The Manual of Darkness (47 page)

They’re called Blindman’s Ballads, because the blind recited them in the streets, the markets, in the squares. That was how they earned their living in the Golden Age. It’s a lot less boring than selling lottery tickets. And easier than performing magic. All it requires is a good memory, something you have in spades. And it pays well. The last line mentions the price because, after the performance, they sold copies of the ballad accompanied by crude drawings. A handful of pages tied with cord. The study of these ballads is called
literatura de cordel
. The ballads tell of ghastly crimes, terrible vengeance, anguished repentance. Very up to date.
It’s the sort of thing you might see on TV. And there’s a guaranteed audience.

There was a lot of controversy in the Gallery of Famous Blind People when the balladeers were allowed in. Technically none of them, taken individually, was famous. But it is impossible to deny that, taken together, they represent something important, a literary genre some might dismiss as vulgar or even as a precursor to the tabloid journalism of today but one to which whole chapters are devoted in academic studies and in any encyclopaedia worthy of the name. When the dispute was at its height, Homer intervened and said: ‘I don’t see why we’re arguing. These men invented a whole genre, for God’s sake. Just as I did. It’s not their fault if later writers abused it.’ Some suspect that Homer just liked the fact that the gallery was heaving with people because that way he could go round hoovering up any gossip he overhead and then circulate it later as if it were his own.

In the end, the balladeers were admitted but, given that they were famous only as a group, it was on condition that they spoke in unison. Nor were they allowed to recite the last verse, since there was no such thing as money in the gallery. They proved popular for a couple of centuries: they made a lot of noise and the stories they told were fascinating. But after a while, everyone stopped listening. However much they dressed them up with extravagant words and rhymes, the stories they told always involved the same crimes. Worse still, there was no way for them to add to their repertoire since crime did not exist in the gallery. Not, it must be said, because its inhabitants were of superior moral fibre compared to the rest of humanity; it’s just that there is very little point killing or robbing when you’re immortal. You stab someone and the next minute he’s alive again.

I
t was her when it was simply a matter of speaking. Warm, honeyed words that carried something like a promise in every phrase, but that was only words. She was the one who took the initiative in those first kisses, and goes on doing so now that you have ripped off her clothes; or rather now that you have made them vanish, since that is how dreams work, the clothes suddenly disappear and suddenly your fingers are toying with the mole they’ve discovered on the small of her back, like someone glancing through a foreword, deliberately postponing the excitement because the best is yet to come, the moment when your hand slips down between her buttocks, when she tenses her stomach slightly and your fingers begin to discover flesh, fluid, skin, and perhaps you will hear her voice murmur in your ear, closer now, because only her voice proves that it is truly her rather than one of the thousands of women who could be in her place right now. If this happens, if she whispers a single word, you will want to enter her because her voice is a promise of paradise regained, and though she is tall and strong willed, you will turn her body to your every whim, perhaps you will direct her, lie back, part your legs a little more, move up, move back, tighter, harder; or perhaps you will simply grab her hips and go for the shortest, quickest route. But it’s not possible for you to have sex with Bacall, you might as well know that before you even try. She is made of light, remember? You can’t fuck a ghost. She will cease to be whoever she is the moment you slip inside her. It’s a rule. Even touching her feels like insolence, and if you carry on, if you stubbornly persist in trying to find a sensitive spot, if you dare to brush your body against hers, the dream will probably evaporate. Pretend it is Irina, lick or nibble the collarbone you know so well, taste Irina, or if it’s the
unknown that turns you on, convince yourself that it’s Alicia, cradle her slender limbs in your hands and do what you will with her. Or give in to the banal fantasy of imagining it’s a nurse, any of the nurses who traipse through your room giving you more painkillers, the nurse who was here the day before yesterday who showed you how to find the play button on the DVD player, the nurse who knows you have not taken off your headphones since, not even when you go to sleep, the one who opens the door from time to time and finds you still muttering those lines in English at all hours of the day and night, the one who asked you this morning whether the girl from ONCE was coming back and, when you didn’t answer, wanted to know whether you were all right, whether you needed anything. Be vulgar, tell her that there is something she can do, put her in a short skirt with too much lipstick and fuck her hard and fast, but leave Bacall in peace because you’re going to wake up in a hospital bed, your shoulder will ache, you’ll feel like someone ripped your hip out with their teeth, you’ll be alone and the long fall from this towering paradise to the dank basement of reality might prove fatal. You should dream to order, Víctor. Lots of people do it. Before you close your eyes, tell yourself, ‘I’m going to dream about this.’ Something that is not painful. Something beautiful but inconsequential, something that you won’t yearn for when you wake. A poppy field. Wet sand. You’ll know. And phone Irina.

