For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind Read online

  Lying in my bed that terrible night thirty years ago, I concluded that being blind was worse than being dead. Being blind was like lying alive within a locked coffin. I’d be trapped and hidden in that dark box but able to hear the world outside carrying on entirely without me. Blind, I’d be left behind. I would want to hammer on the lid of the coffin and shout, For Christ’s sake, let me out! but my arms would be pinned to my chest in that tight space and all I’d be able to do was scream. But the screaming would get me nowhere. I’d be imprisoned that way for the rest of my pointless life, conscious of my predicament and helpless to change it.2

  Surely being blind was like being buried alive. I was certain then that I would rather die than lose my eyesight.

  Aias came out of the surgery with hard transparent plastic protective covers taped over his eyes and moving a bit unsteadily at the side of the surgeon. I hooked his arm through mine and led him across the waiting room, in which that day there sat a preponderance of Hasidic women. Some wore heavy loaflike wigs that gave them an armored appearance, and those wigged women who had bandages on their eyes looked particularly baleful. As we moved toward the door, the surgeon gave me a startling nudge in the ribs with his elbow. “What about you?” he said. “You want the surgery?”

  I laughed with false agreeability and nodded in a way that meant Oh, sure! Good idea! Thanks for thinking of me while in my heart I was thinking, Fat fucking chance. You wouldn’t catch me dead submitting my eyes to that knife.

  For a while Aias had been encouraging me to have the surgery. He hated it when I reached for my eyeglasses, hated the way they looked on me. But even though it was true that at age forty-nine, I found my eyes rapidly weakening, I was adamantly set against laser eye surgery. I couldn’t read a thing now without magnifying lenses, not unless I squinted severely and held the text as far away from my face as my arms would allow. I often heard myself muttering with ornate irritation, “I cannot see a thing anymore.” And yet I would rather be dependent on eyeglasses and the annoyances of losing them, sitting on them, endlessly wiping fingerprints from them, replacing the loose screws on them, rummaging constantly in my bag for them or thrashing my way through the house in search of them when in fact they are sitting atop my head the whole time, silently mocking me—I would rather endure all those minor annoyances than surrender my eyes to anybody or anything over which I could not have complete control.

  The surgeon said his unsmiling good-byes and admonished Aias not to exert himself unduly for the next forty-eight hours. We took a taxi back to our hotel, where Aias lay on the bed, head propped up on three pillows, hands by his sides, nose and toes pointing at the ceiling. With the bulbous protective cups over his eyes, he looked somehow incarcerated, detained. In an hour or so I was to remove the coverings and put medicinal drops in his eyes. It struck me as I looked at him lying there that being sightless was akin to being toothless. Self-defense and aggression both seemed to me difficult to achieve fully when you had no eyes or teeth. For a few seconds I imagined Aias toothless, his mouth caved in. Which would I prefer him to be: toothless or blind? Toothless looked bad, but then some kinds of blindness did too. Toothless was a condition that could be remedied with a bit of expert dentistry, whereas in most cases blindness could not be remedied by anything at all.3 I sincerely hoped that Aias was not blind. Soon enough, when I administered the eyedrops, we would have the answer.

  I went to the window and looked out. I could see Jerusalem’s old cemetery on the hill to the north. The stones of the tombs gave off a parched, senile yellow light and looked, from this distance, for all the world like the rubble of a ruin. A phalanx of stiff-spined cypress trees stood at the edge of the cemetery as cars crept by on the avenue below it—Israelis going about their business while the skeletons above them lay motionless in their tombs, a silent reminder of what was ahead for all of us.

