Sobre a Deficiência Visual

Love in Relief

Guy Hocquenghem

excerpt

Mrs. Hallowe’en

I woke up and knew it was morning. Sometimes in California, when hitchhiking was slow I would fall asleep on the sand. The heat fell softly around me, the ground under my sandals crunching, warm crystallized sugar, taking solid form beneath my back with the humidity of twilight or dawn’s early light. I woke up because the sun touched my hand, and I was waiting for it to dry the salted drops of dew upon my face.

When I say that, I am talking again like people who can see. It really felt more as though I, not the dew, was evaporating, gently lifted toward the rising sun. In California, I began to feel my skin, to become my skin. Its sensitivity had abruptly changed, multiplied by each pore, crazed by this salted electricity, wildly excited by sun and sea. My skin. Even through a T-shirt, walking along the freeway at night, across the sound-filled horizon, the music from the snack bar at the crossroads I assume, and the roar of motors like huge bumblebees flying all around me, I could still pick out an oncoming car by the heat of its headlights climbing my back. There would be one moment when this heat became searing, almost a burning. I would turn to face it, imagine the big shining eyes looking me over as the driver slowed down across from Rudolph Valentino Park, not quite daring to pull up alongside me.

Meanwhile Zita would climb upon me to insult the fourwheeler in cat talk, mechanically clawing my shoulder as she meowed.

Amar is not exactly my name. The name my mother used to cry for hours in the little courtyard shaded by a fig tree with a painted white trunk where the laundry hung to dry. My real name is U’mar, like the second Caliph after the Prophet: the one you call Omar because Europeans never can pronounce Arabic vowels.

My mother raised me alone. My half-sisters went to Europe before I was born. I carry her name. As a last name, my mother used the name of her village.

It was the Europeans who called me Amar on Kerkenna.

Later, I could have corrected my name, but it had become a part of me. Amar clung to my flesh. People who did not even know each other made the same mistake. Omar. Mrs. Hallowe’en would have said I sounded like a bridge player.

It took me years to be able to speak the Europeans’ languages very well. When people asked me my name at first in America, I had to ask them to repeat the question, a terribly humiliating situation which I avoided like the plague.

One evening I cannot recall without shame I was on the twenty-second story in a hotel. I have been around so many elevators that I can recognize what country it is by the style of the elevator car. The hotel was beside a large port. Beyond the huge, cold bay windows the lake teemed with the drone of skimming boats. From time to time I heard a noise quite clearly; a siren, a cry drifted up like a piece of paper caught in an eddy of wind, rising to our windowsill. I was lying next to a presence who gurgled who knows what and held my hand.

I thought she was calling me. I leaned over her outstretched body and had her repeat what she had said. Too late, I understood. I had made this woman explain to me she’d been saying “I love you.” Since then I’ve learned English. There was a long confusing time during which I debated with myself in silence, or near-silence. I entered and left rooms and bedrooms and all my conversation passed from my hand to the hand pulling me along to a table, a car, into a drawing-room, from one group to another. Groups of odors of dignified older people, elegant voices speaking incomprehensible idioms, nasal and proper. These groups came nearer, then drew away again, atolls of noise, under Mrs. Hallowe’en’s towing. Sometimes an arm, an evening gown or sports jacket would linger next to me, dragging me into halls, elevators, cars with silent chauffeurs. I never lacked the reassurance of her cane, tiny conspiratorial taps for my benefit, an audible telegraph destined to keep me posted. Mrs. Hallowe’en was old, so old I never really knew her age. I cannot read the identity of others. As for whether the Central European nobility beneath which she hid her Jewish origins was authentic, that was beyond my reach.

Born on the banks of the Danube, she had married a governor of Minnesota, himself a product of public assistance who had risen to the Capitol.

His name, which his widow had kept, meant in English the Feast of all Saints, or All Dead, or whatever. It was the result of some orphanage director’s inspiration when he was searching for a name for his young pupil.

I have sometimes heard receptionists say that it was a perfect name for Mrs. Hallowe’en, that she could have been a model for the cut-out pumpkins the Americans use to frighten their little children. She wore dentures and a wig, and she carried a cane.

She called me “Amar,” so Amar I remained. When we were first together I was Amar because I was too shy to say anything about it. Afterward I made this sacrifice for her—an extreme sacrifice. When I was a child if someone pronounced my name wrong it was not inerror, but as an insult, one I corrected with my fists. But after my accident I liked to listen better than to speak, to be called than to call myself. On Kerkenna when I was crazy about speed and quarrels like the others, I was more interested in proving my indifference than in being violent. The French would say I am a fatalist; doctors that all invalids are passive.

I often feel the modification of my name is a sign. Since my accident, I have become so much another person that I am ina sense reborn. Mrs. Hallowe’en brought me into the world a second time, and things changed to the point that I was no longer sure I was an Arab. She often spoke French with me, pre-war French. Perfectly multilingual, she later taught me “/e fluent English.” Too late for me to ever know who all those people from Acapulco to Copacabana were, those permanent exiles from their palaces, senior citizens with rich and heavy names from European history, ambassadors, left-overs from before the war who made up her world. I am probably the last person to have slept with the Austro-Hungarian nobility.

Mrs. Hallowe’en was American by marriage. Some days after we first met she offered me my first tape recorder. Since then I have spent years in front of every kind of tape imaginable. I have never been without a tape recorder, true faithful dogs to the human voice. Mrs. Hallowe’en insisted I spend days on end in hotel rooms repeating unknown languages. I had my whole life to devote to study if I wanted to. Mrs. Hallowe’en was immortal, or tireless at the very least, and I drank in the sum total of human knowledge, murmured by thousands of anonymous voices.

I had always studied out loud. I have said I was different from other people from the simple fact that I cannot understand something not read aloud. More different because of that than from the fact that I do not see.

Even today I scan what I am writing, murmuring low between my teeth. Koran means “reading,” but only Europeans ever imagined reading which is “mute.” Like all young people on Kerkenna what with scooters, jukeboxes and Egyptian and Hindu films, I didn’t have much time for the old bearded men in turbans who my mother would often go to see for fresh afternoons of silent meditation. But without ever being pious I have long been a believer. Repeating the fatihat al Kitab—the first verses of the Islamic profession of faith—so many times formed within me a physical link between the Text and the proclamation, between my brain and my lips, even though I no longer believe in any god.

Since I learned that Amar means “to love” in Portuguese, I gave up trying to correct my name. They are right, those who see me, who name me. After all, those on the outside speak better of me than I can. Between them and my consciousness they describe a frontier. It has a different name depending on which side of it you look from. I too look at the frontier from my confused interior confines. Mrs. Hallowe’en taught me never to be afraid of words of the sighted ... I say “I’ll see you tomorrow,” without any worry. I “look” to see what time it is in Braille on my digicassette.

The sighted cannot claim to have a monopoly on attention to time and to appointment schedules. Mrs. Hallowe’en also insisted I turn toward the person I’m speaking to. On Kerkenna in the months following my accident, no one had the least idea of my new needs. My mother wrung her hands; I was surrounded by neighbors who fed me like a baby, forgetting that I had seen before, that I could recognize a tool, a spoon....

Mrs. Hallowe’en was patient and systematic. She discovered at the same time as I did all the humorous gadgets in the world of the blind. The most expensive were not expensive enough for her.

I had a talking alarm clock which told time out loud. I had a photoreceptor, the size of a pen, which vibrated on contact witha light source in a room. There was a parrot especially trained for the blind by an old Spanish man in Florida, worth thousands of dollars because it knew how to warn in Spanish at traffic lights so you could cross the street. I walked around the Bahamas with that bird on my shoulder, a creature that perhaps knew how to recognize colors because it had so many itself.

Mrs. Hallowe’en taught me how to drink without spilling a drop using a whistling glass which indicated the weight and the level of the liquid. She taught me how to use the telephone, how to find zero on push-button phones which I prefer, or on the older dial models, and also where the other digits were by adjacent positions. I have used telephones frequently, and tape recorders, and today the digicassette; a Braille typewriter recording this text.

Mrs. Hallowe’en had the patience to teach me Braille over long evenings playing games of dice. She had bought a special set with the dots in relief. l’ve now learned how to write on the Braille-writer with its six keys, but I have never really tried the stylus and perforated board used to write Braille by hand, and I can’t read the letters easily. Record, reread addresses, take down memories ... What good does it do? I never reread, and I think the human word is made to run, to never retrace its path.

During all the time I lived with her, I barely learned to sign my name, and Mrs. Hallowe’en needed my signature for legal papers.

She did not want to force me to stumble through using my fingers like an invalid, nor could she stand to see me walk with a white cane. According to her a pair of canes together would have been a laughing stock, a public ridicule. We tried everything: a kind of folding cane, an antenna fixed in back of my buttonhole, anything to help me forget my predicament. One summer I went around with an electronic yo-yo which emitted sound in front of an obstacle, a kind of radar which cost a fortune.

When I say “obstacle,” I am especially referring to holes and excavations which are the only real obstacles for me. Missing manhole covers, descending stairways ... I very quickly learned to sense a wall, a dead-end, a closed door without the aid of any contraption. What I really fear is the hollow world, not the three dimensional world; not the world in relief, but a world riddled with mortal chasms, eaten up by plates of nothingness where I might fall. Since the accident, taking a tumble is my obsession of fear. Mrs. Hallowe’en built for herself out of me an invalid de luxe, a Young robot all the sales girls fell in love with: her gadgets made me look like a Martian, an extra-terrestrial come down to offer my body to Earthlings. That is how one of her friends put it once, at about the third drink before dinner. After a year or so, Mrs. Hallowe’en gave me small amounts of money to take care of certain expenses, then she got me accustomed to receiving “gifts” from her friends. I had to learn how to calculate again. I had an abacus with silver beads, a cubarhythm with a hundred little ivory cubes, and finally a crazy videocalculator—a pocket-sized tape recorder that spewed out the sums of my computations when I hit certain keys. Those machines taught me how to do without machines. Without being able to do figures in my head I would never have been able to lead an independent life. There, as elsewhere, Mrs. Hallowe’en was paving the road to tomorrow. ...

Over three years’ time, in her capable hands, a little peasant boy from Kerkenna became cosmopolitan. Thanks to her, I know the pleasure that comes from arranging flowers, whipping up a canvas of scent and texture, what you call color. She patiently reconstructed my education, a framework entirely conceived to enhance my future freedom; an education of refinement and intelligence for which I have not returned to her a hundredth of its value in love.

