Seeing Red

by Lina Meruane

  dictation

  It was one thing to theorize strategies of the subaltern and resistance from the margin, and quite another, radically opposed, to empathize. My colleagues’ strategy turned out to be this: turn a blind eye. Take refuge in their reading. Seek protection in the academy and let themselves be tarred by their jargon. What could they tell me, when they only knew how to talk about arduous concepts stuffed in even darker books that I wasn’t reading. Maybe they thought it was impossible to think without eyes. Did they believe that in order to think one had to be up on the latest theory? I never got the chance to tell them that I did nothing but read during my long days of blindness. Every week I received books on tape, kilos on kilos, in the mail. I clung to fiction like I did to Ignacio. Only my thesis advisor knew. Only she bothered to dial my number on occasion. How did your surgery go? asked her dilapidated but firm voice, in which her first accent barely sounded. I don’t know what to tell you, I said, and she jumped to the next line without giving me time to share any details, which were now my specialty. Silvina had plenty of details, she was another expert on the horrors of the body. She was a master of survival: in addition to academic diplomas she brandished intangible medals certifying that she’d vanquished death, twice in a row. And your writing? she asked me. How is the writing going? What writing? I asked, reminding her that we’d agreed I would suspend my research. Illness in Latin American literature, I thought, thinking I was like an anthropologist who falls in love with her subject. An excessive, risky love, because my subject has taken me over, has turned against me. And that’s when I should have battened the hatches, thrown my thesis overboard. I was doing nothing but plugging novels into my ears or listening to the news on the radio or TV, trying not to disconnect from the world but abstaining from my own writing. I meant, said Silvina, the novel you were writing. The novel, I replied. That shapeless thing is this now, I said, and I was speechless after that phrase that not even I really understood. But you can’t stop writing, she urged, write the now, the every day. Write a blind memoir, I said. Silvina said, there are so many blind writers. There’s only one, I reminded her. True, she murmured. And we fell silent, while she thought about that writer and his hourly readers, his successive secretaries and stenographers; I was thinking, meanwhile, about Silvina’s trembling hands, the peristaltic movement of her fingers when she talked, the eyelid slightly fallen over her left eye that lent her a disquieting and beautiful affect. But Silvina interrupted our simultaneous thinking, as if she were confirming something. Dictate to a recorder, that’s what you have to do: dictate. Dictating a novel isn’t the same as listening to them, I told her. Dictate a diary, then, she said. And I told her my impulse had always been toward fiction. It wasn’t actual events that drove me, but rather words, and it was my hand that pushed the words, that built them up and then broke them down to forge the phrases again. Writing was a manual exercise, pure juggling. It would be easier to learn braille, which required fingers, than to try to work by ear. But why not try? she asked, resolute. Do you have a recorder? Should I send you mine? You’ll get used to it quickly. No, Silvina, I’m not ever going to get used to it and I don’t want to, I told her, somber, feeling my reluctant words grating on the silence that came next. You do realize that you’re making Lina Meruane disappear? And I, unhesitating, told her that Lina Meruane would come back to life as soon as the blood was in the past and I had my sight again.

