Mom!!! Where Is the Eye?

Prologue

The night that had an eye

“Mom!!! Where is the eye?”

My voice came out of my throat as though someone else had pushed it out.

I had woken with a start, sitting upright in bed, both hands pressed against my chest. The room was dark, but not quite dark. A little moonlight came through the window and drew a pale, almost cold square on the floor. My wardrobe looked larger than usual. My chair looked like a seated man. My shoes, lying against each other, seemed like two tired little animals.

I was breathing fast.

In my dream, I had seen a giant.

He stood on top of a mountain. He was enormous, taller than the trees, wider than the church door, more silent than the stones. He had a single eye in the middle of his forehead.

Just one.

But that was not what had frightened me.

What had frightened me was that the eye was crying.

My mother came into my room without turning on the lamp.

She always did that. When I was afraid, she did not chase the night away at once. She said that not every fear should be blinded by light. Some needed to be heard first.

She came over and laid her hand on my forehead.

“Were you dreaming?”

I nodded.

“About the Cyclops,” I whispered.

At that word, her hand stopped moving. Her fingers lay still against my skin.

“You saw him?” she asked.

I looked at her.

“Then he exists?”

Mom did not answer straight away.

She sat on the edge of my bed. The mattress sank gently beneath her weight. She pulled the blanket up to my shoulders, then looked towards the window. Outside, the night said nothing.

“He exists,” she said at last, “the way things exist that people dare not look at.”

I did not understand.

“He had only one eye, Mom.”

“Yes.”

“Why only one?”

“Because sometimes a single eye is enough to see what a thousand gazes refuse to see.”

I felt my throat tighten.

“Mom… where is the eye?”

She looked at me for a long time. Her own eyes were gentle, but deep inside them lay a weariness I did not know. An old weariness. The weariness of someone who has seen things and has decided, in spite of everything, to remain kind.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked.

I nodded yes.

“Then I must tell you a story.”

“A scary story?”

She smiled sadly.

“No, my child. It is worse than that.”

“Worse?”

“It is a story that tells the truth.”

Chapter 1

The village of a thousand gazes

Once upon a time, Mom began, there was a village built between three hills and a slow river. Its houses huddled together like people who were cold, but its hearts were often very far apart.

The village was called Belregard.

Its name was beautiful, but names are sometimes polite lies.

In Belregard, the windows were large. The doors had cracks. Curtains stirred whenever footsteps passed in the street. People watched everything. They watched who came in, who went out, who had bought bread, who had not, who wore shoes with holes in them, who talked to themselves, who laughed too loudly, who cried too softly.

The villagers said:

“Nothing escapes us here.”

And it was almost true.

They saw the stains on someone’s clothes, but not the weariness of the person wearing them.

They saw the trembling hand, but not the hunger that made it tremble.

They saw the child stealing an apple, but not the three days without a meal behind the act.

They saw the woman lowering her eyes, but not the harsh words she had heard that morning.

They saw the faults.

They almost never saw the wounds.

In that village lived a little boy named Nilo.

Nilo was no better behaved than other children. He ran, he fell, he sometimes lied to avoid punishment, he ate too quickly when he was hungry. But he had one rare quality: whenever he saw someone suffer, his own heart grew heavy, even if he did not know why.

His mother often told him:

“My son, hold on to that. The day another person’s pain no longer moves you, you may have both eyes open and still be walking in the night.”

Nilo did not always understand his mother. Adults had a strange way of planting sentences in children’s heads that would not grow until many years later.

In Belregard, people often spoke of a being who lived at the top of the northern mountain.

They called him the Cyclops.

No one spoke his real name. Perhaps no one had ever known it. Perhaps he had once had one, but the village had taken it from him, as you take away someone’s face when you call them only by what makes them different.

The Cyclops, people said, was enormous. He could lift a cart with one hand. He walked at night. He spoke to stones. In his cave, he kept stolen objects and children’s gazes trapped in jars.

But above all, he had only one eye.

A round, deep, unbearable eye.

Parents told their children:

“Never go up towards the mountain. If the Cyclops looks at you, he will steal your eyes.”

So the children were afraid.

But like all children, they also wanted to know.

One evening, after the soup, Nilo asked his father:

“Who has seen the Cyclops steal eyes?”

His father put down his spoon.

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone says he steals eyes. But who has seen him do it?”

Silence fell over the table.

His older sister lowered her head. His little brother stopped chewing. His mother looked at his father, not to encourage him to answer, but to ask him not to answer too quickly.

Nilo’s father frowned.

“There are things we know because people have always said them.”

“But what if they have always been said by people who did not know?”

“Nilo.”

His tone had hardened.

The child understood that he had just touched a closed door.

But closed doors sometimes make you want to enter more than open ones do.

That night, Nilo barely slept.

He thought about the Cyclops. He imagined his single eye in the dark. He imagined jars filled with gazes. He imagined children coming home with holes where their eyes had been.

Then another thought came.

If the Cyclops stole eyes, why was no one in the village blind?

And if no one had seen him steal eyes, why did everyone speak of it as the truth?

In the morning, Nilo rose with a question that burned more fiercely than hunger.

How do you know a monster is a monster when no one has spoken to him?