The second evening after we met, we were in the huge dining room of a palace. It was warm, and somewhere an orchestra was playing bossa nova. Mrs. Hallowe’en was explaining to me how to explore my plate with a fork without making any noise, and how to find the chair a well-intentioned waiter pushes up to you, by slightly drawing back your heel until you touch its legs.

I have never stopped learning since that night. I discovered tinkling glasses, plush carpeting, the odors of food and flowers, the velvety voice of the maitre d’. Even someone who does not see can perceive all that.

Practices, customs are much more to me than mere practice: they are the guides which allow me to have nearly normal contact with others. I hate it when visitors do not announce themselves or do not talk.

She would show me to my seat, in airplanes as well as in theatres, by putting my hand up on the seat back, letting me know that space was mine and that from there on I was on my own.

During the short time I stayed on Kerkenna I no longer knew how to dress myself, to wash or how to eat alone. She had the patience to respect the revulsions of a little Arab afraid of pork hiding in every meat sauce, she followed the ritual of my toilette; first my chest, then my head, and finally my feet, as prescribed in the Koran. Those first months I continued to recite my prayers five times a day, and to say bismillah like an ongoing mantra. She let me do it, up ’til the day when I forgot it myself.

My beard began to grow. She took to guiding my arm every morning in a repetition of shaving which soon became an integral part of my toilette.

I tell myself sometimes that I am nothing more than the sum of Mrs. Hallowe’en’s attentions and preoccupations who continues to live through them. She rebuilt an existence for me that I had never known.

Sometimes I get people mixed up, especially those from the beginning, from the first years. So many voices, so many people leave you with your emotions suffocated. But hers is the first clear identity to leave its imprint after Hocine left me sitting in front of the hospital in Rome while he went off to find a taxi.

I never took the initiative to get away from Kerkenna. The whole island took up a collection to send me to Europe for a medical consultation. Finally, my mother sent me with Hocine to see a famous professor in Rome. I went along with it but I was already sure that nothing could be done.

It seems as though I was really little more than half-animal when the accident happened, nearly unconscious, paralyzed with shyness. For me, the world stopped near the wharf of our little sun-parched port where dogs slept in the dust awaiting the arrival of the daily boat.

That summer some European tourists came to the island.

They were my first white friends. I do not even remember their names. The girl’s, maybe. She had an Italian man’s name. They disappeared after the shock that left me in the Kerkenna hospital.

The following winter was a numbing time for me when, from sunrise to sunset, I heard groans of mourning in the background amid the noise of earthenware utensils being put away: the wails of my mother. Bad luck had hit me from behind like an evil spirit surging out of the desert then slipping back into the sandy wind after its stroke of misfortune. Using my hands I could feel my shaved head, the little scars of sutures just above my neck where my head had struck the scooter’s handlebars. The hair on my scalp was already starting to grow back in, it bristled against my palm. For some time I did not speak. I scarcely moved. The doctor at the Kerkenna hospital, completely at a loss, himself suggested that I be examined in Italy. Hocine carried all those people’s savings from the caper harvest inside a knotted handkerchief.

In exchange, the great professor confirmed that I was definitely stricken with blindness arising in the brain. He also added that contrary to what had been feared, no other brain center was affected. I had not become an idiot. That was the only certainty I could hope to take back to Kerkenna with me. But without light, Kerkenna was nothing.

Others told me that I was, as they say, “blind.” I got used to it but I was never convinced. At first at the hospital, I thought there was simply something screwy with my vision. What, I didn’t know. I was not in darkness but in a world without color, without shape, with the persistent impression of a simple fog just on the verge of breaking up. Scooter wrecks are so natural on Kerkenna that at first I was sort of proud, before I understood that I would never see again. Proud to the point of being grateful to those Europeans who were the source of my downfall, and who made me into a hero. When I had understood my blindness, I resigned myself to God’s will. I could not figure out what I was being punished for. I had not looked at lightning—my mother had warned me on stormy days not to, convinced it would burn your eyes. I later discovered in a European dictionary that going blind there, too, is considered a punishment. They cited Oedipus, Orpheus and a sorcerer named Tiresias, who once looked upon his goddess mother as she was bathing nude. I never desired my mother, not even in dreams.

I wandered around conking into the walls of the house, repeating to myself that I must have been at fault, but without knowing how. Distances overlapped; my mother got into my way, stepped into my path. I ended up sitting still, going back into myself where I could still “see” myself, if only a bit.

So I began learning to be blind. When my friends —Hocine, everyone—thought I was walled up in sadness, silently suffering on the edge of suicide, I was merely immobile. Draped in my djellabah, I sat in the sunshine petrified by stupefaction, in the midst of the new universe which was, they told me, non-visible. I stretched out slowly, very slowly, exploring the shadow my arms made on the ground.

All I knew about blind people were those heroes of tales my mother used to tell when I was a little kid. I would go over the story of Baba Abdallah, with his white beard and his broken voice, blinded by a powder box, punished for his curiosity, and for wanting to place upon his right eye a magic cream intended for his left. Well, I had never tried to discover the treasures Baba Abdallah had lost. I had never committed any serious sacrilege, except maybe sometimes drinking wine, or yelling Dinemuk! to the woman selling newspapers at the port. I was not blind: it was a lie. One day or another to come I would be punished for having pretended to be blind, like that hero in another tale: caught in flagrante delicto imitating a blind beggar, he fended off a mob by denouncing the truly blind as charlatans. Where was the difference between acting blind and really being blind? Unable to say, I was chilled at not being able to escape fraud: one day the whole island would know I was nothing but a fake.

Kerkenna ignored me. Having known her before my accident, she now seemed to manifest an absurd indifference to the experience l’d had of her. Without knowing for certain I was blind, I felt that something was missing that I had known before on Kerkenna. Why go back?

I was nervously fumbling with the dark glasses the hospital had given me which felt too heavy on my face. I couldn’t see what good they did. I was standing in front of the hospital that night on the edge of a sidewalk. It must have already been late. Hocine had left a long time before to search for a taxi. A man—the hand of a man—took me authoritatively by the arm. For more than two months I’d been dragged around, dressed, washed by others’ hands—my mother’s, those of the hospital staff. I followed this new hand and found myself on the sidewalk across the street, unable to go back, completely at a loss.

I smacked into the iron fence of a public garden where the cumbersome charity of those who always want the blind to cross streets had led me. I sat down wondering how I would ever find Hocine. Later that night, another hand—a young one this time— guided me along more sidewalks, and on to a sandy path. The traffic noise was damped by murmuring trees. It was cooler, and we walked a long time before the hand sat me upon a bench and began to touch me.

Since the accident, I had been touched constantly. However, my sexuality seemed dead. On the island, even those girls who had once lavished me with caresses and oral sex during my adolescence no longer dared touch that part of me which had become sacred since the day I could no longer see. When this hand opened my fly, I became excited. I felt a pair of lips, an unshaven chin. Then there was some disturbance, the noise of running in the distance and the hand abruptly withdrew. I heard footsteps disappearing in the night.

I zipped up the wash-and-wear pants my mother had bought from a wandering merchant on Kerkenna and I moved forward a bit randomly to the edge of a large expanse of tarmac where cars ambled around in a zoo of backfires. There, at the edge of the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I met Mrs. Hallowe’en.

I heard a rather shrill and nasal voice yelling insults in American from the other side of the tarmac. Then I felt something softly flowing against my leg, rubbing against me before it jumped onto my shoulder. It was her escaped cat.

Mrs. Hallowe’en limped. She claimed it was an old injury from the First World War. I heard her walking, scattering the automobiles. The imperious gait of an old rich woman who has adopted a cane not to lean upon but to add rhythmic tapping to her walk.

She called me. I did not understand English, but she was so authoritative that I moved forward, guided by her dancing cane; only then, she later told me, did I emerge from the shadows and she saw my dark glasses.

I have always thought, and heard said, that she did not really limp. Just as I did not try to make her pronounce my name correctly, I did not contradict her own little inventions. That evening she hammered the ground with precise little taps, moving around me as I put the cat back onto the ground. Then she spoke to me in English, French and Italian, telling me that this part of the Villa Borghese was no place for me to be hanging around, given my age and disability. She spoke firmly. I could not understand how the Villa Borghese at eleven o’clock at night, at her age, could be a place for her. We walked around cars where, according to her, Italian lovers were making out with salesgirls from big department stores. Across the way, lit by the lights of passing automobiles were a dozen down-and-out boys trying to supplement their income. She had thought I was one. Mrs. Hallowe’en stopped a taxi with a couple of whacks of her cane, and we drove back down to a big noisy piazza to drink cognac at an outside cafe, because she was worried about how pale I looked. While we lingered amidst odors of rancid cooking, the desk clerk in the palatial old hotel said he couldn’t do anything for me. Mrs. Hallowe’en threatened to cause a scandal by sleeping in the lobby; they wouldn’t allow the handicapped into this hotel where they made you pay a hundred dollars a day for a room without air conditioning. A great ruckus of Italian voices broke out around me, and the manager went off and returned with his copy of the Italian penal code, which defined the blind as “persons juridicially incapable.” He repeated these words with immense satisfaction, and then allowed us to go upstairs, to the accompaniment of the rustle of banknotes which must have been an incredible tip. Once inside the elevator Mrs. Hallowe’en decided we would leave this country which denied the handicapped their rights. Six hours later, early in the morning I left Rome, having known little more of the city than the hotel, the road between the airport and the hospital.

During those few hours l’d made a very important discovery: the accident had not left me without sexual feeling; but it had made me indifferent to the criteria to the problems of the sighted.

For example, I didn’t wonder if Mrs. Hallowe’en was ugly. She undressed and bathed me. She lathered me up in every hotel tub in the world. She led me to bed, wrapped me in a perfumed dressing gown. I heard a plop in the glass beside the bed, the water making a bizarre bubbling noise. For three years, she removed her dentures every evening at my side, before conscientiously sucking me off, without any attempt at other kinds of sex. She had a proficient technique, and ever since her I’ve come to like to be sucked. Since that time I’ve come to believe that it is the simplest form of sex for somebody blind.

I was born to sex under bizarre circumstances. From the time I became a being who could make love, I could no longer see. The people I later knew always believed my amorous adolescence in the company of Mrs. Hallowe’en had been monstrous. They had no idea what desire without sight is. She was the real reason for my survival: because she provided me with care, access to erotic sensation. At her side at night I often thought of kissing her on the forehead as she slept away, snoring, murmuring in German, sweating in wrinkled sheets. How could I judge her? She was my entire life, down to the smallest detail: my deepest intimacy.