  mutilated

  The cordless phone stayed in my pocket and rang at all hours and I—lying in some part of the house, on the still nonexistent sofa or armchair—on the floor wounded from the move—but most often stretched out on the bed so I could bear the weight of my head, I pressed the button and said simply, yes? Yes? wondering when I would start to say no. It could always be Manuela calling to suggest a visit that I always put off. It could be Ignacio calling from his office or my mother or father or both together from Santiago. My father uttered only a hesitant Lucina? daughter? How are those eyes doing? because right away my mother would snatch the phone away or interrupt from the other extension. Now that there was no one in the house but them, all the phone extensions were available. There was one in every room and they used them all to call me. This time it would be them, I thought, because Ignacio had just left his office. They greeted me simultaneously: how are those eyes doing? My father immediately ran out of questions and ceded the conversation to my mother. And without listening to a single answer about my condition or my apprehension, my mother categorically pinned a weakness on me. I was losing hold of my patience, she said. I was losing confidence and sanity. My whole being was faltering but I had to be strong, because I had the privilege of being alive. I know you’re not well, she said. My barometer never fails me, added my fantastic and abrupt mother from eight thousand two hundred and fifty-three kilometers plus a few meters away. Nothing she said worked as consolation. Still doubting, doubting but not controlling herself, she thought—thinking wrong—that a story worse than my own would put things into perspective. Being blind is nothing, nothing, she told me. It’s nothing compared to what just happened to this poor medical student. I shouldn’t have asked, but I fell into my mother’s trap and I did ask about the poor medical student who I had almost ten years on—nine, exactly. This poor student, my mother—exaggerated, gloomy, morbid—started to tell me, had taken the train down south, and in the middle of the night something crossed her sleeping mind, a bad premonition blowing smoke and hissing in the darkness of some closed-up station; no one knows what it was, said my mother, but the student started to walk through the train in search of her bad luck. And when crossing between two cars she made a false move that was sadly far from false, it was a step that dropped her into a void—there was nothing between the cars, not even a little piece of platform. My mother paused while both of us thought about her fall onto the sharp tracks and the indolent train continuing on its way. Are you there? I’m here, where am I going to go? I said, wishing I hadn’t felt the fall, the student’s mortal drubbing. She bled out and died, right? No, replied my mother. She was unconscious on the tracks and she woke up when the train had already disappeared. She didn’t know what had happened to her. There was no moon that night and she couldn’t see a thing, she didn’t understand why she couldn’t get up, why her hands wouldn’t obey her. She started to shout, because she heard some sleepless dogs barking in the distance. Until finally the neighbors were alerted by the barking and ran to help her. Following a mechanical impulse, my mother tells me then that the train had sliced off both arms and both legs. And then… she continued, but I already knew where she was going and I didn’t want her to go there, I didn’t want her to torment me any more, never again. Then nothing, I told her. I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want to know. How could you even think to compare my fate with hers? I asked her, feeling an old rage rising up, a visceral terror that had never really left me; I could forget it, but my mother was always there to bring it back and bully me with her own anxiety. Don’t tell me about any more tragedies, Mom, never, ever again. And, pushing all the buttons at once, I cut our communication off for a few days.

