BY THIS TIME I had achieved an affection for little Lissy. Whenever she disappeared for a day or two I found myself waiting for her return. Of all of them she was the most talkative, the most fetching certainly, and the fact that I was sightless intrigued her, whereas the others merely deferred to me. One morning she found me in the kitchen by bumping into me, because she had decided to keep her eyes closed from the moment she woke up. It’s not so bad, is it, she said. Oh I know I can open my eyes at any time where you can’t, but right now you can see better than me, can’t you? I said I could because my other faculties were a kind of recompense. And while we had this conversation I put a glass of orange juice in her hand, and she gasped.
Lissy’s experiments in sightlessness brought us closer. She would feel my features, touching my forehead, nose, my mouth with her small hands, at the same time I ran my fingers over her face. She was so charming, her eyes closed, and her head averted in the manner of someone thinking of the image her hands created. Supposing this is what people did instead of kissing, I said to her. Like we were some isolated island people apart from the rest of the world. And at that I felt her lips on mine. She was standing on tiptoe to reach me and I held her waist and ran my hands down her back and felt her flesh under the thin shift she wore.