The Country of the Blind and other Selected Stories Page 40

  ‘A man,’ one said, in hardly recognizable Spanish – ‘a man it is – a man or a spirit – coming down from the rocks.’

  But Nunez advanced with the confident steps of a youth who enters upon life. All the old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the Blind had come back to his mind, and through his thoughts ran this old proverb, as if it were a refrain –

  ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King.’5

  ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King.’

  And very civilly he gave them greeting. He talked to them and used his eyes.

  ‘Where does he come from, brother Pedro?’ asked one.

  ‘Down out of the rocks.’

  ‘Over the mountains I come,’ said Nunez, ‘out of the country beyond there – where men can see. From near Bogota, where there are a hundred thousands of people, and where the city passes out of sight.’

  ‘Sight?’ muttered Pedro. ‘Sight?’

  ‘He comes,’ said the second blind man, ‘out of the rocks.’

  The cloth of their coats Nunez saw was curiously fashioned, each with a different sort of stitching.

  They startled him by a simultaneous movement towards him, each with a hand outstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread fingers.

  ‘Come hither,’ said the third blind man, following his motion and clutching him neatly.

  And they held Nunez and felt him over, saying no word further until they had done so.

  ‘Carefully,’ he cried, with a finger in his eye, and found they thought that organ, with its fluttering lids, a queer thing in him. They went over it again.

  ‘A strange creature, Correa,’ said the one called Pedro. ‘Feel the coarseness of his hair. Like a llama’s hair.’

  ‘Rough he is as the rocks that begot him,’ said Correa, investigating Nunez’s unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. ‘Perhaps he will grow finer.’ Nunez struggled a little under their examination, but they gripped him firm.

  ‘Carefully,’ he said again.

  ‘He speaks,’ said the third man. ‘Certainly he is a man.’

  ‘Ugh!’ said Pedro, at the roughness of his coat.

  ‘And you have come into the world?’ asked Pedro.

  ‘Out of the world. Over mountains and glaciers; right over above there, halfway to the sun. Out of the great big world that goes down, twelve days’ journey to the sea.’

  They scarcely seemed to heed him. ‘Our fathers have told us men may be made by the forces of Nature,’ said Correa. ‘It is the warmth of things and moisture, and rottenness – rottenness.’

  ‘Let us lead him to the elders,’ said Pedro

  ‘Shout first,’ said Correa, ‘lest the children be afraid. This is a marvellous occasion.’

  So they shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to lead him to the houses.

  He drew his hand away. ‘I can see,’ he said.

  ‘See?’ said Correa.

  ‘Yes, see,’ said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against Pedro’s pail.

  ‘His senses are still imperfect,’ said the third blind man. ‘He stumbles, and talks unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand.’

  ‘As you will,’ said Nunez, and was led along, laughing.

  It seemed they knew nothing of sight.

  Well, all in good time he would teach them.

  He heard people shouting, and saw a number of figures gathering together in the middle roadway of the village.

  He found it taxed his nerve and patience more than he had anticipated, that first encounter with the population of the Country of the Blind. The place seemed larger as he drew near to it, and the smeared plasterings queerer, and a crowd of children and men and women (the women and girls, he was pleased to note, had some of them quite sweet faces, for all that their eyes were shut and sunken) came about him, holding on to him, touching him with soft, sensitive hands, smelling at him, and listening at every word he spoke. Some of the maidens and children, however, kept aloof as if afraid, and indeed his voice seemed coarse and rude beside their softer notes. They mobbed him. His three guides kept close to him with an effect of proprietorship, and said again and again, ‘A wild man out of the rocks.’

  ‘Bogota,’ he said. ‘Bogota. Over the mountain crests.’

  ‘A wild man – using wild words,’ said Pedro. ‘Did you hear that – Bogota? His mind is hardly formed yet. He has only the beginnings of speech.’

  A little boy nipped his hand. ‘Bogota!’ he said mockingly.

  ‘Ay! A city to your village. I come from the great world – where men have eyes and see.’

  ‘His name’s Bogota,’ they said.

  ‘He stumbled,’ said Correa, ‘stumbled twice as we came hither.’

  ‘Bring him to the elders.’