Someone like me is never alone because I am never sure that I am alone. Mrs. Hallowe’en led me to understand that my “interior,” my innermost self was from then on hers, too, as it would eventually become a part of others after her death—after three years of southern hotels from Florida to Brazil, Bermuda to California.

Mrs. Hallowe’en’s death in San Francisco meant a greater change for me than the death of my own mother. Not that I didn’t love my mother, but from the time on Kerkenna that I could no longer see, she was a different woman—a mountain ofd esolation with clumsy gestures which reduced me to an inconvenient package. The fact that I did not try to see my mother again before her death was not due to insensitivity as Mrs. Hallowe’en once reproached me. My mother was dead to me the day she disappeared from my view.

Later, after I turned seventeen and once my mother’s death was legally confirmed, Mrs. Hallowe’en obtained my freedom through a court in the city of Key West. My mother was crushed by the rock above our house which an earthquake shook loose: Kerkenna taking revenge upon my escape. Mrs. Hallowe’en took me from my family only to give me back my self. This emancipation required nothing more than a simple legal process.

Since those first days when she had me explore our hotel rooms wall by wall—everything within arm’s reach, the very space around me, my environment—she had taught me to use all my fingers, to reconquer space. Getting up, lying down, even sitting ceased to be the nightmare of an animal caught in a sticky canvas of obscurity. I returned with delight to the normal exercise of my physical body. Nothing is more absurd than the prejudice I’d suffered on Kerkenna, in which space for the non-sighted was nothing more than a series of traps from which escape was unknowable, simply because one orientating sense had been taken away. Through Mrs. Hallowe’en, I found a place in the world again; not the same place as before. I was better than the sighted: now I could feel the world as volumes in truly sensual depth, not pale, flat deceptive planes, but in relief! 1 could perceive the most ordinary objects in depth. She had me touch and retouch everything until the muscles in my fingers and hands were sore, as the sighted sometimes get headaches from too much reading.

In the confusion that followed the accident this one thing at first escaped my attention. More than others l’d moved around, breathed, in three dimensions. l’d never reduced the world to its merely visible side; now I explored it minutely in all its facets, before forming ideas about it.

The only objects that still escaped me were mirrors. One day on Kerkenna my mother broke every mirror in the house; she had surprised me passing longing hands over its glassy surface, trying to find the memory of my double. One evening with Mrs. Hallowe’en I had fun imitating the movements of a man looking at himself in a mirror. There was no point in being afraid of mirrors, afraid of visual illusions. The only difference between a sighted person and myself is that I do not let myself be taken in by that error which makes him see perspective in an object when it’s really flat. That’s where I have a superior view—I can sense an object without being shown it.

When I saw that I had a place in the world again, I must point out that in the beginning this place conformed precisely to that of Mrs. Hallowe’en and her cat. By modifying my manner of perceiving I mentally followed her steps, her cane, her space, her animal as though they were mine. Her cane she used especially for my benefit, as a warning, as a means of touching and exploring the surrounding world by sound, both alerting me and teaching me. Why should I need a cane when Mrs. Hallowe’en traced out the path?

She preceded me by half a step everywhere, a shadow in front of my own sensitivity, that paled with the years. The edge of a sidewalk, the steps to a train... I never confronted them first or alone. She never pushed me ahead. I would slide behind her at doors. Politeness disguised our tactics. Keeping contact with me she would tap her cane on every obstacle; I had only to follow.

Since my accident heat and taste had undergone a complete transformation. After a few unfortunate incidents where I burned my fingers upon heating coils or matches, my skin became a longdistance thermometer. Taste, especially in the company of Mrs. Hallowe’en, took on incredible complexity. Our words for taste are reduced to simple contrasts: bitter/acidic, sweet/salty. Not enough words exist for the series of tastes which are colors to the sightless; my possibility in description is reduced almost to black and white. Even in lovemaking, my mouth became the essential seat of pleasure. Upon the trembling edge ofl ips unfolds the most mysterious, the most refined of impressions, that which can be compared to fluttering bird wings taking to the air. Exploring the world, my lips more than any other organ served as my guide.

Mrs. Hallowe’en used to say that the greatest number of points of sensitivity in the body were squeezed together there, a cushion of vibrating pins.

The luxury she had me living in did not surprise me. A kid straight off an island of fishermen is not truly conscious of all that; and I was not impressed by the outward signs of a respect and power that I could not see.

From time to time, remorse crept up. I imagined the imam of the little mosque on Kerkenna blustering into his beard to my mother about the new kind of life I was leading. After her death these scruples vanished. Even the imam would have been secretly proud. Living on the good graces of a woman is nothing to be ashamed of. Did not the Prophet himself marry the widow Khadidja for her money?

Occasionally, Mrs. Hallowe’en had me touch little rectangles of plastic where her name was engraved in relief, and which furnished her with tickets to anywhere by a magical transcontinental system rivalling any of the fairy tale genies of my childhood. Borders to cross were purely on paper, which she would fill out for me in majestically carpeted first-class waiting rooms. She would declare on them that I was adopted from the Red Cross, or I was a war refugee, according to the whimsical documents one of her friends—a high official at the U.N. and a Chevalier of Malta (a title which set me dreaming)—cooked up for her.

From the day of my emancipation, she got me used to having my own money and to accepting gifts from her friends. My only means of really “knowing” people, of forming a “mental image” of them, is to make love to them. At that time, most of the bodies I explored were elderly. That did not shock me. I would describe them to Mrs. Hallowe’en and we would burst out laughing when we compared the image I had formed with the descriptions that she provided. Every such adventure left me with banknotes with numbers upon them I could not read.

For anyone else but me life with Mrs. Hallowe’en could have seemed the ultimate in artificiality. Over the long haul, I familiarized myself with all those nuances of the practiced culture of the well bred man such as must have existed in Europe before the last war. We never stopped at a hotel which did not require coat and tie in the dining room. I came to recognize silk from synthetics, good wine from imitations, gold from other metals.

Mrs. Hallowe’en had an attachment for gold of a European exile who has gone through all the wars. I had never even seen gold, so for me this metal that my toilet articles were made of was only a particular patina, polished, warm, far from the brutal cutting iciness of steel or the granular softness of silver. There she was covered with jewels, and I covered in her gold. We ought to have been attacked during the long walks we sometimes took in the middle of the night. At night? Yes, I chose to live at night, which is so convenient for me. Because Mrs. Hallowe’en was an insomniac, we lived mostly between dusk and dawn. It became my turn to guide her sometimes in dark alleys or along deserted shores.

The word “blind” in English, like most words meant to describe me, gives the impression of confusion, of bumping into things, of struggling no end. I’m not at all confused. I’m even able to guide a sighted person in the dark. All the confusion and stumbling are provoked by sighted ones around me, who oblige me to carry some distinctive sign of my blindness to keep them from knocking into me. I have never been able to get used to someone calling out “Careful!,” which they are so generous with, after the fact. A warning always said too late, signifying nothing.

So, we needed a way to make me recognizable as blind... We had a difficult choice, Mrs. Hallowe’en and I; she did not want to see me in those frightful dark glasses from the hospital and had thrown them out the window the first night; nor did we want a white cane or some other similar, humiliating sign. I took to walking around outdoors with closed eyelids, since for all a sighted person can see, my eyes are normal: the muscles move, the reflexes and pupil all appear ordinary. With my eyes closed, I become for them a blind man. But closing my eyes is only a trick to me; I’m never bewildered.

I have heard everything, undergone everything that a blind man who doesn’t look it can undergo. Walking with my eyes closed and hesitating at a street corner, I would feel a coin slip into my hand. Every time I’m treated like a blind man, I open my eyes, which puts charitable souls into a rage.

Mrs. Hallowe’en took me to see both eminent physicians and the worst quacks. I began to know my medical file by heart. My organs of vision seemed intact; however they had become useless.

A laboratory in Florida undertook a series of injections with a radioactive substance which was supposed to outline my optic nerves, to make them visible to X-rays. The doctors hoped to establish the exact location of the break in my optic nerve. They never succeeded: on the other hand, after those injections, the reactions of people on the street to me, at night, was sometimes astonishing. I couldn’t understand why they turned around flabbergasted. Then one evening as she leaned over me Mrs. Hallowe’en screamed. She claimed my eyes were glowing faintly in the dark: they’d become phosphorescent.

I don’t know if it was around that time that I began to feel handsome. I always supposed I was handsome, if only because my mother and the entire island said so. Between the kid who listened impatiently to the compliments of old men sitting around in a circle gravely smoking their hookahs and the man writing this text, two thousand years have passed. I know that I am handsome, a curse or a trick my body plays on me, since I cannot see it.

The sighted feel beautiful seeing a face through the deceptive aid of mirrors, a face encountered only indirectly. I know that I am handsome from their voices, the voices of those who speak to me. My beauty is the emotion which makes them babble, a mysterious effect enveloping me like a gas. I know I am handsome because I imagine myself to be, without looking at any facsimile of myself. I might have done that in the months following the accident, trying to memorize my own features. But I didn’t: I forgot my self.

I lost the anguish of visual memory quickly enough. A new sensitivity was born. Even when my hands were trying to “imagine” some body I had met, I wanted less to judge if it were beautiful than to establish total contact. One body next to another remains my way of knowing others. Without this contact, between her, or between him and me, there is too much hypocrisy, a mass of syrupy hypocrisy that I always sense in the voice speaking to a blind man. For me, every voice simply reveals what is hiding, making the admission stand out crystal clear.

Then, there are the voices after lovemaking, the tones bubbling over with gratitude and confidence, recounting their lives, their most secret desires. Making love to someone blind, for those voices, is making love to a corpse that can listen.

Mrs. Hallowe’en often told me that I described people-voices, beings not of flesh and blood but of wind and lamentation. But this was not due to my lack of perceiving their moist skin, their odor. Their moral being was reduced to their sound for me: more precisely reduced to how their voices either harmonized or contrasted with the grain of their skin.

A voice is to me what a face is to you: an indelible imprint, the surefire path to the quality of someone’s presence. I used to be able to make serious errors with voices. Don’t people make them with faces?

To set my emancipation into motion Mrs. Hallowe’en contacted the rest of my family. I learned then that my mother had died alone, none of her children at her side. I did not cry.

