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excerpt

Jordi Gual: A portrait of his blind daughter
He raps once lightly on the door and almost simultaneously opens it. He
enters the kitchen, unhurried, again nearly blinded by the gloom. Then
he sees her, an image in a photographer's tray, emerging into focus.
Later that night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, or bending to the
fridge for a beer, Andrew will recall again the swift surprise of her
presence, her back resting against the sink, her arms folded across her
chest. It wasn't that he hadn't expected her; he had known she would be
waiting for him. It was that her proximity, after all these years, was
deeply unsettling, as if a fragment of a dream, a dream he'd thought he
lost years ago, had indeed turned out to be real.
"HELLO," she says.
She is holding herself still, her gaze seemingly directed toward a
window beside him.
"I wanted to see you," he says. He shakes his head. "To speak with you,
I mean." He stands in the center of the linoleum floor, uncertain as to
whether he should sit at the table, make himself at home, or not. She
has not invited him to. Perhaps, he thinks, she has no sense now, as he
does, of the awkwardness of a conversation conducted standing stiffly
face to face. Though she cannot see him, he feels uneasy in front of
her. His arms and hands are appendages that seem no longer to belong to
him. He folds them across his chest in unconscious parody of her stance.
"I thought. Yes," she says elliptically.
A quick intake of air she cannot fail to hear betrays his nervousness.
"So how are you?" he asks. It is an inane question, and instantly he
regrets it.
She gives the faintest of shrugs. "I am always all right," she says
evenly.
He searches for the next sentence as if hunting for a trail that will
lead him out of an unfamiliar wood. All his choices seem lame.
"It's been a long time," he says.
She doesn't answer him. Instead she turns her head so that she is
looking at him so acutely he wonders fleetingly if perhaps he has got it
wrong—and she can see after all. Her stare is uncompromising. He tries
to imagine what it is that she "sees": his presence must be to her a
voice in a vast inky sea.
"Your mother is dead," she says.
Her words startle him. The sentence is bald, unadorned. Almost
unfeeling. But he realizes that he likes the frank statement. Likes not
hearing an expression of sympathy, likes not hearing the words I'm sorry
for the hundredth time. The fact is a simple one: His mother is dead,
and she has said only that.
"Yes. We had the funeral. Your mother came. Did she tell you?"
"She tells me ... some things. But you always did that."
"What?"
"Call her my mother."
"Well, she's..."
"Not."
He nods. He realizes she cannot see the nod. "Right," he says.
It will take some time to learn how to speak to her, he thinks.
Everything must be in the voice.
"Jim died here," she says.
Another bald sentence, one that takes him by surprise. During his three
brief visits to this house, Andrew has not thought of this fact, but, of
course, he knows it is true. Jim died in this house, on the floor
upstairs, and Andrew's father found him. He has a sudden, too vivid
image of Edith Close being pressed to the ground by the ambulance
attendants, of Eden with a bloodstained towel at her head, of his father
with the rifle limp beside his leg.
"You have a wife and child," she says, her gaze sliding a few degrees
off his face.
Perhaps it is having been alone for so long that reduces her sentences
to this simplicity, he thinks. She has lost the etiquette of
conversation, having had, he supposes, no experience with small talk. If
it were T.J., or anyone else, the sentence would have been looser: "So I
hear you're married"—something with a tone of familiarity.
"No," he explains, trying to answer her with equally honest sentences.
"I have a son but no wife. We're separated. I live alone, and I see
Billy, my son, on weekends."
"I won't have a son," she says.
She says it quickly, without emotion, though it brings him up short. He
wants to say, too glibly, Of course you will, as he might to almost
anyone else, but her statement rings so true he cannot form a reply.
He shifts his weight. He glances down at his feet, then looks at her
again. He tries to take it in. All the years spent here. All the days
inside this house while he was away; all the years, while he was in
college, in the city, at his home in Saddle River. He thinks of what he
has had—the grown-up toys and trinkets, the days filled with color and
people and work, while she has had only this. Who can calculate, he
thinks, even the accumulated weight of one single day: a hundred colors
seen in a glance out a kitchen window; a dozen lives witnessed in one
brisk walk through an office; the complex wealth of a meal with a wife
and child. While her days seem to him, appear to him, impoverished by
contrast—weightless, undistinguishable one from the other. Or is he
wrong? Is there in her slow universe a life as rich as, even richer
than, his own?
