The Manual of Darkness by Enrique de Hériz Page A

tells him to make himself comfortable, that he will have to wait for a few minutes. His eyes are watering. He would love to be able to burst into tears, into great gasping sobs, but it is simply a physiological reaction to the fact that he has not blinked for too long. He keeps his head down, staringfixedly at a join in the parquet floor to see whether the halo is getting bigger as he waits. The halo in his left eye is still where it was when it first appeared. The one in his right eye comes and goes, a white pulse, a shooting star. He is suddenly struck by a memory of his mother. Her voice: don’t stare so hard at the paper, you’ll go blind. The ophthalmologist places a hand on his shoulder.
    ‘From what I can see, your eyes are fine. I think perhaps you should see a neurologist.’
    ‘But the white spot …’
    ‘Human eyesight is a complicated thing …’
    ‘A neurologist …’ he echoes now incongruously, as though it has taken him some time to process the information.
    ‘That’s not to rule out …’
    Is nobody capable of completing a sentence?
    ‘That I’m going blind.’
    Blind. There, he’s said it. The terrible word hovers over the high plateau of his brain like a hungry eagle, chooses a place to alight, folds its wings against its body and thrusts out its powerful talons. All other thoughts are now just frightened rabbits.
    ‘It’s possible that it’s psychosomatic in origin. Have you been particularly stressed recently?’
    ‘A little.’
    ‘Well, that might explain it. Trust me, make an appointment to see the neurologist. In the meantime, try to take your mind off it, think about something else. You need to relax.’
    The time it takes to process his credit card seems endless. When the moment comes for him to sign, he closes his left eye unthinkingly as though to see what it would be like to be one-eyed.
    Stepping out into the street, he bumps into the first passer-by. They don’t actually collide; it is barely a brush, a clash between the air each person trails in his wake, but Víctor freezes, stands petrified on the pavement. He is still standing there when the other person crosses the street. Night is falling. Víctor begins to walk, head down, staring at the patch of ground a few inches in front of his feet. People turn to stare. It is impossible to say whether he is trying to walk carefully or steeling himself to bump into someone else. Or whether it is just that his mind is on other things.
    When he gets home, he goes straight into the kitchen, fills a pan with water, goes out on to the terrace, sits in a chair with the saucepan on his knees and stares out into the distance, across the rooftops. After a while, he places his right hand on the formicarium. For ten minutes he does not move. He does not even blink. He is thinking about the ants. Although, after his father died, he got out of the habit of doing his Saturday morning chores, he has carried on filling the moat with water from time to time. It has been years since he saw a single specimen crawling over the surface, but he has always suspected that there is still something living deep beneath the earth. He pictures the day when the ants realised no one was going to leave food for them in the little box. Perhaps the first envoys dispatched on an urgent mission came back with news that there was no talc on the formicarium walls. Hundreds of worker ants were sent out to find food but only one, half dead, came back to report that there was still water in the moat. Clearly they didn’t say: ‘We’re alone. We’re under siege. Somebody do something.’ Ants don’t talk. They learned to go out only at night. They crossed bridges. Fragile, precarious, made up of tiny twigs found on the surface, pieces of dead leaf and even the corpses of their fellow ants. Every night, dozens drowned on the way out and dozens more on the way back. Only a few made it to the safety of the terrarium with a few crumbs to share, hurrying down into the