  Bored, I lay down on the bed next to Aias and held his hand. I knew he disliked being idle and debilitated. But he was a patient person, far more patient than I. Had I been in his position I would have been restlessly bad-tempered, complaining bitterly, and emitting dark vocal sighs of despair every sixty seconds or so. Aias, however, was silent and relaxed, waiting for time to take its course. He could even smile at his predicament, showing his strong teeth. I smoothed his knuckles and fingers, put my arm over his chest, kissed his neck and ear. I admired his patience and his equanimity. He made it easy to take care of him. I pressed my cheek to his, kissed him on the mouth. He kissed me back. The call to prayer suddenly began quavering from ten different directions outside our window, and we lay that way for a long while until one thing led to another and even though the surgeon had said that Aias should not exert himself in any way, we exerted ourselves. Gingerly we did so, and while we did, I was very careful to keep my hands away from his face, fearing I would damage his eyes.

  Eventually, Aias’s eyedrops were due. I settled my eyeglasses on my nose and carefully peeled away the adhesive tape that held the protective plastic covers in place. The eyes were filmy and watery. Aias blinked and looked beyond my head in a testing way, trying to focus. I held his eyelids apart and put three drops into each eye. The liquid pooled, then streamed from the corners of his eyes and slid toward his ears. When his eyes cleared he looked at me for a while, minutely examining my face. Finally he said what I knew he would say: “Those glasses you’re wearing are no good.”

  Surprised and relieved that he could see me through all that rheum, I said, “How come?”

  “They make you look old. They make you look like an old schoolteacher.”

  Just around that time I had, in fact, become a schoolteacher of sorts. I had recently taken a job as a volunteer teacher at the International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs in the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala in southern India—nearly as far south in India as a person can go without stumbling off the end of Cape Comorin and plunging into the Laccadive Sea. The school was not exactly in Trivandrum but eleven miles outside the city in what seemed to me a deeply insignificant coconut and banana jungle set between a tiny village and a muddy lotus-choked lake called Vellayani. Housed in a walled brick compound of brand-new construction, the school comprised four buildings—an office building, a dormitory, a dining room/kitchen that also served as an auditorium, and a classroom building. I was there to teach English and anything related to it. Communication, pronunciation, elocution, writing of all forms, grammar, punctuation, public speaking, whatever the students needed in this broad area, I was to help them with it. Not having had more than two years of experience with this sort of thing, and that nearly twenty years ago, I was only one step ahead of my students. There were some two dozen students between the ages of twenty and fifty-two. They came from thirteen different countries. There were two from Madagascar, three from Kenya, one from Norway, two from Ghana, one from Japan, one from Colombia, one from Nepal, three from Germany, three from Liberia, one from Sierra Leone, one who got chased out of Liberia as a boy and ended up in Sierra Leone, one ethnically Indonesian man from Saudi Arabia, two technically Chinese people from the Autonomous Region of Tibet, and one irrepressibly cheerful, fast-talking young woman from so extremely far northeast in India she might as well have been Bhutanese.

  One of the criteria for admission to this school was that the student be proficient in English. For a couple of the students, that criterion appeared to have been waived. Though they could all put together simple sentences, only a few were truly proficient in English. The Kenyans’ national language was English and they were, of course, fluent in it, though their English was full of quirks and Britishisms and their accents were so rich that one had to concentrate carefully to follow what they were saying. The Liberians, for whom English was also the national language, were also very good at it. They knew English, understood it perfectly, but when they spoke it, they were almost completely unintelligible to the rest of us English speakers. No amount of careful concentration could solve this problem. The number of times
I had to say “Sorry, what did you say?” to my Liberian students in the first few weeks of meeting them was a source of regret for me. I felt for them. With their nation, their lives, their education, their very psyches disrupted and dismantled by Charles Taylor’s nightmarishly weird Liberian civil war, they were not like any of the other students at the school, and they felt their difference and were, I eventually came to realize, quietly wounded by it.

  The other important criterion for attendance at this school was that the student had to be either legally or entirely blind. Thirteen of them were completely blind. The rest were in various stages of blindness, low vision, or visual impairment. Some could see a little light, a little color; some could see objects dimly; a few could read printed type if the type was very large and they pressed their noses up to the page. Most could read Braille; most were in possession of a white cane.

