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, some-thing’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.