expert assistant spread before him after taking scrupulous sight measurements. It’s Yuku, murmured Ignacio, as if reading my thoughts, here she comes with her eyedrops down the hall. She scraped her moccasins across the rug as she walked. She stopped in front of me and I straightened up, understanding what her doubly foreign tongue was asking me to do: tip my head back. Her fingers separated my eyelids and let fall, with precise Japanese marksmanship, two burning drops on my corneas.
let’s see if it clears up
Lina, Lucina, Ignacio burst out, relieved or exhausted and confused, Lucina, getting tangled up among my names, Lina, with his back tight and his neck complaining: get up, Lekz is waiting for you. He had stationed himself by the door, Lekz, to let me enter while Ignacio stayed seated. He had me climb into the mechanical chair that I called electric and that he directed with his legs. He didn’t need to tell me to lean my forehead against the bar and press forward. We’d had two uninterrupted years of training: he and I had practiced in that position like two resistance fighters, measuring our strength, taking our pulses and breaths; him examining me with his mechanical eye, me letting him scrutinize my inner workings. Letting him burn my retina with laser flashes, all so it wouldn’t come to this. But now Lekz was taking his time sitting down across from me, he was bypassing the routine, eluding the exam, taking an interest in the detailed account of that night, the party, and the days that followed: what I had seen and what I could no longer distinguish. With his hand perhaps lost in his abundant hair, Lekz quizzed me about glimmers, flashes, iridescent sparks, and he wanted to know if I felt throbbing back there, behind the eye. He paused over my file before sitting down and finally lifting his arm to open my eyelid with his specialist fingers; only then did he peer into the dilated hole like it was a keyhole. What do you see, doctor? What are you seeing? I was asking a question and impatiently demanding an answer, a clearing of the throat, a sign he planned to give some kind of clue. But the doctor only let out perplexed sighs. He was seeing the same thing I was, I realized. The same bloody nothing I saw. In spite of his infinite magnifying lenses, Lekz couldn’t make out a single detail on my retina. He leaned back absolutely resigned
and said, We’ll have to wait, see if it clears up so I can take a look at this mess. And if it doesn’t ever clear up? I interrupted. If my body doesn’t absorb its own blood? If it doesn’t happen, he answered haltingly, if it doesn’t ever happen—because, it’s true, it’s very unlikely an eye will clear up on its—if it doesn’t disappear we’ll have to take our chances and operate. Blindly. One eye, then the other. Lekz had bits of words between his teeth, pieces of little words hanging from his nose and sliding down his cheek, fragments of calamitous syllables that put off any immediate interruption. One eye and the other but not now, he said, later, dry as a recording, like a machine on repeat although Lekz’s tongue seemed to be palpitating inside him. It was a throbbing tongue darting into my ear with its thick, still-warm drool. Gulping air, choking down myself and all my frustration, my resentment, my blind hate for that life I wanted to tear away from, stifling myself so I wouldn’t poison him with my rage, I told him with a thread of a voice to please take me out of that uncertainty and put me into the hospital. The operating room, immediately, tomorrow, please. I felt my eyes more swollen than ever, and throbbing. We have to wait, replied Lekz, immutable. Wait for what, doctor, a donor? But no. We are, he told me, still very far from a transplant. I was starting to slowly deflate, nicked by the scalpel of medicine. One whole month you have to wait, he insisted, making a note in my file. No fewer than thirty-one days, while your eyes clear up and we also clear up your case with the insurance company. I repeat, he repeated, implacable, before one month is up we cannot from any perspective operate on you. And in the meantime, doctor? What do I do in the meantime? Weren’t you going to go to Chile to see your family? Go to Chile. Take a vacation.
