A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY GLASS EYE
A contribution from a friend, Ludovica Barassi.
A Brief History of My Glass Eye is a contribution from a dear friend Ludovica Barassi, translated from the Italian by Giacomo Martelli.
As always, I kindly ask that if you have the means, it would mean a great deal if you could support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber, and keep this show on the road.
Your loving writer, Hanif.
It was May. I was eight. I badly wanted to receive my first communion and confirmation, to wear the pretty white dress and the bonnet with white rosettes around the brim - the one that my cousins and my sister Egidia had worn. And I really loved the headband you'd get to wear around your head, a bit like the one the native Americans wore, only without the feather. Now, it was finally my turn. First, however, I had to attend Sunday school at the Cenacle, where the ceremony would take place. The classes were taught by a graceless, obnoxious nun. I annoyed her by chatting and attracting the attention of the other children with nonsense and rubbish. One day, the nun pulled my Mum aside and told her that several of the other mums had complained about me, that I was not ready to receive the Lord.
All I wanted to do was run away in fear, but my mother said she would speak to Father Chiappati: for it was from him that I would receive communion, just as my sister and cousins had done before me. Mum argued that no one is really ready at the age of eight, and since I was already a somewhat different child, not taking communion would be a great disappointment that would only reinforce my problems. Father Chiappati thought my Mum was absolutely right.
Despite the beautiful dress, on the day of the ceremony something felt off. I knew that I did not deserve to receive Jesus, and I was terrified that the wafer would fly straight out of my mouth. During the elevation, when the bell rang, I prayed: 'Lord, let me die... No, no, no, I like living... Take my eye, anything would be better than the wafer flying out of my mouth'.
The bell rang again, by now I had made my request, time was up. I don't know why I asked to lose an eye. Perhaps it was because my father had lost one when he was 18. The tip of his wooden ski had penetrated his right eye after hitting a root during a race, but he’d managed to remain upright, reaching the finish line on one ski, with one eye missing.
Father Chiappati began to give out the communion. My fear was unbearable. When it was my turn, I retracted my tongue faster than a gecko catching a mosquito. But immediately afterwards, I spun away with my mouth clamped shut and slipped into a dark spiral. I woke up in my bed two days later. I remembered nothing, a complete blackout, but everyone was happy to see me awake again. They told me that I'd fainted in church and had come down with a terrible fever. My body was covered in red spots. I had measles. I was disappointed not to have received confirmation, but I was happy not to have to go to school for a while, and I was looking forward to the summer holidays. Unfortunately, one of those red spots happened to be right in my right eye and it really hurt - increasingly so with each day.
They took me to see an eye doctor, a friend of my parents. He told me that I had developed a herpetic virus keratitis on my cornea and recommended an experimental treatment that consisted of taking my blood, shaking it up, and creating a serum that I could use as eye drops. So that was exactly what we did. The serum had to be kept in the fridge, and wherever I went I had to carry a small icebox with my eye drops in it.
The holidays soon arrived. We went to Lake Maggiore, to grandmother Egidia's house. She had a henhouse, and it was always a great joy when the eggs hatched, and the chicks emerged.
If they turned out to be roosters, Grandma had no problem wringing their necks. I found it somewhat upsetting, but I liked seeing her in her apron, catching a chicken, sitting on her chair, twisting its neck a little and...crack. One tug and the chicken was killed without suffering, at least that's what she told me. She'd immediately slice its throat, grabbing it by the feet and allowing its blood to drain into a deep dish. 'My hope is for you children to grow strong and healthy. Tonight, we'll be having black pudding. I want to see you kids grow up strong and healthy.' Then she'd pluck its feathers and cut its head and legs off, using them to make a good broth.
After the lake, we all went to Elba.
It was difficult to keep my eye drops cold, but I was able go swimming, even though I had to cover my face and avoid getting my eye wet at all costs. By the time we left, I was on cloud nine. It was a strange summer, with my eye constantly bandaged up, reams of scotch-tape on my face, large masks, and drops to put in my eye up to nine times a day. I still enjoyed myself, though I was annoyed I couldn't jump headfirst off the high cliffs like my sister, parents and friends. I could only dive in feet first, firmly holding the mask pressed against my face with my hand.
When I returned to Milan, the situation had worsened, and my parents decided to change doctors. They took me to see Prof. Valerio, a very austere man, but a great doctor. He was always kind to me. This was fortunate, because for the next five years he would be one of the people I saw the most. His nurse, who looked like a nun, gave me a honeyed candy each and every time I went. I spent hours and hours in the waiting room, and I sat through hours and hours of conversations on how to improve a now very precarious situation. The herpes continued to destroy my cornea; I could no longer see anything.
