Earshot
“Day after day, I kept turning up the volume of the music, but it only seemed further and further away. After a few months, it had disappeared completely.”
NOVEMBER 12, 2024
It’s said that hearing is the sharpest of the fetus’s senses. The unborn takes in all sorts of sounds coming from its mother’s circulatory, cardiac, and digestive systems; it has no choice, it can't filter anything out. It’s constantly surrounded by these raw and indistinct noises, by the patterns and vibrations of its mother’s voice, and sounds from outside, too, that reach it, muffled by the amniotic fluid. The newborn, though, feels only the beating of its own heart. It realizes that the other heart doesn't belong to it and will have to be left behind, that life must be lived with a single heart.
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My mother and I lived in a small apartment. When she came home from work, the first thing she did was to grab the remote control and turn on the living room TV. She would barely greet me, much less ask how my day had gone. Once the main TV was playing, she hurried into her bedroom to change and switched on the smaller set, then came out to the kitchen and went straight for the wall-mounted radio. Sooner or later she’d make her way to the bathroom radio, too, a transistor with the antenna extended to full length; its tiny speaker was covered in a thick layer of dust that blocked out all but the lowest frequencies, bass tones blending with the hum of the ventilation system. There was nothing at all that connected the content emitted by these different devices—a sitcom might be blaring on the living room TV while the nightly news flowed from her bedroom and a Baroque sonata played in the kitchen, heavy metal in the cramped space of the bathroom. The result was a fusion, or rather, a cacophony that made it impossible to distinguish one source of sound from another.
I never dared ask my mother to lower the volume of these devices, let alone turn them off. This constant background noise formed a kind of partition between us. She seemed totally unreachable to me.
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Once, a long time ago, all this racket had made me cry. It's my first memory: I'm in my crib, I look up at the ceiling and, suddenly, I’m aware of the aural chaos pressing in on me from all sides. The sounds are like thorns in my ears. I start to wail, but no one comes to comfort me and the thorns continue to pierce my eardrums. I scream louder and louder until I have the confused sense that my screaming protects me from the surrounding noise—that I can stay inside this screaming, safe from the sounds that aren’t my own.
I could no longer hear the ambient din of our apartment—I was only aware of these specific sounds, of this rhythm and these melodies that now came to me so clearly, and for the first time in my life, I understood what the word music meant.
Years later, when I started to choose how to spend the pocket money my mother gave me, I went to a shopping center to buy some earbuds. It had occurred to me that I could try to block out the pervasive din of our apartment with a single source of sound, one track of music. I grabbed the first pair of earbuds I saw and headed straight for the checkout. As I stood in line, my heart started beating wildly and my hands grew moist. For some reason, I was terrified by the thought that the cashier would refuse to let me buy the earbuds. When I faced him, I tried to hide my embarrassment with a smile that must have looked exceedingly awkward. He threw me a cold glance and handed me the earbuds along with the receipt.
Back at our apartment, I locked myself in the bathroom. My mother was already home, the TVs and radios all turned on. I sat down on the edge of the toilet and carefully inserted the earbuds. The sounds around me were muffled, as if they’d been covered by a layer of snow. Then I plugged the cord into the tiny transistor. At first, I heard only some crackling and sputtering, and then the music came streaming out. I’ve never been able to track down that song again. I remember only that it was classical, something like a symphony. In the moment, it was completely irrelevant. I was absorbed by the purity of the notes that flowed into my ears, by this gentleness I’d never experienced before. I could no longer hear the ambient din of our apartment—I was only aware of these specific sounds, of this rhythm and these melodies that now came to me so clearly, and for the first time in my life, I understood what the word music meant.
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On that day, I laid claim to the bathroom radio, which my mother quickly replaced with another transistor. Then I bought a portable CD player and I went to a record store. Walking up and down the aisles, I told myself that all these composers, all these singers could be listened to simultaneously by millions of ears. I had a vision of innumerable ears detached from their bodies, straining toward the music—and, lost among them, my own two ears. I had no idea which CDs to choose. I wanted to listen to all the music, to take in all the melodies that had ever been composed.
After wandering around the store for hours, I finally chose three albums. It was their covers that stood out to me. One had a photo of a musician playing a grand piano. He wore a white shirt, half-unbuttoned, a black tie slung over his shoulder. But it was the expression on his face that intrigued me most of all; he seemed to be ecstatic and suffering at the same time. The second cover showed a woman, a figure that seemed to have been borrowed from a very old painting. She rose up from a big, gold, five-pointed star, her eyes raised to the heavens, hands held out in rapture. On the third cover, three men walked peacefully side by side through the sky. They seemed lighthearted, happy. The songs were in a language I didn't know and I think it was this, too, that drew me to them.