  And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black as pitch, save at the end there faintly glowed a fire. The crowd closed in behind him and shut out all but the faintest glimmer of day, and before he could arrest himself he had fallen headlong over the feet of a seated man. His arm, outflung, struck the face of someone else as he went down; he felt the soft impact of features and heard a cry of anger, and for a moment he struggled against a number of hands that clutched him. It was a one-sided fight. An inkling of the situation came to him, and he lay quiet.

  ‘I fell down,’ he said; ‘I couldn’t see in this pitchy darkness.’

  There was a pause as if the unseen persons about him tried to understand his words. Then the voice of Correa said: ‘He is but newly formed. He stumbles as he walks and mingles words that mean nothing with his speech.’

  Others also said things about him that he heard or understood imperfectly.

  ‘May I sit up?’ he asked, in a pause. ‘I will not struggle against you again.’

  They consulted and let him rise.

  The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found himself trying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen, and the sky and mountains and sight and such-like marvels, to these elders who sat in darkness in the Country of the Blind. And they would believe and understand nothing whatever he told them, a thing quite outside his expectation. They would not even understand many of his words. For fourteen generations these people had been blind and” cut off from all the seeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and changed; the story of the outer world was faded and changed to a child’s story; and they had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond the rocky slopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius had arisen among them and questioned the shreds of belief and tradition they had brought with them from their seeing days, and had dismissed all these things as idle fancies, and replaced them with new and saner explanations. Much of their imagination had shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and fingertips. Slowly Nunez realized this; that his expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts was not to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been set aside as the confused version of a new-made being describing the marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into listening to their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men explained to him life and philosophy and religion, how that the world (meaning their valley) had been first an empty hollow in the rocks, and then had come, first, inanimate things without the gift of touch, and llamas and a few other creatures that had little sense, and then men, and at last angels, whom one could hear singing and making fluttering sounds, but whom no one could touch at all, which puzzled Nunez greatly until he thought of the birds.

  He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into the warm and the cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how it was good to sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that now, but for his advent, the whole town of the blind would have been asleep. He said Nunez must have been specially created to learn
and serve the wisdom they had acquired, and that for all his mental incoherency and stumbling behaviour he must have courage, and do his best to learn, and at that all the people in the doorway murmured encouragingly. He said the night – for the blind call their day night – was now far gone, and it behoved everyone to go back to sleep. He asked Nunez if he knew how to sleep, and Nunez said he did, but that before sleep he wanted food.

  They brought him food – llama’s milk in a bowl, and rough salted bread – and led him into a lonely place to eat out of their hearing, and afterwards to slumber until the chill of the mountain evening roused them to begin their day again. But Nunez slumbered not at all.

  Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his limbs and turning the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over and over in his mind.

  Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement, and sometimes with indignation.

  ‘Unformed mind!’ he said. ‘Got no senses yet! They little know they’ve been insulting their heaven-sent king and master. I see I must bring them to reason. Let me think – let me think.’

  He was still thinking when the sun set.

  Nunez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that the glow upon the snowfields and glaciers that rose about the valley on every side was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went from that inaccessible glory to the village and irrigated fields, fast sinking into the twilight, and suddenly a wave of emotion took him, and he thanked God from the bottom of his heart that the power of sight had been given him.

  He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village.

  ‘Ya ho there, Bogota! Come hither!’

  At that he stood up smiling. He would show these people once and for all what sight would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find him.

  ‘You move not, Bogota,’ said the voice.

  He laughed noiselessly, and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.

  ‘Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed.’

  Nunez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped amazed.

  The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.

  He stepped back into the pathway. ‘Here I am,’ he said.

  ‘Why did you not come when I called you?’ said the blind man. ‘Must you be led like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?’

  Nunez laughed. ‘I can see it,’ he said.

  ‘There is no such word as see,’ said the blind man, after a pause. ‘Cease this folly, and follow the sound of my feet.’

  Nunez followed, a little annoyed.

  ‘My time will come,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll learn,’ the blind man answered. ‘There is much to learn in the world.’

  ‘Has no one told you, “In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King”?’

  ‘What is blind?’ asked the blind man carelessly over his shoulder.

  Four days passed, and the fifth found the King of the Blind still incognito, as a clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.