They decided to stitch my eyelids together to allow my eye to rest. But eyes move together, and it looked a bit silly, so they sewed up my other eyelid as well. It was unbearable not to be able to see. I remember that there was a little hole in the corner of my good eye and, when no one could see me, I would look through it, using my hands to enlarge it a little and then twisting my body until I could see what I wanted to see. Eventually, they decided to open up my good eye. This was shortly before I left for the mountains, and I was looking forward to returning to Celerina to go skiing.
One day, when I was on the cable car with my Mum, I remember there was a Swiss gentleman who wouldn't stop looking at me. It began to really bug me, and so I started to stare at him as he was staring at me. He asked me why my eye was stitched shut, so without breaking eye contact, I told him that I loved having a sewn-up eye and that's why I had had it sewn shut. Mum was stunned and apologised, signifying: 'Don't mind my daughter, she has issues'.
When we returned to Milan, I started Year 7 at the Parini School, where my sister was in Year 4. My class, or rather all of the classes, had these filthy old double wooden desks with two folding benches attached. One day, during break time, instead of going down to the courtyard with the others, I took three large pieces of sandpaper of varying thicknesses out of my schoolbag and began to sand my bench. I used the thickest sandpaper first, followed by the middle one and finally the thinnest until it was perfectly clean and smooth. The end-of-break bell rang. I straightened up to admire my work from a little further away and was delighted. Prof. Pinna, who taught Literature, came into the classroom with her usual general stride, but when she reached her desk, she recoiled. She couldn't breathe. I realised that the whole class had been enveloped in a cloud of wood-dust.
We called the caretaker who opened all the windows. The teachers from the other classes came up, and the headmistress arrived. Prof. Pinna was gasping for breath and her face was like a balloon. I didn't understand what had happened to the poor woman. An ambulance came and took her away. Dust had gone everywhere. My classmates dusted off their notebooks, while the caretaker looked on in dismay. The headmistress came in and we all stood to attention, but she came at me with a terrified face: 'What have you done?'. 'I cleaned my bench.' 'No, you've destroyed a classroom and Prof. Pinna is allergic to wood'. They suspended me for three days and made my parents pay a fine of 5,000 lire, which was a fair bit back then.
At home they punished me and forbade me to leave my room. I was convinced that a great injustice had befallen me. How could they say that I'd ruined my bench? How could they make my parents pay all that money for making my desk the most beautiful in the class, in the entire school? I only had 15 minutes to sand it down, and I did it quickly and with my head down in order to finish in time. I hadn't factored in the dust, but how was I supposed to know that the teacher was allergic to wood dust? She should have written it on her door.
The morning of the fourth day, when I returned to school with a million instructions, I went in a little early and reported straight to the headmistress. As she hung her coat on a hook, I told her that I had a great idea to solve the problem of my desk being different: I would clean them all, after school of course, when Prof. Pinna wasn't there. I would even clear away all the dust. I would have done it for free, but it felt right to repay the 5,000 lire to my parents. I noticed the headmistress' nostrils flaring. I was frightened, worried she was allergic to something. She gave me another three days of suspension, which I spent locked in my room, and then I returned to my silent classroom, happy to see my spectacular desk again.
Meanwhile, the problems concerning my eye, as well as the medicines I was taking and the experiments they were doing on me, continued. One day, they came up with the hypothesis that the virus might die at a temperature of 40-42 degrees, and so they decided to give me a course of intravenous injections to spike my fever. The ophthalmologist spoke to my paediatrician and one day, at home, Dr. Carletto arrived to give me the intravenous injection. Slowly I felt as though my bones were breaking, experiencing a terrible pain and an ever-increasing headache. I was scared. I felt like I was going crazy. After four hours, I vomited my soul from the immense malaise. This was the peak - my fever had reached 41 degrees. Slowly, it went down, and when, after another four hours, food was ready on the table, I was famished. The following week the second injection arrived, and I begged Carletto, crying and screaming, not to give it to me. But Mum said, if Prof. Valerio said you must, you must. Full stop. It was the same as the first: a truculent, indelible memory. Then came the third and fourth, but Carletto, seeing me become increasingly terrified, abandoned the procedure just as my fever was about to reach its peak. Upon seeing me in such a terrible state, he burst into tears, apologised to me and promised never to do it again, not to me nor to anyone else. I was starving that evening too, but I was happy, so happy that you can't even imagine. In less than four weeks, following the injections and that terrible bone pain, I had grown 10 centimetres, but the herpes remained unchanged.