T
he piece of wood is already a cube, so the only difference with a dice is the edges. They have to be carefully sanded, the edges rounded so that chance can glide across them and show its capricious face. Though he does not always manage to do so, Víctor tries to keep his shoulder and his arm still, as Alicia instructed. He feels like a washerwoman desperately scrubbing a shirtsleeve. When he gets bored, or when he realises that he is holding the piece of wood awkwardly and is about to sand his knuckles, he takes a break.

Darius assumed the cube was a toy and rolled it under the chairs a couple of times. After that he became obsessed with running his tongue over the sandpaper. Now he’s tottering around the visitors’ room, pointing at objects and naming them: chair, shoe, more shoe. Paper, he says just before pushing all the magazines off the coffee table on to the floor.

‘He speak more good Spanish than me,’ Irina says as she gathers them up.

Víctor reaches his hand out and offers Darius the cube. There is the sound of a wooden block rolling across the floor.

‘Tomorrow I’ll be able to pay you for the last few days,’ he says. ‘They’re finally letting me go home.’

‘This no is work,’ Irina says.

‘Of course it is,’ Víctor replies. ‘You wash me, you dress me, you help me find my way through these corridors. It’s work.’

‘Greek-style is work. French-style is work.’

‘Someone really should invent the Romanian.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing. Are you going to shave me?’

‘Of course. All-inclusive price.’

Yesterday, he asked her to bring shaving foam and two or three razor blades. They get up, and Víctor takes her elbow. Irina did not need any instructions to be able to guide him. They start to walk, but Darius is still dawdling behind. She has to let Víctor go, pick up the boy, then offer him her elbow again. They ask a nurse for a washbowl and then head back to his bathroom. Víctor sits on the toilet. Irina drapes a towel across his chest, wets his beard then lathers it with lots of shaving foam. From time to time, she stop to glance at Darius, who has his hands in the washbowl. She starts to shave Víctor, but quickly stops. By the third pass, the blade is already clogged with hair. Víctor tells her to keep going, tells her not to worry if it snags, that it doesn’t hurt, but Irina goes out and asks a nurse for a pair of scissors.

‘Come over here, Darius,’ Víctor says when Irina leaves. ‘Give me a hug.’

They both open their arms. Since the boy is silent, it takes Víctor a second or two to find him. He picks him up, sits him on his lap and says:

‘How much does Víctor love you?’

‘Much!’

‘How much?’

‘Thiiiiiiiiiiis much!’ Darius flings his arms wide, then starts clapping. It’s something he learned today.

What would life have been like if I’d had children? Víctor thinks. I’m forty years old, I could have children in their teens by now. Would they look after him? Would they think he was a pain in the neck? Would they treat him with infuriating pity? Irina appears with the scissors and starts to cut his beard. Víctor likes the click of the blades next to his face. There are a few sounds that perfectly emit the light of the immutable world: the tinkling that slips in through his kitchen window in the late afternoon as mothers start to make tortillas; the rumble of the bin lorry that sometimes finds him lying awake in the middle of the night; the clicking of scissors; the muffled sound of Darius’s footsteps. The sounds reassure him that the world is still there, that the cruel disappearance is not yet complete.

Twenty minutes later, Irina has reduced his beard to something closer to three-day stubble and both the towel draped over Víctor’s
chest and the floor are covered in hair. Darius is sitting on the bed watching television.

‘Wait,’ Víctor says. ‘Start up here.’ He points to his left cheek just below the sideburn. ‘And just shave down as far as here. I want to see what a goatee feels like.’

‘You are crazy man,’ Irina says.

But she does what he asks. When she has finished, he asks her to shave off everything except the moustache. Irina tells him it looks horrible. Making the most of the fact that their faces are close together, Víctor steals a kiss. A peck on the lips.