Someone that I don’t hear suffering does not exist for me; what I do not touch scarcely touches me. My family came back into my mind only two years later when I received a thick envelope smelling of patchouli and containing pages torn out of a school notebook. At the bottom, a powder fine as dust had fallen between the pages.

It was kohl. I remembered what I’d learned from my mother: make a point of the end of a matchstick and soak it in the mineral; then lift it to your eyelid, so lightly you almost can’t feel it. Upon contact with the stick my eye became irritated—as it had on those holidays of my childhood, the powder spreading between my lashes. I felt the moisture of tears gather on those membranes that were hiding the world from me. Soon I would shed real tears.

That letter from my half-sisters made me want to speak Arabic, to compare my old world to the new. I decided to go see these sisters l’d never met. They had sent their address in Paris.

They wrote in French. Mrs. Hallowe’en and I went to Europe for twenty-four hours. When we arrived, I mistook Djamillah for Alissa and vice versa. Naturally I attributed Djamillah’s fouroctave voice to the older sister.

Noise bothered me more in Paris than anywhere else; the streets there, the traffic along the big avenues (which seemed like huge corridors jammed full of crowds) were more compact, more tightly pressed into a narrow space than anywhere I’d been. I stayed inside a hotel near the Tuileries Gardens, and instead of the sights of Paris, I explored the monuments of my sisters’ faces.

They came to meet us at the airport, and I did not leave them the whole day. We had a little Tunisian house installed in part of the suite rented by Mrs. Hallowe’en. Pillows and colochons were placed in a square on the floor against the walls. Alissa brought a canoun made out of a big tincan with her, one of those enamelled metal teapots, and goblets with handles like we used in Tunisia.

Summoned by an outraged maid, the hotel director found us seated traquilly in the midst of a cloud of charcoal smoke.

Since my birth, my sisters had lived in Lyon with our father, cloistered those first years as though they were still on Kerkenna.

They had broken away from him by sleeping around with the bad crowd from Villeurbanne. I could not understand by what mystery they had exchanged their faces—faces that I knew, used to know, only by photographs. How was it I didn’t recognize their voices? Why, compared to a vague memory of the portraits my mother sometimes showed me on Kerkenna, did Alissa seem younger, sweeter than her little sister? Perhaps I made the same kind of mistake every day! My fingers told me about shapes and I arbitrarily compared them to hazy memories. Perhaps after all my world coincides with that of the sighted only at the price of a gigantic misunderstanding. I will never know if the objects I touch are the same ones you see.

The meeting with my sisters concluded witha party, and poor sparkling wine in one of the most fashionable spots in town; it definitely put me on guard from comparing a visual past with my present. My family was included in this. Anyway, my father hadn’t even bothered to make the trip from Lyon. To him, a blind man could only bring bad luck.

This was my only attempt at “finding my roots.” If I had felt such confusion seeing my sisters again —and they were only halfsisters, after all—and my visual memory of them was so off-track, doubtless things on Kerkenna would have been disastrous had I tried to go back there to see my mother. My sisters told me that her solitary death had been something of a relief to the rest of the family, rebuilt around a second wife and mother in Lyon. Both sisters admired me, but they didn’t hide the fact that no one in Lyon really worried about me. To them I was just another invalid.

Mrs. Hallowe’en and I left for San Francisco the following day. California was to be fatal for her. Two weeks after we arrived she took me to the huge Golden Gate Bridge. I liked the sea as much as she did. The vastness of such a panorama reaches me, too: a shock of immense space upon my face, as I turned toward the western sea.

Few passersby troubled our promenade. A woman’s footsteps passed beside us. The bridge resounded deafeningly with the wheels of automobiles. It swayed slightly, as though hesitating in its flight toward the Pacific. All of a sudden Mrs. Hallowe’en’s cat, Zita, must have taken off again. At the same moment that I felt the gusting of a truck past me, Mrs. Hallowe’en ran forward limping. I heard a scraping of high heels upon the concrete in front of me then a muffled cry. Perhaps I was imagining things, but I heard cracking bones, a skull shattered; and the soft plump of her handbag bouncing into the gutter, her abandoned cane rolling off the sidewalk’s edge. I cried out her name; it was echoed back to me in the mirror of concrete pillars. They later told me that her body had plunged into the Pacific channel.

We were in America. The footsteps I heard swiftly faded into the distance. I called for help. I flagged down a car whose motor purred behind me. The driver, contemplating what few remaining traces were left of Mrs. Hallowe’en, reproachfully said to me, “Was she your guide?” I had the strong feeling he thought it should have been me—the blind one—and not her who should have been smashed to death.

They never found the cat, nor the truck driver. When the police arrived, the patrol sergeant in command placed a tissue paper in my hand. I began to blow my nose; that’s when I noticed water under my fingers. For the first time since my accident, my eyes had formed tears.

I only truly understood what I had lost in Mrs. Hallowe’en when I began to live that institutional life which it seems is normal for the blind. We cry before we know what there is to cry about.

That same afternoon I was taken away, police sirens screaming full blast, by two cops who smelled of hair oil and who chewed gum, spitting their words at the two-way radio. Instead of driving back toward town, we made a u-turn on the bridge and went the other way. We stopped a half hour later in front of a house. When we got out of the car I searched—in spite of myself—for the sound of Mrs. Hallowe’en’s cane. The cops followed me; they didn’t know one was always supposed to walk in front of me. I crossed a garden with dirt paths, passed a glass door, and in an air-conditioned room a friendly young woman sat me down and offered me an orangeade. She then took upon herself the responsibility of telling me of my protectress’ death, which I had already perfectly understood. Mrs. Hallowe’en had been taken away bya simple twist of fate; exactly as she had first been brought to me, providing a bitterly ironic satisfaction and locking my thoughts together as the woman stroked my hair and finally told me that her husband had returned. He was the Juvenile Court judge.

I felt brutally yanked back thousands of kilometers by all these people: they dripped with pity; they spoke to me, touched me, as you would a small child or some tiny pet. I had forgotten all that. Even as an apprentice, my relations with Mrs. Hallowe’en had been free and adult.

The judge was a young man witha weak voice who smelled of deodorant and who spoke of me as a “he” to the wall across the room, or to some listeners that I didn’t see. Once again, I had become nothing, an object.

Until her death Mrs. Hallowe’en always used the formal “vous” with me, in French and “voi” in Italian, which we both spoke fluently. However imperious she was in word and gesture, she never considered me a minor, a kid: perhaps a savage, but an independent savage. The young man smelling of deodorant brought me into his office. He told me he was a judge. I detest this mania they have for repeating things to me they’ve already said in my presence, as though by not seeing I’m also deprived of ears.

He told me not to be afraid of him. If the circumstances hadn’t been so sad I would have burst out laughing in his face. Why should I be afraid of him? To me, judges, policemen, doctors are mere names, abstractions. The uniform they use to terrify others ... well, that intimidation simply can’t reach me.

The judge explained that I was now an orphan. My father had never recognized me, thus I fell under his jurisdiction, or that of his colleagues, from which I would never have recourse or escape.

In vain I held out my American residence permit to him, my emancipation from the Florida court. In Florida, the law does not protect minors as in California. At any rate, he added softly, my “handicap” gave him the right, even the duty, to put me under his protection. Of course he wanted to recognize the validity of the certificates from the United Nations, given by Mrs. Hallowe’en’s friend, which had declared me a political refugee. The judge spoke of her condescendingly, convinced that for the past three years I’d been in the clutches of a madwoman. He offered me psychiatric sessions right away, to “decompress.” I thought I understood that a will had been found in her purse which left Mrs. Hallowe’en’s entire fortune to her cat. The judge expressed extreme caution with respect to the validity of that heir. But the cat had apparently been killed in the accident too, leaving me high and dry.

I remained silent. The judge told me that since court was closed that day, he was hereby declaring court in session (and I did hear him scratching out his signature) remanding temporary custody of me to an institution whose name I could not quite catch in Santa Barbara. This decision was made by virtue of some law about endangered children and permits prolonging of the status of minor up to the age of twenty-one. It was either that or they would send me back to Tunisia. Anyway, he added, meticulously rubbing at a spot on the paper, there was really nothing repressive in these measures. We were only putting things back in order. The State would allow me—as a refugee—a financial allotment to cover the costs of the institution. I might even submit an application for retroactive benefits for all those years I'd spent in the United States at the expense of a benevolent third person, instead of having had the salaried companion-guide to which I'd been entitled. With even more persistence, I might obtain a pension for life.

I remained confused about so much generosity, skeptical of so many promises. That night, I slept on a sofa-bed; the judge had pinched his fingers unfolding it. I wanted to cry more, but tears would not come. For the first time in three years I was sleeping alone. I stayed awake a long time, listening to insects rustling in the garden, a slowly rising nocturnal sound in the cool night air. I threw off the rough army blanket and walked over to the guillotine-like window. I could walk alone, though the spirits of Mrs. Hallowe’en and her cat were still with me. Those men, that woman who had grabbed me by the arm after the accident had not been out of contact with me for an instant, hiding this primal discovery.

Perhaps l’d already been walking alone for a long time, deluded by the easy confidence Mrs. Hallowe’en made me feel even when she pulled her arm away, as though it were unimportant, continuing a conversation we had begun or going through a doorway or climbing the stairs. Now I stood alone before the open window absently searching for moonbeams upon my skin, meditating upon my newfound liberty.

The Valentine MacPherson Institute was atop a hill covered with pines that whistled in the Pacific breeze, just above Santa Barbara Beach, upon which the entrance colonnade opened. The view was breathtaking, making all the visitors exclaim in wonder and leaving all the residents completely indifferent. Upon entering the institute, you were accompanied one last time, as though it was saying adieu, by the California panorama.

The whole building operated on infrared and photoelectric cells. The furniture and walls were rounded, and the straight stairways had carpeting which warned you at your first step with a soft buzzer. The posts and trees in the courtyard were surrounded by a flexible plastic covering to prevent accidents.

When I entered I was saluted by the discreet puff of a doubledoor run on compressed air. The doors to all the buildings operated on the same system. From the library to the gymnasium, passing by the Fathers’ offices or the woman director’s office, every passageway was furnished with either light or heat detectors which did the work of the eyes for us, preventing all collisions.

