The Blind Man of Seville

‘You have to look,’ said the voice.

But he couldn’t look. He was the one person who couldn’t look at it, who would never be able to look at it because it started things up in that part of his brain, the part that would show up bright red on a cerebral scan while he was asleep, that tunnel of the brain maze which laymen would name ‘wild imaginings’. It was the danger zone which had to be closed off, barricaded with whatever came to hand, nailed up, chained, padlocked, key hurled into the deepest lake. It was the dead end where his big-boned, mule-knuckled peasant frame was reduced to the shivering nakedness of a little boy, face pressed into the dark, hard, narrow comfort of a corner, legs and buttocks raw from sitting in his uncontrollable urine.

He wouldn’t look. He couldn’t.

The sound from the TV switched back to an old movie. He heard the dubbed voices. Yes, he’d look at that. He could look at James Cagney speaking Spanish while his eyes darted in his head and his lips said things differently.

The tape whirred in the video player as it rewound, clicked off at the beginning. A horizon slopped in the back of his head. Nausea? Or worse? The tidal wave of the past rising up. His throat tightened, his lip trembled, a fuzziness converged on James Cagney’s manic Spanish. He curled the toes of his bare feet, gripped the arms of his chair, his wrists already cut from the flex that secured them. His eyes filled and blurred.

Tears before bedtime,’ said the voice.

Bedtime? His brain juggled with the concept. He coughed a muffled thump into the socks stuffed in his cheeks. The end? Is that what bedtime means? The end would be better than this. Time for bed. Deep, dark, endless bed.

‘I’m going to ask you to try again … to try to see. But you must look first. There’s no seeing without looking,’ said the voice, quiet in his ear. The ‘play’ light winked red out of the black. He shook his head, squeezed his eyes tight shut. James Cagney’s voice was swallowed by the scream of laughter, the wild giggling holler of a small boy. It was laughter, wasn’t it? He rolled his head from side to side as if this might deafen him to the sound, the confusing sound that he refused to believe could be agony, shrieking agony. And the sobbing aftermath, the helplessness, the terrible weakness as when the tickling stops … or was it the torturing? The sobbing. The concentrated panting. The recovery from pain.

‘You’re not looking,’ said the voice, angry.

His chair rocked as he tried to throw himself back from the screen, away from the piercing sound. James Cagney’s perfect staccato Spanish returned and the whirr of the rewind, the acceleration to the thump at the end of the tape.

‘I have tried,’ said the voice. ‘I have been patient and … reasonable.’

Reasonable? This is reasonable? Tying my feet and hands to the chair, stuffing my stinking socks into my mouth. Forcing me to watch this … my … this …

A pause. The muttered expletive behind his head. Tissues ripped from the box on the desk. The smell in the room again. The one he remembered. The dark patch coming towards him, but not on a rag, on tissues. The smell and what it meant. Darkness. Lovable darkness. Give it to me. I’ll take that over this.

The hard smack of the chloroform tilted him back into space.

A snick of light, small as a star, punctured the high vault. It grew to a circle and drew him up from his dark well. No, I’ll stay. Leave me here in the dungeon dark. But it was inexorable, the drag, the wrench into the widening circle until he was reborn into the living room with James Cagney and a girl now, which wasn’t the only thing that was different. There was flex cutting into his face. It had been pulled tight under his nose and fastened to the high back of the chair so that he could feel the carved contours of some ancient coat of arms digging into his scalp. And there was more. Dios mío, what have you done to me?

The tears were warm on his cheeks, down the sides of his face, in the corners of his mouth. They dripped thickly on to his white shirt. There was the taste of a sugary blade between his teeth. What have you done to me? The screen rolled on its casters towards him, stopping at his knees. Too much was happening at once. Cagney kissing the girl, nastily. The flex cutting up into his septum. The panic rising from his feet, ripping through his body, collecting more panic on the way, funnelling up through his organs, shunting up his narrowing aorta. Irrepressible. Unswallowable. Unthinkable. His brain was livid, his eyes on fire, the tears blazing away. His lids — lines of stubble burning in the dark — advanced towards his black and shining pupils, blistering the whites of his eyes.

A dropper appeared in his torched vision, a quivering bead of dew hanging from its glass tube. His eyes would drink that down. Drink it down and take more.

‘Now you will see everything,’ said the voice. ‘And I will provide the tears.’

The drop flashed on to the eye. The tape engaged and squeaked on its reels. James Cagney and his girl were consumed by a creeping blizzard. Then came the screaming and the administering of considerate tears.