When I wake up I realise straight away that something is wrong. There’s a sensation of emerging from a very deep sleep, and I am feeling dizzy. Then there’s the pain radiating from inside my ears, and at the same moment I perceive the tickling of blood dripping from my earlobes to the back of my neck.
Suddenly, when I move my body, my hands, I realise that I can’t hear the rustling of sheets and blankets that I’m expecting… not even a rattling of chains!
“Oh no! He has gone and done it! He has pierced my eardrums!”
My first reaction is panic. I feel as if I am falling down into a deep well. I brace mentally for the moment when I am going to hit the bottom really hard. Then there is despair: for the first time in my life I feel crippled; I have the sensation of being helpless and isolated… The despair feels like a thick blanket that is smothering me. I can hardly breathe.
I make a conscious effort. “Whoa! Slow down. Keep breathing… At least you know exactly what happened, there’s no mystery there… You knew it was going to happen. Now you must stay alive, keep going, keep your wits about you… As your skipper used to say: stay sharp!” But it’s no good; it’s just like holding your breath, you can’t keep it up for long. Soon you have to suck in some air; I can’t keep the despair from flooding my soul. But it no longer feels like falling into a well; it’s more like slowly sinking away in quicksand, suffocating all the while…
Then suddenly someone touches my shoulder, and I jump out of my skin. In a kind of animal reflex, I lash out and hit something, hit a part of someone with a sharp blow of my clawing hand. I wonder if that could be the Master, standing there to see me wake up, gloating over what he has done… But the touching is not repeated. The Master, if it is him, is not insisting, which is strange.
I sniff at the air, but I can’t smell his presence. “Maybe my sense of smell is gone as well, for some reason…” Tentatively I touch my nose, but it doesn’t hurt, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. Holding my hands close to my face, it slowly dawns on me that my wrists are not manacled. For the first time I am no longer chained to the wall…
“Hey… I wonder if Loretta is still chained? Maybe it was her that just touched me? I must find out… I must wander over to her bed.”
But I still feel dizzy. Probably from the chloroform. Now I’m afraid that I will faint if I get up. My ears are still dripping blood, so the first thing to do is to rip off some pieces of cloth from a corner of one of my sheets. Without getting up I proceed to do so. It is very strange to tear the fabric to pieces without hearing a sound. I stuff little fragments in my ears to staunch the bleeding. Again, strange to be fumbling inside your ear tracts with wads of cloth and not hearing a single sound. “This should stop the bleeding…”
Having taken care of that, I now wait. I will try to get up in a moment, I decide, it may take some time before the bleeding stops. “Then I will try to find out how Loretta is doing… Let us see if she is free to move and if it was her that just touched me…”
Then a horrible thought strikes me, that makes my heart stop. “I wonder if the girl has been blinded!”
A moment later I feel a hand touch my shoulder again, and again I am startled—I just can’t help it—but this time I make sure to open my arms in an inviting gesture. I hug the girl as soon as she bends down, I take her in my arms and make her lie down next to me on the bed. I marvel at what is happening: “We’re both free of chains: the Master has changed the rules completely!”
Now I probe the girl’s eyes, anxious to know if they are unharmed, but it is hard to tell. The girl’s eyelids are closed, but that is because I’m touching them; and they feel wet, soaking wet even, but it is impossible to say if it is because of the tears streaming out of them, or if it could be blood…
The girl is shaking all over. “Poor thing”, I reflect, “the horror she must have witnessed! She must be terrified…” I rub her back soothingly, and push her head in the nook of my neck. I can smell the girl like I never did before, especially her hair, that now bunches up right under my nose, its pungent, unwashed odour unmistakable.
Loretta is sobbing, her back and shoulders heaving violently, but of course I can’t hear a single sound. Then the girl raises her head up and turns her face towards me. I can feel this with the hand that is resting in the nape of her neck. I also feel wisps of her breath on my face. I deduce that the girl must be talking to me, and that she is probably getting quite desperate at not receiving any answer. I motion towards my ear with my other hand, shake my head and shrug my shoulder. Loretta’s head sinks back despondently and nestles again in the nook of my neck.