MacPherson, founder of the institute, had wanted it wholly conceived on the most up-to-date standards. This generalized foresight, destined to facilitate the boarders’ lives, satisfied most of my companions. I, who knew how to open doors in the real world, found these precautions useless. In each room the lamps were out of reach, the windows were opened and closed by electric levers, hot and cold water were armed with warning sounds. We students were to avoid all efforts at adaptation. A loudspeaker—something like that I sometimes hear on the radio in the limousines Mrs. Hallowe’en rented—broadcast from one half hour to the next a program of guidance. Instead of announcing congested freeways, the director’s voice reminded everyone of sports times and discussion groups, it whispered sermons at bedtime inspired by the Angel of Blind Purity; or she read some of the residents’ poems, celebrating the songs of the local birds.

The park and walkways between the buildings were furnished with differently shaped tactile indicators placed on wooden posts at about the height of your hand. Spheres led to workshops, cones to the gymnasium, crosses to the chapel.

We met in this chapel for assembly once a week in a group prayer for Valentine MacPherson’s soul. Her father had been the largest agricultural machinery manufacturer in the West. She had become blind and deaf at only six months old nearly a century before when a combine-harvester machine being demonstrated had exploded. As an introduction to our course, the professors related her life to us. It was years before anyone around her got the idea of making her touch certain objects, or of communicating by means of a tactile code. One month after this occurred, she knew the entire alphabet-in-relief. A year later she was writing proficiently. One day, the doctors came up with the idea of having the little mute touch their vocal cords during her speech exercises. She, in turn, would imitate the movements of the voicebox and tongue and so began to talk; she became a curiosity to the entire world. The adventures of this learned ape was an exemplary epic at the institute that every student ended up knowing by heart.

The chapel was as electronic as everything else. Stereophonic loudspeakers sang motets, ventilators wafted clouds of incense.

The public standing behind us witnessed with astonishment the play of lights, while we each stood in our places dressed in white robes.

The institute was lit up day and night, including our rooms, as a permanent offering to God: the spectacle of our innocence. And of course this measure simplified the task of our surveillance.

In the middle of the central court of honor a statue of little Miss MacPherson chattered on every day about falls and scrapes.

I spent hours in front of this statue, “conceived,” according to the pedestal, “so that the sightless might forever keep the memory of the daughter of their benefactor.” The hair, clothing, even the statue’s skin was made of some indestructible material which felt almost real. The sculpture’s features seemed exaggerated, a caricature, so that we could get a better idea of it. Naturally I could not resist touching the eyes. I noted with disappointment that the sculptor had been satisfied using glass, confusing the visual and the tactile. I heard a brief whistle to make me get down off the pedestal: that was how the director communicated orders to the residents.

I was to hear this noise—an exasperating familiar call to order of an ever-present surveillance—hundreds of times over the course of my stay.

The courses did not interest me; after having verified that I knew nothing of the location of Calcutta or the exploits of George Washington the director placed me in an elementary class. The first week, I was especially fascinated by the library where I could forget my sorrows by reading. We had afternoons free. I could not read Braille and I never really did manage to learn it. That manner of reading is too slow for me. The simple thought of all those texts hidden under that delicate pointed lace made me dizzy. But I did treat myself to an orgy of cassettes, which I was already accustomed to using. Those captivating voices—older women for the most part, anonymous benevolent readers whose every cough I heard—and the sound of turning pages made me listen to study-texts as you would listen to a story.

I knew some passages by heart and made a game of changing the readers’ intonations.

I learned how to use a typewriter at the institute. Those for the sighted are not much different from those for the blind, which delighted me. I also learned how to use the ones which write in Braille using six keys, each of which represents a point, which you press simultaneously to form a character. I never could stand the tablet-and-punch my fellow residents carried around attached to their wrists, which reminded me of a beggar’s wooden cup.

During class they made little insect noises as they perforated their paper. The machine only made a mechanical “ploc-ploc.” Later, people told me I could have no idea of what literature was, limited as I was to knowing it only in its verbal and sonorous defilement. I had left Kerkenna without ever really having read, though I pretty much knew how to write in French. I have always known how to write before knowing how to read; the only way I do read is aloud. The idea of a silent text still sends shivers up and down my back. Naturally, by the simple fact of knowing entire passages by heart, I am quite capable of standing back intellectually to consider the whole of the passage just as any sighted person would.

Going through the mountains of cassettes of a history of civilization I also discovered that most cultures have bypassed silent texts. Even the ancient Romans had their letters or books read aloud. Only modern European literature has been written expressly, one might say, to elude the blind.

My discovery of my companions came much later than that of the library, but as a consequence of my reading. I had passed an entire week without noticing anyone. I could just as well have been living alone if it weren’t for the rustling of paper, or the sound of a closing book, like phantoms around me, and the song of the six-winged Braille scratching during class, just beneath the professor’s voice. They began to complain when I insisted on trying to learn Braille by decoding my manual aloud in the study hall, while all of them read silently.

My classmates: for the first time I existed in the same night as other sightless people. We were united by that sole fact, a court of miracles of differing destinies returned to infancy.

I learned that there were more than one hundred thousand blind in America. Until then I thought I was the only one, orj ust about. The news was not pleasant. My companions had strange customs like always saying the first name of the person they were speaking to when they were in a group, a device which the Fathers had instituted to avoid confusion.

The fact that these people read Braille fluently—the compleat blind—translated for me the reclusiveness of their lives. They had no other experiences than dining halls, workshops, classrooms and rooms with glass doors where you never knew if the director was watching you during one of her surprise inspection tours or picking up stray pieces of soiled linen, or arranging chairs, or changing lightbulbs.

I speak of the compleat, the completed blind, because I discovered in this place—which existed only for a group, “the blind”—that this very notion was to be shattered into a thousand pieces. The selection of residents was almost arbitrary. Most of them were completely convinced, even if they were the only ones, that they were simply “vision-impaired.” I know from my own experience that when you're blind you imagine yourself as seeing for a long time, maybe forever. During my first medical exam I was able to persuade the doctor that I “saw” his white coat perfectly well. It took an in-depth examination to discover that I had not the slightest visual perception. This affirmation by the doctors had never totally convinced me. No one ever really thinks he is blind, but there we were, living proof, all brought together and certain that there must be some mistake. Maybe we were right.

Every one of us, in our own way, could see. I discovered that the act which the sighted call “seeing” is in fact the complex totality of an entire civilization written into our bodies.

In the Braille library I got to know Huong. He was half Vietnamese, the son of a G.I. He was alexic; sitting down at my table at lunch, he explained that he couldn’t read or write in black print but was obliged—he could see perfectly well—to read and write in Braille. Others suffered from a spatial disorder, an inability to organize or localize objects. They were the worst because they were more incapable than any of us to properly orient themselves even by touch. Others were simply incapable of glancing; their visual attention became fixed in a stare, like the tall Canadian girl who always stood still in front oft he first object she spied, and whom you could find no matter where you left her, hypnotized by a doorknob or a spoon. Others had lost their visual memory, and another group couldn’t tell high from low anymore. In the eyes of the Fathers, all were blind.

Among those of us who could “see” without being able to use their visual perception, the most touching was David, a sweet and smiling kid about twelve years old. It was nearly impossible to shake him loose once you had met him. David’s cries would break your heart as soon as you began to move away from him. David suffered from a complicated disorder with a mixture of perception problems of space and time. Whenever someone walked away from him at a normal speed, David saw them disappear ina flash, as though they had been instantly torn out of his visual space in dizzying motion which brought him to the edge of tears.

You had to leave David half a step at a time, like an actor in front of a sped-up camera.

The most astonishing of my companions was a complete paralytic: a Thalidomide victim. The little torso already had fifteen years of vegetative existence. He had learned to get around in a wheelchair, even to move objects by letting out little cries, setting off some electrical mechanism linked to his vocal cords.

At the institute the Fathers of every nationality were keptina continual frenzy by the director. Many of the staff members were unpaid volunteers, and this little charitable world of telephone calls and lost files, persuaded to offer its good work to God, stirred around Mother Superior.

The teachers spoke to us in that sticky-sweet tone that always made me stop and turn around, as though the remarks were being addressed to some small child behind me. A just impression. The Fathers weren’t really talking to us: they were talking to something beyond us, above us. While their physical side was turned toward our bodies, their thoughts were off to God, whose favored witnesses we were. We were Salvation by Void: almost above sin—which neither kept them from watching us like hawks nor from suspecting us. Incapable of doing real evil, devoted sooner or later to mystical paths, to great music (the organ, preferably) we were the Mission-field par excellence.

They didn’t quite trust me, but they weren’t enemies either.

Even the director softened up toward me. Something in me particularly moved them, which led me to take account of the power of my beauty. The director’s dry hand always trembled a bit whenever she touched me, during her lectures upon my lack of sociability.

The idea that the blind are close to God seemed really comic.

At the most extreme, the Fathers would have willingly accepted me even with my God, the God of the Koran. I obviously did not have the same religion as they did, not even the same kind of religion. I often think I unconsciously became an atheist; but a Moslem atheist will never be like a Catholic atheist. And when I no longer know a single word of the Koran, I will still believe in the legend of Hassan, his nine djinns and his magic wand. I will still purify myself with water, or at least with sand—with something that flows—after every act of daily life. I had been really stupefied to find no faucet in the W.C. but rolls of paper. in American hotels, something I had once thought due uniquely to Italian filthiness. I continued to carefully collect all the debris of my toilette, trimmings from my beard and nails, and to put it into little papers which I burned. “When you are ready for prayer, wash the face and hands to the elbow; purify yourself when you have satisfied your natural needs, or when you have had the contact of love...” It had been a long time since I had ceased to pray, but this invocation came back to me as an imperative, more powerful than any belief.

Without having been religious, I realized that having been raised as a Believer gave me an opportunity which my companions would never know. Most of them were dirty. They had no interest in their bodies and dressed any way, with sweaters on backwards, or covered with greasy spots; some wore pajamas all day long.

I did not have this ignorance of my body. I knew from the time I was a small child how important it is to purify oneself, what you call a toilette. Then, with Mrs. Hallowe’en, I learned how to put all the little things in order, the minute attentions that permitted me to eat in publice (1 preferred to eat alone—a clumsy move like putting an elbow in my plate was always possible) without differing noticeably from a “normal” man. Most of my blind companions could not eat without turning over a glass, and considered all the elements of clothing outside their tactile field as irremediably lost. The many diabetics among the boarders—as if one infirmity brought on another in a cynical fate—carried a syringe filled with insulin around their necks, to administer their necessary daily injections to themselves. They smelled like rubbing alcohol, with a tincture of unmade bed.