  My reason for going to India to teach blind and visually impaired people was not that I wanted to teach English or live in India. I have never really wanted to teach, and I might as well say now that, although I’ve tried over the years to see the charm of India, after five separate trips there—a couple of them extended—I still do not see the charm of India. No, I was teaching at this school solely because I had developed a strong curiosity about blindness and wanted to meet blind people, to spend time with them, to get to know them, to find out how they think, to see how they live in the world, how they navigate, how they talk and eat and dress and write and shave and brush their teeth, and learn just about anything else I could about blind people without trespassing too far beyond the limits of decency. Teaching in a school for the blind seemed to me a good way to learn, and I was given the rare chance to do that in Trivandrum, Kerala.

  I had begun to develop this interest in the blind four years before, when an American magazine sent me to Tibet to write an article about Sabriye Tenberken, the blind German woman who, together with her sighted Dutch partner, Paul Kronenberg, founded Braille Without Borders, Tibet’s first school for the blind. At the time that I went to Tibet, I had no real interest in blindness beyond the usual reflexive dread of it, the usual pity for people who couldn’t see, the usual fearful wish that it would never ever happen to me. My dread of blindness was great enough that I was even a little apprehensive about meeting Sabriye. In preparation for my trip to Tibet I read a book she wrote about her experiences and saw photos of her (she looked normal enough, presentable enough; when I accidentally held her photo upside down for a moment, she looked oddly like me when I was younger); she was by all accounts a brave, adventurous, highly intelligent person, but still, she was blind, and that big, terrible fact made me uneasy and even reluctant to meet her. I didn’t know what was the appropriate way to behave with a blind person, whether there was some particular etiquette I should follow. There must, I thought, be rules about relating to a person so extremely disadvantaged in the game of life. The unfamiliarity of it worried me and the bleakness of it depressed me a little. I was forty-five years old at the time and had rarely spoken to a blind person.

  My first encounter with a blind person took place thirty years ago in the waiting room of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, the Irish broadcasting company in Dublin. I was sitting on a couch waiting to do a radio interview when a blind woman came into the room with a guide dog and sat down next to me. She was moonfaced and pale and wore a red dress and black patent-leather shoes. Her thin hair was cut in blunt bangs across her forehead, and over her ears she wore the bulky headphones of a Walkman that she held lightly in her right hand. The guide dog lay on his side and stared dully at the woman’s glistening shoes while she listened to music with her eyes closed. Her eyes were slightly sunken, and the lids had a darkish hue, as if lightly dusted with coal ash. I was enthralled by the pair. The woman’s nose twitched repeatedly, as though she were investigating a breeze or a scent that was wafting across her face. Presently, a short bald man poked his head through a doorway and said to the blind woman, “I suppose you’d better come and operate the switch, Lisa.” She unplugged the headphones from the device, removed them from her ears, stuffed them into her handbag, then abruptly lifted the Walkman to within an inch of my chin and, with bold authority, said, “Pardon me, madam. I want to be sure the machine is off. Is it off?”

  Startled, I took the machine in my hands, fumbled with it, accidentally turned it on, turned it off again, confirmed that it was off, and handed it back to her. She said, “Right, then,” and stood up and headed for the door with no guidance from the dog, who followed slowly behind her with an air of resigned obedience.

  I remember wondering with intense puzzlement how the blind woman knew that I had been sitting there, for I had not moved or spoken or made any sound at all since she came in and sat down next to me. And how was she going to operate the RTÉ switchboard if she didn’t know whether her own radio was on or off? Above all, how did she know I was a woman? She had called me madam. Why? With strong feelings of suspicion, mistrust, fascination, and resentment I watched her and the dog disappear through the doorway.

  Aside from one fleeting exchange with a blind man over the harness of his guide dog in a very small elevator in Boston, a vacuous little volley of small talk in which neither the blindness nor the conspicuous dog was mentioned, Lisa had been my only real encounter with a blind person before I went to Tibet. Fourteen years later, on my way to Lhasa I felt that my ignorance about blind people could somehow hurt both them and me.

