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THE final component of my treatment was massage. Long after I left the hospital, I continued to do it myself, in the mirror, like a woman worried she’s getting old. I’d put a little talcum powder on my fingers, and start with my forehead, pushing my skin toward my temples and noting, day by day, how, if I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise, the folds in the left part of my brow took a clearer shape (in the hospital they’d been non-existent). I turned next to my eyebrows and the tops of my cheekbones, with the special movements I’d learned from the blind masseur, and then massaged under the cheekbones to the cheeks, where I would push for minutes on end. The cortisone and electricity treatments had stimulated the regeneration of my nerves, but my facial muscle mass recovered almost randomly, so that my face’s symmetry changed — the price I paid to recover basic movement. I spent even more time on my lips and chin, and then ended by massaging my neck, marveling every time at how thin it was and how quickly it reddened under my fingers. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, feeling a benign tension in all of the muscles of my face. An adolescent’s head, pale as death with circles around the eyes, stared back at me from the prison of the mirror. Then I’d fall into bed with a book, and evening would find me reading, as usual, and mad with loneliness.
But, while I was in the hospital, the facial massage sessions took place in the office of the blind masseur, twice a week; his wide, moist hands alone shaped, like a sculptor, the waxy clay of my face. He emanated cold like an iceberg. I was scared of him the entire time, even though, when I descended into his lair for the first appointment, I realized he was not completely unfamiliar. I had seen him often on Ştefan cel Mare, walking arm in arm with a red-haired woman, violently rouged and painted, wrapped in fox furs. Utterly imposing, with an unusually large face, the blind man displaced the air in front of him as he walked, with that characteristic gait, as though he was resisting someone who pushed him from behind. In his examining room, beside its diminutive furniture and bookcases, dressed in a white shirt that revealed his hairy arms, the masseur was even more impressive. He filled his office the way an enormous statue of an idol gathered the cave around itself. Inside the building, he took off his black glasses, so you saw his closed eyelids, with beautiful lashes, rounded by the dead eyeballs underneath. He had the eyes of a sleeping person, or of someone trying to solve a knotty problem that has no answer.
I never felt completely relaxed when I went in for the massages. I would always have rather done the rays. In the first place, the office was far from my hallway. It seemed like I had to descend dozens of floors and cross hundreds of empty corridors to get there. At the beginning, I would always get lost and end up in the women’s halls, x-ray rooms, or laboratories, or simply in cold, green halls with no way out. I remember how surprised I was when, opening one of the anonymous white doors at the end of a corridor, I found a bedroom, a boudoir really, with a vanity holding a variety of unguent perfumes and a bed with a teenage girl lying on the sheets, curled up and reading a book with a cherry-red cover. Hearing the door, she jumped up, frightened, and began to scream, looking at me with wide eyes. I saw my reflection for a second in the clear mirror of the vanity: a dreary guy, in a robe and pajamas, standing in the half-open door, just as frightened as the girl. Apart from the strange apparition of this intimate alcove within a hospital and the powerful beauty of the brunette who occupied it, there was, through the window with foaming curtains pulled to one side, a piaţa surrounded by blackened old buildings, with an equestrian monument in the middle that I knew well from the encyclopedia I read — I really read it, I didn’t just look things up — and I had read it often and well from the age of seven: it was the statue of Simón Bolívar from downtown Montevideo …
Finally I made it to the massage room, which looked just like any other examining room, white and functional. The blind masseur knew me by my voice and invited me to take off my robe and pajama top and sit on a veneered chair in the middle of the room. He stood behind me, like a barber or dentist, and suddenly I felt my head caught by unusually large hands and pressed powerfully against his stomach, which felt like a soft, white wall. The massage could not have gone more than twenty minutes if he’d done it without stopping, and that’s how long it lasted on days when many patients were in line, patients whose footsteps, whispers, and massive men’s growling voices were easily perceptible through the door. When I was the only client, however, his hands might wander over my face for an entire hour, focused, pressing, vibrating