They began to discuss transplantation. As I was very young, I was the most suitable for this initial experimentation. In a hospital in Milan, there was a terminally ill patient who had decided to donate his cornea. The operation was to be performed by Prof. Valerio, immediately after the gentleman's death. They gave me blood tests and various X-rays for anaesthesia, deciding they would stitch my cornea by hand. In October they hospitalised me and kept my food intake light in case he suddenly died. A week passed, nothing. Two weeks, nothing. By the time November arrived, I was still in hospital, waiting and waiting.
I was immeasurably bored. I learned how to make stars and flowers from an origami book my Mum had given me. I sewed them together, making garlands of all colours and sizes which I used to decorate my room. Word spread and I started receiving orders from all departments. Patients who were able to walk came to see me to pick their own. I had a full range of samples, and the doctors pitched their orders in too. So, I started working all day every day, and I was happy because it was Christmas and the whole hospital was chock full of my garlands. They were in the windows, in the corridors, in the doctors' rooms, everywhere.
I was hardly thinking about my donor. But one night, when it was still dark, I heard a commotion, and nurses came into my room: it was time. I jumped out of bed and picked one of my favourite garlands. They dressed me for the operating room and a stretcher on wheels arrived. ‘You can’t take the garland into the operating room,’ Mum told me. ‘I only want it for the way there,’ I replied, greeting her. With two nurses pushing my stretcher, we got into a big lift and went down. Another long corridor, big doors opening. When I arrived, I saw there was another stretcher. I knew it belonged to that gentleman and that he was dead. ‘Please, nurse, I want to give this to him. Can you put it close to him?'
I woke up in my room with two sand-filled pillows on the sides of my head and my eyes completely bandaged. They made me pee and poo in a pan, I couldn't move my head at all. After a few days, I started to get restless. It calmed me just to be able to start making stars again, which I could do even without looking by this point. After a week they decided to remove the bandage around my good eye, on the promise that I would stay quiet. I was happy to see Mum and Dad's faces again, as well as those of my beloved nurses. I loved them a lot, and they gave me lots of requests for stars from the abundance of new inpatients.
After a couple of days, however, I felt that something was wrong with the eye that had been operated on. There was an ever-increasing, unbearable pain. They called the doctors and told me I had an acute glaucoma crisis. My eye was turning into a hard ball from too much internal pressure. The pain radiated into my head, and it was dangerous for my newly stitched cornea because of the possibility that it could tear. But between one medicine and another, and with crises invariably occurring at the same time in the afternoon, they simply sent me home with a million restrictions. I cried when I said goodbye to the nurses, but I couldn't wait to see my sister, my cousins and my room, and to smell the scent of home. It was a great joy, but the illness came back, and now I was alone with it. The only relief came from lying on the floor next to Sunny, our big dog, and turning onto one side of my face in search of the cold tiles.
I couldn't make sudden moves. I couldn't run. I couldn't jump. I couldn't do any of the things I liked. My life had become extremely limited. That summer, they sent me to Celerina with Grandma Isotta, since going to Elba without being able to swim, run along the rocks, or dive, would have been torture. I remember going to a large meadow that led up to some beautiful larches, where I would stop happily to admire the view. One day I noticed a deer looking at me. I tried to concentrate, urging him to stay put. It seemed he could hear my thoughts, and he crouched quietly without losing sight of me. The next day, my little deer came back. I concentrated on letting him know that I loved him a lot, and he crept up a little closer. Eventually, we became great friends.
But one day, Grandma wanted to take a walk to Lake Statz. We walked to the station, then into the woods, passing the little dwarf house and reaching the restaurant, contemplating good rösti and tubes of Thomy mayonnaise and mustard to spread on the bradwürstel. The sun shone bright. While Grandma was waiting for her café creme, I started wandering around the restaurant and met a boy. I didn't understand his language, but he took me to see a seesaw. He signalled for me to sit on one side, while he sat on the other. I was lifted up, and then I tried to force myself down, lifting him up on the other side. We quickly became better and better at balancing. Of course, when he lifted up, I would hit the ground really hard. I knew this was forbidden because I was supposed to be careful, my eye could burst. But I didn't want to get off because I really liked this boy and we were having so much fun. We said goodbye to each other with a big smile when his mother came to pick him up.
On the way home, I was in a lot of pain and when we put the drops in, we realised that my eye was in bad shape.
My parents arrived and we all returned to Milan. My ophthalmologist wanted to consult with a famous ophthalmologist from Lyon, Prof. Pofique. Prof. Valerio, father, mother and I all left on the train. We arrived in Lyon on another beautiful sunny day. After a thorough visit, Prof. Pofique spoke in French with Prof. Valerio and my parents. I understood bits and pieces. He advised taking out my eye to protect the other one as it also risked becoming diseased. This thought worried me greatly. When we were on the train back, I asked the three of them to promise to tell me if my other eye was in danger. To console myself, I told myself that I'd become just like my father: with the four of us in the family, we'd have six eyes between us.