  double effect

  Locked in the bathroom I take off my patches: first one and then the other, and third, I open my eyes. By now the stitches of black thread have broken and fallen out, according to their mysterious design. No longer are there only halos of strident light. By now the bubbles have started to shrink, leaving the edges to my true peripheral vision splashed with tenuous and imprecise colors, residues of a rainbow that will never again have the same brilliance. In the center, though, the gas is a lens, a powerful magnifying lens through which the lines of my hand grow and enlarge when I hold it close, or the tiny flowers pressed into the soap dish, the directions on the aspirin bottle. I have the impression I’m hallucinating. This seems like seeing, but it’s much more than seeing, it’s having a true bionic eye. Having lost the habit of using my eyes, I feel around in the drawer for a hand mirror. What I see in it, held
two centimeters in front of my face, are the holes of my nose and above them two swollen, wounded balls, two open and unfathomable pupils, and if I move away I see my two eyes become four. I inhale and move further away, I check what each eye sees separately and I’m worried when I find that while the right one produces exaggerated and pristine images, the left one perceives things somewhat distorted. I try them together: I see duplicated objects. I think that double as I may be seeing, seeing is the good news; but I see badly, and that’s the bad. Then I see two tears on the surface of my mirror, mine and its own carbon copy. Something went wrong, I let Ignacio know when through the keyhole I hear him coming back with a carton of eggs and a box of milk. In this eye, I tell him, something’s-wrong, measuring and separating each syllable, there’s a problem here, maybe two. What problem, how do you know? he stammers, knowing what this could mean: more operations or the final operation. I see badly and I see double. Double, babbles Ignacio with a dry mouth, confused and sick of surprises but also startled that I could even know I saw badly. Couldn’t you be imagining it? (How to explain this to you, who never lived through losing your sight and then seeing again, each eye on its own.) Explanations are too much. My body knows with irrefutable certainty that this is worse than bad. Worse than the aftereffects of the blinding laser Lekz used to gradually burn the inside of my eye over the years. Worse than the swelling of the soft tissues that kept me from reading after his procedures. Worse than the possible tears from the pincers in the operating room, than the tight scabs on my retinas, than the cataracts when the helium finally disappears. I renounce science and its possible explanations. This is an eye giving up, a limping eye, one eye or two that are irreversibly sick. And I let some furious and acid tears fall, and I punish them, my damned eyes, leaving them at the mercy of my hands that peck at them, dig into them, press on them and dry them recklessly. Ignacio tries in vain to stop me. I lift my chin and I lift my eyelids. I see his two big, terrified bulbs that suddenly become four blurry eyes. (So many eyes, you have more than enough, four eyes with four lenses for myopia.) Let go of me, I tell him harshly, we don’t need to play eye doctor, there’s no way to win at that game. And as if the devil were listening and wanted prove me right, when I turned my indignant head I slammed it into the door. A violent blow against the handle. A dry and resounding impact that has a devastating effect. Blood, again, in my eye. A fine thread of blood that comes from I don’t know where. Another double effect, another copy of what happened before, it’s all happening again but this time I start to scream, to cry out and not from pain. Ignacio yells and shouts back at me, what happened? Where did you hit yourself? I have my eyes wide open, I’m watching as the eye watches its thread of blood, looking at everything without ceasing my cries: I’m bleeding I’m bleeding again. But you can’t be bleeding, he said, tongue-tied and flustered, you can’t bleed anymore, they removed those veins. Then I shout louder, I shout all the shouts I hadn’t shouted when I should have. I see red again, Ignacio, I’m seeing blood with my own eyes. (I want to yank out yours, stick them inside mine so you can see the blood. Ignacio runs toward the bedroom to dial Lekz’s number. He asks to talk to Doris: yes, Doris, I hear him say, skipping over the greeting, yes Doris, we know Lekz doesn’t see patients on the last Friday of the month, we know that’s his day off. ¡Que te calles! And though Doris speaks nothing but English, she understands in the universal language of hysteria that this is a moment for silence. I hear Ignacio give a resonant grunt and then, with his professorial diplomacy, modulating every consonant, every learnedly British syllable, breathing deeply for an instant to recover his tone, please, Doris, put me in touch with Lekz. And he turns to me, standing in the doorway, clutching at myself, and he tells me, panting, get dressed right now, we’re going.

  setbacks

  We raise our arms in the street as if asking for help, but what stops in front of us is a yellow car that takes off like an autumn gale, wildly crossing the city on the highway. Ignacio hands the driver some warm and crinkly bills and we storm in and sit down. Ignacio notes right away that the clientele today is different; Fridays at noon are when they schedule operations with the cataract specialist. They’re all patched like me—because I’ve put my patches back on—but they hold their heads high and proud like fighting cocks. I hear a well-known clucking coming closer. It’s Doris, who kneels down beside me and brings her greasy lips close to my ear to announce: we have a setback. Yes, I repeat, we do, or more like I do. Doris nods and asks if they’ve contacted me as well. Who are they? The company! What company? I say gloomily; I certainly want no company other than Ignacio’s. Doris, who doesn’t know how to attend to more than one office problem at a time, sits ruminating for a second, confused by my confusion, her gaze fixed on some documents until the mystery is resolved and she finds herself with the need to clarify that, right now, this isn’t about me. But for some time now everything has seemed to be about me. But no, says Doris again, forget about yourself and your eyes for two minutes. Doris wants to talk to me, but I feel like there’s no more room inside me, not for any more air or blood or any more bureaucracy, and I’m going to explode while she talks about the damned insurance company. They don’t want to pay for the operation. My operation, I say to myself without contradicting her, but noting that once again we are talking about my body. The company, Doris continues with a brittle air, approved an operation that wasn’t the one you ended up having. Things got complicated in the operating room. Oh, really? I say just to say something, trying to reroute my thoughts toward some zone of my existence that doesn’t entail complication, but I can’t find any. Yes, says Doris, unable to bear the weight of her own body, slowly getting up and sitting on a chair next to us. Yes, she says, the company determined that your tests don’t contain conclusive evidence of any defect or lesion or visual anomaly. And since I’m no longer answering, she is the one who asks the usual rhetorical questions and then responds to them. What did they want? she exclaims, a blind woman with a cane and a guide dog to confirm the operation was absolutely unavoidable? My operation, I think in secret, what would it cost her to say it’s mine, just like my tests, my life, my Ignacio. Ignacio stays silent, determined to not get up from the chair again, and the two of us follow his example, all three of us silent, all three of us glum, our legs crossed, each stringing together various ideas around that millionaire figure that could be for nothing, that the insurance is refusing to pay. But the battle-hardened secretary can’t bear her silence for long, and she abandons it to tell me how they’re some real good-for-nothings, and it’s not the first time they’ve done this to us. We’ll send them the video of the operation (my operation, mine and maybe a little bit yours, Ignacio), along with a box of popcorn, she goes on. We’ll swamp them with photographs blown up and framed to make them understand, and full copies of all your records, we’ll send them all the most recent medical literature, the research protocols, we’ll bombard them with emails. Doris promises to bombard them with calls, overwhelm their phones. Until they get sick of me, she concludes, anticipating victory. They’ll pay us every last penny. Don’t let them scare you. And giving little pats to my hand she gets up laboriously, making the chair creak. As she leaves us she greets Lekz, who is arriving just then, his hair slicked back by the wind. Good afternoon, he says, and his expression when he sees us is puzzled.

