I always go swimming with them, but this is the first time an ocean has slapped them off my face. Without my glasses, crossing streets at night is all bokeh and danger, and finding restaurants without asking is nearly impossible, and about the only thing I can do close to normal is read things held a foot or less in front of my face. The only thing I can do better than normal, I found out, is pretend not to see souvenir vendors trying to get my attention. Just last week S was telling me that the Native Americans believed that long hair signified a strength in spirit, intuition. A sixth sense. During Vietnam, the war department recruited scouts from Indian reservations and found, after giving them military haircuts, that they had lost their “extrasensory” abilities. When I Skype with S and tell her what happened, she says, “Now you’ll just have to use your hair.”
I don’t have to use my hair for long. A popular guidebook says this about my next destination: “Trujillo doesn’t have much to interest potential shoppers, unless you need eyeglasses.” There I walk down Jiron Bolivar at nine-thirty in the morning and there must be two dozen opticas, just on a single block. I go into the only one with an old Peruvian man behind the counter (all the others have young female sales associates staring down either at their phones or their nails – I can’t tell which). Yo perdí mis lentes, I say. I lost my glasses. His urgency is even greater than mine, and he ushers me into the examination room and has me stare into a box for three minutes at a picture of a red house that goes in and out of focus. I spend two minutes picking out a frame with the sales clerk, one minute trying to tell her and the guy No, I don’t need the polycarbonate lenses (sin polycarbon, sin polycarbon), and two and a half hours later I come back to the shop and I can see again.
