To Alicia, it is almost a game. She has done this a hundred times during her training. She knows how the system works. All it requires is that both parties keep their arms in the correct position at all times so that every time she changes direction, he automatically turns with her. They could go round the world like this. All that needs to happen is for Víctor to walk more naturally. And not hang on so tight. Her elbow is beginning to hurt. They all hang on tightly at first, as though fate has just thrown them a lifeline.
In spite of the huge floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the wall on the right side, the hallway itself is very wide, narrowing only when they come to the dresser.
‘We’re not going to fit through here,’ Alicia announces. ‘Imagine we’re in the street and I need you to walk behind me. It doesn’t happen very often, only when the pavement is narrow for some reason, if there’s a group of people coming towards us, or someone is walking a dog, or there’s scaffolding maybe. I move my arm like this,’ she explains, moving her elbow behind her back, ‘and you move with it so that you’re right behind me. That way we take up half as much space.’
The slight shift in the position of Alicia’s elbow has brought Víctor directly behind her. They move effortlessly around the dresser and continue on as though performing a piece of choreography they know by heart. A drop falls from Alicia’s arm on to Víctor’s hand. He moves a little closer. She does smell of sweat, but it’s not unpleasant. Immediately he trips over her heels and ends up with his nose between her shoulder blades.
‘You see? You forgot to keep your distance. Let’s try again.’
‘OK.’
A shudder runs down Alicia’s back. The voice sounded too close, like heavy breathing in her ear.
They start walking again. For the first time in more than a year, Víctor feels time move with him. Even if it is backwards. Galván’s voice, old and distant, echoes in his memory. This is a pack of cards. This is how you pick it up. Don’t look at your hands. Don’t smile. Tell me a story. Don’t ask how it’s done. Hold my arm. Keep your distance. Trust me. It has been years since someone gave him instructions. All he needs now is a light, a meagre spotlight set into the ceiling of his brain, a small grimy window deep in his neurons, something that would allow him to sense Alicia’s face if nothing else. Or her hands.
When they come to the living room, she manoeuvres Víctor so that he is leaning against the table, takes a chair and slides it against the back of his knees, as a maître d’ might in a restaurant. She needs to stall for time. She takes a step back to look at him. She feels as though she is working with two different men simultaneously. One holding her elbow with exquisite gentleness, following her instructions to the letter; the other whispering suddenly into her ear and sniffing her like a cat. She stares at him and for the first time notices something so incongruous that, in other circumstances, it would be funny: Víctor is wearing glasses. The lenses are spotless as though he conscientiously cleaned them that morning. Alicia remembers that the previous reports clearly stated that Víctor’s sight had been devastated by the effects of Leber’s syndrome, and he had been left with absolutely no trace of vision. What could this mean? Why would someone who is completely blind continue to wear glasses which, to judge by the thickness of the lenses, could only have been used to correct an earlier minor myopia. And how did he manage to clean them so perfectly? She continues to study his face, or more precisely, what little of it can be seen under the thick, unkempt beard, one which, over the months, has extended in every direction so that it partly covers his cheekbones, emphasising the dark purple circles under his eyes. The paleness of his skin is telling: it has been months since this man left his apartment. His face looks like a thin sheet of glass on which someone has sketched blue veins. She wishes they were two or three weeks farther on in this process. ‘It’s such a shame, Víctor,’ she’d say, ‘you used to be so good looking. Now you look like a member of the Taliban.’ But at this moment she is staring at the straggly hairs on his neck, the cuts on his face, the three spots of dried blood, and she realises that Víctor tried to shave this morning. Once again she recognises the same duality: the combination of slovenliness and affectation, resignation and rebellion. She doesn’t know how to deal with this man.
From her bag, she takes a notebook and wooden case.
‘Are you comfortable?’ she asks as she opens the box. ‘To begin with, we’re going to test your sense of touch. I’m going to give you a series of simple geometric shapes and you have to recognise them by touch.’
Víctor feels the first shape and says:
‘A square.’