This indifference to appearance was not a hatred of the customs of the sighted, which however are often incomprehensible to the blind. They let themselves go by obedience, by resignation, to the status of the Assisted Inept to which the Fathers invited them. Well, I wasn’t one of them. If I scorn the rules of the sighted, I still know how to handle them, to conjure up that illusion and to be visible in the midst of them, if I wish.

The most distressing and by far the most numerous of the whole groups of boarders were the elderly. They were closed upin another wing, where we went once a week to shake the flaccid hands of those poor half-vegetable, abandoned creatures. They were a confusing alignment of definitive odors: old cologne bottles standing open too long, old housecoats worn an entire lifetime. A shuffle of slippers. A gurgling, almost a rale right next to us, signalled a nearly covered presence: an old woman perceptible only to the sighted who if it were up to us would have been forgotten and left to die.

The Fathers involuntarily helped us that day (at least those of us who still had a bit of vitality) to get a powerful taste of the future life of the blind according to their ideal: a life steeped in boredom, in impotence. Nine out of ten of the blind are old people. Once again I found myself the exception. These visits pushed me further in my determination to not become one of them. These senior citizens had been progressively, inevitably deprived of movement. The risks, the insurance premiums all pushed for their immobilization. They were rolling in reverse back into themselves, which is what produced that continuous scraping of chairs surrounding them. For the first time I became aware of that rolling-at-anchor in the others; most of the younger ones, blind since birth, were afflicted with it too. This rocking back and forth on themselves replaced all real movement, real exploration. It was the sound equivalent of the uniform of the institutionalized blind.

The residents who had been there several years spoke a definite slang, which had its humorous side. For one Father who always played the Pope whenever he gave classes, they said he had a fizzy voice. Blankets or hair were “sheep,” soft to the touch; but it was also used for music, or someone’s personality. Basic conversation revolved around the difficulty of getting out of that space they had closed us into: ineptness. An inept, I learned, is called “blind,” a word we never used except in its original sense.

An inept “rowed,” that is he extended his arms for orientation, or he “got it”—he knocked into something. The fear of running into things paralyzed us all.

There remained speaking and being touched. I had discovered touch by myself and had learned languages. I did not need to be put to pasture in a pen. To the Fathers, my education as one of the blind had been done in a savage manner. We had to start again at Zero, clear the slate if possible. They wanted to eradicate the imprint of Mrs. Hallowe’en. To speak, to be touched ... the Fathers were babbling mystics with roaming hands. The sort of vague religious tone they supplied to our “communication groups”—where we were supposed to talk about ourselves, all of us holding hands—filled me with repulsion.

I didn’t like to talk about my past as the others did, or to be smothered with their compassion, each waiting his turn to “deal with” his handicap. They really meant to deal with their bad luck.

In me—whose daily independence they admired—they paradoxically saw independence as a refusal to “deal with myself as non-sighted.” My tongue remained paralyzed during these recitation groups. I had already discarded the self-blubbering some handicapped crawl in. I didn’t fee/ blind.

The Fathers’ doctrine, in the form of insinuating niceties, had contaminated those soft brains. In each of my companions’ activities, they ended up acquiring a totally specialized talent.

With the Fathers’ encouragement, their little manias finally constituted their entire universe. The only people I talked to were Mexican twins, afflicted with congenital glaucoma. Still only vision-impaired but soon destined for full blindness, they were learning the techniques of the blind, useless at the moment, but which would shortly become indispensible. They were learning to be blind, and while they waited they took advantage of what sight remained to rip off jam packets from the serving line at lunch.

In the “activities,” everyone was so absorbed by his own toy that the institute, seen from a helicopter, would have looked like an assembly of hermits. There was a sixteen-year-old virtuoso flautist whom they showed off on holidays; there were translators putting the Bible into Indonesian; there were experts in assembling electronic components who didn’t know how to hold their own forks at the table. As a community, these people who demonstrated such astounding aptitude, turned into a chorus of fuzzy voices, objectively believing in their “infirmity;” most had never known anything of the universe beyond the inside of the park gate. Their real infirmity was in their isolation from the world.

Life at the institute was exasperating because of its systematization, laid on thick, which even today comes back to me asa bad taste. The professors had to count the residents so many times, and to instill into them the fear of forgetting an object or a word that they found it simpler to turn the students into maniacs.

The place was drenched in electronic spirituality. From time to time adventure would break out between two residents in the “youth” pavilion. Some of those I took to be kids were more than thirty years old, retarded adolescents. The Fathers did not tolerate relationships between residents of different “blocs” (impaired-vision boys, impaired-vision girls, sightless boys, etc.) except under certain mysterious conditions which resulted from an in-depth examination by the director herself or from dossiers and close interrogations, which sloshed around inside her head for weeks. You did not make love in the institute. But at the end of a long inquest a young man could look forward to marriage with a young lady. The Fathers were haunted by genetics: they searched the couples’ genealogical trees for other cases of blindness. So—under the guise of hygiene—their fear and hatred of blindness was clearly manifested. Couples formed inevitably, which the systematic retardation of the place was unable to prevent under Catholic guidelines. They were tolerated better than the “domino” couples—as they were atrociously called, couples consisting of one blind and one sighted resident—at least the problem of poor genes was known; no further risk of contamination when all the eggs were from the same bad basket.

Old adolescents’ trembling hands sometimes found each other ineptly under the table at breakfast time, knocking over coffee pots in the process. Passion was purely verbal. Even touching between “fiancés” remained above all symbolic. A little peck on the cheek was the most daring caress.

Incredible: of the hundred girls and boys in good physical condition with full faces and well-nourished bodies who were left after one subtracted the old people and the basket cases, not one had the slightest notion of what sex was. It didn’t take me long to verify that first hand.

Maybe these guys had never even had a hard-on; the girls thought you got a kid by kissing when you're twenty-five. Yet their physical development was the same as any student in the country.

Fortunately, I began working out. I had never done physical training until then, preferring to play soccer when I was a kid on Kerkenna. We all had our favorite soccer stars, born in the streets of Tunis. Sports opened a world to me closed to invalids, just as it opened the only door to success back home to the most downand- out of our “disadvantaged.” I quickly became one of the most eager participants in sports.

The gym teacher was a former speleologist, blind from birth, who had set up an entire system appropriate for us. He never left the sportsgrounds and gym. Christopher had lost several fingers underground in caves, far below the surface, but plain as daylight to him. Spelunking is the mountain climbing of the sightless he once explained to me in a terrible Oakland accent. He was repairing his “harmonic target.” Oh, Christopher was black, I forgot to mention: I can’t see black.

The “harmonic target” was a contest of adroitness where I won every prize. A big round target made of resonating wood had concentric circles each with a different tone, sounding sharper in pitch as you neared the center with every arrow. A cord hooked onto a central rim allowed you one chance to get a fix upon it before you drew the bow.

Christopher always began class by letting us position ourselves at random in the vast, sonorous gymnasium. We were supposed to call out to each other, answering once, to allow us to direct ourselves toward another person before calling out the name of someone else. The session lasted until we had covered the entire gym, taking possession of the space.

I hung from the rings, on the trapeze, in emptiness. Christopher’s hand went with me. We jumped the horse. Christopher would call out a brief signal to indicate its position.

I didn’t like it when we walked in a line to the rhythm of a record of African music, each with his hand on the shoulder of the one in front, a long blind worm squirming along the field. I preferred the bicycle races on stationery bikes, with weights which rubbed against the wheels to make hills, and an electric buzzer to mark the finish line. The real tandems, bikes that Christopher let me sometimes drive with his hands upon my arms, were usually piloted by the sighted person and pedalled by the blind.

We ran foot races, the clumsier of us holding onto a ring which slid along a wire stretched out beside our lanes, others guided by our feet, by the simple difference between sand and grass. À line of fringe caressed our sweaty brows to mark the finish line.

I was on the baseball team. We wore armbands with bells, and the ball that Christopher let fly sent out a continuous beep-beep into the pure Pacific air above our heads. That summer I lived my best moments of institutional life. In the locker room, in secret, Christopher told me all about his expeditions. The Fathers hardly wanted someone inciting us to wanderlust.

Christopher had recognized me, not as an Arab but as someone who was not blind in their sense of the word. My accident was only an accident, a rite, an initiation. I wasn’t about to construct my whole existence around one of those “blind man’s crafts,” which permit the sighted to use our weakness to their best advantage. Their ideal life for us would be a little blind couple—a switchboard operator and a newsstand operator, or a cellist and a radio technician—laying their white canes side by side next to the fireplace. They would be involved in one of those post-institutional groups; the former residents return once a month for “tea,” as though they were sorry they ever left. I never wanted to be “welcomed” again. I didn’t want anything more to do with good souls.

I became convinced that my abduction by Mrs. Hallowe’en had been the great opportunity of my life. Had I stayed, like my companions, under my family’s care my mother would sooner or later have put me into an institution, one a lot worse than where I wound up. My only memories, my only desires would have been—like those others —strangled by two closed worlds. Families were the only visitors (aside from former residents) authorized to get into the institute. I had the luck to come in late enough, formed enough, to retain my distance.

The residents who had been sighted once were completely attached to their families: their letters, their visits. Their families contained the only living beings they could attach a visual memory to. I could think of nothing but the crazy and anonymous world, outside.

All these students had as visual souvenirs were their family photos, the images of those relatives whose letters a teacher would read to them in a flat neutral voice. Absorbed in the recitation, they would silently scan for these images, trying to find a memory of themselves from that time back when they could still see: the touchstone of their tragedy. Most of them had long since ceased to have any interior “image,” except in the form of a persistent recurrent regret which they confused with the picture of health.

I had nothing to look back to anymore on Kerkenna, and I would never return there. A dusty courtyard surrounded by fresh blue and white rooms, the crushed velvet of the divans where we had sat cross-legged for meals at the little round table, the school, the dust from scooters, the flies that got into the bar through parted curtains over the doorway: all that world stopped with my accident and would never return again. Then, I had beena young empty-headed colt, scared by his own shadow. Since then, I have already lived more than any other kid on Kerkenna will in his whole life.

In the institute there was a calm which astonished me: the incredible calm of the resigned. Personally, I had become neutral, a spectator to my imprisonment more than an actor in it. I was ready to attribute this calm to the other students’ spontaneous numbness, since they had managed to transform every occasion to touch one another into religious kitsch or naïveté.

One day, inadvertently, I asked aloud why the grape juice they served us had such a bitter taste. An old-timer explained it was the saltpeter that the Fathers dumped into our drinks every evening. After that the only thing I drank was tap water from the courtyard near the gym.

