A Silent Death

Chapter Nineteen

Ana remembered the first time she ever set eyes on Sergio. He had not immediately endeared himself to her.

It was 1997. She was in her final year at secondary school and facing an uncertain future. The hearing problems which had dogged her from early childhood were getting worse. School had been a hostile environment. As her auditory perception deteriorated and she was forced to wear hearing aids, so the friendships she had made in the early years fell by the wayside. One by one. No one wanted to be friends with a girl who couldn’t hear, as if they too might be tainted by her disability. It wasn’t cool. It made her seem stupid, and slow. Besties became bullies, playing tricks on her behind her back, indulging the apparently endless capacity of children for cruelty. Relentless mimicry, humiliation. And her tearful response only encouraged further ridicule, somehow whipping former friends into a frenzy of heartlessness.

Her teachers were just as bad, or perhaps worse, since they were at least adults. Their cruelty came more in the form of thoughtless neglect than cold-hearted design. Ana had been refused a place at a special needs school. Her hearing deficiency was not deemed serious enough, and from the earliest age the only concession to her problem was to place her in a seat at the front of the class. Her teachers would then proceed to address the others over her head, or speak while facing the blackboard, so that Ana could not even read their lips.

For Ana herself it had resulted in slower than average progress and disparaging report cards.

Ana doesn’t pay attention.

Ana is clever, but she just doesn’t try.

Ana is lazy.

Ana doesn’t do her homework.

So unfair! Ana only ever missed her homework when it was delivered verbally to class, and she either misunderstood, or didn’t hear at all. Not one of her teachers took the trouble to write it down for her, or ensure that she understood what was being asked. She was just an irritation, an additional problem they didn’t need. A lumpen girl who sat at the front of the class. A girl who never responded, never participated, failed her exams and forgot her homework.

A girl who ached inside, hiding her misery and her loneliness from the world — even from her parents.

Her father was loving in his own way, but hardly ever there. A travelling salesman, he spent days on end, sometimes weeks, away from their home in a small apartment in Marviña old town, leaving Ana in the sole care of her mother. Although her mother came from a poor working-class family in a village in Catalonia, she had a certain conceit of herself, and always stood on her dignity. She adored Ana’s elder sister, Isabella, who was everything Ana was not. Pretty, clever, socially adept. And the ten-year age difference between the girls meant that they had virtually nothing in common, sharing very little of the childhoods that were always at very different stages of development. By the time Ana was nearing the end of secondary school, Isabella was already married with two young girls of her own.

Ana was viewed almost with embarrassment by her mother, as if her deafness were somehow her own fault, contrived to reflect shame on her family. When her husband was away she frequently chastised her daughter for failing to listen or understand, shouting at her quite unnecessarily when Ana was perfectly able to hear. Then, overcome with regret, she would smother the girl with love and tears, only to revert to type when Ana next frustrated her.

It was with some trepidation that Ana received the news her father brought home with him one night that he had obtained a place for her at a voluntary centre for the deaf in Estepona. Her mother was none too pleased either. It would be like announcing to the world, she said, that their daughter was disabled. Ana herself was less than happy. She was hard of hearing, she said, not deaf. But her dad had been insistent. The centre was run by a charity, but received government money in the form of a grant from the Junta de Andalucía. They provided facilities for the visually impaired, as well as the — and he chose his words carefully — hard of hearing. But it meant that Ana would get the opportunity to learn sign language, and that could only be a good thing. Ana was not so sure.

The centre was tucked away in a back street off the Plaza de las Flores in the old town of Estepona. Ana’s father drove her there on the first evening. After parking his car he took her by the hand and led her through the square up into a gloomy side street. ‘I’ll come and get you at nine, cielo,’ he said. ‘If you like it, you can get the bus next time.’ The centre was open three evenings a week, but Ana didn’t think there would be a next time.

An unprepossessing entrance led to a dark hallway that in turn opened into a large room set with tables and chairs, a couple of settees and several old armchairs. A hatch leading to a small kitchen released the smell of freshly brewed coffee into the crowded room. A young woman with short dark hair shook her father’s hand, and then Ana’s. ‘Welcome, young lady,’ she said. ‘Your father tells me you have hearing difficulties, but that you’re not deaf.’ Ana saw her eyes wander to the hearing aids in each of her ears. She nodded. ‘Good. Then that’ll make things much easier when it comes to learning sign language. We have an instructor who comes twice a week.’ Again Ana nodded. She didn’t want to let on that she had no intention of learning sign language. It would be like admitting that she was deaf. Perhaps, she thought, there was more of her mother in her than she might have wanted.

When her father had gone the young woman led her to a table and told her that someone would come shortly to speak to her and take down all her details. Ana sat and looked around with dismay. This was a gloomy room, with scarred and damp-stained yellow-painted plaster, and there was almost nobody here, she decided, under sixty.

