It was fair to say that apart from the passengers who had left their cars parked on the other side of the river in the places where the highway opened out and had stepped outside with their binoculars to admire the elegant flights of the Egyptian vultures, even during one of the months when the birds had emigrated to their winter quarters, there wasn’t another soul around. Perhaps, with nothing else to see, they were now watching him; in fact, he was practically sure of it, judging by the way two of those tiny little dots were motioning wildly. But he looked away from them, from the ridiculous vanity of their movements and their concern for him (didn’t they, too, have a part in all this, the question crossed his mind for an instant), and he raised his eyes as if trying to understand the whole thing for a moment, once and for all.
Beyond the bend in the river and the green and yellow plain of the fields, beyond the roadway that ran parallel to the river, there was a smooth expanse of hillocks and mounds, of arable land at times and other times of lands peppered by dark splotches of oak trees where the silvery coil of another road wound its way. Sometimes the land was red, a red that was on occasion claret or crimson, and on other occasions it was like freshly spilt blood, a vibrant cinnabar color in stretches, or ferrous hematite, and other times, in the fallow or stubble fields left uncultivated, it was yellow, or rather greenish, low, open scrubland. Beyond the first hillocks, as they gained height, a few ridges were covered with sessile and Pyrenean oaks that had begun to turn yellow and lose their leaves, and along the riverbeds, the leaves of the poplars, raising their lances on high with all the golden splendor of autumn, provided a counterpoint that, in its transitory finiteness, suddenly seemed eternal to him. Far off, in the distance, and it would have been hard to say whether closing it all off or making everything stand out all the more by delimiting it, the great mountains of the cordillera showed off their sharp, blue profiles in the clear, clean light of morning.
He didn’t know if he had ever seen such beauty in his entire life, he surprised himself suddenly thinking, or if perhaps that, what there is before disappearing, is what true beauty is in the end, what one has had in his sights and has not seen, now that one has it but cannot go on having it, and if, as a result, it might always have been thus, in the face of every moment that is, by its very nature, about to disappear, or if it was only now.
Nor did he know if all of that beauty was in fact there, in space, or at that moment and, therefore, in time, or even if it was truly out there rather than inside him, or perhaps neither without him nor within him but in the attention he paid, which is what enriched things or impoverished them, what broadened and stretched them or narrowed them and made them rigid and numb like his legs just then, or even what helped create them or crush them. The only thing he knew was that he was there right then, at the edge of everything and right before nothing, and in that everything and that nothing that that moment was, still, for him.
But what kind of thoughts are these, he asked himself, what am I doing thinking such things right now? But suddenly it occurred to him, too, that he had gone up there at the exact moment when it had never been more difficult for him to take a single step, when he could move little better than a lame, broken man in his last days, afflicted by some unknown paralysis. I had to wait until the end, when I could barely walk, to come up and see what could be seen from up here, he told himself again. Does that mean something? Do things speak to us, or is it just our need to implore them to say something to us?
He had barely completed these thoughts when he looked down again, over the precipice, still keeping his vertigo in check, and he saw his road there still, next to the river, the dirt road of his father, may he rest in peace, and his grandfather, and his own, too, the road that seemed to mark a boundary between the fertility of the earth and the rocky, steep flanks of the mountain, between the sere and the lush, that white, perfectly defined path, delicate more than narrow, just a tiny little thread from up there, one he could navigate even in his sleep and still tell you precisely where he was or was not at any given moment, one you could only travel on foot and, most likely, in silence, but whose breath — for a moment he was sure that just beyond a bend, the road continued along past a metalworks and then a tire retread shop before passing a great, windowless hangar, a gas station, then an automobile dealership, and an interchange — seemed to waft curiously all the way up to where he was, in the least dispersed and the most inexhaustible, sure way in the world.
Everything up there seemed to reveal to him its exact opposite, and it was then that he opened his eyes as wide as they would go so that he could fit into them all the space around him, so that he could fit the road and that immensity and even the entire expanse of time with all its vicissitudes, while simultaneously breathing in as much air as he could get into his lungs, as they said his father had done. The vertigo of disappearance made him wobble slightly for an instant, still at the cliff ’s edge, and immediately, with all that vastness in his eyes, with the breath of the eternal rising off the road and up toward him, and a strange sense of piety for all that remained impenetrable, he took one dumbstruck step, just one, and it was not forward into the abyss but backward, onto terra firma, followed a moment later by another, and then another, all filled with liberating, inaugural astonishment, and as he turned his head to one side, drawn by the shouting that had just begun to reach him, he saw, too, against the background of all those strangely indomitable surroundings and, above all else, all that unbowed opening of his eyes, his son Felipe — he, too, Felipe Díaz — gasping for breath and running for all he was worth to reach him and throw his arms around him.
He said nothing then, either, but suddenly — the pomegranates are opening up down below, and they’re as red and ripe as ever, he heard his son say after a short while — he was certain that if he uttered one phrase or began to say anything, regardless of how softly or loudly, words would have regained all the meaning whose restitution they themselves were clamoring for at the top of their lungs.
Trieste, December 2008
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. Á. González Sainz is a Spanish writer and translator born in Soria in 1956. His latest book is a collection of short stories, El viento en las hojas (Anagrama, 2014). Among his other works are the novels Ojos que no ven (Anagrama, 2010), Volver al mundo (Anagrama, 2003) and Un mundo exasperado (Anagrama, 1995), which received the Herralde Novel Prize. In 2005 he was awarded the Castilla y León Literature Prize. He has translated a number of books from Italian to Spanish by authors such as Magris, Del Giudice, Flaiano, Stuparich, Severino, and was founder and director of one of the most important cultural magazines during Spain’s Transition from dictatorship to democracy, namely Archipiélago, cuadernos de la crítica de la cultura (1989–2009). He received his degree in Hispanic Philology from the University of Barcelona and has taught Spanish as a Foreign Language for more than thirty years. None So Blind is his first work available in English translation.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Harold Augenbraum is an American writer, editor, and translator. He is currently Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, where he established the Innovations in Reading Prizes, the Literarian Award, 5 Under 35, BookUp, National Book Awards on Campus, and the National Book Awards Teen Press Conference. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Common literary magazine, founded the Proust Society of America, and is former member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian American Writers Workshop and vice chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. Augenbraum has published six books on Latino literature of the United States, translations of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition and the Filipino novelist José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El filibusterismo for Penguin Classics, and, for the University of Texas Press, the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s The Plain in Flames (with Ilan Stavans). In 2013, Augenbraum edited the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust, also published by Penguin Classics.