‘Check to make sure all the sides are equal …’
‘A rectangle,’ Víctor corrects himself, running the tips of his thumb and forefinger around the object.
‘Excellent. And this one?’
Triangle, square, semicircle, circle. He correctly identifies each one within seconds. The rhombus takes a little longer. But the deftness with which he handles the pieces is remarkable. Under such circumstances, she would expect him to frown, look at his hands, even though he cannot see anything. But Víctor’s fingers seem to respond to the objects instinctively. Alicia decides the magician in him is still alive and congratulates herself. On the other hand, the way Víctor stares at her makes her uneasy. Well, stares in a manner of speaking, as he cannot actually see her. Though he seems to be trying hard to do just that.
‘Now let’s try indirect touch,’ she says as Víctor hands back the rhombus. ‘You can use your left hand to hold the shape in place on the table, but without feeling the contours. With your right, take this stick I’m giving you. That’s right, like that. You have to trace the outline of the shape with the tip of the stick and tell me if you recognise it.’
Like a small child absorbed in a task, Víctor correctly identifies the first shape as a triangle.
‘Rectangle,’ he says, tracing the second shape. ‘No, square. Rectangle. Wait a minute, rhombus.’
He drops the stick and the shape. Sighs. Tries to start again but accidentally knocks the stick off the table. He thumps the table. Alicia jots something in her notebook.
‘What are you writing?’
‘I’m just making a note of the excellent results we’re getting.’
She is lying. She has just written: ‘Not good at dealing with frustration.’ She gathers up the objects, puts them in a pile in front of him and gives him a wooden block with the dimensions of each shape carved into it.
‘Now I want you to help me put them away. Could you put each piece in the right place?’
Víctor works slowly, but surely. When he is finished, he pushes away the wooden case and sits in silence, as though gathering enough patience to deal with the next task. Once again, Alicia recognises a duality: an eagerness and determination to do things properly but scorn for what he has achieved. Gently, as though afraid to break Víctor’s concentration, she pushes the block towards him again and asks:
‘Could you tell me what shape it is?’
Víctor traces the outline with a finger. He gives a faint smile, one corner of his mouth barely moving.
‘A teddy bear?’
‘Excellent,’ she says with exaggerated enthusiasm, like someone encouraging a child to scrawl his first letters. ‘You’ll notice that there are a number of holes around the edge. I want you to take this lace and thread it through the holes as if you were lacing up a shoe …’
‘You want me to tie a bow?’
‘You don’t have to, unless you want to earn yourself an extra point …’
Perhaps humour will bring him out of his silence. Víctor hands her back the base, the string neatly threaded through the holes and tied in a perfectly symmetrical bow.
‘Amazing. Now I’m going to give you …’
‘How long is this going to go on?’
Finally, an opening, a chink of insecurity, or maybe irritation. It doesn’t matter. Next she needs to give him a shirt to see whether he is able t
o fold it properly. Then take out the samples she has in her bag and hand them to him one by one so that he can smell them and see whether he can guess what is inside. Alicia calmly puts the shape block in its case and places her hand on Víctor’s shoulder.
‘Let’s leave the tests for later,’ she says. ‘I think maybe we should talk a bit first.’
‘I’m all ears,’ Víctor replies.
And he stares at the ceiling, so to speak. His face turned upward, his mouth half open. He looks as though he is merely imitating a blind man.
