The Body Where I Was Born

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I was born with a white beauty mark, or what others call a birthmark, covering the cornea of my right eye. That spot would have been nothing had it not stretched across my iris and over the pupil through which light must pass to reach the back of the brain. They didn’t perform cornea transplants on newborns in those days; the spot was doomed to remain for several years. And in the same way an unventilated tunnel slowly fills with mold, the pupillary blockage led to the growth of a cataract. The only advice the doctors could give my parents was to wait: by the time their daughter finished growing, medicine would surely have advanced enough to offer the solution they now lacked. In the meantime, they advised subjecting me to a series of annoying exercises to develop, as much as possible, the defective eye. This was done with ocular movements similar to those Aldous Huxley suggests in The Art of Seeing, but also — and this I remember most — with a patch that covered my left eye for half the day. It was a piece of flesh-colored cloth with sticky, adhesive edges, covering my upper eyelid down to the top of my cheekbone. At first glance, it looked like I had no eye, only a smooth surface there. Wearing the patch felt unfair and oppressive. It was hard to let them put it on me every morning and to accept that no hiding place and no amount of crying could save me from that torture. I don’t think there was a single day I didn’t resist. It would have been so easy to wait until they left me at the school entrance to yank the patch off with the same careless gesture I used to tear scabs off my knee. But for some reason I still can’t understand, I never tried to remove it.

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