I listened to these albums until I’d learned all the songs by heart, then went back to the store and bought others. I carried my CD player with me everywhere. I almost never took the earbuds out of my ears.
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Now, when I rode the crowded metro, I stood amid the crush of passengers and felt as if I were alone in the world, invisible. I was no longer disturbed when someone’s gaze happened to linger on me. The music enveloped me and I felt beyond reach. At the same time, it influenced the people around me without their knowledge, it made them perform a secret, repetitive dance to the rhythm of the swaying metro car, a dance that only I perceived.
Outside, the streets I knew so well were suddenly strange. Everything seemed to have intensified under the effect of the music: the sidewalks were more solid, the bodies of the cars shinier, the clouds more sharply outlined, the lights more dazzling. The most insignificant things stood out in relief. I watched food wrappers float rhythmically along the gutter and was captivated by the movements, both spontaneous and perfectly synchronized, of a dog on a leash or a pigeon hopping down the sidewalk. I couldn’t comprehend how the music did all of this without ever being seen. I was certain it had a magical power over my surroundings.
Before long, my mother was called to the middle school. As my teacher closed the classroom door behind them, I heard him say in a low voice: Your daughter has a problem… I waited outside in the empty hallway. Through the windows, the setting sun turned the walls red and projected my shadow far out in front of me. I wondered what my mother would say to me when she came out of the classroom. I prepared several explanations to justify the fact that I never took out my earbuds; I even considered telling her that it was all her fault, that it was all because of the incessant noise at home that assaulted my body and mind. I would say these words as coldly as possible, without the least hint of emotion—to make sure she understood that the situation was objectively unbearable, that anyone would have felt as tormented as I had.
But when she came out of the classroom, she walked past me without saying a word, without even looking at me. For a brief moment, her shadow stretched out beside mine on the hallway floor, and I thought our two shadows looked alike. I leaned against the wall and watched her walk away, listening to the rhythmic clicking of her heels in time with the music that played through my earbuds. I don’t remember exactly what I felt then. It wasn't disappointment or bitterness. I think I was waiting for her to say something, for a word, a smile, a gesture that would have changed everything.
After a while, I stopped going to school. Now I had no more homework to do, no more classmates to avoid, no more teachers to face. I left the apartment less and less often. The things around me inexorably receded, then disappeared—and finally, nothing was left but the music. My days were simple. I absorbed the music and no longer bothered with anything else. From morning to night, I let it cradle me. At a certain point I noticed that there was a game, a sort of hide-and-seek, between us: We followed and raced past each other by turns, we repelled each other slightly before attracting each other again. It was like the movement of light and shadow on a tree’s foliage. And in the end, we became one. I no longer felt any difference between the music and me.
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My mother never once insisted that I go back to school. She seemed to consider my retreat into the apartment as a foregone conclusion. When she came home from work, she turned on all the TVs and radios as usual, as if nothing had changed. With my earbuds in, I would watch her, and she sometimes returned my gaze, but I never managed to read any emotion in her eyes.
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One day, I felt an itching sensation in my ears. When I removed the earbuds to scratch them, a yellowish fluid drained out. By the next morning, the itching had become so bad that I had to go see a doctor. He told me I had an ear infection and prescribed medication, adding that above all, I should not put the earbuds in. It was the first thing I did after leaving his office; I never went back there again. As the weeks passed, the pain gradually went away, but my hearing continued to worsen. A thick crust grew inside my ears that I removed each morning and that formed again during the night. Day after day, I kept turning up the volume of the music, but it only seemed further and further away. After a few months, it had disappeared completely.
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I accepted my deafness as a fact. It proved even more effective than the earbuds in isolating me from the racket of my surroundings. Only a few indistinct noises, very low, still reached me at times, a rustling or a throbbing that didn't bother me at all. This was another kind of music, even purer and more elemental than the sounds that flowed from my CDs. It came from inside me — a music that seeped out of my own body.
During that time, the memory of a scene from my childhood often returned to me. I must have been seven or eight. My mother had taken me to a crowded restaurant. The customers ordered their food and drinks in shouting voices, laughing loudly and hollering at each other across the table, their faces bright red. On top of this came the clatter of dishes and the scraping sound of chairs against the floor. The waiters moved around the room as gracefully as fencers. We were seated at a corner table, next to a couple dining alone. Right away, I could tell there was something different about them. They ate in silence, very calmly, with peaceful expressions on their faces, exchanging little smiles from time to time. It was as if the noise didn't reach them at all. At one point, the woman set her fork and knife down and began rapidly moving her fingers and hands. I realized then that they were deaf, that they were communicating in sign language.