“Well, at least it seems that she isn’t blind,” I tell myself. All I can do now is to keep stroking her to calm her down; massage her shoulder and her neck to relax her. “How nice it is, how wonderful, how pleasurable to be holding someone else in my arms again!” For a couple of weeks now I have been chained to my bed and have only been able to stroke Loretta’s legs with my feet. Apart from that, of course, I have also felt the rubbing of another person’s body against mine while I was being raped…
I put the tips of my fingers on Loretta’s throat and feel the vibrations of her vocal cords: she must be keening or moaning… She seems to be mourning me as though I have just died. If only I could comfort her!
As I lie there on the bed with Loretta in my arms, stroking her back and shoulder endlessly, I start sinking back into a quagmire of despair: I can’t hear a sound; I’m crippled! I’ve never known what light and darkness really mean for normal people, but now that I suddenly experience complete silence for the first time in my life, it’s as if I’m also experiencing darkness in a way I never did before: a veil of doom closing in on all sides… I must stop this. Think of something… positive. Suddenly an idea strikes me, that seems rather silly at first: “Now I have become like Helen Keller!”
The dark veil is no longer closing in on me, I can perceive a point in front of me that is glowing with hope. Helen… Helen… the great heroine of my youth! She was also blind… and deaf! When I was growing up in the 20s and 30s, Helen Keller was a celebrity. Everybody had read “The Story of My Life”, and every girl at my school for the blind—including myself—wanted to be like her.
“She’s an old lady now, in her eighties, and she has retired from public life, but only a few years back she visited the White House and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon B. Johnson…”
Breathing in the scent of Loretta’s hair, I think of the story about the honeysuckle. Helen Keller became deaf and blind at the age of eighteen months, after a bout of “brain fever”. At first she was completely isolated, locked up in her own head by her double disability, though she did spend her days playing wild games with her slightly older friend Martha Washington, the daughter of the family cook. According to her memoirs, there was a honeysuckle growing just outside the porch of the family house in sunny Alabama, and this played an important part in her life as a child, because the scent of it was such a landmark in her world.
“Now the equivalent of that honeysuckle for me is the scent of Loretta’s hair!”
While playing with her young black friend, little Helen had spontaneously devised a sign language of about sixty different ‘words’, all of them relying on the sense of touch, of course. For instance, pinching a small piece of skin on the back of the hand meant ‘small’; opening one’s fingers in the palm of the other person’s hand meant ‘big’. With their private code the two children had been able to communicate among themselves, up to a point.
“This is something that I really need to work out with Lorry as well, urgently!”
I start to review all the means of communication that allowed Helen to unlock herself from her isolation. First there’s fingerspelling: writing words in the discrete alphabet of the sign language for the deaf. When Helen was six years old, her parents hired a twenty-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan, to take care of their daughter. Anne started fingerspelling words onto Helen’s hand-palm, and by this means she managed at length to teach her English. Before that, of course, her pupil didn’t really master speech, except for those sixty signs.
“If we ever get out of here, and if the damage to my eardrums turns out to be permanent, I’m going to have to learn the British Sign Language for the deaf… Difficult!”
By the time she was a student at Radcliffe (to make a long story short), Helen didn’t need fingerspelling anymore. Anne Sullivan now worked as her interpreter, rendering the teachers’ lectures in standard sign language, with her hands, while her pupil “read” her signing with her fingertips. And so Helen managed to graduate cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1904, at the age of twenty-four. She could also lip-read what people were saying by touching the speaker’s mouth. There are photographs, apparently, of Helen at a Hollywood studio, lip-reading off Charlie Chaplin’s mouth!
“I can’t imagine that I will ever be able to do that! It has always seemed an almost superhuman feat to me…”
Then finally, Helen had learned to speak. At the age of ten she started to take speech classes at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. But it took her almost twenty-five years to learn to speak so that others could understand her. By the time she could do so, she had become a social activist, passionate about social justice and civil liberties, and she went on to propagate her ideals on the national and international lecture circuit…
“That, at least, is one of her achievements that I could easily match! I can already speak…”
Suddenly I can feel an almost physical wave of relief pushing back the veil of darkness all around me.
“Wait a minute! Oh! but wait a minute… Just wait a minute! Of course! Deaf or not, I can still speak!”