‘Prickles.’

When, finally, there is not a hair left, she lathers his face and, dipping the last blade in the washbowl, shaves him again. It feels like the sandpaper rubbing against wood. When she has finished, she runs her fingers over his cheeks to make sure it is perfect. She straddles Víctor’s legs, presses herself against him, his groin, his chest, his face, especially his face. They move their heads, rubbing their cheeks together. They do not kiss; she breathes softly into his ear.

‘Irina …’ Víctor says as he feels a hand slip under his dressing gown, ‘Irina … Darius.’

She reaches out her other hand and gently pushes the bathroom door shut.

‘One minute.’

She kneels down, pushes her hair away from her face, and takes the base of Víctor’s cock in her hand. She does not take it in her mouth, but she licks it. There are no edges to sand away. It takes longer than a minute. But not much. And he does not make a sound.

‘Now you
have
to let me pay …’ Víctor says when it is over. ‘Because that … That is work, yes?’

Irina does not answer.

S
itting on the floor next to the wardrobe in his bedroom, he cradles his father’s box in his lap. He has not opened it yet. From time to time, he leans his body slightly, bringing his left ear close to the wardrobe. He holds this position for a few seconds then goes back to how he was. Yesterday, as the ambulance was bringing him home, he had the fleeting impression that he could distinguish the slightest movements in the air. Now he has just discovered that he can tell the precise moment when he is about to touch the wardrobe door. He tries it again, to make sure the effect is not temporary or simply a matter of chance. It is progress. A spontaneous development. Not something he has been practising. He feels more surprised than happy. Alicia has often talked to him about how the other senses become refined to compensate for lack of vision, but this is different. It is not that his hearing has become more acute. There is nothing to hear, neither the wardrobe nor his body is making a sound, there is just a slight shifting of the air, a subtle increase in pressure on his eardrum as he brings his head closer to the door. This progress is something offered him by time: a spontaneous increase in sensitivity, something that clearly also involves his skin, because he has just begun to notice a slight breeze on his wrists, his ankles, around his neck. No windows are open. It is simply the shifting of cold air slipping under the front door, tiptoeing along the hallway and coming into his bedroom to greet him. If Víctor believed in such things, he would call it a spirit or, to be more precise, the faint tremor spirits produce as they move. He knows exactly what Alicia would say, if he told her. Congratulations.

He is not going to say anything. He doesn’t want to talk about the progress he is making. On the contrary, the reason he has taken
out his father’s box is because he wants to show her something that negates the very possibility of progress in the hope that he can get her to stop congratulating him on every little improvement. When the intercom buzzes, Víctor will open the box, rummage around and find the piece of amber then put the box back where it was, or maybe just toss it on the floor since none of the other objects inside interests him any more. He will wait impatiently for Alicia by the front door as she stows her bike in the hall and starts up the stairs, or maybe he’ll use those minutes to go over what he wants to say, to find the right words, the right order: look, I want to show you something. And if she just stands there in silence, holding the lump of amber, not knowing what to do, or she just tells him it’s lovely, Víctor will ask her to focus on the insect trapped inside. Nineteen sixty-six, he will say. Until 1966, myrmecologists dated the earliest fossil traces of ants to between forty and sixty million years. Everyone took it for granted that they had existed before that, but no one could find proof. The discovery came by chance. And it wasn’t some adventure, some expedition, nothing to do with Amazonian rainforests, caves, jungles, insect bites or disease. An elderly couple were walking on Cliffwood Beach in New Jersey. A storm had broken up the clay embankments by the beach. As they wandered, they picked up a number of pieces of amber and, inside one pristine nugget, they saw what seemed to be the shadow of an ant. They then sent it to a university. His father told him all this years ago. He is not even sure which university it was: Harvard, Yale, one of those. Initial investigations dated the amber to ninety million years, something spectacular in itself, but the real commotion in the scientific community came when it was studied under a microscope. The insect – or what was left of it – had only two teeth, like a wasp, but had a gland specific to ants; the thorax of a wasp and the trunk of an ant. It was the missing link. Obviously what he is holding now is not the original piece of amber, but a scientifically accurate reproduction. A curiosity his father used to take pride in showing him.