I had to become deaf myself to find within me the same profound calm that had emanated from those two strangers.
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A few years later, I left my mother's apartment. It all happened very quickly. I bought a plane ticket with the money from my disability check, packed a bag and left everything else behind.
I went far away, to the North. When I stepped off the plane, the cold air whipped my face, but after a few minutes I was used to it.
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He came to get me at the airport. I had almost no memories of him, and yet I recognized him right away. His face was browned by the sun and his eyes were sharply slanted, their irises a deep gray. He wasn't very tall, only a little taller than me. When I pointed to my ears, squeezing my eyes shut to let him know I couldn't hear, he nodded easily as if for him my deafness was natural or unimportant.
We climbed into his pickup. In the back there were stacks of canned food—peas, tuna and sardines, artichokes. He didn't say a word the entire time. Maybe he was used to driving alone in silence, or maybe he thought there was no point in talking to a deaf person. I kept my head turned toward him for most of the ride, studying his face. In profile, it seemed more resolved, colder. His nose was straight and pointed and his lips were thin, pressed tightly together. It was the profile of someone who didn’t hide behind a mask, of someone accustomed to the wind of this place, to the blinding light and the snow. Every so often—probably troubled by the steadiness of my gaze—he would turn to look at me for a few seconds and I’d have this familiar face before me again, both distant and reassuring.
After two hours of driving down narrow roads, he parked the pickup in front of a modest cabin and signaled to me that we had arrived. He brought my suitcase inside, then tended to the few logs that were smoldering in the fireplace. He gestured toward the bed made up in a corner of the room and pressed his hands together along his cheek, eyes closed, miming sleep. Then he pointed to a small sofa and placed his hand on his chest. I shook my head, he left the cabin, and I stayed there alone.
I looked around; there were only the barest necessities. This place suited him, I thought. I noticed a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. It was a portrait of a little girl, smiling. A long time ago, she must have smiled at the person who'd held the camera, but now she was smiling at me. I stood in front of the photograph until the warmth of the fire made me drowsy. My cheeks were burning hot. Fatigue swept over me all at once and I lay down on the bed.
There is no longer any boundary between here and there, no distinction between morning and night, between one day and the next.
I don't know how long I slept. When I awoke, there was a shooting pain in my back and a ringing in my ears. I had dreamed of voices or of low, murmuring sounds, but I couldn’t remember any of what I'd heard. I stayed in bed until I felt calm again, then got up and went to open the window. I had no idea what time it was. In this part of the world, in this season, the sun stays low in the sky all day long. Its rays bounced off the snow so intensely that tears came to my eyes. I closed them, took a deep breath of icy air, and felt my awareness of my own body become suddenly sharpened.
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Here, the whiteness covers everything. The landscape disappears beneath the snow, all its colors, all its lines and features blotted out. And all the animals are white, too. The fur of the mice, the scales of the snakes, the feathers of the birds: Over time, they’ve turned white to blend in with the snow and escape the claws of their predators. Even their shadows seem white. Sometimes I wonder if I, too, will end up becoming white like the snow. When I examine the strands of my hair closely, they look a little lighter to me than before.
I feel at home in this white world. There is no longer any boundary between here and there, no distinction between morning and night, between one day and the next.
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He’s asked me to go hunting with him. It will be the first time in my life that I kill an animal to eat. A thousand questions run through my mind: How will the animal react when my rifle’s bullet pierces its flesh? How will the traces of its blood look in the snow? What will its fur smell like? How will its flesh taste?
I think of my mother again. I wonder what it was that she didn't want to hear, that she had to bury beneath the noise of TVs and radios.
I wonder if she misses me, and if I miss her.
There are moments when I’d like to be able to show her this landscape. Maybe it would inspire her, somehow; maybe it would change her.
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One by one, these questions evaporate. They no longer hold any meaning. My features are becoming hardened.
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Here, I’m learning to live the life of an animal. I feed myself, I empty my bowels, I breathe and I sleep. And the silence grows. Slowly, surely, I'm finding my place.
This story originally appeared in Le jour où le désert est entré dans la ville (Editions Verdier, 2019), and was translated into English for The Dial.
✺ Published in “Issue 22: Language” of The Dial
