Питер Мэй - A Silent Death

His obvious distress felt like someone plunging a knife into her heart. She fought hard to stop the tears. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. It’s not you. Nothing to do with you.’

He was, quite patently, completely bewildered. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Well, what, then? What? What’s wrong, Ana?’ Heads turned, drawn by the pitch of his voice, which had risen beyond his ability to control it.

And quite suddenly her tears came. Welling up from deep inside, and spilling down her cheeks in large, quivering drops. ‘You don’t want to know.’

‘I do!’

She shook her head. ‘You won’t want to be with me anymore.’

He threw his head back in despair. ‘Why in God’s name would I not want to be with you?’

More heads turned towards them.

‘Because I’m going blind, Sergio. Soon I won’t be able to see you, or hear you. You’ll just be a touch in the dark. And you won’t want anything to do with me.’

He was shocked. Staring at her in disbelief. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I have a genetic disorder. It’s called Usher Syndrome. And it’s going to take away my sight, as well as the rest of my hearing. It’s already begun.’

He closed his eyes. ‘Oh, dear God.’ And she let him gather her into his embrace, drawing her head to his chest, fingers laced through her hair. ‘Oh, Ana. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Then he held her again by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and absolutely trapped her in his gaze. Earnest eyes staring determinedly into hers. ‘How could you think, even for one minute, that something like that would drive me away? That somehow I wouldn’t want to be with you any more?’ Now he raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘For God’s sake Ana. It’s you I love. The person you are inside. Not what you can see or hear.’

But the only thing she heard was It’s you I love . Words that replayed themselves in her brain like an echo on a loop. And she saw that he did not even realize what he’d said.

He was oblivious. ‘We’ll find a way to communicate. It’ll only bring us closer.’

She wiped the tears from her face, but couldn’t stop the flow of more. ‘An instructor is coming next week to start teaching me touch-signing while I can still see and hear. I don’t know exactly how it works, but...’ Her voice trailed away.

‘I’ll learn it with you,’ he said quickly. ‘We’ll be fluent in it in no time.’

And she imagined how intimate that might be. Communication by touch alone. She couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather have touch her. And for the first time since receiving the diagnosis, a glimmer of light shone somewhere in the darkness of her future.

The next weeks passed in a blur, and in equal measures of hope and despair. Learning tactile signing was easier than she had thought, since in many ways it was like a sensory extension of the signing for the deaf that she had already started to adopt. But as each session required her to close her eyes, she began to get a sense of what it would be like to be blind, and the shadow that cast upon her future was deep and depressing. By contrast, hope came from the regular and intimate contact with Sergio. They attended the lessons together, and there was something arousing about feeling his hands on hers when she couldn’t see him. His fingers on her face, and hers on his. Something she had never known before.

Since the evenings were still light, she persuaded her father that she could travel to and from the centre by bus, and she thought he was relieved to be excused from the obligation of driving her there and back. But, in fact, she and Sergio only attended the centre on the days that the instructor came, and two evenings a week they would go and eat together at a little fish restaurant on the beach front at Santa Ana.

The proprietor was a small bald man with no teeth who greeted them every evening with a gummy smile and a bottle of white wine that he set open on the table almost before they sat down. They ate salad with tuna, and boquerones , and calamares and abadejo, and watched the sea wash pink phosphorescence upon the shore as the sun dipped towards the west. They closed their eyes and practised touch-signing with fingers greasy from anchovies and olive oil, and Ana thought she had never laughed so much in her life.

It was a desperate idyll. Desperate because it could not last, idyllic because they were sharing themselves with each other in ways that most people would never experience.

On the nights they ate at the restaurant, Sergio would drive her home, dropping her in a quiet street just around the corner from the apartment. Always before darkness fell, although already she was struggling to see in the twilight.

Nearly two months of tuition in the basics of tactile signing, and the regular practice she achieved with Sergio, was paying dividends. Already she was quite comfortable with it, spending sometimes hours on end with her eyes closed, the world reaching her only through Sergio’s fingertips. But the summer was coming to an end, and with it the nights were drawing in. There was less and less light, and Sergio was forced to take her home earlier. Soon, as the evenings grew darker, Ana’s father was going to insist on picking her up from the centre, and their idyll must come to an end.

It was a hot evening in mid-September when a thunderstorm rumbling across the Mediterranean from North Africa brought the meal at their little restaurant in Santa Ana to a premature end. They saw the storm approaching across the water, like a giant rolling cloud of mist, blotting out the blue of the evening sky, and finally the sun, before the wind that accompanied it began whipping large stinging drops of rain in under the awning. Day turned to night in the space of only a few minutes.

Sergio took her hand and they ran to where he had parked his car in the narrow Calle Condesa de Arcos. But, still, they were soaked by the time they had thrown themselves into the seats and slammed the doors shut. Rain streamed down the windscreen, and all the windows in the car quickly misted.

Ana was alarmed by how little she could see as they drove up the hill towards Marviña. The storm seemed to be following them, surging up the slope in their wake. The rain hammered out a deafening tattoo on the roof, and even though her hearing was fading, Ana felt it fill the car.

Marviña was deserted as they drove past the police and fire stations before turning down to their right, the view across the valley to the mountains obliterated by the storm. Sergio wanted to take her as close as he could to her apartment. It was almost dark out there, and the rain was obscuring the far end of the street. But Ana told him to stop. She could make it home from here, she said. It would be dangerous to get much closer because it was likely that in this weather her father would head out to meet her off the bus in the square.

Reluctantly, Sergio pulled in. He reached over to brush the wet hair from Ana’s face and leaned in to kiss her. A long, lingering kiss that left the taste of him on her lips. She would have given anything to stay with him, safe and warm in the car. But the threat of an encounter with her father was too great. He would be incandescent if he knew that Ana had continued seeing Sergio, after he had made her promise him that she wouldn’t.

She let her fingers trail gently across the fine stubble on his cheeks. ‘See you Wednesday,’ she said, and slipped out into the night.

She was startled in the rain by a figure that appeared out of nowhere. A shadow disengaging itself from the dark, brushing past her to round the front of Sergio’s car and open the driver’s door.

‘Get out, you pervert!’ It was her father’s voice.

In the rain and the gloom, it was a shadow play that acted itself out before her. Her father dragging the hapless Sergio from his car, a fist swinging through the night to impact with the face she had so recently touched with loving fingers. She screamed as she saw Sergio fall into the road, raindrops hammering the surface of it, bouncing off the tarmac all around him. She saw her father pull back his leg to swing repeated kicks into the chest and stomach of the now foetal curl of the young man who had just kissed her.