no light bulbs
Ignacio pounced on me as I entered. They just left, he exclaimed. It’s full of boxes, but come see how the repairs turned out. He dragged me by the hand like a child while I tried not to crash into the walls of the narrow hallway. In a minute he had taken me to see the refinished floor of the living room, the newly painted bedroom, the splendors of the kitchen, the shadowy bathroom that we’d leave for another day when we had more money. The apartment felt colossal, and to judge by Ignacio’s eyes (to judge by the memory of your eyes, which are also mine) it still felt uninhabited. We had almost nothing and nearly all of it was his, and we’d decided to bring only what was indispensable. Everything else was so worn out, so collected from streets and subways, so abandoned on curbs or stolen from lives that came before ours. Leave the past where it had perished instead of lugging it with us to that newly remodeled apartment. There’s nowhere to sit, cautioned Ignacio as if excusing himself, but we’ll get some beach chairs and put them in the living room. I answered that yes, of course, whatever you want, while thinking what do you mean? We’ll buy a sofa and a recliner and a pair of chairs and splendid lamps. But first we’ll paint again to cover all the sickly white on the walls. We’ll have to get to work soon, I thought, tomorrow if possible. There were only two days left before the eye doctor’s dreaded news, but we showered happily without a curtain, washing our hair with whatever was at hand. And we put on the same clothes, sweaty but now dry, and we sat on the newly sanded and varnished floor. Look what they did, said Ignacio. It’s too dark, I said. True, he replied, grabbing my hand and guiding one of my fingers to slide along the rough groove, full of splinters, that went across the room. They dragged the bookshelf here, he continued dryly; all the way to here, sorrowfully; the whole length of the room, with something like resigned rage. I saw him coming but I couldn’t stop him, he went on, and I imagined the muscular man’s strong but soft arms, covered by a barely-there, transparent down, his punished-dog eyes, the stupefied muteness of the man who had ruined our floor. But what could a little scratch in the wood matter to us? We’d lay a rug over it. Then we’d lay each other on top of that scratch and the Persian rug I’d pick out once I had eyes again. And once we finished getting laid, exhausted but radiant and satisfied, we’d start all over again. We’d screw like animals on every scratch the house had, in every hole in the wall, like insects. I thought of the scrapes and homemade defects that we’d leave on the house, that we’d collect gradually, maybe. I was worry-free as I stretched out on the floor with my eyes shut tight. Ignacio uncorked a bottle in the kitchen and complained, his voice becoming abstract, where’d you put the glasses, where’d you put the napkins, opening and closing crates and rummaging in boxes. I got lost in the crackle of newspaper between his fingers, in the cork that shot against the wall, and the champagne fizz. Because that was the only certainty: inaugurating our life with glasses washed by shadow, letting ourselves be stunned by the silence. It was night already and we didn’t have electricity, there wasn’t a single bare lightbulb swinging from the sockets. Not even a candle. Ignacio had no clue where the lighter was. He searched through clothes and felt his way over the floor, looking for it but not finding it. And we also toasted to that, because in the darkness of the empty house we were the same: a couple of blind lovers.
house of hard knocks
Thwacks against half-closed doors, all of their edges blunt. A nose mashed against a shelf. Scratched fingers, broken nails, twisted ankles almost sprained. Ignacio took note of every mishap and tried to clear the boxes still only half-emptied, he moved the open bags from the hallway and cleared away orphan shoes, but then I got tangled up in rugs, I knocked over posters leaning against walls, I toppled trash cans. I was buried in open boxes with table legs between my fingers. The house was alive, it wielded its doorknobs and sharpened its fixtures while I still clung to corners that were no longer where they belonged. It changed shape, the house, the rooms castled, the furniture swapped places to confuse me. With one eye blind with blood and the other clouded over at my every movement, I was lost, a blindfolded chicken, dizzy and witless. But I dried some sheepish tears and counted my steps again, memorizing: five long steps to the living room and eight short ones back to the bedroom, kitchen to the left, ten to the bathroom, to the left. The windows must be somewhere and I bumped right into Ignacio. You’re dangerous, he told me, angry, trying not to yell at me; stop wandering around, we’ll end up breaking all our bones. I know he stood there looking at me because I felt his eyes on mine, like snails coating me in their slime. Lina, he sighed, immersed in a sudden sadness or shyness. Lina, now even softer, holding my chin, his slimy eyes everywhere: you’re blind, you’re blind and dangerous. Yes, I replied, slowly. Yes, but I’m only an apprentice blind woman and I have very little ambition in the trade, and yes, almost blind and dangerous. But I’m not going to just sit in a chair and wait for it to pass. Ignacio would have preferred me to sit and meditate, but there’s nothing to think about now, I told him, snatching his cigarette by touch and taking a forbidden drag. I’ve already thought everything thinkable, I said, taking an even deeper drag. Thinking, I repeated, moving the butt out of reach when Ignacio tried to take it from my fingers — I accidentally hit the light bulb — I’ve been thinking since the first time I went, against my will, into an eye doctor’s waiting room. Since then I’ve done nothing but think about the future, and how I’ll never see it. Think about that twisted and recalcitrant doctor saying I was carrying a time bomb inside me, ticking faster and faster. He reported all the medical details to my mother, I went on, as if I wasn’t sitting right there next to her and getting splashed by all the sticky, acidic saliva he was spouting. The doctor never looked at me, but the thick lenses of his eyeglasses are burned into my memory, and the clogged corneas crisscrossed with thin lines, those miserable, miniature eyes that from the doctor’s very depths had foreseen this moment. Then I remembered, now without telling Ignacio, the way the doctor adjusted his black frames atop his nose while he murmured that maybe — but only maybe because no one can be sure — that maybe in a few years the diseased organ could be replaced with another, compatible one. And I remembered having thought about what it would be like to see through foreign eyes. The doctor’s myopic eyes, I said aloud, raising my voice, his eyes made me more afraid than the future of my own, because they are eyes that have followed me and are still coming after me; even in dreams, Ignacio, those rabbit eyes. I don’t have anything left to think about, I repeated. Think about it yourself, if you want. Really think about it, I insisted, raising my black eyes toward Ignacio and feeling I was losing my balance. I said it like a challenge, like an accusation, like a reproach, because it wasn’t the first time I’d said this to him. I’d begun to say it six months before, starting with the dinner we gave Ignacio after his talk, the dinner I’d attended as a doctoral student, and where I’d sat down across from him to tell him I wrote, too. How I’d started in journalism but then they kicked me out for falsifying the objective truth of the facts, and I moved on to fiction, one hundred percent pure, I’d told him, caressing his leg with my calf. And to prove it I put my latest novel on the table, explaining that I’d condensed my name. So are you or aren’t you Lina Meruane? Sometimes I am, I said, when my eyes let me; lately, I’m less and less her and I go back to Lucina. The extra syllable bled sometimes. Ignacio’s face took on a puzzled expression and he chose not to believe my insinuation that I suffered from a defect that could leave me blind. Blind, I said, without dramatics, without losing my smile while we had a long drink while the distance between us got ever shorter. He should really think about it before he paid my bill and invited me into the taxi, I told him, before he touched me, gave me that wet kiss on the ear and then on the lips, before my sighs that were used but felt new, before my absolute silence, before he ever brought me a pancake breakfast in bed, or strummed that languid, cloying bolero on an old guitar, before he ever asked me to stay. To stay. First, yes, think about it. Think about it hard, I told him, looking at him fiercely, hoping he wouldn’t think for too long, obliging him to at least pretend to think. Ignacio, I thought, now without insisting; Ignacio, open your eyes, you still have time.