The Manual of Darkness (39 page)

‘Short?’

‘Very short. It’s more practical. What else?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘I’ve got brown eyes.’

‘Cinnamon brown? Honey brown?’

‘I don’t know, brown …’

‘And you’re thirty, give or take.’

‘Thirty-four.’ Liar. She has just asked time to lend her five years in order to give herself an air of authority. It’s ridiculous. ‘Anything else you want to know?’

‘Not at the moment.’

What else could he possibly ask? Do you bite your lip when you’re running? Do you tilt your head when you’re wandering around thinking about things? Do you ever fart in bed and stick your head under the sheet? Do you have a hidden freckle he might lick some day? What does your breath smell like when you’ve stuffed your face with peanuts? Because this is getting to know someone; the rest is just foolishness.

‘OK. I’m going to take your fingers in my tiny little hands,’ Alicia announces, ‘and without lifting the receiver, we’re going to put the index finger on the 1, the middle finger on the 2 …’

Víctor lets her do the work, pretending to pay attention. Alicia touching him like this unsettles him. It’s barely a touch, but his fingers feel especially sensitive, as though he has a fever or has burned himself. The skin of the fingertips is a frontier. It is where ‘here’ ends.
Finis terrae
.

‘Come on, Víctor. One, two, three. Honestly, it’s not that difficult.’

‘Sorry, I wasn’t listening.’

‘I want you to press one, two, three.’

Víctor moves the three fingers in succession, barely lifting them from the keys.

‘OK, from now on, I want you to say out loud the numbers you are pressing. One, two, three.’

‘One, two, three.’

He’s back. Víctor is back, he has reappeared after his sudden absence. And Alicia notes this. Rhythm.

‘Move your fingers down a row: four, five, six.’

‘Four, five, six.’

They go over the three rows of numbers several times. After that, they work from right to left: three, two, one. Then vertically: one, four, seven; two five, eight; three, six, nine. With no mistakes. ‘He’s really good at this,’ Alicia thinks. ‘Great, I’ve slipped even farther down the scale,’ Víctor thinks. ‘From magician to telephone operator. From pianist to typist.’ But he is enjoying it. He likes being given instructions, complying with them.

‘You’ve got it. Let’s test you. You’re going to dial my house. You don’t need to pick up the receiver, obviously. It’s just a test. I don’t want any more surprises on my answering machine.’

She smiles as she says this. Víctor behaves as though he hasn’t heard her, his fingers in the starting position. Alicia dictates her number and he dials it correctly. Three times. She goes on, making up numbers now. Adds international dialling codes. Víctor keys in the numbers. He doesn’t want to do anything else.

‘I couldn’t ask for better, Víctor. Congratulations again. Not because it’s difficult, but with your attitude you could learn anything you want.’

This is enough for today. Just as she is about to set aside the phone, Alicia notices the memory key.

‘Well, there is one more thing. Do you want me to add any other numbers to your speed dial apart from mine?’

‘No.’

‘There’s no one else you call regularly? Someone in your family? The supermarket? A friend?’

‘No.’

‘No’ means ‘No Entry’. But Alicia is not about to release her prey so easily. No man is an island. No one could be so alone. She remembers the social worker’s report mentioned a teacher or
something. Someone who got in touch with ONCE to ask for help. Another person, another island. An archipelago.

‘There has to be someone,’ she insists. ‘A former teacher, maybe?’

‘I told you, no.’

Before he says this, he turns to face her. A year ago, he could have silenced her with a single look.

‘Eight, zero, three …’ Víctor says finally.

‘Eight, zero …? What type of area code is that? Where did you get the number?’

‘From a girl I know,’ Víctor says, and goes on dictating, ‘Zero, seven …’

Alicia keys the number into the speed dial.

‘Right, it’s speed dial two. Now, I really have to get going. Same time tomorrow?’

‘Whatever suits you. I don’t have any plans.’

‘You don’t have to walk me to the door. I’m happy today, Víctor. Take care.’ She presses a hand against his cheek and cannot resist tugging his beard. Then she clicks her tongue and suggests: ‘One of these days, we need to sort that out.’