‘Hola, how are you doing?’

She looked up to find herself gazing into the eyes of a young man in his early twenties. A shock of unruly brown hair tumbled across a strong brow with thick, dark eyebrows. He possessed a long aquiline nose, and full lips that seemed pale set against the deep tan of his face. He was tall and quite skinny and smiled at her, and for the first time in her life Ana felt her stomach flip over.

‘I’m alright,’ she said uncertainly.

‘Good,’ he said. Then made a series of signs with his hands that left her mystified.

She shrugged helplessly.

‘You lip-read?’

She nodded. Reading lips had never been a conscious process, simply something she had learned to do over the years out of pure necessity. She said, ‘But I’m not completely deaf.’ She saw him watching her lips intently.

He said, ‘I am stone deaf. I could hear perfectly well until I was seven years old, then a virus damaged my auditory nerves and I’ve been unable to hear anything since. I don’t like to speak now, because I’m always afraid I sound like a deaf person.’ He laughed. ‘Which I am, of course. But it’s safer to sign.’ He paused. ‘Have you come to learn?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m here because my father brought me. I doubt very much if I’ll be back.’

His smile faded, replaced by a look of disappointment. ‘Oh, you must. You can’t leave me here on my own with all these old people.’

She glanced around self-consciously and he laughed again. ‘Don’t worry, they can’t hear me. They’re deaf.’ Which made her laugh, too. Of course they were. ‘Blind people come on Thursdays to learn to use the white stick. The lucky ones get guide dogs.’ He paused. ‘I sometimes wonder which is worse — being deaf or blind. But I think losing your sight would be the worst of all. I can’t imagine not being able to see the world around me.’ He glanced towards the kitchen hatch. ‘Someone will likely come and take your registration details shortly. Can I get you a coffee?’

She nodded. ‘Please.’ And she watched him cross to the hatch. He had an easy gait, and she could see from his T-shirt that he had well-developed arms and pectorals, in a wiry sort of way. He wore tight-fitting jeans, and she found her eyes drawn to the lean but well-rounded buttocks that filled the seat of them.

He returned with two mugs of black coffee. ‘I forgot to ask if you wanted black, or...’

‘I prefer it with milk.’

‘No problem.’ He set the mugs down on the table and hurried away to the kitchen, returning a few moments later with an open carton of milk. He poured milk into her coffee until a wave of her hand indicated that it was enough. But as he put the carton down he was too busy looking at her, and caught it on the edge of the table. It slipped from his grasp, and milk went cascading down the front of her blouse and over the legs of her jeans. He leapt back as if he had been burned, and her chair toppled backwards as she jumped to her feet. Both mugs of coffee went flying.

‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. Wait, I’ll get a cloth.’ He hurried off again to the kitchen.

Ana stood with milk dripping on to the floor and running in white threads through dark pools of coffee. She looked around with embarrassment, expecting all eyes to be on her. But apart from an old lady at the far side of the room, no one seemed to have noticed. The young man returned with a tea towel and began feverishly wiping it up and down the front of her blouse. Before suddenly realizing that his fingers were brushing her breasts.

‘Oh my God!’ he said again, and once more jumped back. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...’ He held out the tea towel for Ana to use for herself. ‘Honestly, it was an accident.’

Ana fought hard to keep a straight face. In truth she was furious at him for ruining her blouse and her jeans. But she had also quite enjoyed the sensation of his fingers touching her breasts. Only once before had a boy put his hands on them. It was after a school dance and he had offered to walk her home. There had been a kiss, and then his hand sliding slyly beneath her blouse. She had slapped his face.

The young man blushed furiously.

She tried to soak up the milk from her blouse then glared at him. ‘Well, since you have managed to ruin almost everything I’m wearing, the least you can do is tell me your name — if only so I can take it in vain.’

It was clear from his face that he was not quite sure if she was being funny or not. ‘I’m Sergio,’ he said, and held out an awkward hand.

She thrust the milk-soaked tea towel into it. ‘I’m Ana. And maybe this time you’d like to get me a proper café con leche, without spilling milk all over me!’

They spent the next two hours just talking and drinking coffee. His lip-reading was better than hers, and she had at least some hearing to augment her comprehension. After ten minutes Ana had completely forgotten that either of them was anything other than a normal young person having a normal conversation. It was the first time in her life that she wasn’t aware of her handicap. That it didn’t seem to matter. That there were no obstacles to communication.

Sergio told her he had just turned twenty-one. He was studying online for a degree in Spanish. The internet was relatively young, but was already opening up possibilities for the deaf that could never have been imagined. The relationship with his tutors was conducted entirely onscreen, and they had no idea that he was deaf. ‘It makes me feel like a normal person again,’ he said. ‘There’s something about being deaf that seems to scare people. As if it’s a disease they might catch. Others think you are just stupid, and they treat you like an imbecile.’ He smiled. ‘But why am I telling you? You must know.’