Like walking, swimming, or riding a bicycle, speech is one of those skills that once acquired cannot be unlearned. It doesn’t require any conscious effort, just as with breathing. And even while I can’t hear a thing, I now realise, I can probably still speak normally…
But there are two problems, I now tell myself. “First: Loretta can’t answer me… But that doesn’t matter, I can still comfort her; try to reassure her; tell her that I still exist in here, inside my head… Then there is a second matter…” I think back to what the Master said the previous evening: “You’ll be locked up for good inside your own head; you’re gonna be very lonely in there!” It is essential that the man keep thinking along these lines, I decide. “The fact that he has unchained both of us only demonstrates that he believes that he has completely destroyed my will to fight by piercing my eardrums…”
Of course I cannot be certain that the Master is not lurking just outside the cell, spying on his prisoners. So I decide to take a number of precautions. And then, just at that stage of my reflections, I have another brainwave: there exists a simple way for Loretta to answer me!
With the tips of my fingers on Loretta’s throat, I can feel the vibrations of her vocal cords: she is still moaning. Now, with my lips very close to the girl’s ear, I whisper softly, “Loretta?”
The vibrations under my fingertips stop at once, and I wait for a while. Then, when I can feel the vocal cords vibrating again, I have the impression that the vibrations are more irregular than before: Loretta is saying something.
“Keep on moaning… Don’t talk to me, I can’t hear you, but maybe the Master is listening. So keep moaning…”
When the regular vibrations are back, I whisper, “Okay, I can’t hear you, because the Master has pierced my eardrums, but if you nod or shake your head against my shoulder, you can say yes or no to me. Do you understand?”
After a short hesitation, the girl lying in my arms nods, her head still nestled in the nook of my shoulder.
“All right… Keep moaning… It’s very important that the Master should not find out that we can communicate… That’s why I’m whispering… Do you think that the Master is still around in the dungeon?”
— No.
“Did the Master do anything to your eyes?”
— No.
“So you’re all right?”
— Yes.
“You can understand me well, when I whisper like this?”
— Yes.
“Well listen. It’s a good sign that the Master has unchained us both. This means that he’s letting down his guard. Nothing has changed, we might still get a chance to escape; and the police must be looking for us now… You get that?”
— Yes.
“What time is it anyway? I mean, has the Master already come down to bring the food?”
— Yes.
“And you definitely heard him leave?”
— Yes.
“Listen: the moment you hear him coming, you must warn me. Knock on my head with your knuckles, like this… so that I’ll know, all right?
— Yes.
“And now I suppose we’d better have something to eat. Though I’m not very hungry… are you?”
— No.
“But we must eat something anyway, we must make sure that we stay in good shape…”
So we get up from the bed, I still feel a bit dizzy, and then, sitting on the floor, we eat our morning spaghetti. For the first time we can sit side by side, taking turns digging up a mouthful from the pan and passing the spoon back and forth. We no longer need to push the tray back and forth over the floor. The girl is behaving with unusual kindness and consideration, going out of her way to help me feed myself, now that I am truly crippled.
Meanwhile, I try to keep up a conversation, speaking normally, as I’m pretty confident that the rapist is not there. When I expect a yes or no from Loretta I reach for the girl’s head or face with my fingertips in order to be able to read her answer. In this way I manage to create an illusion of casual banter, but as a matter of fact, I still find it very strange to be speaking without hearing a word of what I say, and to be receiving only mute nods and head shakes as an answer. Though now that I’m using my voice again, I do feel the vibrations of my own vocal cords, and that feels good, kind of reassuring.
After our meal, hoping to restore a semblance of normality, I suggest a session of callisthenics—no longer “chain rattling”—, but Loretta declines.
“And how about a word problem? You could give me the answer by holding up the correct number of fingers for me to probe…”
— No.
“You’re not really in the mood, huh?”
— No.
“Well, maybe tomorrow, then…”
— Yes.
“You know what? I’m pooped, and so are you, I guess… Let’s just lie down on the bed and take a rest.”
— Yes, yes.
Again we lie down together, and once more I enjoy the pleasure of holding someone else in my arms. I stroke the girl’s back and shoulder, enjoy the weight of her head on my own shoulder, and after a while I start thinking over the important pieces of information I have gathered yesterday evening. The rapist really intended to kill one of his two slaves. The way he talked about it clearly indicated that he must have done this before. “And if he is capable of piercing my eardrums, he must be capable of killing…”
Then there is the fact that there are two beds in our cell. Loretta’s explanation, that the Master just wants to rape her “on a clean bed” from time to time, no longer seems convincing after what happened last night. There must have been two girls kept in this cell originally… In the end I decide to speak up: “Tell me something, Lorry. Do you think the Master has had other girls in here before?”
