The Manual of Darkness (38 page)

‘There’s a problem with that …’ Víctor interrupts her. He seems different. His voice is light, delicate. ‘I don’t know how to use the phone, and even if I did, I’m not sure I’d be able to dial the number. But we’re going to sort that out today, aren’t we?’

He reaches out his hand at precisely the height of Alicia’s elbow, and with his other hand, he gestures for her to come in. The
difference in his voice makes her heave a sigh of relief, but she does not drop her guard.

‘You’ve been shut up in here for a year, haven’t you? And I don’t suppose you spend most of your time lying in bed. Every now and then you go to the kitchen or the bathroom. In fact, you’ve just come to the door and you obviously didn’t bump into anything. So maybe, for the moment, you don’t need a guide while we’re in the apartment. When the day comes that you want to go out, I’ll be happy to lend you my elbow. You can have my whole arm. But right now I need to know if you can walk in a straight line by yourself.’

Víctor shrugs his shoulders and walks up and down the hall. As he comes back for the third time, Alicia finds herself obliged to correct him.

‘Without touching the wall.’

‘Am I touching it?’

‘With your right hand. Obviously if you need to touch it, the most logical thing would be to put your arm out in front of you. That way you won’t bump into anything. For example, you’ll notice the dresser before you reach it. Bring your fingers together,’ she tells him as Víctor keeps walking. ‘Perfect. And you can bend them a little. You don’t need to touch the wall with your whole hand. The back of your little finger is enough. It’s the one part of your hand where it doesn’t matter too much if you prick it or burn it.’

When he gets to the end of the hallway, she asks him to turn around and walk back, this time without using his hands. After three steps, his right shoulder grazes the wall. Without saying anything, Alicia puts her hand on the small of his back and pushes gently to centre him. Víctor takes six steps with apparent confidence, walking so quickly that Alicia has to intervene so he won’t smash his face against the wall. He stands motionless and sighs, then waves his hands around. He needs to touch something.

‘It’s all right,’ she reassures him. She would like to stroke his back, to soothe him. ‘It might seem easy, but no one can walk in a straight line with their eyes closed. We have an image of our body that is symmetrical, one that doesn’t conform to reality,’ she explains. For the first time she feels comfortable. She could recite
whole pages about balance and orientation from her notes. ‘We all have one leg shorter than the other, or we favour one foot, or tilt one hip without realising it. It’s something we generally don’t notice because our sight corrects the imbalance. You have a tendency to veer to the right. It’s important that you know that and learn to correct it.’

They practise for twenty minutes, until Víctor finally manages to negotiate the length of the hallway without swerving. When he gets to the end, he turns around, takes a couple of seconds to ensure he is centred, then runs to the other end of the hall where Alicia is waiting, biting her lip so as not to shout out a warning when his hip comes within an inch of the dresser. She has to stop his body with her own. Something very much like an embrace.

‘You’re crazy,’ she says.

‘I call it the kamikaze method.’

‘Well, I call it stupid, but I’m not going to tell you not to do it. After all, it’s your head that you’re going to split open. In any case, I can teach you to protect yourself.’

‘From what?’

‘From everything. From bumping into things. And don’t tell me you don’t need me to. Right now, I decide what you need and what you don’t. Raise your left hand. Now bend your elbow as though you want to grab your right shoulder.’

Rhythm, thinks Alicia. That’s what is missing. If yesterday it felt as though she had stepped into a cage where time stood still, today everything seems to be passing in a flash. She gives orders and he complies. Does his utmost to comply. Manages to do so with unexpected skill. He is prepared to do each task as many times as necessary. It works.

‘Don’t stick your elbow out so far. And move your hand away from your shoulder slightly.’ She continues to give instructions. ‘Palm turned out. Stretch out your fingers and bring them together. That’s it. Good, now relax your hand a little. Perfect. Now the other arm. Bring your right hand over to your left thigh, but don’t actually touch it. The idea is that your arms create a sort of protective barrier. The left arm protects your top half, the right arm protects the bottom.’

