At some point I realized that I could no longer recall the sound of my own voice, and the thought dumbfounded me. How could I have so easily forgotten something I’d heard for so many years, a sound that had been silenced only for a fraction of that time?
But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined. If my body were cut up in pieces and those pieces mixed with those of other bodies, and then if someone told me, “Find your left eye,” I suppose it would be difficult to do so.
He treats me just as he pleases.
He brings me my meals. It seems he prepares them in the little room at the back of the typing classroom where there’s a burner to heat water. They are far from gourmet, but they are perfectly acceptable. For the most part, he brings soft, liquid things that have been stewed or simmered.
He sets the tray on the table, sits down across from me, rests his chin in the palm of his hand, and stares at me. He never takes a bite. I’m left to dine alone.
I have never been able to get used to eating this way. It wears on my nerves to have to swallow each bite under his unwavering gaze, without music or laughter or conversation. I have no appetite, picturing as I do the morsels of food falling down my throat, scraping past my ribs, and finally making their way to my stomach. When I’m barely half finished, I’ve had enough, but I force myself to eat everything—because I’m afraid to imagine what he might do with anything left over.
“You have some sauce on your lip,” he’ll say to me from time to time. I’ll hurry to lick it off, since there’s never a napkin. “More to your right,” he’ll say, forcing me to lick my lips from one side to the other. Then he’ll tell me to go on eating.
He has the mannerisms of a waiter in a fancy restaurant. And I eat slowly, ripping off small pieces of bread, cutting my meat into tiny bites, sipping my water, and glancing up at him from time to time.
At night, he strips me, makes me stand under the light, and then washes my body. The water he brings in a bucket is very hot, and steam floats around the room. But he takes so long and washes me so carefully that it has all dissipated by the time he’s finished. He moves his hands much as he does when he polishes the stopwatch.
As he works, I find myself surprised by the sheer number of parts that make up a human body. The job seems almost endless. Eyelids, scalp, behind the ears, collarbone, armpits, nipples, belly, the hipbone cavity, thighs, calves, between the fingers. Nothing is neglected, not the tiniest part. He works tirelessly, wiping every inch of my body, without seeming to strain himself, without so much as a change of expression.
When he’s done, it’s up to him, of course, to choose the clothes I put on, and his choices are always odd, unlike anything I have seen in the stores. So odd, indeed, it’s unclear they should be called “clothes” at all.
First of all, the materials themselves are strange: vinyl, paper, metal, leaves, fruit peels. When they’re handled roughly, they tear away from the body or cut the skin or tighten around the chest. Which is why the garments have to be put on slowly, with great care.
One day he confessed that he had made the clothes himself. An image would come to him, he would sketch it, make a pattern, and then gather the materials from here and there. As he told me this, the most absurd, inexplicable realization came to me: I was absolutely certain that his fingers were terribly beautiful as they fashioned these clothes. That’s what I thought. To imagine his fingers as they threaded a needle or cut the peel from a piece of fruit held the same charm as imagining them as they typed out words on a page.
He stands smiling with satisfaction as I hunch my shoulders and bend my legs and wriggle my hips in order to force myself into the strangely shaped garments. The light from the lamp overhead is reflected in the bucket of water, which is by now quite cool. By morning, the clothes will be crumpled on the floor like a worn-out rag.
Needless to say, my nerves are frayed. But it is the inability to speak that confines me much more than being shut up in the room. As he’d said, to be deprived of one’s voice is much the same as having one’s body go to pieces.
From time to time he gives me an icy stare and asks whether I want to speak.
I shake my head violently from side to side, knowing full well that nothing will come from nodding.
In the past few days I’ve begun to feel my body growing more distant from my soul. It’s as though my head and arms, my breasts and torso and legs are all floating somewhere just out of reach, and I can only watch as he plays with them. And that, too, is because I have lost my voice. When the voice that links the body to the soul vanishes, there is no way to put into words one’s feelings or will. I am reduced to pieces in no time at all.
I wonder if there is any way out of here. Of course I think about the possibility. At the instant he opens the door, I could push past him and run down the stairs. I could beat on the floor with a typewriter to alert the students in the classroom below, or take one apart and throw the pieces out the window. But these ideas all seem useless, and besides, even if I found my way outside again, I wonder whether I would be able to reassemble the pieces of myself.
While he’s busy teaching the typing students downstairs, I peek out from behind the face of the clock and look at the scene below. The church garden is carefully tended, with some flower always in bloom. People often gather here, chatting in the shade of the trees, sitting on the benches to read. Children play badminton, the typing students pass through on bicycles. Occasionally someone will look up at the clock on the tower to check the time, but of course no one notices me.
If I listen, I can hear the sound of their voices, but I can’t understand what they are saying. At first I thought it was because they were too far away. But that wasn’t really the reason. It’s simply that I can’t comprehend the words.
One day I saw him laughing and chatting with some of his students in the garden. From a distance, he looked stylish, intelligent, and distinguished, and the students seemed quite taken with him. I am the only one who knows what he becomes here at the top of the tower.
“No matter how much you’re tempted, you mustn’t look at the keyboard. That’s the secret to improvement. You find the keys with your fingers, not your eyes.”
They seemed to be talking about typing. I could hear his voice quite clearly, as though the wind bore it up through the crack in the clock face and into my ears. But then one of the students, a woman with short hair and dangly earrings, turned and said something to him.
I could hear the sound of her voice, but not her words. The wind seemed to carry her words past the clock and off into the sky.
“Close your eyes and let your fingers feel the typewriter. The position of the keys, of course, but also the shape of the levers, the thickness of the roller—learn all of it with your fingers.”
I had heard the same instructions when I was his student, and I could hear each word he spoke now.
The young women around him spoke one after the other, but nothing they said meant anything to me.
“From now on, if you look at the keyboard during class, I’ll be handing out a punishment. So that’s clear? We’ll start tomorrow.”
He clapped his hands, and the girls recoiled, letting out a sound that was neither laugh nor scream.
It was then I realized that I could no longer understand anyone but him. Any words but his, coming from the outside, sounded to me like the random squeaking of an out-of-tune instrument.
Even if I were able to escape now, I realized it was too late. My degeneration was already too far advanced. If I took one step outside, my body would dissolve into a million pieces.