Cara

               
I was running late for the concert, driving recklessly through early spring rain then running helter-skelter from Hope Street to the concert hall just as the doors were closing. Thankfully I already had my ticket, purchased a week before. A disapproving, ageing usherette admitted me. Grudgingly. I wondered why the young man I had to pass to reach my seat did not retract his feet for me to pass, until the young woman beside him murmured: ‘Mind the dog.’
A black Labrador lay at the feet of another young man in the seat next to mine. Both youths were elegantly attired in well-cut clothes – Italian tailoring which perfectly complemented their classical features and dark good looks. Involuntarily I was reminded of sculpture – the beautiful ephebe beloved of Greece and Rome. Between the two youths sat two girls of similar age. The one who had warned me about the dog appeared to have no visual impairment. The other was so finely boned, so fair, so delicate that it seemed possible she would wither under strong light. She, too, was dressed in an elegantly tailored jacket and trousers, with a fine gold chain on the wrist clasped by the young man sitting nearest to me. She was wearing thick-lensed, tinted glasses.
Throughout the Brahms concerto on the first part of the programme, I found my mental attention divided between the musicians and the young concert-goers in the adjacent seats, listening intently with a composure and vulnerability that differentiated them from other members of the audience, experiencing the music from a place apart which I could neither imagine nor enter.   
During the intermission, the usherette distributed left-over programmes to those in the front rows. She handed a small booklet with news of forthcoming events to the very fair girl, who turned it this way and that in her hands, registering it as an object without attempting to read it. The young man next to her commented on the odour of wet dog. I asked the dog’s name. ‘Cara’, he said. ‘That means ‘black’ in Turkish,’ I said, proffering one of those random items of information one garners in the course of one’s travels.
He leaned towards the other young man and relayed this information. They both seemed amused and said, almost in the same breath: ‘It suits her. She’s a black dog.’ Then the one sitting next to me added: ‘But in Italian, her name means ‘dear’.’ I asked his permission to pat Cara. ‘It’s okay, she’s off duty now,’ he said. Cara responded affectionately to my touch, but I was wishing that all the people from the opposite end of the row would not insist on exiting from our end and returning past us, stepping over Cara, who looked slightly uneasy but sat quietly. I was already feeling protective towards her and her charges, the young man next to me holding the dog’s harness and his delicate, pale companion, who inclined their torsos close to each other, cocooned in the same aura. I thought of sculpture in the rain, marble streaked with centuries of spring showers, human forms of great beauty and purity, eloquent in their sightlessness, sequestered in some forgotten Mediterranean courtyard wreathed in wind-tossed jasmine.
The second half of the programme commenced: Vaughan Williams’ symphony, ‘The Sea’. The chorale delivered Whitman’s lyrics. All around us surged the tide, augmented by the gale and tempest unleashed by the orchestra. Grandeur and majesty. Intonations of an age that still believed in certainties. Beneath the surface textures of sound, the voices and frequencies and energies of symphony. Stealing a glance at the faces of the young couple nearest me, he dark-haired, dark-eyed, aristocratic, Italianate; she so delicately fair, I saw they were enraptured, transported into a dimension evoked by the music. There were no visual cues to distract them as they listened with rapt concentration. Possibly they were quite unaware of how they appeared to someone like me.
At the end of the concert, with tempestuous waves of sound and emotion subsiding within the auditorium, the lights came on, Cara’s keeper snapped the hand-grip onto her harness, and she rose eagerly and began to strain towards the exit, wagging her tail in anticipation. ‘Let’s go!’ her body language said. ‘Let’s go home!’ Arm in arm, the lily-pale girl and her slender, dark-haired companion exited with Cara and their two friends. They were like a family, a closed circle. I stayed in my place and watched them go, feeling bereft, lonely, wishing they might sense me there, wanting to farewell them as one does close friends, wanting to see them again. A voice in me was whispering ‘Take me with you, into that other world where you are going...’
A couple of days later, I discovered that I had pre-purchased another ticket to that same concert, months before, and subsequently forgotten that I had done so. It was part of the series I had subscribed to. The unused ticket was, of course, for a different seat, in another row. Seemingly quite by chance, I had blundered into the world of Cara and her companions.
What is it that sighted people miss, I have been wondering ever since. Certainly some qualities of sound, but how much more? If the power to restore their sight were granted, they would see a different world from the one in which they have lived so courageously and patiently. And they would no doubt wonder at the other kinds of blindness that sometimes afflict the sighted.
I never used to notice the replicas of Labrador guide dogs in every supermarket where I shop. They can’t all have appeared in the month that has elapsed since the concert. Now I always insert coins, with the silent mantra ‘For Cara’, knowing that the ritual gesture will make little difference, rather like the collecting bowl passed around in church when I was a child. But I think of Cara and her family often. Their image shines for me, lighting my own intervals of darkness. In a way, they have transformed the way I see my world, now that I am conscious of their presence, somewhere.
Even to write of them in this way seems an act of appropriation, an almost voyeuristic transgression. They probably wouldn’t wish it. If those young people with whom I listened to Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony could trade places with me for a time, I have no doubt that they would not wish to return to a sightless world; nor would I wish to remain in theirs. And yet they unwittingly gave me a glimpse of something missing from my sighted world. An intimation of innocence, of purity: a blessing.