After Sunset

For over an hour I sit motionless, staring at my desk.

It is a tidy desk. Not a speck of dust. A stack of blank sheets. A fountain pen. A laptop, closed.

The contact lens case, a white and blue plastic box. Every thirty days I buy a new one, always the same, in the shop round the corner. It’s a hygiene issue. I have had this one for seventeen days. I have marked on my calendar when I’ll have to buy a new one.

I hear the door opening. Marta has returned. It’s eleven o’clock. Lately, she has been having a lot of meetings that go on until late. Or she’s cheating on me; who knows.

I hear her throwing her briefcase onto the kitchen table, the flower vase trembles. Tired and irritated. Now she gets something from the fridge. Opens a beer, throws some instant meal into the microwave. She’ll gulp it down too quickly, will get sick tomorrow and this will make her even more furious.

She can’t see me like this, inert like a turtle absorbing sunlight. Come on. I must do something. Soon she’ll be upstairs.

I pick up the contact lens box. After a few hours the storage solution solidifies, who knows why. It leaves a white, rubbery patina, a semi-solid residue along the screw thread. I don’t like thinking that every morning the same substance comes in contact with my eyes. I unscrew the small caps with extreme delicacy, place them neatly. The cap of the left lens to the left, that of the right lens to the right, not too close to my fountain pen (the mere proximity of the black potential of the pen seems dangerously impure). I have my foolproof procedure. It is necessary, for mixing up lenses is a real problem. My eyes are different. Not different enough to notice it immediately, when I put them in, but enough to give me a fierce headache at the end of the day.

Marta is moving up the stairs fast and heavily, taking three steps at a time. How does such a small and slight woman shake the house so much. She opens the door to my studio.

“Aldo! Are you there?”

Always like this. For her it is normal. She always asks me if I am there when she sees that I am there, if I’m going out when she sees that I’m going out, if I am in the bathroom when she knows I am in the bathroom. Who knows what she really wants to learn. On second thoughts, I do not remember that she ever asked any questions about something that she does not know already. Too bad, because for the rest she could pass for a rational, almost balanced creature.

I can not remain silent, to confine myself to a silent ostension, to let my glorious presence exhibit itself. “Mmm mmm“, I feel compelled to say, as quietly as possible to grant her as little energy as possible. Even though I know that if I speak so softly it will irritate her more.

“I’m warming up a pizza, want some?”

“I don’t.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking out my contact lenses.” I accept the fact that the little box in front of me and the tiny cap between my fingers can’t work as conclusive evidence. Maybe Marta is unsure of her own perceptions, perhaps she needs to be reassured. Maybe all her questions just mean: is it really true what I’m seeing?

She holds the bottle of beer in front of my nose. I signal that I don’t want any. She says something, but I’m not listening. I’m looking at the structure of the bubbles in the round case that stores the contact lens. A ring of tiny little bubbles anchored to the edge, very regular; and right at the center, a circle of much larger bubbles. I count them. There are nine. Can’t count the small bubbles. I try, but my vision becomes blurred. Interesting, though. I must remember to look on the Internet to see if there is a law of physics that controls such regular structure. Maybe this is another manifestation of the splendor of one of those principles discovered in antiquity; say the Golden Mean, or something.

I throw the liquid into the waste paper basket. I should have emptied the box this morning. It should remain dry and open during the day, less germs. It should not be dried by hand. More hygienic.

“Did you understand what I said?” Marta is staring at me, more furious than attentive. I decide that I can bluff. “I understood,” I reply. I wonder what it was about. Perhaps her job. Maybe, had I listened, I really could have understood. If she had been in the office or with a lover, I mean. Anyway.

She’s not satisfied with my answer. She inhales nervously and is just about to speak when the microwave signals that the pizza is ready. She rushes down.

I pull out a mirror from the top drawer. My mirror for removing the lenses. A small one. I never learned to do without one.

It has some dust on it. I wipe it with the green microfiber cloth.

Always start from the left, and you can’t go wrong.

I look at my thumb and forefinger that gently squeeze the soft clear lens, remove it from the eye. It’s a bit reddened.

I let it fall into the box. Now the right one.

I wipe my hands. I unscrew the bottle of liquid and fill the box. The jet comes out skewed, how annoying. Again it’s this substance which solidifies in contact with the air that must have clogged the hole.

Marta is back up. She is carrying a plate with a remnant of pizza and a bottle of beer. Full. Must be a new one. She has been drinking every night, lately.

“What are you doing?”

“I told you. Taking out my contact lenses.”

“You were taking them out before.”