Ana nodded sadly. ‘I know that I’ve lost all my friends. You sort of get used to just being on your own.’ She smiled. ‘After a while I kind of got to like it. You start relying on yourself, because you can’t rely on anyone else.’

‘Exactly right. But that’s why I love the internet. You can just be yourself, and nobody’s judging you. Nobody knows that you can’t hear them, cos you don’t need to. We could meet online in a chat room if you like.’ The idea seemed to excite him.

Ana’s smile faded and her eyes turned down towards the table.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘We don’t have internet at home.’

‘Oh.’ Sergio was crestfallen. ‘Maybe you could ask your dad?’

‘I don’t think he can afford it.’

‘Well, then, you’ll just have to come here three nights a week, and we can make this our real-life chat room.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ll teach you proper sign language.’

She pulled a face.

‘No, honestly, it’s good. When you get the hang of it you can really express yourself. You forget that you’re not actually speaking out loud.’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ She paused. ‘Still not sure I’m coming back, though.’ She watched his face fall again — an odd expression, but for the first time she realized how apposite it was. His face really did fall, and she didn’t have the heart to keep playing hard to get. It made her laugh. ‘But if you ask nicely...’

His relief was patent, and he grinned. ‘I’ll do better than that. I’ll take you out for tapas. I don’t just have to see you here.’

‘Woah!’ she raised her hands. ‘Not so fast. We just met, remember?’

‘Life’s too short for wasting time.’

‘Maybe. But it seems to me that you’re asking me out on a date when you really don’t know anything about me.’

‘Well, how am I going to get to know you if I don’t see you again?’

‘You can see me here.’

His face lit up. ‘You’re coming back then?’

She saw how he had trapped her into that. ‘I’ll think about it.’

He beamed. ‘Well, think about tapas, too. And maybe a beer. We don’t want to spend our whole time surrounded by a bunch of old deaf people.’

She laughed out loud. ‘One day, Sergio, we’ll be old deaf people, too.’ And she realized how much she liked saying his name, and how much she really did want to get to know him better. And she decided there and then that she would accept his offer to take her on a date. But she wouldn’t tell him just yet.

It was a couple of weeks before Ana plucked up the courage to tell her parents that she had been asked on a date by a young man at the centre. She needed a lift into Estepona. But she was completely unprepared for the reaction it provoked. She had been five times now to the centre, and on her previous visit had told Sergio that she would go for tapas with him.

It was a hot summer’s night. Her father sat at the table wearing only a singlet and shorts, the local newspaper open in front of him. A pair of half-moon spectacles rested halfway down his nose and sweat darkened the white cotton of his vest where it stretched itself over his ample belly.

He looked up, frowning, and said simply, ‘No.’

Ana bristled. ‘What do you mean, no?’

‘Well, which part of the word don’t you understand?’

She turned belligerent. ‘I understand that I’m seventeen years old and that if I want to go out with a boy, I’ll go out with a boy.’

‘As long as you’re under my roof you’ll do what I damned well tell you.’

Her mother appeared at the kitchen door. ‘What do you even know about this boy?’

‘A lot.’

‘What age is he?’ her father said.

‘He’s twenty-one.’

‘Hah!’ He folded his newspaper shut and slapped a palm on the table. ‘Well, that settles it. Only one thing on his mind.’

‘How could you possibly know what’s on his mind?’ Ana was aware of her voice rising in pitch.

‘Because I was twenty-one myself once. I know what a young man thinks when he looks at a seventeen-year-old girl. The answer is no. And that’s an end to it.’

Her mother cast a judgmental eye over her husband, wondering perhaps if those same things still went through his mind when he looked at a seventeen-year-old girl. She refocused on Ana. ‘You met him at the centre?’

‘Yes.’

‘So he’s deaf?’

‘Yes, he is.’

She gasped her frustration. ‘Holy Mary mother of God, Ana, could you not find yourself a normal boy?’

Ana’s simmering anger started to boil over. ‘What do you mean, “normal”? Are you saying I’m not normal?’

Her mother realized her mistake. ‘No,’ she said hastily. ‘But you need someone with normal hearing to make up for your lack of it. You know the doctor said it’s only going to get worse. One day you’ll not be able to hear at all. Then you’d be two deaf people.’

Now her father slammed both palms down on the table. ‘Enough!’ he bellowed, and Ana was sure they must have heard him down on the coast. ‘You are NOT going out with him.’

Ana felt hot tears fill her eyes. If only Isabella had been there to speak up for her. She was sure her parents would have listened to her sister. But the only one who was going to stand up for Ana was Ana herself. She got to her feet. ‘What are you going to do, tie me up? If I want to go out with Sergio, I’ll got out with Sergio. And if you won’t give me a lift into town I’ll just get the bus.’ She lifted her bag, slung it over her shoulder and stormed out of the living room, slamming the door behind her.