So Let’s Talk
He has three pairs of jeans, eight pairs of white boxer shorts, eight black short-sleeved shirts and eight identical shirts with long sleeves, which he wears depending on the weather. The temperature in the apartment, day and night, is set at 23 degrees. He always gets undressed in the bathroom, next to a laundry basket into which he puts his dirty clothes. First thing every Monday someone from the launderette comes to pick them up and brings the clothes back washed and ironed in the afternoon. When the package arrives, he takes it into the bedroom and, on top of the chest of drawers, sets out the boxer shorts, the trousers, the shirts, in piles next to one another. He always puts his clothes on in the same order. Alicia, thinking she can see another opportunity, asks: what about socks? Shoes? Víctor tells her he has no need for them. What do you mean, what about when you go out? I don’t go out. But … But, Víctor …
Alicia bites her tongue. They have only just started talking and she does not want to make him defensive. Besides, she doesn’t know what to say. Because he’s not complaining. Víctor is not saying that he can’t go out, that he’s afraid to try, that he wants to but doesn’t know how. He is saying he doesn’t go out. Full stop. He turns his face towards her again as though it is obvious that she needs to move on to the next question.
What about eating? Simple: open the fridge, take out the sliced bread, the ham wrapped in tinfoil, the cheese slices. It’s not hard to work out which is which, since there’s nothing else in the fridge. He makes a sandwich and eats it, standing in the kitchen. And if he’s really hungry? Another sandwich. What about dinner? Another sandwich. Every day? Yes, every day. For a year. Always cold? Always cold. What about breakfast? Fruit. Grapes, when they’re in season. Apples. Bananas sometimes. Nothing to heat up, nothing to wash. What if he wants a snack? Peanuts. If she’s interested he drinks water. Straight from the tap. Every answer is accompanied by a telling shrug of the shoulders: this is how it is.
Alicia doesn’t know what to write in her notebook. Her task is to help this man with his dark life, his dark home, his dark voice, his pale skin. But what if Víctor does not need anything? She mentally runs through the points, the advice her instructors gave her, the stories she has heard other technicians tell. Denial is common in the early stages. A lot of people refuse to accept that they have lost their sight. They constantly change the subject, postpone making decisions and learning to cope, focus on secondary problems to avoid thinking about the real problem; some even go so far as to invent other ailments which require attention. But this is not the case with Víctor. Quite the opposite; rather than refusing to accept his blindness, he seems to have embraced it as though it defines him: yes, I am blind. Yes, I deal with the consequences. Yes, I get by. This is who I am now.
She had expected to find a ruined village crippled by need and instead has found a fortress besieged by loneliness. She looks for a single crack, some weak point through which she might sneak her Trojan horse of resources. She came prepared to put herself in his place, but that place is so cramped that she can make space for herself only if she pushes and jostles. Unless she can think of the right question. Unless Víctor finds himself forced to admit that he needs her. She goes on with her questions.
The bed? In summer, nothing but a fitted sheet. In winter, a duvet. The launderette takes care of them.
Let’s move on. How does he manage to do the shopping? By telephone. He doesn’t even need to phone the supermarket; they phone him to confirm that his order is the same as usual. Ham, cheese, bread. Fruit, whatever they’ve got. What about paying? Víctor tells her to go into the hall and look in the dresser drawer. Alicia opens it and quickly shuts it as though there were cockroaches inside. Or the spoils from an armed robbery, because that is what it looks like. Coming back to the table she fights the urge to calculate the value of the notes she saw: thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of euros. She asks whether at least he is able to tell the notes apart and Víctor replies there’s no need. If she had checked, she would have noticed that they were all fifty-euro notes. What about change? There’s never any change. Whatever is left over is the tip, to cover small favours such as taking down the rubbish. Or waiting until he puts everything in the fridge and taking away the plastic bags. So, the rubbish is taken out only once a week? Of course. After all, there’s not much of it. A banana skin from time to time.
The ideal blind person is one who, while waiting for ONCE to come and help, and during the first rehabilitation sessions, manages to make a little progress and, above all, is aware of the progress he makes. The technical term is ‘perceived self-efficacy’. The blind person realises that he is able to make progress through effort and this generates expectations that will encourage him to go on learning. Ideally, such expectations are confined to the realms of the possible so as to avoid disappointments. It is not a matter of becoming who one was before, but of becoming someone else. Someone more or less functional. Adapted. Rehabilitated. Alicia thinks Víctor got lost somewhere along the way, like a snake that has feverishly rubbed up against reality to shed its old skin but cannot find a means to cover itself with a new one and therefore decides to hide away under a rock. If Alicia stepped out on to the terrace, if she saw Martín Losa’s ant farm and learned the story behind it, she would realise that the comparison is mistaken. That she has chosen the wrong creature. That words will never take her to the dark corner where Víctor is hiding, because ants have no ears. To draw him out, she needs antennae. Antennae and a pheromone trail. And centuries of patience.