“I do it slowly. The more meticulously you handle them, the longer they last.”

“Aldo, it takes three seconds to take out a fucking lens. I went down, heated the pizza, ate half of it, filled the tub and even wrote two e-mails.”

I struggle to follow what she says, impossible to answer. Now I am reaching for the box with the utmost care. More difficult now that my hands have taken a slight tremor.

“Hey, wake up! It’s me. Marta. Your wife. Look up! What the fuck do you find so appealing about these stupid lenses?”

This, she should not have said. “They are very interesting. Bifocals, you know?”

“Really”, she says sarcastically. She always think she knows. She does not know that she does not know.

“It is easy to make bifocal eyeglasses” I continue, without taking my eyes away from the box. “You know them, right? Those lenses that once had the tiny horizontal cut in the middle. Part at the top, to see at distance. Bottom, to see up close.”

“I know what bifocals are.”

I lean back in my chair, stretch out my legs. “But contact lenses; they move around the eyes. You can not divide them into top and bottom. Then you know how they do it? They do inside and outside. The inside for reading, the outside for distance. Or the reverse, is doesn’t matter. Indeed, to avoid your eyes getting too used to them, to avoid the brain atrophying, the two lenses are reversed: if one has the inside for a reading, the other has the inside to see at distance. Are you following?”

“I’m all ears. How exciting. “She doesn’t hide an exasperated snort.

“When they gave me the new lenses, I found that my left eye could see very well in the morning, but not in the evening.”

Marta takes a long swig of beer.

“Then I discovered that I stop seeing well every afternoon at exactly the same time. Half past five. This is interesting, no? And you know why?”

“I know you’re going to tell me.”

“At this time of the year, the sunset is at five thirty. In the dimmed light my pupil dilates. The left pupil reaches the outer ring of the lens, the part made for looking close. And suddenly everything is out of focus. I do not see anymore.”

Marta looks at me blankly.

“I worked it out by myself, you know? I suggested a solution to my optometrist: after sunset, if I have to drive, I remove the left lens and I just replace it, with a disposable lens. Inexpensive one. Then I can’t read very well, but I drive great. I’ve tried: it works just perfect.”

I interrupt the meticulous drying of the exterior of the box and look at her. No, she’s not interested. But she has something to tell me.

“You and I need to talk, Aldo. You’ve changed. You sit all day here in the studio. But I know that you don’t work, you’re not doing anything at all.”

“That’s not true …”

“I talked with your boss, Aldo. He says you did not submit anything, not a word, for weeks. Don’t try to fool me.” She approaches me, her face almost touching mine.

“There are two things I would like to know. Why don’t you talk to me anymore? And why you spend all day just sitting there, doing nothing? On Sunday I watched you the whole afternoon. You stared at the table for three hours. I am not exaggerating. You looked like a reptile, like a fossil.” Marta sighs, gets up, looks into the darkness beyond the open window. “You’re so changed.”

I’m not answering. I don’t want to tell her, why.

Yes, I stare at the table. It is an interesting table. The box of lenses. Very interesting, that box. The mysterious bubbles, the delicate and diaphanous structure of those two round films that make me see so well, near and far. How my thoughts do change when I wear lenses, and when I don’t. Bifocal thoughts, until five thirty. After sunset; it depends.

You are only interested in what you can see, the rest falls into a limbo. Without lenses, with my eyes squinting, I see well only up close. I learned to love the little things within less than a meter. The smear of ink on the last letter of my signature on a contract. The grain of that same sheet, wrinkled and regular like a plowed field, like papier mâché, like the skin of old people, like a crust of bread, like a furrowed sea. Things I’ve known since I was a child and yet had to find out I needed glasses. Distance was as inaccessible as future; my world could only fit what I could see: very close things. The roughness and regularity of surfaces, colors, translucencies. The eyes of insects. The movement of the colors on the fur of cats. The life line in my left hand. The world is interesting; I’m not a reptile, Marta, not a fossil. The world is interesting. Especially if the doctor tells you that you’ll live for a maximum of six weeks. But this is exactly the part that I decided not to share with you.

On second thoughts, my silence on this is also interesting. Why don’t I want to tell you? Die, I will die. Soon. What difference does it make whether you know it today, or in a few days, or when you find me slumped on the table, or in bed with my eyes closed, or maybe on the ground, in some funny position in front of the bathroom door? It is an act of kindness on my part, or the awareness that we are too far away to share this further intimacy?

What the hell. Let’s face it, I’m telling you now. I’m about to open my mouth, but you’re already out, scrambling down the stairs, muttering something between your teeth. You’ve always been so damn fast.