No imagination, however fertile and creative in making comparisons,
images and metaphors, could aptly describe the filth here. It is not just
in the state to which the lavatories were soon reduced, fetid caverns
such as the gutters in hell full of condemned souls must be, but also
the lack of respect shown by some of the inmates or the sudden
urgency of others that turned the corridors and other passageways
into latrines at first, only occasionally, but now as a matter of habit.
The extent of the conditions become almost unbearable and characters
begin to lose hope, their bodies now like “condemned souls” in hell. One
of them proclaims that “there is no salvation for us” (p.93) and that “If
we had our sight we wouldn’t have landed in this hell” (p.185). They
become slaves to their urges “each time their bodies demanded to be
urgently relieved” (p.125) and their bodies are contaminated physically
and perhaps spiritually by the “fetid caverns” (p.125). As the Doctor’s
Wife desperately washes the body of her deceased friend, she does so
in an attempt “to deliver her purified to the earth, if it still makes sense
to speak of purity of the body in this asylum where we are living, for the
purity of the soul, as we know, is beyond anyone’s reach” (p.175).
Interestingly, although we are faced with images of contaminated water
within the asylum, water also acts as a cleansing image later in the
novel when the rain begins to fall. Once the internees have escaped we
see “blind people everywhere gaping up at the heavens, slaking their
thirst, storing up water in every nook and cranny of their body” (p.221)
we are additionally told that “Holy water of the most efficacious variety,
descended directly from heaven, the splashes helped the stones to
transform themselves into persons” (p.224). The cleansing and restoring
image of holy water recalls ideas of spiritual baptism and the removal
of original sin. Observing the visually impaired basking in this water
secures the notion that they are spiritually or morally blind in some way,
their blindness now creating another binary reminiscent of the saint and
sinner archetypes. The connection between sin and blindness is also
made in The Country of the Blind. Initially Nuñez appears to dismiss
such assumptions, attributing them to ideas of the past, “in those days,
in such cases, men did not think of germs and infections but of sins”
(p.99). Yet when Nuñez finally leaves the valley “it seemed to him that
before this splendour he, and this blind world in the valley, and his love,
and all, were no more than a pit of sin” (p.116). Although Nuñez includes
himself in this image, and may well be experiencing the grandeur of the
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