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.’