The Sand Child

An uninvited, blind, self-proclaimed “biographer of error and lies” joins the three alternate storytellers at the Marrakesh café (135). Claiming that the secret is at once sacred and ludicrous, the blind troubadour explains that he’s spent his life falsifying and altering others’ stories, inventing them as he touches a listener’s face.

Evoking their present setting—April 1957—he speaks of his life six years prior in Buenos Aires, where he one day received the visit of a thin Arab woman whose deep yet shrill voice so strongly struck him that he wondered if the visitor was a castrated man or a wounded woman. Somehow knowing his passion for old coins, she proffers a rare Egyptian 50-centime piece from the mid-19th century. As the two sit in his library, the woman’s gaze falls upon an Egyptian handwritten Koran from which she begins to read. Remarking that he views books as labyrinths designed to confuse men, the blind man experiences a vision of a tormented man whom he senses is his visitor’s father.

Staring at the Koran, the mysterious woman cites her need for truth, forgiveness, and justice. While listening to the woman, the blind man is aroused by an odd sense of desire, which brings him back to the visit 30 years prior of another woman who came to borrow books from his library, leaving brusquely with a copy of Don Quixote after their bodies brushed in a passageway between two shelves.