Andalucía

Thirty-five minutes from Sevilla, on the road that leads to Cádiz following the Guadalquivir river, there is a medical retreat run by Carmelite nuns. The small red brick monastery has had that vocation since the Franco era. Little has changed since it’s origins, the original head nun just recently being admitted herself as a patient in the retreat due to the hiccups of age.

Agustin had been admitted 254 ago. He knew because he counted the days in the calendar of the common room. He could see very well, although his medical dossier said he was legally blind. He wore black metal glasses to get the privileges of being blind, such as staring at the younger nuns, eye spying over other patients folders while inside the guards room whom let him enter when a futbol game was playing in the old TV. His favourite of it all was cutting in line for the food. He would wait for a sufficient gap to open between two patients and he would sneak in between. The only ones who could see what he did where the cooks and they had stopped calling him out after the third week of him pulling the stunt.

Agustin was inpatient with the other patients. They walked slowly, touching everything as they went. He would often push them and swiftly move aside without saying a word. When bored he would throw things at other patients but always making sure no nun saw him, for he wanted to maintain his cover of being blind.

And so he spent his days, a superhuman among disabled humans as he liked to think of himself. Like a player in a game who suddenly had all the answers to the riddles. A driver who knew the secret shortcuts. He who could see it all. Or at least that what he thought. For you see, none of the patients were blind, the little red brick monastery was a house for lunatics. And who is crazier than he who believes himself greater than other men.