‘And I look like I’m doing karate.’

‘Not exactly,’ Alicia says, though she cannot suppress a smile. ‘More like a footballer in the wall when someone is about to take a free kick.’

Or a blind person who doesn’t even know what he’s protecting himself from, she thinks.

‘And what use is all this?’

Carefully, making sure she makes no sound, Alicia picks up a chair and sets it between them.

‘Come towards me slowly,’ she says. At his second step, Víctor bumps into the chair. ‘I’ll let you work out for yourself where that would have hit you if you hadn’t had your arms in front of you. Depending on where you are, you might need to bring your left hand up to protect your face. But we’ll come to that later.’

We’ll come to that. Perhaps deciding when the time is right for something is the most important aspect of her profession. Víctor’s attitude makes it seem as though he could be taken out into the world right now. But she only has to look at him to see how the awkward gestures he has just learned barely protect him from the air to realise it is too soon. To stumble at this point, to fall or take a painful knock, might have drastic consequences for the whole process. She has managed to run a thread right into his lair, now she has slowly to draw Víctor out. But the thread is made of flimsy materials: trust, desire, panic, need. With the slightest jolt, it could snap.

Víctor is still standing with his arms in the defensive position.

‘You can put your arms down now,’ she says. ‘Relax. Now, for this next bit, we’ll need more space.’

Quickly, fearful that this interruption might break the spell, she pushes the dining table and chairs into one corner of the living room and the sofa into another. Then she guides Víctor to the centre.

‘Do you know where the door to this room is?’

‘There,’ Víctor answers, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

‘There is not a place. It’s no good to me. Is it in front of you or behind?’

‘Behind me.’

‘Exactly. What’s in front of you?’

‘The wall. Well, the bookshelves. And you.’

‘That’s right. I’ve moved the furniture. Now the table is on your right and the sofa is on your left. Turn around. I mean, turn and face the other way.’ Víctor does so and stands with his back to her. ‘What’s in front of you?’

‘My bedroom.’

‘And behind?’

‘You.’ A long pause. ‘OK, the bookshelves.’

‘To your left?’

‘The table, and the sofa is on my right.’

‘Very good. Make a quarter-turn to your left, please. Try to turn without moving from that spot. Where’s the door to your bedroom?’

‘There. Sorry, I mean to my right.’

Víctor answers confidently, without stopping to think, though he seems puzzled, as though he thinks this is a waste of time. Alicia knows that it is still too soon, that she will have to confuse him a little more before his sense of direction deserts him. For fifteen minutes, she has him spin around in the middle of the room like a top, but every time he is able to identify correctly the cardinal points of his apartment.

‘Now I need you to pay careful attention,’ she tells him. ‘I’ve taken a pen from the dresser. I’m going to drop it on the floor and I want you to tell me where it lands. Or rather, I want you indicate where you think it’s landed.’

‘No.’

‘What?’ This is the first time he has refused. Maybe he didn’t hear her correctly.

‘Not that pen, no. You can use anything else.’

‘Oh …’ Alicia stares at the Parker pen. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise it was so valuable.’

‘It was my father’s.’

Rhythm, Alicia, don’t stop now. No questions.

‘OK. We’ll use a coin.’

She takes one from her pocket and throws it a few inches in front of Víctor. He stands for a moment, as though sniffing the air, then points to the right place. Alicia goes over and, as she bends down to pick it up, she cannot help but stare at Víctor’s toenails again. The day she teaches him to cut them, or rather the day she
gives him a reason to want to cut them, will be a major victory. Maybe by that point it won’t be a problem, asking him what happened to his father, or why he’s so alone. Maybe she will tell him stories about the Gallery of Famous Blind People so they can laugh together. But right now she has a different battle to fight.