and rubbing certain groups of muscles with fingers like a violinist’s, and other times totally distracted, touching just my eyeballs (extremely gently), the corners of my lips, and my jugular, which beat slowly in the warm flesh of my neck. During the first few appointments, the blind man massaged my face in silence, at most tossing out a remark or two that left me at a loss: “Your bones are like crackers. Don’t ever become a boxer.” Then he fell quiet again, and I heard nothing but the grainy swish of the talcum-covered fingers that rubbed my flesh until, I imagined, it became translucid like the cap of a jellyfish and revealed, pure and white, the ivory of my skull, as polished as a stone in a riverbed. The repetition of the same pushing and pulling and trembling fingers, the odd heat of his stomach that almost completely engulfed my head, and the mystical light of blindness that floated in the examination room transported me into a tense and unpleasant state. I was deeply scared, so deeply that I could not recognize it as fear, but more as sadness, as disappointment. The blind. Blindness. Since I was little, I had been tortured by a thought that I tried in vain to communicate to the big people. And it wasn’t just the great quandary that all boys and girls rack their brains about: how children come into the world. To that at least I knew I would not get, as yet, the answer, or I would not get the whole answer, because the adults, united in an impenetrable conspiracy (as though they were initiates of an Eleusinian Mystery, and we, the little, were profane; and really, don’t all mysteries, and maybe all religions, follow the model of this first exclusion? Isn’t sex a kind of immortality to which you gain access through maturity? Doesn’t it divide life into two stages, a larval stage and another, burning in the eternal light of consciousness? Isn’t the child, in comparison with the adult, like the adult in comparison with the angel he will become, through transformation and vestment in praise of the holy body? “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face …”), a conspiracy that did not allow anything to reach our little minds thirsting for truth. I thought then that children appeared out of their mothers’ stomachs at the bottom, or by cutting the belly, the way we think now (mistakenly and madly) that we will see without eyes and hear without ears and sing without lips in the promised new life after the obstetric labor of death. More than the question, “how are children made — and born,” which made grown-ups seal themselves inside a bitter and angry muteness (somehow jealous), saying only, through their teeth: “You couldn’t think of anything better to ask?” other questions nagged me, ones I knew that my parents would not answer, not because I wasn’t supposed to know the answer, or because they didn’t know, but because they couldn’t understand what I wanted, because I couldn’t explain what made me so uneasy. I burst into tears so many times, sitting on the bed behind my mother who, naked to the waist, tapped a fork between the threads of the Persian rug she was working on. I might have asked her what the world would be like if no one lived in it, that is, if no one saw it, but I couldn’t even transform the mounting fear into a thought, let alone a question. I had, in fact, from time to time, had a horrible flash of insight: the world would exist even if no one ever saw it. But then what would it be like? It would have no color, or taste, or texture, or smell … And yet it would be, just as much as the one we see and feel. I looked at the room around me, and I tried to imagine the carpet frame, the bed, the walls, and even my mother, with her curly hair falling between her shoulder blades and her damp breasts hanging on her chest. I tried to imagine erasing the colors from everything, but somehow keeping the shapes, and I tried to “see” the chunky, desperate gray that would remain, the way that our room would be if no one saw it, a kind of concrete bunker in which you couldn’t distinguish the chair from the cement, or the rug frame from the cement, or the half-woven rug from the cement, or Mamma from the cement, petrified on the edge of her bed. I knew, though, that even this vision was an image, that it was also “seen” with a half-closed mind, they way you squint to see just the essence of a painting. But what if my mind closed all the way, and what if, even more to the point, there had never been an eye or a mind? How would things look where no person had ever stepped? How could they exist, without form or color? Then I would imagine the world, the whole world, everything that existed, as a great darkness, with denser parts and muddier parts where the things used to be — a limitless swamp, with spheres slow dissolving, no light anywhere, no nuance, no sound, only darkness with bigger and smaller muddy parts, thrown in heaps and piles like old furniture in a completely dark workshop.