Then she stands on tiptoe and he bends down a little to kiss her cheek. Just before they make contact, Víctor tilts his head to one side an inch or two. Their cheekbones brush against each other. Alicia’s breath makes the hairs of Víctor’s moustache quiver.

H
e can see everything down to the last detail, note the gradual dilation of the lips, wonder at the colour of the tunnel of flesh opening before his eyes, at once strangely dark and brilliant. When he finally sticks out his tongue to lick it, he notices a slight increase in the pressure of Alicia’s thighs against his ears, even feels the temperature rise slightly, thinks he can hear a whimper as he breathes in the sour-sweet emanations from her vagina.

He watches her belly, drawn in tight, tensed, ignoring Alicia’s pleas for a few seconds, a spell, a word, come, come, come, seconded by the fingers buried in his hair, pulling him upward, a clear signal which in reality means come inside me, come in, come in me. And if Víctor is resisting, it is not through lack of desire, nor through a commendable wish to prolong the pleasure by waiting, but because he is fascinated by the way the downy hair stretches upward, like sunflowers at midday. Everything is so real that it cannot be true.

If Alicia can hold out a little longer, Víctor will linger over her collarbone, resist the urge to bite it, rub his beard against it and then, astonished by the lunar landscape of her nipples, will want to change position, find a way to free his hands. Perhaps he decides to sit. As he nibbles, as he strokes and kneads, as he presses, envelops, his face is pressed against Alicia’s skin, eyes open, his microscopic vision attentive to the stirring of every cell, the frenetic exhalation of life through the pores. He wants her to cry, to moan, to thrust, to stretch. To swallow him whole. This is why, before he penetrates her, he hesitates, allows his penis to brush against Alicia’s maddened flesh for a few seconds, as though he were preparing to bring a lamp into a grotto. To illuminate it.

Finally, he enters her. In a single thrust, sharp and slow. He enters her and then stays motionless. Only then does he draw his face away a little, just far enough so he can contemplate the weakened body of this woman, for it must be she and no other, this woman who smiles and moans, this woman who does not know what to do with her hands until she decides to bring them up to her mouth, this woman who arches her hips so she can possess him, lift him up, suspend him in the air. From here, Víctor can finally see how the light explodes, Alicia’s whole body is lit from within and from that point it is not she who is the object of his onslaught, but the light itself. She understands and stops struggling, agrees to float with him, both motionless in a chemical eternity until the brightness erupts and both bodies dawn.

You can laugh now, Víctor. While you are not lingering, while you are clearing a path to the hidden sun you are about to find inside this woman, while this wild burst of laughter does not distract you from your duty, laugh all you like. If only you could see yourself. You have just found your new place in the world, your mission as an archangel. You will not drive anyone out of heaven with your bright sword. Quite the reverse, you will use it to open the gates to Eden. See how she surrenders herself? Possess her, convert her.

The light is God, Víctor. The book of Genesis is a fraud. Whoever wrote it was in too much of a hurry. That is the only possible way to explain the implausible order of the story in which a creator would fashion the earth, without form and void, as darkness was upon on the face of the deep, his spirit moving upon the face of the waters. Only afterwards did he utter the accursed phrase ‘Let there be light.’ Four words! Articulate, pretentious sounds condemned for all eternity to the menial task of indicating what already existed. And the narrator, not content with attributing an unfeasible power to these words, goes on to say that the light was good. Those are his exact words: ‘And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.’ How? Did he test it? What kind of omnipotent God is this? The same God that later amuses himself by populating his creation, mapping out its surface over a period of six days, with rivers, mountains and deserts, with men and animals of every kind, cattle, snakes
and vermin. The way your father did when he set out the train set, Víctor: tinfoil to create the river, mountains made of cork, cotton wool for the snow and a little stationmaster with a flag and a tiny whistle.