Sergio was waiting nervously for her outside the post office on the Paseo Maritimo, an elegant tree-lined promenade that ran the length of the seafront in Estepona. The chiringuito beach bars were full and the smell of fresh fish grilling on wooden embers filled the evening.

She was nearly half an hour late, and had done her best on the bus to repair the damage to her face.

‘I really thought you’d stood me up,’ Sergio said. ‘Another five minutes and I’d have been off.’ Although Ana suspected he would have waited a lot longer. He peered at her in the fading light. ‘Have you been crying?’

She shrugged it off. ‘Some bad news at home,’ she said. ‘But it’s okay, I don’t want anything to spoil our evening.’

Concerned eyes lingered on her face for several long moments before Sergio took her hand and they began strolling slowly along the Paseo in the direction of the old port.

Apartments rose on three and four levels above the shops and restaurants lining the broad Avenue del Carmen that swept down into town from the west. A fine, sandy beach stretched away to their left, and a gently foaming Mediterranean washed up along the shore, breathing softly into the night. It was cooling now, but the air was still soft on their skin.

Ana liked the feel of her hand in his. It felt big and protective. Their arms swung together a little as they walked in an easy silence. Lip-reading, since they were both facing in the same direction, was not an option. And their hands were otherwise engaged.

Ana had taken her first few lessons in signing, and spent most of her time with Sergio practising it. To her surprise it had come much more easily than she expected. But for now she was content just to feel close to him. Words were unimportant, and she let all memory of the row with her parents slip away.

Sergio took her to a tiny tapas bar in the port, squeezing past crowded tables on the terrace to find a quiet spot in the dark interior. The walkway outside was jammed with tourists and locals finding seats in restaurants and bars. The smell of woodsmoke and barbecued meats suffused the night air, and yachts bobbed gently in the dark on the moonlit waters of the marina. They ordered the house selection of tapas, and a waitress brought them seemingly endless plates of patatas bravas, albóndigas, langostinos, empanadas, tortitas... Sergio asked for two glasses of Rioja, and they sipped on its smooth velvety vanilla as they ate.

Ana spoke and signed at the same time, Sergio correcting her as she went. Tea-light candles burned on their table, and tiny pinpoints of light danced in his dark eyes. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Once you have graduated, what is it you want to do?’

‘I want to teach,’ he said. ‘In a school for the deaf, or special needs pupils. I want to bring the world to children with problems and teach them that they are no different from anyone else. That there’s nothing to stop them from being whoever it is they want to be.’

Ana felt her heart swell. ‘I wish I’d had someone like you to teach me. Maybe I wouldn’t have grown up believing that everyone else was better.’

‘Oh, Ana...’ He placed both of his hands over one of hers. ‘You mustn’t ever think that. You’re beautiful inside and out. You’re clever, you’re articulate, you’re funny.’ He paused and she felt his hands tighten their grip on hers. ‘I think you’re wonderful.’

She blushed and glanced away, embarrassed by his directness, but filled with pleasure. And feelings of — she wasn’t quite sure what. Just feelings she had never had before.

They ate their way through every plate, washing it all down with a second glass of wine. They talked and laughed and Ana thought, this is how it must be for ordinary people. For the first time in her life she forgot about her hearing difficulties, forgot that Sergio was deaf. Simply felt the pleasure of being alive, and enjoying the company of the person she was with.

When it came time to go, and Sergio paid the bill, she got up from the table with reluctance, for the first time allowing thoughts to enter her mind of what might await her when she got home. In the port outside, bright lights obliterated the darkness, turning night into day, air filled with the sound of humanity at play. Sounds Sergio would never hear, and which registered only distantly for Ana. As they wove their way through the terrace Ana stumbled on someone’s bag lying on the floor and almost fell.

Sergio caught her, and for a moment she found herself in his arms, safe from all the dangers that the night presented. He made sure she was steady on her feet before letting her go. She laughed it off. ‘I’m getting so clumsy. Tripping over things that I don’t seem to notice, bumping into people as I go past them.’

Sergio laughed. ‘It’s the wine. I feel a little heady myself.’

He took her hand and she leaned in to his side as they walked up out of the port to the bus stop in the Avenue del Carmen. They stood waiting for the bus and for the first time that night could find nothing to say. Something about the anticipation of parting silenced tongues and hands. They had spent many hours together at the centre, but this was their first time out alone, and Ana wondered how they would end it. Her mouth was dry, and her heart beat a little faster when she saw the lights of the bus turning on the roundabout. But she had no time to think about it before she felt Sergio’s arm around her waist, his face lowering itself to hers, his lips soft and warm brushing her mouth. She strained on tiptoes to kiss him, and they very nearly let the bus go past.

When it came to a stop, Sergio held her hand as she stepped up into it, and she slumped into a seat at the front ignoring the lecherous grin of the driver.

