The Crossing(103)

The woman leaned back. The boy thought that she would continue but she did not. They sat in silence.

Era la muchacha, he said.

Sí.

He looked at the blind man. The blind man sat with his drawn face half enshadowed in the light of the oil lamp. He must have sensed the boy studying him. Es una carantoña, no? he said.

No, Billy said. Y ademas, no me dijo que los aspectos de las cosas son engañosas?

Because the blind man’s face lacked all expression one could not tell when he would speak or if he would at all. After a while he raised one hand from the table in that odd gesture of blessing or despair. Para mi, sí, he said.

Billy looked at the woman. She sat as before, her hands folded upon the table. He asked the blind man had he heard of others who had suffered the same calamity as he at that man’s hands but the blind man only said that he had heard, yes, but had not seen nor met. He said that the blind do not seek each other’s company. He told how once in the alameda in Chihuahua he had heard a cane come tapping and he’d called out his own condition and asked if another such were there in that mutual darkness. The tapping ceased. No one spoke. Then the tapping commenced again and withdrew down the walkway and faded among the sounds of traffic in the street.

He leaned slightly forward. Entienda que ya existe este ogro. Este chupador de ojos. El y otros como él. Ellos no han desaparecido del mundo. Y nunca to haran.

Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case. He said that in his opinion no one could speak for the origins of such men nor where they might appear but only of their existence. He said that who steals one’s eyes steals a world and himself remains thereby forever hidden. How to speak of his locality?

Y sus sueños, said the boy. Se han hecho más pálidos?

The blind man sat for some time. He could have been sleeping. He could have been waiting for word to be brought to him. Finally he said that in his first years of darkness his dreams had been vivid beyond all expectation and that he had come to thirst for them but that dreams and memories alike had faded one by one until they were no more. Of all that once had been no trace remained. The look of the world. The faces of loved ones. Finally even his own person was lost to him. Whatever he had been he was no more. He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again. No puedo recordar el mundo de luz, he said. Hace muchos años. Ese mundo es un mundo frágil. Ultimamente to que vine a ver era más durable. Más verdadero.

He spoke of the first years of his blindness in which the world about him awaited his movements. He said that men with eyes may select what they wish to see but for the blind the world appears of its own will. He said that for the blind everything was abruptly at hand, that nothing ever announced its approach. Origins and destinations became but rumors. To move is to abut against the world. Sit quietly and it vanishes. En mis primeros años de la oscuridad pensé que la ceguedad fué una forma de la muerte. Estuve equivocado. A1 perder la vista es como un sueño de caída. Se piensa que no hay ningún fondo de este abismo. Se cae y cae. La luz retrocede. La memoria de la luz. La memoria del mundo. De su propia cara. De la carantoña.

He raised one hand slowly and held it before him. As if in measure of something. He said that if this falling were a falling to death then it was death itself that was different than men supposed. Where is the world in this falling? Is it also receding away with the light and the memory of the light? Or does it not fall also? He said that in his blindness he had indeed lost himself and all memory of himself yet he had found in the deepest dark of that loss that there also was a ground and there one must begin.

En este viaje el mundo visible es no más que un distraimiento. Para los ciegos y para todos los hombres. Ultimamente sabemos que no podemos ver el buen Dios. Vamos escuchando. Me entiendes, joven? Debemos escuchar.

When he spoke no more the boy asked him if the advice then which the sepulturero had given to the girl in the church had been false advice but the blind man said that the sepulturero had advised according to his lights and should not be faulted. Such men even took it upon themselves to advise the dead. Or to commend them to God once priest and friends and children all have gone to their houses. He said that the sepulturero might presume to speak of a darkness of which he had no knowledge, for had he such knowledge he could not then be a sepulturero. When the boy asked him if this knowledge were a special knowledge only to the blind the blind man said that it was not. He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them.