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 wax; 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.