At every attempt, Víctor gets it right. He even draws in his neck when she tosses the coin over his head so it will land behind him. As though the air anticipated its route and alerted him to dodge it. Alicia decides to vary the test. Now, Víctor has not only to identify where the coin has landed, but also to bend down and try to pick it up. Although he still gets it right most of the time, once in a while his fingers brush the floor an inch or two from the coin without finding it. So Alicia teaches him to feel for things. There is even a specific technique for this which entails squatting down, reaching out and feeling, first around the feet, working from the outside in first, and then the other way, then working in a line parallel to the first, over and back, first with the knuckles, then with the fingertips, first horizontally, then vertically, reaching out, picking up, fumbling, stretching, bending. As Alicia instructs him, Víctor repeats the movements over and over, and if he shows the least sign of getting tired, she encourages him: ‘Imagine it’s a knife or a thumbtack,’ she says. ‘You can’t just leave it there, especially since you never wear shoes.’ Victor concentrates. He is enjoying this. And not simply because he is obviously making progress, not because each time it is easier for him to find the coin – who cares about the coin? – but because in the thirty minutes he has spent pawing the floor, he has ceased to be a ghost. He fumbles, gropes, picks up, notes the dust, feels his calves cramp from constantly getting up and bending down, notices the sweat beginning to pool at the back of his neck, and he realises that his skin is drawing a frontier between his body and the void. He is here, the floor is there. Alicia is right: there is not a place. It is a void, it is nothingness. The coin is nothing and it falls on to the nothingness that is the floor with a sound that means nothing, but Víctor is here and he is something: he is the man who is searching, the blind man who feels around, finds the coin.

Though she hasn’t forgotten yesterday’s session, nor Víctor’s tone of voice on her answering machine, Alicia is happy. There is
not a trace left of the anger she felt when she arrived. It is a reflexive, groundless happiness. And this is just the start. She looks at Víctor and, though he seems more than happy to keep on practising, she senses his tiredness in the way his shoulders slump.

‘Good. Congratulations,’ she says to him. ‘You’re doing really well. As a reward, you get to sit down now.’

She sets a chair in front of the telephone and helps him to sit down.

‘No, you don’t need to pick up the receiver. We’re not going to call anyone just yet. Put your index finger on the 1, your middle finger on the 2 and your ring finger on the 3 …’

Víctor sits, his hand hovering in the air. She can’t tell whether he doesn’t know which key is which or which finger. ‘For God’s sake,’ Alicia thinks, ‘he’s a magician.’ But she helps him. She takes his fingers and starts to position them over the keys. ‘She has a very small hand,’ Víctor thinks. He realised yesterday that Alicia is not very tall. He only had to touch her elbow to know that. He had to bend down to whisper in her ear. Yet somehow he took it for granted that she was a big-boned woman with large hands – not fat, exactly, but thickset. He squeezes her fingers gently.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m sorry … I didn’t think … It’s just … I realised, I don’t know what you look like.’

It’s classic. She has heard other technicians talk about it. Now it’s time to go through the details – height, hair colour, the colour of her eyes … Things that are useless to a blind person. Or perhaps they are useful. Alicia would prefer to go on working. She wants to push Víctor to make a little more progress, to realise he is making progress. Perceived self-efficacy. Rhythm. But it’s fine. It won’t hurt to stop for a few minutes, to bond. After all, they will be spending a lot of time together. They have to talk about something.

‘What do you think I look like?’

‘Um, well, I know now that you have small hands. But the rest …’

Alicia looks at her hands. She wouldn’t say they were small.

‘Tall or short?’ she asks.

‘Middling height. Five foot seven?’

‘Nearly. Five foot three and a half. Hair?’

‘Hmmm … I’d say auburn.’

‘Black.’

‘Black black?’

‘Absolutely. Black as a piece of coal.’

‘And curly.’

‘Well, sort of. Let’s say it’s wavy.’