She asks him whether she can use the bathroom. It is an excuse to nose around: a neutral shower gel on the shelf, good for washing body and hair every day. A toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste on the washbasin and next to them a nail file. Perhaps his supermarket order includes a new toothbrush from time to time, because although the bristles on this one are slightly worn, it is still serviceable. A razor clogged with a few stray hairs. A roll of toilet paper on top of the cistern and, on the floor, a recently opened twenty-four-roll pack. There is no hand towel, but there is a bath towel, hanging from the shower screen. Alicia goes over, brings it close to her face. It smells clean. Hardly surprising; today is Tuesday, the launderette delivered yesterday. Her nose still pressed against the damp cotton, she closes her eyes and pictures Víctor. She sees him naked, his skin chalk pale, the water beading on it. Skinny as a rail. She sees him turn off the tap, take down the towel and dry himself, walk naked and barefoot back to his bedroom, fingertips running along the walls. Alicia trembles. She had to see this ghost to understand completely.
She goes back and finds him exactly as she left him. She asks him something, anything that will make him go on talking, but she has stopped paying attention, stopped taking notes. He is sitting so close that she can smell his breath and, taking advantage of the fact that he is blind, even count the hairs sprouting from his ears. She need only stretch out her hand and she could follow the dark blue tracery of the vein beneath the pale skin of his forearm. She could feel his bones, the gaunt flesh, but not even this would chase away the thought that she is staring at a ghost: Víctor Losa, the finest magician in the world, the man who likes his women ‘al dente’, is dead. What remains, what is here before her very eyes, is the last vestige of his spirit, the remnants of a time long gone. A ghost. And the worst thing is, he knows it.
‘I think we’ll leave it there for today,’ she says suddenly. Not that she is giving up. She needs a little
distance, needs to go home and go over her notes, to prepare a strategy. ‘We’re both exhausted. I’ll come at the same time tomorrow, if that’s OK with you,’ she says, getting to her feet. ‘I’ll programme my number into your phone just in case.’
The phone is a Telefónica DOMOuno with large, well-spaced keys and additional buttons for memory and redial functions. It’s perfect. Alicia knows these things. She knows which phone models suit blind people. And when they’re not suitable, she knows how to customise them using DYMO labels. Shit, she knows a lot. She has studied everything there is to know about helping blind people improve their quality of life. It’s her job. But nobody ever said anything to her about ghosts.
She enters her home phone number. Thinks perhaps it would have been better to leave her mobile number, then dismisses the idea. That time will come and she’s in no hurry to become too intimate. This is something else the training courses do not deal with: in less than two hours she has exchanged sweat with this stranger, she bears the imprint of his fingers on her elbow, has felt the warm haze of his voice, has even seen him walking naked, barefoot, wet from the shower. Admittedly, this happened only in her imagination, but … can there be anything more intimate than imagination?
‘If you need me, all you have to do is press “1” and hold,’ she tells him. She slings her bag over her shoulder. ‘In any case, one of these days, maybe even tomorrow morning, I’ll show you how to dial any number you like. It’s easy.’
Víctor has his back to her. He hasn’t moved. Alicia wants to leave.
‘Víctor,’ she calls, her voice weak and exhausted. ‘I’d like you to show me to the door.’
He hasn’t forgotten this lesson and matches his steps exactly to hers, but this time, rather than gripping her elbow, his hand barely grazes it, as though intent on confirming her suspicion that he is a phantasmagoria. The ultimate question, the one that might finally break down Víctor’s defences, the wall he has built around himself, occurs to her as she opens the door.