Seeing Red, Lina Meruane
It was happening. It was finally happening.
The doctors had been warning Lucina for years now about her eyes – about the brittle veins of her eyes. Any extremes – smoking, drinking, or the wild throes of lovemaking – and her eyes could haemorrhage.
Having flirted with danger or the idea of danger for so long, Lucina felt maybe, maybe, everything could be alright afterall. The idea that she could go blind seemed too unreal, too far-fetched, not something that could happen to her.
Yet this time, in the middle of a party, blindness arrives, announced by fireworks.
"A firecracker went off in my head. But no, it was no fire I was seeing, it was blood spilling out inside my eyes. The most shockingly beautiful blood I have ever seen. The most outrageous. The most terrifying."
With this, Lucina is thrown into darkness. Utter. Absolute.
From balancing her academic and writerly ambitions, Lucina has to now learn how to balance her own feet on the ground, while her friends and family adjust to a Lucina they'd not seen before. A Lucina who is acerbic and fierce, a Lucina who is soon labelled "blind and dangerous."
She has no desire of going down quietly, this Lucina.
"Yes, I replied slowly. Yes, but I'm only an apprentice blind woman and I have very little ambition in the trade, and yes, almost blind and dangerous. But I'm not going to just sit in a chair and wait for it to pass."
It's not all bleak though. Even in her desolate desert, Lucina finds, almost by accident, oases of hope and tenderness.
"It was night already and we didn't have electricity . . . Not even a candle. Ignacio had no clue where the lighter was. He searched through clothes and felt his way over the floor, looking for it but not finding it. And we also toasted to that, because in the darkness of the empty house we were the same: a couple of blind lovers."
What about her identity? The one that is slipping away like sand through Lucina's desperately flailing fingers. She is, or used to be, a prolific writer and a voracious reader.
Now blindness is gnawing away at the core of her soul.
"Did you forget yourself, too? Raquel hammered away, trying to activate my memory or my wish to remember. To remember not the forgotten pages, but the identity my blood had drowned. You can only be yourself when you're writing, said Raquel, as if she had to remind me."
Can Lina grope her way out of the darkness?
Lucina's story is not hers alone. Lucina is Lina. Lina is Lucina. Seeing Red is based on the author's own loss of vision, and how she copes with herself, with this new version of herself, with this new version of a pitch black world that is not sure how to treat her.
To read Lina Meruane is to slip and glide on an oily smooth prose. I kept gliding – gliding around for a tour of her dark house of horrors.
Once you've bumped your head or the stub of your little toe in the darkness a few times, you learn how to trust her flow and the slope of her treacherous floor.
Once you start trusting the darkness of her empty house, you and the writer become the same: a couple of blind lovers.