The twenty-minute drive back to Marviña passed in a blur, a confusion of thoughts and emotions. She tried not to think about her parents, but focus instead on the time she had spent with Sergio. But as her bus turned up the hill from the roundabout at Santa Ana de las Vides, she couldn’t prevent fears of what awaited her from creeping into her conscious thoughts.

It seemed profoundly dark as she stepped off the bus into the Plaza del Vino. The square, she knew, was ringed with street lights, and she wondered for a moment if there had been a power cut. She heard rather than saw the bus pull away and the hand of fear closed around her heart and filled her with dread. Why couldn’t she see anything? It was as if the whole town was smothered in black dust. She was gripped almost immediately by a complete sense of disorientation. It was only a five-minute walk to the apartment, but she had no idea which way to go. She turned left, then right, stumbling over a kerbstone and nearly falling. She put her hands out ahead of her to avoiding walking into a wall or a building or a lamp post and wanted to call out for someone to help her. But at this hour the town was deserted. Shutters closed, bars emptied, lights out.

Her fear was so great now it took almost physical form, rising up from her chest and into her throat, very nearly choking her. She staggered forwards, hearing the approaching vehicle before becoming aware, even more distantly, of its headlights turning towards her. She spun around in a panic, heard the screech of tyres, and the impact of the car as it sent her careening sideways. The world tilted, the falling sensation ending abruptly as her head hit the tarmac and true darkness enveloped her.

When light finally penetrated the black, she became aware of a softness enfolding her, almost as if she were suspended in it. But with the light came pain, a searing pain that spiked through her skull and violated her consciousness. She opened her eyes, startled, only to be blinded by the light in her bedroom.

Beyond initial confusion, shapes took form around her. Silhouettes against the light. Faces crystallized into familiarity. Her mother, her father. Isabella. A man who it took her some moments to realize was their family physician, Doctor Celestino. A small and balding man with large, horn-rimmed glasses. They leaned into her field of vision and she could see concern on all their faces.

The doctor’s voice came to her faintly. Her hands shot instinctively to her ears, but her hearing aids had been removed.

‘She’s lucky,’ Celestino was saying. ‘Some cuts and bruises, but nothing broken, I think. The driver said he had come to a virtual standstill before he hit her.’

Then her father’s voice, tight with anger. ‘I can smell alcohol on her breath. She was out drinking with that boy!’

Anger gave Ana the strength to pull herself up on to one elbow. ‘I am not drunk!’ she shouted, only convincing everyone in the room that she was. ‘I couldn’t see when I got off the bus. Everything was dark, like they’d turned out the lights.’ The effort of speaking exhausted her and she dropped once more on to her back. ‘I couldn’t even see the stars in the sky.’

‘So you were blind drunk!’ her father growled.

‘Papi!’ It was Isabella’s voice, trying to calm their father.

Doctor Celestino leaned in close to peer into her eyes. ‘Has that ever happened to you before, mi niña?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never let her drink in this house.’ Her father was defensive now. ‘Not once.’

But Celestino ignored him. ‘Ana,’ he said. ‘Has it?’

Ana tried to bring clarity to her confusion. ‘No. Not like that. I never see well at night. Never have.’ She paused. ‘It’s like that for everyone, isn’t it?’ Then, ‘It’s as if I was blind. I just couldn’t see.’

Ana’s mother’s voice now. ‘Is there something wrong with her, doctor?’

But Celestino kept his focus on Ana. ‘Do you have trouble seeing things in your peripheral vision, little one?’

Ana didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Bump into things or people on either side of you that you just don’t see. Trip over stuff on the ground.’

Ana remembered what she had told Sergio only an hour before. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All the time.’

Celestino turned towards Ana’s parents, his voice laden with concern. ‘I think maybe Ana should see a specialist.’

Resentment simmered in Ana’s house for the next ten days. Neither of her parents could forgive her, nor she them. She did not go back to the centre while she waited for her appointment with the ophthalmologist in Estepona. School had closed for the summer, and it had not been decided whether Ana would return for a repeat year or apply for a place at college. Her results were not yet in, and everything would depend on how good, or bad, they were.

The days dragged and she wished there were some way she could contact Sergio to tell him what had happened. But she had no idea where he lived, or even his family name.

Nights were worse. She had noticed, with an increasing sense of disquiet, that her night vision was deteriorating rapidly, and she did not even want to venture out of the house after dark

She spent most of her time shut away in her room listening to music, or reading, or simply daydreaming. Anything to avoid facing the uncertainty of a doctor’s diagnosis and a future whose clarity was obscured by doubt.

Her father took the day off work to drive them into Estepona for Ana’s appointment with Doctor Esteban at his private consulting rooms in the healthcare centre on the Avenida Juan Carlos Rey de España. Ana never thought to ask how much it might be costing, but her parents had been told that an appointment with a health service specialist could take weeks, even months, and so her father had decided to go private.