Yet for all his advantages, he has the distinct feeling of being at a
disadvantage. There is a reality here that he is unprepared for—one
seeming to have little to do with the minutiae of the life he has left
behind. It is in keeping, he thinks, with the way he has been feeling
lately, the way he sometimes does on vacation, the workaday world he has
left on hold receding hour by hour so that it seems like something from
another period of his life, so that he is no longer sure which is his
real life, that or this. His world now, circumscribed by the two houses,
far from the screening room and the noise of telephones, far from the
Thai restaurant where he usually lunches and from the banter of men in
offices, is this tiny piece of geography and the three women who have
inhabited it for all of the nineteen years he has been gone.
He examines her. He is a voyeur, seeing what she cannot see. She is
taller, he observes, but not very tall at all—perhaps five feet four or
five feet five. Her arms and legs are slender, her abdomen nonexistent,
like a girl's. Meeting her on the street, one would find it impossible
to guess her age.
With her hair tangled behind her, her arms folded across her chest, she
might be a young housewife, he thinks, barefoot, in old clothes, turning
from the dishes in the sink to confront a husband across the room, her
children playing in the backyard, seen through the window. He notices
again the gray substance on her hands. She is, in some ways,
astonishingly ordinary. What had he expected? Someone retarded?
Deformed? A character in a dream? Rapunzel in a tower?
And yet she is not ordinary at all. It is in her speech, in the way she
tilts her head as if to catch a clue in the silence. Her speech is
off—too direct and then too enigmatic, as if rehearsed but never spoken.
He thinks of the way he sometimes rehearses in his mind whole dialogues
he never actually has.
"What do you look like now?" she asks.
He lets out a small laugh, more a release of tension than because the
question is amusing. He puts his hands on his hips.
"Well," he says, "pretty much the same, though older and more decrepit."
He smiles. Can she remember what he used to look like, after all these
years of darkness, of nothingness? Can she remember what any human face
looks like?
"Wrinkled here and there," he continues. "A few gray hairs. T.J. says
I'm out of shape, and doubtless he's right."
When he says T.J.'s name, she flinches almost imperceptibly, but he is
certain he is not mistaken.
"Are you looking at me?" she asks.
"Yes," he says.
"What do I look like now?"
"Oh," he says. Is it possible she does not know? Of course it's
possible, he thinks. Unless she can see herself by touch, or unless
Edith has patiently described her features. But he cannot imagine Edith
doing this. And would Edith tell the truth?
"You've grown some," he begins, "but you look younger than most women
your age. You're slender. Your face is much as I remember it, except for
the, ah, eye and the color of your face, which is pale. Your skin is
very white. Uncommonly white."
It is this whiteness that makes him cautious, he realizes, that reminds
him he is an intruder—as if he'd dived too deeply toward the ocean floor
and found in a sea cave a creature not meant to see the light or to be
seen. He takes a step closer to her—he wants to see her face more
clearly—and a floorboard under the linoleum creaks under his weight.
"Tell me about the eye," she says.
"It's..." He swallows. "It's somewhat elongated, shaped more like an
almond than your other. And beside it there is a bit of skin that is
smoother than the rest. And there seems to be a small patch of very
slight depressions. It looks ... OK," he says, stammering. "I mean that.
It looks not exactly normal, but it's not ... unattractive either. I am
trying to be accurate."
"Thank you," she says.
"Does that seem like how you see yourself? Think of yourself, I mean?"
"I didn't know my skin was white," she says. "I can't really imagine
that."
"No," he says.
She moves her weight against the sink. She crosses her ankles. Her bones
are small and delicate. It surprises him to think of her as delicate: in
his mind she was always tough and sturdy, though he supposes she created
this impression by her demeanor.
"Perhaps I didn't say exactly what I meant," he says. "You're really
very beautiful."
He thinks he sees a smile skimming across her lips, and when it is
quickly gone, he finds himself disappointed. He wants, he realizes, a
real smile.
The possibility, however, seems remote. The visit is proving more
difficult than he had imagined. Reunions are always fraught with awkward
tensions—the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find,
through memories, an ember of the old emotions—but this one has no
rules. What memory could he dredge up now without fear of hurting her?
Memories from the past upset her, Edith said. Is this true?
"So what do you do all day?" he blurts out, unable for a moment to
endure the silence, her poise.
"What do you do all day?" she retorts quickly.
"Right," he says, and nods. He smiles again. This is better.
He brings his hand up, rubs his cheek with his palm. He has an idea. "Do
you ever...?" he asks. "I've heard, or read, about it and was wondering
... Would you like, would it help, to touch my face?"
He is thankful she cannot see him just now. It is one of a thousand
deceits the sighted can practice on the blind. Or do they, he wonders,
have ways of deceiving the sighted? Hearing things we did not know we
said? He wonders if she will be able to feel the heat in his face.
