Chapter 1

      It was a windy afternoon, very windy. Not a molecule of air was moving. Suddenly, a line from John Donne: “variable, and therefore miserable condition of man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute.” Where had that phrase come from? Who knows. Certainly not from Dami’s mind. Dami had never heard of John Donne, poetry mattered little to him, and, above all, he was in excellent health. He was a bull. A stallion. A Man with a capital M. He was a stranger to unforeseen changes, unacquainted with cyclothymia, sudden illness, the bodily humors. For Dami, neurosis was something that happened only in Palermo Viejo (he couldn’t know it yet, but years later he would end up in therapy in an office on Charcas Street overlooking Plaza Freud). Meanwhile, the wind finished its job: the Donne phrase had flown from his mind, from a mind in which it had never been; it had flown like umbrellas from the beach at dusk, a little bit spastically, stumblingly, staggeringly, like a mild ridiculosity; but at the same time definitively, irreversibly, conclusively (one could also say the phrase had disappeared, but that word in Argentina has connotations it’d be better not to go into). Dami was walking with the wind, the wind of that afternoon, of any afternoon, of all afternoons. He walked to the Fiat 1. He opens the door of the Fiat, gets in, sits down, takes the key from the back pocket of his pants, starts the car. Dami is going to an important event: getting his driver’s license. Dami had actually been driving since he was fourteen, his father taught him while they were on vacation in San Clemente, in sandy streets, muddy ditches, and four-wheeler tracks. But he’d never gone through the procedure, he’d never taken the exam. Therefore, the situation presented the following paradox: since he knew how to drive, he was driving his own car to get his license. But since he didn’t have a license, he was committing a traffic violation. So: in order to comply with the law, he first had to break it (really, the situation was more like a syllogism than a paradox, a simple rule of three, the inexorable order of natural logic, the most positivist reasoning; the ultimate truth of the social bond). Dami arrives for the exam. The exam consists of three parts. First, the driving test itself. Second, a 45-minute class on the great truths of traffic. And third, a simple eye exam, a routine checkup. Dami passes the first part without difficulty. Then he listens attentively to the second. Finally he goes to the optometrist. The optometrist is about forty-five, has gray hair, wears glasses (it seems ironic, but really isn’t). He asks Dami to look at a chart with letters and read them aloud, Dami does this without a problem. “Okay, you can go now, everything’s fine.” “Thanks, doctor,” Dami says, while wondering “are optometrists medical doctors or is it a separate profession?” and while he’s thinking about that, the optometrist adds: “Oh, I forgot; there’s one more test, it’ll only take a minute.” He couldn’t possibly know it (obviously: Dami was a sociologist, not an optometrist) but he was about to find himself face-to-face with the Ishihara Test. The Ishihara Test is a method involving numbers or geometric figures made up of small, different-colored dots, and it’s used to detect anomalies, in particular, various forms of colorblindness. The Test is highly reliable, far superior to others such as the Farnsworth Test, pseudochromatic cards, or the anomalascope. The Test bears the name of its inventor, an extraordinary Japanese scientist, now somewhat forgotten. As usually happens with great works, often they succeed so overwhelmingly that they send their creator into oblivion. Who’s the composer of Ave Maria, the most celestial religious music? Who said: “The heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know”? And who invented hydraulic steering? It doesn’t really matter, only the product endures, that remainder of eternal transcendence. At any rate, Ishihara, in his day (1879-1963) was chair of the Ophthalmology Department at the Imperial University of Tokyo (in 1940 he was named professor emeritus) and author of more than a hundred first-class academic works, among them the Test that bears his name. The Test: easy as pie. Easy for most people, that is, but would it be easy for Dami? Suddenly time became eternal, millions of microseconds floated in the air in slow motion, like some kind of atomized idling; the clocks stopped marking time, history stopped happening, no time interval began; everything was happening as if the calendar had expired—the western calendar, the Judeo-Christian calendar, the Russian Orthodox calendar, and also the ancient calendars, the Mayan, the Aztec, the Inca, the Chinese, the sundial of the Egyptian pyramids. “What number do you see?” Dami hesitates and ventures: “. . . a . . . two?” “Aha . . .” Aha, that was all the eye doctor said. Again, silence. Time stops moving, etc., etc., etc. “Aha, what?” Dami asked. “Well, it’s actually not a two, but a five.” “Aha” (it’s incredible, but in a matter of seconds the linguistic roles had been reversed). “The Ishihara Test is infallible in the identification of vision anomalies. You have a disorder called dichromacy, a mild type of colorblindness.” “. . . ?” “It’s very simple: on this slide, normal people see the correct number, five, while dichromats see a two. It’s infallible.” “. . . ?” “I’m going to give you a license good for only two years.” “. . . ?” It hardly needs to be clarified, but Dami had fallen speechless. He thought: “Dichromacy, what is dichromacy?” Dichromacy is anomalous color vision, in which any color might be equal to the mix of two primary colors. The spectrum is seen as two colors separated by a colorless band (neutral point). Whoever wants to dig deeper into the topic will see (what an obvious joke!) that there are three types of dichromacy: protanopia, tritanopia, and deuteranopia. Dami was afflicted with the latter variety. It’s a case of dichromacy with a relative spectral luminosity very similar to that of normal vision, except that red and green are confused. In the spectrum, the deuteranope sees only two primary colors. The long wavelengths (green, yellow, orange, red) appear as yellow, and the short wavelengths (blue and violet) appear as blue. These tonalities become weaker from the extremes to the center until they arrive at a neutral point, which is colorless. A deep depression shook Dami’s face. He drove away in the Fiat 1, license in hand (for two years instead of ten) and everything seemed confused, odd, strange: as if the trees weren’t green, the red light wasn’t red, the white of his teeth was no longer white. He was exaggerating, of course, but that’s how the depressed behave (frankly, depressives