She spent more than an hour with the doctor, undergoing tests for both sight and hearing. He asked her endless questions about her apparent clumsiness and invited her to perform various tasks that tested her spatial awareness. He took blood samples to be sent for analysis, performed standard eye tests, and took an electroretinogram to measure the response of her retinas to light stimuli.

Afterwards she sat for what seemed like an age in a waiting room with her parents until Doctor Esteban called them into his office. His manner was very matter-of-fact, but there was a certain gravitas in his tone when he addressed them that somehow telegraphed the bad news to come. He directed his comments directly to her parents as if she were not there.

‘I believe your daughter is suffering from something called retinitis pigmentosa, sometimes known as RP. When considering this in conjunction with the continued deterioration of her hearing, I am inclined to believe that she has a condition known as Usher Syndrome.’

It was a name that meant nothing to any of them, though it was one that would come to haunt Ana, not only in the days to come, but for the rest of her life.

He said, ‘Assuming my diagnosis is confirmed, Ana will become not only profoundly deaf, but will also lose her sight. She will become deaf and blind.’

Ana was devastated. She had more or less come to terms with the possibility that she would at some future time lose her hearing altogether. But to become blind as well? It was unthinkable. Unimaginable. She remembered Sergio’s words from their first meeting. I think losing your sight would be the worst of all. I can’t imagine not being able to see the world around me. And when, a week later, the diagnosis was confirmed by a senior consultant in Malaga, she was plunged into the deepest depression. An abyss from which she could never imagine any way out.

It was a genetic condition, the consultant said. There was no cure. Nothing to be done. And the prognosis itself was uncertain, impossible to predict how quickly or slowly her sight would deteriorate. The only certainty was that blindness, along with eventual deafness, would come. Whether it was weeks, months or years was in the lap of the gods.

He had suggested that Ana start preparing for it immediately. There was, he told them, a form of sign language specifically designed for deaf-blind people. It was called tactile signing. A little like sign language for the deaf, except that the movement of the hands was conveyed by touch rather than sight.

It was with considerable reluctance that Ana’s father allowed her, then, to return to the centre in Estepona. They could, they had told him, obtain the services of a special instructor to teach her the basics of tactile signing, preparing her for future blindness. And so with great trepidation Ana went back for the first time in weeks. She had not seen or heard anything of Sergio since the tapas they had shared that fateful night, and with the knowledge that her future promised only darkness, she was afraid to face him. Afraid that when he realized how dependent she would be on him in any future relationship, he would turn away. After all, who in his right mind would want to take on that kind of responsibility for another human being? Living your own life was hard enough.

Her father drove her to the centre and told her he would return to collect her later, before it got dark. She was taken into an office at the back of the building, where the centre’s administrator told her that they had applied on her behalf for the services of a touch-signing instructor. But the instructor would not arrive for another week, and could only come once a fortnight. So it was important for Ana to have someone to practise with in between times.

When her session with the administrator was over, Ana ventured back out into the big lounge. It was busy tonight. Elderly deaf men and women gathered around tables, signing and laughing and drinking coffee together. But her eye was drawn, almost involuntarily, towards the little group of blind people who sat near the door, white sticks resting against chairs, a guide dog sleeping against the back wall. They had no need to sign, for none of them was deaf. However bad it might be for any one of them, it would be worse for Ana. She felt tears of self-pity gathering in her eyes.

‘Hello stranger.’

She spun around to find herself face to face with Sergio. She could see the uncertainty behind his smile, and she blinked away her tears.

‘It’s been a while.’

She nodded.

‘I thought you were never coming back.’

She shrugged and attempted a smile. ‘Neither did I.’

They stood in awkward silence, then, unsure of what to say next. Finally Sergio said, ‘I have a little car now. I could run you home at the end of the evening, if you want.’

‘My father’s coming to get me.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ He looked disappointed. ‘How have you been?’

She shrugged noncommittally. How could she tell him about her night blindness, that soon it would extend to daylight hours too, that the only future she faced was one of darkness? ‘I had a fall,’ she said. ‘Nothing serious. I’m okay now.’

He seemed concerned. ‘What kind of fall?’

She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

He gazed at her with apprehension, aware that somehow all the intimacy of that evening spent together in the tapas bar at the port had dissipated, like smoke in the wind. ‘Can I get you a coffee?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m not staying.’ What was the point? The instructor would not come for another week. No reason for her being here, or coming back until then. It was light until much later in the evenings now. She could walk down to the Paseo and telephone her father from a call box. She saw the disappointment in Sergio’s face.

‘Why not?’

She looked him very directly in the eye. ‘Forget about me, Sergio. We weren’t meant to be.’ And she turned to walk briskly to the door. Moving carefully through the darkness of the hall, and then out into the evening sunshine that slanted across the street from the clearest of blue skies.