She shrugs.
The silence in the kitchen is so complete he can hear the refrigerator
whining.
He walks to the sink, pauses a moment, and then reaches for her hand.
Her fingers are cool, and when he touches her, the touch is so private
he feels he might lose his balance, and he nearly withdraws his own
hand. But instead he pulls her hand from where it is wrapped tightly
around her elbow. She doesn't resist. He brings her hand to his face, to
his cheek, in an unnatural gesture. He has the weight of her hand in
his, but when he lets his own go, she leaves her fingers on his skin.
At first she seems paralyzed, and he is about to reach up, when she
moves her fingers slowly across his cheekbone to the bridge of his nose.
He closes his eyes. He feels her touch move toward his brow. The touch
is very slow, very light, very tentative. She traces his hairline down
one side, pauses, moves up again to the brow and down the other side.
She seems about to pull away then, but doesn't. She moves her hand up
toward the eyebrows, and delicately she brushes her fingers against his
eyelids. Her touch is cool air moving across his face. She skims down
along the bones of his nose to his mouth. She outlines his lips, smooths
her fingers across them, then dips under his chin to his throat, causing
in him a deep internal shiver. He knows that she must feel his shiver,
but she gives no sign of recognition. She fingers the collar of his
shirt, trails her hand along the bridge of his shoulders and lets it
drift away.
When he opens his eyes, she has her head turned from him, her arms again
crossed in front of her.
He takes a long slow breath.
"Do I look the way you imagined me?" he asks.
"No," she says.
He puts his hand at the side of her head and turns her so that she is
facing him.
"What?" she says.
"Don't move," he says.
He shuts his eyes. He begins on the cheek, as she did, and traces the
exact journey she has taken. It is a map he will always remember
perfectly, one he knows he will be able to recall in all its detail
years from now. Her skin is smooth and dry. He feels the tightness of
the almond eyelid, the silky skin directly beside it, with its tiny
dots. Her mouth is warm and moist, and when he touches it, she bites her
lower lip. He tries to "see" her face in this way, to form a picture
with clues only from his hands. The image is different, he thinks, than
the one his eyes see. Her skin feels fuller, her lips plumper. He lets
his hand trail under her chin to her throat, lets his fingers rest in
the hollow there. He traces the line of her shoulders.
He turns and walks toward the table. He sits down and runs his hand
along the sticky oilcloth surface.
"What can I get for you?" he asks, changing the subject, knowing the
question is condescending, even as he asks it. "There must be something
that you need."
"Don't," she says.
"Don't what?"
"Don't bring me anything."
"Why?"
"She'll know you've come, then," she says.
"And if she knew?"
She shrugs again, not answering him. "What do you want?" she asks.
He looks at her. "I want nothing at all, except to talk to you," he
says.
"T.J. and Sean and others, many others, they always want something. But
not you?"
"Sean is dead," he says. "And T.J.?" He shakes his head. If she is
talking about what he thinks she is talking about, she cannot mean T.J.,
surely. Andrew is positive of this.
"There are lies In T.J.'s voice," she says. "I can hear them when he
laughs."
He is confused. Her leapfrogging from present to past makes him
light-headed with the effort of trying to understand her. It is as if,
deprived of time, past, present and future intermingle without context,
a day twenty years ago as vivid and as all-consuming as the worries of
the morning, or of tomorrow morning.
"What do you mean, T.J. lies? Lies about what?" he asks.
"He lies about himself," she says.
He studies her. "When you asked me how you looked now...," he says.
"Yes?"
"There is something else I meant to say and didn't." She lifts her head
slightly but says nothing.
"Your hair is very tangled."
She turns away, resting her hands on the sink.
He walks to where she is standing. He touches the back of her hair. "I
could brush it for you. Now, I mean."
She shakes her head.
But that's all right, because he has another idea.
End of the Excerpt

Synopsys | «Eden Close» is the first
novel by acclaimed romance author, Anita Shreve. An adopted child, Eden
had learned to avoid the mother who did not want her and to please the
father who did. She also aimed to please Andrew and his friends, first
by being one of the boys and later by seducing them. Then one hot night,
Andrew was awakened by gunshots and piercing screams from the next farm:
Mr. Close had been killed and Eden blinded. Now, seventeen years later,
Andrew begins to uncover the grisly story - to unravel the layers of
thwarted love between the husband, wife, and tormented girl.
ϟ
Eden Close
excerpt
by Anita Shreve (author)
1.st published in 1989
24.Jan.2025
Publicado por
MJA
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