— …Yes.
“Have you ever been together with another girl?”
— No!
“But how can you tell that there’s been another girl, then? Wait! Wrong kind of question…Umm… Did you find some kind of clue?”
— Yes, yes!
Suddenly the girl jumps up and disappears for a moment. Then she’s back, lies down next to me, takes my hand and puts a small object there. It’s a chainlet with a little cross hanging from it… Fingering it, I find out that she’s handed me a pendant in the shape of a Celtic cross. “Wait a minute… Your father showed me one just like this… Or, no: not your father. This belonged to Loretta McCullough, right?”
— Yes.
“So… you are not Loretta?”
— No.
“Did the Master kill Loretta?” I feel the girl shrug her shoulders.
— I don’t know…
“But this pendant is not yours…”
— No.
“It belonged to Loretta…”
— Yes.
“So who are you?”
The girl starts to shake all over, her back and shoulders heaving, and I try to calm her down. “It’s all right, it’s all right… No harm done. I understand what must have happened: I was asking for Loretta, and you just wanted to oblige me, and once you started there was no going back…”
— Yes, yes!
“All right. Now let’s try a little experiment. I want you to spell your name in block letters on my hand… Got that?”
The girls nods her head, takes my open hand, and slowly traces three letters with the tip of her forefinger: S, U, E…
“Sue? Like in Susan, Suzanne? Well, that’s an easy name… Nice to meet you, Sue!” We shake hands.
But I am amazed by this latest revelation, of course. The girl has changed her story before; who knows if she won’t change it again. Does she even know the difference between the truth, her half-truths and her lies? Oh well, it can’t be helped… The poor girl has been grievously abused for more than a year, and she’s still so young… or is she?
“Sue? May I ask you something? How old are you? Can you write your age in my hand?”
The girl nods, takes my open hand, traces a straight line for 1, then a double loop for 8… It takes a moment for me to make sense of the double loop, but then I suddenly understand.
“You’re eighteen years old, is that it?”
— Yes.
“All right, well done! You’re pretty good at communicating… Now listen, it makes no difference. As I’ve told you before: the Master has broken every law in the book, and you’re the victim. I’m mad at that man, not at you: never at you. The fact that you’re two years older doesn’t change a thing… You’re still incredibly young to have to go through all this!”
I wistfully tell myself, “I wish we could get out of here… If only I knew how…” And even while I stroke the girl’s shoulders, I realise that I will have to rely entirely on myself. Not only is Sue—if that is really her name—not to be trusted, but also, she is simply too clumsy…
Finally, after a while, Sue seems to be falling asleep, and I tell myself that taking a nap is maybe not such a bad idea right now… But before I slip into a slumber, I find—to my own surprise—that I am thinking back to the day, in a distant past, when I found out for the first time that I was blind…
At the age of five, when other children start asking such questions as “How are babies made?” and “Where do people go when they die?”, I had asked my mother, “What does ‘blind’ mean?” My mother had clearly been taken aback. “That’s hard to explain, darling… Maybe you should ask your father when he comes back from work. Daddy is a lot better than me at explaining these things…”
“Yes but, Mummy, are you blind too, just like me?”
“No! I am not!”
“Is Daddy blind?”
“No!”
“And what about Granma, Aunty Agatha, and Cook, and Nanny?
“No, no, they’re not blind either, none of them!”
“So it’s only me?”
“Yes… Well, there are other blind people in the world at large, but you don’t happen to know them.”
“But what does it mean to be blind, then? You’re always telling other people that I’m blind, so you must know…”
“Well, being blind means that you don’t have eyes… You cannot see things at a distance. For instance, if I look out of the window with my eyes, I can see that our good neighbour Mrs Mulroney is walking down the street. And she sees me looking at her and waves at me, and then I wave back…”
It had suddenly dawned on me that most people were not blind, and that they had wonderful powers that I did not possess. This had made my very sad… and a bit angry as well.
When my father came home in the evening, he noticed straight away that something was bothering his little blind daughter. In a whispered exchange with my mother, the problem was explained to him, and he then sat down in his favourite armchair and said, “Daisy, darling, please come here…”
My father lifted me from the floor and sat me on his lap, he hugged me tenderly, and said, “Now look here, my clever little girl: you do love your Daddy, don’t you?”
“Of course, Daddy! I love you very much! And Mummy too…”
“Good! Well then: love is something that no one can see… Have you