She shook her head. ‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m not staying.’ What was the point? The instructor would not come for another week. No reason for her being here, or coming back until then. It was light until much later in the evenings now. She could walk down to the Paseo and telephone her father from a call box. She saw the disappointment in Sergio’s face.
‘Why not?’
She looked him very directly in the eye. ‘Forget about me, Sergio. We weren’t meant to be.’ And she turned to walk briskly to the door. Moving carefully through the darkness of the hall, and then out into the evening sunshine that slanted across the street from the clearest of blue skies.
She had reached the Plaza de las Flores before Sergio caught up with her. Tables around the perimeter of the square were filled with people enjoying drinks and tapas. The warm air was filled with their voices, like the chatter of birds. Trees in full leaf were laden with oranges, and flowers in bloom suffused the evening with their fragrance. He grabbed her arm, and she turned, surprised, and pulled it free of his grasp.
‘What do you want?’
He couldn’t hear the tone of her voice, but he could see the anger in her face, and he recoiled from it, hurt, like a dog suddenly slapped by a trusted master.
‘What did I do?’ he said. ‘All this time I’ve been thinking I must have done or said something to offend you. Why else would you have stopped coming to the centre? Was it the kiss? Did I cross a line?’
His obvious distress felt like someone plunging a knife into her heart. She fought hard to stop the tears. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. It’s not you. Nothing to do with you.’
He was, quite patently, completely bewildered. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Well, what, then? What? What’s wrong, Ana?’ Heads turned, drawn by the pitch of his voice, which had risen beyond his ability to control it.
And quite suddenly her tears came. Welling up from deep inside, and spilling down her cheeks in large, quivering drops. ‘You don’t want to know.’
‘I do!’
She shook her head. ‘You won’t want to be with me anymore.’
He threw his head back in despair. ‘Why in God’s name would I not want to be with you?’
More heads turned towards them.
‘Because I’m going blind, Sergio. Soon I won’t be able to see you, or hear you. You’ll just be a touch in the dark. And you won’t want anything to do with me.’
He was shocked. Staring at her in disbelief. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I have a genetic disorder. It’s called Usher Syndrome. And it’s going to take away my sight, as well as the rest of my hearing. It’s already begun.’
He closed his eyes. ‘Oh, dear God.’ And she let him gather her into his embrace, drawing her head to his chest, fingers laced through her hair. ‘Oh, Ana. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Then he held her again by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and absolutely trapped her in his gaze. Earnest eyes staring determinedly into hers. ‘How could you think, even for one minute, that something like that would drive me away? That somehow I wouldn’t want to be with you any more?’ Now he raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘For God’s sake Ana. It’s you I love. The person you are inside. Not what you can see or hear.’
But the only thing she heard was It’s you I love. Words that replayed themselves in her brain like an echo on a loop. And she saw that he did not even realize what he’d said.
He was oblivious. ‘We’ll find a way to communicate. It’ll only bring us closer.’
She wiped the tears from her face, but couldn’t stop the flow of more. ‘An instructor is coming next week to start teaching me touch-signing while I can still see and hear. I don’t know exactly how it works, but . . .’ Her voice trailed away.
‘I’ll learn it with you,’ he said quickly. ‘We’ll be fluent in it in no time.’
And she imagined how intimate that might be. Communication by touch alone. She couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather have touch her. And for the first time since receiving the diagnosis, a glimmer of light shone somewhere in the darkness of her future.
*
The next weeks passed in a blur, and in equal measures of hope and despair. Learning tactile signing was easier than she had thought, since in many ways it was like a sensory extension of the signing for the deaf that she had already started to adopt. But as each session required her to close her eyes, she began to get a sense of what it would be like to be blind, and the shadow that cast upon her future was deep and depressing. By contrast, hope came from the regular and intimate contact with Sergio. They attended the lessons together, and there was something arousing about feeling his hands on hers when she couldn’t see him. His fingers on her face, and hers on his. Something she had never known before.
Since the evenings were still light, she persuaded her father that she could travel to and from the centre by bus, and she thought he was relieved to be excused from the obligation of driving her there and back. But, in fact, she and Sergio only attended the centre on the days that the instructor came, and two evenings a week they would go and eat together at a little fish restaurant on the beach front at Santa Ana.
The proprietor was a small bald man with no teeth who greeted them every evening with a gummy smile and a bottle of white wine that he set open on the table almost before they sat down. They ate salad with tuna, and boquerones, and calamares and abadejo, and watched the sea wash pink phosphorescence upon the shore as the sun dipped towards the west. They closed their
