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Written all over my face or not, since when was she so opinionated? now those two are fooling around they’ve got all big for their boots, dishing out opinions like they’re paid per word, when really the only thing they’re doing is getting in the way of my calculations because this isn’t a honeymoon, no sir, I’m working here, working out if there are any more dead to subtract, but with all this fresh air I get muddled, my mind clouds over, which is why I bring all my eyes into focus, to cut through the mental fog and see if there are any more mislaid stiffs lying around, cos they could be anywhere: in the pollen of the hydrangeas, in the spikes on the cacti, in the salt crystals in the desert, and that’s why I head out into Mendoza, to see if I can air all these black thoughts: written all over my face or not, what difference does it make when the one who’s really hung up is her, Iquela, while I, on the other hand, just keep on moving, walking and looking round me, cos time is a traitor, like Iquela, hell-bent on making sure they can’t tell, that it’s not written all over her face, when really the rage pours out of her eyes, yeah, that’s why I told her when we were kids to walk with her eyes to the ground, to avoid the gaze of her living-dead dad, to listen less to her mummy, to talk always to stray dogs and meadowlarks, cos I learnt to read the lies in corneas, not mouths, and, well, mouths are silky and smooth and I don’t like smooth things, no, that’s why I trained myself to make out the rage in the pupils of dogs and cows, those southern cows with their grey eyes, because they weren’t white and smooth those eyes, no, they were a pair of slippery, greyish sclera, the whites of the eye, only, in this case, they were grey, identical to the eye they brought me in Biology once, an eye that smelt bad but whose look gave away everything, it was written all over that eye: the choroids, the fovea and the blind spot, yeah, that wondrous eye our teacher brought one morning, one each, she told me and Iquela, the Iquela from our childhood, not so cool then, no, a total loner, just one friend, that other girl, the weirdo who’d follow her round school like a shadow, that little mouse of a thing who was always digging her nail into Iquela’s hand, her friend the scratcher, while now Iquela walks around with her chest puffed up thinking she’s the bee’s knees; it wasn’t like that before, which is why I’d sit with her, cos I’d promised and promises are debts and you always pay your debts, I sat right next to her in that classroom, each of us waiting for our own eye, but at the last minute the teacher told us he was sorry, very sorry, but there weren’t enough eyes, there are never enough eyes, and so I had to share, an eye per pair the teacher told us, and I was really mad but I swallowed my rage because there it was, there it was in the middle of that enormous classroom, lying on the lino table, so whole and big and beautiful, there was the eye, it was staring at me, and I edged nervously towards it, but straight away I knew that it was mine, that eye was fixed on me, because it looked like a hamster, a street rat, a burnt-out star on the table, and Iquela and I were sitting right next to each other, Iquela, the eye and me, and then I cupped it in my hands and held it like a rabbit, I held it up and brought it in close to inspect it, without blinking, eye to eye, and in its dilated pupil I saw half of everything that cow had ever seen: I saw black patches on white coats, I saw the blazing red iron bearing down, I saw placenta and blood and a squidgy mass coming out of its entrails, I saw thick, yellowy milk and rusty machines sucking on its udders, and I saw the creamy top, that creamy skin, and white aprons splattered with red, and I also saw lovely things like the mud encrusted in its hooves and the dew dusting its ears, and the clouds rolling over his back, stroking it, and stroking mine too, stroking me, all this I saw split in two while my hands took the vitreous humour and squeezed it, disgusted, cos I find smooth things disgusting, yeah, but I went on looking anyway, because the cow had imagined lovely things: it had dreamt of tall, wild meadows and flies rubbing their legs together against their neck, and it had seen sad things, things that had saddened it like the parched fields and dried-up well, and at the end of all this I saw a long line of other cows, tail to mouth, that’s how they were, perfectly in line, and at the end of the passage I saw a light, the gleaming flash of blades, knives lit under halogen, slicing against one another, a terrible shrill ringing, yeah, and you couldn’t see it in the round eyes of any of those cows, their sorrow and their fear weren’t written all over their faces, which is why I went on looking, and then the parts appeared: the hunks hanging upside down, legs, necks, flayed feet, the horrible hunks of this cow, ribs, hooves, and I kept looking in spite of it all, in spite of the disgust and the fear I kept observing that eye, cos the cow and I had seen similar things, that’s what I thought as I touched the white-grey sclera and its reddish constellations, its skeletal veins and iris scored with scars, and then I raised my eyes and saw Iquela sort of hypnotised, clutching the scalpel and carefully extracting the lens, telling me to touch the optic nerve, see what it feels like, she was saying, and then, first making sure no one could see her, she removed her gloves to touch the soft part and sniff her fingers, Iquela did that, I saw her, she sniffed her fingers and then sucked them one after the other while I looked around and removed the cornea and I took it, I did that and nobody saw me, and the teacher gave us a four out of ten for being messy, and that night, when Consuelo and the living-dead man had gone to sleep, I slipped into Iquela’s room and showed her the cornea, look what I’ve brought you, Ique, it’s ours, for both of us, so we always see the same things, even if we’re far away, half for you and half for me, I said holding it out like treasure in my hand, but she said, no way, José, that’s gross, because Iquela only has one set of brown eyes, eyes made for seeing her mum, her mummy, her mummakins, and she says that it’s written all over my face, ha! I’m the only one who does anything useful around here, indispensable things like finding dead people and subtracting them, how can my sorrow be written all over my face with all these eyes, because everyone knows that you grieve through the eyes and I’ve got hundreds, millions of them, cos even though Iquela didn’t want her share of the cornea, I didn’t care and I trundled off to the bathroom alone, locked the door, took out the cornea and placed that soft mulch on the tip of my tongue, that’s what I did, because I wanted to see what was inside me, because I couldn’t feel anything, no, and you keep your feelings on the inside, which is why I stuck out my tongue with the cornea and I looked at myself for a while in the mirror, and from the tip of my tongue I saw half my face and half of everything I’d ever seen: stray, hungry pups and every one of my decapitated flowers, the petals, the sepals and the stamens strewn on the ground, the chickens coming back to life, and hundreds of bones at the bottoms of black pits; I saw long-tailed meadowlarks, giant crunchy nalcas, and all my unfinished subtractions, and my Gran Elsa and Don Francisco and my mother dying again, and also my dad, but not whole, no, there were his parts, parts, parts, and I’ve never liked the parts, which is why in the end I swallowed it, just like that, without so much as a swig of water, and the cornea was salty and as it slipped down my throat I saw all those new landscapes inside me; I saw the soft walls I was made up of as the thing made its way sadly along the thick wet bends of my body, travelling through my pink waters, and I saw poo and blood clots and tattered muscles, and I also saw lost ideas, night-time ideas cowering from the day; and then came the black and everything dissolved, because the cornea was pulverised and turned into millions of particles floating in my blood, and each of those particles snuck into my pores and that’s how the eyes in my skin came about, and that’s why I see them, cos I have a completely different perspective, in each pore a minuscule eye born of that cornea, and given how many there are I can spot dead bodies wherever they are, and here in this town there are none, no, the only thing here in Mendoza is air, so much air that I’m choking, so much air that all I want to do is smoke, smoke a spliff and for its fumes to make me disappear, to take a drag and vanish whole, to breathe in and not feel the oxygen, because there’s way too much oxygen here, yeah, way too much air.