I got my first pair of glasses at the age of eight. They were handed to me by a gentleman in a white coat, whose face blurs and dilutes my memory. They came in a case that closed the jaws on my fingers, covered with a silky canvas like the skin of a lizard.
They gave me the air of a solemn dwarf, perhaps aged in comparison with my peers, they excluded me from sports and the rowdy patio. With them I acquired gestures, promptness and poise. In short, they have given me a seriousness that is as useful as it is false, an alibi for laziness and a crystalline, albeit thin, mask.
The voice that placed them in my hands introduced me to the peculiar dictionary of the blind man: glasses, like men, have a graduation and rest on armor. With legs, bridges, hinges and frames, his anatomy is that of a two-faced and mythological animal, a magical object. As if that weren’t enough, they lose their screws – their madness is to become incomplete – and age, like the eye or the bones.
I later learned that what I called spectacles others called spectacles, or spectacles, and that by wearing them one risked falling into the mouths of the scoffers in the class. The elegance of my armour, with its fine curves and mahogany colour, prevented me – unjustly, I admit – from sympathizing with the short-sighted class, with its crude and gaudy binoculars. An exemplary horror.
The day they broke for the usual reason – a limp due to wear on the sinister screw – I bore it in silence and with rancor, as only a child can do.
The day they broke for the usual reason – limping from the wear of the sinister screw – I suffered in silence and with resentment, as only a child can do when he discovers that his things and his relatives are not immortal. Like someone looking for one woman while thinking of another, I ended my childhood with glasses that I despised.
Eliseo Diego states that glasses are among the objects that “serve no purpose, except to establish once and for all the solid position of man”. Thus the pipes, the diaries, the pens, the clock – a little flowery hell, according to Cortázar–, the jackets, the tie and the memory are nothing more than handles to confirm reality, to be more than ghosts.
In my case they are the ones who, clear or cloudy, define my world and give it shape. They bring closer or further away what my hands touch, rewrite the contours and shades of the city, and frame everything in a black border, which I’m already used to.
The old folks taught us to define things using the dictionary. It took me little to better understand my glasses. In fact, everything has become more confusing since I read that the Academy, in order to admit that they are called that in my country, must first try eleven different meanings. The mirror, minimal mirror, is a crystallized plaster in brilliant slabs – that is, the ancient mineral that the Romans called mirror stone and also moonstone, and the rose window or the window which is made with that translucent plaster.
This is also the name given to a certain reflection of the circular cuts in the wood and the slices of pumpkin in syrup. Only in last place, and timidly, is it given the equivalence of glasses.
Here they are, twenty years after they first hid my dark circles and weighed down my nose. Armor, glass and vines, but without having repaired anything in me
The dictionary of Cárdenas and Tristá, of Cuban Spanish, finally does them justice – between mirror and hope – in the plural: optical instrument, composed of two crystals and a frame, used to correct or compensate for vision. Mistrustful, I remove them from my face and once I recover from my usual dizziness, I check the accuracy of the definition.
Here they are, twenty years after they first hid my dark circles and weighed down my nose. Armor, glass and screws, but without having fixed anything for me. Every day I go towards blindness, which is, as is known, a metaphor for old age, silence and oblivion.
I leave in my will – for those who want to collect and collect them – the glasses from my childhood, the ones I broke due to insomnia at university, the ones that melted in summer sweat, the metal ones and the plastic ones, the cheap and foreign ones and patched up, the ones the eye doctor put for me in a dark room with the letters – infinite due to their retractable mechanism – and the ones I use now, which darken when the sun hits them.
I don’t owe him, do I? Didn’t they oversee everything I’ve written, the books I’ve read, and the making of this page? I hold them accountable for my headaches and my literature, what other statement of loyalty can I make to them? Even my life, the one I remember and now leave in writing, would be very different if I hadn’t looked at it, like the pirates, through my glass eyes.
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