  recognition

  Lucina, I said to him, and I reached out my hand to the air and to him, because I knew he’d already forgotten me. He always forgot, in spite of our unhappy and almost historic adventures through consulting and operating rooms. Lucina, doctor, I know you won’t remember, I said, promising myself I would make him remember me. Lowering his voice impossibly, Lekz asked me to forgive him, it wasn’t me he forgot. It was everyone. Much as he struggled, he watched them enter his office and he didn’t have the slightest idea who they were, that’s what he told me, clearing his throat continuously, the magnifying lens raised before my eyes but still without examining me. With his hand susp
ended in the air, he confessed that patient after patient would come in and he would greet them all by name, something he’d learned to do mechanically. Greeting them as though he knew them was part of the job. A matter of checking the list that the diligent Doris left typed up for him on the table. Hi Peter. Step inside, Gary. How are you, Ms. Smith, nice to see you. And so they went, entering one after the other, to detail their optical difficulties: one hemorrhage, torn retina, glaucoma, or macular degeneration after another. Such everyday things that they gradually became indistinguishable. After so many years, the names became insufficient too. They don’t say anything to me anymore, he said, effortlessly raising his thick gray eyebrows, wrinkling his brow, aging a century. Their voices say absolutely nothing to me, their faces either. They talked without seeing him, I thought, he looked at their faces without recognizing them. They all seemed discreetly familiar, each one of their gestures, their inflections, generated a fleeting glimmer, a pulsation, a throbbing in the cerebral cortex that never congealed into a memory. Nor did the clinical histories tell him anything, because he was unable to decipher his hieroglyphical notes from previous visits. Like an illiterate lost in an excess of signals, he faced them all, every day. But he sat them down and his lens prepared to read the full story of every eye. On that surface each patient’s identity was revealed to him: as he peered into them, he remembered details. He even remembered the order of his enlightenments. But no, it’s not remembering, Lekz specified as he instructed me to lean my head back; it’s not exactly looking back or recalling. Lean further, he repeated, forcing his voice while he lifted my eyelid to begin the exam and immerse himself in my wide, dilated pupil. It’s not a memory, it’s recognition. Because inside, but also outside, all the eyes were different and now they all had his signature. In spite of the emergency, Lekz sounded faraway when he repeated his passwords: up, first, up and to the right, to the side. All the way. A little down and now all the way down. My neck turned ritually on its axis. And following that circular tour, Lekz lit up the whole perimeter of my retina with that strongest of all magnifiers. I waited for him to tell me what he saw there, what image of me was emerging from the depths of my eye. What did his diagnosis say about my life? What’s happening with my eyes, doctor? Ah, he said, lengthening the a in the voice of an oracle or iridologist or simply a charlatan oculist. These retinas are my masterpiece.