  It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had supposed, and in the meantime, while he meditated his coup d’état, he did what he was told and learned the manners and customs of the Country of the Blind. He found working and going about at night a particularly irksome thing, and he decided that that should be the first thing he would change.

  They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements of virtue and happiness, as these things can be understood by men. They toiled, but not oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for their needs; they had days and seasons of rest; they made much of music and singing, and there was love among them, and little children.

  It was marvellous with what confidence and precision they went about their ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs; each of the radiating paths of the valley area had a constant angle to the others, and was distinguished by a special notch upon its kerbing; all obstacles and irregularities of path or meadow had long since been cleared away; all their methods and procedure arose naturally from their special needs. Their senses had become marvellously acute; they could hear and judge the slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces away – could hear the very beating of his heart. Intonation had long replaced expression with them, and touches gesture, and their work with hoe and spade and fork was as free and confident as garden work can be. Their sense of smell was extraordinarily fine; they could distinguish individual differences as readily as a dog can, and they went about the tending of the llamas, who lived among the rocks above and came to the wall for food and shelter, with ease and confidence. It was only when at last Nunez sought to assert himself that he found how easy and confident their movements could be.

  He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.

  He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. ‘Look you here, you people,’ he said. ‘There are things you do not understand in me.’

  Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it was to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelids less red and sunken than the others, so that one could almost fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to persuade. He spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity that presently became condemnatory. They told him there were indeed no mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the universe, from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to things in which they believed – it was an article of faith with them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter altogether, and tried to show them the practical value of sight. One morning he saw Pedro in the path called Seventeen and coming towards the central houses, but still too far off for hearing or scent, and he told them as much. ‘In a little while,’ he prophesied, ‘Pedro will be here.’ An old man remarked that Pedro had no business on Path Seventeen, and then, as if in confirmation, that individual as he drew near turned and went transversely into Path Ten, and so back with nimble paces towards the outer wall. They mocked Nunez when Pedro did not arrive, and afterwards, when he asked Pedro questions to clear his character, Pedro denied and outfaced him, and was afterwards hostile to him.

  Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows towards the wall with one complacent individual, and to him he promised to describe all that happened among the houses. He noted certain goings and comings, but the things that really seemed to signify to these people happened inside of or behind the windowless houses – the only things they took note of to test him by – and of these he could see or tell nothing; and it was after the failure of this attempt, and the ridicule they could not repress, that he resorted to force. He thought of seizing a spade and suddenly smiting one or two of them to earth, and so in fair combat showing the advantage of eyes. He went so far with that resolution as to seize his spade, and then he discovered a new thing about himself, and that was that it was impossible for him to hit a blind man in cold blood.

  He hesitated, and found them all aware that he snatched up the spade. They stood alert, with their heads on one side, and bent ears towards him for what he would do next.

  ‘Put that spade down,’ said one, and he felt a sort of helpless horror. He came near obedience.

  Then he thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past him and out of the village.

  He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a t
rack of trampled grass behind his feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their ways. He felt something of the buoyancy that comes to all men in the beginning of a fight, but more perplexity. He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures who stand upon a different mental basis to yourself. Far away he saw a number of men carrying spades and sticks come out of the street of houses, and advance in a spreading line along the several paths towards him. They advanced slowly, speaking frequently to one another, and ever and again the whole cordon would halt and sniff the air and listen.

  The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not laugh.

  One struck his trail in the meadow grass, and came stooping and feeling his way along it.

  For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then his vague disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He stood up, went a pace or so towards the circumferential wall, turned, and went back a little way. There they all stood in a crescent, still and listening.

  He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands. Should he charge them?

  The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King!’

  Should he charge them?

  He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind – unclimbable because of its smooth plastering, but withal pierced with many little doors, and at the approaching line of seekers. Behind these, others were now coming out of the street of houses.

  Should he charge them?

  ‘Bogota!’ called one. ‘Bogota! where are you?’

  He gripped his spade still tighter, and advanced down the meadows towards the place of habitations, and directly he moved they converged upon him. ‘I’ll hit them if they touch me,’ he swore; ‘by Heaven, I will. I’ll hit.’ He called aloud, ‘Look here, I’m going to do what I like in this valley. Do you hear? I’m going to do what I like and go where I like!’