All these people were sexual latecomers, and I’ve always been more advanced. The saltpeter, no doubt, but surely their unbelievable resignation, too. Well, Z had a body, /had sexuality.

I would spend mornings in class, and afternoons in the library or at the workshop: a sort of big hangar in the middle of the lawns. It contained a sampler of work for the blind: offices with tape recorders dictating quotations from the cattle market to apprentice stenographers; the holy of holies of the institute with vibrating keys—a section for computer programming; a special workshop where the vision-impaired recopied books into large print for the institute’s library. At the back was a photographic studio.

I had asked to be trained in photography and the director beamed with satisfaction because that meant I had come out of my “state of shock.” They’d figured I was in a state of shock those first days because I refused to speak to them.

I became an expert in photo-developing chemical baths and their temperatures. I recognized the different trays by their odors.

I selected paper by its grain. At first I would forget to turn out the light, or to close the door, which meant a certain number of foggy negatives. Then I had a buzzer installed—connected to the light bulb—which reminded me.

The huge building resounded as the students took part ina symphony of noise. The walls were too thin and the roof must have been made of iron. Out of the midst of the buzzers and bells, the hammering and machinery noise, an unreal music sometimes wafted up, above it all, hesitating, incomplete. Leaning over my pungent developing trays or hanging photos to dry I would hear a series of notes sounding like runs played at random, sometimes separated by a deafening shock. The descendents of black slaves who played the gumbri back in Tunisia spent hours like that: they'd have a great time playing chords on their instruments, accompanied by little slaps with the palms of their hands upon the body of the guitar.

One day as I was opening the photo lab, instead of going inside I turned and walked toward the music. With the Fathers’ help, each of us was allowed certain standard routes within the institute. They didn’t like you to stray from the path by yourself.

To meet people there were encounter groups with all their pious sap. At any rate, two residents could never really be sure of being alone.

The musical noise continued, undisturbed by my approach. I added a final note to the score when I crashed noisily into what I thought was a wooden wall, but found to be the moaning body of a piano.

Beside it, squatting or stretched out on the floor someone was working, or had just stopped working. I asked who was there, and all I got for an answer was a mumble, until Jenny took the piece of wood she was using to repair the instrument out of her mouth. Jenny was learning to tune pianos.

She started in again, making the large injured beast moan under her nimble fingers, letting out an occasional “ouch” whena hammer landed on her fingers. She wouldn’t speak first. I had to question her. She told me her story in half sentences while she continued her work. The students knew their handicaps by heart and loved to talk about them.

Six-year-old kids spoke seriously about their “retinal conjunctivitis” and other horrible things. Jenny wasn’t really blind, either. She just could not identify objects. A hysterical blindness had made her lose vision of movement. Only stationary bodies or those just coming orj ust going when she was herself motionless, were perceptible to her. What’s more, she only saw a tiny part of the visual field: only a bizarrely-shaped slit, the same on both retinas, “saw.” Jenny imagined the world across this twisted slit which demanded long minutes from her as she held her breath to make it appear.

Jenny never did manage to see me: I was too mobile. She showed me some scores in Braille, where each note is indicated by a letter of the alphabet with the music written after it. I found her again in the following days. She continued to repair her piano, slowly climbing toward the high notes.

Each note of the piano is comprised of more than a hundred twenty pieces, and there are eighty-eight notes. While she was busy with her tuning key and wedge, Jenny let me stroke her breasts. She didn’t seem to be more than fifteen, and my hands wandered over her blonde girl’s skin which she said was covered with freckles. Bathed in sweat and dust, we rolled on the floor in our blue work clothes (embroidered with the initials of the institute). The piano hid us, letting out an occasional protesting vibration whenever a foot or an elbow knocked against its naked wires.

When the hammers were done she began on the keyboard, decoding the Braille score with one hand while playing a childish song with the other. She had a way of pulling her head down into her shoulders when I caressed her neck like a plaintive little squirrel who shivers at the slightest touch.

Her naiveté bothered me. After she was used to me, Jenny was very fond of cuddling. To keep her from seeing the blood when I deflowered her, I washed her myself with a sponge from the lab. She wanted to “tell the Fathers everything,” which wasn’t all too clear in her mind, anyway. She sincerely believed we were going to be married. If only because of our ages it was out of the question.

I must have been the very first one to touch her with desire.

She had never known adolescent sexual games as I had on Kerkenna. She thought that every time you touch each other lovingly, a trace remained, a brand which the Fathers could not help but notice.

At the highest note, our lips approached and touched, and I felt the slight trembling of her mouth. We embraced, reinventing the kiss, our tongues inside warm and humid hollows. For the first time I kissed on the mouth. Mrs. Hallowe’en had never kissed me, and neither had any of the friends she had loaned me out to. I was familiar with women’s bodies and with their mouths around my sex. For the first time now I made love to someone near my own age, someone less than thirty years’ older.

I dragged her off into the lab and locked the door. Nasty vapors from the fixatives swirled around us as we made love.

Jenny tirelessly caressed my eyelashes, describing the little house where we would soon be living, peopled in several years with (why not?) little blind ones: our children.

My photography was going well, since by then they had started trusting me with the key. Despite the fact that they still considered me “anti-social,” the Fathers and the director decided I was beginning to resemble the others. The little lone wolf would become a good sightless human being. I was starting to owe them something: my training was the principal. I might have become the little darling of the institute, or so it seemed. They kept repeating that I had the face of an angel.

They still kept reproaching me for my refusal to become confidential with them and especially for my lack of shame which outraged the personnel. With Mrs. Hallowe’en I was accustomed to think of the state of undress as strictly a function of the temperature—which in Florida is mild.

I am indifferent to clothing; it is only an obstacle between people’s bodies and myself, a barrier similar to putting a sighted person in front of a screen, or a mask in front of the negative youre trying to develop ... let us say, like someone wearing dark glasses whose gaze you cannot see.

In September I passed my exam as photo technician with flying colors. The director had taken me herself in her Cadillac to the examination room, one hand upon my knee, the other on the steering wheel. The teachers organized a little reception in my honor on the lawn. Between a glass of hot wine and some cake I was presented to the Senator from Santa Barbara and his wife.

She was saying in a hysterical voice (already a little drunk), “You could swear he sees, don’t you think?” An old gentleman who turned out to be the son of MacPherson, founder of the institute, handed me my diploma and shook my hand between his two dried up old thrashing machines.

The next day, the Father in charge of the darkroom accompanied me to work. I thought he had found out what I was doing with Jenny. I coughed to warn her. She must have heard the Father’s footsteps and stayed behind her piano, showing her irritation by a lot of wrong high notes.

You could easily guess when a Father was there by the swishing of his gown. But the Father only wanted me to developa roll of pictures from the party the evening before. He smelled like licorice, and you could hear him sucking on his candies while he mused over the pictures. All of a sudden he grabbed my arm and said in a voice choked with emotion, “Do you realize what you have just developed there? Your own picture ... too bad ...” (that you can’t see yourself) formed unconsciously on his wellshaved lips.

Usually, I didn’t worry about the subject matter of the photos I was developing. Only their texture was important. They could have had me turning out pornographic film for all I cared.

But upon hearing that, I was seized by incomprehensible exasperation. I jerked up the soft and running proof and tore it to shreds, it ripped warm and noisy like a living being.

I abruptly stopped being interested in photography. Occasionally, I would return to the lab, but I always had the impression of being washed out since I couldn’t even see the results of my work. Jenny, pressed against me, didn’t understand what had brought out my anger. Resigned to being blind since birth, she admitted without discussion that the world of the sighted around her was superior to hers; she recognized that, not contesting the presence of some authority beyond the reach of her hypersensitive little palms. Since I had led her to discover sex, her entire universe was limited to me, to touching me insatiably, as if to assure herself that I hadn’t disappeared. There was only one single body in the world—mine; and that, she imagined in her frail little brain, until the end of time.

*

So as to not be doing nothing, I asked to try kinesitherapy, an activity much in vogue among the institute’s students. The massage room was hidden in the basement, a big, fresh, tiled room as noisy as a swimming pool with the slap of hands massaging muscles echoed by the walls.

As with many of the other students, massage was practically natural for me. I had the tactile familiarity of my own body.

When I was a little kid on Kerkenna, in the hammam (what you would calla Turkish bath) the masseur had twisted my arms and had climbed onto my back—in the midst of wooden pails filled with boiling water drawn froma steaming basin. Vapor ran along the platforms and climbed the columns toward the shadowy vaulted ceiling. I had learned the importance of the body from those long massages every Friday. Mrs. Hallowe’en had continued this ceremony in her own manner by sudsing me in the sunken tubs of intercontinental hotels.

Unlike photography, there was no hidden sense in this activity. Everyone was equalized: I was completely mixed in with the sensual world.

After a few lessons I could “read” a body, and with my busy contented hands, work on sprains, cramps and other muscular weaknesses. Bodies trembled, became firm, admitted their frailties.

To relax the subject, I spoke without interruption. Knots of pain, of nervousness slowly unravelled under my fingers. According to the director whom I treated for back pain, I had magic hands.

I often had to treat members of our rugby team that Christopher sent over. The club was renowned on the West coast: they played the Santa Barbara firemen’s or policemen’s clubs in amateur championships and often our non-sighted team walked away with the game. One Sunday morning, Christopher brought me a patient who had dislocated his hip in a demonstration match at the stadium. He stretched out on a mattress on the floor. His name was Enrico, and he muttered complaints in Italian-American.

All his muscles were stretched and painful because he had stayed out in the cold just after the demonstration. I massaged up the length of his leg, starting from his heels—stuck inside big mud-caked socks. Enrico was very muscular with thick solid muscles outlined under my hand like a flexible modeling form, supple and warm. Of course I had to examine the hip, but when I pulled on the elastic of his shorts he stopped my hand. I thought I had hurt him, and I started speaking to him in the Italian I had known since living on Kerkenna. Footsteps of the Father on surveillance duty approached. He leaned over me and let out a distracted groan of approval. I had begun to strike Enrico’s right thigh with the heels of my hands.

The Father moved away, and I remembered that Italians were very modest. I sensed Enrico raising up on his elbows. Then, I knew he had a hard-on.

That didn’t bother me in the least, but it seemed that for him it was torture. Enrico must have been one of the male nurses. The very worst fault for one of the personnel was to allow any resident to suspect sexual emotion. Touching him, I had recognized it. His brutal, ashamed manner of quivering upon contact with me was that of someone sighted. I went with him into the showers. I was surprised when he took the initiative. I felt his anxious eyes scanning the glass door of the locker room at the moment he began to suck me fiercely.

