Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

As lovers they had talked of going to South America. Maybe following through with that was the answer. Ava had found the Ecuador tour on the Internet while searching the ethnobotany Web sites, especially the ones that were obvious drug tours dressed up as culture quests. It was all her idea — the river trip, the yaje, the Secoya village — a possible journey for Steadman to find a subject to write about. It had everything: Indians, rain forest, drugs, difficulty, exoticism. She had contacted Nestor and bought the tickets, because she felt certain that it was their last trip, an innovative goodbye, “a ceremony of farewell” was how she put it, like the despedida, a word she was to learn later. He agreed. Months before, they had stopped making love. That coincided with his abandoning his writing, as though writer’s block was another expression of impotence. Neither of them imagined that the trip would keep their relationship together — blind him, inspire him as Burroughs had been inspired, arouse him, fire him with the idea for a book.

How were they to know that the farewell would become its opposite — the way home, truth-seeking, a renewal that was a kind of betrothal? They now saw that the trip to Ecuador had been a revelation, for from the moment he was overwhelmed, fearing he was lost, Ava took charge. At the onset of his darkness she gave him light and propped him up, so he hardly knew the terror of blindness — or, more precisely (for he wanted to be precise), what he knew of it, the descent of blackness had so terrified him that he was not even aware how long it lasted. In that seemingly endless loop in the hazy time-scheme of a dream, just before he woke from his datura trance and she was holding his hand, he understood that it was not blackness at all but rather a bedazzlement, a blinding light of revelation, more than he could bear by himself.

Ava promised not to leave him. She left the hospital instead. She asked for a leave of absence. “I need a break. I’m tyrannized by my pager.”

She moved onto the estate with him, and he began his book. Writing occupied his whole day now. He talked, she recorded it, she took notes; she played his words back to him. She was full of suggestions; he needed her encouragement and approval. And his prose always sounded better to him, with a ghostwritten concision, when she repeated it.

He was living at the margin, trespassing again, and delighting in being on the frontier. The shadows had always given him a clear view of the world. He had Ava’s word on this. The man in the book was him. The women, all of them, were Ava.

She repeated that his taking the blinding datura was an indulgence — his conceit, his arrogance — but in the same breath would admit how fluent and observant he became in his blindness.

Saying “Now let’s finish it,” she praised him for noticing particularities, for remembering so much.

All the rooms he had known as a sensualist, their odors like reeking ghosts, and every disfigurement of their ceilings; the peripheral sounds of birdsong, wisps of music, muttered remarks, far-off voices — these and more. One entire chapter was background, no foreground, although all that was implied — a love scene, in fact. The man on the floor, the woman kneeling astride him, facing his feet — this was suggested by the movement in the mirror, the tugging of the carpet, the frantic cheeping of the caged bird, the shapes they cast on the wall, like Javanese shadow puppets — more subtle for being elongated — and the way it all sounded to a thirteen-year-old girl named Flora passing in the street outside, walking her dog. It was the dog that first noticed, frisky at the almost inaudible sounds. Then the young girl looked up at the jumping shadows and the fluttering candlelight, and she stopped to watch and remember a scene that might not make complete sense to her for years.

“And what did Flora say?”

“Flora just watched.”

Flora just watched, she wrote, saying, “But Flora was mumbling to herself, as if seeing into a cloudy aquarium.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s watching, but we do. And so we are seeing it through her eyes, understanding it, though she doesn’t.”

“That’s nice. Details, please.”

Every detail was in his description except the sight of the two people on the floor, the man hovering, holding the woman’s ankles as he penetrated her, but in the way Steadman dictated it the whole room was suffused by the sexual act, the lamplight, the wallpaper, the flowers, the reflections from the wineglasses, the half-heard murmurs vibrating in furniture, the walls glimpsed incompletely from outside, so much of it a play of warm lopsided light on the ceiling and finally filling the imagination of the young girl in the street.

When he was done he told Ava he loved being alone with her, spinning his story.

“You’re not making it up,” she said. “You’re remembering it.”

He wondered at her certainty. He saw it all so clearly, peering within himself, his life so vivid in recollection it did not matter to him whether it was real or invented. He could see so distinctly into his early youth, memories of yearning and discovery, of the satisfying approximations of desire, when to his boy’s lust, sex was everything, in the far-off country of the flesh.

“I want you to look at me like I am a piece of meat,” Ava said, and laughed, and he could tell she meant it. “Salivate and then take me. I want to watch you eat me.”

He was aware in his blindness that Ava closely observed him, remembering his reactions and using them to please him. Early on, his glance at the waitress’s blond hair was one of her insights, inspiring her to wear the blond wig — a simple thing, but on her straight-haired and serious doctor’s head it was a wild promise. In the first flush of his love affair with Charlotte she had done that — studied him in order to please him. When another woman flirted and he responded, Charlotte didn’t scold but instead flirted with him and aroused him. It hadn’t lasted. He had forgotten it until the memories were all returned to him in his blindness. And his blindness allowed Ava to explore his curiosity, giving her access to the hungry man within him who hardly had words for what he wanted but was obsessed by imagery.

Another summer day he chose to drive blind, walk blind, shop blind, get money blindly from an ATM machine, tap his cane near the ferry and take pleasure in the way he could part a crowd, cutting a swath through it like a prophet in a hurry. Men became anxious and helpless when they saw him; women lingered to watch, wishing to touch him. What was it about his blindness that roused women and made them protective, maternal, calm, sexual, all at once? Seeing him, it seemed they would do anything for him.

He tapped his way into a health food store on a side street in Vineyard Haven. He rummaged and by smell alone found a box of herbal tea bags and a jar of honey and a bag of garlic-flavored croutons and a package of sun-dried tomatoes, placing them in the basket that Ava carried. The shop’s sections were defined and made logical by their delicious fragrances. But these too were memories. He had been there many times before. Years of being solitary had made him obsessive and turned him into a food crank. A preoccupation with health and the body was one of the consequences of isolation. Another was its opposite, disdaining health and order, damaging yourself. There was nothing in between. It was either self-denial or gluttonous indulgence; lonely people were either health nuts or chain smokers. He had told Ava that. He had told Ava everything. He repeated it that day as they left the place.

Ava said, “Now I know why you’re a writer, because you’re so sure of yourself even when you’re wrong. Especially when you’re wrong.”