  1No, not just a little—a lot. A few years before this event I had seen for the first time the film version of All Quiet on the Western Front. One scene had stayed vividly in my mind: In the midst of a relentless bombardment, a band of German soldiers are putting up barbed wire to keep the enemy at bay. The younger ones are wild-eyed with fear. The bombardment worsens, and the soldiers are directed to retreat to their dugout. As they go, one of them gets knocked to the ground by an explosion and the next thing we know he is screaming hysterically, “My eyes! My eyes! I can’t see! I’m blind!,” and running around in jagged circles. The very next thing we know, he’s dead. It isn’t entirely clear what has killed him, but I think we’re meant to suppose it’s the injuries he sustained. I knew better, though. I knew in my heart that the soldier had died not of his injuries but of the sheer horror at knowing he’d been blinded. I had felt his utter despair, his psychic repulsion, so forcefully that I frowned at the television screen and said out loud, “It’s better that he died.”

  2Years later, when I read in Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone that a man who had lost his sight was like “a man shut alive inside a tomb where he could live and move,” I thought that if he had only removed the second clause, his description would have been dead accurate.

  3Later, I’ll discuss some of the cases in which sight has been surgically restored to the congenitally blind. The earliest reported instance came from Arabia in the year 1020. By the year 2000, there had still been only a very few successful cases.

  Braille Without Borders

  I arrived at the Braille Without Borders school—which, Sabriye Tenberken later clarified, is not really a school but a training center for blind children—during what appeared to be a recess period. Though the air was cool, at eleven o’clock in the morning in downtown Lhasa, the Tibetan sun was hot on my bare head. The entrance to the school grounds was a formidable, fantastically decorated portal, like a gate lifted whole from the Forbidden City. At its center was a pair of wide-planked wooden doors painted bull’s-blood red and fortified with black iron straps graced with fine white filigree. Above the doors, a wooden lintel extended out over the head of the visitor, forming a kind of awning against the sun. Along the length of the edge of the awning hung a puzzling six-inch-wide strip of pleated red cotton; it fluttered in the breeze like a cheerleader’s skirt. (I soon learned that every door and window in Tibet is bedecked with a similar pleated length of cloth. Far too short to be useful as curtains against the sun, the cloths are simply fanciful frills that lend the buildings of
Lhasa the festive air of a parade float.) The lintel was painted in a decorative pattern of lime green, orange, red, yellow, and blue and was supported by two wooden columns, the left displaying vertically the uppercase letters of the Roman alphabet, the right the letters of the Tibetan alphabet. The Braille equivalent of each alphabet had been carved into the wood beside it.

  Affixed to the great door was a beautifully handwritten note that said BE AWARE OF THE DOG!, which is a euphemistic way of saying THERE IS A VICIOUS DOG IN HERE WHO WILL PROBABLY BITE YOU. More often than not, though, it’s really only a way of saying THERE IS NO VICIOUS DOG IN HERE, BUT WE WANT YOU TO THINK THAT THERE IS. Whatever the case, merely being aware of a dog is of no use at all if the dog is determined to attack. I hesitated, considered the possibilities, heard nothing beyond the door but the raucous clatter and shriek of children at play. Realizing that after traveling some eight thousand miles to write an article about this school, I didn’t have much choice, I rang the bell, an ancient-looking bronze cowbell dangling from a rope. I waited, staring at the magnificent gate. Had a winged, fire-snorting Chinese dragon come roaring out of it, I would not have been entirely surprised. Eventually the great doors were hauled open by a tall, skinny teenager in a double-breasted pin-striped suit jacket three sizes too big for him. He was smiling hugely, positively brimming with delight. One of his eyes was rolled back in his head and the other seemed to be looking intently westward. The sleeves of his jacket dangled several inches below his hands, making him look like an amputee.