She had reached the Plaza de las Flores before Sergio caught up with her. Tables around the perimeter of the square were filled with people enjoying drinks and tapas. The warm air was filled with their voices, like the chatter of birds. Trees in full leaf were laden with oranges, and flowers in bloom suffused the evening with their fragrance. He grabbed her arm, and she turned, surprised, and pulled it free of his grasp.

‘What do you want?’

He couldn’t hear the tone of her voice, but he could see the anger in her face, and he recoiled from it, hurt, like a dog suddenly slapped by a trusted master.

‘What did I do?’ he said. ‘All this time I’ve been thinking I must have done or said something to offend you. Why else would you have stopped coming to the centre? Was it the kiss? Did I cross a line?’

His obvious distress felt like someone plunging a knife into her heart. She fought hard to stop the tears. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. It’s not you. Nothing to do with you.’

He was, quite patently, completely bewildered. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Well, what, then? What? What’s wrong, Ana?’ Heads turned, drawn by the pitch of his voice, which had risen beyond his ability to control it.

And quite suddenly her tears came. Welling up from deep inside, and spilling down her cheeks in large, quivering drops. ‘You don’t want to know.’

‘I do!’

She shook her head. ‘You won’t want to be with me anymore.’

He threw his head back in despair. ‘Why in God’s name would I not want to be with you?’

More heads turned towards them.

‘Because I’m going blind, Sergio. Soon I won’t be able to see you, or hear you. You’ll just be a touch in the dark. And you won’t want anything to do with me.’

He was shocked. Staring at her in disbelief. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I have a genetic disorder. It’s called Usher Syndrome. And it’s going to take away my sight, as well as the rest of my hearing. It’s already begun.’

He closed his eyes. ‘Oh, dear God.’ And she let him gather her into his embrace, drawing her head to his chest, fingers laced through her hair. ‘Oh, Ana. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Then he held her again by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and absolutely trapped her in his gaze. Earnest eyes staring determinedly into hers. ‘How could you think, even for one minute, that something like that would drive me away? That somehow I wouldn’t want to be with you any more?’ Now he raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘For God’s sake Ana. It’s you I love. The person you are inside. Not what you can see or hear.’

But the only thing she heard was It’s you I love. Words that replayed themselves in her brain like an echo on a loop. And she saw that he did not even realize what he’d said.

He was oblivious. ‘We’ll find a way to communicate. It’ll only bring us closer.’

She wiped the tears from her face, but couldn’t stop the flow of more. ‘An instructor is coming next week to start teaching me touch-signing while I can still see and hear. I don’t know exactly how it works, but...’ Her voice trailed away.

‘I’ll learn it with you,’ he said quickly. ‘We’ll be fluent in it in no time.’

And she imagined how intimate that might be. Communication by touch alone. She couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather have touch her. And for the first time since receiving the diagnosis, a glimmer of light shone somewhere in the darkness of her future.

The next weeks passed in a blur, and in equal measures of hope and despair. Learning tactile signing was easier than she had thought, since in many ways it was like a sensory extension of the signing for the deaf that she had already started to adopt. But as each session required her to close her eyes, she began to get a sense of what it would be like to be blind, and the shadow that cast upon her future was deep and depressing. By contrast, hope came from the regular and intimate contact with Sergio. They attended the lessons together, and there was something arousing about feeling his hands on hers when she couldn’t see him. His fingers on her face, and hers on his. Something she had never known before.

Since the evenings were still light, she persuaded her father that she could travel to and from the centre by bus, and she thought he was relieved to be excused from the obligation of driving her there and back. But, in fact, she and Sergio only attended the centre on the days that the instructor came, and two evenings a week they would go and eat together at a little fish restaurant on the beach front at Santa Ana.

The proprietor was a small bald man with no teeth who greeted them every evening with a gummy smile and a bottle of white wine that he set open on the table almost before they sat down. They ate salad with tuna, and boquerones, and calamares and abadejo, and watched the sea wash pink phosphorescence upon the shore as the sun dipped towards the west. They closed their eyes and practised touch-signing with fingers greasy from anchovies and olive oil, and Ana thought she had never laughed so much in her life.

It was a desperate idyll. Desperate because it could not last, idyllic because they were sharing themselves with each other in ways that most people would never experience.

On the nights they ate at the restaurant, Sergio would drive her home, dropping her in a quiet street just around the corner from the apartment. Always before darkness fell, although already she was struggling to see in the twilight.

Nearly two months of tuition in the basics of tactile signing, and the regular practice she achieved with Sergio, was paying dividends. Already she was quite comfortable with it, spending sometimes hours on end with her eyes closed, the world reaching her only through Sergio’s fingertips. But the summer was coming to an end, and with it the nights were drawing in. There was less and less light, and Sergio was forced to take her home earlier. Soon, as the evenings grew darker, Ana’s father was going to insist on picking her up from the centre, and their idyll must come to an end.