There were no pompous words. Nor even a buzzing sound. It is much simpler: the light is God and created the world because it was bored with seeing nothing. Be its apostle. Baptise this body. And cry when you awaken. Not for the dampness you feel, the wasted seed spilled on the sheets, not for the loneliness and the frustration. Not because a single goodbye kiss was enough to kindle this dream. Nor even because Alicia is not and never will be in this bed. Cry for the light you thought you saw. Wish with all your heart that you had been born blind. Those who are born blind don’t dream in pictures. Shower, change the sheets, the ants are still hungry. And call Irina.

W
hen he wants to listen to ‘If’, it’s easy. The CD has been in the machine for months now. His fingers have memorised the movements to press
Play
and skip forward six tracks. But, at the last moment, he decides to put on the cassette instead. He would rather listen to Saint-Saëns’ Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, even though this means having to put up with all the other sounds on the tape, the soundtrack to the last minutes of Martín Losa’s life. It doesn’t matter. He has listened to it so often recently that his ears have grown accustomed to focusing on the music and filtering out everything else. The sound of the tweezers falling or the distant gasp of the death rattle are no more intrusive than the sound of the audience in a live performance. He has become obsessively fond of the sonata, especially the third movement, marked
Lento
. It is haunting, fluid, harmonious, strewn with pauses so timely that each note seems to herald the arrival of the next such that one need only whistle the first note and all the others fall into place. Every time he listens to it, he rewinds the tape so it will be ready the next time. Sometimes, during the day, he catches himself humming the melody, though perhaps he does not realise that these notes have taken over that place in his throat which, years ago, was occupied by ‘If’. It is hardly surprising that time has replaced a lullaby with a funeral march.

He has other reasons for choosing the sonata just now. Víctor turns the volume all the way up and is grateful that the music, above the hiss and crackle of the old cassette, drowns out the screams of Alicia, who seems to have little imagination when it comes to insults, given that she has repeated ‘son of a bitch’, ‘bastard’ and ‘get me out of here’ seven times already. From time
to time she attempts to formulate a threat: I’m going to … I’m going to … but she never actually completes it. Get me out of here right now. Time is another reason for choosing the sonata, because ‘If’ barely lasts three minutes while the various movements of the sonata run to more than twenty minutes. It’s not much, but it will teach her a little lesson.

Alicia arrived this morning in a sunny mood, happy because yesterday everything went perfectly. Víctor doesn’t like her displays of joy. He knows it is simply her way of seeming feisty, a means of trying to cheer him up, but it annoys him. Like her preposterous habit of speaking in the first person plural: let’s do this, we have to get that, it’s important that we understand I don’t know what. It’s an old-fashioned trick. Doctors do it, bankers and mechanics do it to try to gain their client’s trust: we’ll do an MRI scan; we’re going to need to change this cylinder head. And he can’t stand the exaggerated praise she heaps on his every achievement, however trivial, absurd and useless it might be: oh, you recognised the square; wow, you know the door is still there; bravo, you’ve managed to take three whole steps. He’s not a fucking child. He’s a blind man. All he needs is for someone to show him how to cope better. Even that’s not really true; he was perfectly fine the way he was. But whatever he needs, what he doesn’t need is someone giving him moral lectures.

Everything was going fine until Alicia started opening doors. They were in the hall doing echolocation exercises. That’s what she called them. Apparently when objects block a sound they reflect sound waves which can be interpreted by the ear and are consequently useful to the blind. There are three doors in the hall: to the kitchen, the linen cupboard and the studio. The exercise involved trying to work out whether the doors were open or closed without touching them, from the echoes made by Alicia clapping. Until the fifth attempt, Víctor didn’t notice even the slightest difference, but he forced himself to carry on trying. On the sixth attempt, he could tell that the kitchen door was open. A minor achievement which hardly warranted Alicia’s effusive congratulations: Bravo, Víctor, perfect, you’re getting the hang of this. Next, all the doors closed. And then Alicia opened the studio. Ever since they started the exercise, Víctor
had been waiting for this moment, was dying to see how she would react when she stumbled on the little museum of wonders. He was slightly scared too, because he was beginning to get to know her and he knew that she would make the most of any excuse to talk about magic, to imply that some day he would be able to work again, that all he had to do was apply himself. That kind of bullshit.