When they told my sister Egidia that they would have to take out my eye, she was quite upset, and I did not know how to console her. I played the clown and spoke to her in Ostrogoth, our invented language. «MEngher GLIrighiz Omper COmper SÌrighiz SAngher RO LIrighiz BEngher RAuf» ('It'll be better this way, I'll be free... and I'll be able to dive headfirst like you, and I won't have to use patches or masks anymore ... it'll be so nice!!!;). I hugged her, concealing the big lump in my throat. But it was time to go and eat. They'd made us ricotta and spinach dumplings, which my sister and I were very fond of.
They removed my eye on 13 December 1963, the day of Saint Lucia, the protector of sight. It had been five years since the onset of my disease. I felt as though I had the whole world at my feet: there was no more medicine, no more pain, no more doing this, no more doing that. And I was 13 years old. For a few months, I wore a pirate's eye patch, which I loved. Once the socket was perfectly healed, I went to Lucerne with my dad to get my first glass eye. Dad took the opportunity to get a new one too, because they had to be replaced every three to four years.
Mr Müller had boxes full of eyeballs of all different colours. Holding it up next to my good eye, he chose the eyeball with the closest colour. Then, using a steady flame, he attached a glass straw to the ball and began blowing and shaping it, adding yellow dots to the iris to better mimic my good eye, as well as red strokes to the white part, drawing tiny blood vessels. He chattered on and on in Italian with a strong Swiss-German accent, continuing to blow into the straw as he moulded my eye until it became a half-concave ball. Finally, he placed the eye in cold water. He made me try it out and seemed satisfied with his work. 'The first,' he said, 'is always the hardest.' Then there would be a model to follow. He handed me the mirror. It looked a little smaller than the other, but I had two eyes again.
Above the seats in the compartment of the train back to Milan, there was a small mirror: I sat down and stood up to look at my new eye and continued to do so throughout the journey. I was 13 years old. At home, everyone wanted to look at it and told me it was beautiful, but I soon grew tired of this and covered it with my pirate eye patch instead.
One day, Dad came home all excited. He pulled out two square batteries with two thin metal tabs from a paper bag. He showed me that if you touched them with your tongue, you would feel an acidic jolt. He took two very small Christmas tree decoration bulbs, a small roll of thin, transparent electric wire, and said: 'Look, Ludo, I'll show you what I used to do as a boy. You have no idea how much fun it is and how happy I am to be able to do it with you.'
He attached two pieces of wire measuring about 60 cm long to the two bulbs, split the final piece of wire in two, and freed the last three centimetres from its casing. 'Now watch me and do as I do.' He removed his eye, put the bulb inside, and reinserted his eye. 'You have to get the wire out from the outer side, so you run it behind your ears. You shouldn't be able to see...' I took my eye out. I did as he did: 'Good, that's it, good, the wire behind your ear, it's a bit annoying, but it doesn't hurt, right, Ludo?' We passed the wire through the inside of my jumper, attached one of the two end wires to a tab on the battery, while leaving the other loose, and then went to the cloakroom where there was a long mirror. Dad turned off the light and, in the darkness, upon connecting the final wire to the battery, I saw Dad's eye light up red, and he watched as mine lit up too. We looked at each other in the mirror and saw both of our eyes light up. We could even make them flash. We laughed like crazy, it was truly an extraordinary experiment, one that only my dad and I could conduct.
One day, my dad told me we could go to the Tonale cinema in Milan to play this game. He chose a slightly scary film - I think it was Roger Corman's X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, which came out around that time - and as soon as the lights went out, feigning indifference, we got ourselves ready.
- Are you ready?
- Yes, Dad, very ready.
– Okay on three, attach the loose wire, and let's turn around to look at the people sitting behind us. One, two, three...'
Our eyes lit up and the people behind us started screaming. Some got up and ran away. There was no way I could ever have imagined that happening. I was ashamed.
'Dad, let's leave, please, let's leave now before the lights come on.'
I ran out, my dad behind me:
– Ludo, the joke worked perfectly. Why did you run away?'
- Yes, Dad, but I don't want to ever do this at the cinema again.
I remember removing the bulb from my eye and going for a nice ice cream. Dad had strawberry and lemon, I had hazelnut and chocolate.
Wonderful story. The matter-of-fact quality makes it particularly appealing and heartening.
Wow!!! What a formidable child what a stunningly well -written piece. Wondrous human.