It was a hot evening in mid-September when a thunderstorm rumbling across the Mediterranean from North Africa brought the meal at their little restaurant in Santa Ana to a premature end. They saw the storm approaching across the water, like a giant rolling cloud of mist, blotting out the blue of the evening sky, and finally the sun, before the wind that accompanied it began whipping large stinging drops of rain in under the awning. Day turned to night in the space of only a few minutes.

Sergio took her hand and they ran to where he had parked his car in the narrow Calle Condesa de Arcos. But, still, they were soaked by the time they had thrown themselves into the seats and slammed the doors shut. Rain streamed down the windscreen, and all the windows in the car quickly misted.

Ana was alarmed by how little she could see as they drove up the hill towards Marviña. The storm seemed to be following them, surging up the slope in their wake. The rain hammered out a deafening tattoo on the roof, and even though her hearing was fading, Ana felt it fill the car.

Marviña was deserted as they drove past the police and fire stations before turning down to their right, the view across the valley to the mountains obliterated by the storm. Sergio wanted to take her as close as he could to her apartment. It was almost dark out there, and the rain was obscuring the far end of the street. But Ana told him to stop. She could make it home from here, she said. It would be dangerous to get much closer because it was likely that in this weather her father would head out to meet her off the bus in the square.

Reluctantly, Sergio pulled in. He reached over to brush the wet hair from Ana’s face and leaned in to kiss her. A long, lingering kiss that left the taste of him on her lips. She would have given anything to stay with him, safe and warm in the car. But the threat of an encounter with her father was too great. He would be incandescent if he knew that Ana had continued seeing Sergio, after he had made her promise him that she wouldn’t.

She let her fingers trail gently across the fine stubble on his cheeks. ‘See you Wednesday,’ she said, and slipped out into the night.

She was startled in the rain by a figure that appeared out of nowhere. A shadow disengaging itself from the dark, brushing past her to round the front of Sergio’s car and open the driver’s door.

‘Get out, you pervert!’ It was her father’s voice.

In the rain and the gloom, it was a shadow play that acted itself out before her. Her father dragging the hapless Sergio from his car, a fist swinging through the night to impact with the face she had so recently touched with loving fingers. She screamed as she saw Sergio fall into the road, raindrops hammering the surface of it, bouncing off the tarmac all around him. She saw her father pull back his leg to swing repeated kicks into the chest and stomach of the now foetal curl of the young man who had just kissed her.

‘Stop it!’ she screamed, and tried to intervene, to prevent this madness. But she stumbled on the kerb and fell.

‘Just stay away from my fucking daughter! If I ever see you with her again, I’ll kill you.’ Her father’s words falling, literally, on deaf ears.

He hurried around the car to pick his daughter off the road and drag her away, weeping, into the rain.

By the time he got her back to the apartment, it was impossible to tell the tears from the rain on her face. She pulled herself free of him. ‘I hate you!’ she screamed. ‘I hate you!’ And she fled to her bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her, and collapsing in a sobbing heap on the bed.

It was into October before her father let her return to the centre to resume her lessons in touch-signing. But he was leaving nothing to chance, dropping her off and then going to meet friends for a coffee before returning to drive her home again.

In the intervening weeks, the atmosphere in the house had been febrile, simmering tempers and Ana’s bubbling resentment. The tension was palpable, and she could not bring herself even to speak to her father. She would address him only through her mother, and spent most of her days, and quite often evenings too, at the home of her sister, unburdening herself, confiding her secret feelings and deepest fears. Isabella’s husband might have resented her constant presence, but for the fact that Ana would babysit the girls, allowing the couple to go out dancing, or for meals at restaurants down on the coast. It was during this time that she formed the bond with Cristina and Nurita that would long outlive their parents.

Ana had been dreading that first night back at the centre, not knowing how she could possibly face Sergio after what her father had done to him. And so it was with a mixture of relief and disappointment that she discovered he was not there. Had not, in fact, been there for several weeks. She feared that perhaps her father had inflicted more serious injury than she had imagined and was filled with concern.

Every night she returned she hoped that he might be there. But he never was, and after a month she went to the administrator to ask for his contact details. The young woman had been very nice, but politely declined. Personal details, she said, were confidential. And, in any case, Sergio had deregistered with the centre, and she had no expectation that he would ever be back.

It was as if the bottom had simply dropped out of Ana’s world. And with the acceptance that in all probability she would never see Sergio again, came the realization that she had been in love with him. Deeply, hopelessly, in love. And that while he, in an unguarded moment, had inadvertently confessed his love for her, those words had never passed her lips. Now they never would, and he would never know. And all that lay ahead in the desert that defined her future was a world of darkness in which the only possible light had already been extinguished.