On Kerkenna, boys used to do things like that together. I tried to figure out what I liked about Enrico. For me love is at once completely abstract and very precise. I make my own synthesis of little dabs of skin, of organs that I caress: It has nothing to do with an image.

I had never had full sex with a boy except once when I was very small, with the teacher from the Koranic school. I would never have thought a young man like Enrico could do the same thing to me as Mrs. Hallowe’en and her gentlemen and lady friends had. I had thought it a custom of old European nobility.

Even less did I imagine he would turn around for me in the shower stall so easily, as though he had always done it.

At first I was sort of cold. Enrico began exciting me by his tactile motions, the fumbling venturesome manner of the sighted; touches exploded under my fingertips, reassured perhaps by not being seen, as he now discovered with me.

I have never seen anyone having an orgasm. When we used to caress each other as kids in a shepherd’s hut of dried rocks isolated in the cactus fields, I always closed my eyes just at the moment of orgasm; and I could never imagine looking at my cousin’s face. Instead, I stared at a slice of the blue skies, a blade of sunlight falling from the heavenly fortress onto my nearly closed eyes; a sight I remembered a long time.

I never imagined how Mrs. Hallowe’en looked. The image of the image didn’t excite me any more, as had still happened on Kerkenna. The image of the image, the mental repetition of the word “image,” whose secret I was trying to pierce by chanting aloud, just after the accident. As if to say “colors,” or the names of colors, forms, of bodies, would make you master them.

I only discovered pornography the day I bought some cassettes in Times Square—stimulating stories. I have always liked the people I am making love with to talk at the same time, even to say something stupid like “more, more.” At least I hear them. I make love with people-voices, with people-skins. Enrico’s scratchy chin on my chest and torso as our hands, legs, mouths were pressing against one another gave rise to electrical discharges in me, reflexive body movements, rapid contractions... the calm silence of rest in the smoke of our first cigarette.

Making love, more than a picture, suggests to me the idea of executing a piece of music; not the ethereal music that the residents’ chamber music orchestra played ad infinitum in the little salon with the open windows, but a music of contrasts, thrown together, almost violent, where an irritating odor strongly opposes the smoothness of a skin; extended arm muscles contrasting with the supple softness of an abdomen.

There exists a policy of regard, a policy of seeing that paralyzes the non-blind. Enrico had a store of passion and tenderness with me that he surely did not have with his official little lady friend. When we make love there comes a moment when all of us are blind, and it’s the strongest instant, the most exceptional moment. I had already known it as a child, at the moment when my body lost fear and timidity. I never felt fear making love with the sighted, with a body close, touching me; yet I feel it whenever I go into an unkonwn room where I have no idea of its shape or of what may be inside it.

This same fear, this same timidity reappeared unexpectedly in my relations with Jenny, since I discovered the immense importance I had become for her. She supposed herself and I alike: two condemned prisoners in the same cell. There was born in me an insufferable irritation which expressed itself bit by bit by impatience. Those blind hands skating desperately over my face, searching for the confirmation of resemblance, burning me, skinning me with the regret of something they did not know, whose key they sought in vain: my visible beauty, which the sighted talked about so much.

Making love with Enrico, then with other men and other women after him, I had the pleasure of unbalancing the naiveté of the sighted. They saw me as a child contemplates a too-precious toy, embarrassed by their own desire, afraid of ruining everything.

With me, they finally succeeded in having what they had always wanted and could only attain by closing the shutters of their love nests, or by taking refuge at night in public parks to make love without any supervisory gaze. It seems that surveillance is born from a passing glance, or from two glances passing.

With Jenny, I got to know how it was for two to explore the bars of our mutual cage. With sighted lovers, blindness takes the upper hand, a perfection allowing them to close their eyes confidently. Inversely, I was “visible” in love only to the blind. My face took my infirmity out of view of the sighted: the same infirmity a blind lover could never forget. With Enrico, love was a consequence of my beauty, that final touch of the artist who creates a strong emotion.

Now that I was sure of being not a blind man but an invisible voyeur of the sighted world I started to talk to Enrico about escaping.

We made love everywhere around the institute, between two brooms in the kitchen closet, behind trees in the park, in the locker rooms of the gymnasium. I stopped going to see Jenny, and I could sometimes hear her, shuffling around in my corridor evenings, not daring to cross the threshold or to ask out loud if I was there, sobbing in a corner like a little mouse.

The first time I told Enrico that I had to get out of the institute and go to Los Angeles he shook the bed jumping up. I was waiting for darkness to get back to my room without being seen. It was hot in the employees’ quarters. Their rooms were not airconditioned and his sweat rolled down onto me. “Do you mean... travelling by yourself?” We were speaking in Italian. I didn’t even have to spell out the word “escape,” which was off limits at the institute. I said, yes, I would be alone. He relaxed. He had been afraid he might have to go with me. “And without the Fathers’ permission?” I said I had a friend in L.A. who was going to put me up. I would come back to the institute after a couple of weeks.

Enrico didn’t say anything. I think he wasn’t taken in by the innocent way I proposed this little excursion. The idea of someone blind out in the world, without a guide, seemed so completely absurd to him that he washed his hands of the whole matter.

As a matter of fact, escape from the institute was so unthinkable that I could have walked right across the court of honor, suitcase in my hand and climbed into a taxi before the director reacted. Naturally I could have gotten LOST, but escape? You cannot escape what I am. And what other world than the institute would have me?

The residents’ suitcases were all heaped together in a locked cellar, it was so completely evident that most of them would never be needed again. Enrico gave me a gym bag which I never got back to him. I filled it with a pair of tennis shoes, some shirts and other clothes, my toothbrush and my minicassette recorder. That morning I was wearing my jeans and some street shoes that Enrico had bought for me. My passports and residence permit were sewn into the lining of my coat. The shoes were too small and hurt my feet.

We went out through the garden door, and I recounted the five hundred dollars Enrico had paid for the link bracelet that Mrs. Hallowe’en had given me. I marked the bills with my nail: one slit for the singles, two for the fives, three for the tens, and a little notch for fifties. It was an old café waiter’s trick. Of all the kinds I’ve come across, American money is the worst: all the bills are the same size.

We went along the roadbank. Enrico was surprised to see me capable of following the arc of the curve descending toward Santa Barbara on a road I had never walked before. Sometimes he stopped to look at me, forcing me to stop too, since I was being guided by his footsteps.

Following Enrico I dreamed about how easy it was going to be to slip in among the sighted—at least as long as they weren’t watching me. All you had to do was cue in on the rhythm of someone’s footsteps. Now there’s an expression I really understand, “To follow in someone’s footsteps.” Then you only had to change steps, slide in behind another passerby, and thus be led down the road to wherever you wanted to go. Following a precise itinerary would of course require another tack. You would have to know the city map pretty well, and only use someone else’s footsteps as a passenger, like taking several buses to get to the right direction.

As long as they weren’t looking at me. As soonas they started thinking about me, their steps and the interest I had in following them were gone. So it did matter if they found out I was blind.

At the third turn, the smell of the sea overpowered the pines.

Far away, the ocean was rolling, spray freshening the air. I faced the wind and breathed in deeply. It smelled like Spring, like on the bridge the day she died. It had been just one year.

One year of being shut up. Enrico started yelling to warn me: the noise of a motor was coming up the slope. The car slowed down when it reached me, then accelerated again, throwing gravel on my shoes with a whiff of warm air and exhausted gasoline.

Enrico had run up beside me. “She didn’t see you!” It was the director’s car coming back from the morning errands. I wasn’t wearing the regulation shirt and shorts anymore. She hadn’t even recognized me. She couldn’t imagine me walking around OUTSIDE dressed like an ordinary sighted man in the street.

Down below there was a bit of a crowd at the bus station.

With Mrs. Hallowe’en I always liked train stations and airports.

When she was furious about a delay or a strike I thought all the brouhaha of the crowd constantly mounting and falling was great, like the waters of a human fountain, punctuated by loudspeakers and odors carried on drafts of air and in strangers’ clothing. This time there would be no one to come take me by the hand once I'd left Enrico; he was among the sonorous spectacle of a ticket window as I sat out of trouble on a bench.

Enrico came back to give me my ticket. For a minute, I thought I heard the toc-toc of a cane, felt Zita’s shape against my leg. At the last instant, overcome with emotion, Enrico took me by the hand and begged me in the name oft he Holy Mother and all the Saints to come back to the institute, where I should never say that he had helped me. I was surprised. I had already nearly forgotten him. While I thought about how to answer him, he left, clearing his throat as he shook my hand. I concentrated on the smells and the noise, on the crowd, shapeless and powerful, anonymous, the crowd again, at last.

The End

 

Guy Hocquenghem (1946-1988) was a French writer, philosopher, essayist and activist, often considered the father and theorist of the Queer theory. He was the author of Homosexual Desire (1972) and L'Amour en relief (1982).

Preface by George Stambolian
Blindness is the physical disability most feared by all. Yet since early times, men and women have also believed that the sightless possess extraordinary even magical abilities. In his first, remarkable novel, French writer, philosopher (“Homosexual Desire”) and filmmaker (“Le Race D’Ep”) Guy Hocquenghem has fashioned a story of blindness which absorbs all previous ideas on the subject and breaks new ground.
Amar is a handsome young Arab boy blinded in a motorcycle accident whose sudden disability takes him from his Mediterranean island and sets him upon a journey to strange lands with eccentric people in bizarre relationships. Amar's travels from the decadent European disco scene in Paris, to the streets of Los Angeles and New York, to the beaches of Southern California and ultimately into the frozen wastes of Alaska, becomes a voyage of self discovery, but also a trek into the hidden nature of man.
Along the way he is attached to many—an aged millionaireness, her uncanny cat, a surfer, an overly brilliant gay scientist, a young guilt-ridden French girl desperately in love with him. Amar learns to be sightless, then learns new kinds of vision. His adventures as a Santa Monica hustler, as a performing surfer in Marineland, as a lover and a loner, and finally as the guinea pig in an extraordinary experiment, make 'Love in Relief' unique.

 

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Love in Relief
by Guy Hocquenghem
excerpt
Originally published in French "L'Amour en Relief"
Editions Albin Michel, 1982
Translation 1985, by Michael Whisler
Edition SeaHorse Press New York City (1986)

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27.Set.2023
Publicado por MJA