Lina Meruane - Seeing Red

eye for an eye

I opened my eye, and there was the little girl with the patch over one side of her face, the girl shooting the electric ray of her gaze at me. In that single uncovered eye is concentrated all the fear of hospitals that now falls like an ax onto my cornea. While outside the street revives — a gust or a whisper in the distance — and the sun peers indignantly through the gaps in the curtains to track us with its flame; while light bulbs swayed slightly in the ceiling, moved by the incessant march of Filipinas changing shifts; while I struggled to wake up, the dazzling, chilling blue of her eye had already been awake for hours, aimed at me. I half-closed my own eye, trying to protect myself. (I looked for you, but you hadn’t appeared.) I blinked, unable to convince myself that I’d emerged from an anesthetic void only to fall, struck down by the gaze of a little girl who was waiting for her doctor too. The creature didn’t take her eye off me, didn’t hold back a gram of that pupil. It was her eye against mine, but mine was just an iris tattered by operations, a faltering pupil. Was she a demon, a sprite, a post-op hallucination? At what point had this girl arrived, so little and so bewildered at finding another cyclops like herself? She was a couple meters away, perplexed; she didn’t complain or scratch at the skin around her patch, and I looked away. And in that deflection that was the only possible escape, I realized the little girl wasn’t alone. No. Around the girl were clamped the fingers of someone who must be her mother. Don’t stare at her like that, murmured the woman, and her voice echoed off the room’s high ceilings. Don’t look at her, she’s looking at you, she repeated, though without the slightest modesty she brazenly ran her own eyes over me: both of hers staring at my lack of one. It’s not polite, she explained, though still blasting me with her gaze. My naked eye was looking at the blurry girl, and then the mother, who was wiping the oil from her forehead, and then at the daughter, confused, waiting for something to happen. Have they taken one of your eyes too, I heard the mother say. Did they have to cut out a cancer. It wasn’t a question but rather a recrimination, a reproach that the mother unsheathed to show that her suffering was superior, the suffering of a mother facing her daughter’s single but devastating eye. And then I remembered my mother, my mother thrusting her old eyes on me as we said goodbye, and I thought about Ignacio, his two flawless black eyes, his eyes he didn’t seem aware of; and I also thought I would be left very alone without my eye if I lost it; I’d have an orphan face. And then. If you care so much about your daughter, ma’am, I said, challenging her, daring her to a duel with herself. If the loss hurts you that much, give her the eye that she’s missing. Give it to her right now, though it’s still too big for her.

proof

(I know that you were committing a slow suicide by nicotine while our fate was being decided. The hours passed by you and you didn’t see them, Ignacio, nor did you see the nurses or the janitors mopping under your feet. You didn’t see anything until you saw Lekz saying goodbye to the court of eye doctors and walking desolately down a hall. His face was shrouded, his arms hung burdened and lifeless by his sides, and Lekz told you we’ll talk tomorrow, we’ll talk about everything, with Lucina, more calmly. For now it’s best you take her home, and you get some rest too, he said, avoiding your name. And he said goodbye without looking at you, leaving you standing in the air, suspended, with the chance for a sudden but maybe premeditated escape, the guilty flight that would one day bring you tamely back. You had nowhere to go, I had become your only place, you told me all this later, don’t you remember? How you felt the need to flee. You went out to buy another pack of cigarettes, to walk through the warm night that suddenly smelled to you like violets, and you walked away following that scent like a goose chasing spring, but the violets disappeared from the breeze and suddenly you were in a square planted with weeds and soulless benches frequented by ruined old men in pants that no one washed, old men who slept alone, each by himself under cardboard sheets until the snow, the ice came, and then. Then? You said aloud, but no one heard your question because you were alone. Like the old man you would soon be, in the future, thinking about that girlfriend you’d abandoned in the hospital, erupting in blood. And then nothing, you shouted, terrified of your own howl, suspicious of the anguished murmur you heard. Were they yours, all those voices arguing savagely inside you? Was it true, had Lucina or her voice really said that to you before she went into surgery? You shook your head, no, it’s not true, then nothing, nothing, you repeated like crazy, but the voice pecked at your head, it wouldn’t let you erase the words I had thrown at you only a few hours before, my voice asking for that, the ancient proof of love. Only one, Ignacio, the proof is only one, I would never ask for both. The smallest proof I could ask you for, scarcely larger than a marble. I asked you because I had no choices left, because I had understood even before Lekz did that all his science had failed. It’s not true, you told yourself, and you repeated that our conversation had not happened, that I would never have dared, ever, but then you started to think otherwise, that I had asked you for something you held so dear, and my request was so vivid, so exact, so simple, that you couldn’t have made it up. Which of us is crazier, you asked, and I know you let out a peal of dry laughter trying to think of something other than my voice, something beyond me; you went on repeating with sudden happiness that the thing you would give me would unite us forever, it would make us equal, turn us into mirror images for the rest of our lives until death. And even after, my voice told you in your head, though we knew nothing about after. What matters is now, that’s what I’d told you, turning my face away when you wanted to put an end to the discussion. Put an end to it as though it had never happened. But what the fuck are you asking me for, Lucina, you asked me, blaring your voice in the park, talking to the air and the rats, the pigeons. How could you even think I’m going to give you that, you said, without daring to name what I was asking for. Just that. But how could you think of that, you said in silence, kicking some burned sticks with rage, with justified distrust, suddenly wondering, jealously, if there was another man who could say yes, yes, Lucina, yes, I do want to be yours forever. A guy capable of saying it and feeling it literally. I know that you were tortured by your own indecision, your difficulty in answering my request with a round yes or an equally definitive no. Listen to me, Ignacio, I’d said. Don’t you think I’d do the same for you? My question resounded, it echoed back to you, it filled your mouth with retching, with bile — because you’d gone hours without eating — empty vomit just imagining that you would give me that and you’d have to live looking at me afterward. And you went on killing yourself with puffs of smoke while I slept, strangely tranquil, dreaming of your myopic and beautiful gaze, dreaming free of that shameless question that now you shouldered in the night. I only ask for one. Lenses won’t help me, colored glass is worthless. You tried not to think about that, you directed your attention to the flame of the match, you counted how many seconds it took to cool and how long your finger could stay pressed against its ember. I know you tried to empty your mind, staring at those skeletal trees that one by one were losing their leaves in the wind, and there you still were at dawn, going in circles around the square and in your head, wishing I hadn’t given you that condition when I said goodbye. If you can’t commit and give me what I want, don’t come back tomorrow.)