Before going blind, he had worked with “the blue-eyed boys.” I didn’t know the expression then, so I asked, “Where?” to which he responded teasingly, “Eh, the guys with stars on their shoulders,” and continued to describe his professional life only in this kind of paraphrase, to the extent that, in the end, in my ingenuous mind of the time, the working-class child whose parents didn’t talk about politics at home, there formed a jumbled-up, fairy-tale image, where I saw the masseur in the middle of a kind of angelic hall of superhumans, all tall and blond, with shining azure eyes … I imagined them naked, statuesque, really white as marble, until their eyes became unsettling and haunting in their Hellenic faces. Their shoulders were decorated with glowing constellations, forming zodiac signs as clear as the decals on glasses. “The happy boys,” as the blind man also called them, could be Cancers, Scorpios, Capricorns, or Virgos, depending on their rank in the hierarchy. They moved among us but were unseen, they heard everything we said, even in the privacy of our homes, and still no one guessed where they held their mysterious meetings, in what network of underground highwaymen’s tunnels … If they were all azure-eyed, it was because their blood itself was azure, like that of gods and spiders. Incorruptible and distant, a race of masters from other areas of the Cosmos, these “boys” (a sign of their ritual virginity), with an unshakable and enigmatic happiness, had interfered somehow, from times immemorial (which went back, according to some rumors, to old king Burebista: because it was certain that Dekeneu, his great priest, due to the heights of the sacred mountain where he lived, had a blue fluid in his veins, with a strong smell of cyanide, blood much better suited to absorbing the scarce oxygen of those heights and transporting it through the systems and mechanisms of his astral body) in the political structures of humanity. More than ever in recent decades, their domination became complete, triumphant. Of a higher rank than the angels, these super-watchers, from their aerial palaces, aimed eagle-gazes over the ant hills that the workers of the earth raised in their cluelessness, and they unleashed themselves from time to time over frightened hoards, snatching mortals toward the sky. No one could penetrate their ways or understand their thoughts. Two men slept in one bed: the one was taken, and the other left; two women were grinding together, one was taken, and the other left. The vultures came in droves to the place where the cadaver lay.
I had this vision while the masseur, whose speech was neither fish nor fowl, pressed my eyelids with his talcum-covered fingers, as though he wanted to open my eyes. “The accident” that made him blind, five years before, removed him forever from that glorious sect. Naturally, those ranks would not admit any being with a deformity, anyone who would disrupt their perfection. The masseur went blind because he had seen too much, he said, and I drew the conclusion that destiny had reserved certain unpleasantness for these privileged beings. The quantity of information that they could receive was limited, and if they consumed their ration before death, they went blind or deaf or insensible for the rest of the years they had to live. Angels fallen into the concrete marsh of streets, metros, and fish markets, dragged the secret of their blue blood with them to their graves.
If he hadn’t been one of the hierarchs of the “Secu Monastery,” their enigmatic meeting hall, whose name suggested dryness and askesis of the spirit, the blind man would have ended up making hairbrushes, like the vast majority of those who lose their sight. The position of masseur at Colentina was created especially for him. It was well paid and close to home. His beautiful wife, who always dressed like an opera diva, brought him to work and picked him up every day, proudly braving the gazes of those who passed on the sidewalk along the hospital fence where bindweed grew. The blind man, with his chest out, seemed to oppose the trek as much as he could, as though he were being dragged toward the gallows by a pitiless guard. Something he said, one of the phrases he let snow gently and continuously over my head in his ragged talkativeness, made me pay special attention: “I don’t know if I am in this room because I went blind, or if I went blind because I was meant to be here …” His strokes paused for a moment. He touched the dusty skin of my face, and continued his chatter, describing the funereal process of his blinding. The beginning of his story would have been atrocious and shocking if the same tone from the tips of his lips (gently amused, as though he were talking about someone else) hadn’t emptied the vessels of his words, leaving them as airy as the rooms of a paper palace.
He had come home in the evening, after a day of listening (probably the listening that monks do in their cells, I translated) and entered the hallway of the block where he lived. The light bulb there, like all bulbs in all block stairwells, had been stolen, so thick stripes of velvet darkness had settled on the side by the elevator. From there, some guys leapt out, drugged him and took him, in a car, probably, to another part of the city. When he came to, he was in the center of an enormous hall, under a great vault like a basilica, maybe thousands of meters above. He was tied to a crystal chair, in the center of a checkered floor that extended as far as he could see, like an open field, with white and red squares crowding toward the edges, where they came together in a single line of fog. The air was gelatinous and frozen, crossed by oblique columns of light from round skylights here and there that perforated the gigantic semispherical vault. He sat, perhaps for days, fearfully following the movement of the spots of light over the floor tiles, which were polished like mirrors. The spots of light darkened into scarlet, the air vaporized from the endless hall, darkness fell, and then, inching upwards, the outflow of dawn began. At the edge of sight and straight in front of him, he thought some points were moving, barely perceptibly. For several days, the points advanced and grew, little by little, taking hours upon hours to cross one spot of light, entering the penumbra again, hours upon hours later, until, one morning, the man bound to the sparkling chair perceived, only a few hundred meters away, a disorderly column of men in white, stiff, vestments, which fell over their bodies not in graceful folds, but in sharp angles, like exoskeletons.
“Soon,” the blind man said, “the forty or so officiants of some Mystery formed a semicircle of rustling robes around me. They held incomprehensible and dreadful tools, the mere sight of which produced waves of sweat on my skin. Only one was empty-handed. On the ephod held at his shoulders by silver chains, there was a shining quartz box. Inside the box was visible a human tooth, with long roots, emanating a pale aura. The irritated-looking priest wore a steel miter on his head, with extended pipes that perforated his skull.
“The indictment — since, judging by the solemn and threatening expression of their insect faces, this is what it had to be — lasted for hours on end, until night fell in the giant sphere. Now the only light, like phosphorus, came from the complicated pliers, screws, and scalpels in the priests’ hands, and from the tooth in the crystal box. The words they shouted at my face, splattering me with saliva — now their Hierarch alone, now all in chorus, now one or another in a moment of inspiration — were signs scratched into my tympanum by an unknown language. Finally they crowded around me and put their hands on my head and shoulders. Their clothes, threaded with gold wires, smelled sharp and verminous. The Hierarch placed an iron circle on my head, tightened it with screws, and hung its mechanical peduncles in front of my eyes. Those small clamps took my eyelids, and with fine adjustments of the screws, they were pulled apart from each other until they began to hurt, tear, and bleed. My eyeballs remained wide, lacking defense, and I had already begun to guess the monstrous torment to come. Copper nails, reddened in fire, would pierce the fragile eggs within their sockets below my brow.